I find it difficult to credit this, since my blog is so peripheral to my activities in general – merely an adjunct to my professional writing, which is already an adjunct to my teaching, which is itself something I do to support my composing – but this blog entry seems to indicate that Postclassic is number 5 among the top classical music blogs. Geez, Louise, what an easy profession. Frankly, I think listing me one notch above Sandow is bogus. He gets a lot more traffic than I do. (Besides, this is a POST-classical blog. How about a listing of the top postclassical blogs, huh? Who’d be number one then, Alex Ross?)

While I’ve got my blog formatting page stoked up, would you like a recommendation on a Christmas gift for music lovers? Albert Glinsky’s Theremin: Ether Music & Espionage is the most exciting music biography I’ve ever read. There are a lot of good biographies, but very few subjects this astounding: Leon Theremin was not only a music-technology genius, but a KGB agent involved in some strange stuff, who disappeared and was presumed dead for decades as he was actually implicated in international espionage. Glinsky’s page-turner reads like a detective story, and he fills in gaps in his subject’s mysterious life with the sometimes hilarious pop history of the theremin. Anyone remotely interested in new music should have this fascinating, effortless read.

For musicological purposes, if nothing else, I should write a few words about the experience of performing Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla with electric guitars. This work, along with its companion pieces Evil Nigger and Crazy Nigger, are ostensibly written for multiples of any instrument. At Northwestern in January of 1980, and at New Music America in Minneapolis in July of that year, Julius performed the piece with four pianos. [UPDATE: Mary Jane Leach adds that the Kitchen toured the piece in Europe that year.] Aside from those and our electric guitar rendition of December 14, I’m unaware of any other performances; I’d love getting information if anyone knows about any. I announced Thursday that that evening’s performance might well have been the first since 1980.

With its long streams of reiterated notes, there are only a few instruments Gay Guerrilla could conceivably be played on. A Gay Guerrilla for oboes is unthinkable (one shudders to imagine). Mallet percussion is a possibility. Strings are too, though the notated pitches cover something like four octaves, so a full string ensemble would seem more appropriate than multiple violins. Pitches are supposedly transferable to any octave, but when Julius puts certain figures in notes below the bass clef, it’s difficult to take that latitude too literally. The piece starts off with one line, and alternately expands and contracts up to nine; with four pianists, each obviously played more than one line. Luckily, we had nine guitarists, and two of those played bass guitars, which seemed the right percentage, though in some passages a third bass would have been welcome. In the piano version, the pianists would dot out the repeated pitches with the pedal held down. On guitars, the plucking of each note would damp the last, so we had to play a little more slowly to get a good resonance. Our first, too-quick runthrough sounded pretty pinched.

The original ms., dated September 1979, which we started out playing from a Xerox of, is sometimes cryptic. A real Downtown score, it needed not only to be interpreted, but deciphered. (Mary Jane Leach has up the opening pages of a similar score, Evil Nigger.) Each line contains figures to be repeated within a certain span of time, notated at beginning and end in minutes and seconds: often these figures are simply steady quarter- or 8th-notes, or else quarter-notes alternating or interspersed with 8th-note pairs. Inconsistency is rife. Sometimes bass clef lines are at the top of the system, above treble clef lines. The quoted tune “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” is notated with a bass clef, though the notes are clearly intended for treble clef (otherwise the tune would be D D D A# B# C# instead of B B B F# G# A#). Enigmatic notations appear. The students enjoyed an inscription that read “THE LESSING IS MIRACLE,” and the music did indeed thin out at that point. Since the Xeroxes were 11″x17″ with lots of unused space, I finally renotated the entire piece into Sibelius, and extracted individual parts, cutting 22 page turns (of 11″x17″ pages) down to 5 (of 8″x11″). This involved considerable “orchestration” of the work, deciding which pitches to double when the number of lines would vacillate widely with no seeming concomitant change of dynamics. I’m afraid I don’t remember how the doublings were decided 26 years ago. I may have to think of my version as just an “arrangement.” Even with the inconveniences of the ms., though, students agreed that something was lost when we switched to the nicely printed Sibelius version, and the spirit of the piece became a little harder to capture.

At the NMA performance I had served as timekeeper by holding up pieces of paper that showed the onset time of each new system. Thursday night we used a computer-screen stopwatch instead, which was a convenient and much more elegant solution, with fewer visual cues to the audience as to what the mechanism was. Being able to anticipate the beginning point of each new line, the ensemble could mysteriously turn on a dime.

