Thanks to an unencumbered and rather inspired summer, I am more than halfway through an evening-length collection of pieces for three microtonally retuned Disklaviers. I’m calling it Hyperchromatica, because a melodic reliance on intervals smaller than a quarter-tone is about the only stylistic constant. 33 pitches to the octave. Most of the pieces have polytempo structures, several are polytonal as well, which I had always wanted to try doing in just intonation. I’m unveiling the nine movements I’ve finished, which total 83 minutes. Scores, tuning, and program notes are here. Three of the pieces I had put up last year, and I finished six more recently.

– Orbital Resonance, 11:31; a meditation on planetary motions, beginning on the 65th and 66th harmonics of E-flat, and ending with the 54th, 55th, and 56th.
– Futility Row, 8:53; my sly Western noir movement, but with more subtlety of large-scale harmonic structure than I’ve yet achieved elsewhere.
– Pavane for a Dead Planet, 9:04; a thoroughly Romantic take on a Baroque form, but with some interesting intervals and rhythms.
– Star Dance, 6:40; a self-indulgent immersion in melodies of the smallest feasible steps.
– Dark Forces Signify, 8:17; this is my tribute to Black Lives Matter (matter being a difficult verb to synonymize). The bass motive is from Julius Eastman, and the simplicity sets off the hyperchromatic voice-leading well.
– The Lessing Is Miracle, 9:36; the title is an enigma found in all capitals in one of Julius’s scores, and the texture was initially inspired by one of his pieces. This one makes my wife nervous. It is odd.
– Romance Postmoderne, 8:36; a nostalgic ballad, and the first piece I wrote in this tuning.
– Liquid Mechanisms, 13:19; a big Jackson Pollock mural of various panels, the complexity of each clarified, hopefully, by internal (and nonsynchronized) repetition. Nested tuplets are a recurring motif.
– Galactic Jamboree, 7:15; the gonzo finale to the whole set.

I’m planning another five or six movements, but who knows if I’ll stop then? The size of the project serves two purposes: one to put out a two-CD set for my own vanity, the other so that, in the unlikely case anyone is ever foolhardy enough to want to stage the entire series with actual Disklaviers, it will at least be a large enough event to justify the expense and trouble. But for now I can do it all on my computer. As Lou Harrison said to John Luther Adams, “We’re the do-it-yourself composers.” I should also report, though, that living so long inside this elegant tuning keeps revealing more and more of its facets and capabilities.

Over the last eleven years, I’ve given at least twenty-two keynote addresses and conference papers, and in recent weeks I’ve managed to post all but six of them (three of those rather redundant, given my other writings) on my web site. I also didn’t put up my keynote to the 2013 Earle Brown conference in Boston, or my analysis of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, since both are coming out in books soon, nor my Geiringer lecture on Ives’s First Sonata, which I want to rewrite [UPDATE: now that’s up too]. Several have already been blogged here, though some of those were afterward altered or expanded. They include:

My keynote address for the 2012 Harry Partch conference in Boston, which I am proud of as one of the few statements on Partch’s elegantly intricate rhythmic innovation;

Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser, which I delivered at the 2015 minimalism conference in Helsinki, and which I think is the first academic paper on someone who was a leading female postminimalist figure;

Robert Ashley as Minimalist (already blogged here), which I delivered at the 2013 minimalism conference in Long Beach;

Silence in the Rearview Mirror (also already blogged here), which is my criticism of Cage’s rhetoric in Silence, delivered at the 2012 Cage110 centennial symposium in Lublin, Poland, and subsequently published in Polish;

A Pre-Concert Talk on Ives’s Concord Sonata, written in 2015 for a general audience;

The Boredom of Eventfulness, my keynote address for the 2011 Minimalism Conference in Leuven, Belgium;

Regarding Ben (already blogged here), my keynote address for the 2010 microtonal conference at Wright State University;

Reconstructing November, a paper on my process for creating a performance version of Dennis Johnson’s six-hour, 1959 piano piece November – first delivered at the 2009 Minimalism Conference in Kansas City and subsequently published in American Music (and overlapping in content with several blog posts here);

The Longyear Lecture (already blogged here), my critique of Americanist musicology delivered at the University of Kentucky in 2008, and subsequently published in American Music;

How the 13th Harmonic Saved My Sorry Ass, a paper on my microtonal methods for the Beyond: Microtonality conference at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015;

