As a teaser for my upcoming CD on New Albion, provisionally titled Private Dances (not due until September), I upload a pre-final edit of The Day Revisited, my microtonal piece for flute, clarinet, fretless bass, and two sampler keyboards. Twenty-nine pitches to the octave, unequally spaced. Though you can occasionally hear the effort that woodwind microtonality involves, I’m really happy with it, one of those pieces that asymptotically approaches the perfect Kyle Gann piece I hear in my head every day. Pat Spencer plays flute, Meighan Stoops clarinet, Bernard Gann bass, and Blair McMillan and I keyboards. The other day I gave a talk about my music at Stetson University down here in Florida, and a student asked, “How do you feel about form?” I told her that my favorite form was to start something and then just keep going.

I suppose it is redundant to alert my readers here to the highly visible blog that the Times is running by an rotating quartet of four composers: Annie Gosfield, Alvin Curran, Michael Gordon, and Glenn Branca. I might note, however, that all of them are what I might have called “Downtowners,” and all thus refreshingly devoted to free-thinking creativity, and unlikely to harangue us about the importance of credentials, knowledge of the European repertoire, and solid education in traditional theory. (I wondered aloud why no composers from the academic establishment or orchestra circuit were represented, and a friend theorized, “Maybe none of them knew what a blog was.”) I also note that Gordon, despite Bang on a Can’s habitual refusal to take sides on the Uptown/Downtown issue, points to a time in his career in which he did take sides:

If I had to choose I would have without question sided with the downtown school. I found the modernists were totalitarian in their belief, misconceived in my opinion, that the point of writing music was to show off how smart you were…. Not only was the downtown school more expansive in its ideas and concepts, they also began to reembrace the misbegotten audience by reintroducing the now forgotten idea that music, in order to be good, needed to actually sound good.

Good for him. Of course, he locates the whole argument to the generation preceding his, thus perhaps obviating the need for any defense of Bang on a Can’s arm’s-length treatment of the Downtown scene during the 1990s.

Far more entertaining is Branca’s wacko tirade (and I mean this in the best possible sense) today about the “secrets of harmony”:

One example of a chord that defies analysis is the “unison cluster.” This is a type of dense cluster in which the tones are placed very close together using small microtonal intervals. The effect is neither of a cluster nor a unison. But the sound is rich with a strange, singing choir-like quality. The clash of harmonics which occurs in a standard cluster does not occur here because the harmonic interaction that creates the harsh sound is so high that it’s outside the range of hearing….

Music is not pure. It cannot be pure. Sound is noise. In the 70s it was popular for studio engineers to try to get the “cleanest” possible sound, a vogue that lasted for years and was a complete failure. The only clean sound is silence.

It’s lovely to see a composer go flying out into the public eye with all the kinds of thoughts we music weirdos usually try to keep people from realizing we have.

One of my expected pleasures of being here at the Atlantic Center for the Arts has been the opportunity to learn more about the music of M.C. Maguire. (I’ll introduce you to all my ACA composers presently, but Maguire, older than the rest, deserves his own day.) Mike’s a Canadian composer, used to live in Vancouver, but moved to Toronto four years ago, and makes his living making soundtracks for films, commercials, and the like. His work for hire is rather amazingly sophisticated, and you can hear his imaginative commercials for Nike, Smirnoff, Fruit Loops, and others here. But I first became aware of him via a torrential sound continuum called Seven Years on the 1989 Bang on a Can marathon, and I’ve been trying to figure him out ever since.

