DJ Tamara, Trimpin, Arthur Sabatini (hotsy-totsy postmodern theorist and narrator of Bill Duckworth’s Cathedral ensemble):

Elodie Lauten and John Luther Adams:

Composers Max Giteck-Duykers, Nico Muhly, Judd Greenstein, and Alexandra Gardner onstage talking to the audience:

Me and John Shaw, blogger of Utopian Turtletop:

Now will you believe we’re not the same person? (I had just glimpsed the ghost of Ferruccio Busoni over the photographer’s shoulder.)

I had blogged that my talk at the Icebreaker festival in Seattle tomorrow morning (Saturday) would be at 11 AM. The time has been changed to 10 AM.

As I off to the airport, I leave a reminder that Alex Ross and I will be going mano a mano in Seattle this weekend, to settle once and for all which of us can lavish more fulsome praise on the other, while each subtly trying to make his own book sound like the better read. The details about the Seattle Chamber Players’ Icebreaker festival, which is hosting us, can be found at their web site. “Alex Ross and his World” day is all day Friday (tomorrow) starting at 10 AM at On the Boards, 100 W. Roy Street, and “The Parallel Universe of Kyle Gann” is Saturday, same place and time. Sunday is the showdown at which we fight to show who can describe Morton Feldman in more scintillatingly piquant terms, and then the SCP has a Feldman marathon. I’ll be seeing so many old friends that I’m sure I’ll end up photo-blogging the event. If you’re around, come see me and get in the picture!

Some of the misinformation that goes out on Amazon.com is an afternoon’s entertainment in itself. Their page for my new CD Private Dances, which officially goes on sale today, lists my son Bernard as the “conductor” for the disc. Actually, he plays bass in one piece. This is how rumors get started.

I recently had cause to mention my tempo canon for two pianos (or piano and tape), The Convent at Tepoztlan, and it occurred to me that the poor piece hadn’t seen the light of day in 17 years. So I took a few spare hours and put it into Sibelius notation, which was a pain in the neck, because the two parts (performed with clicktrack) are out of kilter by a tempo ratio of 23:24. I had to input one part in an invisible 23:24 tuplet, and since Sibelius won’t copy partial tuplets or paste into tuplets, there was no efficiency involved in its being a canon. (Of course, I’m still using Sibelius 2; if Sibelius 5 is improved in that respect, I’d appreciate hearing about it. I’m resisting upgrading because I don’t like how long the sounds seem to take to upload in newer versions.) And since the meter is 5/4, and 5 doesn’t divide into either 23 or 24, I couldn’t justify measures and staves in either part. Does anyone know if true multitempo (or multi-meter) music is getting any easier in notation software?

In any case, a score to The Convent at Tepoztlan is now available. I think I might not post an mp3, since the sole recording used a tape part made with 1989 MIDI technology, and I would only get comments on its hokiness. It’s an odd piece for me because the structure of the canon (pianos starting together, diverging, switching tempos, and coming back, at the canonic interval of a minor third) imposed a more audible, somewhat Bartoky architecture than I’m accustomed to use. It wasn’t my first tempo canon – I wrote a slow, soft, Feldmanish one in college, at a time I’m not sure I’d even heard any Nancarrow – but I’ve never written one since. I’m curious as to whether my readers know of other tempo canons besides:

– the two dozen Nancarrow wrote,

– the couple I’ve written,

– Lou Harrison’s 1941 Fugue (though per its title this may be more tempo fugue than strict canon, I can’t remember and don’t have the score handy),

– Jim Tenney’s Spectral Canon,

– Larry Polansky’s Four-Voice Canons,

– the augmentation canons in The Musical Offering,

– and the remarkable Agnus Dei from Josquin’s Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales reprinted in HAM.

I remember years ago Ron Kuivila had an electronically generated piece based on the idea called Loose Canons, a title I much envied, and I also recall once a live performance by “Blue” Gene Tyranny in which material he played was echoed by a sped-up recording in real time. We should make another list! (I’m not going to count Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationem, because a prolation canon and tempo canon aren’t really the same thing; once Ockeghem moves into faster note values, the voices all end up at the same tempo.)

