My review of Eric Richards’s recent concert has just appeared in the Village Voice. It used to be, you could input my name in the Voice search box, and a list of my articles would come up in reverse chronological order, so you could always find the most recent one. Now, the list comes up in seemingly random order. Very inconvenient, for me as well as anyone wanting to read me. Things change, but I never understand why things get worse without anyone seeming to benefit.

I have an article today where you wouldn’t think to look for it, in the Los Angeles Times. It’s a feature on the postmod string quartet Ethel.

Conlon Nancarrow, like all artists interesting to read about, was a fount of idiosyncracies. One was the tendency to bring out earlier music, often abandoned works from his early years, as brand new music. His most spectacular instance of this was renumbering his Player Piano Studies Nos. 38 and 39 as Nos. 41 and 48 because he was using them to fulfill commissions, and didn’t want his patrons to know that they were paying for works that had already been completed prior to the commission. (No shame in this, by the way; Stravinsky did it as a matter of course, and recommended the practice.) As a result, in the complicated numbering of Nancarrow’s 50-odd studies, Nos. 38 and 39 do not exist.

Now this personal quirk is occasioning some interesting wrinkles in Nancarrow scholarship, and I’ve spent the week unraveling some of the mysteries I wrote about last week. First of all, the Three Movements for Chamber Orchestra, his last work, since it’s receiving it’s US premiere with Alan Pierson and the Alarm Will Sound ensemble this Saturday, Feburary 19, at Columbia University’s Miller Theater. Around 1993 Conlon received a commission from New York’s Parnassus ensemble. Having already suffered a stroke, and not feeling up to conceiving a major work from scratch, he was rumored to have gone through some of his abandoned player piano works (of which there are dozens) and orchestrated them. Now, thanks to files Alarm Will Sound has sent me, I’ve been able to confirm this.

Trimpin labeled all the unknown piano rolls alphabetically, A through Z, then AA through ZZ, up through BBB. Some of these are mere sketches or jokes, some apparently early versions of studies you’re familiar with, others entirely completed works he abandoned for some reason, and one of them remarkably Romantic in tonality, kind of Lisztian. The Three Movements for Chamber Orchestra is based on three separate rolls, marked R, AA 39 A (because either Trimpin or I once thought this had something to do with #39/48), and “UK Finished A,” so labeled by Trimpin – “UK” meaning unknown, and “Finished” to indicate that it was clearly a completed work. (If memory serves, this last roll is one of the ones Trimpin presented at the Kitchen in 1993.)

R is only a rhythmic canon using five pitches, and might have been presumed to have been written for Conlon’s abortive experiments with a percussion machine in the 1950s; however, I’m not so sure of that, because the five pitches are spaced out at octaves, and the percussion rolls seem to used a chromatic scale over a much smaller range. Alan Pierson confirms that the first movement is only for percussion, and that the tempo relationships (which I couldn’t quite figure out from the piano roll) are 75:96:105:120:126. This doesn’t quite correspond to the roll, which seems to be 75:84:96:105:120; some change must have been made while arranging. Also, this is a remarkably complex ratio for Conlon, the kind of number series he used in his last few works, but never in his early music. I wonder if that suggests a more recent time period.

The second movement seems pretty literally based on AA 39A. The third starts off based on UK Finished A, but some notes are missing and altered, and I’m still curious as to how this differs from the original. UK Finished A contains a large canon, but one somewhat obscured by an additive process in which chromatic pitch gestures repeated over and over with one more pitch added each time. I’ve put up a MIDI version of UK Finished A here, if you’d like to listen and compare it with the third of the Three Movements being premiered this weekend.

