I’m teaching Bartok again. I use the little Erno Lendvai book that explains the “systems” with which Bartok allegedly composed. One is the “axis” system, which luckily has nothing to do with the “axis of evil,” but is rather Bartok’s tendency to equate four tonics separated by minor thirds; thus, the “tonic axis” of a particular piece might be C, Eb, F#, A, the subdominant axis F, Ab, B, D, and the dominant axis G, Bb, Db, E. This is especially clear in the piece I usually analyze, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The first movement begins on F# and ends in C; the second begins on B and ends in F. The end of the first movement is especially telling, with the primary theme reiterated over and over on the pitches C, Eb, F#, and A, and all of them somehow sounding very tonic chord-y. It’s astounding that, after a century of the diminished seventh chord being such a cliche with specific connotations of anxiety, Bartok could redefine it and find a fresh new use for it.

The other, less convincing system is Bartok’s tendency to articulate his temporal forms via Golden Sections. The Golden Section is an irrational ratio found in nature and apparently used in a lot of ancient Greek art and architecture. It’s found by the formula x/1 = 1/(x+1), and equals the square root of 5 minus one, divided by 2, or approximately .6180339887…. It’s increasingly approximated by consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci series, the series in which the last two numbers are added together to get the next: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, and so on. There’s a cottage industry surrounding the golden section on the internet if you’re interested. Bartok apparently timed the climaxes of some of his pieces to mark the golden section, so if you multiply the number of measures by .618 you’ll find the climax; and if you multiply the number of measures in each half by .618 you’ll find the measures of the secondary climaxes, and so on.

What has struck me for many years is how uncomfortable music students are with the idea that a composer would use a system to compose. (Bartok denied using any such system, by the way, but the evidence is eerily compelling.) The axis system they don’t seem to mind, but they don’t like hearing about the golden section points in Bartok; the idea that he would plan out in advance where his climaxes are going to occur disappoints them. But that’s nothing compared to their distaste for the complicated double inversion canon in the first movement of the Webern Symphony. I present Webern as sympathetically as I can, relating his canons to the ingenious Renaissance music on which he did his doctoral dissertation, but after a couple days’ explanation they harrass me with questions along the line of, “But do you really like this piece?” One day I related the sad story of Webern’s fatal shooting, and added the detail that the American soldier who had pulled the trigger regretted it for the rest of his life. In the dramatic silence that followed, one of my more incorrigible composers muttered, “But then when he heard Webern’s music, he decided it was OK.”

It’s not from any prejudice against dissonance or complexity. Quite the contrary: they all become Rite of Spring fanatics, and they fall in love with the improvisatory feel of the Concord Sonata, the facts that Ives’ unbridled imagination welcomed the wrong notes that got printed, that he added an unforeseen flute to the “Thoreau” movement, and even the very fact that I can’t explain away Ives’ harmony. The theorist’s inability to reduce the music to basic principles strikes them as a decisive victory for the composer. I know what’s coming up, because I go through it every two years: they will be unpleasantly incredulous when I lay out the detailed pre-compositional structure of Babbitt’s Post-Partitions, but for some reason Stockhausen’s Gruppen will seem more interesting, more expansive, despite its fanatical 12-tone overall plan. Afterward, they will warm up much more to the intuitive feeling-out of Feldman’s Rothko Chapel.

To some extent I think there’s a little adolescent romanticism in this reaction. Students – and the noncomposing population in general, actually – derive comfort from the idea of music as inspiration. The composer is a special kind of person able to summon up music out of his or her soul, and derives power from the sure-footed certainty of being able to judge at every moment exactly what tune or harmony will sound exactly right next. Doubtless there would be a general deflation were it learned that a symphony has to be built like any other large structure: that composers use devices, plan out themes and harmonic structures before the piece is written, sketch out sets of pitches from which they intend to draw, concoct relatively abritrary structural skeletons over which they will hang their harmonies and textures. For hundreds of years composers had sonata form as a pretty specific template, and when that collapsed, the early modernist composers had to come up with some kind of framework to defuse the anxiety of the empty page. You don’t expect an architect to proceed without blueprints and concealed steel girders, and it’s not entirely fair for a composer either. What’s astonishing about someone like Bartok is how passionately he was able to pace his crescendos and decrescendos to completely efface any hint that there might have been a precompositional plan.