A Talk on John Cage’s 4’33”, delivered at the New World Symphony’s John Cage Festival in Miami in 2013 – largely drawn from my book, but with a few added ideas that occurred to me afterward;

The Uneasy, Unarticulated State of American Music (somewhat expanded from the version blogged here), delivered at the 2013 ISCM conference in Vienna;

From Hits to Niches (already blogged), my keynote address for the Canadian New Music Network in 2007;

My keynote address for the Extensible Toy Piano Conference at Clark University in 2005; and earliest and possibly least,

The Percussion Music of John J. Becker, my first scholarly article (1984), published in Percussive Notes journal.

In addition, I’ve been moving some of my more substantive blog essays to my web site, since I have no control over what goes on at Arts Journal, and didn’t want them vulnerable to potential disappearance. In short, the amount of Gannian verbiage on my web site is now well more than twice what used to be there. The collected writings are catalogued here. I hope some of these extra tens of thousands of words, with many score examples and audio examples (eat your heart out, books), will be of some interest to students of the more radical side of American music.

I peer-reviewed all of these papers myself, and enthusiastically recommended that they be web-published as submitted. That sure as hell saved a lot of time.

Bari – Pianist Emanuele Arciuli, director of the “Embracing the Universe” festival that ended yesterday, likes to casually mention that America is currently producing the best music in the world – and he doesn’t mean pop or jazz. He means postclassical. I didn’t know the whole program when I first wrote about it last week, but here’s a list of all the pieces performed on two concerts and during the conference:

Bernadette Speach: Embrace the Universe and Viola

Michael Gordon: Romeo

Mary Jane Leach: Prospero’s Sigh and Bach’s Set

Eve Beglarian: Fireside and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Philip Glass: Etude No. 13

John Adams: American Beserk

Andrew Thomas: So Far Beyond the Faint Edge of the World

David Lang: Before Gravity, After Gravity

Julia Wolfe: Believing

Larry Polansky: Ensembles of Note

me: Serenity Meditation; “Faith” from Transcendental Sonnets; Earth-Preserving Chant; and Sang Plato’s Ghost

With one exception, they’re all friends of mine, all people I’ve written a lot about, and all postminimalists or totalists. (The exception, Andrew Thomas, was chosen by the performers, and his thoughtfully virtuosic percussion showpiece fit in well.) The concerts, well attended and well-received, consisted of the kind of repertoire that would be ubiquitous today had my plans for world domination worked out successfully. The conductors, Giovanni Pelliccia for the orchestra and Filippo Lattanzi for the chamber concert, are both dynamic visionaries. It is so common in the US for me to show up and find the performers not really understanding the piece, that I sometimes fear I don’t capture the idea in the notation well enough; but here, each conductor had a compelling vision for the piece that was obvious from the first notes, and I needed add only the tiniest cosmetic touches and check the occasional questionable note. It was the most thrilling week in my life as a composer.

One of the papers was on the important Italian jazz figure Giorgio Gaslini (1929-2014), who promoted a concept called “Musica Totale,” which involved a blending of classical and vernacular styles. I told Emanuele that if I could prove that totalism originated in Europe, America would start to take it seriously.

Below: the ancient city of Matera, kind of an urban Grand Canyon, and where we ate there:

And the Bari Conservatory Orchestra rehearsing my Transcendental Sonnets:

Next week, May 9-12, Bari Conservatory in southern Italy, on the Adriatic, is hosting a totalism festival, titled “Embracing the Universe.” It was organized and is directed by pianist Emanuele Arciuli, who is perhaps Italy’s greatest advocate for recent American music of a more populist bent. (I had announced the festival for last September, but it was postponed.) You may remember totalism. Emanuele and the Conservatory Orchestra will play four of my works – Serenity Meditation, Sang Plato’s Ghost, Earth-Preserving Chant, and excerpts of Transcendental Sonnets, along with music by friends of mine: Bernadette Speach, Mary Jane Leach, and Michael Gordon (see poster below). Bernadette, whose ancestors are from that part of Italy, is finally getting a premiere of her 2001 chorus and orchestra piece Embrace the Universe , and, since it ties in with the idea of totalism, thus the festival’s title. I’m giving a lecture on totalism on the 11th, and since I have to miss a week of teaching anyway, my wife and I are spending the weekends as well. I may eat a lot.

