blog – Page 66

I Do Love a Good Piece of Writing

Off topic, I realize, butÂ this Palin article by Matt Taibbi from Rolling StoneÂ is too entertaining not to share:

Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin’ Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

And again:

We’re used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She’s all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It’s just designed to sell her.

And as a public service announcement, some much-needed publicity forÂ the Alaska Secessionist Movement.Â

Bleak Inheritance

I wrote an article on William Schuman for Symphony magazine, which I’ll give you the details on presently. I couldn’t really spare the time, but chances to write about Schuman are rare, and I love his music too much to have resisted. I gather that being a huge Schuman fan puts me in somewhat of a minority (what else is new?). There is a prejudice abroad that Schuman’s composing career was only propped up by his powerful position as President of first Juilliard and then Lincoln Center. Don’t you believe it.

I met Schuman once. He had some piece played in Chicago in 1986, and I reviewed him by phone for the Chicago Reader, then introduced myself at the performance. I wish I had had the chutzpah to insist on getting to know him. I told him that at home, beneath my bed, was a box of compositions I wrote in high school, most of them attempts to plagiarize the bleak opening atmosphere of his Eighth Symphony. In perfect crusty-old-sea-captain character he growled, “Surely you can do better than that!” Here’s the passage in question, a reiterating series of succulently grim major-minor triads leading to a long, angularly wandering horn solo:

I know it’s fuzzy, but try to look at those two harps and the piano, with tubular bells playing both thirds of the triad and a grace-note in the glockenspiel. Delicious. There are few passages in the orchestral literature I love so dearly. It’s desolate, haunted, almost motionless, yet palpably not despairing; there’s a latent energy to the rhythm and even the subtly shifting voice-leading that somehow forecasts the sardonic fireworks that will come in the third movement. It’s as Americanly tragic (sorry, “tragically American” just won’t do) as The Grapes of Wrath – a novel that coming events may compel us all to reread. I love Schuman’s Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies too, and his New England Triptych, and I played his less impressive piano piece Voyage which had a little impact on my piano writing, but the Eighth is the one I kept trying to duplicate.

My guilty secret is that before I discovered Cage at 15, I had already lost my creative vriginity to the Harris Third, the Schuman Eighth, and the Bernstein Second (gang-banged, as it were). My high school composing style slithered around among Schuman, Harris, Ruggles, Copland, Bernstein, and – more consciously but a little more distantly as well – Ives. Had I not then fallen in with the Cage crowd, I suppose I’d be writing symphonies today. And I still suspect that my personal take on minimalism, heard through glacially moving microtones, minor-triad obsessions, and even my fetish for the 11/9 interval (347 cents) that’s halfway between major and minor, was conditioned by the spellbinding effect Schuman’s gloomy chords had on me at a tender age.

I’ll put up a first-movement mp3Â hereÂ temporarily, but hopefully everyone already knows this piece.

A Clementi Afterthought

One more word about Clementi, and as example a piece I bring into many classes. I was always a collector of canons, even before I discovered Nancarrow, and Clementi was something of a fanatic about them. (Sometimes to his detriment; the otherwise magisterial Op. 40 No. 1 Sonata is a little marred by its canonic scherzo, which doesn’t bear enough weight for the rest of the piece.) There are eight canons in his massive, almost-five-hour piano opus Gradus ad Parnassum, and two of them are inversion canons. It seems to me that an effective inversion canon, in a tonal idiom, is one of the hardest things you can write, and this one, the more effective of Clementi’s two, I find remarkably charming for the genre:

You can hear the canonÂ hereÂ in a recording by DaniÃ¨le Laval. Of course in E major he has to reflect the lower voice around F#, because the major scale (as a glance at the keyboard will show, noting D’s position among the white keys) is symmetrical around the second scale degree. Debussy tweaked fun at Gradus ad Parnassum in his Children’s Corner, and Charles Rosen blasts the collection as a marathon of mechanical soullessness. He’s almost 100 percent wrong. They’re all teaching pieces on some level, but included are dozens of lovely, memorable vignettes, variously diverging toward early Romantic harmony and warm neo-Baroque counterpoint.Â

I’ve always gotten a kick out of keeping a secondary musicological specialty besides contemporary American music, sort of as a hobby and to keep new music in perspective. My period used to be medieval, which I studied in grad school with Theodore Karp, one of the leading figures in the field. But the last time I taught medieval, the textbook (by Jeremy Yudkin, the only enjoyably readable medieval music text) contradicted half of what I said, and I realized that that field changes too fast for me to keep track of – pieces are now attributed to different composers than was true when I was in grad school, and even the technical terminology has changed. So several years ago I switched to Classical Era as a secondary specialty, though I only do the instrumental music; most 18th-century opera bores me to tears. I enjoy taking students through the Haydn symphonies because they’re so incredibly varied and numerous, though it’s a rare student who shares my enthusiasm for Haydn. And I try to show them that the period was a lot funkier than it gets credit for, by playing Albrechtsberger’s concertos for jew’s harp, Michele Corrette’s Combat Naval with its forearm clusters on the harpsichord, and music in odd meters like this fugue in 5/8 by Beethoven’s childhood friend Antonin Reicha:

But I bring up Clementi’s inversion canon even in composition lessons as an example of grace achieved under intense compositional restrictions.

