I’ve seen the light on Wikipedia, and I feel like a fool. I’ve used it, praised it, and, determined populist that I am, extolled it here as a model. I’m probably one of the few professors who has talked it up to his students and allowed them to cite it as a reference – carefully, with outside confirmation if possible, and judging the quality of an entry carefully. I started contributing to Wikipedia as a kind of spare-moment hobby, and I guess I was lulled into complacency by the fact that most of the entries I worked on were obscure ones, not likely to attract attention. But I had the temerity to do a little badly-needed clean-up on the dismally confused “Minimalism” entry, and learned more than I wanted to know about how the site operates. The articles that a lot of people think they know something about, it turns out, are a nightmare. I take back everything: Wikipedia is a playground for belligerent adolescents.

What pushed me over the edge was that a kindly editor finally directed me to a policy page called Expert retention. (One thing you’ve got to hand the Wikipedia community: they take self-analysis and self-examination to levels Socrates would have envied, and the site’s every foible is analyzed to within an inch of its life.) It turns out that Wikipedia has a difficult time holding on to experts to edit their articles. The site, with its ever-present Wikimania for lists, lists many scholars who have given up on the site, many more who are discontented, and only two who are happy with the status quo. The vandalism problem has received a lot of publicity, but that one’s actually fairly minor, or at least relatively fixable. More aggravating is “edit creep,” the gradual deterioration of a polished article by well-meaning but careless edits, and, even worse, “cranks,” which are classified with typical Wiki-precision as “parasites, scofflaws or insane.” And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article’s usefulness.

The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool’s errand. Many of the departing scholars note the incident that finally brought them to leave; mine was a truculent teenager who refused to acknowledge that minimalist music was considered classical, because, as he put it, “it sounds more like Britney Spears than like Merzbow.” Let that sink in a minute. A person who insists that Einstein on the Beach, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue cannot be considered classical because it sounds like Britney Spears is not a person one can seek consensus with. Because of that and his flippant rudeness I refused to argue directly with him, and appealed to the Wiki editors. Yet because of the Wikipedia policy about consensus, I couldn’t get around him, either. And when I checked the “Expert retention” page, I realized that this was not an isolated bit of bad luck, but that this recurring problem bars the dissemination of knowledge throughout Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is amateur-friendly, and that’s what I liked about it. Too many print reference works are hobbled by the exclusion of scholars and thinkers who are ahead of the curve, whose ideas (and even entire categories of knowledge) are not countenanced in the stodgier university departments whence many reference works depend. But Wikipedia is not only amateur-friendly, but expert-unfriendly. They pretend not to be, and give lip service to the importance of expert editors. But when you put the rules together, you realize that people who are actually authorities on a subject are forced to argue with one hand tied behind their backs.

For instance, there’s an “original research” rule: original research, i.e. facts you’ve dug up or deduced yourself but that are not verifiable in the scholarly literature, are not allowed. Well, I can see that. You don’t want every unpublished crank using Wikipedia to propagate his crackpot views. Most of what I do is original research, since I rarely write about things other scholars have already covered, but that’s all right, since I’ve published most of my research, and all I have to do is footnote my own books. Ah! but there’s another rule called “Conflict of Interest,” which disallows quoting yourself for the purpose of bringing public attention to your writings. Which means that any other person on the planet can write something in Wikipedia and quote me as an authority, but if I do it myself, that’s suspect. I have done it myself, and the citations stand if no one objects, but if a crank wants to contradict me, all he has to do is yell “Conflict of interest!,” and delete whatever he wants. After all, who knows what scruffy, fly-by-night vanity presses my books might be issued by (Cambridge University Press, Schirmer Books, University of California Press)? Editors are sympathetic – everyone agreed with what I was saying except this post-pubescent parasite – but rules are rules, and nothing could be done. There’s even an official “Ignore all credentials” policy, which explicitly disallows a writer’s credentials from being taken into account. I thought I was egalitarian enough not to mind. Turns out I’m not.

