I hadn’t replenished PostClassic Radio in well over a month, and to my horror Sarah Cahill told me that a friend of hers, a devoted listener (so that’s who’s logging on), had now heard the entire current playlist. Well, it’s no longer true – 19 new recordings just went up by a crowd of composers mostly quite a bit younger than myself: Andrea La Rose, Matt McBane, Paula Matthusen, Andrian Pertout, Teresa Hron, David Toub, Jim Altieri, the amazing M.C. Maguire, Carolyn Mallonée, Kevin Volans, Scott Unrein, Jo Kondo, plus a Flute Trio by Feldman newly out on New World with flutist Dorothy Stone. Nice stuff. More to come, don’t stop listening now.

UPDATE: Someone actually complained that I don’t have any of my own music programmed lately (all right, it wasn’t a complaint exactly, he was just wondering, and come to think of it, he did sound a little grateful), so I’ve fixed that. I try not to repeat pieces, and I just don’t compose fast enough, or rather record fast enough, to keep contributing.

I treasure your comments, which at this point, I believe, take up well over half of my total blog space. There’s no way I’d turn off my comments feature: the dialogue is too good, I’ve gotten tons of helpful feedback, and being able to put up your comments directly saves me a lot of time. From my own experience reading comments on other blogs, though, it detracts from the enjoyment when someone posts a comment that goes on for paragraph after paragraph, all out of proportion to the other comments and sometimes longer than the blog entry itself. You don’t want to miss anything because someone might respond to it, but you begin to suspect that someone’s nerve has been struck and he’s going to go on for pages about his pet peeve. Also, this not being a group site, it’s not an effective place to grandstand, shout down the other commenters, and try to get in the last word. On your blog you get the last word, and I get the last word on mine. For more general and democratic discussions, go to Sequenza 21 or New Music Box. I’ve deleted a few comments lately for various combinations of verbosity and bellicosity, and I always feel guilty doing it, but I’m the bouncer here, and I do it to preserve the enjoyment of others.

Another bounceworthy infringement, as I’ve noted before, is writing in to disparage music I write about. Say, Carl Stone or somebody is sitting off in Japan minding his own damn business, and I put up a fragment of an mp3 of his music, and five people write in to say how much it sucks, and Carl’s being spat upon, when he didn’t have any control over the presentation, and maybe I didn’t explain his music correctly, and maybe I played an old version or the worst two minutes, and it’s not fair to judge composers on fragmentary work of theirs I present for analytical or musicological purposes. Sometimes I’m merely trying to illustrate a point. I’m writing about postminimalism now, and there’s a lot of great postminimalist music and a lot of bad postminimalist music and a lot in-between. So if I play or describe something that’s in-between because it illustrates my thesis, that’s not a cue for everyone who doesn’t like that fragment to roar in exulting that, Aha!, just as they suspected, postminimalism sucks. We’ve got to be able to discuss music without instantly confronting the earth-shaking question of whether you LIIIIIIIIKE the music or not, as though being LIIIIIIIKED was music’s sole purpose for existing. There are people who are very quick to reject new ideas without thinking about them much, or studying the scores of the music that inspired them, and usually those people seem to be in gradyooate school. Well, I was in gradyooate school once myself, and I knew everything. Someone should have given me a high-powered job just at that moment, because I had the entire world figured out, and I knew for sure which was the good music and which was the bad and why. And now I’m 51 and confused and can’t figure out how the world works or where it’s going, nor where to draw the line among the 171 shades of gray I see everywhere, and guess what? Now they let me teach. Go figure. But at least I don’t sit here going onto blogs of musicians more experienced than myself and tell them their ideas are bullshit, and neither should you.

I’ve been too busy recording a new CD to take note, but in response to my postminimalism essay composer Galen Brown has started his own history of postminimalism over on Sequenza 21. It’s in installments, and he got to talking about conceptual art, and I don’t know where he’s going with it yet, so it’s kind of a cliff-hanger. I look forward to Episode 2.