UPDATE: OK, in response to overwhelming demand from David Toub and Marc Geelhoed – come on, guys, slow down the e-mail barrage already! – I’ve put up an mp3. The tape part was sequenced in 1989 on old Voyetra Sequencer Plus software – anyone remember that? – with a Yamaha DX7, onto a four-track cassette recorder. Sounds like I was living in the 19th century (but at least I wasn’t using Italian expression markings). The pianist is the superb Judith Gordon of Essential Music, but the recording is hardly better than the MIDI realization. Let it serve as a cautionary example, a reminder of primitive times.

Icebreaker is the name of a fantastic new-music ensemble in England, a space in Amsterdam that used to present new music and no longer does but still serves excellent food, and an annual festival presented by the Seattle Chamber Players. I can’t imagine why that one word has so many new-music connotations.

In any case, the next Icebreaker festival in Seattle is in three parts: two concerts of new music curated by Alex Ross and myself, respectively, January 25 and 26; and a Morton Feldman marathon on January 27. The festival takes place at On the Boards, 100 West Roy Street. The concert I’m involved with is called “Classics of Downtown”, and features music by Bill Duckworth, Elodie Lauten, Eve Beglarian, Janice Giteck, and John Luther Adams. Also a new piece of my own: Kierkegaard, Walking for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, the best (in my opinion) of my 2007 works. (I didn’t curate myself, the commission came with the gig.) I’m also speaking about my music at 10 AM on Saturday, reading from my latest book at 4:15, giving a pre-concert talk at 7 that evening, and talking about Feldman on a panel the next day between 10 AM and 1. It’s a lot of talking, but I’m excited about it, and also about visiting Seattle to see so many friends, not only the composers on my concert, but Alex and some of his protègès, and the Seattle players, with whom I visited Costa Rica a few years ago. It’s going to be a great weekend. Good things always happen to me in Seattle, it’s a charmed location for me. I began my piece The Planets there in 1994, and wrote “Venus,” which was at the time the best music I’d ever written.

On the Boards has a podcast up in which I talk about the composers and pieces on my concert. I don’t even know what a podcast is, but I am now the author/performer/podcaster pf one.

And the day I return to New York I resume teaching at Bard. I’ve written 100 minutes of music in 13 months, and, for the first time in my life, I’m actually tired of composing. Usually I get to compose for two weeks here, six weeks there, and I’m always squeezing it in between other obligations. This was my full composing year. Believe it or not, I’m finally looking forward to waking up some morning soon and being able to do something besides put notes down on paper, or entering notes into Sibelius. I’ve now lived as a composer, and I know what it’s like. Funny, some of the pieces wrote themselves (“Mercury” and “Uranus” from The Planets, Charing Cross), some needed revisions but clicked into place flawlessly (Kierkegaard, Walking), some I had to struggle with but after much work they came out splendid (Sunken City, Olana for vibraphone), and others were just damned hard work (my guitar quartet, “Saturn” from The Planets). I feel like it has to do with mood swings and inspiration levels, but, really, it seems to depend most on the type of piece, because one piece will zip along easily, and the next day another will bog down. The easiest pieces to write are not necessarily the best, but the hardest to write seem to lead in the most interesting and unexpected directions. For the first time in my life I am sated with composing, and ready to take a break. 2007 was the most productive year of my musical life. If you’re near Seattle not this weekend but the next one, come celebrate it with me – and pick up a copy of my new CD Private Dances.

It seems like I’m writing an awful lot about European music lately, as though going to Europe focused me on a continent I hadn’t paid attention to in a long time. Partly true, perhaps, but largely coincidental, I think. In any case, David Carter has uploaded his elaborate MIDI realization of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s Jami Symphony. The timings of the movements are as follows:

1st movement: 1:34:47 (86.81MB)

2nd movement: 19:46 (18.1MB)

3rd movement: 1:58:57 (109.91MB)

4th movement: 43:07 (39.48MB)

Total: 4:36:37 (301.82 MB)

Four and a half hours: that’s one long friggin’ symphony. That’s the Well-Tuned Piano of orchestral works. I freely admit I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet, and don’t know when I’ll have the time, but I’m fascinated by Sorabji’s music, especially given how early (late 1910s) he was working at a level of complexity unprecedented by anyone except the then-unknown Charles Ives. According to the Sorabji web site, the Jami was his Third Symphony, written between 1942 and ’51. You can obtain a miniature score for £205, in case you’d like to arrange a performance with your school orchestra or something. The work contains a wordless chorus and baritone solo, realized by wordless vocal timbres in the recording. Carter’s goal is to someday implement a higher-quality realization using the Vienna Symphonic Library. It’s only a MIDI version, but, as Carter says, if you’re my age, you’re unlikely to hear an actual performance or recording of the work in your lifetime.