By and large, however, I think my students are right, and I learn from their spontaneous dismays and enthusiasms. Minimalism (as has been little acknowledged) gave birth to a certain amount of systematic thinking in the 1980s, and as I look back in my own music, I don’t treasure the ingenious systems I came up with back then nearly as much as the occasional unique moment that fell into place without my knowing how until afterward. There’s an element of sincerity involved. A precompositional system may commit you to a D# and an E colliding in measure 137, and how will you know you’ll still mean that when you get there? As Ives said in defense of improvisation, how do I know that those are the notes I’ll feel like playing next Thursday night at 8:19? And though Ives did it experimentally, he disdained what he called “composing with a ruler,” i.e., setting up strict processes and letting them run. A system can be the result of inspiration, but a system carried out temporily precludes the possibility of surprise or inspiration arriving at some point later in the work. (This has always seemed to me to apply even to the Schillinger system, that it defines elements early in the piece and doesn’t allow for the spontaneous creation of new ones.) It’s a lecture read from the page, without the possibility of the reader gauging his audience and reacting to interruptions or nuances of reception.

The reaction my students have explains the tremendous aura Morton Feldman exerted from the 1980s on. Here was the Frank Gehry of music: pure inspiration stretched out over six hours, every sonority judged by ear, every note individually weighed, expanse without architecture. After decades of bureaucrats tinkering with systems, he was the Godzilla of musical sincerity. (There are reports that Feldman used more structure than is assumed, but I haven’t yet found them convincing. As for Feldman’s own word, when Stockhausen begged him to divulge his system, all Feldman would reply was, “I don’t push the notes around.” Stockhausen’s alleged response: “Not even a little bit?”) Feldman gives young composers permission to decide at any moment that the music can take a left turn, that nothing stands in the way of their whim. What he doesn’t tell them, that I suspect is beginning to dawn on them, is what an existential quandary Feldman has left them in, what massive and sustained concentration it takes to create a compelling, unified, large-scale musical image without structural props.

In the era in which I went to college, WEBERN was GOD, and a composer was judged by the intricacy of his systems. I still rather like Webern’s music, but I had begun racheting down his pedestal even before year after year of my students convinced me that he was always going to be a hard sell. Algorithmic composing software makes systems really easy to explore, so the issue is not going to go away. But we’re in a good, calm place right now, unbuffeted by the winds of competing ideologies that have all spent their force: we can look back critically over the modernist era, decide what worked and what didn’t, and use it to guide us in deciding what priorities to put forward in a postclassical world.

If you find yourself in upstate New York this coming Sunday, I have a performance of my music at the Storm King Music Festival. Emily Manzo, a dynamite young pianist just a few years out of Oberlin, and with an abiding interest in the latest music, will play my solo piano piece Time Does Not Exist at 2:00 at the Ogden Gallery of the Museum of the Hudson Highlands in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. Other composers on the festival include Carman Moore, Stefania de Kenessey, Wendy Griffiths, Jonathan Hallstrom, Peter Kirn, Bruce Lazarus, Yuzuru Sadashige, and Raymond Torres-Santos (some of whom will appear on the previous day, Saturday, at 2). Storm King is a noble, aesthetically diverse little festival that specializes in not only presenting music but in getting the composers together to publicly discuss new-music issues (the discussions this year took place in August). Time Does Not Exist, which I wrote in 2000, uses various looping techniques to explore concepts of timelessness, not in a minimalist, pattern-creating way, but in an attempt to elicit psychological states; the title alludes to Freud’s statement, “In the subconscious, time does not exist.” And Emily plays it beautifully, with sustained tension and real understanding. (You can take a look at the score of the piece here.)

Call 845-534-5819 for info, or look up the Storm King Music Festival, and find directions.

Following up on a previous blog entry, I’ve received two reports of John Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur, his new orchestra piece with the LA Phil premiered at the Disney Center, which was to be Adams’s first foray into the alternative system of tuning known as just intonation. According to one third-hand rumor, there wasn’t enough rehearsal time to deal with the tunings, and the piece was played in conventional tuning. However, according to a more official report I received, this wasn’t quite true. Finnish composer Juhani Nuorvala subsequently interviewed Adams in Helsinki for the Finnish music magazine Rondo and e-mailed me the results. Nuorvala is himself a just-intonation composer, which I was excited to hear, both because he’d know what to ask Adams about, and also because in the microtonal world it’s supposed that none of the European microtonalists use just intonation, and I was glad to hear of a counterexample.

