All right, it looks like, once again, the fate of postclassical music rests in my hands. So gather for the official announcement:

The 2014 John Cage Award ($50,000) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has been given to Phill Niblock.

Phill Niblock (b. 1933) started as a conceptualist filmmaker and, untrained as a composer, began making musical scores for his films based on charts of pitch frequencies in cycles per second. In so doing he pioneered the use of small pitch complexes and very slow glissandos (pitch slides) often moving gradually between extreme consonance and extreme dissonance. For example, A Trombone Piece (1977) employs only the following frequencies, appearing in all combinations: 55, 57, 59, and 61 in one octave, 110, 113, 116, 119, and 121 in the next, and 220, 224, 228, and 232 in the highest octave. Rich in acoustic phenomena and almost imperceptibly slow metamorphoses, Niblock’s music sometimes involves the use of live performers moving around the audience and playing along with loudly amplified prerecorded drones. In recent years he has written, in similarly austere terms, for multiple orchestras, with great effect. Ever since his early recording Nothing to Look At, Just a Record, his titles have tended to be drily descriptive, but he has been a major influence on Downtown composers, such as Band of Susans, David First, Lois Vierk, and Glenn Branca, since the 1960s. Pieces available on commercial recording include Five More String Quartets, Held Tones, Hurdy Hurry (especially recommended), A Y U aka “As Yet Untitled,” Yam Almost May, A Third Trombone, Four Full Flutes, Disseminate Ostrava, and many others. (Read my 1999 Village Voice article on Niblock, “Master of the Slow Surprise.” No recordings are given here only because the acoustic phenomena in Niblock’s music aren’t captured adequately in the mp3 format.)

The 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Award ($30,000) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has been given to Elodie Lauten.

Elodie Lauten (b. 1950), the daughter of jazz drummer Errol Parker, came from her native Paris to New York in 1972 where she sang female lead for a band called Flaming Youth and fell in with the circle around poet Allen Ginsburg. She studied with La Monte Young and improvised many of her early keyboard works, composing within what she called “universal correspondence systems”, in which correlations were drawn among Indian Vedic cosmologies, hexagrams of the Chinese I Ching, astrological signs, scales, keys, and rhythmic patterns. Much of her music is cloudy, meditative, and static in its textures, though she also has a more neoclassic mode marked by melodic lyricism grounded in ostinatos; either way a haunting mysticism is rarely absent. Starting with The Death of Don Juan (1987), a ground-breaking work in which she would set a pattern for Downtown opera by performing vocally and on a harp-like instrument of her own invention over electronic backgrounds, she drifted toward opera and oratorio, and many of her recent works are quite large, including Waking in New York (based on poems chosen for her to set by Ginsburg); Orfreo (an opera based on the suicided conceptual artist Ray Johnson); and Deus ex Machina, a 100-minute cycle for Baroque-instrument ensemble and singers. (Read my 2001 Village Voice article on Lauten, “East Village Buddha.”) Listen to movement 1 of Lauten’s Variations on the Orange Cycle; “Jumping the Gun on the Sun” from Waking in New York; and “The Exotic World of Speed and Beauty” from Deus ex Machina.

Pardon the lateness of this announcement, which became official two months ago and has gone almost unnoticed. Not since Meredith Monk’s 1995 MacArthur Award has any music award announcement made the world seem like such a benign place.

A keynote address I delivered in 2012 for the Nancarrow festival in London is going into Music Theory Online, the web journal of the Society for Music Theory. The above link [updated 3.25.14] was put up for my proof-reading convenience, and I don’t know how long it will remain before being whisked behind some paywall or something [it won’t be]. But it explicitly states that I own the copyright, so for now knock yourselves out. Readers of my Nancarrow book will not find anything particularly new here, though I do talk more, I think, about Nancarrow’s place in American music in general than I have elsewhere. But the prize is at the end: an mp3 of Nancarrow’s piano roll RR, one of his most elaborate finished works that isn’t one of the canonical (and I don’t mean canonic, I wish my students could grasp the difference) player piano studies.