As for the named earlier works for player piano cited by Helena Bugallo in her dissertation, she’s kindly clarified their provenance for me. The Didactic Studies are all different versions of Study #2a, simply the same tune and ostinatos but with a variety of different tempo relationships. I had found these scores and piano rolls in Nancarrow’s studio, and wrote about them, and they are almost certainly a product of the 1950s when he was first starting out. But apparently in a 1980 interview he referred to them by the title Didactic Studies and avowed an intention of publishing them as a set. Perhaps he really did return to this piece as late as 1980, but it seems odd. I think he had abandoned any such intention by 1988, because I looked at those scores then with his supervision, and he said no such thing. The other work, For Ligeti, was apparently presented publicly in 1988 (though he also never mentioned this to me either). This, according to Sacher Foundation archivist Felix Meyer, has been found to be an early study originally intended as Study #3, but withdrawn. I’m eager to get more information.

In addition, two readers wrote to inform me that, while several of the recordings of the Canons for Ursula contain only two canons, there are two recordings that include the third, or rather middle, canon. One was a 1996 recording by Joanna MacGregor which may soon be rereleased on her own label. The other is the brand-new Wergo recording by Helena Bugallo herself, on which, in addition to some player piano study transcriptions that she plays with her duo partner Amy Williams, she also plays all three canons. Sorry I missed this fact.

There are doubtless new Nancarrow works yet to come to light; a few years ago at a Nancarrow conference in Mexico City someone showed me a couple of brief 1940s piano pieces found among his papers, and I myself had discovered a movement for large orchestra apparently intended for an expanded version of his Piece No. 1 for Small Orchestra from about 1942. But I suspect most of what we have to look forward to comes from the piano rolls, and perhaps I’ll have time to get some of my MIDI files of them into performance shape. If so, I’ll post them to Postclassic Radio.

You’re probably not used to hearing anything strangely familiar on PostClassic Radio, but if some of the chord progressions ring a bell in coming weeks, it’s because I’m playing some selections from CRI’s disc The Alternative Schubertiade. On September 12, 1997, a bunch of the most incorrigible Downtown composers, invited by Phil Kline, got together at American Opera Projects to pay homage to good old Franz Schubert. I reviewed that concert, they recorded and released it, and I’m playing:

Nick Didkovsky: Impromptu in Eb Major, arr. Minsky Poplov

Annie Gosfield: Cram Jin Quotient

Roger Kleier: Sighted Sub, Sank Same

Kitty Brazelton: Fishy Wishy, and

David First: Thought You Said Sherbert

As I wrote at the time, “The cohesive logic of sonata form was never very congenial territory for Schubert anyway, and his weakest passages are those in which he dutifully fills out the repetitions and transitions of his Beethovenian heritage. The Downtowners liberated his melodies from sonata duty, and his shards of beauty shone just as bright without being glued together.”

Also, to satisfy a request, Ben Johnston’s experiment in endless melody, his String Quartet No. 6. Twelve-tone, but it doesn’t sound like it, AND in just intonation at the same time. I do take requests! Sometimes.

UPDATE: And now, a mini-festival of Australians, Margaret Legge-Wilkinson and Ron Ford from Canberra, Alistair Riddell from Melbourne, and Ross Bolleter from Perth.

In my book on Conlon Nancarrow I analyzed 65 of his works, which was everything known to me at the time. However, like Schubert, Conlon goes on producing music posthumously, and recently I’ve been getting information on three pieces I didn’t include. First, pianist Helena Bugallo, who has been performing his player piano works in piano duo arrangements, has just completed her doctoral dissertation at SUNY Buffalo, entitled Selected Studies for Player Piano by Conlon Nancarrow: Sources, Working Methods, and Compositional Studies. (It’s available from the ever-helpful UMI Dissertation Services.) She lists two works I’d never heard of, called Didactic Studies and For Ligeti, with dates 1980 and 1988 respectively, but neglects to mention what medium they’re written for. [2/14 UPDATE: They’re for player piano. I’ll be writing more extensively to give all the details soon.] These may have come from about 60 unnamed (and unnumbered) player piano rolls that Conlon had left in his studio as unfinished or abandoned works or sketches. Bugallo did her research in the Nancarrow archive at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, whence all of Nancarrow’s materials were moved before he died. I knew that a group of odd little piano pieces (for live player) had been found, but they were written clearly in Conlon’s 1940s style, and can’t have been the Didactic Studies referred to if the latter truly came from 1980.

