Holy shit. Critic Steve Smith of the Times has proclaimed Dennis Johnson’s November, which I reconstructed and Andrew Lee recorded on Irritable Hedgehog, as the number one best classical recording of 2013. Of all of the ventures I’ve taken on in my life, I would not have picked this one to garner as much public resonance as it’s received. I was talking to my good friend, radio personality, and songwriter extraordinaire David Garland about it recently, and pointed out that I had also resurrected Harold Budd’s Children on a Hill, which is incredibly beautiful. “Incredibly beautiful by itself is never enough,” he said. There’s something about Dennis Johnson being an underappreciated underdog, he thought, that made a story that resonates with people. It’s not just that November‘s a wonderful piece, but that it disappeared for fifty years, that it anticipated so many of aspects of minimalism, and that Dennis didn’t get credit for all that. The public (and critics) don’t just want great music, they want a stunning narrative to go with it. If I go down in history as primarily the resurrector of November, I will be very disappointed, but it will make a certain kind of sense.

[I should clarify that while Steve Smith does write for the Times, this particular list appeared in Time Out.]

I took my boxes, paper, empty wine bottles, and what have you to the local recycling place after Christmas. The overweight old guy who runs the plant directed me to put all my trash in the garbage because the huge recycling bins were too full – the amount of recyclables people had brought in were off-the-chart voluminous. Obviously there had been a ton of Christmas presents locally (and it is a fairly upscale neighborhood). I faintly joked, “Well, I guess the economy must not be too bad.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, “there’s nothing wrong with the economy. People who want to work are going to work, and those who don’t want to work aren’t going to, whatever the economy’s doing.”

I had no ready answer to this, and he pressed me: “Don’t you think that’s the case?”

Wanting to disagree with him without being rude, I finally said, “Well, I don’t want to work, and I’m working.”

He said, “Yeah, I’m working. And I’m going to be 74 next month!”

I have nothing to add to that that you can’t as easily supply yourself. Happy new year.

There are authors of true originality in whom the least boldness offends because they have not first flattered the tastes of the public and have not served it the commonplaces which it is used to; it was in the same way that Swann roused M. Verdurin’s indignation. In Swann’s case as in theirs, it was the novelty of his language that convinced one of the darkness of his intentions.
– Proust, Swann’s Way

The semester never rounds off to an end; it unravels. At some point you realize you’ve lost your students’ attention; their roommates have scheduled their ride home during your final class in which you were going to sum everything up, or else they’re skipping in favor of the graduation barbecue and their summer job; their final paper topics are not what you’d hoped, revealing that they weren’t on the same wavelength as you after all; a couple of kids, sometimes the most eloquent, freak out or overdose and disappear from class; you yourself are too harried by student concerts and conferences to prepare an adequate lecture; hasty requests for incompletes are e-mailed by young scholars whom you will not see again. And so in the penultimate week you quit kidding yourself and start closing up shop, shedding your expectations for even the most formerly gratifying semester as if it were an alcoholic houseguest who was so charming earlier in the evening, but now must just be trundled off out of sight as discreetly and safely as possible, and in the last moments only you and a couple of colleagues are left to stare at each other sardonically as the whole thing fizzles.

Over at New Music Box, Frank Oteri, back from his world travels, finally weighs in with his own impression of the ISCM festival in Vienna. He emphasizes (and possibly exaggerates) my slender role there, and says very nice things about me, and I’m flattered. He writes, however, that some people “had their feathers ruffled” by me, and I’m a little sensitive these days about getting trapped in the feather-ruffling meta-narrative. I sometimes think people get shocked when I open my mouth because they’re trained to think that’s the proper response. I used to occasionally ruffle some feathers, and I’m proud that I did – much prouder than had I been some high-falutin’ whore for the status quo – but I’d rather emphasize that it’s been many years since I attended an event with any intent of antagonizing anyone. In the ISCM case, several other people equally ruffled feathers, and many people present expressed agreement with even the most radical things I’d said. The scholars who brought me in, Christian Utz and Nina Polaschegg, seemed to intend me to play a certain role, which I played, as did Sandeep Bhagwati, who was likewise calculated to express a non-Eurocentric viewpoint. It would be far more accurate to say that Christian and Nina ruffled some feathers by inviting me and Sandeep (and some other non-Eurocentrics) into this heavily Germanic and conventional context. In addition, a draft of my paper was published, before I arrived, in the accompanying Osterreichische Musik Zeitschrift, so people knew exactly what I was going to say before my flight touched ground in Vienna. Someone on the panel even quoted a line of mine from that publication that I had omitted when I gave the talk. In other words, I pretty much said what my hosts requested I say, and certainly surprised no one.