For years I’ve wished some younger Kyle Gann would come along and take over the responsibility I still feel of chronicling music of my generation. I strongly suspect that the Village Voice, under new and less idealistic management, would no longer hire a person to do this, but it might be worth a try. Of course, Tom Johnson’s devout fans were terribly disappointed in Greg Sandow, and Greg’s fans were just as disappointed with me, and so if someone does come along and make a career out of describing and contextualizing the new music, he or she’ll likely make no friends among people who like what I do. But I’ll root for him anyway.

I was almost remiss in letting an important milestone go by: today composer Mikel Rouse turns 50. In America you’re a “young composer” until you’re 50, and it’s disconcerting to think that Mikel, only 14 months younger than me but ten years younger-looking, has crossed the line. He’s the only composer younger than myself whose music has influenced my own long-term. He piles up layer after layer after layer in his recordings, all at different tempos and rhythms, and yet his music retains a remarkable clarity, and the ear can zero in wherever it chooses. My music sounds nothing like his; his is extremely pop-oriented and exquisitely produced in the studio, mine is mostly regular acoustic concert music with almost no pop influence. But when composing I stop and listen to his albums to remind myself to never stop reaching for that amazing clarity. I drink to his health and incredible music.

A singing correspondent asks if I’ve written any songs, and I have, and it makes me realize that I haven’t made all my music available that I could have. So I’ve added four songs to my PDF score page. They’re early: I used to write songs, but no one ever sang them, and I kind of lost interest. I’ve also put up a score to a brief 2003 piece for string quartet called Love Scene, an instrumental arrangement from a scene in my opera The Watermelon Cargo. It’s in just intonation, and I haven’t yet succeeded it getting anyone to play it, so, having recently gotten a couple of performances from having my PDFs available, I throw it out to the masses. It’s a waltz, for gosh sake – I write a whole piece in 3/4 and you’re gonna give me trouble about a few lousy extra pitches?

We pre-empt your attention to the succeeding postminimalist rant to alert you to a fantastic interview Frank Oteri did with my teacher Ben Johnston over at New Music Box. Frank asks Ben about his new book edited by Bob Gilmore, Maximum Clarity (which I knew was coming but didn’t realize was out already), and alludes to something I’d never heard Ben talk about:

…possible meanings for various types of intervals: the 3rd overtone ratios of perfect fifths and fourths representing stability and strength; the 5th overtone radios of major and minor thirds representing emotions; 7ths representing sexuality; 11ths ambiguity; and 13ths death.

This makes a certain sense (although, 13 = death?), which Frank teases out well during the interview. For many years I’ve had a fascination with the “meanings” of prime numbers, such as those applied by the great/notorious qabalistic crackpot Aleister Crowley:

11: The general number of magick, or energy tending to change.

13: The scale of the highest feminine unity… or, the unity resulting from love.

17: The masculine unity….

43: A number of orgasm, especially the male…

61: The negative conceiving itself as a positive…

It’s so tempting for a just intonationist to try to apply qualitative aspects of numbers to tuning. One book I studied for that was Number and Time by Jungian psychologist Marie Louise von Franz. One of her examples, showing that the Chinese mind considers numbers qualities as well as quantities, was a story of a battle in which eleven generals couldn’t decide whether to attack, so they voted. Three voted to attack, eight not to – and they attacked, because three is “the number of unanimity.” I never got very far with that compositionally, though I do consistently use the 11th harmonic as a gateway between opposing states. The interview with Ben is well worth reading, though, and there’s a 1970 article by him too, which almost reads as if written yesterday.

