Bard College music and film building (center):



The parking lot on right is student dorm parking. I park right next to the building in an area that’s shadowed here: can’t tell whether my car’s there. The photo’s about a year old because it was taken in winter and includes the new music building addition but not the extension being built on the Curatorial Studies Center across the field (top of the photo).

Gain a new perspective here.

UPDATE: On closer inspection, this photo is two years old, because the parking lot isn’t finished yet and there are construction trucks all around. Why don’t they update more often? The New Orleans photos look pre-Katrina, too.

I just woke from a vivid dream that I was telling a class about a jazz trio recording with Miles Davis, Kenny Barron, and a drummer whose name I never got. (Waking researches suggest that Miles and Barron never recorded together, and I realize now that the record cover I was looking at was actually Coltrane’s Ascension, with, significantly, only one figure on the cover.) The brief liner notes on the back – those were the days – merely told an anecdote about how Miles scoffed at the idea of explaining his music, and swore he could show his musicians how the music went without words. Next Miles, Barron, and this drummer whose name I was trying to remember came to lunch with me at the Bard faculty dining room (which also looked, in the dream, like Chicago’s old Museum of Contemporary Art, where I first worked in 1981). Kenny Barron talked most, discussing the impossiblility of capturing music in words, but finally Miles leaned over and spoke into my ear, so close that his lips touched me, and told me that you had to have a really divided allegiance working for The Man in a place like this. I realized that he was talking about being Black, but added (with amazement at my own temerity at telling Miles Davis anything) that it was also inherently difficult for an artist, because academia expects you to explain what you’re doing, and artists can’t always justify themselves logically. Miles kind of nodded. I woke up and ransacked my jazz vinyl collection for a Miles Davis trio record, which, of course, wasn’t there.

I’ve been listening to little besides jazz lately, because I’m writing a concerto for piano and a saxophone/trumpet/trombone ensemble, and it strikes me that the effective, American prototypes for combining piano with reeds and brass are all jazz: so I listen to the Earl Hines orchestra, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Seven with Lil Hardin, Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer, and the Miles Davis/Gil Evans orchestrations. I guess that accounts for me dreaming about Miles, along with a pianist he never played with. The last time I had a dream encounter this significant with a famous musician was 1991, when a bunch of people were waiting in Charles Ives’s living room for him, and he came out to see me, played the piano with me, and gave me his blessing. That was a tremendously empowering dream. But I think Miles Davis just told me I talk too much.

For Christmas I received Richard Taruskin’s massive two-volume tome Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, and I’m finally reading it. I always knew I would eventually, but I put it off for years – because the book is bulky enough to serve as doorstop at Notre Dame Cathedral, because I was afraid it would tell me more about Stravinsky than I wanted to learn, and because after 2000 pages it only progresses up through Mavra, which is not my favorite period of Stravinsky. However, I should have realized that the brilliance of Taruskin’s writing would have made it difficult to put down regardless of topic, and the book has a tremendous amount to teach not only about Stravinsky but about musical progress in general. One of Taruskin’s tremendous strengths as a musicologist, beyond the panoramic sweep of his research, is his theoretical ability to correctly grasp and describe compositional process. Take a look at the following statement about Stravinsky’s youthful Piano Sonata in f#:

There is no end of decorative “trompe l’oreille.” Any dominant seventh can be resolved as an augmented sixth, and vice versa. Any first inversion can be treated as a Neapolitan. Any tone can be a “common tone” for instant links between “unrelated”chords. Colorful nonfunctional bridge progressions are freely concocted by means of chromatic outer voices in contrary motion (what is often termed “intervallic expansion”)… But all the harmonic novelty is surface embellishment; beneath the decorator colors the functional relations are pristine, easily followed, tame. [p. 116]

Reading that, and looking through the musical example on the facing page, any composer can grasp at a glance what Stravinsky’s early compositional modus operandi was. Damn few musicologists can offer compositional insight at that depth.

