I grew up attending the First Baptist Church of Dallas, the south’s largest Baptist Church, and the one of which Billy Graham was officially a member. Many of my peers there seemed to me the worst kind of religious hypocrites, and some were just ruffians stuffed into Sunday suits, but there was one kid named Robert Jeffress who was quiet, likable, humble, and genuinely nice, mature beyond his years. I didn’t run into him often, but he played the accordion precociously well, so we occasionally discussed our common interest in music. My mother informs me that Dr. Robert Jeffress, author of 16 books, has just been appointed pastor of First Baptist of Dallas. He looks astonishingly little changed.

UPDATE: On the other hand…. (And I had just finished reading Elmer Gantry, too.)

The papers blown off of the Adirondack chair were the first sign that something was amiss. A new nip was in the air, almost chilly. The mountains etched the horizon with a crisp, purple line that he hadn’t noticed in months. A sense of time passing settled slowly on him like dust stirred up from a long-neglected cabinet. Old enmities had passed; recent inequities were etched in stone with a certitude that no hand could revoke. He struggled to rid his mind of the remnants of insistent issues that now needed no longer ever be thought of again. But as more troubling thoughts cleared, it occurred to him that internet radio was still alive. How could it be possible? The pronouncements had been so dire. Yet that woman from Washington had hinted that there was never really any danger. Was it all a game, a distraction concocted by CEOs and political lobbyists to divert onlookers from the real crimes being committed, the money being siphoned from foreign governments, the restrictions being tightened on some form of expression no one was watching at the moment? Again, as so many times before, he chafed at his inability to see behind the curtain, his ignorance of the machinations of those expert outside his field, those who affected his future but were forever exempt from responsibility for it, hidden behind a veil of corporate secrecy.

No point in thinking about that now. The altered circumstances, however outside his control, dictated a certain responsibility. He made an effort to notice the stack of compact discs on his desk which, despite its steadily increasing height, had come to blend in with the rest of the furniture. Names that had flown by so fast as not to register now stood out with accusatory frankness. Slow Six? An ensemble of some kind, with compositions credited to one Christopher Tignor. Songs by pretty Molly Thompson, whom he hadn’t seen in years. An enormous piano work from 1977-78 by Lubomyr Melnick, titled simply KMH, was listed as a rerelease. Why had he not owned the vinyl original? No way to puzzle that out at the moment. A new Noah Creshevsky CD awaited. Emily Bezar’s “Angel’s Abacus,” with its Feldman-like minor sevenths, had been haunting his memory, from which he hoped to excise it by adding it to the mix. Kerry had recommended This Window Makes Me Feel by one John Supko, and he uploaded it almost absent-mindedly. And of course there was Gloria Coates’s Fifteenth Symphony, which had made such a riveting impression on him only days before. Art Jarvinen had sent him a CDR of Breaking the Chink, and there was a new Mary Ellen Childs album out too enticing to ignore. More difficult to fathom was the recording of intermission noises by Christopher DeLaurenti, the tall, shaved-headed Seattleite whom he had just run into at school. Names, names, each attached to a trail of memories, except for a few curious in their absence of evocations. There would doubtless be other names, many, many others, and beneath the shadow of the political charade, the work would continue.

But now the harsher noon-day light edging around the deck and through the sliding glass door prompted reflections that there remained alternate histories to write, additional ephemera to be entered into the record of events. He allowed his eyes to close for a moment, and, shaking off melancholy, returned to books still laying open from yesterday….

You have to listen to Dick Cheney explain in 1994 why an invasion of Baghdad would have been a bad idea.

My esteemed colleagues at Sequenza 21 note that yesterday was the ten-year anniversary of Conlon Nancarrow’s death. (While at the Voice I was always amazed at how many composers die in August – Feldman, Cage, David Tudor, Nancarrow, Earle Brown – and always noted it, because there is a dearth of New York concerts in August, and I was always stuck for column material. Someone usually died in the nick of time, and I always considered their timing their final gift to me.)