It is undoubtedly the most heinously unpopular thing about me, that I will apply a generic term to my own creativity. No other cliché could possibly be as widespread in music today as the conviction that one should never, ever admit that one’s art falls into any kind of category. (“Beyond category” is oft trotted out as Duke Ellington’s highest compliment, and every grad composition student believes it already applies to himself.) And yet I not only refer to myself as a postminimalist, but embrace it as kind of a guideline. Perhaps it’s a composer-critic thing: Tom Johnson, who freely called himself a minimalist, is the only other composer I’ve ever heard of self-applying such a term. But I did not get where I am today, wherever that is, by capitulating to widespread professional ukases, and although other composers urge it on me right and left, I have never considered conformism a very smart long-term career strategy for an artist. In this, as in other things, I flatly refuse to comply.

By postminimalism I mean something more specific than most people mean who use the term. In fact, for purposes of the current essay, perhaps the word should be temporarily understood as not being at all generic, but as referring solely to my own aesthetic – although ultimately I think there’s more to it than that. I think the term describes a condition, an attitude toward the materials of music, that many have come to share, though I will allow the reader to be the judge of that. No other composers need be tarred with the brush that tars me.

The superficial understanding of the term, it seems to me, is that it refers to a kind of watered-down minimalism. For me, postminimalism is qualitatively different from minimalism, almost a reaction against it, or a deliberate misappropriation of certain elements of it. Minimalist music maintains a balance between concept and sound. The value of the music is in its literal fidelity to its concept, and it expands one’s perception because of the cognitive dissonance between one’s right-brain experience of the (often sensuous) sonorities and one’s left-brain recognition of the extraordinary processes involved. Minimalism is inherently transgressive in venturing outside the perceptual conventions of concert attention, both in terms of scale and patent linearity. Minimalism aspires to the condition of natural phenomenon, and does not call attention to its “composed” quality.

None of this is true of postminimalism. Postminimalism is no more concept-related than any other body of concert-hall music, nor is it transgressive. Even less does it obscure its quality of being “authored.” It inherited from minimalism one thing: the value of limiting one’s materials, of composing within a circumscribed range. The postminimalists took from minimalism a lesson that was hardly intended – the contingent nature of musical elements – and ran off with it in a very different direction. Postminimalists noticed that the processes of minimalism did not depend on whether the harmonies were consonant (Steve Reich), dissonant (Phill Niblock), rhythmic (Philip Glass), or static (La Monte Young). The easy step from Reich’s Come Out to his Piano Phase was a striking demonstration that materials don’t matter. If you want to encourage perception of a process, piano notes and speech samples are equally effective. Minimalism had broken the traditional Romantic/modernist correlation between musical qualities and the external world.

And so, for postminimalism, an escape from modernism became also an escape from metaphysics. Sonata form had been considered, by its classic adherents, a natural form, something discovered in the processes of the mind; for postminimalism, there is no such thing as a natural form. The tendencies of tonal harmony were seen as conforming to natural laws, and 12-tone music was an attempt to draw music from an organic method; for postminimalism, there are no laws outside the composition, all tendencies are defined arbitrarily by a logic created within the specific piece of music, and organicism is understood as a constructed illusion. In traditional music, minor harmony and dissonance create tension, major harmony and consonance resolve it, in a tension-release pattern meant to mirror and elucidate emotional life; in postminimalism, one chord is as good as another, consonance and dissonance are equally acceptable, all being defined contextually rather than via reference to the outer world.

And the postminimalists had help: with his delicately gorgeous dissonances, Morton Feldman discredited, single-handedly and forever, the traditional correlation of dissonance with violence or even anxiety. The cord connecting qualities of musical materials to aspects of the outer world was snipped in two. Julia Wolfe’s dissonances, William Duckworth’s consonances, John Luther Adams’s tone clusters, Art Jarvinen’s pencil sharpeners, even Joshua Fried’s radio commercials, all became neutral markers for the various logics in which they circulated. A harsh piece no more suggested the world was a vale of tears than a consonant piece exhorted everyone to be happy. For an entire generation, the battles of our teachers’ generation – tonality versus atonality, consonance versus dissonance, harmonies versus tone rows – ceased to carry emotive force. “All art is artificial,” wrote Stravinsky (the proto-postminimalist par excellence), and the postminimalists, hearing in serialism and minimalism the ultimate failure of an attempted musical metaphysics, embraced that slogan with open ears.