Because his music – wild, noisy, intense, relentlessly high-energy – is nearly opposite in style to most of the music I like, but it is nothing at all like most modernist music characterized by those qualities, and I always have to admire fanaticism. Most of his pieces are what he calls “concertos,” by which he means pieces for solo instrument accompanied/obliterated by tape or electronic soundfile layered with from 200 to 400 tracks. The noise periodically parts for pop references and quotations: lightly-altered pop songs, the scherzo from Bruckner’s Eighth, Brazilian pop, heavy metal, all cascading by like someone trying to find his favorite radio station during a hurricane. Two of his pieces, which he analyzed for us – Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ for guitar and tape and Short History of Lounge for piano and tape – will be released on the Tzadik label in May, and he had to alter some of the quotations to avoid copyright infringement. He claims that he replaced the vocal parts with vocalists singing software manuals in Portugese, but Mike’s humor is so dry that it’s hard to discern where reality ends and satire begins – probably somewhere within his music.

It turns out, though, that beneath all the wildness runs a detailed sense of proportion and structure as obsessive as that of the Berg Chamber Concerto or the middle studies of Nancarrow. Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ is based on 49 tonalities that alternately rise and descend by thirds. As Mike helpfully charted out on a blackboard for us, the piece ascends to chord 7, returns to 1, slogs its way up to 14, returns to 1, and so on until it finally climbs the mountain of 49. The central tonality is the E power chord of the guitar solo, and you can sometimes hear the music dramatically return to it via a circle of fourths – though Maguire’s moments of repose and respite start about where Mahler’s climaxes end. Short History of Lounge, its title notwithstanding, is – at least on paper – a conventional three-movement concerto form, though enlivened by background quotations and sections that greatly accelerate and decelerate. The finale runs through an incredible gradual deceleration from quarter note = 900 to quarter note = 4. The magnitude of such gestures leaves you exhausted. In retrospect, though, I should have figured that his sense of form was knitted together by obsessively detailed structure, because it would be extremely difficult to make music of such rich complexity without a plan to generate all the various moments: the musical analogue of Bruno’s Theater of memory.

I’ve included some Maguire on Postclassic Radio, but I’ve also uploaded Short History of Lounge here on my website, so you can hear it. It’s the easier-listening of the two pieces, if that term can be used in this case, and I’ll take it down when the CD appears in May, and remind you that it’s out. I can see why Zorn likes the music – perhaps a rare point at which our tastes overlap. Maguire’s not completely isolated in Canadian music, for his friend Paul Dolden also makes take pieces of mammothly superimposed hundreds of tracks, and has gained a little more attention for doing so. But with his peculiar blend of postmodern style juxtapositions, pop appropriations, and fanatical intellectual structure, I think Maguire’s the most original Canadian composer since R. Murray Schafer – and I don’t know Schafer’s music well enough to be certain the qualifier is necessary.

Bernadette Speach has passed along to me the extremely sad news of the death, Saturday, from lung cancer, of violinist-composer Leroy Jenkins. He was just shy of his 75th birthday, but he never seemed old. Wiry, lively, young for his years, he was a comforting presence in the new-music world, with his raspily idiosyncratic but perfectly controlled violin tone that seemed as much at home floating up from the orchestra pit of his operas as in improvisations with Oliver Lake. Talking to him, you forgot after awhile that jazz and classical music had ever had their differences, he flowed between them with such fluid ease. He worked a lot with Muhal Richard Abrams and other AACM greats, but once told me a story about getting sick from all the decadent rich food during an extended weekend at Hans Werner Henze’s house. The music theater works of his that I was privileged to review, The Mother of Three Sons and The Negro Burial Ground, would be well worth reviving.

I’m late mentioning this, but pianist Blair McMillan is performing some of my Private Dances this afternoon at Da Capo‘s concert at Bard College.

On March 3, Ensemble Green is performing my chamber piece New World Coming at the Renaissance Arts Academy (1880 Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles) at 8 PM. Also on the program are works by Marc Lowenstein, Peter Knell, and Lou Harrison’s Grand Duo for Violin and Percussion.

Even more exciting, James Bagwell will conduct the Dessoff Choir in the premiere of my My father moved through dooms of love at Merkin Hall in New York on March 10. Works by William Duckworth, James Bassi, Philip Rhodes, and Elliott Carter also on the program. This one I’ll be at.