But what first struck me about the book was the history lesson it gives on the development of musical style, with parallels that offer mirrors of our own situation. One article quoted from the music critic Vladimir Stasov, written in 1861 as Russia was just beginning to form its own art-music culture, seems as relevant now as it was then. Dubious about Rubinstein’s attempt to introduce conservatory training, Stasov warns:

“Higher” institutions for the arts are an altogether different matter from higher institutions in the sciences…. A university imparts nothing but knowledge; a conservatory is not content with that but meddles in the most injurious way in the creative work of an artist trained there, extending its despotic power over the style and form of his work, attempting to force it into a certain academic mold, imparting to it its own customs, and what is worst of all, sinking its claws into the artist’s very mind, imposing on him its own judgment of works of art and their creators, from which it will later on be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for him to extricate himself.

…The experience of Europe teaches us that to the same extent that modest schools which limit themselves to the rudiments of music are useful, higher school, academies, and conservatories are harmful. Is this experience going to be lost on us? Are we then required to copy slavishly what exists in other places, so as to have the pleasure of boasting afterward nothing but an enormous quantity of teachers and classrooms, a fruitless distribution of awards and prizes, proliferating volumes of worthless compositions and legions of good-for-nothing musicians?

Of course, in the narrative of successive decades Stasov goes on to become something of a clown, jingoistically continuing to cheerlead for the Russian nationalist composers, those descended from the “Russian Five” or “mighty heap” (kuchka), long after their students and protégés have descended into patent mediocrity. And yet, on some level Stasov’s tragedy vindicates his thesis: the kuchkist faction declines in quality precisely because those composers gained power in the conservatories, and turned out generations of dutiful students taught to compose in similar manner. It’s a particularly clear object lesson in how a musical society turns rancid through access to power and excessive inbreeding. Composers of this group were published by the firm of the wealthy patron Belyayev, and of their later activities Taruskin writes:

By the turn of the century, then, Russian music had entered its “Brahms phase,” manifested quite literally in a cult around the Hamburg master such as never could have existed in Russia during Brahms’s lifetime…. This cultivation was in every way a hothouse growth, subsidized by the Belyayev fortune and increasingly divorced from the realities of the surrounding world. The combination of denationalization and safe conservatism proved utterly bland, and for most of the public and the press the name Belyayev came to be synonymous with the word boring. Attendance at the Russian Symphony Concerts [a kuchkist venue] was famously poor. [p. 65]

Taruskin details how quickly a young composer could gain publications and performances once accepted into the Belyayev circle, and comments:

…[I]t is only natural that composers so favored will seek to perpetuate their favored status – or at least do nothing to jeopardize it. Within the Belyayev circle a safe conformism became increasingly the rule, and mediocrity flourished, especially as the need to fill four concert programs a year with new Russian works made it necessary to dip rather deep into the pool of available Conservatory-trained talent. As a result, the Belyayev circle became known for harboring a great multiplicity of “kleinmeisters” who were often far from meisters – “clones,” to use [Cesar] Cui’s kind but prophetic word… It was as easy to deride this group from without as it was difficult to rebel against it from within. [p.57]

A contemporary of the scene, the composer Nicolai Cherepnin (patriarch of a composing family that continues to its fourth generation today), wrote that there were no explicit rules that young Belyayevets composers had to follow, but that

…there most certainly and most naturally were such implied constraints on composers who were accepted into the [Belyayev] catalogue…

From them it was required – if only unconsciously – that the works presented by them for publication be more or less close – in sound, in esthetic, in the character of the musical ideas and workmanship – to the works of the builders of the catalogue…

There arose, and was even engraved in the Belyayev Charter, a certain qualitative yardstick: “No lower than the average item in the Belyayev catalogue”… This was to be interpreted as follows: “Look, we taught you to compose. Well, go ahead and compose as we have taught you, so that the general musical content of the catalogue shall be worthily augmented, continued, and developed along creative lines we have devised and marked out for you.” [p. 58]

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

As a music educator by day job, it is uncomfortable for me to admit how much I share Stasov’s reservations: that “modest schools which limit themselves to the rudiments of music are useful,” while “higher academies and conservatories are harmful.” I’ve said here before that I sometimes find myself agreeing with the Harvard faculty who in 1876 tried to prevent John Knowles Paine from becoming America’s first music professor.