As research for next fall’s Beethoven class, I just finished reading Barry Cooper’s Beethoven. Excellent book: crisp, intelligently revisionist, scrupulously factual, devoid of any retro sentimentality. I highly recommend it. I’m going to take exception to examples in it of the way we talk about classical music, and I don’t want to give the impression that I’m criticizing Cooper, or even disagreeing with him. He does something we all do, and it’s not necessarily a wrong thing to do, but I think we should think about the ramifications.

In his thumbnail analyses of myriad Beethoven works, even the most humble, Cooper is constantly drawing out interesting key relationships. For instance, the Op. 77 Fantasia, not a very characteristic work for Beethoven, nor in my opinion a very compelling one, opens in G minor and ends in B major, a surprisingly distant key – but Cooper notes that in the progression of tonalities (g, Bb, d, b, B), each tonic triad shares a pivot note with its predecessor (p. 202). Even when dealing with separate works, he finds key correspondences among the three Razumovsky quartets, and notes that the third of them begins with the melodic notes E and F, which are the keys of nos. 1 and 2 (p. 174). Nothing wrong with that, I do it myself. We all know to use that disturbing C# at the beginning of the Eroica as a pointer to the long passage in Db later in the movement, as a kind of structural resolution.

But the unacknowledged implication is that these seemingly coincidental correspondences, many of which no listener would ever notice (and in fact, Beethoven doesn’t even use those available pivot notes when modulating in the Fantasia) are subtle evidence of Beethoven’s mastery. The argument in the back of the classical-music mind seems to run something like this:

1. We all know that Beethoven was a great composer.

2. Great composers presumably know profound secrets of how to make music great.

3. One can find aurally unnoticeable long-range correspondences in Beethoven’s music.

4. Those correspondences must be Beethoven’s secrets, and therefore evidence of his greatness.

5. Ergo, Beethoven, even in his lesser works, was a great composer.

There’s nothing necessarily untrue about any of this, except that the argument begins with, as premise, the conclusion it sets out to prove. To make my point, I could do this very thing with the music of any number of recent composers. I could go through Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes, find an Eb and F# in one, then find it in another, and, with little more than an implied raised eyebrow pointed at the reader, silently plant the idea in the reader’s mind that that’s why Duckworth is a great composer. All that’s missing to complete the circle is the tacit premise accepted by the reader that Duckworth was a great composer. For that matter, consistently changing tonalities via pivot note is something I’ve sometimes done myself, most ambitiously in my chamber opera Cinderella’s Bad Magic – and without any idea that Beethoven had ever done such a thing.

Ergo, if Beethoven’s use of pivot tones to control a series of distant modulations is evidence of his greatness as a composer, my independent use of that identical technique must of necessity be evidence of my greatness as a composer as well. If you are inclined to accept that argument, then I’ll thank you to read no further. But it might be more accurate to say that, in a piece that wanders far from its opening tonality, having some kind of control over the tonal shifts is a stabilizing technique, and that Beethoven and I happened to chance on the same one – and it doesn’t prove “greatness” for either of us. For all we know, many, many pieces by second- and third-rate composers may well use the same device. Either Beethoven or I might have decided on a different one without our respective pieces suffering (or improving) for the change.

It is part of the classical-music mind that certain composers – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms – are assumed great from the beginning, and so everything found in their music must be evidence of that greatness. I once read some celebrated musician’s explanation that “the reason” Beethoven’s quartets are so great – the reason – was that he uses the entire range of each instrument. That sent a chill up my spine. Does my quartet music, I thought, use the entire range of each instrument? On the other hand, all I have to do in my next quartet is use the entire range of each instrument, and then it will be great! Right? But by knowing in advance that the composer is great, and assuming that every device we find will constitute evidence for that greatness, we musicologically heap more and more greatness over the decades on Mozart, Beethoven, & Co., and make it more and more impossible for current and future composers ever to live up to that exalted standard. Myriad other composers, in whom we could doubtless find similar devices, are denied that rank merely because they lack the initial presumption of greatness.

