[UPDATED] Thursday night, March 6, at 7:30 the amazing University of Kentucky Percussion Ensemble will play my Snake Dance No. 2 at the SCFA Recital Hall there in Lexington. The program also includes works by Jay Batzner, Lou Harrison, David Crowell, Russell Peck, and Paul Lansky. I’ve head these guys do it, and though they’re young, they’re incredible. (I’ve also been thinking about what a great place to live Lexington seemed. I was treated to lunch in a huge natural food coop where everything was great, and there were some lovely bars and restaurants. We on the coasts think of flyover country as pretty deadly, but there are some amazing pockets of liberalism, enlightenment, and good living, and Lexington was one of them. Plus, during the Kentucky Derby, Maker’s Mark sells bottled mint juleps. Those truly are deadly.)

The following night at 8:30, Friday March 7, pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera play at Roulette in New York, 20 Greene Street. It’s a largely Terry Riley program, filled in with pieces by Ingram Marshall, Michael Byron, and my own On Reading Emerson, which Sarah plays beautifully on our new CD Private Dances.

My new electric guitar quartet Composure, on which the ink would still be wet if I still composed in pen, is premiering in Montreal April 4 at the Voyages: Montreal-New York festival, organized by the tireless Tim Brady.

Rodney Lister plans to include my Long Night for three pianos and Paris Intermezzo for toy piano on a program at Boston University on April 11.

On May 6, the Bard College Chamber Singers and Symphonic Chorus, conducted by my friend James Bagwell, will perform my Transcendental Sonnets at Bard’s Fisher Center, only the second time the work has been done.

However, the Relache ensemble’s May performances of my suite The Planets have been postponed to the following fall, though we’ll still be recording the work for the Meyer Media label this summer. Mmm… think that’s it for the forseeable future.

UPDATE: Heavens, forgot the most important of all. On May 9, Williams College is offering the American premiere of my piano concerto Sunken City.

No obituary I’ve seen for the record producer Teo Macero (1925-2008) has mentioned that he was also a composer, though the Times notes that he studied with Henry Brant. I offer the only piece I’ve heard of Macero’s, One-Three Quarters (sic): a six-minute quarter-tone piece for two pianos and ensemble from 1968. It’s pretty cool. It was on an Odyssey vinyl disc, with Ives’s Quarter-Tone Pieces and other 24tet works.

As a just-intonationist, I officially disapprove of quarter-tone music and would never write any, but I harbor a secret affection for it anyway. My music starts to sound all too normal after awhile, but quarter-tone music just never stops sounding weird.

UPDATE: Tom Hamilton sends a link to recordings of Macero’s music. I always feel bad making a big deal out of a composer just after he dies. That’s why I’ve devoted the bulk of my musicology work to living composers while they’re around to appreciate it.

No comment. Completely speechless, in fact.

UPDATE: For that matter, you can market aleatory music and totalism, too.

As an introvert who grew up as a classical musician in Texas, I tend to apologetically assume that everyone in the world knows more about pop music and jazz than I do. For instance, I didn’t read Miles Davis’s incredible autobiography until I was in my 40s, while I assume any hip musician would have read it in his 20s if not earlier. (The fact that I was 34 when it was published does not allay my suspicion.) But it appears that not everyone knows the context in which Miles referred to classical music as “robot shit,” and the story – heavily underlined in my own copy of the book because it had so much relevance to my own experiences, and made me feel so good – is worth retelling as often as possible. The occasion was the recording of Davis’s and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain, for which they hired some classical brass players to play some of the background parts:

…I just went to Gil and told him, “Gil, you don’t have to write music like that. It’s too close for the musicians to play. You don’t have to make the trumpet players sound like they’re perfect, because these trumpet players are classically trained and they don’t like to miss no notes no how.” So he agreed with that. In the beginning, we had the wrong trumpet players because we had those who were classically trained. But that was a problem. We had to tell them not to play exactly like it was on the score. They started looking at us – at Gil, mostly – like we were crazy. They couldn’t improvise their way out of a paper bag. So they were looking at Gil like, “What the fuck is he talking about? This is a concerto, right?” So they know we must be crazy talking about “play what isn’t there.” We just wanted them to feel it, and read it and play it, but these first ones couldn’t do that, so we had to change trumpet players, and that’s why Gil had to reorchestrate the score. Next we got some trumpet players who were both classical and could feel….