Something else Bugallo provides is a renotated complete score, recreated from the player piano roll, of Conlon’s Study #47, the final score of which had been lost. Very welcome.

More excitingly at the moment, the chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound is giving the US premiere next Saturday, Feb. 19, at Miller Theater in New York, of Nancarrow’s Three Movements for Chamber Orchestra, supposedly his last work, written in in 1993. I had heard from Conlon’s assistant Carlos Sandoval that this was an arrangement of music from some much earlier player piano rolls. Nancarrow had a stroke (actually a stroke-like condition brought on by pneumonia) in January of 1990, and afterward his music became much simpler, almost naive, in a not unattractive way. He was commissioned by Parnassus for an ensemble piece, and – so the story I heard goes – had Carlos help him arrange something from an unnumbered player piano study, since he didn’t feel up to conceiving a major new work. (Some of the abandoned player piano rolls are complete multi-movement works, so this is plausible.) But I had also heard the work was a quintet, and virtually unplayable, and it turns out to be for three winds, three brass, five strings, percussion, and piano. So this is a mystery, and I’m eager to get it cleared up.

One further Nancarrow mystery, which I’ve never addressed in public: You’ll occasionally read references to Nancarrow’s “Three Canons for Ursula,” which he wrote for Ursula Oppens, but on the available recordings there are only “Two Canons for Ursula.” The third canon required the pianist to play four tempos at once. Conlon showed me its opening pages, but told me he had abandoned the piece as too difficult to play. So Ursula premiered the Two Canons, and in recent years the third canon has surfaced, and has apparently been played by a pianist in Europe. English composer Thomas Ades, in a review of my book, lambasted me for “hiding” the existence of this third canon, but Conlon had told me he was deleting it from his catalogue; I believe he hadn’t even finished it at the time, and didn’t plan to. Since I published my book while he was still alive, I felt that I should limit my assertions about his music to ones that he didn’t contradict. Now that he’s gone and the archive at Basel is being organized and mined by scholars, however, new Nancarrow music is coming to light, and it’s certainly true that he wrote a lot more pieces than he officially acknowledged.

Last night the American Symphony Orchestra played Brahms’s First Piano Concerto here at Bard, with Blanca Uribe as soloist. As you may know, the work starts off with an aggressive drone on D, above which the theme enters on a surprising B-flat major triad. Much later in the 22-minute first movement, in the recapitulation, the orchestra lands dramatically on that D drone again, only this time, the soloist slaps down the theme on an E major triad, a tritone away from the opening statement and thus the biggest harmonic shock possible; the D drone is the third of the B-flat chord but the seventh of an E dominant, so instead of the expected VI6 you get V2/V, as radical a reinterpretation as Brahms could have managed within his musical language, and a seeming brazen coup for the pianist. I had written the program notes and drew attention to this demonically brilliant moment, which may be my favorite in Brahms’s entire output.

This morning I dreamed about those B-flat and E entries as standing at opposite ends of human experience and encompassing all thought between them. The B-flat was feminine, the E masculine, one was radical and the other conservative, et cetera, a symbol for a whole philosophical system. And the dream went on for seeming hours, as I traveled through ancient and exotic lands, relating everything I came across back to some point in the spectrum defined by B-flat versus E in relation to some eternal grounding on D.

As you’ve guessed before, it’s pretty weird being me.

It took longer than usual uploading everything, because his pieces tend to be epic, but John Luther Adams is Postclassic Radio‘s February Composer of the Month. Adams is the self-created composer of the Alaskan landscape, a painter of 60-minute-plus continuous orchestral canvases that shimmer and sparkle and hover in the air, often with little or nothing in the foreground. He’s written an astonishing number of pieces that use only “white” notes, no sharps or flats, including his large orchestra piece In the White Silence, which I’ve posted in its gorgeous 75-minute entirety. (If you don’t think there’s any gap between Uptown and Down-, show a 75-minute score with no sharps or flats to some well-established New Romantic or 12-tone composer, and watch the look on his face darken.) I’ve also posted another of my favorite long works, Clouds of Unknowing, Clouds of Forgetting, and there are a few more selections to come, some of them not commercially available.