So the “Minimalism” article is wretched, and so it will remain. When I came to it, one of the definitions given was “From hippie to yuppie[,] minimalism is a drip-feed pseudo-art for cultural bottle-babies.” That no one objected to. I removed Petr Kotik from the list of minimalist composers, for the minor reason that there is nothing minimalist about his music, and there was a vehement protest. I removed a statement that minimalist pieces are known for their brevity, and there was a protest. Then I ran into the moronic crank, who wouldn’t agree that minimalism was the most controversial movement in recent classical music on the grounds that it wasn’t classical. He stonewalled. How can one verify that minimalism is part of classical music? No reference work will state as much, because everyone with an above-80 I.Q. simply knows it. I could have overlooked that and gone on, but the “Expert retention” page informed me that such problems are endemic throughout Wikipedia’s warp and woof. There is an apparently famous case in which one amateur crank defeated a group of professional scientists trying to describe facts about uranium trioxide. It’s kind of an intellectual’s worst nightmare: you find out your new editor is the dumb bully who used to beat up on you in seventh grade – and he hasn’t changed in any respect! He’s still in seventh grade, and imagines you are too.

And so I’m off Wikipedia. What’s more, now that I know how the background process chases away experts, I can no longer allow students to cite it. I’m holding out some hope for Digital Universe, which has been designed to elicit expert writing in order to circumvent such difficulties. Meanwhile, I have actual books to write, with adult editors willing to take my word for something. Between my Simpsons videos and The Comics Curmudgeon, I don’t need to spend my spare moments building sand castles of knowledge on a heavily-trafficked beach.

UPDATE: Forgive me for turning off the comments here, but some Wikipedians (Wikipediots?) are beginning to come here to continue arguments started over there, and, not having any earthly idea who’s right and who’s wrong, I don’t want to get stuck refereeing. The site clearly stirs violent emotions, sufficient reason for me to keep well away from it.

(AP) — The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.

Let me say that again:

(AP) — The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.

The next time Democrats are portrayed by Republicans as aiding and abetting the terrorists, turn to someone near you and remind them about this.

Somehow I happened across a blog called The Comics Curmudgeon today. Its premise is that the author (I can’t even find his name) picks out the worst three or five comic strips in the newspaper every day and makes savage fun of how pathetic they are.

This. Is. The. Funniest. Thing. I’ve. Ever. Read.

Before this, I thought The Simpsons was the funniest long-running bit of humor on earth. But this guy’s running dissections of Mary Worth, Mark Trail, For Better or Worse, Cathy, Hagar the Horrible, and so on, have made tears of laughter, joy, vindication, malice, and restored sanity run down my cheeks more than a dozen times today.

The question is, of course, why are the large majority of comic strips, which supposedly exist to create humor, so miserably unfunny? When I was a kid I devoured them, and I read them avidly into my 40s. But now when I run across a comics page, it takes awhile to search out one that seems like its creator intended it to be funny, and as Comics Curmudgeon says repeatedly, they all look, even the newer ones, as though written by crusty nonagenarians steeped in Eisenhower-era morality who refuse to consider computers anything more than a nuisance. How can almost an entire industry continue decade after decade in such pathetic straits?

The personal angle is that, before I started composing music (at age 13), I wanted to be a cartoonist. In junior high I filled many a notebook with comic strips, and even took a cartooning course from a guy whose name, I seem to remember, was Charles Hamm – NOT the musicologist. I had no talent for it whatsoever. I still have the comic books, but I will make sure they are safely consigned to the flames before I die. Later, in high school, I ran into Charles Hamm at an amusement park. I told him that I had given up cartooning, and was now a classical musician. He thought a moment, rubbed his chin, and responded, “Well, that’s sort of an art too.” The bitter truth that The Comics Curmudgeon drives home is that I could have found something to do with my life infinitely more fun than defending music no one’s ever heard of.

[AFTERTHOUGHT: Say, what if I started a new blog called “New Orchestral Pieces Curmudgeon,” to make savage fun of… no, no, it’s too cruel to contemplate.]

The venerable (by new-music standards) American Festival of Microtonal Music is this week and next, three concerts at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. The concerts are Sunday, April 29; Wednesday, May 2; and the following Tuesday, May 8, all at (the-ungodly-hour-for-those-of-us-coming-in-from-out-of-town) 10 PM. I’m performing May 2. We’ll be playing my quintet The Day Revisited, for flute, clarinet, two keyboard samplers, and fretless bass, all in a 29-pitch unequal scale. Pieces by Elodie Lauten, Joseph Perhson, and Johnny Reinhard are on the program as well. The Bowery Poetry Club is at 308 Bowery at Bleecker St. Read more about it all here.