I just don’t want people thinking I show up at events and start shouting at people and kicking over the potted plants and insulting my hosts and making contradictions for contradiction’s sake. At this point in my life I attend these events for the pleasure of getting a vacation to someplace exotic, or else for money. I am who I am, I’ve had the experiences I’ve had, and I’m through trying to prove anything. Music composition is such a warped world these last few decades, that it’s easy to get some composers all riled up just by telling the simple truth. (Also, I admit, I tend to say things clearly, and without the accustomed obfuscations and academic qualifications – but that’s my journalistic training, and I refuse to lose it. There are a lot of scholars who’d piss you off if you could tell what the hell they were talking about.) So, yes, a lot of composers these days are resentful about what the world has become*, and deeply irritated by the fact that people like me exist, who describe the world as it is – and my presence, genial and mild-spoken as I am, might indeed ruffle their feathers. But the only way I could prevent that would be to stay home.

*Or, more likely, resent that the world never became what their delusional educations taught them it ought to become.

UPDATE: Corey Dargel comments on Frank’s article with a wonderful takedown of what he calls “Damnstadt”: “The opposite of ‘popular’ is not ‘inscrutable,’ and the opposite of ‘muzak’ is not ‘etudes.'” That’s feather-ruffling, if you needed a comparison example, and well done, too.

FURTHER UPDATE: Alex Ross says I was merely making waves. I’m always happy to make waves.

Composer Martin Bresnick gave a composers’ forum at Bard tonight that was absolutely fabulous. He played recordings of the most compelling music I’d yet heard of his – Every Thing Must Go for sax quartet, Prayers Remain Forever for cello and piano, Ishi’s Song for piano, and some faculty played his *** for clarinet, viola, and piano – and his manner of explaining his music was understated, humble, yet inspiring. When someone commented with surprise on the simplicity of his recent pieces, he replied, “I don’t write ‘modern music.’ I write my own music,” and I silently thought, “Yes! Yes! Yes! This is exactly what our students need to hear!” It renewed my faith in the value of bringing composers to talk to students.

But what moves me to write is a story my colleague John Halle afterward told me he’d heard about the composer Ben Weber. Maybe someone can confirm it. Weber (1916-1979) was an American twelve-tone composer who managed to make the technique sound energetic and jaunty; I particularly admire his Piano Concerto, and he seems all but forgotten today, partly because he worked as a copyist rather than in academia. So the story was, apparently Aaron Copland [or apparently Virgil Thomson – see comments] met Ben Weber. Both were gay. Copland started out, “So, Mr. Weber, I hear you’re ‘one of us.'” “That’s right, Mr. Copland,” Weber said. “And I hear you write twelve-tone music.” “Yes, that’s true too, Mr. Copland.” “Well,” Copland replied, “…you’ll have to make a choice.”

It had to be the ’50s; gay twelve-toners were not so rare from the ’60s on (and Copland later went dodecaphonic himself). But it encapsulates a certain moment in American music.

(Click for better focus.) Consequent to the recent post I wrote about analyzing Gavin Bryars’s music, the man himself nicely got in touch with me, and since he was going to be in New York City anyway, we had lunch today, along with Tony Creamer (major supporter and fan of new music) and Norman Ryan, Gavin’s publisher at Schott. Gavin’s and my conversation really took off when we realized what big fans we both are of the music of Kaikhosru Sorabji; he was actually in touch with Sorabji, and presented the first concert of Sorabji’s music in Italy in 1979. I think it was the first time I’ve ever had a personal conversation with anyone who knew more about Sorabji than I do. And Gavin signed my copy of the score to his Piano Concerto “The Solway Canal,” which I bought at Doblinger’s in Vienna last week. Sorabji was heavily inspired by Busoni; I’ve always been heavily inspired by Busoni; Busoni’s Piano Concerto includes a male chorus; Gavin’s Piano Concerto includes a male chorus; the pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge has made recordings of Busoni’s Piano Concerto, Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum, and my Sunken City Piano Concerto; and so on, Q.E.D. Or something. Busoni/Sorabji/Bryars/Gann is some kind of nexus of affinities.

