Everyone has web sites that he or she returns to compulsively in idle moments, and my new one, which I learned about from a comment on New Music Box, is the International Music Score Library Project at http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page, a rapidly growing collection of PDF scores from the entire history of music. (Unable to remember the cumbersome title, I’ve started thinking of it as “I’m-asleep.org.”) You would imagine that the site would fill up quickly with Beethoven symphonies and Brahms chamber music, but actually the variety and the obscurity of the musical offerings are quite stunning.

My most exciting find so far has been the 36 Fugues, Op. 36, of Antonin Reicha (1770-1836), Beethoven’s teenage-years friend from Bonn. Reicha professed unbelievably advanced (for the time) theories about music and about the fugue in particular. He advocated for odd meters; the 20th fugue is in 5/8 (with the subject answered at the tritone rather than the fifth), the 24th is in virtual 7/4 (4/4 alternating with 3/4), and another one in 3+3+2/8. They were written in 1803. Reicha ended up teaching at Paris Conservatoire, where Liszt and Berlioz were among his pupils, and sent his old friend Beethoven a copy of the fugues; old Ludwig tossed them aside with the comment, “The fugue is no longer a fugue.” One of the fugues has simply a single repeated note as a subject; another is built on the theme from Mozart’s Haffner Symphony, and their modulatory propensities are sometimes as striking as their rhythmic oddities. I’ve been fascinated by them since Tiny Wirtz’s recording came out (the premiere recording) on CPO in 1992, and am astonished to suddenly find a score. (MDG has also released a charming and rather Czech-sounding Reicha orchestral overture in 5/8 meter. He also speculated about quarter-tones, long before Liszt and Busoni. The earliest explicit use of quintuple meter I can find, by the way, seems to be the mad scene in Handel’s Orlando. One of the Obrecht masses has a passage with a repeating five-beat isorhythm, but of course there was no way to notate quintuple meter in that era.)

My first, 1997 Village Voice article about internet web sites was entitled “Weirdos Like Me,” enthusing about the other crazy people who vomited forth their obscure passions on the internet, and many of those weirdos, it seems, are uploading to imslp.com. Here you will find a two-piano score to Max Reger’s Piano Concerto (one of his most elephantine and least gratifying works, but one I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with lately); Arthur Foote’s Piano Quintet, perhaps the finest chamber work of the American 19th century; Anatoly Liadov’s lovely little high-register piano piece The Music Box; Busoni’s wonderful Piano Concerto in a two-piano version, which a friend had finally bought me in Germany a few years ago; and Kaikhosru Sorabji’s astonishingly forward-looking First Piano Sonata of 1919. I’ve now got the Concord Sonata in PDF form, as well as the Second and Sixth Nielsen Symphonies, and several early Dussek Sonatas for which I can find no recording. In recent weeks the number of scores expanded from 6000 to 7000 in only 20 days, and one of my favorite features is the “Recent Additions” on the main page, which I check daily to see what’s been added. A couple of days ago I wanted to show a student an example from Holst’s The Planets, without having to drive to my office for the score, and there it was.

Submissions are limited by copyright restrictions, as you can imagine, and so there are few recent works, and hardly any postclassical ones; though you will find In C and an intriguing flute and piano piece by electronic genius Chris Brown. Living composers are encouraged to add any works they are willing to release into public domain, or under a Creative Commons license. I toyed with the idea, but my available scores are easy enough to find on my web site for those who are looking for them. It’s tempting to consider the people who might run across my pieces without imagining that they might find them at kylegann.com, but I am reluctant to relinquish so much control. So for now I’m not joining in the uploading frenzy, but I’m having a blast benefitting from it. The crazies who are releasing their eccentric music collections to the world have my immense gratitude.

