A fine postclassical composer whom I inadvertently left off my postclassical piano list (I have since added him on) writes to ask in some confusion what my criteria for postclassical music are. Ah! That is the question, isn’t it? I have intentionally been avoiding specifying what postclassical music is, exactly, and perhaps my lists are an attempt to show what it is by dozens of examples, without setting up a definition.

Quite essentially, I don’t know how to define postclassical music any better than anyone else, but I know it when I hear it. I wouldn’t quite expect anyone else to get the same feeling from the word that I do. But I judge it from the transition I myself went through early in my career as a composer. When I was young, I had this vague but powerful sense (a neurosis, it seems to me now) that music was supposed to have a certain kind of pitch complexity, a certain kind of variety, a form that started at one place, went somewhere, and came back; a certain feel for organic unity-within-variety. Music, in order to be Great Art, needed to manifest some kind of psychological cohesion, some analogue to sonata form. Pitch complexity was central, and a piece’s form had to be defined harmonically; rhythm was not an important or sufficient formal element.

Certain pieces challenged that: Riley’s In C, Reich’s Drumming, anything by the mature John Cage. Variety, it turned out, wasn’t necessary. “Going somewhere” wasn’t necessary. I started hearing this music that seemed to begin from a clean slate, that allowed itself to sustain one sound-image all the way through a piece, or that moved in an abrupt, nonlinear, nondevelopmental manner. Classical music required lots of glue to hold its notes together, but this new music seemed to get by fine without glue, seemed to be freer and happier without it in fact. I enjoyed listening to it. I asked La Monte Young why the movements of his Five Pieces for String Quartet were so much alike, and he scowled a moment and answered, “Variety is for people who can’t write music.” What a revelation! The old classical music started with the germ of an idea and DEVELOPED it in a careful manner towards increasing and then decreasing intensity. Climaxes were crucial, to be approached gradually and left carefully. The new music, though, started from scratch, without such assumptions, writing on the listener’s attention as on a blank slate, adding whatever appeared to work without bothering with the inner reality of smooth dynamic curves and gradual pitch-set transformation.

One thing that bugged me about the “classical” music of the 1970s and ’80s was the kind of precious feeling of sounds going into and out of silence. Sounds were supposed to die into silence, decrescendoing “al niente.” Classical composers were deathly afraid of grooves and hard, clean lines. Music was supposed to be mercurial, delicate, always in transition, virtuosic, endlessly rubato, impressive in its subtlety of detail, with different dynamics on every consecutive note, every tiny little nuance very carefully worked out. It was supposed to limit itself to “good, 20th-century intervals like sevenths and tritones” (as one of my professors exhorted me), constantly negating any unambiguous tonal implication, rather than making use of the full spectrum. Ambiguity was the goal, any clear statement a professional faux pas. I got sick and tired of the precious, delicate, busy, hard-working sound of this music. It sounded afraid: afraid to keep going, afraid to start up a beat, afraid to make a direct point, afraid to paint a clear and recurring melody on the canvas of silence.

Reich, Riley, and Glass, and even before them Cage and Feldman, brought a new kind of music with constant pulsations, clear melodies that didn’t fluctuate in volume from the first note to the last, music with a beat, sometimes a groove, bold music that could be loud all the way through or soft all the way through, music that would take a singular sound image and hammer away at it until you really got it. Memorable music. Music that didn’t give a shit whether its pitch constructs were all derived from the material in the first three measures. Music that appealed to how people hear, how their attention spans work, not music meant to be analyzed on the page for its ingenious transformation of pitch sets. Music that if it suddenly wanted to go into C major in measure 135 just suddenly went there, and if it wanted to turn atonal in measure 402, it could do that too. Music that sounded like it was made by composers who were unfettered and free, not by composers who were lining up to be the next successor to Schoenberg in the Great Line of Composers.