 

The biggest tourist thing I did in Vienna was visit the Zentralfriedhof, the big cemetery where many famous composers (more than I’d realized from my research) and artists are buried, even though some of them were first buried elsewhere and then moved. So here are some photos. It seems silly to include so many photos of myself (taken by my wife Nancy), but after all, you can probably find most of the tombstones on Wikipedia, and the point is to prove I was there. (Click on photos for better focus.)

Here I meet the Great Man himself:

But here was where I got sentimental and weepy:

and with Johannes I felt a little confrontational (that damn lullaby, dontcha know):

Alex Ross told me to make sure I found Ligeti, and I did:

The monument is odd in that, if you look from the right angle, and only then, you can read his birth and death dates:

I’ve been told that Ligeti looked at my book on Nancarrow and pronounced the verdict: “Too American.” Thanks, György. Nearby was Ernst Krenek, whose name on the lower, flat rock has unfortunately become almost illegible:

Zemlinsky’s tomb, if attractive, was rather pretentiously jazzy, I thought, for someone whose music I usually find a mite turgid; there are some lovely songs and Die Seejungfrau is nice, but the Lyric Symphony has never impressed me:

I was surprised to run into Hans Erich Apostel, a name you don’t hear much these days (if indeed one ever did):

And also Egon Wellesz; I realized with a start that, for so familiar a name, I couldn’t remember ever having heard a note of the old man’s music, so while I was there I snapped up a disc of his 1st (unabashedly Mahlerian) and 8th (unconvincingly near-atonal) symphonies:

While we’re at it, Wellesz’s teacher the musicologist Guido Adler:

I actually fulfilled my threat of having my photo taken at Schoenberg’s tomb with a sign that read “LONG LIVE HAUER” – but I’m going to save that one for some future special purpose; it would give too much ammunition to all those who consider me the nefarious enemy of everything great in music.

I was amused to run across the arrogant-looking Franz von Suppé, whose Light Cavalry Overture I quote in my piece Scenario, so I do owe him something:

Gluck was there:

and Hugo Wolf, looking menacing despite the nude couple making out nearby:

Also Johann Nepomuk David, whose music I once had to write a program note for:

and Johann Strauss, whose waltzes I am fond of, though I found it inexcusably lazy that all the local Muzak systems relied solely on “Blue Danube” and “Wine, Women, and Song”:

His dad, too:

And to tell you the truth, one of the tombs I most wanted to visit was that of Franz Schmidt, whose chamber works and last two symphonies I’m very fond of (I hummed the Fourth the rest of the trip); I’m sure it’s supposed to be his muse, but the design suggests that he dreamed of scantily-clad young women, which I do too, but it’s not what I’d want to be immortalized for:

The only composers I had read were there and couldn’t find were Pfitzner and Czerny, but I’m not sentimental enough about either of them to consider the trip unfulfilling. I felt like I had seen enough of the old gang.

 

 

[NOTE: If you’re here from a link at New Music Box, you might want to check out my response to that article as well.]

[UPDATE BELOW] My journey into the very heart of musical Europe provides me with a renewed opportunity to reflect on how happy I am to no longer be a music critic, no matter how happy I once was to work as one. The day was when I would have attended every event of the ISCM’s New Music Days 2013, taken names and scrupulous notes, mentally organized the event into its own little symmetrical Theater of Memory, and presented its digested evidence to you as grandly and unanswerably indicative of The Times We’re Living In; but no longer. Now I am relieved to skip the events that look tiresome or simply too inconveniently late in the evening, walk out on concerts I’m not enjoying, and afterward amuse myself by sketching an old man’s vague impressions, if I decide to do so – or even possibly write them up halfway and decide not to publish at all. I often wonder if there is another composer in the history of the world of whom people can so truly say, as one would say of me, “He has spoken enough; he has explained more than we needed explained.” Only Wagner comes to mind, and he would certainly have a more benign reputation today if he had taken many more opportunities to keep his damn trap shut and his opinions to himself. Posterity may well say the same of me, and perhaps we need not even wait for posterity.