It’s remotely conceivable that you’re sitting around with nothing to do, and in case you’re in that enviable position, I have two hours’ worth of new recordings of my music up to entertain you. Most consequentially, my Ezra Pound song cycle Proença (2015) received its official premiere Saturday night in Kansas City; Michelle Allen McIntire and her Proença Band will recap the piece at Bard College next Wednesday, March 2, at 8 in Bito Conservatory Building.

Of six songs in the cycle, “Na Audiart” and “Near Perigord” are settings of Pound poems about Bertan de Born, the 12th-century warrior/poet; “L’aura amara” and the Alba are settings of Pound’s translations of troubadour poetry; and the other two are settings in Provençal of original troubadour poems. You can read the lengthy program notes if you want texts and background, and here are the recordings from the premiere:

1. Bem.pac d’ivern
2. Na Audiart
3. Alba (En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi)
4. Estat ai en greu cossirier
5. L’aura amara
6. Near Perigord

[UPDATE: I have just (March 3) replaced the Kansas City recording of Near Perigord with a much tighter March 2 performance from Bard College.]

Michelle Allen McIntire did a beautiful job singing them, and she was backed by Virginia Backman on flute, Jennifer Lacy on electric piano, Jennifer Wagner on vibes, and Brian Padavic, bass. As you can tell, they did a ton of rehearsal.

The previous weekend two of my works were premiered at Illinois Wesleyan University. Nancy Pounds and William West finally played my Implausible Sketches for piano duo, four of whose movements were written in 2006, and the second one in 2011:

1. The Desert’s Too-Zen Song
2. Mediating Daydream
3. The Goodbye Fugue
4. Frigid Azure
5. Don’t Touch My Pint

The remaining project is almost more historical and literary than compositional: my settings of poems by the American Transcendentalists, Transcendentalist Songs (2014). Of these, Ingrid Kammin sang “Enosis,” “To the Face Seen in the Moon,” and “I Slept and Dreamed,” accompanied by Larisa Chasunov; Robert Mangialardi sang “The Rhodora,” “The Columbine,” and “Questionings,” with composer David Vayo on piano, also the symposium director who had invited me; while tenor William Hudson, with pianist Kent Cook, performed “In the Busy Streets,” “Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell,” and “The Garden.” “In the Busy Streets” and “I Slept and Dreamed” were written in the 20th century, and I include them as a kind of appendix. “Enosis” and “Questionings” are rather the grand philosophical statements, while “The Garden” is perhaps the most conventional thing I’ve ever written, and everyone seems to love it. “To the Face Seen in the Moon” is the torch song I thought history has owed poor Margaret Fuller. The piece can be seen as an expression of regret that there was no American composer in the 1840s as musically adventurous as the Transcendentalists were spiritually adventurous.

Enosis (Christopher Pearse Cranch)
To the Face Seen in the Moon (Margaret Fuller)
The Rhodora (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
In the Busy Streets (Henry David Thoreau)
The Columbine (Jones Very)
Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell (Henry David Thoreau)
I Slept and Dreamed that Life Was Beauty (Ellen Sturgis Hooper)
The Garden (Christopher Pearse Cranch)
Questionings (The Idealist) (Frederic Henry Hedge)

I am deeply gratified by all the time and attention. There’s nothing so inspiring to new composition as having some of one’s unplayed works go public at last.

I am excited that I’m going to have three world premieres within eight days this month, amounting to some two hours of music. On February 12 and 13 I am the featured composer at the Symposium of Contemporary Music at Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington, Illinois. On Friday, February 12, I give a lecture at 7:30 on the Concord Sonata at the School of Music. The following evening, also at 7:30, my two-piano piece Implausible Sketches (2006/11) and my song cycle Transcendentalist Songs (2014) will be performed at Westbrook Auditorium. I’ve been waiting years for the premiere of the two-piano piece, which I consider one of my best works. The symposium dates back to 1952, and previous honorees include Roy Harris, Shulamit Ran, Stephen Paulus, Arvo Pärt, John Corigliano, David Diamond, Karel Husa, my Oberlin teacher Edward Miller, George Crumb, Wallingford Riegger, and quite a wild variety of composers with whom I do and don’t identify. Crazy.