By the way, if you’re ever looking for a way to distinguish the Nixon in China John Adams from the one described above, his middle name is Coolidge. (There’s also an electronic composer John D.S. Adams, who got his start working in David Tudor’s famous Rainforest installation. Surely it’s time for some innovative entrepreneur to organize a festival of Adamses?)

UPDATE: Richard Friedman urges that I re-mention John Luther Adams’ new book Winter Music, from Wesleyan Press, which I am all the happier to do since I wrote the introduction to it. I had written about it in September here.

My mother has a stock answer for people who draw generalizations from insufficient data. She replies, with a tinge of sarcasm, “All Indians walk single file. I saw one once, and he did.”

I admire Bill Osborne’s writing enough that I don’t think he’ll mind my taking issue with his note to Jan Herman which that worthy reprinted in his excellent blog. Bill went to a John Zorn concert at Miller Theater, and concluded (on the basis of that and other unspecified concerts) that there is no longer any difference between Uptown and Downtown music these days.

(Sigh.) This is a hip thing to say, and everyone says it, and most people believe it, and I would make a lot more friends if I would just shut up and go along. But the truth is that this perception does some harm, because it obscures the fact that there is a rich Downtown tradition that is very different from Uptown, and which is becoming less and less visible.

First of all, John Zorn. Zorn has long said in interviews that the early classical influences in his music came from European post-serialism. If I may quote what I wrote in my history of American music about him,

At 15 [Zorn] chanced across a recording of Mauricio Kagel’s chaotic Improvisation ajoutée, and said to himself, “Yes, this is the music for me. This is what I want to be doing.” Later, he has related, he attended Pierre Boulez’s “rug” concerts in New York where “I saw premieres of Stockhausen pieces. It was exciting, but at the same time, it was, like, very dry. No one was standing up going ‘Yeah!’ An emotional quality was missing somehow.”

If you listen to Zorn’s early records like Pool and Archery, their statically noisy textures sound almost identical to certain works by Kagel, like Der Schall and Music for Renaissance Instruments. At the same time, Zorn has expressed impatience and disdain for many of the composers I consider central to the Downtown tradition, including Cage, Oliveros, and the minimalists. It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that Zorn and 15 of his free-improv colleagues took over the Downtown scene in the mid-1980s and turned it very much in the direction of Europe-influenced noise and complexity. Osborne notes that the works he heard “were extended, highly chromatic, rhythmically complex, precisely notated and formally structured works that sounded almost completely uptown….” He was surprised, but I’m not – that’s always been the nature of Zorn’s notated music. I’m not going to be a snob and say that Zorn’s music isn’t really Downtown, because the whole philosophy of Downtown music was that anything goes, no boundaries apply. But if you characterize Downtown music as being what it was from the days of the 1960-61 La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield concerts given at Yoko Ono’s loft up through the public emergence of Steve Reich and Philip Glass in the ‘70s, up through the artrock Branca/Chatham scene of the early ‘80s, and then again as the Postminimalist/Totalist scene that re-emerged in the late ‘80s through the Bang on a Can festival and my criticism, it is fair to say that within that basically minimalist/conceptualist mainstream, Zorn’s world constituted something of an aberration, one that veered towards jazz, but also way out toward European/Uptown opacity and complexity.

So for the Uptown world, whose scorn for minimalism was endless, Zorn became the Downtowner par excellence, the hip bandwagon they could all jump on. His music had a postmodern cachet due to his quotations and genre mixing (much like Uptowner William Bolcom in the same era), he quoted Elliott Carter, he reincarnated Stockhausenesque complexity, and he never touched a drone or ostinato with a ten-foot pole. No wonder they’re playing him at Columbia’s Miller Theater – he’s right at home up there. But to listen to Zorn’s music, of all people, and conclude that Downtown music has come to sound just like Uptown? Well… all Indians walk single file.