I heard some music the other night in a loose improv style that, given a lot of more rigorous recent musical developments, I find a little old-fashioned. But I imagined myself going up to the performers and telling them that I had just finished a piano concerto, and thought I could do it with a straight face only if I were wearing a powdered wig and dipping into my Wedgwood ceramic snuff box. How old-fashioned would that have sounded? “I finished a piano concerto today” – it sounds as comically anachronistic as the sketch with which S.J. Perelman once opened a satire, in which a man comes home to his wife with the lapidary greeting, “Hello, dear, I just finished Hoover Dam.” Yet my earliest musical memories are of piano concerti – Geza Anda’s recordings of Mozart’s K. 466 and K. 503, which my parents played while I was in the crib (they would lovingly quiz me on Köchel numbers) – and the genre is so imprinted on me that I’ve always expected to write one. Even though I scrupulously avoided thinking about sonata form, sonata touches crept in before I realized it – each movement contains an arguable point of recapitulation, and the first-movement recap picks up the exposition’s ideas almost in reverse order, a Mozartean trick. Didn’t plan it that way, but I listened, and that’s where the piece wanted to go. (I keep waiting for someone to ask, “Wait a minute, you’re a Downtown composer, and you’re writing a piano concerto? What gives?” Then I’d have to admit that before I discovered Cage at 15, Copland, Harris, Bernstein, and Schuman had already seeped into my DNA, and that Composer Kyle is sometimes more Midtown than Critic Kyle likes to acknowledge.)

(End of the first movement)

In other Gannian news, I just learned that Philadelphia’s Relache ensemble is planning to premiere my suite The Planets in its 75-minute entirety next May in Delaware, so I’m going to have a ton of music premiered in the coming academic year. (Not only Mozart, I can imitate Holst, too!) As I sink deeper into composing, I predict that my blog will become so introverted that eventually no one except my mother will continue reading. (Hi Mom! Thanks for the Mozart!)

I was subjected this morning to an NPR spot about André Previn’s new solo jazz piano album. Excerpts I heard were sensitively played, I guess – but it was the kind of lusterless, easy cocktail piano that our best student jazz pianists can doodle out when they’re not really thinking about it. Our jazz piano professor would play in that style only for satirical purposes. But André Previn is a famous musician, and of course famous musicians make only great music, and NPR can’t risk wasting its audience’s time with a musician no one’s heard of….

Please forgive this intrusion of politics into a blog that has been exclusively musical lately, but a comment at The Carpetbagger Report, echoing a thought I had already had, deserves as wide circulation as possible. Democratic Representative William Jefferson has been indicted for corruption, and the meme of the day is that corruption in Congress is bipartisan – meaning Jefferson on the Democrat side, Cunningham, Ney, DeLay, Safavian, Libby, Griles, Foggo, Crawford, Foley, Korsmo and quite a few others on the Republican side. And pace those who still insist there’s no significant difference between the parties, the Carpetbagger notes the respective reactions:

Even before the indictment against Jefferson was issued, congressional Democrats spoke out against him, distanced themselves from him, and removed him from power committee assignments. The Democratic leadership made clear they had no tolerance for Jefferson’s alleged crimes, and pivoted off his indictment to introduce a massive new ethics reform measure.

And then there’s the GOP. When Cunningham was exposed, House Republicans defended him. When DeLay was about to be indicted, they considered changing their own rules to let him stay in the leadership. When Ney was investigated, they stood by him. Indeed, the standard Republican strategy was to blame prosecutors, blame the media, make excuses, and defend the accused.

Even now, none of the current lawmakers facing criminal investigations have been ostracized for what appears to be a series of scandalous decisions, while most of the party wants a pardon (amnesty?) for a convicted felon caught lying and obstructing justice in the Plame leak scandal.

A playable draft of the 18-minute second movement of Sunken City, my piano concerto in homage to New Orleans, is completed. Now I have to go back and tackle the first movement’s complex coda. The problem with composing, for me, is that once I start it pretty much ruins me for any more practical work. It’s really not unlike drinking too much: once my head is absorbed in trying to figure out where the piece goes next, all quotidian matters, like e-mails I need to write, bills I need to pay, errands I need to run, fly out of my head and it’s difficult to remember that I was supposed to do anything else. Even forgetting to eat is quite common; I realized an hour ago that I didn’t have lunch today. So when I go into a composing period my life becomes very disorganized. If practical duties demand my attention, I basically have to take an entire day off from composing to do them, in which case I suddenly get a tremendous amount done. I’m just not the kind of artist, I don’t believe, like Anthony Trollope or Philip Glass, who can get up every day, compose from 8 to 11 or whenever, and then cut it off and go about the rest of my life.

