I am thrilled to report that the University of Illinois Press has officially confirmed that they are going to publish my book Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord.

Here’s what happened. Yale UP doesn’t have a music series anymore. Nevertheless, a humanities editor there liked the idea of my book and accepted it, some three years ago. Naturally, he left. I had broken my own rule: Never approach a publisher until a book is virtually finished. Editors rarely stay at one publisher for the amount of time it takes to write a book. I don’t know why, but editors and publishers play a game like musical chairs. One former editor calls me up offering to do a new edition of American Music in the Twentieth Century every time he lands at a new publisher, which seems like about every two years. And the new editor is likely to have completely different interests and criteria. Out my my six books, three have now gone to a different publisher than I started out with for pretty much that reason.

Anyway, a new, inexperienced, surly, and non-musically-savvy editor inherited my manuscript. I could tell from her first week she wasn’t interested. She kept throwing up hurdles in my path. She sent it to terrible readers. Finally, I challenged her to explain why my defense against the readers wasn’t sufficient and to detail what changes she wanted and why. Didn’t hear from her for months. In the meantime I approached my lovely former editor for my Robert Ashley book. She was all enthusiasm. She sent it out to two readers who basically had no complaints whatever, just unadulterated praise. (I suspect they were not musicologists, but one a composer and the other a pianist who’d played the Concord.) Part of being an editor is knowing whom to send the manuscript to; you need two professionals to sign off on it, not to give the author pretentious advice on how to write his sixth book.

Anyway, the Yale editor finally, in May, sent an email saying the book was accepted. I told her I had another publisher interested, and that if she wanted to get out of this contract, as she manifestly did, this was her chance. She jumped at it. It was the fastest I’d ever heard back from her. I returned my $750 advance, which I thought was a totally unfair demand on Yale’s part, but I would have paid more than that to get out. And I afterward heard that that editor is leaving Yale UP for a publisher I’ve never heard of, so I gather that I wasn’t the only one unhappy with her. If only she’d left a few months sooner.

So – following a totally pointless eight-month delay, Essays After a Sonata is back on track. I made none of the substantial changes demanded by the Yale readers. They accomplished nothing, except to make me change publishers. Despite years of booing and hissing from the musicological community (including being turned down for three years’ worth of NEH and ACLS grants), my book will come out exactly as I intended it.

 

 

Here’s an audience listening to a live performance of Nancarrow’s Study No. 25 at the Whitney Museum yesterday:

(As always, clicking on photos makes them appear in a new window in better focus. Don’t know why.) There was a player piano roll of Nancarrow’s Study No. 36 draped across one side of the room. Here are some high points:

And, via Susan Schied of “Prufrock’s Dilemma” blog fame, here I am standing in front of it. I had subconsciously chosen a shirt for the day that everyone thought was a player-piano-roll pattern:

High points of my evening took place at dinner with (L to R) Susan Schied, Liturgy guitarist Bernard Gann, his singer-girlfriend Heidi Farrell, my wife Nancy Cook, musicologist and Cage scholar Sara Haefeli, and one of those Pulitzer-Prize-type composers, John Luther Adams:

And in various other, more picturesque reconfigurations:

(Sara, who’s quite tall, is standing off the curb.)

Not pictured, unfortunately, because they’d already left: composers Mikel Rouse and Tom Hamilton, director of the John Cage Trust Laura Kuhn, and Nancarrow’s stepson Luis Stephens. Thanks to Jay Sanders of the Whitney and Nancarrow expert Dominic Murcott for involving me in a wonderful event.

