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PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Niblock Under the Microscope

I’m teaching my Analysis of Minimalism seminar this semester, and I have never had a group of students (eight of them) who came in already knowing so much about the repertoire we were dealing with. They bring up pieces I hadn’t planned to mention and occasionally even one I hadn’t heard of, and I have to think quick to stay one step ahead of them.

What I enjoy doing most in my analysis seminars is figuring out music I’d never analyzed before. I let them do the work for me (or if I end up doing it myself, I assume they’ll learn from watching me), and this class is certainly obliging. For the first time I’m analyzing scores by Phill Niblock, some of which are included with his CD liner notes. For instance, the following stack of random-looking numbers is the beginning, about half the score, of his 1980 piece for eight overdubbed flutes, titled SLS after the initials of his soloist Susan Stenger, on the XI disc Four Full Flutes:

SLS-excerpt

(Click on the image for better focus.) With just this to go on, the students figured out that the top numbers in each line above the little T marks (110, 418, 606 in the first flute) are the timings of the piece: 1:10, 4:18, 6:06. The upper number above the horizontal line following each one is the duration of the note in minutes and seconds. The bottom number, below the bottom line, is the frequency of the pitch, since Niblock never uses musical notation, but writes directly in cycles per second instead. We worked out that there are only ten pitches used in the 20-minute piece; three of them, C, D, and F, are based on frequencies from the conventional equal-tempered scale, and others are tuned upward or downward a few cents:

SLS-pitches

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition, as someone in class figured out, each pitch at a certain frequency lasts the same duration every time it comes back: the pitch 260.7 cps always lasts 3:09, 345.7 cps always lasts 2:32, and so on. We figured out how we could make something of a readable score from this sloppy accounting sheet, and that, with the timings across the top, it would look something like this:

SLS-transcription

(Here’s this much of the piece to listen to, although you really need to hear the whole twenty minutes to appreciate the overall shape.) At least this translates the number score into something that we can follow with the timer and hear somewhat, although this hardcore minimalist essay can really only be experienced, not analyzed by ear. But we’ve figured out that Phill does seem to start pretty much with equal temperament as a basis, and that while some of his pieces have a gradual process going (as does Five More String Quartets, which we looked at the number score of as well), SLS has a more whimsical, less logical form.

The other day we used Neo-Reimannian analysis to compare the chord progressions in movement 2 of Phil Glass’s Low Symphony to those in Einstein on the Beach, and then we traced the course of the ubiquitous four-note rhythmic motive on which John Adams’s Phrygian Gates is based. This week we’re finally analyzing Gavin Bryars’s The Four Elements, which I’ve always wanted to do, a fabulous piece. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a graduate-level seminar at Bard, because the students walked in the door already loving the repertoire. And it’s such a cool new world of music to analyze, I can’t believe most music departments want to opt out of it.

 

 

Vertiginous Plastic for Sale

Aron-Kallay-Beyond-12 I received in yesterday’s mail several copies of pianist Aron Kallay’s new CD Beyond 12: Reinventing the Piano, the first installment of his project of playing microtonal music on virtual pianos. (I love the unmatched black keys on the cover art.) The disc includes my own Echoes of Nothing, which I wrote for him in 2011; also non-12 pieces by Isaac Schankler, Aaron K. Johnson, John Schneider, Tom Flaherty, Vera Ivanova, Jason Heath, and Brian Shepard. It’s a disc of remarkably delicate and gentle and colorful music, though ranging from the vertiginously out-of-tune to the exquisitely in-tune. I’m afraid I have to mention that the names of the movements in my piece got reversed: the opening long, dreamy meditation is “Nothing,” the subsequent boogie-woogie is “Something.” It’s the third disc on the Microfest Records label, and they are well worth supporting.

I also remembered that I failed to draw attention to David Garland’s recent interview with me about Dennis Johnson’s piano piece November, which you can hear here on WNYC’s website.

