Corey Dargel has an update on the state of his cat, Mr. Bojangles, whom he feels was led down the primrose path to decadence by my book:

But I have a different interpretation. The way I see it, reading Music Downtown educates a feline, or anyone else, in the rewards of the well-spent Downtown life. Replace those Lucky Strikes with a box of Padron cigars, and Mr. Bojangles will have “imbibed,” so to speak, the book in exactly the spirit in which I wrote it. (Or is that spirits?)

[T]here are still modernist philosophical experiments in art since the end of art, as if modernism had not ended, as indeed it has not in the minds and practices of those who continue to believe in it. But the deep truth of the historical present, it seems to me, lies in the Age of Manifestos being over because the underlying premiss of manifesto-driven art is philosophically indefensible. A manifesto singles out the art it justifies as the true and only art, as if the movement it expresses had made the philosophical discovery of what art essentially is. But the true philosophical discovery, I think, is that there is really no art more true than any other, and that there is no one way art has to be: all art is equally and indifferently art. The mentality that expressed itself in manifestos sought in what is supposed was a philosphical way to distinguish real art from pseudo-art, mush as, in certain philosophical movements, the effort was to find a criterion for distinguishing genuine questions from pseudo-questions… [I]n the period of competing manifestos, declaring that something was not – was not really – art was a standard critical posture. It was matched in the philosophy of my early education by the declaration that something was not – not really – philosophy. The best such critics would allow would be that Nietzsche – or Plato, or Hegel – might have been poets. The best their counterparts in art might allow is that something which was not really art was illustration, or decoration, or some lesser thing. “Illustrational” and “decorative” were amongst the critical epithets of the Age of Manifestos.

– Arthur Danto, After the End of Art, pp. 34-35

I quote from this book not because the ideas are new to me. On the contrary, I wrote in the Village Voice in 1990 that “no one spouts manifestos anymore because their inherent conservatism has become almost transparent,” and in 1992 that “‘must’ follows ‘music’ only in the dictionary.” “Let us have bad composers and good within each idiom,” I continued in that latter instance, “but no more excommunications.” No, besides the fact that he states the case so eloquently, I quote Danto because

1. The last time I read ideas such as these was in the 1980s, when they were still controversial, on the defensive, and bore the burden of proof. It is interesting to read Danto’s 1997 statement from a calmer and more cognizant perspective, with more of the details filled in and the overall trajectory clearer; and,

2. Because it interests me that someone coming from visual art can write in such depth about the current situation in that field using terms that are just as applicable to music. What little contact I’ve had with art professors and art classes in recent years had impressed me with the vast differences between current music and current painting. Painting today seems subject to constant scrutiny for political meaning, and to call for such scrutiny, so hedged around with deconstructionism and identity politics as to preclude the innocence of a single brushstroke. By contrast, most music today (though certainly not all) strikes me as floundering for a new syntax, and for ways to assimilate all the new technological advances available. Music seems to me caught in abstraction at the moment no matter how much it yearns to incorporate politics; painting seems trapped in the political sphere, no matter how much it would occasionally just like to be painting. But at least insofar as Danto has summed up the current philosophical dilemma in art, the two, refreshingly, appear to have completed the same revolution in tandem.

And as Danto opens here, modernism has indeed not ended in the minds and practices of those who continue to believe in it, especially within academia. There are still composers who tell students that 20th-century music needs to be heavily chromatic (the fact that this is no longer the 20th century holding no sway with them); that music that is not notated in great detail is “not serious” (music’s answer to “merely decorative”); that improvisation is the best music because it is “risk-taking”; that an age of “anguish” demands a music that expresses anguish; that electronic music in which the composer didn’t sculpt every sound individually with Max/MSP or Supercollider is not real electronic music. These people’s opinions of what music must do are no more than idiosyncracies, to be humored or cast aside as such as the situation requires. And it’s good to see Danto delineate the philosophical context for that point as though it is now no longer daringly heretical, but the merest common sense.