This de-charging of materials, so to speak, was reinforced by the more explicit aesthetics of the period. Philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-98), the most influential aesthetician of my youth and one closely aligned with the then-new, more humanistic trends in analytic philosophy, denied in his influential Languages of Art of 1968 that perceived correspondences between art and reality were more than conventional. Artists, in his view, pretend to only document the world, but in actuality they shape our perceptions of it and create a new reality by conditioning us to reinterpret. “Realism” is never innocent. “That a picture looks like nature,” he wrote, “often means only that it looks the way nature is usually painted.” Drawing Wittgenstein’s insights to their logical conclusions, philosophers of the ’60s concurred that there is no ultimate reality to which all statements, and by extension all works of art, refer: “there is no such thing as the way the world is.” As I’ve written elsewhere,

the more [composers] portray the world as chaotic and formless, the more chaotic the world becomes. There is no such thing as ontologically neutral art. The artist cannot escape responsibility: no matter how innocently he “paints what he sees,” he is toying with our perceptions. (Music Downtown, p. 150)

Oscar Wilde had articulated the same insight in a light-hearted but profound essay that strikingly anticipates Goodman:

…[W]hat is nature?… She is our creation…Things are because we see them, and what we see,and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us… At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist until Art had invented them… That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is [Art’s] latest fancy, and… Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she now gives us exquisite Monets and entrancing Pisaros. (Intentions, 1889)

Had the world taken Wilde’s topsy-turvy formulations at face value, the early Modernists might have approached their task with a little more self-conscious irony. At first eager to portray the new Machine Age in noise, then concerned to warn mankind of the dark forces that threaten human freedom, modern music began as a heroic attempt to capture in sound realities that classical form had banished to the world of nonsense. Le Sacre gave us the relativism of non-Western society; Wozzeck gave us psychological reality; Ionisation gave us musical atomic physics. In the troubled but comparatively innocent 1920s modern music had seemed part of the solution, but by the ’70s it was part of the problem. The harshness, violence, and complexity of modern music, it turned out, had not been simple depictions of reality, but had helped condition us to perceive reality as harsh, violent, and complex. And when modernist music, dragged into a scientific dead end, suddenly yielded to minimalism, the relationship of music to the world stood exposed as contingent, not determinate. The collapse of what had seemed like the open-ended and unidirectional history of music faced composers, for the first time in history, with true freedom to write any kind of music they wanted.

Now the interesting question becomes, given absolute freedom to compose dissonantly, consonantly, complexly, simply, linearly, repetitively, noisily, melodically, structurally, intuitively – why did so many composers (not a majority by any means, but quite a few dozens) gravitate independently toward the same small set of ideas? Fittingly enough, part of the answer is simple historical accident. Not only serialism and minimalism but the American experimental tradition had tossed up phase-shifting, tone rows, isorhythms, arithmetical rhythmic structures, additive processes, echo and delay, polytonality, tempo canon, cross-rhythms, and many other devices, toyed with in seeming haste and then abandoned, begging for further exploration. Add to this that the sudden wealth of information about other world musics, plus increasing acceptance of vernacular traditions, made Gamelan melodic cycles, Indian ragas, African rhythms, bluegrass melodic patterns, boogie-woogie harmonic progressions, and five hundred other musical artifacts available. All of these have gone into postminimalist music, a variety so vast that you’d think the external appearance of a unified style would have become impossible.