 

Several people have noted that I am mentioned in connection with the Nancarrow festival at the Whitney Museum this week. (I’ve been quoted in the Times and the New Yorker.) I will indeed be present for it next Wednesday, the 24th. At 1 PM and again at 4 I’m supposed to give an informal talk on Nancarrow, and bring up my favorite Player Piano Studies, which will then be played “live” on an Ampico player piano like Conlon’s. Sounds like a fun gig, but I can never decide which studies to play. The ones I wouldn’t play are easy to pick, but I always want people to hear nos. 3, 4, 6, 7, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, and 48 and the unofficial roll M. It’s too much. I never know how to choose. No. 3 is so fun for the uninitiated, 4 is lovably cute, 6 is fun to explain, 24 is perfect, 25 is a riot, 40 is transcendentally exciting, 21 is a crowd-pleaser, 36 is a miracle, 37 is a modernist classic, 48 is hugely ambitious. I could do it all given enough time, but I never know where to start or stop. And I’ll have a dozen friends there to catch up with, including Luis Stephens, Nancarrow’s stepson by his second wife, who’s been an invaluable font of information about Conlon in the 1940s.

And to bring up another important composer, my friend John Luther Adams has a long excerpt from his upcoming memoir in this week’s New Yorker, in which he was kind enough to mention me. Good reading. John says I once told him, “John, you’re always so earnest, but I like you anyway.” John and I have been sober for a modest percentage of our times together. He greatly heightened my appreciation of expensive single-malt scotch, and I’ve never recovered.

I remember Morton Feldman saying in the ’70s that if there was one musical idea that was finally dead, it was multimovement form. (Was I present when he said it? I can’t recall.) That seemed about right at the time, and, like most of the progressive composers I associated with, I pretty much wrote only one-movement works in the 20th century. But starting with Transcendental Sonnets in 2001-2, I became interested in the multiple movement problem. In recent years many of my works have divided into movements, and I’ve had to grapple with what my conception of the form is. My aesthetic is postminimalist – and by that I mean I do have my own aesthetic, and by comparison with other composers whose style it resembles, I can locate it as postminimalist, but it is simply the style I feel driven to write in, and I could just as easily call it Gannian and leave everyone else out of the picture. It is personality, not ideology; not a political strategy, but simply the route my imagination takes. The style itself produces highly unified movements of little internal contrast. (I could have adopted “No-Drama Gann” before it got applied to Obama.) My music shuns development, rarely relies on tension and release, nor am I comfortable bringing back the same main idea in one movement after another. In this sense I am not really a symphonist in the sense of most modern symphonists, as my friend Robert Carl is; my ideas do not progress from movement to movement. I have often felt that I produce suites, not sonata- or symphony-type works.

I’ve finished a draft of Proença, my song cycle on Ezra Pound. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, though one tends to think that when the ink is still wet, and especially when the piece is ambitious. Unlike my other song cycles, it is not merely a collection but a large structure, and I’ve come closer than ever to feeling what multi-movement form means for me. At 47 minutes, it’s my second longest work next to The Planets. The timings of the Sibelius files are as follows:

I was aware as I was composing that I was selecting poems and song idioms to balance each other off, and that the tendency of one song in one harmonic or textural or rhythmic direction seemed to imply the necessity of another song going in the opposite direction. Once the sixth song clicked into place I realized I was finished, because there were no more variables within my system with which I could create further contrast. And once I got nearly finished I made up a chart showing the kinds of symmetries I ended up with (click on images for better resolution):

Two of the songs are original Provençal poems; two are Pound translations of Provençal poems; and two are poems Pound wrote in response to response to Bertrans de Born’s poem “Dompna puois.” In addition, the 1st, 3rd, and 5th songs are each set in a single, unchanging tonality; the 2nd, 4th, and 6th have no central key. Songs 3 and 4 are characterized by neo-Riemannian chord progressions (closely chromatic voice-leading), one in the context of a stable tonality, the other in a kind of free-floating (though consonant) atonality. Song 2 uses more of a jazz sense of progression; Song 5 has jazz elements in the harmony as well, though it doesn’t change key. In Song 4 the root movement is typically by major 3rds, in Song 6 it is mostly by minor 3rds. Actual troubadour melodies are quoted only in Songs 1 and 6, foregrounded in the former and backgrounded in the latter. Songs 1 and 3 both follow a kind of additive process, 1 and 4 both have an articulated steady pulse, 1 and 5 share a pointillistic texture. Songs 1, 3, 4, and 5 are stanzaic, and I handled stanzaic form four different ways:

Song 1: Static accompaniment, three different melodies
Song 3: Melody becomes more developed with each repetition; final envoi switching to a slower tempo
Song 4: Through-composed, no repetition
Song 5: Repetition of both melody and accompaniment; final envoi switching to a homophonic texture

There are other, smaller ways in which the songs echo each other.