Of course, this means I drive down to NYC with a car full of equipment – two MIDI keyboards, three amps, two keyboard stands, three music stands, a fretless bass, my computer, and all associated cables and sheet music which I hope I can remember – for rehearsals and performance, and since it’s New York I can’t park outside the rehearsal space but have to go down the street and park in a garage and carry everything all at once up several flights of stairs and then carry it all back down again once rehearsal’s over. Many, many of you know what I’m talking about. I’m getting too old to make music this way. I went to study with Ben Johnston in 1983 saying, “I love his music, but I’m not getting into this microtonality stuff, because it’s too much work for nothing!” And I was half right: it’s too much work. (Frank Oteri has an article over at New Music Box called “Complaining Doesn’t Work,” and I wanted to test out his intriguing theory. I dunno if he’s right, though, I already feel better.)

Take a look at this list of books:

Leonard Meyer: Music, the Arts, and Ideas, 1967

Iannis Xenakis: Formalized Music, 1971

David Cope: New Directions in Music, 1971

Michael Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 1974

Cornelius Cardew: Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, 1974

John Vinton, ed.: Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Music, 1974

Robert Erickson: Sound Structure in Music, 1975

Roger Reynolds: Mind Models, 1975

Steve Reich: Writings About Music, 1975

Walter Zimmermann: Desert Plants, 1976

Gregory Battcock, ed.: Breaking the Sound Barrier, 1981

Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras: Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers, 1982

Wim Mertens: American Minimal Music, 1983

Pauline Oliveros: Software for People, 1984

George Rochberg: The Aesthetics of Survival, 1984

To follow up on and illustrate my last post, these were the books that informed me about new music in my youth, that chronicled about where it was going and what it was doing. They explained music that was only a few years old; they described and categorized current trends; they predicted what would soon be coming up in the future. There was a real effort to understand how music was changing and why, and a small industry devoted to arguments on every side. Most important, a narrative was being drawn, that a diverse group of thinkers (many of them composers advancing their own interests, of course) were contributing to. We in new music had a story about what was going on, and we could all be on the same page even if we disagreed about the details.

And then, suddenly, – nothing. In the 1980s art rock, totalism, free improvisation, postminimalism took over stages in New York and elsewhere in quick succession, but no books noted, no authors tried to explain. In the next several years we had a few memoires by elder statesmen reminiscing about what they had done way back when: Milton Babbitt’s Words About Music (1987), George Perle’s The Listening Composer (1990). In 1990 Cole Gagne came out with an odd little book, self-consciously vernacular in style, called Sonic Transports, that contained a lot of dubiously edited information about Glenn Branca and “Blue” Gene Tyranny; good luck finding it. The mid-’90s gave us two books of interviews, Gagne’s Soundpieces 2 (1993) and Bill Duckworth’s Talking Music (1995) – excellent, though aimed more at celebrating the diversity of what was going on, preserving some raw material for future musicology, rather than trying to draw a narrative to make sense of things. (The ’90s also finally brought us books by Rob Schwarz, Ed Strickland, and Keith Potter thoroughly exploring the minimalism of the ’60s and ’70s.)

Finally, since the 21st century started, we’ve had a few 1970s-style synthesizing compendia appear: John Zorn’s Arcana: Musicians on Music of 2000, the 2004 collection Audio Culture edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, and Duckworth’s Virtual Music (2005). The first of these covers the free improvisation world, the second is largely historical and focuses on technological issues, and the third explores music’s relationship to the internet. Put these three books together and you can start to make a picture of the era, though not much in terms of more general compositional issues. That leaves, by my calculation, my American Music in the Twentieth Century (1997) and Music Downtown (2006) and John Luther Adams’s Winter Music (2004) – finally, the first book of essays by a composer of my generation – as the only books to address general recent compositional trends in a narrative format since the genre disappeared in the early ’80s. And Schirmer kind of blindsided me by marketing American Music in the Twentieth Century as a textbook, thus making it more difficult to find, which wasn’t the original idea.

Of course, there are a lot of issues here, and no one explanation. A significant one is that university presses were pressured to go commercial in the 1980s, and certainly weren’t encouraging anyone to write about a subject perceived as non-lucrative as new music. But so many of the helpful early narratives about new music were by composers – why, in the ’80s and ’90s, did composers quit writing? The breakup of the new music world into a dozen or more niches certainly creates a daunting challenge. The “musical intellectual” niche, proudly clinging to Ligeti and Kurtag and following Ferneyhough’s every move, is isolationist, and doesn’t consider the rest of music worth writing about, yet their own music is too arcane for books about it to be marketable. The midtown orchestral composers, possessing all the institutional power, don’t feel compelled to pay attention to anyone but themselves, yet most of them write such bland, compromised music that no one wants to write about them. Other niches, like postminimalism, have received so little public support that no one knows about them as a group phenomenon despite their vast numbers. And sometimes I think the microtonalists are doing everything they can think of to keep from being heard or seen.