The performance was stunning, much louder than the piano version of course, and not so much sadly stern as menacing at times, almost like a Branca symphony – though without any urging from me the group took a restrained approach to volume. I kept thinking of Bruckner too (one of Branca’s favorite composers), because of all the reiterative sonorities cycling through slow harmonic changes. There are passages in which the harmonies are dense and dissonant, and the loud guitars fused into a sound more than the sum of its parts; some reported audio illusions, thinking they heard voices. And the piece seemed to be virtually a universal favorite on the concert. My nine “gay gorillas,” as I came to call them, worked hard and were dedicated to the piece, and deserve to be cited for participating in this historic occasion: Brian Baumbusch, Willy Berliner, Bernard Gann, Kenji Garland, Liam Hofmann, Narayan Khalsa, Anthony Kingsley, Jonathan Nocera, and Ezekiel Virant. Maybe they’ll all be famous musicians themselves someday. If so I hope they’ll notate a little more clearly than Julius did.



Me with my gorillas: Aaron Wister (standing at left), JP Nocera, Ben Richter, Brian Baumbusch. Photo by Anne Garland, Kenji’s mother and wife of brilliant avant-garde songwriter David Garland.

I’ve learned too many things from my students in the past two weeks to get them all in one blog entry. It’ll take three at least.

Our three-and-a-half-hour Open Instrumentation Ensemble concert last night went splendidly. We played Glass’s Music in Fifths, Riley’s In C, Samuel Vriezen’s The Weather Riots, Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, Rzewski’s Attica, and an electric guitar version of Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla, plus three works written by students in the ensemble. I was truly dumbfounded by the massive student enthusiasm for this music – as though they’d been looking all their lives for music like this, and weren’t sure it existed. They are determined to continue the ensemble next semester in my absence. And I’m trying to figure out what needs it fulfilled for them.

For one thing, pieces like these allow for a wide range of proficiencies. We had, in this ensemble, both senior instrumentalists of considerable virtuosity and freshmen guitarists who could hardly read music and had never played notated music in an ensemble before. Both were challenged, neither got bored. Music in Fifths, with its interminably expanding patterns of 8th-notes on F G Ab Bb C, is difficult to play, but it is not particularly more difficult for beginners than it is for the more experienced. Its difficulties have to do with cognition, concentration, and endurance, not instrumental ability or musical insight. The inexperienced had more trouble at first getting Riley’s 53 melodies in their heads, but once that’s done, the challenges are pretty much the same for everyone.

More than that, though, I think this minimalist, process-based repertoire has a kind of performance density that younger musicians enjoy. Classical music is all about enslaving yourself to an inexorable continuity drawn out on the page. Jazz is certainly freer in a way, and Bard has a thriving jazz program – probably the healthiest part of our department at the moment – but there are certain students who find the jazz regimen too limiting. Our jazz students learn the bebop language forwards and backwards, and play Charlie Parker fluently before going into anything more experimental. It’s rigorous. Classical music and jazz both impose on the young musician a tremendous discipline undertaken for the goal of playing with consummate expertise a repertoire that – however sad to say – may ultimately seem a little old-fashioned, not terribly hip to most of their friends. The road is long and torturous, the rewards far away and, in social and economic terms, arguably dubious.

But minimalist music? Easier to master, and the result of a training more personal than professional. Highly developed expertise isn’t entirely an asset; I’ve heard student performances of In C that were way better than the one the New York Philharmonic gave at Merkin Hall a few years ago. More importantly, the performance mode is not so fraught with anxiety. Within In C and Attica, there’s room for individual performance decisions made on the spot. Miss a pattern in Music in Fifths? Drop out for a measure, and then plunge in again – not only does no one care, it adds variety to the texture. (We had one excessive moment in which we lost the entire guitar section, but the closing repetitions were dynamite.) The discipline is more quickly achieved, creativity encouraged, mistakes far less penalized.

And the rewards? In the short run, far higher, for the music is both exotic enough to impress friends with its hypnotic strangeness and groove-oriented enough to delight them. It’s music you can perform with the comfortable familiarity and leeway of pop, but with more intellectual heft and formal interest. The three student pieces were all based on In C-like techniques, yet achieved quite different textures and forms. In fact, it’s really a perfect performance repertoire for college-age musicians: you can get good at it fast, a little effort will make you really good, mistakes are rarely an issue, you can compose it without sweating over every note, little changes in rehearsal can make a big difference, and it’s mesmerizing to listen to. The reward/discipline ratio is through the roof.