In Which Exception Is Taken to Various Common Practices

Here is a quotation from a document I had to discuss with my academic colleagues today:

The school should continue moving forward in its attempt to formalize more structured processes for planning and the allocation of resources. It is important that a more structured planning process involve various constituencies, provide increased opportunities for collaboration across units, communication, and shared governance, and that it should integrate multiple programs and sites into a coherent whole.

I know all these words, but this is so vague that I have no idea what it actually refers to in our particular case. It is intentionally abstract, allowing for multiple interpretations, and in fact we made kind of a party game figuring out how various initiatives we’d already undertaken might fit into it and satisfy it. I’m sure it is left vague and in passive tense for legal reasons, lest we fail to comply with some directive and get sued for the deficiency. In fact, this paragraph isn’t an exact quote; I changed the order of several phrases for fear someone might Google it and locate where it came from, and I don’t want to get in legal trouble myself.

I take minutes for these meetings. If I report what anyone actually said, my colleagues jump all over me. I have finally learned that the purpose of my minutes is to conceal what we’re saying, not reveal it. After 25 years in the newspaper business, my trained instinct is to report what goes on, colorfully and in intelligent detail, and I have to forcibly squelch that impulse in my current administrative role. For a well-trained writer to intentionally write badly – obfuscatingly and in noncommittal terms and passive tense – is really painful.

We write evaluations of our colleagues. It used to be, the writer of an evaluation would construct a narrative pertinent to the facts of the file at hand, but now we are given a recipe for the evaluation, which specifies how many paragraphs it will contain and which issue each paragraph will address. The result reads like a transition-less child’s primer with all the small words replaced with long ones, but the fear is that someone suing the school might be able to prove that his or her evaluation was more or less thorough than someone else’s.

I read books and book proposals for academic publishers. It seems that every book I read lately at some point mentions Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, or Lyotard, and then launches into a melange of special terminology. These terms all seem to stand for actions or processes that are entirely familiar to us all, but by packing them into proprietary formulae, the author can squeeze the argument into smaller, denser paragraphs in which every word stands for an entire phrase – as though paper were terribly dear, and meanings had to be expressed in the maximally efficient manner possible. It is amazing to me how often the author wants to prove his or her critical theory credentials in the first chapter, and how often I can simply skip that chapter and find the meat of the subject matter expressed more cogently in chapter 2.

And I watch my poor students, who know what they’re trying to say, stumble and stutter and search for the most abstract, most grandiose words, so that they’ll sound as pompous and abstract and authoritative as the models that are put in front of them every day. I’ll read some circuitous paragraph of five-syllable words they wrote, and ask “What are you trying to say here?,” and they’ll tell me in simple words, and I’ll ask, “Well why didn’t you just write THAT?”

ACADEMIA TRAINS YOUNG PEOPLE TO WRITE TURGIDLY AND VAGUELY. And not only young people. Readers of this blog sometimes get upset with me that I seem so anti-academic, that I am always denigrating university culture. I love certain aspects of college life, and I am extremely pro-education, but it has to be acknowledged that academia, as it stands, has a default tendency toward inculcating pomposity in writing and, most of all, a bureaucratic avoidance of personal responsibility. One shouldn’t need to reread George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” to realize this. Slate magazine recently had an article on how the SAT teaches high school kids to write badly. Young people, and young faculty, learn how to become part of the bureaucracy, and how to write in such a way that no one is ever personally implicated. It becomes a habit, and a grating one. I am a beautifully-trained, colorful, clear writer surrounded on all sides by execrable prose and forced to occasionally commit turbid paragraphs myself. That’s why I’ve been posting my own scholarly articles on this blog, because in the “peer”-review process my translucent sentences get edited into embarrassing mud. I am thrilled and honored to be in academia, especially given the horrible state of culture in the current outside world, but I have to harangue our students to resist the bureaucratic influences that the college surrounds them with. And the same foul brainwashing that turns students into bad writers turns them into bad composers as well. There’s really no alternative to being here – but some of us understand that we have to push back against the prevailing winds to stay intellectually and artistically honest. Anyone who’s offended by my saying that is part of the problem.