According to Nuorvala, there had indeed been little rehearsal time, and many of the musicians couldn’t get what Adams was aiming at. Some of the brass players reportedly said that it was no use trying to get the high overtones Adams wanted, but the harps were retuned. Adams hopes for more rehearsal time at the Proms in London, and perhaps the tunings will work out better there.

And as it so happens, someone also slipped me a recording off the radio of The Dharma at Big Sur (you’ll never learn who, I protect my sources), so I’ve had a chance to judge for myself. I can’t really better Nuorvala’s description: “…it was laid back and pretty, reminding me of Adams’ electronic studio record, Voodoo Zephyr. The tuning didn’t sound as special as I expected, and I was unsure what I was hearing though there were some 7/4’s [seventh scale degrees lowered by about a third of a half-step]. Harmonically the music was pretty static, the orchestra forming a background texture for the soloist’s improvisatory quasi-Indian style lines.” This is all true, and I indeed hear some intentionally flat seventh scale degrees at the beginning. Overall, however, except for some quasi-Indian sliding around by the solo violinist Tracy Silverman, the unconventional tunings don’t seem to come off. It is a lovely piece, though – I find it probably the most attractive Adams piece I’ve heard since the 1980s.

An interesting bit of news from Wired: It’s been ruled, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that bloggers can’t be sued for libel as a result of republishing information. I found the logic intriguing:

“One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they’re not just selling information — they’re selling reliability,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren’t necessarily selling anything, they’re just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn’t exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward.”

Recent attempts, ironically enough attending his centenary, to make out George Orwell as less than a saint grate on me. Orwell was less than a saint and freely and honestly admitted it, which is what makes him so human, such a kindred and readable spirit. He distrusted the aura of sainthood, and admired Gandhi, for instance, only insofar as he could strip away the suspicious illusion of selflessness that was placed around him. Whether great or not, Orwell remains well worth reading because he was trustable: he told the truth even against himself. Take this passage from the end of his vivid eye-witness account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia:

I had had five days of tiresome journeys, sleeping in impossible places, my arm was hurting damnably, and now these fools were chasing me to and fro and I had got to sleep on the ground again. That was about as far as my thoughts went. I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics – I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but while they are happening I merely want to be out of them – an ignoble trait, perhaps.

Those are not the words of a hero: but they are the words of someone who’s not trying to make you think he’s a hero, which is why I return to Orwell’s writings agin and again and again, not because he was a GREAT MAN, but for honest and thoughtful companionship on life’s difficult road. Saints are rare – luckily enough, for they’re not my preferred company. I’m weary of this modern tendency to use a person’s life to discredit his work, or his politics to discredit his philosophy, or his womanizing to discredit his novels, or his antisemitism to discredit his music. I think of all my heterodox opinions, petty hatreds, sins of omission, and embarrassing little vices that future morality-policing historians could glom onto, in the service of whatever political correctness becomes ascendant, to buttress a claim that my music should be shunned, and it makes me go listen to Die Gotterdammerung, just out of spite.

Last week I voluntarily subjected myself to a flaming war at New Music Box, which maintains a policy of allowing anyone to post anything they want, anonymously if so desired. I had been libeled as a writer, and rather than sit idly by and take it, I was in a mood to fight back. After a couple of weeks of exhausting college work, I had a free day with nothing else to do, and – as they say – it was just the wrong day to piss me off. But the activity was so repetitive that I learned a lot about flaming – the practice of posting incendiary e-mails in an attempt to discredit, insult, and anger someone – and I learned to anticipate and counter the verbal venom-spewings of malevolent morons in a way I hadn’t before. So I kept a record of flaming strategies, which I detail here in hopes that writers everywhere will learn to defuse these hangers-on who have nothing else to do besides heap bile on people they envy:

1. The most common strategy, of course, is to a) ignore a poster’s or author’s main point and latch onto some little peripheral factual statement that can be credibly contradicted; b) flatly contradict it with some evidence or other; and then c) smugly act as though the truth value of the entire post is therefore rendered suspect and demolished because a small imperfection was found. About all you can usually do in this instance is ignore the person, because the only alternative is to waste your energy trying to back up factual points that had little relevance to your main argument, and in the process you’re bound to make other peripheral factual points that are vulnerable to challenge, embarking on a process of infinite regress. That’s why this is the most common strategy.