There are other reasons that you could attend ostensibly Downtown concerts and think that they’ve gone Uptown. Many Europe-oriented, grad-school-trained composers have taken to launching their careers from Downtown spaces as being hipper. Passing yourself off as Downtown, as long as there’s no telltale hint of Cage or minimalism in your music, has become a smart career move, and ever since Zorn you can do it and still indulge Uptown pitch complexity to your heart’s delight. Meanwhile, the hard-core Downtown composers, the ones from that La Monte-Reich-Branca-Bang on a Can tradition I mentioned? They’re moving out of Manhattan because they can’t afford it anymore, and giving so few concerts these days that I have a hell of a time finding true Downtown concerts to go to. Yet Downtown music still thrives, even as it becomes less logistically accessible. Listen to the pieces I play on Postclassic Radio – not much there is going to remind of you of Carter, or Stockhausen, or even John Corigliano. Meanwhile, all the critics say, “Gee, there’s no difference between Uptown and Downtown anymore,” and my hundred best Downtown composer friends and I, all writing Cage- and minimalist-influenced music that doesn’t sound the least bit Uptown, sigh at yet another sign that the classical music world really doesn’t want to deal with our music.

Hard to believe from my gray locks, but I was 13 once – or so says the evidence from boxes of old manuscripts in my storage room. I fell in love then, slowly and cautiously, with the Concord Sonata and Le sacre du printemps and Cage’s Variations IV. I needed a refuge from grownups, and like many teenagers, found it in music that grownups didn’t understand. My peers anchored their contemptus mundi in loud rock ‘n’ roll, but I was practicing George Rochberg’s 12-tone Sonata-Fantasia on the piano, along with the acerbically atonal Form by Stefan Wolpe, which I once confounded my girlfriend’s mother with by playing for her. Is there any function of music so perennially reliable as this, to be used by teenagers to set themselves off as special and incomprehensible?

Between 13 and 19, I plunged into Cage, Varèse, Stockhausen, Babbitt, Boulez, Carter, Nono, Pousseur. The louder, more violent, more complex, more dissonant, the better. Composing meant piling up as many major 7ths and minor 9ths and chromatic tone clusters and rhythmically conflicting layers as possible. Then minimalism came along – Steve Reich’s Drumming and Philip Glass’s Music in Fifths suddenly appeared in the summer of 1974.

Maybe I had gotten into musical complexity too early. If I hadn’t discovered the Concord and Variations IV until college, like most music students, maybe incomprehensibility wouldn’t have lost its freshness so easily. But at 19, minimalism suddenly made all that complexity seem old hat. Having used so many dozens of chromatic tone clusters by my freshman year of college, it had already become painfully apparent that there is a ceiling to meaningful dissonance. I had piled up as many minor 9ths as human hands and lips could play. The idea that I could go back to the major scale as a starting point – and still seem avant-garde and special – came as a relief.

At the same time, there was much talk in the 1970s about new music’s decreasing social and political relevance. Rock music had stolen center stage in terms of music’s engagement with social issues. Cornelius Cardew had abandoned the world of complex, incomprehensible music for political reasons, and Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski, in rhetoric at least, followed. From the appearance of Rzewski’s Attica and Coming Together, minimalism seemed to have a political impetus as well as a musico-historical one.

And thus came about an association that today’s young composers seem incapable of grasping: the move to simplify music and make it more comprehensible and communicative was a PROGRESSIVE move. Progressive musically, because it bypassed the info-overload dead end of endless noise and complexity, and made possible all kinds of subtle new phenomena that had never before been used in Western music, though one could find precedents in musics of Asia and Africa. Progressive politically because it offered the opportunity to reconnect with audiences of nonmusicians, in a performance paradigm that had little to do with the stuffy formalism of “classical music.” Eventually I found that there were many, many other composers like myself who felt that the development of minimalism was the clearest progressive approach to a music of the future.