Certainly students around me are told, in a thousand indirect ways, often so subtly as to ensure the professor’s plausible deniability, that this composer should be admired, and that kind of music should be looked down on. Constraints are almost never explicit, as Cherepnin notes, but are pervasively implied and unconsciously implemented. Young composers are strongly urged to move their music in certain predictable directions, usually toward greater pitch complexity and notational specificity. Even more harmful, they are given historical tools and techniques that most of them, naturally enough, feel obliged to use in their own music – why else would they be paying to learn them? Of course some composers in academia are well aware of these dangers and scrupulously try to avoid sending out such influence vibes, but there’s no penalty for slipping up; I don’t feel entirely innocent myself in this regard. Some composition faculty, and I’ve seen it happen, even show a student how to deliberately write music that will win prizes, even writing the “right” notes into their score.

And what’s the result? The more compliant, eager, impressionable students go to the right conservatories and grad schools, get introduced into the system by their teachers, and are chosen for advancement on the basis of their willingness to continue in the style their teachers have marked out as acceptable. On recommendation of their teachers, they get commissions and prizes. So easily do the rewards flow that rebellion becomes impossible. And they are never quite as good as their teachers’ generation. Jacob Druckman was a weaker composer than Roger Sessions, John Harbison is kind of a watered-down Aaron Copland, and their students, their “clones,” are less distinctive still. And the new-music world revolves around a system of “fruitless distribution of awards and prizes,” Guggenheims and Fromm commissions and Prix de Rome, 99 percent of which go to kleinmeisters, people who might have started out with true talent, but who have learned not to jeopardize their status by independent thinking, and content themselves with safe conformism and mediocrity.

Kleinmeisters: an early 21st-century typology of the term would be easy to delineate. Kleinmeisters are those composers who get dozens of orchestra commissions, especially for concertos, and hundreds of performances. Most of them, virtually all of them, are very nice people – naturally, since they’ve made careers out of their ability to accommodate. (The younger generation of kleinmeisters is astonishingly good-looking.) Because the major-paper critics are part of the system, the kleinmeisters get incredibly positive reviews in the top 15 or 20 newspapers and music magazines. They excel at two genres: the ten-minute concert opener with lots of brass and percussive momentum, and the concerto whose solo part is visibly at the limits of endurance. Their music thrills with its virtuosity, its patent sense of difficulty; it is neither remembered nor asked for afterward. Frequently their performances are greeted with a vindicating roar of applause that is taken to attest to its quality, but is really either intended for the poor soloist having survived his ordeal, or else a reflection of the piece’s noise.

What’s lacking with the kleinmeisters is any sense that their music is taken seriously. It is praised, usually in vague and unconsciously patronizing terms (“X really knows her way around an orchestra”), but it is not discussed. Its methods are not problematized. It may be considered thorny, but no one pretends it presents a new perceptual paradigm. Reviews most often cite as praiseworthy its orchestration – in other words, its professional clothing, not its content. Most of all, there is no buzz about the kleinmeisters among younger composers. Harbison, Chen Yi, Penderecki, Higdon, Zwilich, Sierra, Paulus, get to command vast musical resources, but no young composers heatedly argue the merits of their pieces. Their names don’t come up in internet discussions. No one acts as though they hold any key to the future. After all, these composers write in styles in which far more vivid music had already been written decades ago. The kleinmeisters of 19th-century Russia were ridiculed by the musical intelligentsia outside that circle, but today’s American kleinmeisters have a whole Potemkin music scene built to support them and protect them from reality – reality being that their music is drab, unoriginal, and cared about by no one, for good reason.

