The other night before his wonderful concert, pianist Emenuele Arciuli, who is a great advocate for American piano music and has published a book, Musica per Pianoforte negli Stati Uniti, told me and composer Martin Bresnick that in Europe he often has to defend American music, which is attacked by composers there as being superficial, commercial, and lacking in technique.

The next day, at New Music Box, web site of the American Music Center, composer Mara Gibson described how inspiring it was for her to study with German composer Helmut Lachenmann at Darmstadt:

Lachenmann vehemently told us (particularly the Americans, a.k.a. the “zombies”) to forget everything we had learned up to that point. He encouraged us to develop our own material independently of our teachers. He explained that we are part of a “North American syndrome” that potentially results in work without any “real artistic provocation, just frustrating and boring.” His musical outlook could be encapsulated in the following quote:

With conventional or unconventional sounds, the question is how to create a new, authentic musical situation. The problem isn’t to search for new sounds, but for a new way of listening, of perception. I don’t know if there are still new sounds, but what we need are new contexts.

Now, in response let me see if I can recreate, from memory, the line that is perennially used by those defending European high modernist music from American composers:

Wasn’t that debate over twenty years ago? Haven’t we yet reached the point at which we can celebrate the world’s musical styles in all their wonderful diversity? Can’t we just all get along?

It is time again, next fall, for me to teach my Analyzing Beethoven class, which I am always happy to do. But I have been threatening for years to make it a Late Beethoven class, and I am on the point of succumbing. Every time I’m frustrated at how little of the late music I get around to teaching. I always spend two weeks analyzing the Hammerklavier and at least a week on Op. 111, and we go quickly through the C#-minor Quartet and the Grosse Fuge. Maybe I can get through the Kyrie and Gloria of the Missa Solemnis, and one year I dawdled for quite awhile on the “Archduke” Trio. I use Beethoven as my sonata form class, and it takes weeks of early Beethoven to get through the sonata-allegro possibilities, the five types of slow-movement form, and so on. But next semester I’m determined to start with the “Archduke” and not listen to or analyze anything written before 1811. So, damn the Eroica and Appassionata, I’m going to get through all five of the late quartets and the last six sonatas if it kills us.

I started looking, though, at the list of works Beethoven wrote from 1811 to 1827, and I got fascinated by all the incidental pieces: the multitude of canons, the dozens of Irish and Scottish song arrangements, the little cantata for Princess Lobkowitz’s birthday, the funeral pieces for multiple trombones, the tritely conventional choral works and marches. I think students should know about those, and hear some of them, to flesh out their ideas of what even a great composer does with his time. When Beethoven’s English publisher complained that a folk song arrangement was too virtuosic, he politely wrote a new one, and when the publisher asked him to find some German, Venetian, Polish, Russian, Tyrolian, and Spanish folk songs for the collection, Beethoven didn’t write back, “I’m goddamned BEETHOVEN, you nitwit, and I’m working on the frickin’ MISSA SOLEMNIS, go find your own crappy folk songs!”, but rather cheerfully asked around and found just the items needed. Even the greatest composers have things to do, often for money, besides sitting around writing masterpieces and torturing their nephews. At the risk of once again diluting my late-masterpieces class, I think the students should know that.

I also swore that I wouldn’t teach a Beethoven course again until Jan Swafford’s Beethoven biography appears in print, and happily it is scheduled for availability in early August. At 992 pages, it’s a hefty prospective sidebar for a theory class, but judging from Jan’s magnificent Ives and Brahms biographies, I expect it to be far more astute and readable than any other I’ve read. (Even freshmen found the Maynard Solomon biography psychologically obtuse.) But I’ve been looking through the Barry Cooper biography, too, which is shorter and entirely serviceable as a detailed record of all the compositions, as well as being extremely well-documented in its revisionism. Someday, perhaps, I will teach my intensive seminar on every aspect of the late quartets and piano sonatas – I guess I’ve really got a graduate-level seminar in mind – but I’m getting there by stages.

In addition to Emanuele Arciuli playing my Earth-Preserving Chant tomorrow evening in New York City, and my recent Helsinki premiere, this Saturday Nicolas Horvath is playing my piano piece Going to Bed: Homage to Philip Glass in Kiev, at the Night of Minimal Piano #2. I’ve been noticing for awhile, from my Hostmonster statistics, that the Ukraine is regularly in the top rankings of countries from which my web site gets hits; this week it’s fourth, behind the U.S., Lithuania, and the U.K., in that order. For a long time Romania was near the top, but it’s lately slipped down to 13th, right after China, Australia, and Turkey. Why are the Ukrainians and Lithuanians paying so much more attention to me than, say, people in countries I’ve visited, like Holland, Poland, and Serbia? I can’t imagine. I never hear from any of these people. And while my microtonality pages tend to be visited more than the rest of my web site, and “Venus” from The Planets is generally the top download, the rest of the mp3s and pages vary widely from week to week in popularity. Aside from the twenty or so people who comment on this blog, I feel rather ignored, but in odd places around the globe people are silently checking me out. Crazy.