Then we had to have some drummers who could get the sound that I wanted….

…Legit drummers can’t solo because they have no musical imagination to improvise. Like most other classical players, they play only what you put in front of them. That’s what classical music is; the musicians only play what’s there and nothing else. They can remember, and have the ability of robots. In classical music, if one musician isn’t like the other, isn’t all the way a robot, like all the rest, then the other robots make fun of him or her, especially if they’re black. That’s all that is, that’s all the classical music is in terms of the musicians who play it – robot shit. And people celebrate them like they’re great. Now there’s some great classical music by great classical composers – and there’s some great players up in there, but they have to become soloists – but it’s still robot playing and most of them know it deep down, though they wouldn’t admit it in public.

So you have to have a balance on something like Sketches of Spain, between musicians who can read music and play it with no feeling or a little feeling, and some others who could play with real feeling. I think the perfect thing is when some musicians can both read a musical score and feel it…. [pp. 243-244, emphases added]

Just like Downtown music. Just like Downtown music. Do you hear what I’m sayin’? JUST LIKE DOWNTOWN MUSIC. Not that you have to be able to improvise, but that you have to be able to feel a musical score, not just replicate the marks on the page.

And as for you, Mr. Edgard “Feel-sorry-for-me-I’m-a-misunderstood-genius” Varèse, you who insists that every note in a score has to have multiple dynamic and articulation marks on it: Why? To turn it into robot shit, to prevent musicians from deciding how they feel it. Because otherwise [in the most simpering possible French accent] “zey do not know how zay vant zere museek to soooooouuuuund.” Well, fuck you, Varése. Fuck you and your pseudo-scientific approach to music. (And while I’m at it – Octandre: nice piece.)

That felt good.

I love this score layout from William Billings’s hymn “Modern Musick” from The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement, originally published in 1781, a reprint of which I picked up at a used book store this week. Notice how the sharps in the key signature are written as much as possible straight up in a line, F-C-D-G:

Notice too how the note-stems are all on the right, and the treble clef in the soprano is indicated by a “g” on the second line. For awhile in college I wrote my treble clefs that way myself, on the reasoning that a treble clef is just an ornate Baroque Italian G written around the second line, and there was no reason for us to go on writing a “g” in that ridiculously festooned manner 300 years later when even the Italians don’t write them that way anymore. I had to choose my battles, I was destined to become engaged in so many, and I rather quickly gave that one up. But I love the insouciance with which the sacred order of sharps in a key signature is ignored, and how little difference it makes in reading the music.

So many conventions of notating music we take as sacred, ancient, and unalterable are actually of relatively recent vintage, and used to be quite malleable. In Bach’s day the customary way of indicating a minor key indicated what we now think of as Dorian mode; for a violin suite in E minor he would notate two sharps, F and C. Nowadays, of course, we “correct” him, for old Bach clearly hadn’t taken first-year theory class. In the 1890s, theory textbooks (Rimsky-Korsakov’s, for example) taught the “harmonic major” scale:

based on the idea that the minor iv chord had become so common in major as to necessitate a special scale. Fashions come and go, theoretical premises change, but we teach notational conventions as though they are somehow ontologically necessary, and browbeat young musicians into a terrified conformity to which Billings was happily oblivious. Why? For efficiency’s sake, so that none of our orchestral musicians will ever have to encounter a piece of music that doesn’t look pretty much like every one they’ve ever seen, which otherwise might force them to actually pause and think a moment.

I had a friend many years ago, who died at a tragically young age. Bill Hogeland will know who I’m talking about. Right out of Oberlin she got a job as bassoonist for the Dallas Symphony. I saw her one morning, and she was tired because, she said, the orchestra had performed the night before.

“Oh, what did you play?,” I asked.

“Ummmm… Mahler, I think.”