I do, however, have a natural cutoff point. At some moment between 2 and 4 PM, my composing mind turns off as abruptly as a spigot. I’ll be working on a phrase and suddenly realize that I wrote four inelegant notes that make no sense and I don’t know why, or I write three variants of something and have no idea how to choose among them, and I know I’m just done. My mind steps out of that fog in which I know how to make artistic judgments. Sometimes I can start composing again around 7 or 8 in the evening, if family or social life haven’t intruded. In between my mind seems too sharply focussed. Peripheral vision perceives objects with a different kind of acuity than centrally focused vision, and I’m absolutely convinced something similar happens with the brain. But that still doesn’t mean I can get much done between 4 and 7, because my mind is still racing around trying to solve whatever problem the day’s work leaves me with. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I love it, but it’s extremely inconvenient.

Certain artists fall into creative patterns, but I believe there’s a wide range of artistic working types, and that nothing can possibly work for everyone. I’ve read enough about left- and right-brain activity to attribute the difference to physiological variations. Men (generally speaking) have less fluid communication between their brain hemispheres than women do, for example, and I’ve long had a distinct impression that my left and right brain barely stay in touch at all. Alternating between talking (left brain) and playing the piano (right brain), for instance, is extremely difficult for me; I have to take that in account in my lecture style. If I play well and then immediately try to talk, I stumble trying to form sentences, and if I talk first it’s difficult to lose myself in the music. And I gather that when I get into composing, I go into some kind of deep right-brain state, and making the transition back involves a painful effort.

Every artist has to figure out these patterns about himself, and it’s more difficult because they change over the course of your life. When I was young, I wrote almost all my music between 11 PM and 4 AM, something I could never do now. It’s very mysterious.

Stephen Colbert achieves what I can only dream of doing: out-talk my college president.

I spoke in my last post of James Tenney’s postminimalist streak, which I have always most associated with his Tableaux Vivants of 1990. A few years ago, learning of my intense interest in the piece, Jim kindly sent me a score, and I’ve long itched to analyze it, never finding the time until this week. As I start working my way through it, I realize that it is far more complex than it sounds on the recording by the Toronto ensemble Sound Pressure, and that it is really not postminimalist at all, but rather classically totalist, or, as we now call it here, metametric. It is unusual for Tenney in being composed mostly of repeated phrases, and in that those phrases loop at different lengths to create a counterpoint of recurring impulses at different speeds (or rather a “harmony of phrase lengths,” as Cowell would have said). The piece sounds gently undulating, not as wild as it looks, because of its uniformly soft dynamic level. May Doug McLennan and those with dial-up modems forgive me, but I’m going to post several measures of this 20-minute work here. All I’ve added, in numbers above each new phrase, is the length of the phrase expressed in beats (i.e., 11/3 = 11/3 of a quarter-note long, or 3 and 2/3 beats):

As you can see, or figure out anyway:

the first “moment” in mm. 34-35 forms lines in triplet 8th-notes, to make repeating periodicities of 5 against 7 against 11;

mm. 36-37 move to a 16th-note common unit for phrase/phase relationships of 5 against 12 against 13 against 15 (12 being the clarinet line three beats long);

m. 38 changes back to triplets for loops of 3 (piano) against 8 (violin) against 9 (clarinet) against 13 (bassoon) against 16 (sax);

and in mm. 40-42, a trio pursues phrase loops of 15 against 17 against 25 in 16th-notes. Notice that this last passage is entirely within the B-flat major scale.

I’ve posted Sound Pressure’s recording of the piece here. The excerpt given above begins at 2:18, immediately following the first sustained vibe-and-piano chord.

In his program notes, Jim calls the piece an attempt “to resume the exploration of harmony in the twentieth century without regressing to some earlier style….” He alludes to stochastic processes, by which I imagine he means the way the pitches are chosen, which seems somewhat random from “moment” to “moment”: the instruments overlap in pitch considerably (which puts the bassoon, you’ll notice, in an incredibly high register even above Le Sacre du Printemps), and the harmonies range from quite tonal to sharply dissonant. I take this to mean that the harmonic aspect of the piece is not susceptible to conventional analysis; if anyone knows more about the piece in this (or any other) respect, I’d appreciate some sharing of information.