Now we jump ahead thirty years. Young musicians go to college having heard little beyond commercial pop and maybe some standard classical music. In college they discover noise bands, Stockhausen, Varèse, John Zorn, obscure varieties of post-punk, even Elliott Carter. The music is exciting because it’s so mysterious, so noisy, so evocative of rebellion, so delightfully transgressive. Listening to it sets them off, as it did me, from their parents and their more bourgeois peers from high school, makes them feel special and in-the-know. Noise and chaos and mystery and sonic violence exert their perennial attraction on disaffected youth.

Meanwhile, I play them music by my peers, the ones for whom simplification spelled progress: Janice Giteck, John Luther Adams, Peter Garland, Elodie Lauten, William Duckworth, Beth Anderson. This music doesn’t make them feel special – it’s not transgressive, anyone can understand it. It’s not the parent-insulting music of youthful rebellion. Far from setting off the listener as insider to an exclusive club, it reaches out to audiences and aims at universality. Duckworth is pretty, it’s OK, but Elliott Carter: “Wow, that’s cool!” What seems dry and dusty and obscurantist and academic to me seems progressive and mysteriously cool to my students. What seems progressive and fresh and socially forward-looking and even beautiful to me seems bland and backward and unchallenging to them.

Part of what’s happened is that we have indeed reached, in a certain sense, the end of history – in the sense that successive generations would continue to absorb the experiences of their elders. My generation devoured everything that had happened in music up to that point, because it was in the air. 12-tone music was dubious but nonetheless available, vinyl discs of serialist music were unavoidable in record stores, there were no gaps in the last 250 years of music that were difficult to fill in. Today, the entire body of 20th-century classical music seems to be a gap. Whether someone comes to college having already heard Varèse, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, seems dependent on chance factors, while total ignorance of more recent major figures like Meredith Monk and Robert Ashley is virtually assured. The idea that music could be premeditatedly dissonant, confusing, off-putting comes as a delightful shock to today’s 18-year-olds, just as it was to me at 13. The insight that increasing doses of noise and complexity can quickly reach a self-defeating dead end is seemingly not inheritable.

As a result, my generation can’t look to younger musicians for an easy audience; our new music doesn’t sound to them like anyone’s revolution. In the context of the traditional classical music world, with its uppity dependence on a certain kind of pitch complexity and dramatic gestural rhetoric, writing the quiet, subtle, meditative music we did was a bold, brave, fresh feat. Outside that context, its courage isn’t always apparent, even when its beauty is. We may have to evermore defend ourselves as progressives despite appearances, just as Schoenberg defended Brahms as a different kind of avant-gardist. Brash young musicians making noise assemblages on their laptops may think of us as not provocative enough, too accepting of the status quo, too eager to please. And perhaps, in some decade to come, they’ll reach the limits of their own tolerance for layered guitar distortions, and decide there was something to us after all.

As to my question of whether a composer should issue three CDs at once, or space them out one a year or so, the masses have spoken, and they do not speak with one voice. The only person to unequivocally agree with my record producer about spacing them out was another composer/CD producer, Mary Jane Leach formerly of XI discs, who said

My feeling in that you should space them out, maybe six months apart. Unless they’re all very similar, it will “confuse” most critics (which one sheet takes precedence over the other?), and you might end up with nothing. Even when I ran XI, I found that if several cd’s were released at the same time, that I got less coverage than if they’d been spaced out.

Several people noted that the issue is very different in pop music than it is in (post)classical – most pop musicians are careful to space their CDs out for maximum sales. As Galen Brown pointed out,

[W]hen Radiohead released Amnesiac close on the heels of their very successful Kid A, and acknowledged that the Amnesiac songs were recorded at the same time as the Kid A songs, people assumed that Amnesiac would be more of a collection of B-sides than anything else. Personally I like Amnesiac even better than I like Kid A, though.