Linked Out the Wazoo

Somebody urged me to join Classical Lounge, so I did, and lots of people there wanted to add me to their friends list, and I always pushed the “accept” button. And I started getting notices that people wanted to befriend me on Plaxo Pulse, so I’d go over there and thread my way through the web site, and then the similar LinkedIn requests started pouring in. And I got invited to join NetNewMusic, as did apparently my entire circle of acquaintances, because most of my e-mail time over the next couple of weeks was spent acceding to requests to link to people there. Many of the requests come from slight acquaintances I admire and certainly don’t want to insult by refusing, others come from complete strangers. But in either case, I haven’t figured out what the point is.Â

If someone wants to get in touch with me, I already felt like the easiest-to-reach person in the blogosphere, with multiple web addresses and message sites. (Sensitive people think they get blocked by my spam filter, but it’s never true.) Given that I’m an introvert with a high need for privacy and prone to the occasional peevish mood, I’m still fairly sociable, and I certainly don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’m too high and mighty to join their little internet club. But I can’t imagine a situation in which someone wanted to get information to me who wouldn’t find it easiest to just add my e-mail address to a list. Maybe if I were young and on the lookout for career opportunities, some would come my way through this route, but my plate, insofar as casual acquaintances would seem to be able to fill it, is pretty full. I’ve found that I don’t like getting caught up in web forums, because my ideas are pretty unorthodox, and classical musicians often get offended by my views (like, I don’t know, my perception that most classical musicians are kind of stupid). And it takes about all my spare time to deal with mail to my own blog, where at least people already know what they’re getting into. If I want to talk to microtonalists I go to their Yahoo list, and I check in on New Music Box, and I look at people’s web sites when too tired to do anything else. I might also mention that I keep pretty busy.

I don’t take to new technologies very well, and maybe there’s something going on here that I just haven’t figured out – or maybe the people who run these sites are themselves just testing the waters. Is there something to these music e-friend groups that I should be paying attention to?

Classical Reflections

The monothematic sonata (in which the main theme reappears as the second theme, and sometimes representing other functions as well) is reflexively associated with Haydn, but it could just as well be identified with Muzio Clementi. Except that Clementi approaches the idea with more nuance than Haydn. Often Clementi bases all his themes on the same motive, or else the second theme is a variation of the first, and perhaps the closing theme the inversion of the first. For instance, in the Op. 37 No. 2 Sonata in G, the opening theme:

is varied to become the second theme (and later inverted to become the closing theme):

It imparts to Clementi’s sonatas a lovely brand of introversion you don’t find in Mozart or Beethoven, a sense of the theme-hero being inflected according to its changing role in the sonata structure, and the whole movement being narrowly focused. I point this out to demonstrate how this particular sonata exhibits one of the cleverest strategies in leading to the recapitulation I’ve ever found. The development ends up on the dominant of A minor, and a modified form of the main theme emerges, moving ambiguously between e minor and G major, and finally reaching a dominant on G just in time for the second theme:

That means that, thematically, the piece arrives at the recapitulation thirteen measures before it reaches it tonally (i.e., a return to the tonic key), and uses the recapitulation of the main theme as its transitional element modulating back into the tonic. It’s an elegant structural pun, the theme serving to embody, hint at, and retransition to the recap all at once. Very smooth, very clever. Clementi clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the potential subtleties in sonata form and how to play around with them. There are many similar examples in his music (and Op. 37 No. 2 pales next to the six magnificent sonatas of his Op. 40 and Op. 50). And when you compare this level of structural thought and compositional rhetoric to the kind of awkward, slapdash transition that Mozart could jerry-rig in a now-famous sonata even as late as K. 545:

it’s clear that some of the excess idolatry we lavish on Mozart could aptly be retooled as honest admiration for Clementi, and for Jan Ladislav Dussek as well. Not that Clementi ever wrote anything that could match Mozart’s late piano concerti and operas (though he did provide Mozart with a theme for the Magic Flute overture), but it’s kind of silly and sad, given our far more complete view of the 19th century (except for the remarkable Franz Berwald) that we impart such a cartoonish, one-dimensional view of the classical era, just Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven with Gluck occasionally thrown in. Beethoven grew up with Clementi’s sonatas and borrowed from them, and I sometimes wonder what Ludwig thought of poor Clementi, a well-respected composer 19 years his senior, reduced to becoming Beethoven’s publisher and representative of his piano retailer. In my Evolution of the Sonata class, I try to correct the balance.