Anyway, as I was saying, Nancarrow died in 1997, and the obituary I wrote for him is not in Music Downtown, my collection of Village Voice articles. I don’t know why. I’m sure I intended to include it, but as I was going through the proofs, I noticed its absence, too late to rectify it. I am happy for the bulk of my columns to disappear into oblivion, but of all the ones omitted, the Nancarrow obit is the one I most wish were in there. So I’ve long intended to post it here, and the anniversary is as good a peg as any. This is the pre-edit version, actually a touch longer than the one that was published:

Piano Rolls and Fresh Mangos

Conlon Nancarrow, 1912-1997

Conlon Nancarrow’s wife Yoko Segiura used to tell me that, in the first years of their marriage, she would ask him what to do with all his player-piano rolls after he died. He’d shrug and say, “Burn ’em.” Kind of a black sense of humor, right? And yet, in the nine years I knew Nancarrow, I never found any evidence that he was kidding. He seemed immune to the charms of public recognition. He wrote music because he wanted to hear what it would sound like to have two tempos running at once, one of which was the square root of two times the other. Once he had heard it, that was that. Oh, he’d keep the player-piano roll around because he wanted to hear it again, down there in his comfortably cluttered, garage-like, Mexico City studio. But he didn’t seem to crave applause for that square root of two, and he endured the travels, film crews, and interviews his growing celebrity required with patience rather than enthusiasm. If his public persona was a pose, it never cracked.

Nancarrow’s death at 7:10 PM, August 10, [1997] from apparent heart failure, caused no tremors in the music world. The difficult part was getting a sense that this underground legend really existed in the first place. Except for some brief exposure in the ’60s when Merce Cunningham choreographed several of his Player Piano Studies, he waited until age 65 for real interest to be shown in his work. He didn’t make public appearances to promote his music until 1981, and he only did so then – so his then-manager Eva Soltes tells me – as a way of proving to his teenage son that he hadn’t wasted his life. Even down in the musical backwater of Mexico City where he lived for 57 years, he had few connections to the local, Eurocentric music scene. Until the last few years, if you wanted to know something about Nancarrow, you had to seek him out.

I did so on three trips to Mexico City (resulting in a book, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, from Cambridge University Press). On the first visit, in 1988, I found him as people had told me I would: suspicious, grudgingly hospitable, taciturn, opinionated about politics, impatient with discussing musical details. The interviews I taped with him on that trip contain entire quarter-hours of silence. He’d look at a manuscript I’d ask him about and finally sigh “I don’t know,” but mention Reagan and he’d rail against the Democrats for not putting up a real alternative. (Driving through his home town Texarkana, I once called up his younger brother Charles, who insisted on taking me out to dinner, and told me, “Conlon’s to the left of Che Guevara, and I’m to the right of Atilla the Hun.”) Nancarrow was no musical philosopher; I went with him to a concert and he immediately dismissed any piece that wasn’t rhythmically complex.

By the time I returned a year later he had come to trust me, and became warmly hospitable. If he had a quiet lifestyle, it could be a delicious one. He had an amazing cook who prepared the best Mexican food I’ve ever had, and succulent, fresh mangos and papayas (completely different fruits from what you can get under those names in America) were passed out like dime-store candies. Nancarrow didn’t care for publicity, but he liked the good life.

After his first stroke, his mental abilities were never quite the same. At first he was strictly protective of the studio where his player pianos stood, and in which he had spent 40 years punching on piano rolls the most rhythmically complex body of music ever written. Later he relinquished control and let me explore there by myself. Along with waist-high piles of manuscript scores and correspondence, the place contained complete editions of Source magazine, Musical Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, and other journals that showed how avidly he had kept up with the contemporary music scene that he viewed for decades from a wary distance. The walls were still lined with tempo charts made from Heny Cowell’s New Musical Resources, the 1930 book that Nancarrow had bought in New York City after returning from fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and which suggested using player pianos to achieve complex rhythms.