Two new PDF scores went up on my website this week. One is not a terribly new piece: Mystic Chords (2012), which I’ve written about here before, and which consists entirely of quarter-notes with a different tempo marking on each beat. I had been waiting on putting up the score until I revised the opening, which I have now done. So there’s a new recording as well, and I’m much happier with it. As often happens with mp3s, my computer keeps going back to the old mp3 when I click on it, and no amount of reloading has yet succeeded in bringing the new recording up; but I’ve been successful when trying from other computers. Presumably you will be too.

The other, new piece is a suite of five brief movements for flute, clarinet, trumpet, vibraphone, piano, and string trio called Catskill Set. It started out as a song cycle on poems by someone who, as it turned out, had no interest in song cycles, and so I followed Ives’s example by rearranging it for instrumental ensemble and calling it a “set.” It’s been good for me, lately, I think, to learn to reuse earlier materials in new pieces; I can more easily see how Ives developed the complexity of his style by adding on new layers to simpler pieces he’d written before. My erstwhile terror of repeating myself was a little exaggerated. I enjoyed (re)writing the piece, it’s a little different for me, more linear and imagistic, and perhaps someone will be moved to play it. I’ve got no commissions or performances pending, just composing for pleasure. And geographically I’ve finally moved from all the desert-themed titles of my youth to admitting that I’m pretty well ensconced in the Hudson Valley.

Awhile back I tried to get my friend at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel interested in buying all my scores for the archive there. I promised I’d send him the original PDFs, not just copies. He looked at me a long time.

Wow: famous Japanese composer I’d never heard of admits his music was ghostwritten. I sometimes wish I could claim that my music was ghostwritten, but I’m afraid I must accept responsibility for every note.

UPDATE: Actually, subsequent reading about this has made me think that the real scandal is that this patent mediocrity was ever considered “the Beethoven of Japan” – showing that compositional celebrity is just as uncorrelated to talent or achievement in Japan as it is here.

A week from tonight, Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli (pictured) will play my piece Earth-Preserving Chant at a 7:00 concert at Columbia University’s Italian Academy, 1161 Amsterdam Ave. between 116th and 118th. The Hungarian/American program includes works all by my kind of guys: Haydn, Bartok, Liszt, John Adams (Phrygian Gates), Martin Bresnick (Ishi’s Song), and my piece, which Emanuele commissioned. The day he first wrote me, I had just been reading about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and was pretty despondent about the projected fate of the human race and its ability to relate sanely to its environment. Emanuele asked me for a piece with a Native American subtext, and a kind of musical prayer for the earth flashed into my ear – I started composing almost immediately. Earth-Preserving Chant is a metaphor for husbanding one’s resources: it all takes place over repetitions of only three drone dyads in the bass (F-C, F#-B, G-Eb), and introduces new material only a little at a time, returning over and over to the accumulating prayer-like cadential formulae with which it opens. The dynamic is fundamentally pp and should never exceed mp. I’d like to think it will make a nice companion piece with Martin’s fabulous, and similarly themed, Ishi’s Song. This is the East Coast premiere.

I hope that the music world has been focusing plenty of attention on Sarah Cahill’s recent concert at San Quentin of works Henry Cowell wrote while he was incarcerated there. The more I read about it, the more historic it sounds, not only in terms of an understanding of Cowell’s life, but also in terms of touching the musically talented inmates held there now. Apparently there’s a long tradition of music as an outlet for prisoners there, Cowell being only the most celebrated (if that is the proper word yet) example.

Minimalists in the news: The Society for Minimalist Music now has a Facebook page, where the Society’s events will be publicized along with various performances and analyses of minimalist music. (I am on Facebook under an assumed name, so you won’t know me when you see me there.) The buzz at the moment is about Tom Johnson’s series of radio programs about composers of his generation, Music by My Friends. Not mentioned on the Facebook page yet, though it should be, is a festival this weekend at Wright State University, “Steve Reich and the Heritage of Minimalism.”

Juhani Nuorvala tells me that my Finnish debut, his playing of Fugitive Objects, went well. But he adds, “the problem with these microtonal concerts is that the intervals are so small there’s never enough time for a decent drink.”

(Sigh.)

I find out too late to make the trip, but Juhani Nuorvala informs me that he’s playing my retuned keyboard piece Fugitive Objects on a program of experimental music in Helsinki tomorrow. There’s also music by Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Roger Smalley, Maija Hynninen, Timo Tuhkanen, and others, plus a celebration of Alvin Lucier that extends through the 26th. Helsinki, of course, will be the site of the 2015 minimalism conference, and I’m much looking forward to being there myself in a year and a half.

