Here’s Alex Ross today, though you might as well go read the whole thing:

But the whole point is that there are no hits in classical music. It’s a niche market that is itself a vast conglomeration of sub-niches, from early music to the avant-garde, from Furtwängler fanciers to Toscanini types, none of whom ever agree. Collectively, however, they purchase many millions of records a year, and the Internet has made it far easier for them to find what they want….

Out in the media mainstream, any information that suggests health or lack of death in the classical area will appear counterintuitive, and will be questioned or ignored. The lack of hits guarantees a lack of coverage, because media outlets want to be able to tell their audience about the four or five big things that matter in any field — the Arcade Fire, Heroes, Spider Man 3, etc. — and this galaxy of subcultures won’t oblige. It’s so much easier to disregard the entire thing. The neverending “death of classical music” talk is the wishful thinking of the culture industry. But the fact that orchestra subscriptions, opera ticket sales, and, possibly, record sales have gone up in the last year or two suggests that music from Hildegard to Anna Clyne can still find its audiences without help from TV, magazines, and commercial radio.

Not that I give a damn, I’m in postclassical.

The immortal quote from Alvin Curran’s New York Times blog today:

Elliott Carter told us the first day of composition class, “You can bring anything in here you want, except octaves.”

Alvin continues: “Octaves are in essence sandwiches with nothing inside, and I love them.” (I seem to recall that Carter’s Piano Sonata, one of the best pieces he ever wrote, starts with a multiple-octave B.)

I didn’t want a laptop with a camera in it. I had no desire to learn what I look like to my computer.



But I have to admit, I no longer go to the bathroom mirror to comb my hair. I just open Photo Booth and comb the hair in my computer screen.

According to David Toub at Sequenza 21, based on an article at The Agonist, a law is about to be passed to price internet radio out of existence via high royalty payments. Petition attached. More in-depth here and at Live365 itself.

UPDATE: Brian McLaren finds a good analysis here.

Well, all right, it’s Sunday night and you could use a laugh.

The Concord Sonata gave Charles Ives a reputation as “the man who plays piano with a stick.” But what if Rachmaninoff had gotten the idea first? I think it might have gone something like this.

I’ve been very much enjoying New Music Box’s new Counterstream Radio Station (click “Listen to Radio” in the upper right-hand corner), though I haven’t yet heard Sarah Cahill’s double interview with Bjork and Meredith Monk. I have heard a lot of lovely new music, though. And I thought there was very little overlap with my PostClassic Radio station, until John Cage’s Dream came on, the piano vignette that is a similar companion piece to his In a Landscape, my signature piece on PostClassic Radio. For one brief moment, I suspected they were stealing my aura. But the more good new music we have out there, the better, and they’re explicitly going for a wider range than I am.

You’re not hearing from me because I bought Logic, and I’m playing with my new toy. You can imagine what it’s like for someone who has spent 32 years writing pieces based on repeating loops going out of phase with each other to start working with a software partly based on exactly that paradigm. It took me about two minutes to generate a typical-sounding Kyle Gann piece. I added some string chords, and it started sounding like John Luther Adams’s Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing. I added a percussion track and it started to sound like an Ives orchestral adagio. At that point I had to stop and give my aesthetic some serious philosophical thought.

One point of interest is the tuning capability, which is limited to a 12-pitch scale, repeating in every octave. The menu of tunings (File > Song Settings > Tuning) offers dozens of historically defined meantones and well temperaments replicated beyond any Baroque expert ability to distinguish them all by ear. Yet there is no harmonic series tuning, no tunings based on Ben Johnston’s piano music, nothing inspired by Harry Partch – although there is, somehow, the tuning of La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano (here called Well-Tempered Piano). You have to wonder what it is about people who design software and synths that they are savvy enough to realize that different tunings would be nice, yet naive enough to think that people making electronic music would want to work in meantone, let alone forty different meantones that differ only by a few cents here and there. It’s the strangest combination of sophistication and ignorance.

The program seems to only allow one 12-pitch tuning at a time; I could get 36 pitches to the octave by having three identical instruments with different user tunings, though there is no way to save user tunings, and I guess I’d have to record them as separate audio files. But I’ll be using sounds and scales from Kontakt anyway, and I’m having a blast with Logic’s glib usability.