We poor composers are all, on some level, in competition with Beethoven, and it doesn’t help that so many music writers are willing to pile their thumbs on his side of the scale. His large-scale structural techniques, his harmonic correspondences, are of course of interest, as are those of many, many other composers. They are not automatically the reason for his greatness, which is more likely to reside in the surface elements that millions of listeners have responded to. I enjoyed the Eroica long before I learned about the C# (which I never thought was that shocking) and the ensuing passage in Db; if that passage was in D-natural, would I love it less? Every composer needs some kind of conceptual scaffolding to build a large piece upon, and composers have an interest in learning what kinds of scaffolding have worked for other composers. That doesn’t mean that the scaffolding makes the piece. Dull pieces have been written on sound theoretical principles, and fantastic ones on pure, whimsical inspiration.

Part of the problem, I think, is that critics and musicologists (Richard Taruskin being the outstanding exception) rarely know enough about composing and theory to distinguish a brilliant structure from a standard one, and either of those from an underlying design that the composer relied on conceptually but never expected to be perceived. What feeds into it is the rather maudlin adoration that classical-music types love to pour onto a few long-dead heros, against which more recent music will always be at a disadvantage. I could write this way about recent composers, too, but I wouldn’t have the reader’s ingrained sentimentality to back me up; to the classical music world, every article praising a recent composer is fundamentally a defense. We could level the playing field somewhat by not overinterpreting the evidence in only a few selected, invariably ancient cases. And maybe just by retiring the concept great.

 

Esa-Pekka Salonen has significantly influenced the field of composition? As a conductor, I presume they mean? Or perhaps someone more au courant than myself can offer a list of Salonen-influenced composers? Or a characterization of how a Salonen-influenced piece can be recognized? Nothing against the guy, but I thought he fairly recently quit conducting to devote himself to composing, and already he’s a major influence?

This comment on the Concord Sonata by John Kirkpatrick, included by him in a July 25, 1937, letter to Ives, is very perceptive, attests to the depth of Kirkpatrick’s aesthetic taste, and is well worth keeping in mind given the occasional charges of formlessness (unjustly) brought against the work:

I don’t know any long work that is so triumphantly sure in the instinctive justness of its timing – and it’s not a piece that has anything to do with nice balances, but the kind of rhapsodic outburst of strong substances that ordinarily makes for disappointing proportion as in Emanuel Bach or betrays the effort of adjustment as in Beethoven. But this treats its subjects in great free round shapes of music that move or plunge into each other with obvious spontaneity, and yet when one gets off at a distance and looks at it in perspective, there is no aspect of it that does not offer an ever fresh variety of interesting cross relation and beautifully significant proportion.

– Tom C. Owen, Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, pp. 256-7

In the flurry of information going around on Robert Ashley, I just learned that Dalkey Archives, publisher of Ashley’s libretto for Perfect Lives, has my introduction to the new edition available online. I’ve always been proud of it, and Bob told me at one point that he had read it over and over, because, he said, “it makes me feel good.” Plus, via Carson Cooman, here’s Ashley’s Lullaby for violin and piano written in 2011, from an Australian recording I hadn’t heard before. A fitting memorial and quite a surprise.