Pardon a little self-indulgence, but wow, what a great gig I had in Buffalo today. It was a Gann/Ives program at the Unitarian Universalist Church; Paula McGirr sang my song “Faith” (which she’d sung 25 years earlier) and Ives’s “Serenity,” and Daniel Bassin conducted The Unanswered Question and my Transcendental Sonnets, with the UUCB Choir and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic. TS was a stretch for the choir, but they sang their hearts out, were totally focused, the momentum grew with each movement, and it was one of those occasions in which I was touched deep down by the emotionality of my own music. One thing I loved was that the Buffalo News critic said in an advance article that the piece might remind listeners of Benjamin Britten. I’m proud of the fact that I can use ostinatos of seven against eleven going out of phase, quintuplet polyrhythms, postminimalist structures of tritone-related harmonies, and still pass as a conservative. And quite a few singers told me afterward what I’m used to hearing from performers: “At first I thought the music was impossible and you were asking too much from us, but then I suddenly got a feel for how to do it.”

I have two public gigs this month. The first is this Sunday, Jan. 12, at 2, when I will appear on a panel at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum called “John Cage and the Contemporary Cultural Landscape,” being presented in connection with an art exhibit on the theme of silence. I appear to be the only musicologist, along with featured artists Xaviera Simmons and Simon Blackmore, and Fluxus curator Jon Hendricks. The Aldrich is at 258 Main Street in Ridgefield, CT.

The more ego-gratifying event will be a performance of my Transcendental Sonnets the following Sunday, Jan. 19, also at 2 PM. Dan Bassin, who graduated from Bard’s master’s conducting program and who now directs the U. of Buffalo orchestra, will conduct the UUCB Choir and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, 695 Elmwood Avenue. It’s only the second performance with full orchestral accompaniment, the first having been the Indianapolis premiere in 2002. The Transcendentalists having broken off from the Unitarians, I like to think of this as something of a rapprochement.

Make sure you don’t miss David First’s cosmic and bumptiously entertaining article “The Entertainer” that went up on New Music Box today. Along with his own personal view of music history, it’s a plea for composers to start making music that actually heals people and makes life better, a return to the Renaissance concept of music as magic. As someone who’s followed David’s career closely for a quarter-century, I can attest that this is an endpoint he’s been visibly and aurally heading towards for decades. And I’m very sympathetic. It was reading about the astrological healing music of the 15th-century Marsilio Ficino that led me to writing The Planets, and I have bought and tried out Chinese healing CDs that are supposed to lower your blood pressure, balance yin and yang, and stuff like that. But in my own music I’ve always been content with metaphor, ambience, and suggestion; David’s actually hoping to rearrange your molecules. Somebody’s gotta try it.

UPDATE: Also, make sure you listen to the drone piece clickable at the top of the article. It made very cool interactions with my tinnitus, seeming to draw my usual drone pitches into it and make them go in and out, neutralizing them at times. It’s the first time I’ve ever noticed my tinnitus while listening to music and could actually enjoy it.

From my minimalism seminar, I received analysis papers on Reich’s Double Sextet, Dan Becker’s Gridlock, Rzewski’s Coming Together, Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Fratres, Laurie Spiegel, and Mikel Rouse’s Dennis Cleveland. My 20th/21st-century history class yielded papers on Ives; Laurie Anderson; Julius Eastman (an analysis of Evil Nigger); a comparison of Emeralds, Eliane Radigue, and La Monte Young as drone groups/composers; Steve Reich (by a kid who had sworn he had no interest in minimalism); Cage as postmodernist; Henry Flynt and Milton Babbitt compared (!); and text usage in Schoenberg, Berio, and Ashley. I have certainly taught my share of Beethoven, 19th-century, and Renaissance counterpoint classes, but I spent this semester doing what I spent my life training to do, which is an opportunity not to be sneezed at.

It is instructive and often gratifying to see what my students choose to write about, for I give them wide latitude. That their choices show evidence of my influence is rarely the correct assumption. When I started to bring up Becker’s Gridlock, the student who wrote that paper instantly begged me not to analyze the piece in class, because he had his heart set on writing his final paper about it. The violinist who wrote about Coming Together had played in it many times before taking my class. Henry Flynt was not someone I had thought of mentioning. Two students in the history class brought up Julius Eastman before I did, and regaled me with the story of how he took off a man’s clothes during a performance of Cage’s Songbooks; I enjoyed responding, “Yeah, I was there.” Some of them harbor their own obsessions with exactly the history of music I’m most involved with, and I can’t always tell how much they connect me with it. It is certainly reassuring, though, to see young people independently attaching tremendous importance to the same things that were important to me.