What surprises me most is the use of repeated motives in lengths not divisible by the quarter-note beat to create an effect of conflicting periodicities not based on the beat, and also a kind of gear-shifting effect, as those periodicities switch among lengths like 13/3, 3, and 15/4, quite akin to what totalists like Michael Gordon, Mikel Rouse, and myself were doing in the ’80s and ’90s. Compare it, for instance to this gear-shifting effect, also using “misaccented” triplets to change the perceived pulse, from my Snake Dance No. 2 (1994) for unpitched percussion:

Then with this passage from my Unquiet Night (2004) for Disklavier, which combines periodicities of 21/13 of a measure (top system), 16/11 of a measure, and 13/7 of a measure:

Then look at this passage near the end of Bunita Marcus’s chromatically saturated Adam and Eve (1987), with its implied periodicities slightly longer than a measure in the piano, violin, and flute, and an impression of layered tempos created by both triplets and septuplets:

It so happens I still have Adam and Eve on my web site, so you can hear it here; the excerpt above comes late in the piece.

Next here’s an excerpt from Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare (1993 – mp3 on my web site here). The little threes above the top system indicate triplet quarter notes, even though other notes are interpolated between them; the grouping of triplets in quantities indivisible by three was a potential Henry Cowell pointed to in New Musical Resources, which I also tried out in my Folk Dance for Henry Cowell (1997). I don’t even know what instruments these are in Michael’s score, because my old copy was pre-publication, but each line is doubled. The top system gives a repeating rhythm 7/3 beats long in quarter notes, the middle line has a rhythmic pattern 7 16th-notes long (7/4 of a beat), and the bottom repeating phrase is five beats long:

And we can even find the same basic idea in easier, more orchestrally digestible form in John Adams’s Lollapalooza (1995), one of his most totalist works. Here a three-beat ostinato in the bass clarinet marks a steady tempo against which the other instruments repeat ornamental phrases at various periodicities, including the title “Lollapalooza” motive every five beats in the triombones and tuba (score greatly simplified and much material omitted):

I’d like to think that Adams was inspired to play with loops-out-of-phase by listening to the younger generation, but he could well have absorbed the same technique from Nancarrow, whose music he has championed, and whose Studies Nos. 3, 5, and 9 in particular experiment with a similar device. Another example could be John Luther Adams’s Dream in White on White (1992), which carries out the idea at lengths too great to quote in notation here. Even I’ve got limits.

In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find Tenney playing around with the same metametric concerns as me and my totalist crowd. Any info about Tableaux Vivants would be much appreciated. Perhaps he even has other similar pieces, I’m certainly not familiar with his entire output. The examples above will be raw material not only for my Music After Minimalism book, but for a paper I’m presenting (“Phase-Shifting as an American Compositional Temptation”) in September at a minimlism conference at the University of Bangor in Wales.

Someday someone will appear who has analyzed more minimalist-influenced music from the 1980s and ’90s than I have, and if that person feels that I have divided my era into categories inappropriately, I will be glad to listen to her argument. So far, I’ve gotten plenty of argument, but only from people who don’t come anywhere close to fitting that description.

There are several ways to characterize a style. One is to catalogue all relevant qualities associated with pieces associated with that style. I’ve done this for postminimalism elsewhere, and I have no intention of replicating that feat today. Another, less cautious tactic is to isolate a compositional aim that one perceives as the essence of a style. This has the disadvantage of marginalizing (or at least discategorizing) pieces that do not manifest that particular idea, for artistic styles, it seems to me, are rarely homogenous in their makeup. Nevertheless, if I had to point to one characteristic that strikes me as quintessential to postminimalism, it would be the impulse to write music freely and intuitively within a markedly circumscribed set of materials, outside of which the piece “knows in advance” it will not venture. For me, and reinforced by the contemporaneous writings of Steve Reich, minimalism’s essence was its quasi-objectivity, its linear movement from one point to another, along with its adherence to audible process or structure. Postminimalism at once became much more subjective, often even mysterious, imitating minimalism’s extreme limitation of resources but replacing the idea of linear, audible structure with that of a nuanced, intuitive musical language.