Postmodern singer-songwriter extraordinaire Corey Dargel has submitted a photo of his cat next to Music Downtown. The only problem is that his cat looks so much like my Ruby that skeptics are likely to conclude that they are the same cat. But if you compare the markings, you can see that Corey’s cat is more spotted, Ruby more swirled:

Thanks to all those who submitted photos of their cats with Music Downtown, but since some of those animals are clearly not cats, and the books ranged anywhere from Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War to Pat Robertson’s The New Millennium, none of them were within the guidelines. [Note to Glenn Branca: if you think it’s not obvious that that’s you in the cat suit, you’re kidding yourself.] Still, all who entered will receive a complimentary copy of my new book, Uptown Music Sucks.

I’m not a violent or a cat-photographing person, but sometimes a man can just be pushed too far.

UPDATE: My son helpfully points out that it looks like I just Photoshopped my book into a generic picture of a cat. The physical setup is admittedly odd: the book is leaning against a sliding glass door whose bottom frame is hidden by a piece of carpet used as a mud-guard that tends to curl up at the door. If you look closely you can see the top of the book reflecting in the glass. It would have been nice if Ruby (the cat is named for the guy who shot Lee Harvey Oswald) had sat there patiently while I rearranged the mud-guard, but I was lucky just to get him to sit next to my book. He hates Downtown music, preferring Purrcell.

…and I’ve always wanted to do something with this 1989 photo of Conlon Nancarrow giving a remarkably young and thin Kyle Gann a tour of a 16th-century convent in the Mexican town of Tepoztlan. For awhile Conlon and his wife Yoko (who took the snapshot) had a country home near Tepoztlan, and took me out with them to stay there. In a Tepoztlan restaurant I had one of the two best meals of my entire life: a mole dish with a shimmeringly complex sauce that contained 19 ingredients. I came home from that trip and wrote a tempo canon for two pianos, or piano and tape, at a 23:24 ratio, titled The Convent at Tepoztlan.

The other unforgettable meal was at a restaurant called Gatto e Volpe in Florence.

It’s pretty far down in the comments now, so I didn’t want it to get lost that Wiley Hitchcock’s son Hugh has started a remarkably honest blog about his late father, with a standing invitation for people to post their memories of him there.

I finally got a recording of my piano concerto Sunken City – by recording it off of Dutch radio via the internet:

First movement: Before (7:43)

Second movement: After (22:19)

The recording is of the premiere in Rotterdam, which had a few more mistakes than the next evening’s concert in Amsterdam, but the spirit of it is quite nice. The ensemble is the Orkest de Volharding, the crackerjack wind and brass ensemble founded by Louis Andriessen in 1972, conducted by the young but impressively expert Finnish conductor Jussi Jaatinen. The soloist is Geoffrey Douglas Madge, an Australian pianist living in Amsterdam since the ’70s. Few I talk to in the U.S. have heard of him, but he long ago recorded the complete Busoni piano music for Philips, and gave the Chicago premiere of Sorabji’s massive Opus Clavicembalisticum in the mid-’80s, so he’s been a big figure on my radar screen for a couple of decades. It was a great honor to have worked with him, and I found him a kindred spirit and a convivial conversationalist. Here’s a photo of him rehearsing just before the premiere (the other half of the ensemble is outside the picture frame):

Of course, I got blasted in the local Amsterdam Picayune by the same critic whom all the Dutch composers hate because he’s blasted them as well. The only stated complaint was that the piece was too long, which is the most superficial kind of comment; I have tried, throughout my critical career, to avoid ever simply calling a piece too long, because that doesn’t mean anything. If Tristan isn’t “too long” at four hours, how can anything shorter be “too long”? What a decent critic would say instead is something about the structure of the piece that makes the overall form unwieldy. Typically such a work will be unclearly articulated, with too much sectional variety to grasp as a large structure. But in this case, the long second movement is a simple alternation of tutti sections and piano solos, ABABA in that respect after a short introduction of piano chords. It is also a chaconne, one of the simplest of forms, interrupted by a jazz section quoting Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man’s Blues,” and returning at the end to the opening chords in a freer order. The chaconne does contain 17 chords, because I needed at the beginning to suggest the seeming eternity of New Orleans victims waiting for help. I have my qualms about the work’s orchestration, transitions, and other details, but there is nothing about it I am more certain about than that it is not too long. (While composing I even found the piece getting too large and compressed some sections.) And no composer in the world knows better than I do exactly what such reviews are worth.