2. If a vulnerable factual statement can’t be found, then one can draw a plausible inference from a statement in the post, spin out a set of ramifications from it, and act as though all those ramifications had been stated in the original. The example I got of this was a textbook classic. I had written,

…in 1973,… Vincent Persichetti’s A Lincoln Address, also based on words of the Great Emancipator [Lincoln], was to be premiered as part of Richard Nixon’s inauguration. Lincoln, however, had denounced “the mighty scourge of war,” which threatened to look like a reflection on Nixon’s pet venture, the Vietnam War…. The performance did not take place.

The six words “Nixon’s pet venture, the Vietnam War,” “argued” a flamer, meant I exonerated LBJ and Kennedy; therefore was biased toward Democrats; therefore was making misstatements and hadn’t been fact-checked; therefore I was making up facts, and not a word I said could be trusted. This strategy is rather easy to call someone on, luckily, because you ask, “Where did I say that? Please quote the sentence that stated that” – and they typically don’t reply. As indeed this flamer didn’t when I pointed out that the fact I had “made up” was that Nixon supported the Vietnam War.

3. Bring up something irrelevant from the author’s or other poster’s past that might potentially embarrass or discredit him. This is especially effective if the past item referred to is an off-screen document the other posters don’t have access to, so that you control the information, and if you describe it in ominous terms, others will imagine that it’s worse, of course, than it will turn out to be. If, in response, you can get access to that information and publish it yourself, at no matter what length, at least you can take back control of the information flow.

4. When all else fails, lie. As one flamer frankly wrote to me when I challenged him to quote the statement he was accusing me of having made: “I can’t. But that’s irrelevant.”

Of course the best defense is not to enter into these conversations at all. But libel is possible on the internet, and sometimes a gang of posters will agree to get together to take you down, and you start to look guilty if there’s not some defense of you in the posts. It’s just like politics. Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet, but a horde of pundits started claiming he had claimed that, and through an excess of repetition it became virtual truth. Repetition can turn blatant falsehood into accepted fact, and those of us who write for a living need protection. When we were writing for newspapers, our armchair critics were required to write a decently credible letter to get into print (still the case at Arts Journal, I’m happy to note). But in some areas of the internet, any idiot can shoot off a spontaneous lie about us, and any mob of his idiot friends (or even he himself under several anonymous identities) can repeat the lie until it starts to pass for common currency. It’s a problem internet publications will have to learn how to deal with, and I’ve now started refusing to write for any internet publication that can’t protect its writers from libel. Free speech is a wonderful thing, but if those who exercise it have to fear the retribution of a libelous mob, then free speech won’t remain free for long.

(For further information, I ran across an entertaining and slightly helpful Guide to Flaming. One of its observations: why do flamers who play “Gotcha!” on spelling errors so often misspell words themselves?)

I rarely pay public attention to reissues – I’ve been collecting records since 1967, after all, since the recorded birth of new music itself, and I got most of the music that interests me the first time around. But a new three-disc set reissued from the hip southern-California label Cold Blue has me so mesmerized I can hardly quit listening to it, and there was only one piece on it I’d heard before. In the 1980s, like a flash in the night, Cold Blue released seven 10-inch vinyl records epitomizing the then-state of California minimalism, and the only one I had ever gotten hold of was Peter Garland’s Matachin Dances. Now if you believe Peter Garland – and you should, because his lone-voice-in-the-wilderness alternative narrative of American music history is the underground conscience of our field (I once saw a hall full of musicologists leap to their feet and give Peter a thundering standing ovation for having harangued us all that we didn’t understand the real Henry Cowell) – if you believe Garland, minimalism was first of all a widespread, lovely, slow, pastoral, California movement that got hijacked, publicity-wise, by the energetic, steady-rhythm New York minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass. I’ve been guilty of pushing the mainstream narrative myself, though under Peter’s nagging guidance I’ve made sure that Harold Budd, James Tenney, Daniel Lentz, and other West-Coasters got their due. But this set, “The Complete 10-inch Series from Cold Blue” (CB0014) makes me realize that California minimalism was a broader and richer scene than most of us east of the Rockies ever knew.