She was a sweet young conservatory product, but her conception of her job was to prepare her reeds, sit down in her chair onstage, and expertly and automatically play the notes on the page some functionary had placed on her music stand, without ever thinking about who the composer was or what the notes meant. And to make sure that such nice people never have to think, never have to pause a moment and figure out anything they haven’t seen a million times before, our young composers have to have notational conformity beat into them on pain of excommuncation from all decent musical society. Yesterday a student brought me an orchestra piece with the following rhythm:

It’s a perfectly nice rhythm of a kind I might have well used myself. But not in an orchestra piece you don’t! I knew enough to put the kibosh on that. Because efficiency, sight-reading, automaticness, and thoughtlessness are at the heart of turning out classical music, that hallowed repertoire that Miles Davis so aptly termed “robot shit” – because it was played by robot musicians who couldn’t be bothered to deviate from or even think about what they saw on the page.

Don’t bother writing in to tell me how communist and retarded my opinions are, ’cause I already know what the robots think of me. I’m an evolutionist, who thinks music has evolved and has a right to keep evolving, whereas most classical musicians are creationists who think Beethoven created it 200 years ago and it has to stay that way eternally. As Mark Twain said, “I don’t give a damn for a man who can only spell a word one way.”

This Thursday at 2:30 I’m delivering the Poynter Fellowship lecture at Yale University. I’ll be illustrating the problems of my career by mixing up musicology, microtonal theory, and composition in one big indecipherable melange, with some rare scores and manuscripts by Nancarrow, La Monte Young, and myself and my contemporaries. It’s at William L. Harkness Hall, Room 207, 100 Wall Street, reception to follow. See ya there.

To serendipitously follow up on my post about publishing and the unavailability of scores, I had dinner with a friend tonight who’s a tremendously successful composer, scads of orchestral performances, awards out the wazoo, you name it. And he’s telling me how he abandoned his big-name publisher, bought a fancy Xerox/scan/printing machine, and is publishing his own scores, with the same kind of binding and exactly the same quality he got from his publisher. He’s sick and tired of people not being able to get his music, or having to pay outrageous prices merely to rent it. And his publisher is nervous and wants a meeting, because my friend hasn’t sent them anything in four years. It’s kind of delicious. So if you were thinking of trying to get a commercial publisher, or fuming because you don’t have one – just forget about it. “What do they do for me?,” he kept asking. And there was no answer.

I note with pleasure that my old friend Bill Hogeland, my only college pal I’m still regularly in touch with, got to write the Times‘s op-ed piece on George Washington for Presidents’ Day. Bill, a brilliant novelist and playwright, has taken on a career as historian of American politics much as I’ve redefined myself as a historian of American music. Seems to be where the money and respect are.

The longest I’ve ever gone without seeing Bill is maybe six or seven years, once. But regardless, when we meet we immediately resume the thread of whatever conversation on aesthetics we were last having, as though the interruption had been momentary. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, he’s a member of my karass.

A non-composing new-music enthusiast writes in with an urgent question:

It is often nearly impossible for an ordinary person to obtain contemporary scores. I’ve written to composers that you mention without success (or often, without even a response). Why do we need to be Kyle Gann or eighth blackbird to get contemporary scores, even (or especially) when recordings are available?

Amen, amen. How can we keep up a civilized discourse about new music today, even when we can get the recordings, when we can’t find the scores on which the recordings are based, and of which they are, after all, only one possible interpretation? I constantly bug composers for scores, and, ironically, it’s the ones whose music is published that are the hardest to come by – I can only get perusal scores for a short time, and they take forever to arrive, and so on. I will point out that a very good collection of recent scores, including mine, is available for low prices at Frog Peak, a wonderful company that supports artists and is not trying to enrich itself. But we need some kind of central score warehouse that people can put their work into. The now-defunct and much-lamented IMSLP looked like it might partly serve that function. I scan a lot of the scores I get into PDFs so I can take them on lecture tours and work on them away from home, but I can’t go handing those out without some arrangement with the composers. Fifty of my own scores are downloadable on my web site, and very good San Francisco composer Erling Wold does the same. Send me notice of others who do this, and we’ll make a list. It’s great that making recordings and mp3s at home has become so easy, but the decline of score culture, in sharp contrast to my youth, has been a bee in my bonnet for a couple decades now. Suggestions welcome.