Much more to the point, probably, is that the second movement is rather sad and Romantic, and as one experienced Amsterdammer warned me, “The Dutch critics don’t like sentimentality.” The piece is, I’ll remind you, an homage to and memorial for New Orleans. I’ve already blogged the program notes, so won’t repeat them here. You can download a PDF score here if you want.

I have a didactic point to make about the performance. You will notice that some of the solos are rather jazzed up, with tasteful pitch bends. I did not notate these. They are, generally speaking, exactly what I wanted. The Volharding players, being smart and sensitive musicians, inferred from the nature of the music precisely what would sound appropriate and played it creatively and in the right spirit. I didn’t coach them on that at all – they were already playing it that way when I arrived. So much for the Midtown fallacy that every nuance has to be exactly notated or no one will know how to play your music. Many Pulitzer- and Grauwemeyer-winning composers would say that my score to Sunken City is “undermarked,” and thus “unprofessional” – and yet a European ensemble, who had never heard my music before, divined exactly the degree of looseness that would make me happy, and achieved it with no input from me. How is that possible? Surely I can’t be right in what I’ve been saying for twenty years, that if you write music clearly enough you can trust smart, sensitive performers to play beyond the notation to find the right feel for the music? Or does this performance, perhaps, prove the orchestral hotshots’ mandate about notational exactitude to be the ideological horseshit it’s always been?

With that in mind, enjoy.

UPDATE: Friend John Luther Adams provides a comforting thought: “Your piece isn’t too long. That critic is too short.”

Peter Cherches has written, for NYU’s Fales library, a research guide to Downtown music, concentrating on the years 1971-1987. I started at the Village Voice in 1986, so this is yet more confirmation that the Downtown scene existed and was well recognized as such long before I came along and started writing about it. In order to get more data from readers, he’s also started a blog on the subject. At the Voice I covered the “classical,” more new-music side of the scene, but Cherches covers the jazz and punk rock areas as well. Got a problem with Downtown music? Take it up with Peter Cherches now. Go tell him there’s no such thing.

I was in Washington, D.C., this week lecturing at Catholic University, and I spent a number of fruitful hours at the impressive National Museum of the American Indian. Among other things, I bought a book on Cherokee astrology: The Cherokee Sacred Calendar by Raven Hail, an elder in the tribe. It seems that Cherokee astrology – apparently based on or descended from the Mayan system, which I wasn’t familiar with – is based on a 260-day Venus cycle. Venus is the morning star for 260 days, then it’s the evening star for 260 days. This 260-day period is divided into 13 periods of 20 signs and 20 periods of 13 numbers. The signs of the Cherokee zodiac are:

Turtle

Whirlwind

Hearth

Dragon

Serpent

Twins

Deer

Rabbit

The River

Wolf

Raccoon

Rattlesnake Tooth

Reed

Panther

Eagle

Owl

Heron

Flint

Redbird

Flower

These signs run by, one a day, sunrise-to-sunrise, in a 20-day cycle. Meanwhile, the 13 numbers go by in a concurrent 13-day cycle.

For instance (and you need to look at the book’s appended ephemeris to find out where your birthday fits in), I’m a Wolf and a 6. The Wolf, according to Hail, is “a two-way personality – genial to his own kind, but savagely protective against all outsiders. Lover of freedom and the wide open spaces. A ‘don’t fence me in’ character. The paradox here is that he marks his own territory aggressively, fencing others out!” And as a 6, I’m “an incurable romantic, in pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful.” Fair enough.