OK, then, why do most of the classic pieces from this genre date from the 1960s and ’70s? I located a few scores from the 1980s, like Barbara Benary’s Sun on Snow, but they were more elaborate, and would have required more rehearsal time than we had. We composers mostly all retreated from this kind of aptly-named “new music” in the 1980s. Even I gave up writing freer, looser music like my Oil Man and Long Night of 1981 to return to more linear, strictly notated works like Baptism of 1983. In my own case, I always think of Feldman’s statement about why he abandoned graphic notation: “If the means were to be imprecise, the results must be terribly clear.” Leaving certain musical details to chance and performer discretion didn’t gratify my sense of composer vanity: I wanted to prove I could get every nuance in place and make it beautiful. Performances of my freer music were sometimes great, sometimes lousy, and I didn’t feel I had enough control. I don’t think that’s particularly true of Music in Fifths, however. I think, rather, that I hadn’t quite found processes that could be guaranteed to work well in performance.

And I regret that. The ’60s and ’70s were an era of tremendous liberalism, and I think that all that minimalist music (to use an imprecise term for the body of process-oriented works for variable ensembles) was an expression of our political inclinations. We were disenchanted with expertise. The experts all seemed to be wrong. We were inclusive. We were writing music for Everyman. We (or our immediate predecessors) came up with a music that made newcomers feel comfortable playing it. Soured on elitist self-aggrandizement, we were in a mood to be generous to performers and listeners both. The music was accessible, striking, attractive, rhythmic. It gave, in Steve Reich’s words, “everyone within earshot a feeling of ecstasy.” And part of that ecstasy surely came from the sense of freedom and personal responsibility of players who were being allowed to make their own decisions without undue fear of mistakes.

So why didn’t we continue? Why didn’t this new genre, with so much to offer, become a new tradition? Times changed. The credentialism of the 1980s, and the renewed competition for jobs, brought back an elitist sense of professionalism. Some of us became successful enough that virtuosos were interested in performing our music, so goodbye Everyman. But I remain convinced that there were worthwhile political convictions expressed in the very cellular structure of that music, and the continuing student (and public) enthusiasm for it seems evidence of that. I may write a piece for the students’ ensemble myself, and I’m going to try to see if I can’t return somewhat to my liberal, ’70s, open-instrumentation, process-oriented roots and see if it’s possible to channel that populist energy in a new century.

“Silent Night” begins with the notes G A G E. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” starts with the same pitches, G G G A G G E. Arnold Schoenberg was delighted by this coincidence, and in 1921 wrote a little work for piano, string trio, and harmonium, in which one tune morphs into the other. Called Weihnachtsmusik, it’s absolutely charming – and not one new-music fan in thirty that I talk to has ever heard of it. In fact, it’s the one Schoenberg piece about which I feel most affectionate, and I almost have to assume that Schoenberg’s fans hide it because they’re ashamed that he wrote something so damn lovely. I’m adding it to Postclassic Radio, but I also put it here on my website, as a Christmas gift to you for reading me. The recording is an old Decca vinyl record by David Atherton and the London Sinfonietta, and I’ve never seen another. It was well after this, by the way, that Schoenberg asserted, “There’s a lot of great music left to be written in C Major.”

This Saturday night, December 16, at 7:00 PM at Bard College’s Bard Hall, my son Bernard Gann will present a concert of his music. Much of it will be by his rock trio, Architeuthis. A piano piece will be played by, coincidentally, student Ming Gan. And a new work called Two Organs will be performed by myself and Joan Tower on electric keyboards. Joan and I have never performed together. It is highly unlikely that we will ever perform together again – I’m not much of a performer, except possibly of my own music, and Joan has retired from anything but conducting. I half think Bern wrote the piece to get us onstage together. So if it ever occured to you that it would be fun to see Kyle Gann and Joan Tower play a duet, this is, in all probability, your one shot. A cofounder of the Da Capo ensemble, Joan is, of course, an incredibly more experienced pianist than I am, and it’s fun playing with her – she’s so good at signaling her intentions, and completely easy to follow. The piece itself is kind of a moment-form postminimalist piece, Glass crossed with Stravinsky, and here and there a Terry Riley echo, enlivened by some totalist rhythmic complications (pictured) that have had me tearing my hair out. Later I’ll put up some Architeuthis music on my web site, because I’d be curious about your opinions.