In any case, I went to Vienna with a sense that I was being invited behind enemy lines with a role to play, and as always on such occasions (especially when free trans-Atlantic airfare is involved) I played it. But my scandals are whimsical and polite these days, not so dramatic or confrontational as they used to be. I try to project an air of not knowing where I am or what I’m doing, just an innocent who doesn’t dream that his anodyne heresies, born of ignorance and inexperience, could give offense. I had never before had any contact with the International Society for Contemporary Music, which certainly has a distinguished 90-year history of presenting new music, but which seems to have acquired by my time a rather musty and narrow reputation. Friends of mine who have long experience with the organization and its traveling annual festivals explained to me that the closer the events are culturally and geographically to Darmstadt, the more prickly, academic, and monochromatic the music involved tends to be. Vienna, by those standards, was in the neighborhood. There are certainly ISCM regulars who are trying to liven the organization up and make it more representative of the totality of what’s going on in new music around the globe, and who freely admitted to me, in private, that the music I heard – and again, I emphasize that I missed more performances than I attended – sounded like it had emerged from a time capsule last open to the air in 1973, even if most of the composers implicated were not yet born by that stale date.

All the more honor, then, to Christian Utz, Nina Polaschegg, and Bruno Strobl for sensing that the annual festival is in need of some self-reflection, and for organizing a concomitant conference on musical aesthetics to provide some perspective. While the music (that I heard) did come from a pretty tiny and dark corner of the spectrum, the conference participants – besides myself, Sandeep Bhagwati from Montreal, Heekyung Lee from Seoul, Andreas Engstrom from Sweden, Alper Maral from Istanbul, Ivan Siller from Bratislava, and others – evoked a far wider and more diverse world, one which the copious and generally enthusiastic audience seemed deeply relieved to have acknowledged. Bhagwati in particular, playing with more authority a role that I once might have attempted myself, scoffed at the idea (brought up by a participant) that the music we heard represented a “critical” type of composing, or that it was a music of continual revolution. Modernist new music, he argued, is a well-defined style like any other tradition, and its practitioners are well instructed in how to satisfy the demands of admittance to its professional mainstream. It said everything about the cultural moment that some in attendance seemed offended by the remark, which others gave a smattering of delighted applause.

The music may have been a matter of taste, but there was little disagreement about its uniformity of idiom. For one thing, what used to be, and apparently still are, called “extended techniques” were ubiquitous. If a flute appeared, so did toneless key clicks. If an accordion, it was slapped and squeezed tonelessly just for the air whooshing. If a clarinet, it was usually taken apart, perhaps used to blow bubbles in a glass of water. If a piano, the pianist disappeared into its interior. It is a little late in history to object to such practices, but it has always seemed to me that what we learned, from the explosion of them in the 1970s, was that they are distracting and seem silly when used sparingly, as punctuation. In other words, a pianist knocking on the outside of the piano in between keyboard phrases can be irritating, but Cage’s song The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs achieves a refreshing poetry by having its entire accompaniment tapped on the external frame of the instrument. If you’re going to use those things, frankly base the whole piece around them. It’s the frequent back-and-forth that creates inelegant theater, and nearly every chamber piece reveled in exactly that. We tried out a lot of crazy things in the ‘70s, and a lot of them didn’t work very well; but there is a large swath of new music for which “didn’t work” is not an allowable concept, and all those embarrassing techniques have just been added to the composer’s mandatory professional vocabulary. I could say the 1970s called, and they want their silly music back – but why would they?

More generally, all of the music I heard was (needless to say) atonal, impenetrable, continuously varied, scrupulously free from minimalist or pop influence, and any impression of harmony, melody, or even memorable moment or event was assiduously avoided. I kept hearing all week about one piece I missed, which created a huge collective sense of relief in the audience by employing major triads. The orchestral music in particular was a panoply of splashes of timbre, violin glisses, celesta washes, brass splats, wind tremolos in tempestuous profusion, and afterward I wish I could have played excerpts back for the audience and challenged them to tell the pieces apart; I couldn’t have. Nominally the youngish composers hailed from all over the world, but a friend, looking through the festival program, brought to my attention that they had nearly all studied in Germany; it couldn’t have been clearer that they were writing the way they had been taught to. The way it works, my friend explained, is that each ISCM chapter makes a call for pieces, and, out of dozens, chooses six to submit to the festival committee, which then chooses from among those for the program. Thus the musical atmosphere is directly attributable to those who do the choosing, and previous festivals, I was told, have sometimes been considerably more varied and inviting than this one was.