There’s been some discussion, a little of it uncharitable, about whether Ashley was as misunderstood and insufficiently recognized as some of his admirers claim. The obvious rejoinder to that is that he wrote his operas for television, and only one of them got produced and broadcast in that medium. The expense was too overwhelming. He was a visionary dreamer at a time when our culture was quickly losing its capacity to dream, and its desire to make dreams come true. Those of us who love his operas are sadly aware that we can’t completely experience them the way he envisioned them,

as a television series, with each episode having some meaning and humor in itself, but ultimately part of a larger something that only makes sense when you come to know it. Television devotees who have watched The Honeymooners for most of their lives finally come to know something that they wouldn’t know if they had only seen one episode. Same for Star Trek. These were my models. I have had to compromise the form of the presentation of my operas, because I was not able to get into television. But they are pure television. They are meant to be heard and seen by two people sitting on a couch, having a drink, occasionally a snack, occasionally going to the toilet, finally giving up and going to bed because of a hard day of work. They are meant to be seen many times. The details pile up, and finally there is a glimmer of the larger idea. This is my idea of opera.

I imagine some more advanced civilization, hundreds of years from now, coming back to Ashley’s operas and finally realizing them in their intended form, the way we revive Baroque opera in detailed technological splendor now.

And then there’s the perennial classical-music snob’s reaction to Ashley, so anticipatable that I reflexively brace for it: “But is that really opera?” A primeval fish watches a lizard learning to scramble around on the dry land, and asks, “But is that really swimming?” “Don’t you love opera enough,” I want to reply, “to get excited about the next step in its evolution?” Bob was a giant, come too late in the sense that the civilization he lived in had quit believing in progress, and too early in the sense that few people could see the future he imagined with such detailed foresight. Even so, I’ve been gratified by all the reports yesterday of how many people are deeply, deeply attached to his music.

 

It’s already speeding around Facebook, but Tom Hamilton wrote an hour ago to inform me that Robert Ashley died at 1:30 this afternoon. Around last June Bob got a confirmed diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver, and he lost 30 pounds over the summer. I went down to see him one time after my book on him was published; I had hoped to see him around last Christmas, but my books always get delayed, and by the time it came out I was lost in the semester’s maelstrom, and didn’t see him until after the diagnosis. His butt had become so bony he had to sit on a cushion. He wrote a gratifying inscription in my copy of the book, and we had a wonderful talk, which I think we both knew would be our last, although he urged me to come back again. He would have been 84 by the end of this month. He drank considerably all his life, and I suppose it finally caught up with him – though I told him, a man ought to have a right to decide what he’s going to die from, and if I thought I could drink vodka and tequila like a fish and live to 84 firing on all pistons like he was, I’d throw moderation to the winds. Good for him. I don’t begrudge him one drink. It was part of his persona and part of his music.

Having published a book on him fairly recently, I don’t know how much else I can say. But the reason for writing the book wasn’t because I thought I’d get much from it academically or monetarily, just for the opportunity to spend 28 hours interviewing the most scintillating personality I’ve ever known. He was so incredibly brilliant and original and alert and non-repetitive. His enthusiasm was unremitting and contagious. My every visit with him left me in a joyous, hyped-up mood, buoyed by his devil-may-care Aries courage. I’d ask a question about his music (I say this in the book), and he’d close his eyes and start telling a seemingly unrelated story, and I’d think maybe he was getting senile, but half an hour later he’d get around to answering my question, which needed a nested set of stories to be intelligible. I’d ask about a piece he wrote thirty years ago, and he’d sit down and play the chord progression it was based on on the piano. Once, out of the blue, I needed the chord structure for eL/Aficionado, and he reached over, picked up a piece of paper, and said, “Here it is.” For a wild creative type, he was the most organized person, inside and out, I’ve ever seen. He seemed to have total recall of his entire life and his entire output. He was bitter that he hadn’t gotten more attention for his astonishing creative achievements, but the bitterness only burst out in moments, and his sunny enthusiasm for everything in life would quickly crowd it out again. He was a fabulous role model.

And let it be set down, Bob was one of the most amazing composers of the 20th century, and the greatest genius of 20th-century opera. I don’t know how long it’s going to take the world to recognize that. And it hardly matters. He knew it. That the world was too stupid to keep up was not his problem.

UPDATE: I just learned that Bob apparently completed, before he died, a piece called Mixed Blessings, Indiana. It was one of a list of seven-syllable titles he had come up with many years ago for all future pieces, and he was particularly proud of it.