This is hardly a definition. It’s a feeling. If you’re tuned into it, you can tell in the first 15 seconds of a piece whether the composer “gets it” or not. Postclassical music can’t yet be defined positively, by where it’s going to, but only negatively, by where it’s escaped from. An awful lot of musicians involved in “contemporary music” are still addicted to that careful, precious feeling, that delicate al niente articulation, the florid interplay of dynamics, all the glue that holds the mercurial variety together. They look for the careful preparation and dissolution of climaxes in music, and are disgusted if it’s not there. The new music seems so unsubtle to them, embarrassingly frank, irritatingly continuous in its motoric beat or unvarying dynamic, insufficiently macho in its refusal to climax. Just this week I played Daniel Lentz, John Luther Adams, and Janice Giteck for some grad music students who were horrified by the music’s unchangeability, its steady beat, its partly electronic timbres, its contentment to pursue one idea for up to 75 minutes. (“Where is the line between classical and pop?,” yelled one exasperated hater of Lentz. “There ISN’T any line!,” I shouted back.)

Well, screw ’em, and screw everyone who wants to hold onto the precious, mercurial, climax-oriented aesthetic. I prefer postclassical music: it dances, it sings, it rags, it quotes ironically, it muses, it abides, it hammers away, it sits in one place when it wants, it takes sharp left turns, it paints in bold, hard-edged strokes. It burns itself into your ear and your brain. It isn’t trying to worm its way into the history books or win awards from prestigious committees of university professors. And (because of that) it isn’t afraid.

So that’s my criterion. If music makes my flesh crawl and my brow furrow, and impresses me with the deadly hard work that went into it and the weight of tradition it carries along with it, it’s modernist. If it makes my ears perk up and my shoulders relax, and brings a smile to my face, it’s postclassical.

All right, here’s the repertoire list for postclassical music for multiple pianos, as well as I’ve been able to piece it together – and longer than I expected to find, I must say, given the inconvenient nature of the medium. There’s a temptation to broaden the category, since so many fine works for multiple pianos remain little known. For instance, Wallingford Riegger’s Variations for two pianos is among his best works, and Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, based on fragments of Bach’s last, unfinished fugue, has been a tremendous influence on me, partly the inspiration for my own I’itoi Variations. It’s curious, in fact, how common theme and variations is in the double-piano literature. But I’ll stick to postclassical, and some of those listed, like Reich’s Piano Phase and Feldman’s Piece for Four Pianos, are seminal works of the era. The number in parentheses is the number of pianos required, of course.

The Postclassical Multiple Piano List

Morton Feldman: Two Pianos (2)

– Piece for Four Pianos (4)

– Vertical Thoughts I (2)

– Five Pianos (5)

John Cage: Winter Music (any number)

Steve Reich: Piano Phase (2)

– Six Pianos (6)

Daniele Lombardi: Sinfonia No 1 (21)

– Sinfonia No. 2 (21)

– Threnodia (21)

Harold Budd, Daniel Lentz, and Ruben Garcia: Pulse/Pause/Retreat (3)

– La Muchacha de los Suenos Dorados (3)

– Iris (3)

– Somos Tres (3)

– The Messenger (3)

– La Casa Bruja (3)

Simeon ten Holt: Meandres (4)

– Canto Ostinato (4)

– Horizon (4)

– Shadow nor Prey (2)

James Tenney: Chromatic Canon (2)

– Bridge (2 pianos, four players)

– Flocking (2 pianos, four players)

Ernesto Martinez: Tocatta [sic] (2)

– Mutaciones Basadas en el Preludio #1 de J.S. Bach (2)

– Adagio (2 electric pianos)

Eduardo Gonzalez: Casi Satie Pero con Adorno (2)

– Estudio Micro-Arritmico #1 (2)

Meredith Monk: Ellis Island (2)

– Phantom Waltz (2)

William Duckworth: Binary Images (2)

– Forty Changes (2)

Ingram Marshall: Five Easy Pieces (2)

Anthony Braxton: Composition No. 95 (2)

Frederic Rzewski: Night Crossing with Fisherman (2)

David Borden: Double Portrait (2)

Stefan Wolpe: Enactments (3)

Paul Bowles: Night Waltz (2)

Michael Byron: Evaporated Pleasure (2)

Terry Riley: Cinco de Mayo (2)

Kevin Volans: Cicada (2)

Jack Vees: Piano Trio (Hulk Smash) (2 pianos, 3 players)

Robert Ashley: Viva’s Boy (2)

John McGuire: 48 Variations for Two Pianos (2)

“Blue” Gene Tyranny: The Decertified Highway of Dreams (2)