 

Hearing the Symphony without Going to Boston

Thoreau-birthplaceNext Sunday at 2 (Oct. 20, Ives’s birthday) I will present a lecture, “Thoreau’s Flute and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata” at Henry David Thoreau’s birthplace in Concord, Massachusetts. Drawn from my upcoming book on the Concord, the talk will trace a simple argument, based on the manuscripts, that the sonata’s “Human Faith” melody was originally conceived as being Thoreau’s flute over Walden Pond, and from there made its way into the other movements of the sonata. This will be a welcome chance to present to non-musicians, and I’m enjoying my forays outside my usual professional sphere; No Such Thing as Silence gave me a chance to write about Zen, and for Essays After a Sonata I’ve enjoyed researching late-19th-century aesthetics (which I already knew a lot about) and the history of theological disputes in American protestantism. After all, I’ve been studying Transcendentalism for its own sake for many years, and have tried at every opportunity to get the administrators of Concord’s many literary museums interested in Ives. Maybe this will be my breakthrough.

 

 

“Fatally Attracted to the Complexity of Speech”

I didn’t anticipate that I would arrive at anything new to say about Robert Ashley in my paper about him at last week’s minimalism conference at Cal State Long Beach. But as it happened, the attempt to talk about him in a minimalist context elicited some insights I hadn’t had before, and as some previously Ashley-dubious audience members claimed to find them persuasive, I decided to post the paper here. Also probably at the Society for Minimalist Music website as a PDF, but here I can link to the audio examples.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Eventfulness is really boring”: Robert Ashley as Minimalist
by Kyle Gann

I hope it does not seem merely opportunistic to appear with a paper on Robert Ashley as minimalist just after I have published a book on Ashley. One of the things I find historically fascinating about minimalism is the magnetic field it cast on all sides, attracting some composers and repelling others, to the point that some composers whom we do not consider part of the movement led careers that we cannot adequately describe without alluding to it as explanation. Morton Feldman is certainly one of these, perhaps James Tenney, and also Robert Ashley. (For instance, my composition teacher Peter Gena recalled, in the early 1970s, being anxiously called into Feldman’s office to look at sketches for his newest piece. Feldman asked fearfully, “Do you think it sounds too much like Steve Reich?”)

In 2009 I interviewed Robert Ashley for a book I was writing about him. He made a statement that rather surprised me, and I want to play you the audio because his delivery is so evocative:

The only thing that’s interesting to me right now is that, up to me and a couple of other guys, music had always been about eventfulness: like, when things happened, and if they happened, whether they would be a surprise, or an enjoyment, or something like that… And I was never interested in eventfulness. I was only interested in sound. I mean, just literally, sound in the Morton Feldman sense…. There’s a quality in music that is outside of time, that is not related to time. And that has always fascinated me… A lot of people are back into eventfulness. But it’s very boring. Eventfulness is really boring. – (Interview with the author, June 11, 2009)

As composers of his generation go, Robert Ashley is not someone often thought of as a minimalist. In fact, a case for the polar opposite would be easy to make. At a certain period in his career he earned a reputation as being the prime exemplar of what we then liked to call information overload. For instance, the initial 1979 version of his opera Perfect Lives, as recorded on the famous “Yellow Album,” was pretty spare, but by 1982 he had overlaid the piece with so many layers of musical activity that the original became difficult to locate beneath the multi-channeled audio surface. His next opera, Atalanta, was a chaos of improvisation. In Foreign Experiences Ashley underlaid his text and music, in the first act, with a 12-tone piano sonata he had written decades earlier. Ashley’s opera Improvement: Don Leaves Linda is entirely based on a fanatical precompositional scheme involving a 24-note row. When I interviewed him about the piece in 1991, he added, “Of course! I’m a serialist! What else would I do?” In the introduction to his book Outside of Time: Ideas about Music, titled “Speech as Music,” he wrote:

For some reason that I have never understood (and don’t fully understand today) I have always been attracted to music that is irrationally difficult. I don’t mean difficult in terms of endurance or effects. I mean difficult in the sense that there are many things going on at the same time… What I think today my problem came from is that even in piano music, when there are a lot of things happening very fast… the complexity resembles the complexity of speech. I came to discover very gradually that I was fatally attracted to the complexity of speech…. (Ashley, Outside of Time, p. 38)