And further to the point, I’ve now put up a score to my vibraphone solo Olana (PDF download). Several people had asked about it, and I am given to understand that the mallet world is desperate for new repertoire. I often feel I can’t get my music played as mellowly as I want it, so I have even introduced into the score the word mellissimo – for those who would feel so much better if I would only use Italian terms.

The opportunity to speak in an endowed musicological lecture series inspired me to talk about musicology itself for the first time in my life. I felt like I was going out on a limb a little, but these are thoughts I’d been having about what we need from musicology lately, and I hoped that some young musicologist or two might see this as an opportunity to return to the cause of new composed music, and do some much-needed good. In that spirit I post it here for a wider audience. The topics are pluralism, minimalism as a new historical era, and the problem with calling American composers “mavericks.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

One night in New York City after a concert I was having a drink with my fellow composer Larry Polansky. He was talking about the musicological and restorative work he was doing on music by Johanna Beyer and Harry Partch, I spoke of my analytical writings on the music of Conlon Nancarrow and Mikel Rouse. Finally, Larry said, “Composers are now doing the work that musicologists used to do, while the musicologists are all off doing gender studies.”

I am a composer, and have been composing music continuously since the age of 13. I have three degrees in music composition, and none in music history. And yet I have published two musicology books and quite a number of musicological articles. I was even hired at Bard College as a musicologist, not as a composer. I’ve presented papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society. I have always had a rather fanatical interest in music history, but I have no specific training that could be called musicological. I always go to musicology conferences half expecting to be exposed and thrown out as a charlatan, and the fact that it has never happened has led me to think of musicologists as being universally generous and good-natured people with a shrewd sense of humor.

That I am invited here today to give the Rey M. Longyear Musicology Lecture certainly preserves that impression. When I started college, the first music history textbook I was assigned was by Dr. Longyear, so my consciousness of the honor of the invitation is wrapped up with some very old memories.

But I never had any particular ambition in the field of musicology, and as my anecdote about Larry Polansky suggests, if the needs that composers have from the world of musicology were being satisfied by music historians, I probably would never have ventured into the field.

Several years ago Wiley Hitchcock, who passed away recently, asked me to write a final chapter, “Music Since 1985,” for the fourth edition of his textbook Music in the United States. Several months later, we had lunch, and he broke it to me that he wasn’t going to go ahead with a fourth edition. No one wanted to read narrative history anymore, he said, everyone was doing gender studies and reception histories and sociologies of vernacular music. “But Wiley,” I argued, “just because people are doing all those worthwhile things doesn’t mean that we can quit doing what music historians have always done. If someone doesn’t write down the basic facts of what’s happening, there won’t be any contemporary accounts of history for future gender studies scholars to work from.” I like to think I brought him around, and the fourth edition of Music in the United States did eventually appear.

There is a perception abroad that in the 1980s musicologists dropped the ongoing narrative of composed music, and when a narrative is discontinued, an impression is created that the story has ended. We composers need musicology, for an objective view of our field from the outside that can create a narrative that will make our activities make sense to the outside world and to ourselves. But for all the good that gender studies, reception histories, ethnomusicology, and histories of vernacular music do, the near blackout of attention to contemporary composing creates a public illusion that the new creation of classical music has come to an end. One reads a lot of dire warnings these days about the death of classical music, and if anything in the world could finally kill classical music, it is this illusion.

What I have to contribute to musicology is data and insights from the composing world, and I would like to use such evidence today to make suggestions on how to get the narrative going again. Literary critics talk about the “master narrative,” the large story behind all the individual stories that largely goes unstated and unacknowledged. Stories that contradict the master narrative often go disregarded, all the more so because the narrative itself has never been made conscious or explicit. I’d like to talk today about three narratives, two master narratives and one more explicit, that prevent the world from getting an accurate view of what’s going on in composed music today, and ask for your help in replacing them with livelier and more accurate stories.

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