The following Saturday, February 20, will see the official premiere of my new song cycle Proença, based on Ezra Pound and a few troubadours, written for and sung by Michelle Allen McIntire. She’s put together the Proença Band, with Virginia Bachman on flute, Jennifer Lacy on electric piano, Jennifer Wagner on vibes, and Brian Padavic on bass (above). They’re actually giving a pre-premiere performance this Saturday, February 6, at Vinyl Renaissance in Overland Park, Kansas City, at 2pm, on a bill with the Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes. The official world premiere, which I will attend, is at the Bragg Auditorium in the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City on February 20 at 7:30. This is the same beautiful space in which Sarah Cahill and I gave the re-premiere of Dennis Johnson’s November in 2009. They’ve put a ton of rehearsal into the piece, and I can’t wait to hear it. Next, they’ll be playing it at Bard College on March 2, in Bito Auditorium.

Just became aware that Sarah Cahill’s recording of my piece War Is Just a Racket is up at YouTube with John Sanborn’s video for it, which I hadn’t seen since the premiere in 2009.

A correspondent named Tim Scott has found a typo in the Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux, Alain Danielou’s encyclopedic 1958 catalogue of all even marginally significant intervals within an octave. On the right-hand bottom corner of page 48, the interval listed as 569/512 should actually be 567/512, as 3 to the 4th power times 7 is, of course, 567:

And as Tim points out, this is one of the intervals used in The Well-Tuned Piano. All fanatical microtonalists please mark your copies accordingly. That is all.

UPDATE: The day that Amazon extended its reach into the nation’s used-bookstores was one of the greatest days of my life, and has compensated for many of the indignities of living in the 21st century. I first saw Danielou’s Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux in La Monte Young’s apartment, and lusted after it mightily. More than a decade later, once the used-bookstores went online, I found it over the web in a little store in Oregon. The nice lady who sent it to me had no earthly idea what it was, but said, “I knew someone was eventually going to know what that was and want it.”

FURTHER UPDATE 2.5.16: In response to this post, over at Disquiet, the ambient/electronica site,
Marc Weidenbaum has posted a series of pieces exploiting the difference between the 567th and 569th harmonics. It seems his internet group, The Disquiet Junto, posts a compositional challenge each week, and everyone has four days to come up with a short piece in response. This is really cool!

One name that musicians may run across often in the literature on John Cage and not recognize is Richard Fleming. He’s a philosophy professor at Bucknell University, a friend of mine for twenty-five years, and he edited, among others, two books with our mutual friend Bill Duckworth, John Cage at Seventy-Five and Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Richard spent a lot of time with Cage, and teaches a fascinating-sounding course, in the philosophy department, comparing the respective Harvard Lectures of Cage and Leonard Bernstein – almost unimaginable, since Bernstein’s lectures are about the underlying grammar of music and Cage’s are chance-determined words and phonemes. A lot of the material, heavily involving Wittgenstein as well, ended up in his beautiful little treatise Evil and Silence.

Anyway, due to problems with publishers similar to ones I’ve encountered in recent years, Richard has decided to publish his long article on Cage via the internet, and here it is:

Listening to Cage: Nonintentional philosophy and music.

I’ve been saying for years (as you all know) that Cage wasn’t a philosopher, by which I have meant that Cage’s writings don’t fit the genre of philosophy as I know it. But Richard tackles the issue head on, and insists that Cage was a philosopher in a very different sense, in that his music makes us rethink our concepts of the world. “Listening to Cage,” he writes,

awakens and stirs us to resist, accept, embrace, reflect, frown, laugh, question, affirm, challenge, walk away, dance, and talk. It brings to mind the brackets or conditions of possibility, the agreements, which govern what we do. This is nonintentional philosophy and music.

He quotes Wittgenstein frequently: “[P]hilosophical problems arise when ‘I don’t know my way about’; and then new questions come to mind,” and this is the state of mind Cage’s music induces. And he closes with a meditation on the tape piece Fontana Mix:

Having provided a grammatical place for our talk and listening, we end this brief excursion in nonintentional philosophy and music by answering more directly our original question about Fontana Mix: Why would we listen to this? It is not hard, now, to suggest that listening to Fontana Mix awakens us from the tired standards and routines in which we find ourselves. It agitates and reorients our sense of importance. It tests our sense of mistake, interruption, ruin, and justification. It clears the ground for questioning our concepts anew.