Of course, for some young composers, a trip through the kleinmeister factory is exactly what they want. For those perceptive enough to be dubious about that route, the potential advantages of higher music education can be difficult to tease out. Given the realities of the world today, I don’t see that there’s much of an alternative for a young creative artist to getting an undergraduate degree, or at least starting one. But grad school is a danger that I urge a student to approach carefully. When a student shows interest, I always ask why he wants to go to grad school. If the naive answer is, “To study and get better as a composer,” I tell him to forget it – that if you improve as an artist during grad school, it will be in the face of the pressures to conform, not because thinking outside the box is encouraged. I emphasize that education, even under the best of circumstances, is something you have to do for yourself, and that great composers (Cage, Feldman) have often had no degrees at all. If the student has the personality to go out and start giving concerts and making partnerships and getting people to collaborate with him, those activities will do more for him than more schooling.

There are, however, a few graduate schools that can be trusted not to do damage; we’ve had positive experiences sending students to Mills College, CalArts, and Hartt. And I do admit three reasons to go to grad school as a composer:

1. to make connections with people who can help your career (in general the kleinmeister route, though there are different kinds of professors and assistance);

2. to idle away some time because you don’t have anything better to do with your life, and don’t have the aggressive personality to get out and be a performing musician (this was my rationale); and

3. to get a doctorate if teaching college is specifically what you want to do with your life.

I also recommend as a possibility going to a non-prestigious grad school, which is what I consider the secret of my own success. I had a couple of great teachers at Northwestern – Peter Gena for composition and theory, Gary Kendall for electronics, plus Ted Karp as a musicology mentor – but Peter, who encouraged my most avant-garde enthusiasms, got denied tenure because he was too far out. The rest of the faculty was so many decades behind that they didn’t push 12-tone music because they were still a little dubious about Hindemith. All that “sinking its claws into the artist’s very mind, imposing on him its own judgment of works of art and their creators”: didn’t happen to me, because I was into Brian Eno and Morton Feldman and Harold Budd and other people they’d never heard of, and they didn’t know what to do with me. I was so rebellious and sure of myself that I can’t imagine what would have happened had I gone to some high-powered department where the faculty had stylistic expectations. I probably would have just dropped out. If you have a personality like mine, you can’t pick a grad school for reason #1.

I don’t know what kind of educational system, or apprenticeship, might be more helpful than the university and conservatory system we’ve got. One recommendation I’d make is that college departments should try to hire more “outside,” less credentialed, even older and more street-experienced artists, to get some new blood and ideas in and keep everything from getting so inbred – but the prejudice against any such idea, not only within music departments but even more within university administrations, is so ingrained as to ensure that that’s not going to happen within my lifetime. One of my former students studies in Calcutta with a guru now, and thinks it’s wonderful – but he admits he has to hide his electronic music equipment when his teacher comes over, or he’d get bawled out for practicing something besides tabla. So I don’t know what the answer is. But Stasov’s fears about higher music education echo to me 145 years later as very real concerns.

Greg Sandow: Classical music is dying.

Alex Ross: Classical music is not dying.

Kyle Gann: Die or don’t die already, but get outa the friggin’ way.

If you hate Pachelbel’s Canon, this five-minute video will be really satisfying, and even if you don’t, it’s entertaining. (Thanks to my Cincinnati friend who’s played the piece 47,000 times.)

Whether this is on the level I can’t vouch, but inevitable it surely was. A press release making the rounds on the web (here and here, for instance) claims that a conceptual artist named Jonathon Keats has made Cage’s 4’33” into a ringtone. (After all the goddamned ringtone advertisements that internet robots have tried to post on this blog as comments, I can’t even believe I’m mentioning this.) I consider cellphones an evil technology, and won’t have one: no one answers them, they go off at inappropriate times, they’re a sonic nuisance, their batteries run down and when they don’t you’re out of range anyway, if you hang somebody people use them to photograph it, they’re easy to lose and losing them’s a tragedy – and most of all, I’m already easier to contact than I like being. But, a silent ringtone? What’s funny is the claims trumpeted for the device, which, even in this modest context, can only be called grandiose:

Since the beginning of time, pure silence has been available only in the vacuum of space. [???] Now conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has digitally generated a span of silence, four minutes and thirty-three seconds in length, portable enough to be carried on a cellphone. His silent ringtone… is expected to bring quiet to the lives of millions of cellphone users, as well as those close to them.