In Westminster Abbey a few years ago, I ran across Clementi’s grave by accident. (The English adopted him as they did Handel.) It was a thrill to run into someone whose music has given me so much pleasure.

Acousmatics Versus Soundscapers

I truly wish that it had been my lifelong dream to publish books about music, because it comes all too easily to me and I could have fulfilled my dream in short order. Unfortunately, in the late 1960s it became my passion to write music and get it performed, which 40 years later I still find a more challenging proposition (the getting-performed part, I mean). Writing a book is a solitary occupation that sometimes actually pays for itself; putting out a CD requires tremendous enthusiasm from performers and cooperation from sound engineers, plus a vast financial structure to make sure everyone gets paid, with virtually no money guaranteed to come back in return. Each book I publish feels like a cakewalk compared to the CDs I struggle like hell to put together. Yet had I put out 30 CDs in my life and no books, I would have been tickled pink with my career. Instead, I find myself writing a book now and then just to take up the slack.

In any case, the Cage book is basically finished, and I’m sending it off tomorrow. One of the topics I deal with in the chapter on the aftermath of 4’33” is something I got from electronic composer Paul Rudy at UMKC: the debate between the acousmatic composers and the soundscapers. I knew the word acousmatic, but I hadn’t realized that it was a kind of official term for a certain approach to electronic music. (In fact, it seems to me that composers actually loooooove terms and -isms, except for postminimalism and totalism, because the latter two denote composers who write music that appeals to audiences, so it’s imperative that those groups be marginalized at all costs, and denying that those terms mean anything is the quickest way to effect that.) But Paul tells me – and I’d like more independent verification on this, though I’ve found some scattered around the internet – that the acousmatic composers believe in using everyday acoustic sounds that are divorced from their sound sources and rendered unrecognizable, while the soundscape composers like to record environmental sounds that are evocative of their origins. Paul is one of the composers who finds this an idle academic argument, as indeed it seems to be, and whose music moves back and forth between deliberate evocation and abstraction as a structural element; he’s pointed me to Jonty Harrison as a kindred spirit. This seems to be a particularly big issue in Canada, where the acousmaticians (if that is the proper term) are centered in Montreal, and the soundscapers on the West Coast, led by the indomitable R. Murray Schafer. This is an issue that seems to have mainly been written about in academia if at all, and while I get the point, my understanding of the differences is lacking in nuance. I’d be curious as to my readers’ knowledge of these categories.

UPDATE: You guys are amazing. (See comments.)

Cleaning Out My Office

Composers Neely Bruce, Kyle Gann, William Duckworth, and Anthony Coleman grouped around pianist Lois Svard, Lewisburg, PA, 1989 or ’90.(Photo: Nancy Cook)

Macho Meters

Anyone ready for another year of music theory talk? I did myÂ annual shtickÂ this week on odd meters. You can anticipate me: Holst’s “Mars,” the ancient Greek “Hymn to Apollo,” and Brubeck’s Take Five for quintuple meter; Pink Floyd’s “Money” for seven; a long passage from Roy Harris’s Seventh Symphony, plus a Bulgarian “Krivo Horo” for eleven; the “Blues” movement of Ben Johnston’s Suite for microtonal piano for thirteen; Waylon Jennings’s “Amanda” for fifteen; and the end of the first movement of my Desert Sonata for a long passage in 41/16 meter. Only this year, I have a student, Benjamin Bath, who grew up in a Greek family and going to Greek weddings and all that, and every meter I’d start to mention, he’d reel off all the traditional Greek and Macedonian and Bulgarian songs, and already knew the couple I played. So Monday he brought in a book,Â The Pinewoods International CollectionÂ selected by Tom Pixton and published by NightShade, and let me copy some examples. Try humming through this little number:

And here’s another, much easier to play, but impressively in 22:

A little more chromaticism, and these melodies would look like I wrote them. From my readers’ previousÂ very informative debate, I know that some will object to the very notating of these traditional tunes, claiming that they can only be learned orally, and I reiterate the most relevant comment left by someone who knew this music:

[T]he Bulgarians DO NOT count out every “8th” or “16th” note while performing their music. They express them as long and short beats. They actively discourage trying to count it out, and expressed that the only way to hope to begin to play it accurately would be to feel the long and short beats.

Doubtless true, making the whole topic an excellent entrÃ©e into teaching students that there’s more than one way to scope out rhythms, and entire societies in which consecutive beats are not assumed “steady,” but can be different lengths. Helpfully, Pixton’s edition marks out the underlying rhythm on the top left of each example. But since I do teach the blackboard theory class and am pretty reliant on notation, I’m thrilled to have more than just a couple of token examples of 7, 11, and 13 – and not only examples by weird avant-gardists like myself, but by normal people who play at weddings.Â

In fact, I’ve got to move to Greece or Bulgaria – out someplace where I can teach some real man’s theory. I’ve had it up to here with this pusillanimous 2/4, and 3/4, and hidden fifths, and D# equalling Eb.