It’s a deeply-considered article and very elegantly written, and ever since I read an earlier version of it several months ago I’ve been soft-pedaling the Cage-not-being-a-philosopher notion. I am convincible, and Richard’s too brilliant to argue with.

I’m putting up a new version of my microtonal work Solitaire:

Solitaire (2009), 14:08

It’s been sound-produced by M.C. Maguire, whom I consider the best Canadian composer of my generation, and in fact the most original figure in Canadian music since R. Murray Schafer (and I do follow Canadian music). My electronic/microtonal works are scored and notated, but I don’t have the electronic chops to realize them in a sophisticated way, and Mike is my software creative genius go-to guy for putting them together. He takes my template recording and retains the timbres I composed, but enriches them and blends them better and adds effects that make the overall sound texture more dynamic. I think he’s done a fabulous job here. In short, I compose the pieces in every detail, and he performs them. The situation makes perfect sense to me, but it renders my music neither-fish-nor-fowl where the electronic composers are concerned. I don’t care. Coloring within the lines never appealed to me. I got sick of writing new chord progressions no one had ever heard before and having people react, “Ew, I can’t stand those timbres!” and dismiss the music. I’m making a push to get my microtonal works out on CD.

I recently mentioned that my Orbital Resonance was the kind of piece composers would be impressed by, and I suspect Solitaire is the kind of piece of mine that makes them shake their heads over me. I have always supported the position that, for many people, words can help people understand music better (otherwise I have wasted much of my life), and so at the risk of raising arguments where none were intended, I’m going to mount a defense of Solitaire against imagined objections.

Like much of my music, the piece doesn’t wear its strangeness on the surface. On the surface are the normal elements of music: melody, harmony, meter, even a slight retro pop sensibility. It seems naïve (or did before Mike got ahold of it, anyway). Its surface naivete is a carefully calculated construction. It is almost cartoon-like, and I’ve always admired cartoons (in fact, at age twelve before I became a composer I wanted to be a cartoonist) for their clean, hard lines, their indifference to realism, their personality-expressing, deliberately pixelated approximation of reality. The strange part – the microtonal connection of chords via intervals based on the 11th and 13th harmonics – is backgrounded, and is so modestly finessed that a casual listener might not even notice it. In fact, I laced this microtonal piece with normal iv-V-vi chords in the key of Eb, so there are passages in which the ear is lulled into thinking there is nothing unusual at all. In its notes, it’s a piece that could have been written seventy years ago – if the preceding two centuries had been very different.

I have sometimes thought of myself as the anti-John Zorn. He tried to make everything as fast and discontinuous and disconcerting as possible, and I sometimes try to make everything sound as normal as possible – EXCEPT THAT…. And that except that is the piece. It’s my philosophical link with my favorite living composer Mikel Rouse, whose music also sometimes sounds so normal that people miss the weird ironies in the background. I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick recently, and of course always knew him by reputation, and there may be a Dick-ish quality to it: a suburban house, kid playing in the backyard, everything is normal except that it’s an alternate reality and these are androids who live their lives backward, or something else from an alternate universe.

Also Solitaire‘s form is, I think, one of my finest achievements. It’s written postminimalistically in rhythmic modules, and the challenge I set myself was to create, via the melody, a subjective and spontaneous sense of form within a simple framework that provided only a method, not a structure. At one point the melody goes into steady quarter-notes for awhile (my old friend Doug Skinner’s favorite rhythm), later it falls into a kind of ecstatic dance in 5/4, then plays note-fragments meditatively, and ends by repeating a three-note motive every six beats, even though the meter and harmony are changing irregularly underneath it – an effect I don’t think I’ve ever heard in any other music. Overall, I wanted the piece (inspired by a Robert Ashley comment and dedicated to him) to sound so normal that people uninterested in new composition would find it appealing and easy to follow, while new-music experts would hear chord progressions and microtonal voice-leadings they’d never heard before. It’s the opposite of what I think of new music as a genre generally represents: crazy stuff that doesn’t even strike the uninitiated as music, but whose elements are quickly recognized and understood by aficionados. As someone who has spent his life defining and classifying new music, it is understandable that as a composer I sometimes have an impulse to get far away from it, with the result that it seems to other composers that I’m not even trying to be original, when in reality my irony has brought me around 360 degrees.