“When major artists such as 50 Cent and Chamillionaire started making ringtones, I realized that anything was possible in this new medium,” says Mr. Keats, whose previous art projects include attempting to genetically engineer God. “I also knew that another artist, John Cage, had formerly tried, and failed, to create a silent interlude.”

Mr. Cage once famously composed four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, which was performed on a piano, in front of a live audience, back in 1952. By all accounts, though, his silence was imperfect, owing to the limitations of the technology available at the time. “John Cage can’t be blamed,” says Mr. Keats. “He lived in an analog age.” [emphasis added]

This kind of reminds me of Monty Burns about to engulf Springfield in perpetual darkness: “Since the beginning of time, mankind has yearned to destroy the sun!” There are many other comments one could make, but the reader can supply them as well as I. (Thanks to Brian McLaren.)

My friend Bill Hogeland alerted me to the arrival of a new book that I’m shocked had slipped under my microtonality radar: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (Norton). It’s by Ross W. Duffin, who heads the early music program at Case Western Reserve University, and who argues that we need to go back and try out the tunings that pre-20th-century composers wrote their music in. He’s not a microtonalist, and there’s no mention of Partch, Johnston, La Monte Young, et al, but it’s an elegantly readable exposition of what the temperament arguments are all about.

Duffin apparently started the book as a much-needed antidote to Stuart Isacoff’s mendacious and unaccountably popular Temperament: The Idea that Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle of several years back. Isacoff’s populist tome was a heady celebration of the status quo: “hey, 12 equal steps to the octave is the perfect tuning, aren’t we glad they came up with it, no reason to ever consider anything else!” To argue that, he had to sweep a mountain of inconvenient acoustic phenomena under the rug. (I wrote a Village Voice review saying so, and, comically, Isacoff wrote a letter to the editor excoriating me as – I quote from memory – “one of those dogmatic pedants who can only imagine doing a thing one way.” Of course, the “one way” I pedantically insisted on was allowing and exploring thousands of different tunings; the open-minded route he so generously opened up was to impose one bland, invariant scale on all mankind’s music for the rest of eternity.) Strangely for so esoteric a topic, Isacoff’s Temperament got a tsunami of undeserved publicity.

Enter, thankfully, Duffin (who alludes to Isacoff’s book, though not by title). His book is just as entertainingly written, just as acutely aimed at the average music fan, and possesses the inestimable advantage of being accurate. He starts off from, and keeps returning to, Pablo Casals’s dictum that, in string playing, sharped notes should be raised and flatted notes should be lowered: “leading notes should lead.” But, once granted that possibility, he shows meticulously how no one style of intonation is good for all musics, arguing that players should adjust their intonation to fit the historical style. His history of tuning theory is quick, concise, and as painless as possible. At one point, before giving some numbers, he adds, “Note to mathophobes: This is not math, it’s arithmetic.” (On the same impulse I call my tuning course The Arithmetic of Listening, not “The Mathematics.”) His history and theory are admirably accurate, and he gives perhaps the simplest exposition I’ve seen of the 18th-century theory of dividing the octave into 55 parts, using a minor half-step of four units (C to C#) and a major half-step of five units (C to Db). We know for a fact that’s the intonation Mozart taught, folks, and as Duffin adds:

Are modern practices better than what Mozart had in mind? I don’t think so, and I don’t think most musicians would deliberately go against the expectations of a composer like Mozart if they knew what those expectations were. And even though the sound of lower sharps and higher flats is likely to be unfamiliar to many musicians, I think Mozart’s endorsement makes it worth trying… and trying very seriously. [Ellipsis in the original]