Larry Polansky: ivt (2)

Wendy Mae Chambers: Ten Grand (10)

Peter Gena: 100 Fingers (10 players, I forget how many pianos)

David Lang: Orpheus Over and Under (2)

Galen Brown: Distance Over Time (2)

Julius Eastman: Evil Nigger* (4)

– Gay Guerrilla (4)

– Crazy Nigger* (4)

Kyle Gann: Long Night (3)

– I’itoi Variations (2)

*Perhaps I’d better hasten to explain the titles of the late Julius Eastman (1940-90). Eastman was a gay African-American, and his titles are quite deliberate strategies to appropriate to himself and neutralize, or even exalt, words that normally have negative connotations. Since the American economy was built on the manual labor of those at the bottom, he defined “nigger” as “that which is fundamental,” and he intended to glorify, through his titles, those who have been demeaned as “niggers.” He was controversial, but the pieces are fantastic.

In addition, there’s an entire repertoire performed by the piano sextet Pianocircus, which can be looked up at their website. I don’t know much of the music there, how many of the pieces are arrangements, or how many are for fewer than six pianos. Suggested additions will be entertained.

I rarely get to sit and talk endlessly about my own music, and I love doing it. You maybe don’t want to hear about it, but if you do, composer Daniel Varela’s interview with me just came online at Perfect Sound Forever magazine (“the online music magazine with warped perspectives”). And I have so much insight into myself!

I have to wonder how often someone reads my blog and then goes back later and reads the same entry again. It must be disconcerting. Because I’ll finish a blog entry, go onto Arts Journal and read it, then go back and fiddle with it, correcting typos, changing a word here and there, even adding or subtracting sentences. I get such a different sense of how the essay looks on the internet than how it looks in my word processor that I almost always change something, even a day or two later. Quote me, and someone looking up the quote may find something else. It’s one of those real internet luxuries to be able to write something, see how it looks to the reader (assuming the reader has the same browser you do, of course), and then go back and keep making adjustments in coming days to get it perfect.

Back in the old days of newsprint (God bless ’em), it took some trial and error to gauge how your writing would look on a page. I was a little embarrassed by the look of my first few Village Voice columns until I adjusted my writing to the new format.

You have to write a little differently depending on the visual aspect of the venue.

Font, column width, art size, and surrounding advertisements and articles have an effect on what you feel you can intelligently get across.

For instance, the Times has narrow columns, and I never quite get used to their tendency toward brief little one-to-three-sentence paragraphs.

I hate to end a paragraph before the eighth sentence at least.

It drives me nuts.

But not as nuts as it must drive someone to e-mail a friend, “That idiot Kyle Gann on his blog today said that Philip Glass was a better composer than Luciano Berio,” and the friend logs on and looks, and e-mails back, “No, that’s not what he said at all.”

My new-music-obsessed friend Anthony Creamer alerts me to a very articulate interview with composer Gavin Bryars, who has written some wonderful music, courtesy of the BBC. (I especially recommend a gorgeous Bryars postminimalist ensemble piece called Four Elements, recorded on ECM.) Bryars echoes my point about fulfillment coming more from the act of composing than from the performance. He also feels, though, as I do, more comfortable being onstage playing in the performance than sitting helplessly in the audience as a new work is played. I like his reason:

Interviewer: Is this so there will be a little piece of yourself in the music?

Bryars: No, it’s so I’ll have something to do with my hands besides bite my fingernails.

Free improvisation maven Lang Thompson quoted my comments about improvisation on The Funhouse blog, and I can’t resist quoting his approving response, especially because it comes from a very different viewpoint. I feel somewhat vindicated that a fellow critic who follows the scene much more closely than I do has pretty much the same perception, even if his take on it is less negative than mine:

Now I’m undoubtedly more attracted to free improv than Gann both as an artistic matter (that rock ‘n’ roll clatter rewritten) and as pure temperament, but think he’s nailed a major problem with the practice (though perhaps not the underlying aesthetic). So much free improv has attempted a kind of purity where no obvious styles intrude that the whole thing feels static; it’s no accident that so many critics have noted free improv tends to fall into either insect twitter or waterfall roar. Frequently there is no feeling that the players listen to each other despite what many reviewers claim (“listening to each other” seems to be a common motif in Cadence reviews). Plugging up their ears or maybe just layering separate recordings could produce nearly the same results. Just look at free improvers’ willingness to play with anybody in any context; I doubt you could convince me this is a bad thing but it does indicate a certain conceptual vagueness. Worse is that the results tend to sound so similar no matter what nationalities, background or even date are involved. A French and American ensemble from 1982 doesn’t sound much different from a German and British one from 1997.