He goes on to make a veiled complaint about minimalism, that around 1970, there was an “official announcement from New York and Washington”: “The announcement said simply, there is a new kind of music; it is very simple; everybody will come to understand, and we will forget about all of that foolishness that has been going on.” (Outside of Time, p. 54) The references to New York and Washington seem to refer to the performing space The Kitchen, the New Music America festivals, and, more explicitly, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts. (He and I were on opposite sides of a generational divide in that issue.)

At the same time, though, Ashley included in Outside of Time another new (2004) article titled “to begin again with ‘music,’” in which he talked about the central ideas that had always been crucial to his music, beginning with the “drone concept”:

I use the term “drone” to mean any music that seems not to change over time. Or music that changes so slowly that the changes seem almost imperceptible. Or music that has so many repetitions of the same melodic-harmonic pattern that the pattern is clearly secondary to another aspect of the form. (And I use the term “drone” though from the beginning it has often been used by critics in its pejorative sense, meaning “nothing is happening.”) (Outside of Time, p. 96)

It is clear that Ashley thinks all of his music has been drone music (as opposed to what he calls “timeline music,” meaning everything else), even when it doesn’t contain anything that we minimalism scholars would think of as a drone.

Bob doesn’t know I’m giving this paper, and it may be that he would disagree with my premises here. But he and I have disagreed before, and in fact he raises quite a public disagreement with me in the introduction I quoted from. To take issue with him a little bit, then, it did seem to me, at the time of the 2009 interview, that Ashley’s claim that he had only been interested in “sound, in the Morton Feldman sense” was something of an illusion of hindsight. In a 1961 interview in Source magazine, Ashley once claimed that subsequent to John Cage’s use of empty time structures, the guiding metaphor of music was now no longer sound but time, and the ultimate result might be “a music that wouldn’t necessarily involve anything but the presence of people… It seems to me [he famously continued] that the most radical redefinition of music that I could think of would be one that defines ‘music’ without reference to sound.” Like many other composers in the 1950s, Ashley had been highly impressed by Cage’s use of empty time structures, the lengths of which were determined in advance before the sounds within them were composed. I have sometimes referred to Cage’s works of this period as being proto-postminimalist, in that they seemed to anticipate postminimalist music rather than minimalism per se. If that is admissible, then we could say that Ashley’s works inspired by Cage’s time structures might be neo-proto-postminimalist, and by a musicohistorical arithmetic that should put them somewhere in the minimalist ballpark. [This was a joke, and appreciated as such. In fact it became a running gag of the conference.]

Born in 1930, Ashley is a little older than the oldest composers we consider card-carrying minimalists, but he knew about the style almost from its origins. He directed the ONCE festival from its beginnings in 1961, and two of the original minimalists, La Monte Young and Terry Jennings, were featured at the second ONCE festival in 1962; Jennings, already a heroin addict at the time, ended up staying at Ashley’s apartment for awhile. While there is no discernible direct influence of their music on his, a couple of Ashley’s better-known ONCE festival pieces were, in fact, explicitly repetitive and extremely restricted in their materials. One was She Was a Visitor, the finale of his opera That Morning Thing (1967), in which the narrator repeats the title phrase over and over as the other performers extend the phonemes of the phrase into a sibilant continuum, sustaining each sound for one full breath. This piece seems to me incontrovertibly minimalist.

A conceptually similar piece called Fancy Free (1969) was written for the stuttering voice of Alvin Lucier, who was supposed to read the text over and over as four cassette recorder operators recorded his speech and played back fragments of it. There is an obvious conceptual similarity here to Lucier’s own piece I Am Sitting in a Room, also based on a repeating text. And it is worth re-emphasizing that Tom Johnson’s first use of the word minimal to describe music (in the Village Voice of March 30, 1972) was applied to music not by the composers we now think of as minimalist, but to works of Alvin Lucier and Mary Lucier.