For instance: Several movements of Bill Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes (1978-79) fit this paradigm exactly. Not all of them, for Time Curve Preludes is something of a transitional work, and several movements preserve the idea of additive and subtractive process that I think of as continuing minimalist practice. Prelude No. 7 is a movement that strikes me as the postminimalist piece par excellence:

This languorous dance is made up of only three elements: a slowly arpeggiated bass line whose final dyad sometimes gets extended (A); a melody that here and there breaks the continuity (B); and a set of six chords that create an impression of bitonality by wandering conjunctly through scales from various keys, though the lower two lines are not actually diatonic (C):

There is some inheritance from minimalism here in the systematic way the phrase lengths expand at first according to lengths proportional to the Fibonacci series, but even this structural element recedes as the B melody intrudes more and more. You can listen to the movement here. I don’t think of the Time Curve Preludes as Bill’s best piece any more than I think of In C as Terry Riley’s best piece, but they are parallel in that they seem to be their respective composers’ most memorable pieces, the ones everyone knows, the ones whose perfectly clear intentions serve as a manifesto, of which their subsequent music works out the ramifications.

Even more restrictive in their materials are some of Peter Garland’s works. Here is an excerpt, mm. 19-23 (showing a transition between sections) from the second movement of his piano piece Jornada del Muerto (1987):

The entire movement employs only five chords in the right hand – given only as seen here, mind you, with no transpositions or octave displacements – plus the pitches B, D, and E in the left hand, usually as octaves, and in one section as single notes:

No process or continuity device informs this music; it is entirely and intuitively melodic in conception, if chordal in execution. Yet despite its extreme paucity of material, this lovely five-minute movement goes through seven sections touching on four different textures and rhythmic styles, undulating between two tempos. “I feel influenced,” Peter has said, “by American modernism from the ’20s, not the ’50s and ’60s. My take on modernism goes back to Cowell and Rudhyar.” Point taken: a line can be drawn from Garland’s use of only specific sonorities to the (vastly underrated) piano music of Rudhyar. Nevertheless, the conscious asceticism of his music is a far cry from Rudhyar’s employment of the entire piano as a mammoth sounding board, and it is worth noting that Peter studied at CalArts side by side with two other seminal postminimalists, Guy Klucevsek and John Luther Adams (all with Jim Tenney, who had his own postminimalist streak). In any case, the appearance of Jornada del Muerto in the late ’80s was exactly in keeping with the then-current postminimalist aesthetic. You can hear the second movement here.

Like Duckworth’s, Janice Giteck’s music is widely heterogenous in its sources of inspiration, but each movement blends those sources into a seamless fusion. The fourth movement of her Om Shanti (1986) draws inspiration from Indonesian gamelan music, and its melody, sung wordlessly by the soprano and doubled in various other instruments, runs along a pelog scale, F G B C E:

The piece is pervaded by a single line of 8th-notes running without interruption through the piano left hand and clarinet, all on those five pitches E F G B C, without ever repeating, like an endlessly flowing river that is never the same twice. In addition, the pitch A appears in the voice melody and its doublings, but only in the upper register and at moments of maximum intensity. At various points the melody is punctuated, as shown above, by one or two notes in the upper piano and crotales, always on the ambiguously unresolving pitch F, rendered even more unsettling by a bass note B in the cello (whose C string gets tuned down to B in the third movement, but that’s another story). The movement, which you can hear here, is a masterpiece of intuitive intensification of melody, texture, and even harmony within an invariant limited scale.