Cleaning Up a Life

John Cage’s life is getting sorted out, but you need to pick and choose your sources. David Tudor and Morton Feldman were both Stefan Wolpe students, and nearly everyone says Cage met Tudor through Feldman, but actually (according to Tudor scholar John Holzaepfel), Tudor was also sometime accompanist for dancer Jean Erdman, in whose apartment Cage and Xenia ended up living when they first came to New York in 1942. (Cage and Feldman met January 26, 1950.) Cage knew Tudor first through Erdman.

Nearly everyone, including Cage, says that he met Robert Rauschenberg at BlackÂ

Mountain College. But Cage visited BMC twice in 1948, and didn’t return until 1952. Meanwhile,Â Rauschenberg first came to BMC in 1949, and in 1951, Irwin Kremen (the dedicatee of 4’33”) saw aÂ Rauschenberg painting in Cage’s apartment. Kremen andÂ Rauschenberg biographer Walter Hopp are adamant that Cage metÂ Rauschenberg in New York, where the latter had a big one-man show in fall 1951, which Cage attended. Nothing else makes sense. Laura Kuhn at the Cage Trust even saysÂ Rauschenberg returned to BMC in ’52 at Cage’s invitation, though I won’t use that unless I find some documentary verification. (After all, I don’t remember where I met Robert Carl, or how John Luther Adams and I first got in touch – that was over 20 years ago. Why trust Cage to have remembered?)

Cage told interviewer Thomas Hines, “You’ll have trouble with me; I’m bad with dates,” and that’s the lord’s truth. At one point Cage says he visited the anechoic chamber in the late ’40s, and in Silence he credits it with having the latest up-to-date 1951 technology. Then, inÂ “An Autobiographical Statement,”Â he talks about the big theatrical “happening” at BMC (August 1952), says he went from there to Rhode Island and saw a synagogue where the audience was seated in the same configuration as at the happening, and from there he went to Cambridge and saw an anechoic chamber. The other references are vague, and this last is the only one that associates the anechoic chamber with datable events. But in the very next sentence, he mentions having written “A Composer’s Confessions” (delivered February 1948) while he was studying with Suzuki. Suzuki arrived in America in late summer of 1950, started teaching at Columbia in 1952. None of Cage’s misdatings seem in any way self-serving – who cares what year he saw the anechoic chamber? Although it does look like maybe he exaggerated his studies with Suzuki a little.Â

I guess this is real musicology, not the kind I’m used to doing. I’m used to the composer handing me the score, asking him or her a few questions, and publishing the results with little fear of contradiction, indeed little fear that anyone else will know what I’m talking about. Wiley Hitchcock kidded me because so many of the footnotes in my American Music book read “e-mail to the author.” But this 4’33” book bristles with real academic footnotes, more than 100 in one chapter – I wish he were around to see it. Details are not my forte. Large scale patterns everyone else has missed are my forte. Luckily a phalanx of impressive Cage scholars have pounded the pavement to dig up the facts in recent years, and I’m their beneficiary. I just have to be careful to read long enough and in the right places, because so many well-known facts about Cage turn out not to be true.

Revising History

John Cage, in Silence:

While Meister Eckhart was alive, several attempts were made to excommunicate him… None of the trials against him was successful, for on each occasion he defended himself brilliantly. However, after his death, the attack was continued. Mute, Meister Eckhart was excommunicated. (p. 193)

In Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press, 1981), medievalist scholar Edmund Colledge gives quite a different picture. Noting that one of Eckhart’s “heresies” was a direct echo of St. Thomas Aquinas that the inquisitors should have recognized as such, he brings upÂ

the problem of why Eckhart himself did not put up a better defense… The years… of paradox-spinning for the scandalized delight of larger but less critical and instructed audiences do not seem to have sharpened his wits… [W]e can perhaps detect signs of the apathetic fatigue experienced by an aging man, aware that he has not fulfilled his early promise and has exhausted his powers in his efforts to woo popular acclaim.Â (p. 14.)

Now I’m trying to figure out when Cage visited the anechoic chamber. Most people (including Cage) say 1951, but his own narrative also seems to imply that he left Black Mountain College (where he was in summer of 1952, not ’51, and must have been until August 16, 1952, for a performance of Sonatas and Interludes), went to Rhode Island, thence to Cambridge for the Harvard anechoic chamber visit – and then wrote 4’33” for an August 29 performance! This is William Brooks’s position, and it looks irrefutable.

I’m at the point at which every day I finish half of what’s left of this book, but the final tiny pieces get harder and harder.

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