Almost from the beginning, Ashley’s music involved the setting up of certain chunks of time, the sounds to fill them being decided upon later, but this determination was often made via group collaboration. Within the conceptualist milieu of the ONCE festivals, what was most distinctive about Ashley was that he seemed less interested in sonic patterns than in the social situation of the performance. Far from being interested in “sound in the Morton Feldman sense,” many of his early pieces allow the performers to choose the sounds, and show an almost total lack of interest on Ashley’s part as to what the sounds are. The combination of this attitude, along with his use of uniform time units and repetition, sometimes results in what one might call a “randomized minimalism,” in which the gambit of sounds within a piece is closely circumscribed, the process might be subtle and gradual, but the sounds might be anything at all.

Ashley’s most famous ONCE composition, The Wolfman (1964), involves singing single notes of 13 seconds each, changing within each breath one aspect of the sound (either pitch, loudness, vowel, or closure). Amplified up to maximum feedback, the piece may have a maximalist noise component, but as experienced by the performer it is as tightly disciplined and as limited in its possibilities as many early minimalist classics. in memoriam…CRAZY HORSE (symphony) (1961-2) is structured as a series of regular pulses in which the players are supposed to sustain a so-called “reference sonority,” changing some aspect of it as certain symbols come up in the circular performance chart.

Ashley-CrazyHorse

A 1966 recording of the work on the Advance label [click for audio] was chaotically noisy, yet gradual in its transformations. However, in 2007 the Ensemble MAE in Holland produced a recording of a very similar piece in the same series, in memoriam… ESTEBAN GOMEZ (quartet), using a drone with a consonant major third as their reference sonority. This recording sounds classically minimalist, and in fact rather similar to James Tenney’s Critical Band, which I think of as really hard-core minimalism. In short, there is nothing in the description of these pieces that precludes a minimalist-sounding realization. This comparison is our first hint today that, as dissonant and modernist as they seemed in the original performances, some of Ashley’s early ONCE festival works were minimalist in concept, and could be made to sound classically minimalist merely by a change in the materials chosen by the performers.

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The second phase of Ashley’s music begins in 1979 with the first of his mature operas, Perfect Lives. Almost all of Ashley’s operas have certain minimalist aspects, usually limitations of tempo, rhythmic structure, or harmony, and it would be easy to cherry-pick passages that sound minimalist or at least repetitive. For instance, in the five operas Perfect Lives, Improvement, Atalanta, eL/Aficionado, and Now Eleanor’s Idea, the tempo is always 72 beats per minute throughout. The tempo in the remaining opera of this group, Foreign Experiences, is 90 beats per minute. The duration of each opera is set in advance. Each of the seven scenes of Perfect Lives was intended to be 24 minutes and 40 seconds, which in 1979 was the legal minimum length of a half-hour television show, allowing for commercials. Originally, each of the four operas of the tetralogy Now Eleanor’s Idea was supposed to be 6,336 beats long, which is 88 minutes (4 acts at 22 minutes each) at a tempo of 72 beats per minute. (eL/Aficionado was exempted from that requirement because it was not originally composed as part of the tetralogy, and its tempo is not continuously articulated.) I’m sure there’s probably someone who knows how many beats there are in the score of Wozzeck or Der Rosenkavalier, but the fact that the number of beats in some of Ashley’s operas is easily calculated speaks volumes about his working methods.

Each scene of Perfect Lives follows a single rhythmic template throughout. The first episode, “The Park,” has a 13-beat meter, “The Supermarket” five beats, “The Bank” nine, and so on. In quite a few passages this results in a repetitive ostinato running through a scene for several minutes at a time. In addition to the rhythmic units, harmonies are also often structured repetitively. Atalanta, a monumental work, is performed entirely over a progression of six chords: Bb, Ab, G, C7, Eb, Bb. This is not always apparent because of the improvisatory latitude granted the performers, but the chord changes theoretically come at regular intervals. Harmonically, eL/Aficionado is based entirely on a repeating series of 16 chords, in four groups of four, each group unified by a single scale:

Aficionado-chords

In the scenes of the opera that are titled “My Brother Called” (scenes 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, and 10), the chord changes every 18 beats, or every 15 seconds, and one line of text is sung over that chord. In addition, while the singer Thomas Buckner improvises his lines within the scale, the initial note of each phrase is determined by a repeating sequence, given in half-notes above. The first scene of Dust (1998) has simple chords repeating in an isorhythm of 1, 2, 3, 5, 3, 2, 1 lines, the rhythm repeated over and over again.