On another rather technical microtonal note, L’il Miss’ Scale Oven software has brought about a revolution in the way I write microtonal keyboard music. When I write for live performance, every key I play is assigned to a certain pitch, and in the past I’ve generally had to keep the pitches in scalar order, running low to high. The reason is that most keyboard-based synths have built-in filtering systems so that if you tune a key more than a few half-steps from its intended pitch, the sound becomes extremely tinny in the lower register and very dull in the higher register. But L’il Miss’ Scale Oven reassigns to each key the sample whose pitch is closest to it, so that no such distortion occurs. So now, high pitches can be assigned to low notes on the keyboard and vice versa, and a lot of microtonal pitch configurations that were formerly unplayable become easy. For instance, in my piece The Day Revisited, I got to renotate the passage notated as follows:



like this:



Tremendously easier to play, and both of them produce the pitches given here:



where E in the first measure is actually 8/7 above D (231 cents), G# is 10/7 (617 cents), B is 12/7 (933 cents), E in the second measure is 9/8 (204 cents), A is 3/2 (702 cents), C quarter-tone sharp is 20/11 (1035 cents), E quarter-tone flat is 12/11 (165 cents), A quarter-tone flat is 16/11 (649 cents), C is 7/4 (969 cents), and so on. What I can do now is assign any pitch to any key on the keybord, and thus assign different harmonic areas to different registers, with concern only for maximum playability, and without concern for actual highness or lowness. My first piece to take full advantage of that was Fugitive Objects, the microtonal keyboard piece I wrote at the Atlantic Center, in which different musical objects were assigned to each octave for optimum playability. In general, the right hand plays the mid-register melody while the left hand plays both bass notes and high treble notes, which are all assigned within the same octave. I’ll put the mp3 up once I’ve finished revising it. Neither hand moves far from its original position, though the pitches are all over the place.

Perhaps this is an arcane matter, of interest to only a few people on the planet, but where better to put arcane information than on the internet, where the words “microtonal keyboard mapping” may well bring in the four or five people engrossed in exactly that subject?

M.C. Maguire, Scott Unrein, and Jim Altieri at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (see update below):



Photo by Caroline Mallonée

UPDATE: Corey Dargel sends a photo from an ACA residency a couple of years ago, with Joshua Palay, Eve Beglarian, Paula Matthusen, and himself (same exact spot, I think):

My three weeks at Atlantic Center for the Arts flew by in a pleasant blur. Getting tremendous free tech support from the composers who came to work with me, I achieved my long-delayed goal of being able to play keyboards off of my new laptop, and wrote and performed a little 13-limit tuning study, Fugitive Objects, to celebrate the fact. But I was kept busier than the other composers, and composing took second place to a very helpful kind of networking. The nine of us met every afternoon; I taught a lot about microtonality, and they coached me on technological skills, everything from programming the “Dashboard” on my laptop to how to get microtones in Logic, the music software program that’s been declared verboten in the Bard College electronic studio, but that I’m about to buy and start using anyway. The more significant meetings, though, were those we had between 10 PM and 1:30 AM, where, over liberal amounts of single-malt scotch, we listened to tons of music from half a dozen iPods, as well as from my 13,000-mp3 hard drive. I got to know my composers’ music very well, and I am happy to introduce you to them – listing them in reverse alphabetical order:

Scott Unrein, a doctoral student at University of Missouri KC, was the one whose iPod so matched my own new music list that I started exulting when I found a rare piece he didn’t know – a feat in which he reciprocated all too often. He is a devotee of the quiet, atmospheric aesthetic typified by Jim Fox’s Cold Blue label, and his own music has migrated from a rhythmic, Reich-influenced postminimalism to a sustained lyricism of tenatative saxophone lines over tremoloing chords and ostinatos quite elegant in their simply metamorphosing logic. Scott’s also an active podcaster of new music, and his Nonpop station runs parallel to my Postclassic Radio and garners many times as many listeners.

Maria Panayotova, originally from Bulgaria but completing a doctorate at Cincinnati College-Conservatory, used to write soulful, metrically fluid acoustic music, often with vocals that evinced an almost unconscious-seeming influence of Balkan folk music, falling into lovely patterns of quick 5/8. In recent years, however, she has switched entirely to electronics, and has started making her own video as well, based in one case on geometric patterns found in forest images, and in another on a cute children’s story about a traffic light that baffled a town by starting to glow blue. An accomplished pianist, she embedded a section of Schumann’s Kinderscenen in the shimmering electronics of her In the Forest video, which became clearly audible after she pointed it out. She kindly introduced me to Soundhack, showed me how she did it, and now I’m Soundhacking away like a hipster.

Matt McBane recently moved to New York City from Los Angeles, where he has started an ensemble of violin (himself – no fewer than three of our composers were violinists), cello, bass, piano, and drums. The ensemble is yet unnamed, but has several upcoming performances booked, to which I’ll try to alert you. One of his formative experiences was conducting a performance of Reich’s Eight Lines, and his music is often marked by a fanatically detailed sense of slow textural transformation. A new work, Drivin’, replaces rests with notes in a maniacal 5/4 rhythm demanding a concentration that only the fearless enthusiasm of youth could negotiate, but other of his pieces are simpler and more pop-influenced.