I don’t think Solitaire is my best piece, because it is far from being the most ambitious, but among my microtonal works of several years ago I do think it achieved an optimal point of crystallization for the ideas I had at the time. As with everything else you may listen to it and not like it and that can’t be helped. But now you are at least assured that I composed out of some sense of artistic necessity, and that the piece’s refusal to cooperate with the modernist project is deliberate.

Wow – speaking of Julius Eastman and Morton Feldman, the SUNY Buffalo Music Library has made available the tape and a transcript of the speech John Cage made at June in Buffalo in 1975, when he was angry with Julius for having undressed a young man during a performance of Cage’s Songbooks the previous evening. I was in the room, a 19-year-old Oberlin student between my sophomore and junior years of college. Some of the details I now realize I had misremembered. I have recounted elsewhere (“No Escape from Heaven: John Cage as Father Figure,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, 2002) the story of how there were too many students for Cage to look at everyone’s work, so he assigned us random numbers and used the I Ching to decide who would get to present something. One young woman protested vehemently against this randomness – Cage refers to her here as Sue, I had transposed her name to Mary – and on Thursday of the week, as he says here, he dropped the system and let anyone who wanted to, speak. George Cisneros, a composer from Austin who asks a couple of questions, was a Texas friend of mine (he had hitchhiked to get there). Peter Gena was there; I didn’t meet him, and he had missed the performance, but I would study composition with him two years later at Northwestern. It was my only time to see the great musicologist Peter Yates. Other student composers from Oberlin, Sam Magrill and Michael Manion, were present with me.

Some SUNY grads may remember that there was, at the time, a fabulous record store across the street from the university, called Record Runner, the best record store I’d ever seen. Incredible avant-garde import section – those words meant something back then. My parents had sent me with $200 spending money and I spent almost all of it on records (which cost only $4 to $6 at the time), getting my food expenses down to about $1.50 a day by having only one meal, a shrimp basket and a Coke. I first read Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism in the SUNY library there. What a kick in the head!

Other memories, while I’ve got them stirred up: The students had arrived the evening before the conference started, and so on Monday morning we were all enthusiastically talking to people we’d just met. Feldman came into the hall and went to the podium and grandly announced, “I’m Morton Feldman.” Almost no one stopped talking, we were enjoying ourselves so much, and he looked a little crestfallen. More than one person, independently, drew caricatures of Feldman as a frog. At one lecture Cage brought in (as he often did, apparently) some edible wild plants he had found on campus, and passed them around so we could see what to look for; a friend of mine, misunderstanding the purpose, said, “Oh thank you,” and ate them. I had a talk with Christian Wolff about Buckminster Fuller, whom, to my disappointment, he seemed to think was brilliant but politically naive. Feldman took several of us for a couple of group lessons; his eyesight was so bad that he looked at people’s manuscripts from three inches away, and his cigarettes (which he went through so fast that he would sometimes absent-mindedly light one when another was only half-smoked) left many a burn mark on the page. Nearly all of his suggestions were about timbre, suggesting more exotic instruments than the ones we’d used. One student told a story about having had a lesson with Toru Takemitsu in which the latter said nothing for an hour, then closed all the scores and said only, “Pay more attention to tone color.” Feldman loved it.

We were all discussing articles from the serialist magazine Die Reihe back then, and when we had a disagreement about Stockhausen, several of us stayed up half the night trying to connect with a German operator who spoke English to get Stockhausen’s phone number. Luckily for him, we failed. During the Friday session I showed Cage my piece Satie, a chamber piece with texts by Satie that I now consider my opus one, all in the C-major scale; Cage kindly said “It makes me want to hear it.” Other stories I’ve told elsewhere. I was such a neurotic, sheltered, immature kid from Texas that I blush to remember it. It was a formative three weeks for me, obviously: Cage, Feldman, Brown, and Wolff, all of whom I would see many times again over the years, but never again in such a concentrated dose. The amount of scholarship that’s been focused on that event blows my mind, and to hear a recording of what I heard at the time makes forty intervening years vanish like an immaterial mist.

As late as 1986, the year before his death, he confessed, “I have no complaints about my career, but I always wondered why it really doesn’t take hold.” (H/T David Beardsley)

It was later, in April of 1987, by the way, that I wrote in the Village Voice that “some people consider [Feldman] the world’s greatest living composer.” He read it, and died in August.

 

Today’s Pearls Before Swine: