My favorite Jonathan Kramer story from his memorial service today, about Jonathan teaching music theory class:

Jonathan: Most of you have probably learned the fiction that there are three kinds of minor scale.

Student: If that’s the fiction, what’s the reality?

Jonathan: There is no reality.

Fuckin’ A, Jonathan.

This note from the ever-vigilant Herb Levy:

Thought you’d be interested/amused/whatever: the clue for 24 across
in the NY Times Crossword puzzle for June 5, 2004 is “Piano composer
______ Nancarrow.”

While I don’t see the puzzle everyday, I think this is the first such
mention of Nancarrow.

Thomas Arne, move over.

And now I’ve just learned that the New York singer Kate Sullivan has died – what age I don’t know, but younger than me. [Update: turns out she was only 40.] I first became aware of her from her expert, street-smart performance in Mikel Rouse’s opera Dennis Cleveland, on the basis of which I engaged her to sing the part of the Mother in my own opera Cinderella’s Bad Magic. I had hoped to work with her again when I restage the opera next season. (In fact, I was writing the lead for my next opera with her elegant mezzo in mind.) She was a lovely person and a dynamite singer.

I’m getting afraid to check messages.

I just received the shocking and very saddening news that my old friend, a good composer and a very important theorist, Jonathan Kramer died yesterday of leukemia at the age of only 61. (He’s survived by his father.) Jonathan was best known as a sort of postmodern theorist, hired as such at Columbia (in 1989) and for years not really recognized there as a composer as well. He was probably best known for his book The Time of Music, which dealt with goal-directedness versus stasis in our conceptions of musical time; powerfully argued with well-chosen and extensive examples, the book lent academic credence to the experience of time aimed at in minimalist music, relating it to kindred trends in European music.

But Jonathan was one of those rare people in whom analytical prowess and creativity went hand in hand. His music of the 1980s was what I’d have to call postminimalist: it used no repetition or grooves, but he would limit himself to only five or six or seven pitches with such inventiveness that you’d never realize the pitch spectrum was curtailed. My favorite pieces from this period were his Music for Piano Number 5 (1979-80), a Terry Riley-ish romp in mostly 11/16 meter; Moments in and Out of Time (1981-83), a big, Mahleresque orchestra piece that stubbornly adhered to the E minor scale; and a mercurial chamber piece called Atlanta Licks (1984). The limitation to a few pitches led Jonathan to experiment with using such limitations to subtly unify passages of otherwise widely varying style, and in his Notta Sonata for two pianos and percussion (1992-93) he achieved a true postmodernism, a fractured idiom in which unreal musics jostled each other in an impression of split consciousness. I never had the chance to hear his more recent music, but he was in the process of bringing out a new disc.

According to his ex-wife, Jonathan developed a blood disease last August which turned into myloproliferative syndrome, and only last weekend suddenly turned into acute leukemia. There will be a memorial service this Sunday, June 6, at 1 PM at Plaza Jewish Community Chapel in New York, 630 Amsterdam at 91st. He mentored hundreds of students, and was a loved teacher.

Jonathan, in a move that must have made colleagues question his sanity, brought me to teach a semester at Columbia as part of an attempt to loosen the place up and encourage diversity. He combined a roving, curious mind with blunt honesty, incisive opinions, and a genuine desire to make the music world a livelier, freer place. I had long looked forward to his someday receiving his just due as a composer. I hope it happens posthumously. For now, I’m stunned.

As detailed by Anthony Tommasini in an article in today’s Times, the Pultizer board was appropriately stung by John Adams’s criticism of the Pulitzer for music when he won in 2003. “Among musicians that I know,” Adams said in a comment much publicized at the time, “the Pulitzer has over the years lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature and journalism.” As Tommasini accurately notes,

Anyone perusing the list of winners, he continued, cannot help noticing the absence of most of America’s greatest musical minds, from mavericks like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Harry Partch, to composer-performers like Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Thelonious Monk and Meredith Monk. These creative spirits, he wrote, had been passed over year after year, “often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.”

Very true, and well said. So far, so good. It would be wonderful to have the Pulitzer board acknowledge that the Pulitzer has concentrated on a stylistically narrow range of composers, specifically avoiding the more accessible composers whose music has the most public impact. I’d love it if Downtown composers like Steve Reich, William Duckworth, Janice Giteck, Glenn Branca had a crack at the Pulitzer along with the usual academic crowd.

So what’s the Pulitzer board’s beneficent response? They’re broadening the music category to also include music theater, film scores, and jazz, including even possibly jam sessions.

Anything, ANYTHING, rather than admit that Downtown music exists.

Pardon the unintended qualitative implications, but this is a little like telling someone their dinners are all meat and that they could stand to include some fruits and vegetables, and them responding, “OK, I’ll throw in candy bars and chewing gum. NOW are you satisfied?” The response completely misses the point of the complaint. First of all, musical theater has always been eligible for the drama award anyway, and Tommasini lists musicals that have won a drama Pulitzer: Rent, Sunday in the Park with George, South Pacific.

Secondly, it could make perfect sense to institute a separate Pulitzer prize for jazz, a Pulitzer prize for pop recordings or songs, even a Pulitzer for film scores. Those genres deserve to have excellence recognized. But to have a prize for best music in which one has to comparatively evaluate film scores along with notated concert pieces, and jazz performances, and musicals, will put the committee in the position of having to decide to pick the best apple this year, the best orange next year, and the best pomegranate the year after that. Say the committee includes a composer, a film scorer, and a jazz soloist: the composer will presumably want to give it to a concert piece, the film person to a film score, etc., and how will they form any intelligent opinion regarding each others’ categories? How do you weigh a great jazz performance of a particular night against a fine chamber orchestra piece against an excellent score for a good or bad film? It’s meaningless. And this “broadening” will water down an already meaningless prize until it is meaninglesser than ever.

What takes my breath away, though, is the arrogance (I suppose one could more charitably say ignorance) with which they deliberately sidestep the explicit intention of John Adams’s criticism. “Hell no, we’re not going to give our precious music Pulitzer to any of those damn Downtown composers. Before we do that, we’ll open it up to jazz and film scores and Broadway music, just so they’ll quit bugging us about our damn elitism!”

Still on a political note but in a very different mode, I pass on, from a friend who alerted me, a link to a timely Eric Idle song, laced with charming obscenity directed at all the right targets, and with particular compliments to the FCC. Be advised of “adult content” in the lyrics, but it’ll certainly leave a better aftertaste than the Nick Berg video – unless you don’t get the irony in the line, “Save the Great White Males!”

All right, it’s off-topic, but I’m getting pretty freaked out by the amount of speculation, accompanied by detailed video analysis, that the Nick Berg decapitation video was a fake. At first I thought I had stumbled onto a whacko conspiracy web page (not that I mind, I’ve rarely heard a conspiracy theory I couldn’t believe), but then I Googled the subject, and there seems to be a rapidly growing chorus of doubters. Main points:

1. The editing is sloppy, with unexplainable time lapses.

2. One of the “Arabs” is wearing a gold ring, contrary to religious practice; another is wearing American running shoes.

3. The terrorist who reads the paper has been identified as Musab Al-Zarqawi. But Zarqawi is known to have a prosthetic leg, which the terrorist in the video doesn’t; and besides, Zarqawi was announced as having been killed in April, 2003.

4. At one point the ear and apparent military cap of a white man comes slightly into camera view, only visible when the tape is slowed down.

5. Berg is sitting in the same kind of chair visible in Abu Ghraib photos, wearing the same kind of orange prison outfit worn by Abu Ghraib prisoners. The wall is the same color as Abu Ghraib’s walls, and Berg’s last known job was working on the tower at Abu Ghraib.

6. The famous scream appears to be a woman’s voice and is not accurately cued to the video.

7. Medical experts attest (excuse me for saying it) that much more blood would come from a beheaded man than appears in the video, suggesting that Berg, if it is indeed he, was already dead.

Of course, the video softened the public response that was calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation after Abu Ghraib, and for some people (not myself) made the Abu Ghraib torture seem tame by comparison – and it appeared oh so conveniently after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, though the beheading supposedly had taken place weeks earlier. I haven’t even begun to touch on all the inconsistencies. A few of the many, many web pages are here, by people ranging from liberals to libertarians to “patriotic” Republicans to anti-government survivalists to Arabs to Europeans to Chinese:

Asia Times

www.vanallens.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4157

Al-Jazeera

globalresearch.ca/articles/HAV405A.html

globalresearch.ca/articles/CAR405A.html

globalresearch.ca/articles/SAT405A.html

www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/15/22827/0477

genmay.com/showthread.php?t=354134

www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1137968/posts

www.libertyforum.org

Believe it, don’t believe it, but it proves beyond doubt how malleable video reality is.

UPDATE: I guess I no longer read my own newspaper religiously enough. It took Jan Herman to point out to me that this week’s Village Voice has its own article on the speculations about the Nick Berg video.

FURTHER UPDATE: Harry Shearer discussed the possibility of the Berg video being fake on his NPR news program Le Show on WAMC radio, May 30, the soundfile of which you can find at harryshearer.com. Under an administration as secretive as Bush/Cheney, conspiracy theories will no longer be limited to the lunatic fringe.

I haven’t been blogging, and have no better, nor worse, excuse to offer than the euphoria that accompanies the ending of the school year and my annual opportunity to plunge back into composing. But the year-end hysteria prevented me from recording a very interesting concert that took place a couple of weeks ago at Bard, which was quintessentially postclassical if the word has any meaning at all. Student composer Matt Wellins (Mr. New Music of Postclassic fame) brought to campus a Chicago-based quartet I’d never heard of before named Town and Country, consisting of multi-instrument performers Ben Vida, Liz Payne, Josh Abrams, and Jim Dorling. Switching around among violin, upright bass, bass clarinet, squeezebox harmonium, and a plethora of handheld percussion, this quartet has developed its own style of mostly brief minimalist pieces, somewhat improvised, somewhat collectively composed. They were catchy, engaging vignettes with often intricate rhythms, and they metamorphosed as they droned along, the players picking up not only different pitches but different instruments as well. I’ve been looking for a long time for someone to come up with an improvisation paradigm that is neither jazz nor “free,” capable of creating original pieces with a recognizable identity but with plenty of leg room for give and take in performance. Town and Country has done it. To come up with a group improv style grounded in minimalism was no small conceptual feat.

And they weren’t even the top bill! Minimalist violin pioneer Tony Conrad performed with them, and also gave a one-hour slice of his “Early Minimalism,” playing violin raspily over loud, prerecorded string drones. Conrad’s maintaining the style of performance I first saw him with at New Music America in Miami in 1988, playing behind a curtain kept in constant motion by electric fans, with a lamp projecting his silhouette on the curtain. (Don’t worry, the music is more than loud enough to completely drown out the fans.) Within this theatrically evocative setting you could hear 11th, 13th, even 17th harmonics over the drones, although Conrad believes in a roiling mercuriality rather than harmonic precision. I keep waiting for Conrad to develop his shtick to the next step, but the students (and faculty) who hadn’t heard him before got a bracing close-up glimpse of history.

Town and Country have a new recording out, called simply 5, on Thrill Jockey, and you can read more about it in this Prefix magaine article about them. They’re well worth checking out.

Another thought on Ives, if you can stand it, from reader Jacob Smullyan:

[W]hile the attempt to characterize Ives as fraudulent should be condemned outright, a related thesis is worth considering seriously, namely, that his later revisions may not be
entirely satisfactory. He had grown distant from the roots of his inspiration, and wanting to get re-involved, gilded the lily a bit (perhaps gold is too trite a mineral — mica?). Some of the thickenings (I’m thinking of Concord here) are inspired, and some are merely
uniformly thick. I liked Kirkpatrick’s way of picking and choosing those variants. I think of the 1947 Concord as being a bit like Wordsworth’s rewrite of The Prelude; each line is strengthened, and the whole is weakened (although 1947 Ives is a lot better than 1805 Wordsworth).

There’s a lot of sense to this. One of the satisfying but perhaps dangerous things about being a composer is that, while you can’t change notes in Mozart, you can change notes in your own music whenever you want. I’ve been inputting into computer notation music I wrote 20, 25 years ago, and I can rarely resist the temptation to change a few notes here and there to accord with my present taste. If I make a major change I’ll mark it “revised version,” but otherwise I’ll leave it. And I would hate to think of some student whom I’ve trustingly taken under my wing watching me make these changes and later putting the most malevolent possible construction on them, implying that I was trying to lie about my place in history – as Elliott Carter did to the man who helped him get into Harvard, Charles Ives. Many interconnected and contradictory impulses, good and bad, go into revising a piece of music, and it shows a paucity of psycholgical insight to isolate just one and claim it’s THE one. Nor, as Smullyan notes, did even Ives’ revisions always improve. I’ve always wanted to hear one recording of Ives’ Second Symphony without the final Bronx cheer, the closing 12-pitch chord, that Ives added decades later as a way of expressing disdain for his own work for being too conservative. That’s a noble, if fun, work, and it deserves to end unironically.

Happy Erik Satie’s birthday, by the way. Seems like that should be something of a holiday in postclassical music circles.

My posts on Charles Ives brought a response from one of the Ives-haters who takes seriously Maynard Solomon’s claims that Ives covertly back-dated his scores to establish his priority as an innovator. I issued him a challenge, and I’ll issue it to the world.

The charge that Ives was trying to establish his priority as an innovator does not square with the picture we get of him from his writings. In all of Ives’s writings that I’ve ever read, which by my count is 100 percent some four or five times at least, Ives presents himself as generally insecure and self-effacing about his “good or bad music,” as he calls it, admitting that his “ears may be on wrong,” and that he likes all these discordant sounds that no one else seems to like. He disparages some of his greatest works, calling his own Third Symphony “technically suppressed,” and saying little more in defense of his own compositions than, “last time I heard it, it seemed like a good piece.” In short, in both his public and private communications, he strikes one as remarkably modest. He was, however, publicly accused by music critics of having “learned Schoenberg’s lessons well,” and of having been influenced by Stravinsky, and, when falsely described, he could get angry; he defended himself in his Memos by saying he had never heard Schoenberg’s or Stravinsky’s music during the years he was composing. That, of course, was his right, as it would be anyone’s. If you accuse me of having been influenced by Michael Dougherty’s Metropolis Symphony and I’ve never heard the work, I have a right to say so; if the work of mine being referred to predates the Metropolis Symphony, I have the right to mention the fact as supporting my statement – but to therefore accuse me of trying to buttress my claim as a historical innovator is a leap of logic that can only seem to indicate some underlying malicious intent.

So if Ives’s detractors are right, that he secretly conspired to shore up his historical reputation by deceiving the world into thinking he had used certain innovations earlier than he did, then there ought to be, somewhere in his writings, some claim of precedence advanced. Certainly such claims of precedence are not uncommon among 20th-century composers – Hauer vociferously claimed credit for the 12-tone row, Cowell for tone clusters (before he learned that Ives had beat him to them, whereupon he dropped his claim), Julian Carrillo claimed credit for “the thirteenth tone,” i.e. for having extended the scale beyond 12 steps to the octave. The day in 1921 when Schoenberg wrote his first 12-tone row, he wrote in his diary, “What I have discovered today will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” So, similarly, someone quote for me, please, a passage in Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata, his Memos, his Postlude to 114 Songs, his letters, his remembered conversations, or anywhere else where he declared, “I was the first to use tone clusters,” “I came up with the 12-tone idea before Schoenberg,” “I was the first to have different tempos going at the same time!” Find us the passage that proves Ives’s modesty was a calculating facade, lay this issue to rest, and I’ll stop defending his character.

Of course, my correspondent admits that he doesn’t like Ives’s music, finds it undeveloped and unfinished sounding. And I have yet to find anyone who believes the Maynard Solomon charges who does like Ives’s music. Some people who find Ives not to their taste use Solomon’s false controversy as a vehicle for Schadenfreude, and don’t seem to see anything wrong with impugning a man’s moral character as a way to get his music out of the concert hall; either that, or they imagine that we don’t play Ives’s music because we love it, but simply because he did everything first. There are certainly composers whose music I don’t care for – Shostakovich, for instance – but I don’t go around trying to prove that Shostakovich was somehow less than human, not a legitimate composer, that his music was a kind of fraud. Even if someone figured out that some of Shostakovich’s music was ghostwritten, I wouldn’t write articles shouting, “AHA! I KNEW it! The swine, his music should never be played again!” Many composers whose music I love – Wagner and Stravinsky, for instance – have accurately been accused of mendacity and worse, but I don’t love their music any less for it. Stravinsky’s book The Poetics of Music is still reverently read despite the well-documented fact that it was ghostwritten; and he tried to cover up Le Sacre‘s indebtedness to Russian folksongs, which was later exposed. By the analogous logic of the Ives case, shouldn’t we retire Le Sacre to the ash-heap of history? If not, doesn’t that prove that there is something more, or perhaps less, than objective scholarly judgement involved in the treatment of Ives’s reputation?