This is above all a practical book, brief and to the point, “because every musician I know would rather be making music than reading about it any day.” Keyboard instruments he all but despairs of, and he even quotes Casals:”Do not be afraid to be out of tune with the piano. It is the piano that is out of tune.” Duffin gears his argument toward singers, wind players, and especially string players, and includes some wonderful quotations about intonational practice from old-style, Old World quartet players. I might add to Duffin’s argument that I keep my own pianos, at the office and at home, in Thomas Young’s Well Temperament of 1799, and that I find it preferable in every respect, for every kind of music, to Equal Temperament. The problem with that, as Duffin emphasizes, is that, in tuning, there’s no one-size-fits-all:

I am perfectly aware that what I am suggesting is a radical idea for musicians and that it is likely to be met with reluctance, resistance, and even scorn in some quarters. Some musicians will be convinced by my arguments but may still view unequal tuning as a Pandora’s box to be opened carefully or not at all; others will scoff at the long historical pedigree of extended meantone as irrelevant; still others will find both the harmonic and melodic intervals strangeand “out of tune.” At least that’s how it may seem to some the first time they hear it or try it. But my experience has been that an hour or so of experimenting over two or three sessions is all that’s necessary to help musicians begin, at least, to appreciate what non-ET tuning has to offer from a musical point of view…. [T]he testimonials of Bach and Mozart have to count for something. What makes it worth trying is that it makes the music sound better. And remember, I’m not saying that harmonic intonation should replace ET entirely and substitute its own tyranny; only that ET is not necessarily the best temperament for every single musical situation….

Now that’s someone who can imagine doing a thing more than one way. Bill saw a stack of Duffin’s books on display at Barnes & Noble, so maybe we’ll finally hear the bland hegemony of ET – that heavily-processed Wonder Bread of tunings – start to erode. And once that happens: microtonality, here we come!

There is an obvious issue in Morton Feldman’s compositional technique that I have never seen anyone write about – though I can’t be the only one to notice it, and perhaps some discussion of it has escaped my reading.

Through some passages of Feldman’s late works, it is remarkable – too remarkable for mere coincidence – how often his textures change at the end of a page. It doesn’t seem true at the beginnings of pieces, which will often be seamless. But at some point in a work, he will begin to settle into a rhythm. A texture or pitch set will be consistent for a page, and then the next page will have a different texture and pitch set, and the next page a different one still, and so on. It is almost as though he treated the page visually, as a whole, and every time he turned to a new page, thought, “Now for something new.”

For instance: in Crippled Symmetry there are no particular texture changes at page turns until page 5. The flute spends most of pages 5 and 6 on a motive in sevenths, Eb – Db – C – D, which ends when page 7 begins. Then:

– On page 9 the flutist plays only long, low notes on E, F, and Gb, and the percussionist plays only slow chords on the vibraphone alternating with single notes on the glockenspiel.

– On page 10, the flutist switches to angular motives on the regular flute, and the percussionist to the Eb – Db – C – D motive.

– On page 11, the flutist plays only reiterated Bbs above the treble clef, while the vibraphone is limited to a motive G – F# – B – A.

– On page 12, the flute takes up a different four-note motive, and the percussion is now limited to a reiterated Bb.

And so on, with changes of texture, pitch set, notation, and even number of staves occurring regularly with the turn of each new page. This is all the more peculiar in Crippled Symmetry, of course, because the three parts (flute, piano, percussion) aren’t synchronized. Presumably, Feldman doesn’t want such changes in texture and motive happening simultaneously, and thus waits until several pages into the piece before implementing them.

For Samuel Beckett for orchestra demonstrates an analogous relation to the page in a synchronized score. On pages 6, 8, 12, and 13, the last four or five measures are encapsulated in repeat signs. On pages 14, 15, and 16, each entire individual page is repeated. On pages 17, 18, and 19, the page is broken into two passages, each in repeat signs. Later we have a long passage in which, on each new page, repeat signs encompass every measure except the first and last. Neither here nor in Crippled Symmetry does any passage within repeat signs cross from one page to another. (Not every late piece is structured this way. I find no such changes in For Christian Wolff, and only a few, more inconclusively, in Clarinet and String Quartet.)