But isn’t this niche problem itself a plum of a musicological pickle? You can’t say no one saw it coming: I well remember scary predictions in the mid-1970s that someday soon the mainstream in classical music would break up and cease to exist, and that we’d have a bunch of different streams that would hardly relate to each other. Well, it happened. Is that a reason to quit writing about it? Isn’t that fact in itself the great musical story of our time? and why aren’t some of the more ambitious musicologists rushing to clarify it, to put their own stamps on our understanding of it? With so many niches and such an explosion in the number of composers, there should have been more books, not none. Just because we don’t have a central musical style anymore doesn’t mean we can’t have a central narrative whose primary outlines everyone could accede to. And how can we have a meaningful new-music world at all without a narrative?

In the question period following my Indiana University lecture the other day, composer-musicologist Brent Reidy asked me what the role of the musicologist should be, given the explosion of interest in the Long Tail, the infinite miscellany of little-known musicians whose internet availability has brought them an audience no retail outlet could ever have provided. I hadn’t really thought about it, and my quick answer – my mouth seemingly working faster than my brain, as it sometimes does – rather surprised me. The musicologist, I said, has to go into the Long Tail and find a narrative, a story, something that makes sense and that people will respond to. Reality is chaos, and chaos isn’t interesting, or rather, can’t be empathetically responded to. There’s no way to describe chaos in its complexity; to describe anything involves making choices. And so the musicologist has to select what means something to him, something that follows a story he identifies with.

In my own case, that was pretty easy. The great musical event of my adolescence was the advent of minimalism, and the ongoing story of minimalism – not so much its birth, which others have covered in detail, but its youth and early maturity – became my narrative. And I mean minimalism in the broadest, epochal sense, the sense in which Glenn Branca once shouted to me in the early ’90s, “I’m sick of people saying that minimalism is dead!”, and I responded, “Minimalism hasn’t gotten started yet” – to which he replied, “Exactly.” There are quite a few wonderful composers whose music I dearly love, and who do not seem to have been pushed in any direction by minimalism – Michael Maguire, Diamanda Galas, Trimpin, Paul Dolden – and I listen to their music and love it, but they’re not part of my narrative. All that’s really moved me as a musicologist was the fact that I was more or less witness to the youth, if not birth, of a new style, and had a very rare chance to chart its growth from the simple to the more complexly elegant. It was like going back and watching the development of the symphony in the 1760s, and I could never understand why no one else seemed as fascinated as I did.

Of course, I never expected that my narrative would remain the only one, nor the dominant one. I was extremely surprised by the musicological vacuum that opened up in the ’80s, the fact that music was changing rapidly and no one seemed the slightest bit interested in coming up with a historical slant to characterize it. In my book American Music in the Twentieth Century (published in 1997), I refused to come up with any general description of music of the 1990s, which I knew everyone would disagree with. Instead I made up a narrative of what all the composers born in the 1950s grew up with in common:

– the introduction to world musics in college

– the corresponding loss of European music’s privileged status

– the ubiquitous influence of rock

– the use of computers, with its emphasis on complex sound samples, paperless notation,

and so on. I had to tell a story that people would understand, and I couldn’t tell a story about the music, which was too diverse, so I told a story about the composers, whose education and experiences were actually pretty similar and easily characterized. What I expected was that someone else would quickly come along and write, “Well, Kyle Gann didn’t exactly get it right, because what happened in the 1990s was this,” and then someone else would write, “that idiot Kyle Gann got it completely wrong, because what happened in the 1990s was this!” – and truth would emerge from all the different viewpoints. No narrative has a monopoly on truth. And I didn’t care, I’m a composer, not a musicologist, I just wanted to start the ball rolling.

But I’ve waited years and years for some other narrative to come along and supersede mine, and all I’ve seen is a continuation of the tired old modernist line – you know, “orchestral music continued to be written and became more and more complex.” The musicologists don’t seem to want to deal with any music after 1980 that doesn’t fall into all the same categories and explanations as music before 1980. So I went way out on a limb with my narrative, and people remain suspicious of it because there’s damn little expressed consensus, and no balancing counter-narrative. And frankly, I’ll be relieved when mine isn’t the only narrative out there, so I hope Brent and his ilk, if ilk there be, will crawl into that long tail and come out with something new.