The world is moving so fast today, isn’t it? Now that we the have the internet, the moment something is discovered it can be flashed around the world. We’re all in a state of instant communication, and the time lag of assimilation of creative work has been reduced to less than a day.

The flat, clichèd tone of that paragraph may clue you in to its high bullshit quotient. On the contrary, we grow musically more and more behind the times. My friends and I spend lots of time trying to bring into the world music that was made 20, even 30 years ago. I’m transcribing Dennis Johnson’s November, the two-hour 1959 piano piece that was the inspiration for La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. I’ve just transferred to CD some rare recordings of Julius Eastman’s works for multiple pianos from a 1981 concert; I’m sending them to Mary Jane Leach, who’s involved in a project trying to bring Eastman’s music back into circulation. My jazz pianist friend John Esposito is sitting on an archive of 1980s recordings of the jazz great Arthur Rhames, trying to get them released. Recordings of influential music by Rhys Chatham from the early 1980s just came out recently (on Table of the Elements, a label nobly devoted to preserving that era). Much of the most important music of the 1980s, despite a tremendous local impact at the time, remains buried, unavailable, and undigested today – and as for the 1990s, fuggidaboudit.

Luciano Berio wrote his Sinfonia in 1969, and by 1973 its Columbia recording with Bernstein had electrified the American new music world. Likewise, Steve Reich’s Drumming from 1969 hit the world the summer of 1974. I consider that period the peak of music’s speed of assimilation (unless, indeed, the peak really occurred in the 19th century, which I sometimes suspect). Since then everything has slowed to a trickle. At Oberlin in the ’70s we students were obsessed with music of the ’60s, but today’s academia hardly acknowledges any music after 1975. I matter-of-factly described Robert Ashley to a student as the greatest opera composer of the late 20th century, and our opera coach, overhearing me, was astonished: he had never heard the name. Nothing unusual about that, unfortunately.

And it’s not just that individual composers go unheralded. New conceptions of music get collectively developed (totalism’s multitempo ensemble structures, Ashley’s text-driven operas which have already given birth to offspring) without the subsequent generation ever learning that that’s already happened. One of my more inventive students created a video alter ego for himself in a music video, and was surprised to learn that someone named Laurie Anderson did the same thing over 15 years ago. Decades go by, one musical movement succeeds another – artrock, postminimalism, text opera, performance art, just intonation, spectral music, sampler collage, new complexity, free improvisation, ambient, illbient, totalism – and years after those movements have crested and begun to evolve into something else, students, faculty, and music lovers alike are still struggling with moral qualms over that scary 1960s phenomenon, minimalism. If the lag time for the acceptance and understanding of new music was 4 years in 1969, today I’d say it’s at least 25.

We seem to be settling into a corporate-dictated stasis, a world divided between a calcified classical (and even jazz) repertoire and “Golden Oldies.” Art continues to move forward, but the money collectors of the world have turned off the spigot on culture, and the amount of new work that drips through approaches zero asymptotically. I’m sitting here looking at thousands of CDs of music from the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s that no musical public is likely to catch up with in my lifetime. Internet, schminternet – it feels like the world is moving at a decelerating snail’s crawl.

One thing I love about writing this blog, I put information out into the world, and I get information back. [To tell you the truth, this is how and why critics gain authority, when they do – they send out their opinions into the world and see them come back all bruised and battered, and they learn by experience to send out better opinions, better protected. After some years, those opinions begin to accumulate powerful collective force from the fact that they are no longer just one person’s. Any critic who sticks to his own egotism and doesn’t learn from that input is a fool.]