Now, rather than being burned as he suggested, all those scores, sketches, rolls, and even the pianos have been sold to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland (Sacher being the industrialist who bought, among many other things, the manuscript of Le Sacre du Printemps). That’s how he had money to live on the last few years, after the inheritance Charles left him when he died ran out, which is what he lived on after his 1983 MacArthur Award ran out. Mexico cancels your health insurance at age 70, and he was paying his own hospital bills. I wish Nancarrow’s studio could be preserved as a historical site, a kind of musical Thoreau’s cabin; after all, the museum-houses of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (whom he knew) are several blocks away. But it isn’t going to happen.

Nancarrow no longer talked on the phone in the last year and a half of his life. A series of strokes had rendered him liable to forget who he was talking to, and his laconicism became exaggerated to the point of monosyllabic answers. He remained lucid long enough to look through the book I wrote about him and express confused appreciation. Problems with his back, lungs, and teeth confined him to bed, although according to Yoko he rallied at the end, and was energetic enough to walk with assistance the day he died. He was cremated the day after his death, with only a couple of local composers – Julio Estrada, Mario LaVista – and Yoko’s friends present.

I once pointed out to him that he was probably the only American composer complex and modernist enough to be admired by Elliott Carter fans and also free and vernacular enough to be loved by John Cage fans. He chuckled in surprise. I don’t think it had ever occurred to him.

I just had dinner with Alex Ross, here for the Bard Festival. My conversation is greatly inhibited these days because any story I tell, the response tends to be, “Oh yeah, I read that on your blog,” so it suddenly occurred to me as we sat down that, since Alex and I read each other every day, we wouldn’t have a thing to say to each other. But we both thought for awhile and came up with some news we hadn’t blogged about.

Geez, now I can’t start a conversation by telling anyone I had dinner with Alex Ross. As Alex said, “Maybe we need to be a bit more mysterious.”

[Three updates below.]

Ouch. The great savants of the New York Times music section name their favorite minimalist recordings today. Six critics, given four albums each, limiting themselves to Reich, Glass, Adams, and Riley – plus one album each by Cage (huh?), Poul Ruders, and Count Basie (double huh?). Ouch again. What, no Well-Tuned Piano? No Charlemagne Palestine Strumming Music, or Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone? No Eliane Radigue Adnos, or Trilogie de la Mort? No Tom Johnson An Hour for Piano? No Phill Niblock Hurdy Hurry, or Five More String Quartets? No Tony Conrad Early Minimalism? I imagined that these people had large CD collections.

Next week, the Times food critics list their favorite ice cream flavors: Strawberry, Chocolate, and Vanilla! What else is there?

UPDATE: All right, I don’t think any list of under 50 “best” things can be worth a damn, and I won’t do four, but for the record I’ll give my top five minimalist albums:

Young: The Well-Tuned Piano (unfortunately all but impossible to get, I know, but maybe that’ll justify the fifth disc)

Terry Riley: Shri Camel

Charlemagne Palestine: Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone

Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano (though I prefer Tom’s own performance to the recorded Rzewski one)

Eliane Radigue: Trilogie de la Mort

For a sixth, I might put Glass’s Music in 12 Parts on there, for sentimental reasons. And there are some individual Jon Gibson pieces I’m deeply attached to, but no full album. Reich’s Octet plus John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music might make the top ten if we’re really going to consider Adams’s romanticism minimalist. Reader submissions welcome.

UPDATE 2: Let’s analyze these Times lists in terms of labels:

Nonesuch: 9

Sony: 3

Naxos: 3

Cantaloupe: 3

Bridge, CRI, Mosaic (Basie), New Albion, RCA, and Hungaroton, 1 each

And so we see that, of 24 discs, 13 are from media giants like Warner (Nonesuch), Sony, and RCA, three from Naxos which has been a worldwide marketing success, and three from the Bang on a Can label Cantaloupe, which has done very well at getting its product out. Now, how about all those obscure labels that we minimalism fans rely on to preserve all the great hardcore minimalist music not conventional enough for the major labels, like Table of the Elements, Organ of Corti, XI, New Tone, Robi Droli, Lovely Music, Barooni, Cold Blue, Mode, Blast First? Absent. Omitted. Not represented. What this tells us is that the Times recommendation list is extremely skewed by the commercial market, and that the critics are swayed, not solely by musical quality, but by the companies that manage to put their CDs across their desks, whose representatives call them up and push product. I’ve been there. I’ve had product pushed on me. It didn’t work in my case. I once pissed off Nonesuch so badly they didn’t send me anything for years. I listen to everything I can get, I go to Other Music to find the records that don’t come in the mail, I like what I like, and I don’t assume that, just because something’s on Nonesuch, it’s the best music out there.