Just before leaving for Europe I chanced to pick up a vocal score of Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s science fiction opera Aniara, and I’ve only recently had time to spend with it. I won’t divulge the used bookstore where I found it, because they acquire a certain amount of modern scores from estate sales (lots of Henze and Berio lately), and I seem to be their prime buyer at the moment – though I must add that their prices seem outrageously high at times. (I’ve also bought scores to Brant’s Angels and Devils, Riegger’s Dichotomy, John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, and some Henze piano music, among other things.) However, Aniara was a piece I reviewed for Fanfare back in the ’80s (the 1985 Caprice recording), and when I saw the score, I knew I wouldn’t resist temptation for long, so I just grabbed it. The piece made something of a splash when it premiered in 1959, got reviewed in Time magazine, and was filmed for TV in 1960. Yet today neither recording nor score seems available. Aniara struck me as one of the most engaging, and at the same time among the least pandering, of modern operas. That it and Blomdahl (1916-68, pictured below – I scanned it because I can’t even find an image of him on the internet) have fallen so far off the radar screen seems unfair.

Based on an epic poem by Harry Martinson (1904-78), who I gather was one of Sweden’s most important poets, and set in the year 2038, Aniara is the story of a space ship taking passengers from Earth (named Doris in the fanciful text) to Mars. In swerving to miss an asteroid the space ship is throw off course, and heads off into the infinite. Meanwhile, radio reports reveal that the Earth has been destroyed by nuclear explosions. Act I shows the passengers entertained by a kind of pop singer named Daisi Doody, who sings in a catchy kind of Swedish scat, and a comedian named Sandon, as they try to absorb the tragedy that’s befallen them. Act II takes place 20 years later, the passengers having fallen into decadence and cult worship as main characters die off and the journey reaches its inevitable oblivion.

OK, it’s not exactly a feel-good opera, and it’s largely 12-tone to boot. But the row is a simple expanding series – C B Db Bb D A Eb Ab E G F F# – and the simplicity of that structure unites the work in clearly audible chromatic tendencies:

Consequently, the harmony always seems to be expanding or contracting, and the choral passages are among the most singable and followable in the 12-tone repertoire. Boulez would probably have pronounced this kind of technique simplistic, but it possesses the right density for music theater, not too dissimilar in this respect from Wozzeck – and, truth be told, there’s something about science fiction, this “woo woo we’re in outer space” feeling, that makes the discomforting 12-tone idiom ring more plausibly. In addition, the chromatic aura is cut by and blended with two other idioms. One is a kind of Swedish outer-space bebop that attends the “Yurg” cult around Daisi Doody – by which I mean that it doesn’t sound like Blomdahl’s trying to write bebop, only that he’s created a hybrid music indebted to it. The other idiom is the electronic music used for various sequences, such as when the computer-like being Mima is transmitting images of the Earth destroying itself. This admirably smooth fusion of atonality, bebop, and electronics must have been unutterably hip in 1959, and given the recent long-lived wave of conservatism we’ve lived through (musically and otherwise), I have to think that if Aniara were reintroduced today as a brand-new work, within the opera world it would still seem just about as daring in its mashup of idioms as it did then: postclassical before the fact.

In fact, one of the first things I did in Europe was to visit the American expatriate composer Wayne Siegel in Aarhus, Denmark, who teaches electronic music at the Royal Conservatory. (My profile of him just appeared in Chamber Music magazine.) And Siegel played for me excerpts of his own science fiction opera, Livstegn, or “Signs of Life” (1993-94), about a scientist plunged into a personal crisis by his unexpected discovery of intelligent life on one of Jupiter’s moons. Here were the same melding of live instrumentals and electronics, only instead of 12-tone, the work’s background style is postminimalist. Livstegn hasn’t been performed since its premiere run in 1994. It deserves revival, and an American premiere, as does its remarkably parallel distant cousin Aniara.