One piece, however, stood apart from everything else. The Klangforum Wien, incredibly well commanded by Enno Poppe, played Mad Dog by Bernd Richard Deutsch (b. 1977), of which I can find no recording, but of course there’s a YouTube of a previous performance by the Die Reihe Ensemble. It struck me as kind of a madly splintered neoclassicism, an ironic neo-concerto-grosso laden with spectralist moments, at once entertaining and baffling, in the most pleasant sense. But what really baffled me were the negative comments I heard about it from Austrian musicians the next morning. When I attempted to praise it they were reflexively apologetic that it was programmed at all: “Oh, he won an award, so we had to include it.” “It seemed too much a kind of cartoon music.” “The players love that kind of music because it shows off what they can do well and fills the house, but it was too much written for the audience.” “The duet for violin and cello that came afterward [which I found strident, limited, and predictable] was much more multidimensional.” Too much written for the audience?! I’M the freakin’ audience!, I wanted to scream, but I was a guest in their country and behaved myself. Watch the YouTube, 21 minutes long in three movements: it’s hardly an easy or noticeably accessible piece, and yet it was lively and intriguing ear-candy compared to everything else I heard there. What a horribly austere, severe world to have to live in, in which the slightest pleasure given to the listener occasions such tut-tutting for its deplorable pandering. What a world turned upside down, in which music is approved only to the extent that one receives no thrill from it whatever and remembers nothing afterward.

It was into this heavy, monochrome, classically and unapologetically modernist context that I tossed what I had accurately intuited would be my stylistic time bomb. After all, I was the decadent American capitalist dog; my sadly commercial lack of taste wouldn’t be held against me personally, and might even provide some schadenfreude. I’ve already given you the core of my paper, though I both expanded it and took out a few things. But at the end, to illustrate what I said would be a kind of music that could only come from the U.S. these days, I played audio examples by three New York composers the same age, interestingly, as Deutsch: Corey Dargel (b. 1977) (click to hear the song I played), William Brittelle (b. 1976), and Judd Greenstein (though I played only a recording of his piece Change, not the brilliant video of it I’m linking you to here). I fully and correctly anticipated that some in the crowd would not consider this music at all, which is pretty funny when you think about it. Worldwide, I think a million out of any million and one people would be far more likely to identify Dargel’s charming song as a piece of music than they would the Austrian woman humorlessly blowing through the middle section of her clarinet into a glass of water, but in the topsy-turvy world of European new music, it was the busy noise pieces that are considered important music and the tonal song with rhyming lyrics that’s not so defined. After my talk one German-accented man objected with some anguish (and came up to me to repeat the observation after the panel) that he could hear no “soul-searching” in the music I played, that it just reminded him of a shopping mall. Now leaving aside whether soul-searching is something one wants to hear in every damn piece of music one listens to, what’s wrong with shopping malls? We build them, we spend time in them, don’t they deserve to be acknowledged in our art at some point? Is music only supposed to inhabit some wilderness of our imagination, and never sully itself with the actual, allegedly tawdry spaces where we spend our lives? And does, say, Vivaldi’s Seasons offer evidence of soul-searching? In any case, among the people I hung out with for the week, the comment became a running joke, and I swore that if I could find a mall that played Dargel’s delightful songs on the PA system, I would never shop anywhere else.

The sharp divide in opinion, interestingly enough, seemed to lie between English-speaking attendees (Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders – there didn’t seem to be any Brits, though since so many Continentals speak English with an impeccable British accent I can’t swear to it) and non-Enlish-speakers. One young Canadian woman came up to me later to ask where she could find more of Judd Greenstein’s music, and an American one to tell me that she had run back to her hotel and downloaded a Corey Dargel CD on iTunes, leading me to realize that I really ought to be playing my own music at these gigs, instead of providing free PR for these jokers who aren’t likely to do anything for my career.

Nina Polaschegg had begun the conference by saying that she organized it because we don’t do nearly enough talking about musical aesthetics, about why we like some pieces and don’t like others. As you can imagine, I completely agree. I mentioned in my paper that young composers these days don’t like arguing aesthetic viewpoints. A couple of young composers in the audience felt put upon by that and objected, but as a friend mentioned to me afterward, both of them basically said, “We do have aesthetic discussions, we just don’t like to argue,” which merely restated my point. I think that if we studiously ignore what makes some pieces better than others and some styles more fertile than others, we will be pretty much condemned to blunder along making music that isn’t meaningful or enjoyable, like so much of the crap I heard last week. After all, start enunciating these aesthetic positions out loud, and some of the most absurd ones just fall apart as you pronounce the words. And it was good for me to get a strong sense of why Germans and Austrians really object to the vein of American music I champion; we get the same objections at home, but no one dares articulate them. To deafly continue in traditions that no one is enjoying, just because everyone is too polite to say anything, is a sad option.