Fear, hunger, sex, and aggression are widely acknowledged, but one of the most destructive human impulses passes without notice: the urge to be useful. The wisest man I ever knew used to instruct his doctoral students to insert errors and infelicities in their dissertations – he was bound to assert his usefulness by changing something, he said, and if the dissertation came to him perfect, anything he changed would only mar it, and he would be unable to help himself. I used to follow this principle with my editor at the Village Voice, with considerable success. If there was an odd locution I wanted to get away with, I would insert a more badly-phrased one somewhere else, and he’d make the change there and leave my idiosyncratic sentence alone.

I thought of this the other day upon hearing a piece by a student composer that was just about perfect, without a note one could add or subtract. I was relieved that he wasn’t studying with me, because I would have wanted to change something, and there was nothing to be profitably changed. Professors dearly like to feel they are doing some good in the world, and the student who shows up with a perfect piece is almost an affront. Even if a piece isn’t perfect, it is sometimes evident that a student is following a process that he or she needs to go through, and no advice from outside will do any good. Usually the student is frustrated about the piece progressing too slowly, or not coming out the way desired; less often, the student is deluding himself about the effect he’s creating, and needs a dose of reality. In those cases, advice and intervention are certainly called for. But 15, 20, 30 percent of the time the compositional process is simply following its necessary course, and no professorial interference can do any good. Sometimes the student even insists on advice and interference, and wants to be taught the kind of lesson that, ultimately, one can only learn for oneself. It takes a disciplined kind of austerity for the professor to stand down and not give advice when it won’t be helpful. I get the impression that some composition teachers don’t believe such moments exist.

It’s not only the student/teacher relationship in which the satanic desire to be helpful intervenes. A faculty member will submit an appropriate, reasonable initiative, that then goes through committee for approval – and every damned member of that committee will feel it necessary to justify his or her existence by altering the original plan in some detail, until it turns into a nightmare of compromises, and gets deservedly scuttled, when the original plan would have benefitted everyone. (Never mind what recent events bring this to mind.) God bless the rare professional secure enough in his own ego that he can sit back and allow a proposal to proceed without making his own mark on it. And let’s wonder why no biologist has yet embarked on any drug to suppress the compulsive urge to be useful.

I just returned tonight from Indiana University, where I gave a lecture Tuesday for the music department entitled “The Ethics of Composing in a Corporate Society.” I probably should have mentioned here beforehand that I was going to present this, so that if you were around you could have gone. But I mention it now because, to tell you the truth, one of the benefits of maintaining this blog is that it contains a running list of my gigs, so that later, if I need to update my résumé (something I hope I won’t have to do many more times in my life), I can look through my blog to locate the details. And I’m not going to post the lecture text here. I need to cultivate a repertoire of unpublished talks I can give when asked to do these things, so I don’t have to write a new lecture every time the way Mozart wrote a new concerto for every concert. After all, I only have a finite number of ideas. At least, I only have a finite number of noncontroversial ideas, and I’ve been trying lately not to piss off the people who invite me somewhere. This hasn’t always been my practice.

Besides, as always with academia, it’s the peripheral human contacts that carry more weight than the central pretext. For the subsequent evening, the faculty invited me to a performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, which I hear is a cute piece, but grad student Brent Reidy also hinted that he was hosting an informal concert of student compositions at his apartment, and that was better bait. Brent – a composer who’s getting a doctorate in musicology, which is an idea I kind of wish I had thought of at his age – hates the standard people-in-rows-of-chairs concert format, and he’s starting his own concert series at which each piece will be played, then discussed, and then played again. It’s a wonderful idea, reminiscent of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performance but even friendlier. So I heard six student pieces, twice, whose lack of academic pretension would have been deemed miraculous during the era I was in grad school. The faculty I met were lovely and gracious and impressive, but the students are always more interesting, aren’t they?, because they give me clues as to what’s coming up in the future.

I also heard an informative and admirably clear lecture analyzing the music of Thomas Adès by John Roeder of the University of British Columbia. This gave me a new vocabulary item with which to discuss my music. Apparently Adès employs a technique that Roeder calls “parsimonious voice leading,” which means that the chord progressions move by the smallest intervals possible. I’ve spent my entire creative life exploring parsimonious voice leading, but didn’t know to call it that, and with 31 pitches to the octave as opposed to only 12, I’ll go up against Adès in a parsimony contest any day. Partch called it tonality flux. [UPDATE: Ah, “parsimonious voice leading” is a Schoenberg term – not one I had paid specific attention to, but it obviously seeped in and took root somehow.]