One of my visual-art colleagues asked me to come into his Art and Technology class today and lecture on John Cage, which I was looking forward to. I actually get to teach Cage very little; someone else at Bard has a course on Cage, and I am not really tempted to devote an entire semester to him, as I have done with Ives and Liszt and Beethoven and have considered doing with Bruckner or Partch or Ashley. But I can certainly fill a few hours talking about him off the top of my head.

Since it was Art and Technology, I started with the 1966 Everest recording of Variations IV, a collage of tapes of musical selections, lectures, conversations played in overlapping juxtaposition. About a minute in, it occurred to me that every student in the room had on his or her computer the software needed to replicate a very similar performance, and that they were not at all likely to be impressed. I tried, but I had no words with which to convey the vast gulf I had crossed over in high school between what the music world seemed like before I heard Variations IV and what it suddenly seemed like after, a half-hour later. I had, in fact, taken that record to play in my high school theory class, where the teacher thought Cage couldn’t possibly be serious and the other students suspected I was mad. That music came from so far out in left field that in 1972 I couldn’t convince any of my acquaintances it was really music. Then the sampler was invented, and many years later my current students were born, and they not only know how to make that music, they regularly hear weirder concoctions on YouTube.

And in fact, the first question I got was, “How did Cage make that? Did he have to cut up pieces of tape that had the music on it?” So I gave a little explanation of how, in the ’70s, we spliced bits of magnetic tape with razor blades and splicing blocks. Then I gave a demonstration of how to churn butter and can your own blackberry preserves. All right, I didn’t really, but it would have felt about the same. That the avant-garde of my youth would be commonplace to today’s students should hardly come as a surprise. But I’ve always got plenty of music they haven’t “caught up” with: Maderna, Ashley, Diamanda Galas, Charlemagne Palestine, and so forth. And in this case, the technology had leapfrogged over Variations IV, so that I struggled to make them imagine a world in which sampling hadn’t even been thought of as a concept yet.

Of course, it can also work the other way. I have a composition student who fills the titles of his pieces with deliberate misspellings and typographical oddities. I took no notice, and he tried to squeeze a compliment for his originality from me by half-apologizing for his roguish whimsicality. I just said, “Contemporary music titles used to be pretty sedate and objective. But then one day David Lang wrote an orchestra piece called Eating Living Monkeys, and since that day it’s been a full-scale competition to see who can come up with the most shocking title, even among people for whom everything else about the music is academic. I don’t even notice anymore.”

 

My surviving musical output (first half of it, anyway) from 1962:

I must have quickly decided that two-part counterpoint was too much work. I’d love to know, though, how seriously I meant that A-flat key signature in the bass. I’m sure I thought I should fill out the end of each line with rests rather than leave it blank. The piece ends with a V6-I cadence in whole notes. Seven years later, at age 13, I still didn’t know what a fugue was, but I embarked on a career in music with a tritone-filled imitation of the Bach inventions I’d been playing:

 And four years after that, at the end of high school, I had not only discovered quartal harmony, but attempted (and maybe succeeded) to exhaust its fertility in a single piece, titled “Impacts,” which I played at my senior recital:

Note the fractional meter, an Ives inheritance. You’ll notice I kept lengthening my name – afraid I’d be confused with all the other Kyle Ganns around. Were time travel possible, I would go back to Dallas, August 1969, and tell the young me, “Kyle, I know it looks like fun now, and you imagine that people will pay favorable attention someday, but don’t even get started.” I surely would.

 

Next month So Percussion is playing my Snake Dance No. 2 at Bard. They wanted the keyboard sampler part that I used to play when I joined in to perform the piece. I hadn’t seen the thing in years, and in fact it was not notated in full detail, because whenever I played in my own pieces I tended to improvise somewhat (like Mozart and Beethoven). So that meant I had to go through the randomly-organized manuscripts in my music cabinet to find and upgrade the sheets of paper they needed.