It is difficult to escape the impression that sometimes Feldman planned out each page individually, as an artist would. Sometimes in For Samuel Beckett the page is planned out symmetrically, making a contained and visible palindrome. Luckily, the Universal editions of these scores are copies of Feldman’s manuscript, because if you engraved them, the pagination would likely change and obscure the relationship (as may have happened in the engraved piano works, like Triadic Memories and Piano). Evidence suggests that he composed the music on these pages – or, at least, when recopying, took care to maintain the same pagination.

It’s an odd thought because, of course, a page is not a unit of musical time. We don’t hear a page go by, or, usually, know from listening when one ends. But Feldman’s music is often devoid of striking temporal landmarks, and the sense of experienced time becomes vague and immeasurable. For him, I suppose any long unit of time was as good as another. He loved exploring notation’s psychological effect on the performer, and apparently he gave free rein to its psychological effect on himself too. A page became just the right length for a section of music, and, sitting in his study, each time he turned the page, it was time for something new.

Photo by Peter Gena

My tombstone is going to read:

Here lies

KYLE GANN

Remember to raise the

seventh scale degree in

minor

so that whenever my students drop by with flowers they’ll get an extra reminder. I wanted to also include the rules for acceptable resolutions of the six-four chord, but I’m afraid the engraving costs would be a hardship on my heirs.

Why is it that some students cannot be persuaded to write a triad without adding a seventh on it? I assume these kids had a jazz teacher in high school who was very, very successful in drilling into them that every chord, every friggin’ chord, contains a seventh. And since it’s often nice in classical harmony to spice up the occasional chord with a seventh, you can’t flat out forbid them, and it’s really not possible to get across the inexpressible nuances of why sevenths sound nice in some contexts and not in others. And if you’re teaching four-part writing, the presence of a seventh in every chord wreaks havoc with voice-leading. And what is it with ending tonal compositions on six-four chords? If I never mentioned six-four chords, would their natural instincts lead them to close in root position? Is it because I so emphatically bring six-four chords to their attention, as something to avoid, that they subconsciously or passive/aggressively end up writing epic strings of parallel six-four chords in their final compositions? What is so freakin’ attractive about having the fifth in the bass on every beat? Did I miss a meeting?

And what is it with the students who are allergic to initiative, and have to have everything done for them? I call them my DLDS Syndrome students: day late and a dollar short. They never have the textbook with them. They’ve never extracted the parts for their compositions, and when they do, they’re never transposed. Their printers, of course, haven’t been operational since seventh grade. They are incapable of looking up e-mail addresses of the performers they need to engage. The posters with which they advertise their concerts remain in the back seats of their cars until hours before the event. Many of them are charming, intelligent, funny, delightful people, some of my favorite students ever. One of my best came to my house to print his orchestral parts with only an hour to spare before deadline – and, as we were finishing, spilled a glass of orange juice over all the parts we had just printed. I slowly looked at him and said, “You really wanted to make this a memorable occasion, didn’t you?”

Why these DLDS students exist isn’t what’s interesting. The curious thing is that THEY ARE ALL MALE. I have never had a female student who fit this pattern. The young women, when they have something important to do, take care of it themselves. Explain, anyone?

That’s off my chest. I’m done. Let the new year begin.

You will no doubt have seen this before reading me, but John Maxwell Hobbs, in a comment below, calls my attention to Clive Thompson’s fascinating interview in the Times with Daniel Levitin, the cognitive scientist who tracks how music gets processed in the brain. The passage that I’ll be quoting to my composition students is this:

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense of reward.

The cerebellum, an area normally associated with physical movement, reacted too, responding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was the brain’s predictions of where the song was going to go. As the brain internalizes the tempo, rhythm and emotional peaks of a song, the cerebellum begins reacting every time the song produces tension (that is, subtle deviations from its normal melody or tempo). [Emphasis added]

For years I’ve harangued my students that every new note creates expectations that must be dealt with – whether fulfilled or contradicted, but at least acknowledged – and now I’ve got cognitive science to back me up.