Merely five pitches also suffice for the nine-minute length and formal complexity of Paul Epstein’s Palindrome Variations (1995): G A Bb C D. The most formalist of them all, and a purveyor of note-by-note intricacy, Epstein could be called the Webern or Babbitt of postminimalism, the extremist in search of a purely musical logic. His 1986 Musical Quarterly article “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase” gives almost more insight into his own composing impulses than it does into its ostensive topic; he is fascinated by note combinations that result from permutational patterns. All the same, Palindrome Variations is not (as some Epstein pieces are) a work composed by linear process. What’s interesting about Epstein is that the musical units with which he works intuitively are not notes, chords, or even phrases, strictly speaking, but notational units resulting from the interplay of meter and repetition. Here, the 6-beat phrase of the first two measures (repeated in the second one) is rotated within the measure afterward, so that in m. 3 the pattern starts on the third beat, in m. 4 on the fourth, in m. 5 on the sixth, m. 2 on the second, and so on:

Of course, in so uniform a texture, the meter isn’t felt as a unit, and so the effect is a constant unpredictable juggling of the same elements over and over. By a nonlinear process of note substitutions, the texture gradually transforms into a canon in which all instruments are playing the same motive but out of sync; then there are canonic solos for the flute and cello, and with inexplicable logic the piece moves to a conclusion foreshadowed by a dominant preparation and a convincingly logical, almost Bartokian, closing move to unison melody, all without any perceived breaks in Epstein’s tightly wound motivic flow. You can hear all that here. I think of Epstein as music’s answer to an op artist like Bridget Riley, whose superficially strict procedures result in wildly expressive visual surprises; similarly, Epstein’s rigorous attention to geometric detail creates conundrums for the ear. I doubt anyone can deny that, like Babbitt within the 12-tone world, he sets a certain edge beyond which postminimalism can go no further.

The first 25 measures of Belinda Reynolds’s Cover (1996) certainly seem to be those of a postminimalist piece. Again, only six pitches are used – E F# G A# B D# – with E in the piano as a low drone note, and a certain obsessive reiteration of characteristic figures, particularly the competing fifths E-B and D#-A# (repeat sign not in the original, but mm. 3 and 4 are identical to 1 and 2):

However, the music crescendoes to a sudden new chord at m. 26, and subsequently every few measures the music ups the energy by shifting to a new scale. There might be no reason to call this curvaceous, quasi-organic piece postminimalist except that, within each “moment” (to use the Stockhausenesque term), it tends to build up pitch sets and melodies additively, starting as an undulation of two notes and adding in others, almost like a memory of minimalism. Ultimately, Cover‘s form is not postminimalist – there are no more implied limitations on where the music could go than there are in Mozart – but its technique is. One of the advantages of defining postminimalism (or any style) in terms of its central idea is that we can treat the style itself as an ideal form, and talk about degrees to which a particular piece participates in that style. Just as Time Curve Preludes lies slightly on one side of postminimalism, coming from minimalism, Cover is a piece evolving from postminimalism and leaving it behind toward something else, but with its origins still much in evidence. You can hear the entire ten-minute work here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Now, don’t write in and tell me you don’t like these pieces. Who cares if you like these pieces? Do I care if you like these pieces? Do I, Kyle Gann, personally give a shit whether you like these pieces? No. No, my friend. I do not. What I care about is that you acknowledge that these pieces by different composers with very different creative personalities share several very clear stylistic characteristics – that they, in effect, define a style. What we name that style, I do not care. If everyone wants to call it Charlie, we can call it Charlie. But I have called it postminimalism, because that word was already in use in the early ’80s but floating around loose without any specific definition. (Rob Schwarz applied the word to John Adams and Meredith Monk in his Minimalists book of 1996. But I have trouble finding important differences in method between Meredith and the true minimalists, while composers of the “neoromanticism with minimalist elements” style that Adams represents were vastly outnumbered in the ’80s by the postminimalists who fit my definition. There are many more of them today.) And it is clear that these composers were all reacting to minimalism, but that minimalism was not their only influence. They defined, among them, a soundworld quite different from minimalism, one of brevity rather than attention-challenging length and stasis, one of intuitive lyricism and mysticism rather than obvious structure and worship of “natural” processes.