Nevertheless, the astonishing fact is that a unified body of music did appear, seemingly without much influence seeming to have passed directly from one composer to another. One of its chief strategies, derived from minimalism but here turned to very different ends, was an overall limitation of materials within any one piece. Nothing is more characteristic of postminimalism than an avoidance of dramatic sectional contrast, or dramatic change altogther unless it is achieved gradually. As I experience the style as a composer, the unity is not necessarily moment-to-moment, but global. One has a sense from the beginning what concise universe of sounds, chords, rhythms, the piece will take place within, and the challenge is to create variety without diverging. Often the most basic idea of the piece is a certain relation among a finite number of harmonies, or a restriction on voice-leading strategies. (For me as a microtonalist, this self-limitation serves a practical logistical purpose, to keep the number of pitches from proliferating wildly in process – a situation that makes me even more surprised that I seem to be the only microtonal postminimalist.)

Theoretically one could have argued that, if all materials are equally acceptable, then a piece of music could include anything and everything. This has certainly been the message and strategy of some of the so-called postmodernist composers such as John Zorn and William Bolcom, and one might even include the more traditionally Ivesian Henry Brant. But to allow and include everything in your music flirts once again with the idea of representing the world, reviving the illusion of non-artificiality. To see the world as a cacophony of fragmentary signifiers, and represent it that way in your music, is to attempt to influence others to see it that way. Self-limitation, by contrast, is the most obvious sign of postminimalism’s embrace of artificiality. And not only formal limitation: postminimalism’s habitual reliance on steady pulse and the diatonic scale signifies a stepping back from naturalism, a deliberate and knowing acceptance of artifice.

One might as well admit, too, that overpopulation probably exerted its own pressures on postminimalism. If every piece includes everything, then all pieces become in some sense the same – a phenomenon that was fairly observable in the era of ambitiously massive, all-embracing serialist works, which inevitably came to resemble each other. There are so many tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of composers now, and without self-limitation on each one’s part, they all end up exploring the same territory. Minimalism had created a model in which, paradoxically, although materials didn’t matter, the focus on a specific element held so much power that, say, a piece based on a major third could have a very different profile from a similar one based on a minor third. Self-limitation enabled a composer to mark off territory different from that covered by other composers – or, put differently, it made pieces recognizable, it gave them profile.

And thus, in an era pervaded by increasing awareness of ecology issues, postminimalism felt like an ecological approach to composition, a refusal to hog more resources than one needed. Concomitantly, rather than a going-outward to say something about the world, it represented a going-inward, a focus on a certain small repertoire of sonorities and processes. Like Mahler, the postminimalists agree that a composition should be a universe: but not the universe, rather a possible universe, a created universe small enough to serve as a controllable model. To take a telling instance, the extreme limitations of John Luther Adams’s 75-minute In the White Silence for orchestra – only “white” pitches used, only a handful of gestural types, a linear and self-limiting intervallic process – does not indicate an attempt to portray the magnificent vastness of the Alaskan landscape (for which some technicolor means such as those of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony might be called for), but rather an attempt to create an inward stillness through a model that that one’s experience of that landscape suggests.

And so, given the realizations that 1. there is no necessity linking a style of music to its period, and 2. the perceived character of a society is more a product of art than art is a necessary effluent of society – the postminimalists came to a logical conclusion: that the purpose of art is not to represent the present, but to envision a future. And given the harrowing state of the world, that future needed to be the exact opposite of the picture given by modernist music, just as the postminimalist language is the antipode of the serialist language in almost every detail. For instance, man’s expansive appropriation of nature had brought us so close to disaster than music needed to show us a process of self-limitation and expansion inward, not outward.

Thus, nothing is more characteristic of postminimalist music than that it avoids the representation of anxiety. Even when postminimalist music is partly dissonant, harsh, or rhythmically complex, it has a sustained, continuous character that gives an impression of overarching calm. Dissonances and conflicts appear, but virtually never disrupt the musical surface. The first art-music style to arise from a collective perception of relativity, in total freedom from social mandates, postminimalism used its freedom ethically, to paint visions of a calm, less aggressive, and more sustainable future. Listening to postminimalist music attunes one to processes not marked by anxiety and disruption, but by variety without appropriation, a universe of activity within contained limits and controlled by logics that may seem intuitive or strict, but always multi-leveled. At its best it can be, I would submit, a blueprint for a more meditative mental state hitherto uncharacteristic of Western society.