In the case of my postclassical piano repertoire list, several people corrected inadvertent omissions. Devin Hurd pointed out that I had forgotten to include Giacinto Scelsi and Somei Satoh, so I added them in. Hurd also mentioned James Tenney’s rags, which I haven’t heard in years and don’t have copies of, and informed me about some piano music I was unaware of: Endless Shout by George Lewis, I and Thou by Barbara Monk Feldman, and Tara’s Love Will Melt the Sword by one of my favorite composers Janice Giteck. These all sound like excellent candidates, and I’d love to hear them. Hurd also reminded me of the “Hyper-Beatles” tributes commissioned by Aki Takahashi. I’d included two – Terry Riley’s The Walrus in Memoriam and Walter Zimmermann’s When I’m 84, and there are other worthy ones as well.

Sarah Cahill, pianist, fellow critic, and important West Coast radio personality, in her firm but charming way, chided me for not including more works using the inside of the piano, like Annea Lockwood’s Red Mesa and Ear-Walking Woman, and Lois Vierk’s To Stare Astonished at the Sea. “It’s important to acknowledge,” she writes, “that there’s more to the piano than the keyboard.” She’s right – consider them included. I was overly timid in what I thought would appeal to the student I was educating.

Composer Galen Brown boldly, and with every right, advocated as postclassical his own piano piece Ex Nihilo, of which the score and MP3 can be found from his website. I gave up trying to access the recording, but from the score it certainly seems to qualify. He also suggested a list for works for multiple pianos (Reich’s Piano Phase, David Lang’s Orpheus Over and Under, works by Feldman and David Borden, plus his own Distance Over Time). Since I’ve written pieces for two and three pianos myself, I’ll probably take up that suggestion.

Antonio Celaya advocated for Frederico Mompou’s transcendent Musica callada, and David Carter for the labyrinthine piano works of Kaikhosru Sorabji. I myself had considered adding in “all of the piano music of Erik Satie,” and I’m amenable to the Mompou and Sorabji causes as well. I have a little theoretical problem with calling them “postclassical,” though. I wouldn’t want the word to merely come to mean “good,” or “better than the classical music we’re all tired of,” or “written by eccentric outsiders whose time has finally come.” I want to think of postclassical not just as a terminological stick to beat classical music with, but as referring to a recognition on the part of the composer that the narrative, sonata-based conventions of the European common practice period were only conventions, after all, and that their moral force has come to an end. Thus I think of Cage as the earliest postclassical composer, and include all and only those who were tuned in to the great breaking away from tradition that happened in the 1960s. On the other hand, I do think of Satie as someone who thoroughly “saw through” the arbitrariness of European conceptions of form. Mompou remains a little close to impressionism, Sorabji to Europe’s mammoth contrapuntal ambitions, but both are striking spiritual predecessors. How about “protopostclassical”? “Postclassical before their time”? Overall, I feel too much energy is wasted in defending terminological purity, and it’s not an issue on which I would want to take a dogmatic stand. I do appreciate the input, and the list grows stronger and less solipsistic with each new suggestion.

Like John Cusack’s vinyl-obsessed character in the charming little film High Fidelity, I end up making a lot of lists, and for similar reasons – though my lists tend not to be “top five,” but more like “top hundred, in no particular order.” This week, for instance, a student pianist asked for some guidance in learning about recent piano repertoire, and so naturally with my Scorpio fanaticism I started obsessively pulling together a CD library of postclassical piano music. I’ll be damned if I was going to concoct a list of the approved 20th-century usual suspects: Boulez Third Sonata, Stockhausen Klavierstucke, Carter Night Fantasies, and so on. The official stuff is so ugly. I wanted her to be, not repelled by modern piano music, but seduced into it, and so I started to compile all the attractive pieces, the ones I love listening to over and over and even enjoy playing through.

There’s a hell of a lot of it. But still, it’s an interesting problem. In general, the late 20th/early 21st centuries are not a great era for piano music. A lot of my favorite composers haven’t written any solo piano music at all, and among many who have, their piano music is not their most convincing work. It’s difficult to write for solo, unaltered piano these days, in relentless competition with Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Debussy, Scriabin, et al. There are a few composers who have written for piano frequently, like Feldman, Peter Garland, William Duckworth, Walter Zimmermann, and myself, and, like Chopin, Frederic Rzewski has composed a mountain of piano music and little else. But I also found that an alarming percentage of recent piano works I’m crazy about are forbidding for pianists because of their extreme length. Larry Polansky’s Lonesome Road and Feldman’s Triadic Memories are each 90 minutes, Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes, Rzewski’s The People United, Otte’s The Book of Sounds, and Tom Johnson’s An Hour for Piano all an hour or more, and Violette’s Seventh Sonata a massive three hours. It’s as though the form of the brief piano piece is way too difficult to do anything distinctive with today, and composers can only do something interesting through scale and form.