Nor – to preclude the kind of silly clichés that some composers bring to these discussions – is postminimalism a “club” that anyone ever decided to join. Not one of these composers ever sat down and said, “I’m going to write a postminimalist piece,” and it would be surprising if anyone (aside from myself) ever has. Anyone who thinks there could be a “doctrinaire” postminimalist doesn’t understand. The style is accompanied by no ideology. Nor was postminimalism even a “scene.” Duckworth and Giteck were unaware of each other until I introduced them. I doubt Peter Garland has crossed paths with Belinda Reynolds to this day. Minimalism unleashed a set, or several sets, of potentialities into the ether, and, in the way that great minds so often think alike, several dozen composers pulled new musical solutions out of the air that happened to have a lot in common. The grouping of these composers into a postminimalist style is not a fact of composition, but a fact of musicology. It is the perception of the first person to study all this music – and I have hundreds more examples where these came from, don’t even get me started on my John Luther Adams file – that commonalities among a certain body of pieces constitute a style. That perception will stand (and has already been widely quoted in the literature) until it is replaced by a more compelling perception, as perhaps will happen someday. This remains true even despite the music world’s refusal to deal with this music as a repertoire, after the vogue it enjoyed temporarily among the New Music America crowd in the mid-1980s.

I wonder if that indifference is perhaps due to postminimalism’s generally formalist concerns, its fascination with pattern and texture, at a time when the music world had become totally disenchanted with formalism. The widespread abandonment of serialism around 1988 (the year it seemed to me that disgust with the 12-tone idea reached a tipping point) inspired a near-universal move toward social relevance and widespread appropriation of pop and world-music elements, a conviction that music should refer to the world and not only to its own processes. Totalism, the other big movement that branched off from minimalism, throve much better in the post-serial milieu, as evident in the more visible careers of the Bang on a Can composers. In many respects, postminimalism was an answer to serialism far more than minimalism was. The postminimalists, like the serialists, worked at creating self-sufficient and self-consistent musical languages, in this case a language in which the reduction of musical elements made musical logic apparent. The attitude was almost, “Let’s do formalism over again and get it right this time, not anxious and apocalyptic and opaque like the serialists, but transparent and lyrical and pleasant.”

By 1990, however, formalism of any kind was a hard sell. Justifiably tired of music that begged for technical analysis, the world wanted big, messy Julian Schnabels of music, not clean, pristine Bridget Rileys. It was, and remains, difficult to argue for music so focused on its own musical processes, no matter how pleasant to the ear. In fact, postminimalism’s very pleasantness works against it: in the macho music world that John Zorn ushered in and the faux-blue-collar Bang-on-a-Canners have continued, postminimalism has never seemed kickass enough, its archetypes too feminine and conciliatory. (Kickass, kickass, kickass… I remember with perverse pleasure how ridiculously frequently that word came to everyone’s lips in the New York scene of the late ’80s, as though they had suffered some dire threat to their collective masculinity, and how easy it was to make fun of.) But pendulums swing, fashions change, and at some point the music world will remember that notes themselves can be made into patterns fascinating to listen to for their own sake. When that time arrives, the beautiful, varied, surprising postminimalist repertoire will be here to be rediscovered.

UPDATE: My little tirade above earned me a very funny comparison with Milton Babbitt via Darcy James Argue. Part of what’s funny is that the Babbitt paragraph he quotes is one I happen to have always agreed with. Babbitt’s a smart man, and not wrong all the time.

“Toward the seven deadly arts Sam had had the inarticulate reverence which an Irish policeman might have toward a shrine of the Virgin on his beat… that little light seen at three of a winter’s morning. They were to him romance, escape, and he was irritated when they were presented to him as a preacher presents the virtues of sobriety and chastity. He hadn’t the training to lose himself in Bach or Goethe; but in Chesterton, in Schubert, in a Corot, he had always been able to forget motors and [his competitor] Alec Kynance, and always he had chuckled over the gay anarchy of Mencken. But with rising stubbornness he asserted that if he had to take the arts as something in which he must pass an examination, he would chuck them altogether and be content with poker.”

– Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth

Hey, I got mentioned in the Times, in connection with Mark Morris. I love how the dance critics think the Disklavier is neat and sort of spooky, unlike musicians, who often see it as a problematic performance situation in need of rectification, somehow.

UPDATE: I can tell you why, as a composer, I prefer dance to theater. I’ve written for theater, and gotten always the same question, rehearsal after rehearsal: “Can it be softer?” Mark Morris asked if it could be louder, and I fell in love.