The music that wows me most here is by composer and instrument-builder Chas Smith, a name that’s remained at the outer edge of my musical consciousness for years and has now moved into the center. Disc 3 has four of his pieces for pedal steel guitar (an underacknowledged instrument that only West Coasters – Sasha Matson, for instance – seem to have discovered) and 12-string dobro. Smith’s pieces are sparse in notes but lush in timbre, gorgeous, restful, and the longest one, Scircura, is a ravishing continuum on an ostinato in two rising triplets (B E G# B F# A#) that draws you in and hypnotizes you by playing with your rhythmic perceptions. Equally lovely, if less lush, are some piano pieces from the late 1970s by Michael Jon Fink: tonal, sparse, with a lonely Harold-Budd feel, and beautifully recorded. The ’70s were a time you could indulge simple yet completely counterintuitive gestures – as Fink does in Vocalise by having a cello and piano play the same slow, single-note melody in unison – with stunning effect.

Garland has surpassed his Matachin Dances in other, more ambitious chamber works – I especially recommend his Another Sunrise disc on Mode. But for years Matachin Dances was about the only Garland you could find (though there had been an early minimalist piece for the Blackearth Percussion Ensemble), and it is paradigmatic: a set of dances for two violins and gourd rattles in Garland’s trademark simple, but not at all trite, melodic style. Daniel Lentz, one of my favorite composers of – no, I’m not even going to qualify that – has his old After Images disc rereleased here. I’d never heard it, but a couple of pieces had reappeared on his extremely hard-to-find Rhizome Sketch disc, b. e. comings. Dreamy, breathy, dripping in arpeggios, Lentz’s music had already achieved postminimalism by 1977, when everyone else was still toeing the minimalist line. Two pieces by Rick Cox have an eerier feel, sliding glissandos through poignant guitar harmonies and whispering unintelligible text over mellow electronic effects.

The remaining disc I find worthwhile but not quite as listenable. Half of it is text pieces by Read Miller, hypnotic in a repetitively cadencing, Robert Ashley-esque kind of way if you enjoy listening to unaccompanied text. Then there’s Clay Music by the late Barney Childs, a set of sweet little pieces for ceramic instruments like ocarinas that seems like it might be charming in live performance, but is a little too intrusive/tedious on CD. Cold Blue, which discontinued production for some 15 years, has resumed and to its great credit is still recording newer music by the same people they used to, who remain curiously resistant to fame. I’ve always felt like I ended up on the wrong side of the Rockies, and that I was meant, by nature, to be a West Coast composer. And this gorgeous set of discs makes me feel, somehow – homesick.

Ahh, back to Arts Journal, the land of sanity, and I don’t even want to tell you what lunatic asylums I’ve spent my week in. My bright spot of the week was Greg Sandow’s very touching compliment to my blog. Thanking him for that strikes me as a private, not a public matter, and I have. But to give some idea what it means to me, picture me 17 years ago at 31, going into the Village Voice office on weekends and reading old Greg Sandow and Tom Johnson columns for hours on end, trying to figure out what they did, what I could learn from them, what the Voice audience was used to and would expect from me. Tom, of course, took a flatly descriptive, non-evaluative approach to a very new kind of music, highly auspicious for that historical moment because it allowed a lot of crazy ideas to float without getting shot down. Greg’s strength, I always felt, was connecting new music to the outer world, placing it in large social perspective, and I remember often having the experience of reading about some music he was describing and then him suddenly turning the world upside down, making me realize with a bracing shock where the little scene I was focussed on actually fit in. His writing wouldn’t allow me to kid myself, and it opened my eyes to a lot of things. I realized early that I can’t begin to compete with him on the sociology of music – his understanding of the pop music world and the classical music business is much more fleshed out than mine, and as he says, I’m much more focused on internal musical logic.

Of course, I had blown in from godforsaken CHICAGO, and for years everyone in the New York scene shook their heads because I was such a pitiful substitute for the great Greg Sandow. So to get such a sincere tribute from the critic I got so used to being unfavorably compared to was like – I made it into the club. Perhaps that’s enough to say.