One of the unexpected kicks of being at the Atlantic Center for the Arts is being here with artists from other disciplines and observing professional differences of behavior. My composers and I are here with poets, who are working with Marie Ponsot, and architects, working with Steve Badanes. The poets are mostly middle-aged women, and, as they themselves were the first to point out, all arrived wearing scarves, even the men – not thick, cold-weather scarves, but tasteful, decorative, muted-color, poetic scarves. The male architects are big, beefy guys who shave their heads, and the women are tall and thin. They think it’s funny that we composers are all joined at the hip to identical Mac laptops, and I’m sure it does look comical. On the first day we got a tour of the studios. The music studio has a sound system, computers, several MIDI controllers, a piano, mixers, and so on, and the visual art sudio has machines for cutting wood and metal and lots of heavy equipment. Then we went to the poetry studio, which contained: a paper cutter. The poets didn’t even bring computers, and walk around with nothing but pencils and paper. The composers spend the first 20 minutes of any event trying to get all their technology to work. We’re all artists, with the same aspirations and complaints, but it’s humorous how different – and how predictably so – our day-to-day lifestyles are.

Now that I’m out of my spider hole for a few weeks, I’m learning that the internet is killing my small-talk skills. If I launch into a story, “I ran into Bob Ashley the other day…,” the answer is a quick, “Oh yeah, we read that on your blog.” Last time I tell you guys anything interesting.

I’m basking in the February sunlight of Florida’s east coast as I write this, enjoying a free morning at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Joining me here as Associate Composers (a term that makes me uncomfortable as conjuring up the “associates” at Wal-Mart, though then I start wondering what it means to be an associate professor) are Michael Maguire, Carolyn Mallonée, Teresa Hron, Andrea La Rose, Maria Panayotova-Martin, Scott Unrein, Matt McBane, and Jim Altieri. It’s a convivial and musically excellent group, and listening to each other’s music, we’re already kind of astonished at how good everyone is. (These are also the people whose music I recently uploaded to PostClassic Radio, so you can hear there what we’re hearing. I’m sneaky that way – clues as to my goings-on appear on the station frequently.) Michael, whom I’d been writing about for 18 years but never met until yesterday, and I are the old-timers, already rehashing the aesthetic battles of our youth, as the thirty-somethings view us with besumed pity. (Over Laphroaig last night, Schoenberg made Michael’s top-five list of 20th-century composers, and didn’t make my top fifty.) Anyway, we’re here for three weeks of discussion and arguing and composing, and I couldn’t feel more in my element. And it’s so blessedly far from snow. You’ll be hearing more, certainly.

The Dessof Choir is performing my piece My father moved through dooms of love at Merkin Hall in New York on March 10. (Also on the program are works by James Bassi, Elliott Carter, my good friend William Duckworth, and Phillip Rhodes.) Preparatory to that, choir member (and fellow Oberlin grad) Jeff Lunden did an interview with me about the piece, which is up here. I’ve also made the score available as a PDF on my score page (click on “Choral”). The choir, under my good friend and Bard colleague James Bagwell, did a beautiful job at rehearsal last week, and I’m very excited about this premiere – in some respects the largest I’ve had in New York.

On most issues on which I am not intransigently stubborn, I tend to be astonishingly suggestible. Someone told me this week that the essence of good web site design was that people should not have to scroll down – that, instead, information should be heirarchically arranged on nested pages, because people would rather click than scroll. OK. So I completely revamped my web site. I think all the pages survived the redesign except that I excised a lot of information explaining who I am, because when I started the site in 1996, I was actively looking for work. Now I’m actively running from it. So now you don’t have to scroll, despite the fact that I’m doing all this on a brand-new MacBook Pro, which has a feature whereby you can scroll simply by running two fingers down the finger pad, making scrolling really fun. Anyway, sorry about all the scrolling I’ve made you do over the years.