Let’s try Stockhausen, since he’s on everyone’s mind. Assuming he was born after sunrise, he’s a Flint and a 12. Flint is “a creator, an originator, an innovator. Opener of The Way to new pathways. He has a keen mind and a lively curiosity to explore beyond the confines of the status quo…. He inspires mental expansion in others, and stretches the mind to the outside limits of any capability in physical and spiritual development. He changes the static to the dynamic.” A 12 is one who “spiritually turns on the light, turns up the heat, and starts the motor running.”

OK, pretty cute. But if you know how I think, and know what kinds of things I like to write about here, you can anticipate what intrigues me about this. It’s that idea of conceptualizing time as cycles out of phase with each other, so that a series of 20-day “months” and 13-day “weeks” are interacting and influencing each other as they go by. And on top of that, the 260-day Venus cycle encompassing them is off kilter with the more obvious 365-day sun cycle and 28-day moon cycle. It’s a more strictly numerological system than European astrology, because it reduces to 13 x 20 even though the Venus cycle isn’t exactly 260 days, because there’s a regular daily progression, and there are no retrograde planets. I love thinking of the Cherokees or Mayans having kept track of the passing of time via these overlapping, out-of-sync rhythmic cycles. And since family legend has it that my great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee, I almost wonder if my love of these cycles is sparked by some ancestral memory stored in a bit of DNA. (The story is that my great-great grandfather married a Cherokee woman, and his siblings were so horrified that they came from Arkansas to Oklahoma and kidnapped my great-grandfather so he wouldn’t be raised by an Indian. Family lore, can’t confirm any of it. And my mother’s father was supposed to have been a bank robber in Louisiana, or so Grandmother said.)

If I had run across this information 20 years ago, I’m sure I’d have at least one Cherokee-inspired piece of music based on the 20 x 13 grid by now. I no longer compose so strictly, but I’ll keep the idea in mind.

….In February 1913, Malevich assured Matiushin that “the only meaningful direction for painting was Cubo-Futurism.” In 1922 the Dadaists celebrated the end of all art except the Maschine-kunst of Tatlin, and that same year the artists of Moscow declared that easel painting as such, abstract or figurative, belonged to an historically superceded society. “True art like true life takes a single road,” Piet Mondrian wrote in 1937. Mondrian saw himself as on that road in life as in art, in life because in art. And he believed that other artists were leading false lives if the art they made was on a false path. Clement Greenberg, in an essay he characterized as “an historical apology for abstract art” – “Toward a Newer Laocoön” – insisted that “the imperative [to make abstract art] comes from history” and that the artist is held “in a vise from which at the present moment he can escape only by surrendering his ambition and returning to a stale past.” In 1940, when this was published, the only “true road” for art was abstraction. This was true even for modernists who, though modernist, were not fully abstractionists: “So inexorable was the logic of the development that in the end their work constituted but another step towards abstract art….”

To claim that art has come to an end means that criticism of this sort is no longer licit. No art is any longer historically mandated as against any other art. Nothing is more true as art than anything else, nothing especially more historically false than anything else. So at the very least the belief that art has come to an end entails the kind of critic one cannot be, if one is going to be a critic at all: there can now be no historically mandated form of art, everything else falling outside the pale….

– Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art, pp. 27-28

And again:

Contemporary art… has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the past is something from which liberation must be won, no sense even that it is at all different as art from modern art generally. It is part of what defines contemporary art that the art of the past is available for such use as artists care to give it. What is not available to them is the spirit in which the art was made. [Emphasis added in both cases.]

– ibid., p. 5

Arthur Danto is an excellent philosopher of art whose work has sometimes inspired me creatively. What he means by “the end of art,” I should clarify, which event he dates roughly to the 1970s, is not the cessation of meaningful artistic creation, but the end of a monolithic cultural conception of art that grew in the early 15th century. And I take pleasure in reiterating his most concise conclusion: No art is any longer historically mandated as against any other art. “There can now be no historically mandated form of art.” Not everyone knows it yet – but we have indeed turned a corner.