Why do such works get marginalized from the narratives of contemporary music? Because their composers are not from the approved countries from which excellent music is supposed to spring? I’m glad to own the vocal score to Aniara, and if I ever teach a course dealing with 12-tone technique – which has crossed my mind at times, believe it or not – I think I’d use it as a particularly clear and flexible example. And since I hate describing anything to you you can’t listen to, here’s an mp3 of Scenes 1 and 2.

I have only made one edit on Wikipedia since I made a big brouhaha about the site several months ago. I ran across a page titled “Cultural depictions of George Armstrong Custer,” and noticed a subsection on musical references to Custer. Human nature being what it is, I rather thought a citation of my music theater work Custer and Sitting Bull might be appropriate there, and added it. It was immediately deleted, as violating the rules against self-promotion. I said “Hmph,” or words to that effect, cursed myself for deigning to pay attention to that benighted web site, and moved on.

Weeks later I get a note from the person responsible for the deletion. He (or she) has restored the reference, explaining that it is better for someone besides the composer to have added it in. He had also supplied, in his text, the helpful fact that Custer and Sitting Bull was premiered in New York in 2000, and asked me to verify the accuracy of what he had written.

Now, given Wikipedia’s philosophy, I am rather affronted to be appealed to to verify facts about my own career. Silly me, I had rather thought I premiered Custer and Sitting Bull in 1999 in Los Angeles, but clearly that impression is too subjective to be trusted. I have no printed reference work to footnote for the information, only my own resumé, which I could have all kinds of self-serving reasons to falsify. Perhaps I am trying to claim credit for having achieved in the 20th century innovations that didn’t really occur until the 21st. And so if Wikipedia’s stance is that information added by an objective party is always better than that added by a self-interested expert, then in the Wikipedia universe, Custer and Sitting Bull will have to have been premiered in New York in 2000. To ask my opinion in the matter seems like hypocrisy.

[Update below] I’ve been intending to write more about my European sabbatical, but I’m rather frantically composing on deadline. I have five world premieres coming up in the next several months, and two of the pieces aren’t finished. Thanks to my extended leave from teaching, I wrote seven works in 2007, totaling some 85 minutes of music – not much by some people’s standards, but a personal record for me. And I have two movements of The Planets to finish before school starts, so that the Relache ensemble can start practicing the entire 75-minute, ten-movement work – my own Turangalila, I like to think of it as – for their performance in Delaware in May. Also, my European trip was a lot to process: seven countries in eleven weeks, giving six concerts and ten lectures, meeting lots of composers, and hearing tons of new music. Unlike the American businessmen in novels, every American artist goes to Europe hoping to be changed. I’m not sure I was, but I did need time to think about it.

What I can do, though, is tell you about the most astonishing composer I learned about there: Matthijs Vermeulen. The Dutch call Vermeulen (1888-1967) “the Charles Ives of Holland,” and also their Varèse. He is the archetypal undiscovered composer. His Second Symphony – considered by many his most groundbreaking work (second page pictured below) – received its first performance in 1953, and Vermeulen himself first heard it in 1956. He had written it in 1920. The tone clusters, polyrhythms, percussion, and atonal counterpoint it opens with are easily as daring as anything Varèse would write in the next decade. To throw yet another comparison in, the Dutch refer to it as “the Dutch Sacre du Printemps.” Curiously modest about promoting their national composers, they won’t tell you anything about Vermeulen unless pressed, but if you mention how remarkable he was, they look proud as punch.

On top of the fact that he was decades ahead of his time, Vermeulen was just my kind of guy. Autodidact and too poor to buy concert tickets, he learned the repertoire by listening to orchestras play from outside the Concertgebouw, sitting in the garden. He found work as a music critic, one whose sharp and outspoken views earned him enemies and injured his chances for performance. (My apartment in Amsterdam was about six blocks from the Concertgebouw. After romanticizing the place for my entire life, I was pretty let down to find that it simply translates as “Concert Building.”)