Tonight, of course, my Open Instrumentation ensemble performs at Bard Hall from 7:30 to 10:30. The description here will refresh your memory.

The ever-vigilant Jon Szanto draws my attention to an admirably insightful summing-up of James Tenney’s output by Mark Swed, in the form of an LA Times review of the recent Tenney memorial concert. Wish I’d been there – it sounds splendid.

American expatriate composer Nancy van de Vate (or maybe we should call her “Austrian composer,” we can argue about that later) kindly informs me that pianist Iris Gerber, famous for her toy piano work, is giving a concert this Friday at 7 at the Alte Schmiede in Vienna, titled: “Down Town New York: Kyle Gann und Tom Johnson, die Komponisten-Kritiker der Zeitschrift Village Voice und ihr Schaffen.” I don’t know which of my Schaffen she’s playing, but I’ll list a program if I get it. She would have needed to include Carman Moore and Greg Sandow, though, to get all of the Voice‘s composer-critics.

YouTube offers an incredible Oscar Peterson performance. Make sure you go past 2:44, when he goes crazy. Peterson received an honorary doctorate at Northwestern the year I got my regular doctorate there (1983), so I was once on a stage with him. But not playing.

Compliments are something I’m inured to, and I’m well aware that everyone in every public field receives them for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. But I am particularly touched by Time Out‘s mention of my new book Music Downtown. In an article reviewing New York’s critics they don’t include me, of course, since I haven’t written in the city since last December. But they do include my book in a list of anthologies of criticism, with the very kind comment:

One of the cruelest cuts of the ongoing reorganization at the Voice is the loss of Kyle Gann, the paper’s unparalleled chronicler of contemporary music and the downtown scene in particular. Like [Virgil] Thomson, Gann is a composer; his best pieces are informed by a sense of being in the trenches that no bystander could hope to achieve. As a memento of New York music in the ’80s and ’90s, this anthology is indispensable.

What a gratifying notice.

I just now got out of a three-and-a-half-hour rehearsal for the concert I’m presenting next week, of my Open Instrumentation Ensemble at Bard. December 14 at 7:30 in Bard Hall, we’ll be presenting the following marathon program:

Philip Glass: Music in Fifths

Willy Berliner: Persistence of Vision*

Samuel Vriezen: The Weather Riots

Frederic Rzewski: Attica

Brian Baumbusch: Cyclical Counterpoint with Sangse*

Rzewski: Les Moutons de Panurge

Julius Eastman: Gay Guerrilla

Jonathan Nocera: Blues for Julius Eastman*

Rhys Chatham: Guitar Trio

Terry Riley: In C

The pieces with asterisks are by Bard students, written for the ensemble. The historical highlight is Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla, which is scored for multiples of any instrument; he always performed it with pianos, and we’re giving what is, as far as I know, the world premiere of an electric guitar version. The students love the piece (you’ll note one of them wrote a piece dedicated to Julius), and they did a dynamite job of playing it tonight. When they started echoing the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” back and forth, which Julius subverted as a gay manifesto, it was a goosebump moment, and I suddenly felt his sardonic spirit fill the room. To be an audience of one at such a performance (since the other players had gone home) was a humbling privilege. I hadn’t directed an ensemble since 1976 – the year I gave the Dallas premieres of some pieces by Reich, Glass, and Riley at Carruth Auditorium at SMU – and I have little experience to remind me how fulfilling it is.

I’m also very proud that these students will graduate free from the academic fallacy that a score must be a complete and detailed reflection of a predetermined sonic image; that they’ll always know that compelling music can be made with repeat signs, gradual processes, and considerable performer latitude, and that it can be a real blast to try out the same music with a variety of different instrumentations, and with diverse dynamic shadings. The student pieces allow lots of performer decisions, and the composers have had fun experimenting with different rules and combinations in rehearsal – so utterly different from the classical experience in which they’re expected to notate every nuance for professional players who will execute their notation with computer-like precision. The students’ enthusiasm and dedication have astonished me, and made me proud that I have this important Downtown repertoire, and attitude, to pass on to them.