A slight majority recommended spacing CDs out, although Joseph Zitt noted,

Speaking as a record store guy (my day job is as classical music specialist as a large CD store in San Francisco), I know that if three CDs come in, looking like a uniform release and packaged as such, I would be quite tempted to make a display of them.

In general, however, Beth Anderson spoke for the composers in the audience:

I think you should get those CDs out as fast as possible. You could be hit by a bus and they might not happen at all. Life is short and CDs take a long time to finish and a very long time to let people know about them.

Cumulative average message: put CDs out when you can and don’t worry too much about control, unless you’re really famous enough to influence reception.

In my Village Voice column this week, I review the Sequitur ensemble playing four works, two of which I possess recordings of. And so, in an experiment aimed at making music criticism more accessible and relevant, which I have long wanted to try out, I temporarily post those two works so, having read the article, you may then listen to them if you like:

Eve Beglarian: Creating the World

Bunita Marcus: Adam and Eve

Both pieces are also posted on Postclassic Radio as noted in the article, but rather than tune in and wait several hours for them, you may want to derive more immediate gratification.

In addition, new-music maven and entrepreneur Herb Levy sent some comments in response to my minor dissatisfaction with Sequitur’s sound production. I suspected something like what he says, but he knows more than I do about the technical end:

Reading your article about the Sequitur Ensemble made me think about
what makes bands like those led by Glass & Dresher work & it’s more
than (or really I think, other than) the instrumental doubling you
cite.

Dresher tour
with a sound technician who knows exactly what the composer wants the
ensemble to sound like. Without knowing any of the people involved,
it’s likely that the sound technician for the Sequitur concert was
less experienced with sound reinforcement and/or recording of
instruments that are more often amplified or just didn’t hear the
disparity of the sound sources as presenting a problem.

With bands like Glass’s & Dresher’s, nearly everything you hear,
whether the original source is acoustic or electronic, comes from the
same set of speakers, just as it does in the recording of the
Beglarian piece (or any recording) you’d heard before the concert.
Because the sound all comes from one source, whatever signal
processing and other coloration the sound system may have is applied
to all the instruments, and the ensemble sound is more unified.

In the picture running with the Voice article, it looks like the
acoustic instruments are amplified with overheard boom
microphones. Letting all that air & room sound into the mix instead
of using close miking is going to give the acoustic
instruments a more distant sound than the direct input of the
electric instruments. By enabling the audience to hear the strictly
acoustic sound of the acoustic instrument, as well as the mix of
amplified sounds, the acoustic instruments retain more of their
separate character. The psycho-acoustics of this also include the
fact that the acoustic sounds are perceived as coming from the
specific locations of the actual instruments, rather than through the
sound system.

In the Glass & Dresher ensembles, the acoustic instruments are
more closely miked (sometimes using contact mics or, in Paul’s band
at least, electric versions of some of the instruments) and little if
any of the sound of the acoustic instruments is heard outside of the
speakers, so the sounds blend more easily with those of the wholly
electric instruments.

I appeal to my experienced readers to settle a dispute. I have been told by a couple of artists that the only way to break through the wall of public indifference and get attention in the press is to have a lot of work come out at once. A CD will pass unnoticed; release three CDs in quick proximity and people will suddenly think you’re on a roll, and treat you as important.

Now, it just so happens that I may have the opportunity to put out three CDs in 2005. And one of the record producers just told me exactly the opposite: that if you put out two CDs in quick succession, one of them will compete with the other, and each will only get half the attention it might otherwise have. Both of these opinions have been given to me in the strongest possible terms, with the presumed weight of vast experience behind them. Personally, as a critic I am more likely to pay attention if I suddenly receive three CDs by one artist, because I can write a more in-depth piece – but at the Village Voice I set my own agenda, and I am told that I am so atypical in that regard that I don’t count.

So, for my own sake and to settle a disputed point for us all, which is better? If you have three CDs to make, do you space them one a year for maximum exposure? or do you try to time them to come out all at once?