To give what by now should be a classic example, take postminimalism’s first ambitious essay, William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes (which I’ll undoubtedly be writing more about in coming months). Of 24 brief movements in that work, about half follow some rigorous process or arithmetical structure, and the others are freely, more intuitively written. And listening, you can’t tell the difference. The distinction between rigorous structure and free intuition, such a bugbear of modern aesthetics, sits nestled there in the Time Curve Preludes as a distinction without a difference, and as you hear more into the piece you become more aware of the differences without it making any difference in the result. The piece is really an astonishingly suave statement about the illusory quality of artistic dualities.

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

As you can see if you’ve read this far (and if you have, it is my duty to inform you that spending too many hours hunched over a computer screen is bad for the vertebrae, and may cause back problems), I’ve started my book on music after minimalism, and, like so many other authors, am using my blog to write it. There will, I fear, be a hell of a lot more where this came from. My goal will be not merely to outline the technical features of postminimalist and totalist music, which is a fairly straightforward task I’ve already assayed in many venues, but to place this music in the world of ideas, and explain what urgency it has for the people who write it – possibility even why it remains invisible to the people who pay no attention to it. The way I’ve explained it has much to do with the way in which I arrived at my own composing idiom, but I think that something of this train of thought infected dozens of composers of my generation, many of whom I’ve listed elsewhere, more than once. Because I really think that postminimalism is not just a derived style that piggybacked on minimalism, but a philosophical departure from the hitherto linear history of music, and an ethical attempt to envision an inner world that will carry us through the fearful times that undoubtedly lie ahead.

UPDATE: Responses lead me to think I should clarify a point. By “The cord connecting qualities of musical materials to aspects of the outer world was snipped in two,” I do not mean to say that postminimalist music is somehow merely self-referential, that it refers to nothing in the world. To say that, and also to say that the music encourages recognition of certain mental states would indeed involve a self-contradiction into which I don’t think I fell if you read me literally. What I’m saying is that postminimalist music does not rely on or refer to the traditional emotive associations of qualities of music elements: consonant, dissonant, noisy, musical, etc. For example, of Adams’s two largest orchestral works, In the White Silence uses only the “white” notes, Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing employs the entire chromatic scale, though both use roughly similar textures and processes. But while the colors of the pieces differ somewhat, the chromatic scale is not used for a different expressive purpose than the diatonic scale, the way Beethoven uses the chromatic to make the second movement of Les Adieux anxious and the diatonic to make the third movement happy, or even the relative eeriness and stability of the first and last movements of Music for Strings, Percussion,and Celeste. The processes and form of postminimalist music encourage a certain kind of attention; the materials are often treated, from piece to piece, as more or less interchangeable, as in Come Out and Piano Phase. Anyone who sees a logical contradiction here has perhaps misread the word materials as referring to the totality of a piece, rather than the constituent elements.

At Bard’s Schoenberg festival several years ago, the guy who introduced Arnold Schoenberg to Charlie Chaplin (I disremember his name, sorry) told about the experience, which occurred after the composer moved to Hollywood. Schoenberg, he said, was disappointed to find Chaplin running around, fixing his cameras, doing the quotidian work of the studio, and cracking jokes, rather than strutting around with an overcoat over his shoulders and voicing his august theories on filmmaking while his subordinates did all the work. That story has always made me think well of Chaplin, and worse of Schoenberg.