I’ve been remiss in blogging this week, but it was out of my hands. I’ve overcompensated at New Music Box – if you go there you’ll find my 17,000-word essay on political music, Making Marx in the Music. But that was mostly written in August. I wish I could say I’ve been caught up in some wild project that I’ll soon tell you about, but truthfully, I’ve had the familiar academic experience of being up to my neck in committee work. I’m “evaluating” my fellow but untenured professors, and find myself every day now in some new and unfamiliar world. One writes about post-Stonewall strategies for gay self-identification. Another is a leading expert on typologies of citizenship throughout the European Union. Another wrote an enlightening article about “Stereoselective oxidative addition of methyl iodide to chiral cyclometallated platinum(II) compounds derived from (R)-(+)-1-(1-naphthylethylamine).” At least I assume it enlightened someone – I can only deal with such texts by reading them for word rhythm, and imagining how they’d sound set to music.

I’m a conservatory product of the ultraliberal, no-course-requirements 1970s, and I can’t say I had a very broad education. I took almost as much philosophy as music, several dead languages, one poetry class (which, like the languages, was mainly for finding texts to compose music to), and fencing. That’s it. My last science class was in 11th grade in 1971 – I think the periodic table was up to aluminum – and from hearing too many lousy pieces of new music based on scientific models, I’ve developed a possibly unfortunate bias that science has nothing to offer art. As I walked across the stage with my doctoral diploma in 1983, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and structuralism were just getting off the boat at Ellis Island, with unsuspected plans to invade. So I’ve had a lot of opportunity this week, recalling the Thoreavian motto with which I began this blog, to “remember well my ignorance, which my growth requires.” But mostly I’ve thought, “Gee, these guys get to teach all this neat, complicated, real-life stuff, and I spend my days explaining the dominant seventh chord.”

I’m sure my colleagues have their own gripes – the chemistry prof must smack his forehead every time a sophomore forgets the valence of radium, and the poli sci prof may get tired of pointing out that Slovakia and Romania don’t share a border (or do they? and when did Slovakia get on the map?). But people expect chemistry to be difficult and dry, and are sometimes delighted when it’s more fun than they realized. Music is in the nearly unique dilemma of being a “sexy,” hip, creative, fun-sounding course of study that, when you start to examine it, turns out to be a mass of numbers and precise terms. “I feel like I need to bring a calculator to this class,” whined one freshman in Fundamentals of Music. I hear myself tell the class about a “six, five-six-of-five, five-four-two, one-six progression with a chromatic neighbor note,” and think to myself, “who invented this idiot system, anyway?” Actually, I’ve been know to say it out loud. How can something as soulfully emotional as music demand such intricate number systems? And the necessity and slowness of imparting such complicated basics prevents us from teaching music as a humanistic discipline, related to other collegiate subjects, as often as we’d like.

It would feel so collegiate to teach symphonic narratives the way lit profs do novels, and offer thematic courses with titles like “Images of ‘The Other’ in Instrumental Music from Haydn to Steve Reich.” Certainly lots of musicologists at larger institutions started doing such things in the 1980s, under pressure to keep pace with the other interpretive disciplines. But for music majors, understanding the details of, say, gamelan influence on Debussy requires some solid foundation in the theoretical basics, and the pressure we feel to turn out technically equipped young musicians leaves us with little time to reflect on what music tells the world about itself. I did have the opportunity, this morning, to let freshmen figure out, with guidance but somewhat on their own, what the correct chords are for the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” and it did seem to elicit in some a sudden epiphany that “one, seven-seven-half-diminished, five-seven-of-six, six” packs a certain kind of emotional wallop capable of thrilling the world (and earning the number-cruncher a shitload of money). How long before all those wacky numbers recede into their subconscious where they belong? In time for graduation? In time for me to enjoy the resulting philosophical insights?

Of course, I do also get to teach pitch-set analysis of The Rite of Spring, tempo charts of Nancarrow and Stockhausen, and even (thanks to being at a highly liberal institution where faculty judgment is given free rein) a very popular course in microtonality. As my friends and I often note, it’s a lot easier to teach the advanced stuff than the basics, and twelve-tone technique isn’t nearly as mysterious or hard to convey as the more necessary dominant seventh. But in 1875, John Knowles Paine convinced Harvard to hire him as America’s first professor of music, over the objections of faculty members who protested that music wasn’t a proper area of university study. And I have had many opportunities, over the years, to reflect that Paine might have been wrong, and the protesting Harvard faculty just might have been right.