One of Ashley’s most conceptually minimalist works is the opera Celestial Excursions. Although it’s also one of his most musically elaborate works, the entire piece uses only the C-major scale. Each scene is based a certain chord, with different reciting tones for the singers, and the scenes differ harmonically by having a different note in the bass – and that note is never C, so there’s never a feeling of resting on the tonic. This is an overall structure very similar to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

Of course, what keeps people from thinking of these pieces as minimalist is most obviously the text. Were we to listen to them without the text, long passages might take on a minimalist aura, but the speaking of a text over a static background tends to preclude any impression of minimalism. Text tends to be linear and unidirectional. We listen to hear what will be said next. There are clearly minimalist text pieces, by Jackson Mac Low and others, but they tend to be restricted to few words, with much repetition and a Gertrude Stein-ish disregard for syntax. Ashley’s opera texts are not of this nature; indeed they tend to be incredibly verbose and extended, with long stories.

However, Ashley’s idea of opera, to the extent we’re inclined to acquiesce to it, is that speech is music, and that we do not listen to it for meaning alone. Several operas deal with the tendency of profanity – that is, intentionally meaningless words – to slow down thought, and as he asks rhetorically in Atalanta, “Who could speak if every word had meaning?” The texts are filled with gentle nonsequiturs and incomplete word-pictures. Each phrase means something, but the totality of what the text means is more than usually in doubt. In other words, Ashley’s texts are narrative in appearance, but he uses a variety of devices to render their narrativity ambiguous. While he denies that his writing is stream-of-consciousness, he also denies that an opera can have a plot. Ashley’s operas do possess background plots, but those plots are rarely inferable from the text of the opera; they are best read in the liner notes. As he has written,

At the opera I am transported to a place and time where there is no disorder. There is disorder on stage, and it is called melodrama. We don’t believe it. This is important: that we don’t believe it. We do believe… what happens in the movies…. Therefore, opera can have no plot. It is foolish to argue that opera – any opera – can have a plot; that is, that the “characters” and their apparent “actions” and the apparent “consequences” are related in any way. Opera can be story-telling only. (“The Future of Music,” unpublished typescript delivered April 15,2000, p. 9)

This may not convince the dubious that Ashley’s words are simply melody, though he often speaks as though he believes that’s the case. At least one can say that the time element in Ashley’s texts is frequently unimportant, that one statement does not lead to another, nor one episode need to be previous to another episode for the sake of understanding. Ashley’s words, frequently nonlinear and read in his own calmly inflected voice, or chanted on or around one note, can be heard in themselves as a kind of randomized minimalism. We will come to a perhaps more convincing example shortly.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

However, when we move to the most recent phase of Ashley’s music, the parallels to minimalism become more and more striking. As modernism moved, from its heyday in the 1950s or ‘60s, to minimalism and the New Tonality, so did Ashley’s music move from often maximum confusion and chaos to more meditative continua. This has been especially true of his non-operatic works, starting from 1988 on with his flute concerto Superior Seven. Ashley’s late instrumental works are in a style that I would called randomized postminimalism. That is, the choice of pitches is limited, the tonality usually clear, the rhythm based in a steady pulse, but within the available gamut the note-to-note choices are determined by random or quasi-random procedures. In his piano piece Van Cao’s Meditation and the ensemble piece for Relache Outcome Inevitable, the order of notes was determined by a systematic document Ashley had been using in the early 1960s for the ONCE festival pieces, what he calls an “encyclopedia of proportions and combinations” of the numbers 1 through 5. Although he’s used it for many pieces, the document mysteriously disappeared about the time I came to write the book on him, and I’ve never been able to take a look at it – kind of a strange thing given how neat and well organized most of Ashley’s files are.