I planned out none of this structure in advance, but kept adding new poems as I instinctively felt gaps in the overall conception. There is no particular narrative arch to Proenca, but I think this is typical of how I tend to create variety in a multimovement piece, mixing and matching an array of qualities from movement to movement for a gradually shaded set of perspectives on similar material. The movements share family resemblances; given seven qualities, each pair of movements may share four or five of those qualities in diverse combinations. No linear energy runs from movement to movement, but each balances the others and helps complete the total picture. And while I kept changing the order of the songs, a certain logic finally dictated the order I came up with, so that too-similar songs weren’t placed too close together. (Complete program notes for the piece are here. And parenthetically, I hope someone can suggest how to get a C with a cedilla to happen in html.)

Looking back, I can see that I’ve instinctively operated this way in other multimovement works. I rarely reuse material from one movement to another (though little melodic ideas do sometimes get transposed, since I like to work on the movements simultaneously), but all the movements together do provide a series of different perspectives on not a single idea but a group of associated ideas. In short, I guess what I’m leading up to saying is that I think I’m a pretty damn good composer, I just don’t do what people expect. But who knows.

 

 

My apologies for false notices. Sometimes I work on a blog post for several days. The “Save Draft” and “Publish” buttons are close together, and if I hit “Save Draft” 25 times it’s nearly certain that one of those times I’ll inadvertently hit “Publish” instead, and then I have to save my text and delete the entry. Meanwhile, apparently those of you who get automatic notices when I post are instantly notified that something new is up. I think WordPress should build in a five-minute delay in case of recall, but there it is; so many technological things we can do in the 21st century, and some we can’t. The post you were about to see will be up later today.

 

I complained to the singer I’m working with that some of my composer colleagues insist that virtually every note in a score should be marked with a dynamic and articulation marking – something I refuse to do. She replied: “Oh, I hate it when I feel hemmed in by the composer. I want to look at the notes and think, ‘What do I need to do to bring this line to life?'” That’s why I’m working with her. I would be irritated working with a performer who needed to be spoon-fed every phrase-shape, just as I would be bored writing a piece that sounded the same no matter who performed it.

I had a vivid dream this morning that I was working for a music festival, which has happened to me in real life before, and in the course of my administrative work came across a conceptual piece by some early modernist artist (which I seemed to recall having known about before). It was a test tube with a scroll inside it directing one to open the much smaller test tube inside in case of suicidal thoughts. And the smaller test tube contained a tiny scroll of paper reading, “The usage is, instead of committing suicide, to write a canon.” This seemed so familiar to me upon waking that I Googled the phrase (in vain), thinking I must have read it somewhere.

I hasten to add that it has been very many years since I was plagued with what I believe is now called suicidal ideation. I am not depressed, but I am still writing canons. The odd wording instantly brought to mind the Almighty fixing his “canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” in Hamlet, and also the annotation to Satie’s Vexations, at the bass line where it says “À ce signe il sera d’usage de présenter le thème de la Basse.” I don’t possess the insight to tease out what this little constellation of meanings signifies, but now, when a student comes in depressed, I might start saying, “Why don’t you try writing a canon?”

 

Today marks my first appearance as a writer in the New York Times since 2003. They asked me for a review of Phil Glass’s new memoir Words Without Music.

 

I was unaware of the Entourage Music and Theater Ensemble, which started in Baltimore and operated from 1970 to 1983 – surprisingly unaware, because though those were my college years, I was seeking out Terry Riley, John Cale, Brian Eno, and any shards of information I could find on La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine. I was spending hours a week in record stores, and their ambient style was right up my alley. But Wall Matthews, the group’s “last surviving member,” is launching a new web site for this group that was somewhat parallel, in the dance world, to Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, and so there’s a chance to discover them long after the fact. I’m curious whether they were on the radar of my fellow minimalism aficionados.