Is it really necessary for a string quartet to be six hours long? Of course not – it would be an easy matter for someone to take a pair of scissors to Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 and cut it down to a far more efficient, concise, nonredundant piece of three hours or less. But one of the points Feldman made with his usual breathtaking eloquence is that art is one of those areas of human life in which efficiency is not an asset. As author John Ralston Saul has argued, efficiency is not a good thing in itself, but something we should apply only to aspects of life we don’t care about. It’s the opposite of love. We want our garbage taken out efficiently, we want our driver’s license renewed efficiently, but someone who advocated efficient child-rearing – eliciting maximum good behavior in return for a minimum of parental attention – would be a heartless brute. Likewise, it would be brutish to want efficiency in our artistic experience, and Feldman’s panoramic quartet is a celebration of inefficiency, of what art could become had we only world enough and time.

Just in case you’ve missed out on the last 25 years of contemporary music – and I could hardly blame you, so little attention is drawn to it – Morton Feldman was the greatest composer of the late 20th century. Or at least he looks that way. More significant than the accuracy or prematurity of the assessment is the fact that a remarkable percentage of young composers would concur with it. In the current Babel of musical styles, Feldman is almost the only composer (another might be Nancarrow, whose mechanical methods of writing for player piano, however, have not been as widely assimilated) whose music appeals across stylistic boundaries, among minimalists, postserialists, 12-tone holdouts, electronic composers, academics, Downtowners, MAX programmers, DJ artists, and other miscellaneous wastrels. His cross-cultural appeal comes from the fact that he created a postmodern sense of form – long, slow musical continua played in uniformly quiet dynamics – while holding onto the basic modernist pitch vocabulary of dissonant intervals. In other words, he deftly sidestepped the crisis of ever-increasing modernist complexity without giving in to what was seen as the vapid anti-intellectualism of minimalist consonance and tonality. Even more than that, by writing in his late years works of a continuous 90 minutes, three hours, four hours, even six hours in length, he reclaimed for the disspirited modern composer a sustainable measure of magnificent ambition, a pride in occupying an audience’s time. Quietly but vehemently he asserted for all of us that new music is worth sitting still for, practicalities be damned. In addition to which, as his friend John Cage said, his music is “almost too beautiful.”

The Second Quartet, dating from 1983, is a vast musical quilt of recurring sonic objects – ostinatos (repeating melodic snippets) of four chromatic notes over and over; brief, returning atonal melodies; rotating progressions of three chords with a waltz-like feel; Webernesqe motives that cancel each other out in quiet arguments; quick, rustling pizzicato textures; even one extended moment of jazzy syncopation. The work was given a truncated, hurried runthrough by the Kronos Quartet at New Music America in Miami in 1988 (the full piece was beyond their physical stamina), but received its real full-scale premiere in recent years from Manhattan’s fearless Flux Quartet, who were brought back to recap the achievement in Zankel Hall October 25 as part of the festival “When Morty Met John” (as in Feldman and Cage). The instantaneous standing ovation and outburst of bravos that greeted the Flux players after six hours of pianissimo intensity was as rousing a recognition of heroism as I’ve ever heard at a concert. Violinists Tom Chiu and Jesse Mills, violist Max Mandel, and cellist Dave Eggar played from 6:12 to 12:05 without any but the most momentary break, yet if they were any more tired during the last hour than during the first there was no audible sign of it, just an occasional neck or shoulder stretch. Hour after hour they played harmonies and little fragments of counterpoint in exact rhythmic unison, as with one heart, and with the extraordinarily sustained tension that Feldman’s music requires. Through this and other recent feats, the Flux – if they can only keep their personnel together – have proved themselves an American Arditti Quartet: not as hip, pop, or vernacular as the quartet Ethel, perhaps, but the people you need to bring in when someone’s given the quartet repertoire a particularly difficult nut to crack.