Composer Lawrence Dillon, who keeps me honest, and who now has his own blog to assist in that interminable quest, notes an ambiguity in my Where are the Philistines? entry. It seemed to him that I was making a sour grapes gripe for certain composers who weren’t getting their fair share of the pie, whereas my intent was to make a more general plea for my own generation, who seem to be the first generation to come of age after the officially defined end of music history.

But I will, to even out the score, make an ameliorating comment about my own generation, which I have long kept under wraps. Namely: I think one of the disadvantages we labor under is that there are so many good composers in my generation, and hardly anyone who consistently stands out above all the rest. The very quantity is too overwhelming for a non-specialist to deal with. When I wrote my book American Music in the Twentieth Century in 1996, I had to choose eight composers, almost arbitrarily, as emblematic of my generation. Nine years later, I would have even a harder time whittling down my choices to that number. And while a lot of my favorite music – music I go around humming, that I listen to for pleasure and without professional compulsion – is by people my own age, I admit that it is specific pieces I’m drawn to more than any particular composer’s sensibility: Mikel Rouse’s Failing Kansas, Elodie Lauten’s Waking in New York, John Luther Adams’ In the White Silence, a bunch of specific David Garland songs, Beth Anderson’s Piano Concerto, Carl Stone’s Shing Kee, Rhys Chatham’s An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, William Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances, John Maguire’s A Capella, Diamanda Galas’s Plague Mass, Janice Giteck’s Om Shanti, Daniel Lentz’s The Crack in the Bell, and on and on and on. Some of these composers are fairly consistent in the quality of their output, others (myself included, I fear) notably not so; every one of them has produced something for which I’d have to apologize and murmur, “Well, not really his best work, you know.” To pick one or two or three of these people and say, “This is the Boulez or Stockhausen of my generation, this is our leading genius,” would be as impossible for me as it is for the public at large. And in America, at least, the way the star system works that has taken over the classical music world, somebody has to be Numero Uno, for if audiences are going to take the trouble to pay for tickets and drive to the concert hall, they want to be assured they are hearing The Very Best. It’s an extremely unfortunate, Philistine, artistically infantile need, but that’s a rant for another day.

What’s confusing is that, to tell you the truth, except for the quantity, I don’t see any difference between my generation and the previous ones. Out of the Darmstadt crowd of the 1950s and ‘60s, I would not have picked out Boulez and Stockhausen as top dogs: I always found Maderna’s music far more beautiful, Pousseur’s and Ferrari’s more interesting. Reich and Glass were not the most fascinating minimalists, just the only ones left standing when the dust cleared. In either repertoire, it’s specific pieces I gravitate toward, not the composer’s entire output. I love Boulez’s Pli selon pli and scorn his Le Marteau, take Koyaanisqatsi very seriously and get bored by Satyagraha, turn my nose up at Reich’s Desert Music though I adore Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. The composer whose every note is sterling is a bird so rare as to possibly not exist; Beethoven wrote some drivel, and there are Bach works I find dreary. If we’re waiting for the composer whose every work is magical, we’re going to wait till global warming has melted our CD collections.

I have often felt that it was one of the great strengths of my generation that our stylistic enterprise is so collective, that we build on each other’s achievements, and have not arbitrarily elevated isolated figures among us to stardom. Unfortunately, it is not a strength that accords well with the American need for celebrity. I suspect what it would take for postclassical music to enter public consciousness would be some sacrificial lamb to get touted as the genius of the age. Every composer would want to be that person, but if it were me, I am scrupulous enough that I would get a guilty twinge every time I heard some gorgeous piece by one of my peers that I wish I had written. How much better if we could short-circuit the star system altogether. Every artist knows, and cites, the reason you can keep crabs in a shallow bucket without them escaping: because if one crab succeeds in getting close to the top, the others will pull him back down. What my generation has been working on, but hasn’t figured out yet, is how to pull together and get everyone out of the bucket all at once.