 

“I knew at fifteen pretty much what I wanted to do… I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell…”
– Ezra Pound, “How I Began” (1913)

A thrill ran up my spine when I read those words in college, for I harbored an identical ambition with respect to music. I recognized a kindred spirit, someone who was not only obsessed with an art form, but for whom creating in that art form was not enough: he had to devour and digest the entire history of the art, the repertoire going back to the dawn of recorded history. The obsession was not with “my art,” but with “all art leading up to mine.” (Pound was not yet thirty when he wrote that.) I became an Ezra Pound fanatic for several years, and the Pound preoccupation intersected with a burgeoning love for medieval music to promote my self-immersion in the troubadours (or, as I prefer to spell them in Provençal rather than French, trobadors). I actually studied Provençal for a semester with a Pound scholar, named Peter Way, who was living in Oberlin, Ohio, at the time but not teaching there. I memorized passages of Pound’s early poems, especially the Provençal-inspired ones; the Cantos I found forbidding. Perhaps the disturbing reputation of Pound’s later decades played some role in Pound’s finally dropping outside my focus. Still, when our medieval literature professor at Bard teaches the troubadours, she brings me in to lecture on the music, and I have a blast doing it.

In February I went to Kansas City to lecture on Ives, partially at the invitation of my friend David McIntire. Michelle McIntire, his wife and a singer and voice teacher, expressed a desire to perform some of my music, suggesting I write something for her. Michelle has a wide range but a low tessitura, with an especially nice quality in the octave around middle C. All of my songs for female voice are written in soprano register. I came home, pulled out the usual suspects among my poetry books. Low female voice I associate with sensuality, the sotto voce side of life. The troubadours registered in the back of my mind Рin my youth early-music groups sang them in the style of sacred music, but I always thought their celebrations of illicit sex would have been more at home in smoke-filled jazz clubs. I pulled out my old friend Pound and conceived of his troubadour poem Na Audiart sung with a cool, jazzy accompaniment of flute, vibraphone, electric piano, electric bass. Poem quickly led to poem, and a huge song cycle with the title Proen̤a (the Proven̤al word for Provence) exploded in my head.

So now Proença comprises six songs lasting a projected forty-five minutes (of which I have a half-hour completed), and I’m not sure that will be the end of it. I have two Pound songs based on the warrior-troubadour Bertrans de Born (pictured), Na Audiart and Near Perigord* (excerpted); two Pound translations of troubadour poems, Arnaut Daniels’s “L’aura amara” and the anonymous alba “En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi” (which Pound called the best alba ever written**); and two settings of 12th-century poems in Provençal, Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Pois preyatz me senhor” (with the original melody), and the Comtessa de Dia’s “Estat ai en greu cossirier,” which I picked in order to have a poem by a woman for which no pre-existing tune had survived. I could so easily go further, there are so many troubadour poems I love and Pound poems, and my poet friend Michael Ives introduced me to the tautly energetic troubadour translations of Black Mountain poet Paul Blackburn (1926-71), which I’d also consider. On the other hand it’s a lot of music to pour into Michelle’s brain, and an odd instrumentation to ask an audience to listen to for half an evening. As it is, she’s thinking about a winter premiere and recording it next summer.

So I’m not sure how much further to go. I mentioned to a distinguished poet on the faculty that I was writing a song cycle on Pound and she spit out, “That bastard!” I know, but I do not believe in holding the artist’s faults against the art. Who knows but that I may be in the doghouse myself someday? And should my music therefore suffer? Pound’s later fascist sympathies aside (and I’m using only pre-1920 texts), those poems have been lovingly settled into the back of my brain for so many decades. Pound planted the seeds of a troubadour fascination forty years ago, and they only needed a drop of attention to blossom into a tropical forest of inspiration.

*It’s difficult to refer to Near Perigord when you’re very used to talking about the Danish composer Per Norgard.

**An alba is a formulaic medieval poem warning two lovers who shouldn’t be found sleeping together that the dawn is visible – presaging Romeo and Juliet and Tristan und Isolde.