A couple years ago I wrote an article about the String Quartet II for the New York Times – about the best thing I’ve ever written for them, I think – which can be found here (for a small charge via Qpass), and I refer the reader to that for a fuller description of the piece. (Also, Chris Villars maintains a fantastically helpful Morton Feldman home page, including a list of works that as far as I know isn’t published elsewhere.) What interests me more today, finally having heard the Second Quartet live, is the strange social situation of being psychically trapped in a hall with dozens of other audience members and a six-hour sonic boa constrictor. Before beginning, cellist Eggar invited the audience to move around, and even to come up onstage and occupy the rugs and extra chairs that had been provided. When he was done, an audience member shouted “Good luck!,” and Eggar responded, “Good luck to you too. You have to work as hard as we do, or it isn’t fair.” There were those (besides the quartet, I mean) who sat in one place for the whole 353 minutes, but most seemed to enjoy the freedom to move, and as soon as someone left a position on those rugs, it was quickly filled again. I doubt that anyone scoped out more acoustic vantage points than Times critic John Rockwell, who’s had a long history with the piece (he tried to bring the Kronos to play it at Lincoln Center, and they reneged), and who checked out Zankel Hall from every angle. Me, I value comfort over acoustics, and I moved only once, to a side seat that offered leg room.

You enter into any concert with some expectation of when you’ll be getting up again, but there’s a special kind of crisis in knowing that the music is going to last six hours, nonstop. Such music mandates more informality than the general classical concert: the fact that I could have laid down was comforting, even if I didn’t avail myself of it. At any given moment a few audience members were in motion, but everyone was as quiet and reverent as a room of typically clumsy homo sapiens could possibly be. For me the most difficult point was around 8 PM, the point at which a normal concert would have ended. I took a restroom break, and a longer one around 9:45. At 9 I counted the audience members: there were 149, not counting the people I couldn’t see in the balcony above me, in a hall that seated (I was told) 750. That was a slightly smaller crowd than we had started with, I think, though in the evening’s final two hours it appeared to me that we didn’t lose a soul. Everyone in that hall knew what they had come for, and even for the one or two people who read the Times and Village Voice while listening, staying to the end was patently a badge of honor. (Not at all like the New York premiere of the hour-long Feldman First Quartet in 1979, which, according to Sandow’s Voice review, lost much of its audience.) I really wasn’t bothered by Zankel Hall’s soft rumble of subway trains that’s been so widely written about – I’m used to that from lots of New York venues – but there was one bad, long moment in which a booming bass line from the Emmylou Harris concert upstairs imposed a tonality on Feldman’s texture that he never intended. I like Emmylou Harris as much as anyone (that’s a bald-faced lie, actually), but “no C&W during Feldman festivals” might be a sane policy for Carnegie to pursue.

By 10:30 something interesting had definitely happened to the audience. Fidgeting stopped, and focus had palpably increased. Sleepiness was very little in evidence; my only bout with it came in the first half-hour, I having just finished dinner. In that last 90 minutes the audience was reduced, or elevated, to a kind of religious awe, or freed from the usual need for action, as if resigned to some fate. Musical ideas repeated, but there was no way to keep track of chronology. Was that melody one from the beginning ot the work, or had it only occurred a few moments ago? Like walking though a vast, undulating prairie landscape, we had only the vaguest and contradictory notion about where we were – until about 11:55, when suddenly the music switched to quiet chords that had an indistinct air of finality about them. Intermittent silences grew longer, and finally one arrived that seemed endless, until we broke it with a fortississimo of applause.

Unlike Feldman’s music for piano, percussion, voices, and other things (For Philip Guston, Three Voices, Triadic Memories, Palais de Mari, Why Patterns?, Crippled Symmetry), his music for string quartet isn’t pretty – it’s grainy, rough, scratchy with harmonics and occasionally even harsh. It’s phenomenal how little his conception of string quartet changed over a lifetime: so many passages in String Quartet II echo images from Structures, the repetitive little quartet he wrote in 1951 and which establishes his claim as a precursor of the minimalists. There are early passages in SQII that just wave back and forth on a whole-step for many seconds at a time, and several times in the first couple of hours I couldn’t concentrate well, and started wondering what I was doing trapped in Zankel Hall on a lovely, crisp evening. But by that final two hours I was, however, not exactly caught up in the music, but surrounded by it, subdued by it, quelled. If I could have the magical experience of that final two hours without going through the first four, I would, but how would that be possible? The music’s effect is cumulative, creeping into your soul as it hardly deigns to notice you exist. And by the time those final chords come, filling you with an unexpected panic that the music is about to end, the sonic images you remember have become – almost too beautiful… almost too beautiful.