UPDATE: I’m not going to rewrite this entry, because I like it, and most people got it. But I have to say I’m astonished at how many people, some of them friends I respect, completely misread it. It has been taken as a blanket condemnation of European music, a rant against modernism, some grandiose claim for the superiority of American music. It is none of those things. It is a description of a specific festival that was criticized by many people, even those within the organization, for being too one-sidedly homogenous for an event that purported to represent music from around the world. When a festival is curated as a kind of competition, and seven pieces in a row sound so similar that one can hardly tell them apart, it is evident that the jurying committee had a very strong aesthetic bias. Maybe some people think that’s fine and the way it should be, but the perception that it was a problem did not originate with me. I believe, though no one said so, that I was invited, as were some of the other speakers, as a corrective, an outside perspective. If so, I applaud the impulse. That the American pieces I played would not “fit in” I could guess in advance, but I was surprised that the most interesting German composition was also considered controversial – which shows what a narrow framework the festival followed. I reported here on criticisms that were made by a wide range of participants. Yet some readers, who didn’t attend the festival or conference, took these criticisms as being entirely my own invention, and also leaped to a conclusion that I must have misrepresented the festival according to my own biases. I wish they would click on Deutsch’s video and hear the exciting European modernism I’m defending, but they seem to prefer to keep their own caricature of me intact. I don’t know how to respond to such gross misreading, let alone evidence-free charges of falsification. As the saying goes, I can write it for you, but I can’t understand it for you. If someone is determined to misread and misrepresent me, he will do so.

Comments are closed.

Friday morning I’m leaving for Vienna, where I will remain until the following Thursday. I’m speaking at the World New Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). I’ll be giving my talk on the state of American music next Wednesday, Nov. 13, at 9:30 AM in the Leonie Rysanek-Saal of the Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität, and then I’m on a panel at 11:30. I appear to be the only U.S. representative on the conference. Never been to Vienna before. I’m trying to revive a little bit of German, and it’s just as I remember it: the vocabulary is a cinch, the grammar impossible. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to visiting the Zentralfriedhoff, the famous cemetery where all the composers are buried, and seeing all the monuments immortalized in Alex Ross’s blog. I have  a few choice words for Schoenberg’s ghost.

 

I don’t know if this constituted a great moment for my students, but it did for me. My favorite piece by the British postminimalist Gavin Bryars, although I doubt that I’ve heard everything he’s recorded, has always been his 1990 piece for ballet Four Elements. I once started analyzing it on my own and didn’t get far, but we spent our entire minimalism class (two and a half hours) on it the other day, and I was quite impressed with what we found. The entire piece is drawn from a three-note motive heard in the chimes in the first two measures, a fifth and a minor second:

 

 

(echoed by the vibraphone in the next phrase, G-C-B). All of the harmonies of this half-hour piece are drawn from this motive, in the form of two fifths separated by a half-step between the bottom note of one and the top note of the other. However, while most of the fifths are perfect, sometimes either the lower or higher one is augmented (Bb-F# and C-G# here):

 

 

 

 

The perfect fifths make either a major seventh chord or a minor triad with a flat 13th, depending on what is emphasized in the bass; the others can be an augmented seventh or a minor triad with a major seventh. The piece capitalizes well on the major/minor ambiguity inherent in these voicings. Of course, any seventh chord can be spelled as two fifths, but this is the way Bryars voices them in the piano and electric keyboard parts, and the melodies in the winds frequently bring out the fifth- (or fourth) plus-half-step motive. In addition, the harmonic feel of these chords can be altered by whatever note is additionally heard in the bass. The elements are in the order water/earth/air/fire, and the opening water movement is built on the following chord progression:

Note, for instance, that the fifth keyboard chord is the same as the second and fourth, but has a quite different feel with the A in the bass rather than the E. The intuitive, meandering quality of this progression, with some chords being sustained over more than one bass note, is the reason I never got very far with the piece in the beginning. But in class we looked at the second section (earth) and found the identical progression, more systematically articulated in repeated 16th-note patterns. The third section (air) begins with a different but related chord progression (shown below), but brings back this above progression toward the end.