Nevertheless, I made a list and I’m burning CDs, and I thought I might as well share the former with you, to suggest to someone out there that a large and very attractive repertoire of postclassical piano music does exist. I included only works that I truly find beautiful, and, since this is a Postclassical list, I left out any works from the European mainstream; no 12-tone music need apply, no matter how superb. Several of the hipper Europeans are included, however. Since the purpose of the list is to offer young pianists repertoire that they could reasonably acquire and play, I omit works for piano and electronics, as well as works for piano in altered tunings (the only ones I would mention are La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, Riley’s The Harp of New Albion, and Ben Johnston’s Suite for Microtonal Piano). I omit works for prepared piano, since the major ones are all by Cage anyway. No works for Disklavier or player piano. I include timings if I have them handy, partly to show you what a factor length has become.

In short, if I were going to curate a massive festival of Postclassical piano music, all live-performed and without special technology, this (in no particular order) is what I would start with:

The Postclassical Piano Repertoire List:

John Cage: In a Landscape

– Dream

– The Seasons

– Etudes Australes (three hours)

– One5

Morton Feldman: Piano (26′)

– Triadic Memories (80′-90′)

– Palais de Mari (30′)

– For Bunita Marcus (72′)

– loads of brief early works, of course

Frederic Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated (60′)

– De Profundis (30′)

– Four North American Ballads

– Fantasia

– Sonata

– Mayn Yingele

– Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier

– The Road (eight hours)

Terry Riley: The Heaven Ladder, Book 7

– The Walrus in Memoriam

Charlemagne Palestine: Strumming Music (hours)

– One + Two + Three Fifths in the Rhythm Three Against Two for Bösendorfer Piano (24′)

– Sliding Fifths (15′)

Giacinto Scelsi: Un Adieu (5′)

– Suite No. 8, Bot-Ba (26′)

– Suite No. 9 (18′)

– Suite No. 10 (34′)

– plus, presumably, all the other suites I don’t know yet

Christian Wolff: Preludes

– Bread and Roses (9′)

– Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida (13′)

Elodie Lauten: Variations on the Orange Cycle (24′)

– Adamantine Sonata

– Sonata Ordinaire

Peter Garland: Walk in Beauty (18′)

– Jornada del Muerto (28′)

– The Days Run Away (18′)

– Bright Angel Hermetic Bird (15′)

– A Song (22′)

– Two Persian Miniatures (4′)

– Nostalgia of the Southern Cross (4′)

John Adams: Phrygian Gates (26′)

– China Gates (5′)

William Duckworth: Time Curve Preludes (60′)

– Imaginary Dances (17′)

– Hand Dance

Giancarlo Cardini: Piano Sonata No. 1 (21′)

– Lento Trascolorare dal Verde al Rosso in un Tralco di Foglie Autunnali (10′)

– Una Notte d’Inverno (6′)

– Una Sera d’Autunno

Walter Zimmermann: Beginner’s Mind (65′)

– Wöstenwanderung (19′)

– Abgeschiedenheit (28′)

– Barn Snail Dance (2′)

– When I’m 84 (3′)

Claude Vivier: Pianoforte (9′)

– Shiraz (13′)

Bernadette Speach: When It Rains, Lleuve

– Angels in the Snow

Annea Lockwood: Red Mesa

– Ear-Walking Woman

Cornelius Cardew: Thaelmann Variations

– The Croppy Boy

– Father Murphy

– Four Principles on Ireland

Beth Anderson: Net Work (9′)

– Manos Inquietas

– Quilt Music

– Belgian Tango

– September Swale

– Rhode Island Swale

– Wallonian Waltz

Art Jarvinen: The Meaning of the Treat (9′)

– Serious Immobilities (24 hours, but a one-hour version exists)