Likewise, I am told that as composers go, I am rather easygoing; my recording session last week went particularly smoothly because I don’t insist on take after take after take trying to get every note the way I want it, and wearing out the performer’s inspiration in the process. It’s true. When I trust performers to understand my music and interpret imaginatively, as my pianist Sarah Cahill certainly does, I give them a lot of leeway. I don’t assume that I always know best, and I take advice. I find that I unconsciously observe a heirarchy of musical elements in this respect:

Pitches I am adamant about. My music must have the right pitches played in the right order, and that’s that.

My rhythms often suggest tempo relationships between 1:1 and 2:1, and it is essential that these come off as representing the notated values, though not necessarily in a precisely measured way. This means that the faster and more regular the tempo, the more precise the playing must be. However, I am fond of rubato, and Sarah has a wonderfully classical way of speeding up and slowing down within the phrase that I find enchanting. In slower passages, she has a freedom with duration that sounds like she’s feeling the rhythm, not counting it out, and I find that more musical than a strictly accurate approach. As long as the quarter-notes and dotted eighths are clearly distinguishable, I don’t interfere.

On dynamics I’m open to suggestion. Sarah insisted that she couldn’t feel a couple of my dynamic progressions, and so I let her have her own way. One I changed in the score, the others I’ll leave for the next performer to try. I am rather infamously sparse with expression markings, but for a good performer they always turn out to be enough.

Pedalling we sometimes disagreed about, and only once did I insist. I love the blur of sustained dissonant chords, Sarah finds it at times unmusical. Who knows?, maybe she’s right.

Tempo I leave to the performer unless they’re so on the wrong track it makes me cringe. Occasionally Sarah would consult a metronome, and I warned her over the microphone that I shoot performers who take my metronome markings seriously. Different tempos work for different performer personalities. Sarah played two of my pieces slower than I’d imagined them, and made them more sensuous in the process. She played another faster than I thought it could be played, and the result is glorious – the piece turned more beautiful than I’d imagined.

And why would I want to preclude the possibility of my pieces surpassing my expectations? What would be the point of writing acoustic music for performers if not to channel their personality into the music as well? If I insisted that there was only one way my music could sound, what would be the incentive for another performer to make a second recording? Yet we live in a weirdly schizophrenic music scene: on one hand, some composers take me to task for not being more open to improvisation; another set criticizes my music because I haven’t plastered it with dynamics and nailed down every possible detail. And yet for the in-between position, the limited improvisation of throwing down notes on a page and letting the performer use them as a vehicle for inspiration – which, after all, has a heavy weight of long tradition to speak for it – one hears little support these days. I always liked, and by “liked” I mean “despised,” Milton Babbitt’s comment, “Letting a performer decide what music should be played is like letting a typesetter decide what books should be published.” Composers either think your music is dead if you don’t let performers extemporize, or they think performers are mere machines to which you should transmit your intentions, which should be exhaustive.

And this second attitude, I think, goes back to a stereotype that the classical music world hasn’t seen for what it is. Underlying much of our classical-music rhetoric is an ideal that the composer should be a stubborn, uncompromising figure who knows everything. I don’t believe that this has as much to do with the nature of the artistic personality as it does with the fact that, just a few decades ago, all the great composers were central Europeans and mostly Germans. And, to generalize a little from my own experiences, Germans, whatever their many lovable qualities, tend to be stubborn, uncompromising fellows who know everything, or talk like they do. I think we’ve grafted the central European personality onto our figure of the artist, and, like Schoenberg, we’re disappointed when someone doesn’t measure up to that inflexible Beethovenian ideal. Americans don’t tend to be so supremely confident, they tend to exhibit more humility toward diverging points of view, and I think this is why American composers (and most British ones as well) are at such a disadvantage in the classical music world. Making a career as a composer seems to have a lot to do with projecting the kind of unflinching, I-know-what-I-want confidence we associate with Europeans. Had I really wanted to impress people with what a great composer I am, I should have stormed around last week shouting, “No, no, no, pianissimo, not piano, and the crescendo doesn’t begin until the third beat!” (An anomaly worth mentioning, however, is George Tsontakis, who’s a funny, egoless, absolutely unpompous guy, and who’s doing well in the awards arena lately.)