While there I met some students who read my blog religiously, and I hope that percussionist/musicologist Kerry O’Brien and percussionist Andy Bliss, in particular, will appreciate reading here that it was lovely talking to (and drinking with) them. Store these names away, because you’ll hear them again someday.

Blogger Allan MacInnis alerted me to a “Bob Ostertag article you have to read,” and I didn’t need to be told twice. Ostertag is not only an interesting San Francisco composer whose music deals with electronics and political issues, but an extremely insightful and articulate writer on issues of musical politics whose articles I’ve linked to before. I wish I knew enough to have written his The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician (also up at AlterNet), in which he eloquently explains why he has chosen to put all of his recordings up for free on the internet. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll give you some tease quotes. Starting out by showing how, in the mid-20th century, record companies were necessary structures for getting music from the artist to the public, he then says,

Record companies are [no longer] necessary for any of this [recording and production assistance], yet the legal structure that developed during the time when their services were useful remains. Record companies used to charge a fee for making it possible for people to listen to recorded music. Now their main function is to prohibit people from listening to music unless they pay off these corporations.

Or to put it slightly differently, they used to provide you with the tools you needed to hear recorded music. Now they charge you for permission to use tools you already have, that they did not provide, that in fact you paid someone else for. Really what they are doing is imposing a “listening tax.”

He goes on:

You would think that musicians would be leading the rebellion against this [corporate copyright-protecting] insanity, but most musicians remain firmly committed to the idea of charging fees for the right to listen to their recorded music. For rock stars at the top of the food chain, this makes sense economically (if not politically). The entire structure of the record industry is built around their interests, which for all their protesting to the contrary dovetails fairly well with those of the giant record companies.

But the very same factors that make the structure of the record business favor the interests of the sharks at the top of the food chain work against the interests of the minnows at the bottom, who constitute the vast majority of people actually making and recording music….

I know one artist who had ten years of his recordings vanish into the vault of a big label that bought the little label he recorded for. He approached his new corporate master and asked to buy back the rights of his own work and was refused. In the company’s view, his work did not have sufficient market potential to justify releasing it and putting corporate market muscle behind promoting it, but neither did they want his work released by anyone else to compete with the products they did release. From their perspective it was a better bet to just lock it up.

The idea that selling permission to listen to recorded music is the foundation of the possibility of earning one’s livelihood from music is at most 50 years old, and it is a myth. The fact that most musicians today believe in this myth is an ideological triumph for corporate power of breathtaking proportions.

I could quote more, but you should go read it. Let me just add that years ago I decided that putting as many of my scores and recordings on my web site for free as I legally could was going to bring me far more benefit than waiting around for some corporation or another to come try to make money off me – only I couldn’t have explained the economic logic behind the decision nearly as cogently as Ostertag does.

In this season of renewal, I have just given PostClassic Radio its most pervasive update ever, after having neglected it lately. Sixty percent of the content is new as of the last couple of days, with pieces never heard on the station before by Andrea La Rose, Miguel Frasconi, Ben Neill, Hirokazu Hiraishi, Michael Hicks, Maria Panayotova, Elodie Lauten, Jessica Krash, David Lang, Mary Jane Leach, Belinda Reynolds, Adam Baratz, John Halle, Carolyn Yarnell, Randall Woolf, Matt McBane, Per Norgard, Ira J. Mowitz, Ed Harsh, Marc Mellits, Dan Goode, Steven Sametz, Todd Levin, Harry Partch, Meredith Monk, Rhys Chatham, Fred Ho, Kevin Volans, John Morton, Nick Drake, James Tenney, Paul Lansky, Michael Finnissy, and myself. Some of the stuff is brand new CDs: notably the new disc Tic by the Common Sense collective (can you pick their names out of the list above?) and several dynamite tracks from International Cloud Atlas, Mikel Rouse’s music for a recent Merce Cunningham dance. Also a 73-minute excerpt from Feldman’s For Philip Guston; it’s always been a plan of mine to program the five-hour piece complete, and also The Well-Tuned Piano, but maybe it’s not such a good idea. Who knows how long I’ll be able to keep the station going? Depending on what Congress does about the copyright, this could easily be my last update. I wrote letters to Senators Clinton and Schumer, and we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, there’s more than ten hours of new music to accompany your egg hunt tomorrow.