Clarence Barlow: Cogluotobusisletmesi (30′)

– Des Nus Descendants Une Echelle

– Clair de l’Une Fois

– Pandora

– Bachanal (1′)

Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano (60 minutes on the dot)

– (and lots of austere piano pieces based on mathematical patterns)

Michael Jon Fink: Two Pieces for Piano Solo (4′)

– Piano Solo (5′)

Dennis Johnson: November (113′)

Maria de Alvear: En amor duro (50′)

Larry Polansky: Lonesome Road: The Crawford Variations (90′)

Harold Budd: Children on the Hill (20′)

“Blue” Gene Tyranny: Nocturne with and without Memory (11′)

Judith Sainte Croix: Kachina Piano Preludes

Donald Crockett: Pilgrimage (9′)

Paul Dresher: Blue Diamonds (18′)

Peter Gena: John Henry

Frank Abbinanti: Jenin

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz: Tirkiinistra

Cornelis de Bondt: Grand Hotel (37′)

Alvin Curran: For Cornelius

Jo Kondo: Sight Rhythmics

Lois Vierk: To Stare Astonished at the Sea

Wes York: Music for Strings

Mamoru Fujieda: Patterns of Plants

Robert Ashley: Van Cao’s Meditation

Hans Otte: The Book of Sounds (72′)

Phil Winsor: Dulcimer Dream (6′)

Andrew Violette: Piano Sonata No. 7 (three hours)

Somei Satoh: A Gate into the Stars (8′)

Stefan Wolpe: Form

– Form IV: Broken Sequences

Andrew Schulze: Dreams and Lullabies (22′)

Kyle Gann: Time Does Not Exist (15′)

– Private Dances (25′)

– Desert Sonata (20′)

– The Question Answer’d (4′)

– The Mercy of the Storm (12′)

In addition, here are some pieces I’ve heard, loved, and would have included on the CDs if I had recordings of them:

Stephen Scott: Departures

John Luther Adams: Among Red Mountains

Kirk Nurock: Four Imaginings

Bunita Marcus: Julia

Ingram Marshall: Authentic Presence

Dennis Kam: The Presocratics

Sidney Corbett: The Celestial Potato Fields

That’s many dozens of hours’ worth of good, varied, challenging but entirely accessible piano music. You may nudge me if I’ve forgotten something, or let me know if there’s something great I haven’t heard – but remember, this is a postclassical list, so examples in the modernist tradition will be dismissed with a contemptuous rolling of the eyes.

A million thanks, by the way, to Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, Gloria Cheng, Aki Takahashi, Ursula Oppens, Kathleen Supove, Vicki Ray, Hildegard Kleeb, Marianne Schroeder, Joshua Pierce, Ian Pace, Herbert Henck, and all the other pianists who champion postclassical music, and whose recordings and performances made this list possible. You’re saints.

Virgil Thomson liked to explain that artists become alcoholics more regularly than composers because composers’ moments of triumph come in public, at the performance, while artists get their triumphs at home alone, in the studio – and then drink. But he was wrong. There’s little triumphant about attending a performance of your music. The people you hoped would come don’t. The performance is rarely what you envisioned (although mine tonight was excellent). Audience reaction seems perversely skewed toward superficial thrills. If you’re being performed in New York City, your quiet moments will be drowned out by the rock band next door (even at Zankel Hall). People won’t know what to say afterward, and comments will be perfunctory and uninsightful.

No, composers’ moments of triumph come just the same as painters’, and any other artist’s: at home, alone, in the studio. That’s what you eventually learn: the great reward of being a composer is the thrillingly intense satisfaction of the process of composing itself when it’s going well. Everything else – performance, publishing, recording, awards, residencies, reviews – turns out to be a disappointment. That’s why envying any other artist’s life is so pointless.

I hope somone named Warren won’t mind my stealing something he said on the Skeptomai blog:

“Fighting terrorists with a military invasion is like trying to kill a bee by shooting its beehive with a shotgun.”

My Steinway baby grand is at a piano hospital for repairs to minor damage incurred in moving. A couple of weeks ago I got sick of not having a piano, and set up my 88-key MIDI controller with a sampler that has a pretty good piano sound, but I never have time to play anyway. I’d been feeling drained lately from being wrapped up in school committee work and running the music department. I was weary of sitting on committees, of arguing with the administration, handling student crises, doing departmental paperwork, and answering carping e-mails complaining about my politics or my blog.