The most famous incident of Vermeulen’s life, the one every commentator mentions, occurred while he was working as a critic in November of 1918. Following a performance at the Concertgebouw of the Seventh Symphony of the rather conservative Dutch composer Cornelius Dopper, Vermeulen, to express his contempt, yelled “Long live Sousa!” – by which he meant that even the little-respected John Philip Sousa was a better composer than Dopper. Much of the audience understood him, however, to have shouted “Long live Troelstra!”, which was the name of a socialist revolutionary who had attempted to start an uprising only days before. For awhile Vermeulen was banned from the Concertgebouw by the orchestra’s management. Unable to make a living in Amsterdam, he moved to Paris for a 25-year exile, eking out a living as a music journalist and travel writer. You can see why my heart goes out to the guy. I have a feeling Vermeulen and I would have been thick as thieves.

After World War II, and the war-related deaths of his wife and son, Vermeulen moved back to Amsterdam, and his works started to be heard. There is a “Complete Matthijs Vermeulen Edition” of his recordings on two three-CD sets on Donemus, sold in every record store in Amsterdam but rather difficult to locate on internet retail outlets. His twenty-odd works are easily listed:

Symphonies:

No. 1, “Symphonia carminum” (1912-14)

No. 2, “Prelude à la nouvelle journée” (1919-20)

No. 3, “Thrène et Péan” (1921-22)

No. 4, “Les victoires” (1940-41)

No. 5, “Les lendemains chantants” (1941-5)

No. 6, “Les minutes heureuses” (1956-8)

No. 7, “Dithyrambes pour les temps à venir” (1963-5)

Chamber music:

Cello Sonata No. 1 (1918)

String Trio (1923)

Violin Sonata (1924)

Cello Sonata No. 2 (1938)

String Quartet (1960-61)

Songs with piano:

On ne passe pas (1917)

The Soldier (1917)

Les filles du roi d’Espagne (1917)

Le veille (1917; also in orchestral version of 1932)

Trois salutations à Notre Dame (1941)

Le balcon (1944)

Preludes des origines (1959)

Trois chants d’amour (1962)

Other:

Symphonic Prologue, Passacaglia, Cortège, and Interlude to The Flying Dutchman (1930)

That’s it: Vermeulen’s life’s work. The symphonies – only the Fifth of which is divided into movements – are amazing. All of his music is tremendously contrapuntal, with many lines competing in a vast rhythmic heterophony. Throughout his life he complained that musicians who looked at his scores warned that the music would never sound, but that no one would play it to prove the point – and when he finally heard his works, they sounded just the way he wanted. He flows back and forth across the threshhold of tonality and atonality, occasionally sounding like Ives or Ruggles depending, though really sounding very much like himself. One of his most lovely and characteristic effects is the atonal (or dissonant) background ostinato, over which lengthy melodies unfold. It’s complex music, difficult to become familiar with, but not at all without personality. In weight and density one might compare the symphonies to those of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, although they are not nearly so complicated in form as Hartmann’s, and easier to take in as a whole.

I was directed to Vermeulen by a casual comment from Anthony Fiumara, director of the Orkest de Volharding. The name was totally unknown to me. I would have never believed that I, lifelong connoisseur of obscure composers, someone who teaches Berwald and Dussek in the classroom, would discover, at 51, a major composer I had never heard of, let alone one who would quickly become one of my favorites. At Donemus I bought the scores to the Second, Third, and Sixth Symphonies. It turns out that my erstwhile Fanfare magazine colleague Paul Rapoport wrote a book titled Six Composers from Northern Europe, about Vermeulen, Vagn Holmboe, Havergal Brian, Allan Pettersson, Fartein Valen, and Kaikhosru Sorabji, which remains one of the fuller treatments of Vermeulen in English; the one existing biography is only in Dutch. And since I hate to tell you about any music you can’t hear, I upload Vermeulen’s Third Symphony for your listening pleasure. Keep in mind it was completed in 1922. It’s amazing what you can reach your fifties without knowing, but delightful to realize how much left there is to learn.

UPDATE: I found an insightful and thorough article on Vermeulen here.