Carl Ruggles’s Sun-Treader is one of my favorite works, an absolute knock-out that I play for students every year. His Organum, too, fantastic piece. Yet Ruggles was an underconfident, easily-swayed person who asked John Kirkpatrick for composing advice and, receiving it, followed it. One could fill a book multiplying examples, but the point is that I believe there is no correlation at all between being a control freak and being a true artist. I’m glad Chaplin fixed his own cameras, and I’m glad I have the sense to let Sarah turn my music into something more beautiful than my imagination alone could have produced.

On the front cover of this week’s New York magazine is a headline about three performance artists who, quote, “are doing their outrageous best to prove that downtown lives on.” [Emphasis in the original.] And the article talks about this guy Dash who’s “a downtown legend.” Now, whenever I use the word “downtown,” six people leave comments to chastise me for referring to it, three people write to New Music Box to ask, “What’s this uptown/downtown thing about?,” and 14 bloggers go on the web to aver that there’s nothing in the world they despise more than people who talk about downtown music. Do you think that’ll happen to Ariel Levy, who wrote the New York article? Or is it only musicians who so resent the fact that something exciting once happened and they weren’t part of it that they feel compelled to vent their spleen whenever someone mentions it?

I just completed an extraordinarily smooth and successful two-day recording session with pianist Sarah Cahill for my upcoming New Albion CD. Tom Lazarus is the recording engineer, with a resumé of hundreds of great discs behind him. (One of his credits was the last recording made by Vladimir Horowitz, which made me expect he’d be a bearded patriarch; actually Tom’s my age and looks younger, and we kidded him about having worked with Horowitz at age seven.) We recorded three works: Private Dances, Time Does Not Exist, and On Reading Emerson. In a couple of weeks I’ll record two more pieces for the disc with the Da Capo ensemble and my son Bernard. I had never heard On Reading Emerson before, aside from my own halting attempts to muddle through it, and I’ve been nervous about committing to disc a piece that I haven’t heard with an audience. Listening to your music with an audience is like going over it with a microscope, and sometimes at world premieres I smack my forehead and suddenly realize what I should have done instead. But Sarah plays the piece so gorgeously that she won me over to it.

To make it scarier, On Reading Emerson, stream-of-consciousness and mercurial, is not my typical style. Sarah commissioned it for an Emerson conference she attended, and while I normally settle into a steady-state postminimalism, there was nothing postminimalist about Emerson. As Emerson so often quotes other writers, the piece wanders into motivically related quotations: from Busoni, Ives, and MacDowell, plus a phrase from an incomplete song I started in college to Emerson’s poem “Rhodora.” And since I think of each Emerson essay as driven by a single idea yet ultimately all-encompassing, I derived the whole piece from a motive that keeps reappearing at the same pitch level despite changes of key – E D# C# D# (G) – and that occasionally expands into a 12-tone row, the first one I’ve ever used. (Sort of like Strauss using a 12-tone theme in Also Sprach Zarathustra to represent “science.”) I’m so happy with it and with Sarah’s performance that I’ll treat you to a rough edit, here (eight minutes).

This is not the first time I’ve written a piece outside my usual stylistic habits and found it in certain ways more attractive than my more characteristic music. Morton Feldman used to have a standard assignment that he gave his students: “Write a piece that goes against everything you believe.” He found that his students wrote their best pieces denying all their usual reflexes. (Sort of like the Seinfeld episode in which he decides, since everything he does turns out badly, that he’ll do the opposite of his reflex habits from now on – and it works.) Feldman also had a standing offer to buy dinner for the student who could come up with the worst orchestration – and no one ever won, because the more they worked to come up with bizarre instrument combinations, the more interesting the results.