For those of us who love Ives’s music, the Solomon charges do not ring true (and have, in fact, been discredited by a small army of Ives scholars that no one seems to listen to). Even were they true, they seem incredibly irrelevant. Maybe Ives added dissonances to the Concord Sonata his entire life (and if he did, how would you prove mendacious intent?), but its amount of dissonance is not why I love the piece (and if it was, so what?). I love the piece for its interplay of themes and its amazing stream-of-consciousness form – and no one has ever charged that Ives added those in decades later, nor would such a charge make any sense. For that matter, if musicological reconstruction managed to prove that the Concord Sonata was written in 1949 by John Kirkpatrick, with Schoenberg sitting by his shoulder giving him advice about the harmony, I would still love the piece and listen to it, still prefer it to anything Schoenberg ever wrote, still consider it amazing and visionary and original. What power do musicologists possess to affect our perception of the music we love?

Wow – thinking about Ives and his accusers, what a beautiful statement from composer and loyal respondent Art Jarvinen:

About that conception that Ives went back and “updated” his scores, to make it appear that he was ahead of his time or whatever: When I was reading the Swafford bio on Ives it struck me that he was probably just a lot like Frank Zappa.

When I worked for FZ as a copyist one of the things we were working on was the score to 200 Motels, which had long before been “finished”, recorded and released. He wanted it all cleaned up and copied beautifully according to the state of the art hand copying methods of the time. It was immediately apparent that the score I was looking at didn’t exactly match the record. We were working from a revision.

I also did reductions for two pianos of most of his orchestral works and saw the same thing. Pedro’s Dowrey, recorded on Orchestral Favorites, has a lot of changes, and is different still by the time he gets it done by the London Symphony. The entire ending is different in fact. Frank paid me put a band together to play Pedro in my two piano version plus percussion, bass, and trombone, planning to record it. But then the LSO deal fell into place and my version became moot. But he used the band as a testing ground, and had Kent Nagano conduct us through it and replaced our percussionists with his guys. All through the rehearsal he was changing things, and having Chad Wackerman play the drum part with different feels – “Now make it reggae.”

The piece he did for the E.A.R. Unit – While You Were Art – came out on Jazz From Hell completely reworked as WYWA II.

What I observed by seeing his music so close up and watching him work was that nothing he did was ever really finished. It was all work in progress, and he changed it every time he went back to it. Records exist, and bands would play a version of a piece for a while, but that’s what they were – the versions of that moment.

Ives published his works, but that doesn’t mean that in his own mind those were THE definitive versions. I think that if he had an inspiration or learned a new trick or just wanted to see what the effect would be if he did it “this way”, he took the liberty to do so. It was his music, to do with as he pleased. No one says Frank Zappa was revising his works because he didn’t get them quite right the first time, and I see no reason to think Ives was up to some trickery.

Who says a work of art is finished, and at what point? Exhibition, recording, publication?

I think some artists just work, and the “work” is over when they die. What we may be left with are several versions of the same piece, all equally valid.

Is Frank Zappa hereby discredited? If not, why the musicological glee among those who attempt to discredit Ives?

I’m very happy to see Richard Taruskin in the Times today saying that Charles Ives was a great composer not only because of his innovations, but because of the depth of feeling of even his so-called “conservative” music. As he puts it,

Thus was Ives effectively plugged into a powerful discourse that valued artists chiefly in proportion to their technical and formal innovations. It was not necessarily the best vantage point from which to view Ives (or, some might argue, any artist). But the long-frustrated composer bought into it for a while, and it turned the Ives boom into a bubble that might easily be pricked.

I’m especially happy because this is almost precisely what I had earlier said at greater length in my article about Ives’s symphonies in this month’s Symphony magazine (regrettably unavailable on the web):

[R]ecognition that Ives was a master of melodic and harmonic continuity may defuse some of the pointless controversy over the extent to which he was “first” to do everything. Yes, Ives’s Third is “suppressed, technically speaking” [as Ives wrote]. But who ever thought that the technical side of music was the important part? Who thinks the Jupiter Symphony is a great piece because of its invertible counterpoint? Who believes that hemiola is what makes the Schumann Third great, or that the contrapuntal superimposition of two themes is the ultimate point of Bruckner’s Fifth? And yet when it comes to Ives, suddenly we get all musicological, and his greatness is entirely credited to a pack of musical card tricks no one had thought of before. And Ives, in the Memos, nods his head in agreement! Ergo, if you cast doubt on those card tricks – prove that some of the dissonance was added later, that maybe the complexity wasn’t complex as early as someone said (none of which has been proven) – then the whole Ives edifice comes tumbling down.

See? And I consider Taruskin brilliant, so those who come up with the same insights he does must be… well, you get the idea.