Here is the recording (ECM, conducted by Roger Heaton) of the first section and the beginning of the second. We had a good discussion in class about why the piece doesn’t sound particularly minimalist or postminimalist. Part of it is the foregrounded and highly expressive melody in the bass clarinet. Another part is that, unlike in most minimalist-related music, the harmonies don’t sound functionally equivalent. Because of the augmented fifths and the variable and sometimes dissonant bass notes, there are purposeful-sounding gradations in the calmness or intensity of the chords, which give the piece a more uneven emotional shape than is common in minimalism. And yet, the harmonic rhythm is pretty regular, either two measures per chord or in some sections three; and the way I’m aurally programmed I still hear the piece as postminimalist because of the way the melodies sound derived from the harmony rather than vice versa, drawing the chromatic connections between distantly related chords in exactly the way Glass does in the “Bed” scene of Einstein on the Beach. Most obviously, here’s the opening alto sax melody with chords from the Air section, and you can hear the audio here:

Perhaps it’s only because I am so attuned to noticing how minimalist music operates beneath the surface that I hear this piece as minimalist. The analysis confirms my impression that the harmonies may have been composed first and the melody laid over it; at least it sounds like it’s the harmony that drives the music. I do something similar in the final movement of my Transcendental Sonnets, a nine-minute chain of seventh chords, although determined via parsimonious voice-leading rather than intervals or root movement. And I didn’t have to go to Gavin Bryars for the idea, it was all implicit in Einstein. Still, that’s a quintessentially Gannian kind of melody in that example. No wonder I love the piece.

One of the things that I love about teaching minimalist music analytically is that it’s such a good pedagogical model for young composers. When I was an undergrad I was trying to mimic Boulez and Berio, and I didn’t have nearly enough technique under my belt to achieve anything close to their complexity and subtlety; I hadn’t “come up through the ranks” on that complicated history. But minimalist pieces tend to be clear in their structure and often deceptively obvious in their procedure once you look just beneath the surface. They embody a level of technique that students truly could imitate and pull off, and while some will take that as a criticism of the music, it’s not. The pieces are attractive and remain so after years of listenings, and the students are thrilled with them. But such minimalist pieces often draw tremendous length from very little material, which, if I remember my history of musical aesthetics correctly, used to be considered quite a virtue (see Bach, J.S., and Webern, Anton, for instance). I would love to command a composition student, “Pick three notes and write an entire 30-minute ensemble piece using only patterns derived from them,” and then show him or her that Bryars did exactly that, with stunning results. It’s such a great repertoire for a student to start out with, and if they want to do something more complicated later, they can always move on. Personally, I would find this rich kind of simplicity enough to aim for.

 

I played the first several minutes of Elliott Carter’s Double Concerto.

Student #1: Who decided that this work was one of the great pieces of 20th-century music?

Student #2: It’s just like what happens in popular music.

Student #1: But no, popular music becomes popular because people like it.

Student #2: No, popular music is made popular by the industry. Somebody decided that Miley Cyrus could be popular, and so they poured a ton of money and publicity into her. Her career was completely orchestrated.

Me: Between the two of you, you have just arrived at the insight that Elliott Carter and Miley Cyrus are mirror images of each other.

[General laughter]

UPDATE: Let me be clear – other examples besides Carter and Miley Cyrus (whoever she is) could have served. I’m trying to teach the class that the canon is an artificial construct, and that it is indeed created by people in power making decisions. Musical academia has its collective narrative, critics tend toward a different narrative, the classical-music performance world has yet another narrative, and the corporate world makes decisions on a different set of criteria. All of these narratives are contaminated by self-serving premises, and none should be misunderstood as resembling any kind of pure meritocracy. And thus every student needs to judge every piece on its own merits as they appear to him or her, and such decisions should not be made on the first listening, or necessarily the second or third. It took me listening to the Double Concerto about a hundred times before I decided there just wasn’t anything there for me. It’s part of what Bard calls “Critical Thinking,” and I’m really into it lately.

 

When I arrived at school today I found a box of copies of the Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, straight off the press. (With all due deference to my esteemed colleagues Pwyll ap Sion and Keith Potter, I would like to point out that the first eleven pages of the book’s Introduction, credited to all three of us, were written by myself; they wrote the conclusion detailing the book’s contents. But they did more of the editing than I did, and provided more of the impetus behind the book.) As I write in the Introduction, “any idea that minimalism is not respectable enough to merit scholarly scrutiny has been consigned to historical musicology’s dustbin. In recognition of its widespread popularity, minimalism is arguably the repertoire of late-twentieth-century music that is most often written about today.”