Due to her formidable resumé and creative prolificity, Caroline Mallonée, who’s got a doctorate from Duke and teaches at the Walden School, earned for the duration the nickname “Alpha Male.” Carrie’s ambitious chamber pieces, such as Throwing Mountains, play off of permutational schemes developed as an expansion of Reich’s technique in Piano Phase (notice how often that name comes up?). Capable of the kind of bristlingly impressive ensemble works that are good for getting commissions, she also has a penchant for simple pieces exploring clear tonal and microtonal phenomena with a Tom Johnson-like directness, and the violin trio she whipped up for herself and her fellow violinists in the last few days explored the harmonic series in a fetching idiom of light folk fiddling.

Andrea La Rose was familiar to me, and will have been to many readers, as the feisty flutist-composer from New York’s Anti-Social Music ensemble who weighs in with considerable fire at Sequenza 21. She’s completing a dissertation on Rzewski at CUNY, and when a horoscope reading attributed to her an “excess of vitality,” it was considered apt enough to become a running gag. She writes high-energy music that usually forays into improvisation at points – thus the Rzewski interest – combining it with minimalist tendencies, so that some of her pieces achieve the odd effect of differing considerably from performance to performance, but maintaining a strong sense of identity in any one reading. I particularly admire her Concerto for Anyone (PDF available at her web site), an entirely instruction-based piece that so reduces concerto form to its essence that a concerto is bound to result no matter what players are used. Prolific and an expert performer, she’s bouncing among a dozen good ideas, and wherever she lands will doubtless cause merriment, consternation, insight, and possibly the End of Civilization As We Know It.

No description of Teresa Hron will sound very credible. A Canadian living in Amsterdam, Terri plays the recorder, travels with a bass recorder almost her own height – and is one of the most challenging rhythmic minds of the age. She studied Carnatic Indian music in India, absorbed unnerving subtleties of rhythm, and came home to apply them to music she plays with her recorder ensemble, as well as more pop-oriented groups with which she’s associated. So she sets up these long, complex isorhythms (e.g., 7 + 5 + 3 + 3, 7 + 5 + 3 + 3, 7 + 5 + 3 + 1), within which certain rhythmic motives recur at tempos of 4-against-3 and 7-against-5, often over the barline. It’s a notational nightmare, though, as she insists, the music is quirkily melodic, and doesn’t sound complex. I’d have declared her crazy, except that she played recordings of herself and her Dutch Indian-rhythm-aficionado friends performing her scores quite competently. Suffice it to say: I nearly fried my brain trying to disentangle her rhythmic structures, and I wrote the Nancarrow book.

(At the final concert Andrea and Terri played duets they had written using copious quantities of 4/6 and 5/6 meter, and if you think that’s impossible, then go back and read the “Rhythm” chapter of Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources.)

Jim Altieri I’ve written about here before, for he’s the genius who implemented John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen installation in Max/MSP. He’s the kind of guy who, if you muse aloud about some weird transformational effect you’d like to hear, will come to you the next day with a disc containing software he devised to effect it. One of the heirs to the James Tenney aesthetic, he’s writing (among other things) string pieces that glissando slowly through various overtone and undertone series’, elegantly simple in conception and quite sensuous and surprising in effect. He was also the third violinist, and much of his compositional technique is based on the fact that, like Tony Conrad, he can play microtonal intervals on his violin and bring out the difference tones and missing fundamentals quite clearly. (Jim and Carrie play together in a band called Glissando bin Laden and his Musichideen, but you didn’t hear about it from me.)

Along with Mike Maguire, whom I’ve already written about, that was the group. They impressed not only me but the poets, architects, and administrators at ACA with their omnipresent energy and professionalism. The final concert, in which most of them performed, was remarkable for its absence of reference to any 20th-century idiom – no hint was left that modernism had ever existed, and the future sounded wide open. I imbibed their musical optimism and curiosity like a healing nectar, and washed it down with 12-year-old Bowmore. You’ll be hearing more about them all, and not only from me.

(I’d also like to mention two alternate composers, who, had we had world enough and time, I wish could have joined us: Paula Matthusen, a composer of lovely music for voice and electronics, and Jacob Barton, a young take-no-prisoners microtonalist who’s already attracted attention in the pitch-splitting world. I hope to get to work with them someday as well.)

My choral work My father moved through dooms of love, based on E.E. Cummings, received a lovely premiere in New York last night, with James Bagwell conducting the Dessoff Choir, Rachel Handman playing solo violin, and Steven Ryan on piano. I’ve posted the recording. Rachel was nearer the microphone than the chorus was, with the result that the violin is a little overly foregrounded on the recording; heard from inside Merkin Hall, she slipped more easily into and out of the choral texture, which was my intention. The text can be found here among other places, and a PDF of the score is available here (click on “choral”). Jeff Lunden’s interview with me about the work here. That’s all the info there is.