Going through my manuscripts is always a heavy psychological trip, a confrontation with the subconscious state of my youth. My paper files of scores, sketches, and various versions basically run up to 2000, after which most of the materials are on my computer. I ran across the repetitive little piano piece titled “Go Walking with Me,” in 8/8 meter with a curious key signature of simply an A-flat on the bass staff, that I wrote at age six. I found, once again, the brief, one-movement, tonal but pointlessly dissonant piano sonatas  I wrote in high school, with their evident influences of Copland, Bernstein, Schuman, Ruggles, and Ives. But this time around I also found a completed, seven-and-a-half-minute piece for voice and percussion ensemble that I have no memory of composing, dated 1987; and also a three-minute, finished piano piece from 1993 whose score just barely rings a bell. They are in my handwriting, with the same silly rhythmic reflexes I’ve always composed with, on my usual 40-stave manuscript paper flanked by sketches for pieces in my acknowledged output, and the vocal piece’s text is one of my favorite passages from Thoreau’s journals, so there’s no doubt that I wrote them – but how did I completely forget having done so?

The low point in my composing life, in terms of both quality and quantity, was around 1986-1990, when I was in my early 30s. In general I wrote better pieces, and made more astute musical decisions, in the early ’80s and even late ’70s, than I did during that post-graduate period. It was during my early years as music critic for the Village Voice, and the pressure of my suddenly heightened visibility was an intense distraction. I had also been introduced to microtonality by Ben Johnston, and I spent years filling notebooks with fractions and logarithms, trying to learn how to be musically intuitive in the post-12tet world. But none of that fully explains the weird detour I took. Before 1985 I was heavily into Harold Budd and Brian Eno, and exploring the avenues that minimalism had opened up. To this day, I know people who think my best piece is Long Night, from 1981. But for a few years, starting with I’itoi Variations (1985), I got back into dissonance and pitch complexity, using algorithms and tone rows (never 12-tone rows, but shorter or longer than that), and my music went through an ambitious, bombastic phase whose motivation is still a mystery to me. I was in search of some compositional system, and hadn’t yet learned that systemic thinking isn’t part of my personality. By 1992, microtonality was beginning to feel comfortable, and with the early movements of The Planets in 1994, I put all that grating spikiness behind me, returned to my minimalist roots, and I have never been tempted back. I’m sure that getting into therapy had a lot to do with my recovery. I highly recommend it.

I keep track of my composition students after they graduate, and it does usually seem that their momentum grinds to a halt in the first years after college. (I finished my doctorate in 1983.) Their lives become unstable, they work with this group of musicians and then that, they form an ensemble that doesn’t last, they have performance disasters, they get a brief chance to provide music for theater or dance, they take exhausting day jobs, and the clear trajectory they had as students wobbles badly. They lurch from one project and one style and one composing paradigm to another, with no clear continuity. Some of them leave music, while the others eventually gather themselves together and start up again in some new aesthetic place once their lives stabilize. Their experience, combined with my own, makes it seem patently absurd to me that the classical music world goes around looking for hotshot 23-year-old musical geniuses, assuming that compositional talent will always manifest in brash but competent works written in one’s twenties. The young composers I know fall apart in those years, as I did, and when their music finally begins to flower at age 35 or 40 , they are no longer considered “young composers,” and thus attractive for orchestral-commission careers. The entire profession seems based on clichéd misconceptions from history books, and an unwarranted assumption of a smooth evolutionary trajectory.

In any case, the forgotten pieces I found seemed worth saving. Both needed revision. The piano piece was too frantically virtuosic for the simplicity of expression it aimed for. The vocal/percussion piece was pretty and well-conceived but too austere, the vocal lines too slow and drawn out, the text too fragmentary, and it was a quick job to speed up the vocal lines and insert more of Thoreau’s text in the resulting gaps. Titled The Stream (Admonitions), I’m now delighted with it, and hope to hear it someday. The piano piece I called Untitled Phase Study. Perhaps revising abandoned works from more than two decades ago isn’t the best use of my time, but a weekend’s retouching did allow me to add two pieces to my worklist. And it must be one of the strangest features of a creative artist’s life that the history of your subconscious is stacked away in a cabinet somewhere, available to be pored over like a doctor examining a patient who is actually himself.