UPDATE 3: Steve Smith responds in his blog, and I’m very happy to see him list some great pieces whose titles I would have loved to see in the Times.

It crossed my mind that if I publicly signed off on blogging for a spell, I’d immediately have something to write about. I went to see Mark Morris’s dance Looky, set to my Disklavier studies, at Jacob’s Pillow tonight. The Jacob’s Pillow people treated me with breathtaking graciousness. Scholar and Mark Morris biographer Maura Keefe gave a preconcert talk that quoted liberally from my blog entries about Looky, making my vernacular prose sound rakish in so dignified a setting. Ella Baff, the surprisingly young director of the place, welcomed me, and, standing in the theater, suddenly said, “Maniacs is here. Do you know him? Do you want to meet him?” Her mispronunciation of “maniacs” nonplussed me, but something about her gestures forced my brain to gradually reconstrue the word as “Manny Ax,” and ten seconds later I was shaking hands with the pianist Emanuel Ax. (I maintained enough presence of mind to enjoy her dancer’s assumption that, since I’m a musician, I must know Emanuel Ax, and by his nickname, yet.) For his part, Mr. Ax did a lovely job of seeming to know who I was. I assayed to run back to my car and return with a sheaf of my piano works, but he was gone before I could make the suggestion. The dances went splendidly.

I tried to remember whether any other famous classical musician (not counting John Cage, Robert Ashley, and the postclassical crowd I hang out with) had ever been subjected to a public hearing of my music before, and I can’t think of an instance. I’d love to know what he thought, but it’s been my experience that my Disklavier pieces make pianists nervous.

Sorry, I haven’t been blogging. Even those of us who like the limelight tire of public life occasionally, and fall into a none-of-your-business mood. I’m trying to organize my fall tour of Europe, and all I can think of is one of Groucho’s famous lines from Night at the Opera: “I figure if he doesn’t sing too often he can break even.” That’s exactly the way it looks: how many lectures and concerts can I afford to give? Not as many as I’d planned, certainly, and every one seems to add a few hundred Euros to my expenses, with the dollars piling up at an alarmingly more rapid rate. Who knew Europeans were as broke as we are? I hope to redo my PostClassic Radio playlist soon, which, with the imminent demise of internet radio, I’ve been neglecting. Other than that, the next fly I drop in everyone’s ointment may be a European one, which may make me seem… almost respectable.

UPDATE: I would like to note, though, that today you’ll see 735 given as the number of entries on my blog to date. The number seems insignificant – but 730.5 days is two years, and on August 29 (anniversary of Cage’s 4’33” premiere, and of Katrina’s attack on New Orleans) I will have been at this blog for four years. When I first started out, I doubted my ability or inclination to post frequently, but decided that if I managed to post every other day on the average, that I would count that as a respectable blog presence. I’m now enough ahead of my goal to take a couple of weeks off.

Debra Bresnan of Yamaha has written a story about my experience with the Disklavier for Yamaha’s in-house magazine, posted on the web as well. It includes a photo of me taken recently by composer Adam Baratz, taken on my screened-in porch – where I am sitting at this moment.

Tuesday through Saturday of next week, August 7 through 11, the Mark Morris Dance Group will reprise Looky, the dance Mark choreographed to my Disklavier studies, at the summer dance festival at Jacob’s Pillow in the town of Becket, in western Massachusetts. Other pieces on the concert employ music by Bach, Brahms, and Stravinsky. Mark’s dances are incredibly beautiful, and, as his reputation attests, intimately derived from the music he chooses.