Then Tuesday afternoon my 4:30 student cancelled, and by some miracle I didn’t have a school concert or event to attend that night. I came home and found a package in the mail from Tom Johnson, composer and one of my predecessors (before Greg Sandow) as new-music critic at the Village Voice. It contained, among other things, a score to An Hour for Piano, which has long been my favorite Tom Johnson piece. This is a very flat, 60-minute piece, quarter-note equals 59 all the way through, highly repetitive but in an irregular way, so that you never get to trust the sparkling 16-note grooves you settle into. It never deviates from the key of G, though some dissonant motives wash through from time to time. The pedal is held constantly, and 99 percent of the notes are in or just above the treble clef.

As best I could without a page turner, I played through the entire thing on my electric piano, nonstop. It was like meditating. It absolutely focused me, and school seemed a zillion miles away. By the time I played the final measures an hour later I was in a healthier and completely altered state of mind. Much piano music could have the same effect on the pianist, but if you’re playing a Beethoven sonata there are difficult parts and easier parts, and a continual change of scenery, so to speak. You have to go through a practice routine, isolate the tricky passages, and there’s a lot you memorize in the process. If you want to practice most modern music like Webern or Stefan Wolpe, there’s a different kind of mental work involved. But in An Hour for Piano there’s really nothing you can memorize because the returns of former figures are too unpredictable, and there’s almost no measure more or less difficult than another. The piece requires constant attention to the page, but requires little of your fingers aside from that they keep moving. It’s an amazing piece, and I don’t know of anything else like it. I made a copy to keep at school, and whenever I have 15 minutes to spare, I start playing it. Afterwards, I’m always refreshed, and the noise in my mind has been turned off for awhile.

Perhaps An Hour for Piano is the perfect paradigm for the postclassical instrumental piece. Much of the 18th-century music we cherish and put up with today was written for home performance, but our home life has changed. This piece fits into and enhances my daily life. It’s also masterfully written in an understated way, with ideas, motives, and note complexes that keep coming back again and again when you least expect them, like a symphony or novel delivered in a quiet deadpan voice, or an expert comic monologue. You could base a whole new school of composition on this 1973 piece, a new kind of meditation music quite different from Pauline Oliveros’s, and no one’s done it yet. Tom also sent me a compact disc of his Bonhoeffer-Oratorium, his two-hour oratorio on texts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Deutsche Bank Bauspar AG label. If An Hour for Piano is the Waldstein Sonata of the postclassical era, the Bonhoeffer-Oratorium is its Carmina Burana: the rhetorical cliches of choral music embraced and repeated until a kind of innocent and infectious joy accumulates. Tom proves, as others have, that it’s not so difficult to write great music: just set something beautiful in motion and then get out of the damn way.

You can order the score to An Hour for Piano from Tom’s publisher at the Editions 75 web page. And, if you play the piano, I recommend it. There’s also a Lovely Music recording of it by Frederic Rzewski, who does a wonderful job. I must say, though, that I’ve heard Tom play the piece himself, and while Rzewski plays with a subdued but taut intensity, I slightly preferred Tom’s own Cheshire Cat innocence.

Believe it or not, the expert Da Capo ensemble will play a piece of mine this coming Sunday at 7:30 in the Tap Room at the Knitting Factory in downtown Manhattan (74 Leonard Street, tickets $15/$10 students/seniors). The ostensibly all-Downtown program for this generally Uptown ensemble at this incorrigibly Downtown space looks something like this:

Frederic Rzewski, Coming Together

Derek Bermel, Coming Together

Kyle Gann, Hovenweep

David Lang, Thorn

John Mackey, Breakdown Tango

Dennis DeSantis, Make It. Stop.

And it’s described as “a rollicking, frolicking set of new works from the stomping grounds of downtown Manhattan.” Whoa! Well, to apply truth in advertising, Hovenweep is in my usual kind of languorous, depressive style, though it gets pretty loud at the end. I’ve never frolicked in my life. Rollicking, I don’t know about. I’ll have to check.

You can probably get more info at Da Capo’s web page.