UPDATE: I should add that my lowered tolerance threshold toward my own minor and abandoned works is probably conditioned by the little-known Beethoven pieces I’ve been researching for next semester’s Beethoven class. I listened to twelve of his contredanses, some canons, and a couple early sets of variations this week, and so I’m thinking, what the hell, as long as you write an Appassionata and an Eroica, people are glad to listen whatever trivial tidbits you penned to kill time or make money.

 

Carson Cooman, Harvard organist, musical polymath, and extraordinarily prolific composer, wrote to me a couple of weeks ago after reading my blog and asked if I’d ever reconsidered writing something for organ. It was something we had talked about long ago. In the mid-1980s my friend Gerhard Stäbler, German political composer and also an organist, had told me if I ever wrote something for organ he’d play it. I had tried, but the medium defeated me several times. As much as I love a lot of music that uses drones, I had never come up with a good strategy for employing drones myself, and the organ’s capacity for endless ones tempted me too far, so that I was in danger of trying to write a piece that was basically all one chord.

But this time I had just been playing the end of my instrumental suite Catskill Set, which closes with a chord that I found attractively poignant: from the bottom up, and voiced only this way, Eb, Ab, Gb, Db, F. The great thing about getting commissions is that the moment someone expresses an interest in my writing something, a musical image springs into my mind and I can frequently hear the piece before they’ve finished asking the question. In this case I realized that that voicing would sound lovely on organ – large intervals, no seconds, with the smallest interval on top – and that by putting the lowest (and thus hardest-to-reach) note in the pedals I could weave chromatic counterpoint around a long series of such chords. Carson also gave the perfect invitation: “For some time,” he wrote, “I’ve imagined broadly in my mind a extremely nice Gannian organ piece in your quiet, beautiful, tranquil/gentle vein. No particularly significant dynamic or timbre change, but just happening.” He also cautioned me against the first-time organ composer’s amateur mistakes of trying to get too fancy with the pedal work and using all the instrument’s bells and whistles in one piece. Given my habitual style, they were hardly miscalculations I would tend toward, but it was a good recipe for writing an effective organ piece. In the next eight days, two of them snow days in which leaving the house was hardly an option, I sketched out a fifteen-minute piece escapistly titled Summer Serenade, and then spent another week revising it. For me, that’s very fast composing; for me to write so much in mid-semester and around class-teaching is just about unheard-of.

But I am as a snail compared to Carson. I sent him the score yesterday, and he, with his tireless and endlessly competent steamroller energy, recorded it last night. He noted that the copy I sent him had no dynamics, and that he presumed it was to be soft throughout. Actually, while I think mezzopiano on a little Baroque organ is probably better in general, I could also hear in my mind the charms of a very loud church organ, the latter preferably heard from several blocks away. And so, mirabile dictu, he recorded both versions for me. I strongly recommend that to listen to the soft version you plug your computer into a sound system with decent-sized speakers, because the bass drones are very low, inaudible through my computer speakers. And to listen to the loud version, I recommend that you turn it up really loud, leave your door or windows open, and stroll down to the end of the block.

(The entire music composition world will be unanimous in its mandate that I MUST DECIDE what dynamic the piece should be played at, and notate it as such – and the entire music composition world can go suck an egg, and I mean just one egg, which they can pass around, just as they all suck their received wisdom from the same teat.)

Spoilers follow, so the easily influenced might want to listen before reading further. Summer Serenade uses a form that I’ve been gravitating toward and using more explicitly lately, which I call “relenting minimalism.” That is, the bulk of the piece seems austerely static, but simmering beneath the surface is a melody which finally, after the static part climaxes in some way, emerges, mediating an apparent disjunction between modernist strangeness and tuneful “normalcy.” “Rewarding the listener,” if you will. More technically, there are nine chords in the piece, transposed to seven keys chromatically from D to Ab (the pedal notes), and they are fairly similar: either minor, dominant, or major seventh chords with various added notes. So the piece’s romantico-minimalist wall-of-sound stasis is more or less built up bebop-style through a series of modulating ii-V and ii-V-I progressions, with added notes contributing to the smooth voice-leading. I do delight in using familiar musical materials in unfamiliar contexts, another thing about my music that composers commonly object to. The PDF score is here.

And I’m very grateful to Carson for his advocacy and numerous superb talents.

 

This morning I was looking through the evaluation file of a colleague who’s up for tenure. He’s someone who uses abundant humor in his work, and one of the external evaluators, noting that humor is always risky, said something so striking that I wrote it down: “Humor in art is an audience divider; you are automatically paring your viewership to a core that shares your sense of humor and sensibility.”

Never thought of that before. I rather pride myself on some of my pieces being jokes, even if I think they’re rather deep and extended and insightful jokes, and would like to think that Ives, Satie, Haydn, and I have that in common. The pieces of mine I consider funny include several Disklavier pieces, such as Despotic Waltz, Petty Larceny, Tango da Chiesa, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, and Bud Ran Back Out; Scenario; the second movement of Echoes of Nothing; “Uranus” from The Planets; Scene from a Marriage; The Aardvarks’ Parade; and “The Goodbye Fugue” from Implausible Sketches. I’ve never heard the ending of the first movement of Sunken City fail to produce a general chuckle. I certainly feel that I have proudly turned my back on the pervasive contemporary aesthetic that deems it necessary to be so goddamned serious and solemn and angst-ridden all the time, that sees every recent Columbia comp graduate as in immediate competition with the late works of Beethoven (which, actually, are sometimes pretty witty). I tell my students that profundity is an occasional and unpredictable side effect, not something one can reliably hit by assiduously aiming at it. Like happiness, it shows up when one isn’t looking for it.

I hope it goes without saying that I do not at all consider my funny works lightweight or lacking in depth, any more than Ives’s TSIAJ (“This scherzo is a joke”) or Haydn’s “Joke” Quartet. But I suppose I should face the fact that people who don’t share my allegedly peculiar sense of humor (which I suspect is a good 90 percent of the population) aren’t going to appreciate the music either. I am haunted to this day by the audience reaction I received in 2007 in Hamburg to Petty Larceny, which is a collage entirely composed of quotations from the Beethoven sonatas. I think the piece rather cleverly demonstrates how Beethoven tended to gravitate toward certain chord progressions in certain keys, but when it ended I looked out at the audience and saw the most uniformly distraught and horrified group of faces I’ve ever seen in my life.

I liked what Nicholas Kristof wrote in the Times about academics using jargon to remove themselves from public relevance, and considered blogging it:

A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose. As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden in obscure journals — or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep readers at a distance.

Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian who writes for The New Yorker and is an exception to everything said here, noted the result: “a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.”

But today on his blog Paul Krugman stepped in, upped the ante, and as usual got to the real point:

But it’s really important to step away from the math and drop the jargon every once in a while, and not just as a public service. Trying to explain what you’re doing intuitively isn’t just for the proles; it’s an important way to check on yourself, to be sure that your story is at least halfway plausible.

And again:

I once talked to a theorist… who said that his criterion for serious economics was stuff that you can’t explain to your mother. I would say that if you can’t explain it to your mother, or at least to your non-economist friends, there’s a good chance that you yourself don’t really know what you’re doing.

All musicologists who feel compelled to add several pages on Lacan or Deleuze to the first chapter of your book/dissertation when they’re not really germane to your subject matter, please keep this in mind.