Van Cao’s Meditation (1992) was inspired by a photo of Van Cao, the composer of the Vietnamese national anthem, sitting at what was supposedly one of only two pianos in the country at the time. The music is made up entirely of 8th-notes on the pitches Bb, C, Db, Eb, and Fb, with an occasional fermata-laden cadence on some octave A-flats:

Van-Cao-excerpt

Texturally and tonally the piece is minimalist in the extreme, but the ordering of pitches is completely inscrutable.

Outcome Inevitable (1991), for the Relache ensemble, is grounded in an insistent repeating middle C in the bass. The rhythmic structure is determined by repeating rhythms tapped out softly on a bass drum in odd groupings. The series of changing rhythms outlines a seven-part structure, each part of which features a solo by a different instrument. The melodies all consist merely of rising scales interrupted by occasional leaps (or steps) downward to keep the line within a fairly narrow range:

Outcome1
Outcome2

(Audio example here.) Each phrase consists of a small random number of 16th-notes (up to 6) leading to a sustained note. Lasting 16 minutes, the piece is a lovely evocation of timelessness, drawn from a clear and endlessly elaborated idea, but quite unpredictable in its details.

In When Famous Last Words Fail You (1997), written for singer Thomas Buckner to sing with the American Composers Orchestra, the entire orchestra plays only the pitch A in various octaves; the conductor does not beat time, but merely controls volume, as the instruments are cued by key words in the singer’s text. Unwilling to do this at the premiere, Dennis Russell Davies did not rehearse the piece well, and gave what Ashley considered a miserable and misleading performance. The piece has never been heard as it was intended, but surely an orchestra piece using only one pitch merits some mention in a history of minimalism.

As for the operatic works, in 1998 Ashley began devising strategies to sabotage the narrativity of his own texts. One of these is the application of more than one text at a time. The stories in Dust (1998) are chanted by each soloist above four other lines chanted by the other singers. Celestial Excursions uses similar techniques, and also includes a scene in which two songs are heard at once, one a country-and-western love song and the other a Renaissance sonnet. In his current opera Quicksand, Ashley is experimenting with a technique of reading the line while passing quickly past the microphone, so that each phrase takes on the envelope of a quick motion, a kind of Doppler effect; in the excerpt I heard performed live, the meaning sometimes became indistinguishable. One of the most striking examples of textual sabotage is the short opera Your Money My Life Goodbye (1998), one of Ashley’s most minimalist works. (Please listen to the first excerpt before reading the following description.)

The musical accompaniment is a series of pulsing A-flat major triads at a pulse of 216 per minute. The text comprises 892 lines of seven syllables each, each line divided 3+2+2, with no line hyphenated over to the next:

Your-Money-excerpt

Each vocal line is meant to be read in a rhythm that parallels that of the title, “Your money, my life, good-bye.” (The opera Concrete will use a similar verbal isorhythm.) There are 15 pulsing chords per vocal line; I think no one would ever notice this simply listening to the piece, but if, starting from the first note, you conduct the pulsing chords in 15/8 (that is, five groups of three), you can predict the onset of each phrase. Since I have realized this, I have found the text much more difficult to understand – I fall into the habit of listening to it as merely phoneme-inflected rhythm. (Now listen to the first excerpt again.)

Your Money My Life Goodbye does have a plot about a spy married to a nefarious woman financier who brings down large corporations a la Bernie Madoff – and this a full decade before Madoff became a synonym for fraud. But if you listen to the text in seven-syllable increments, it can virtually cease to be heard as text and sound like a repeating rhythm, like those optical illusions that can be seen either as a vase or as two faces. The effect illustrates perhaps better than anything in Ashley’s output his idea of speech being musical in and of itself. Towards the end of the work, in another complication, a bass ostinato starts grouping the chords into a syncopated 6/4 meter. Thus the text marks off chords in groupings of 15, and the ostinato creates a harmonic rhythm of 24 chords, for a quite complex but minimalistically steady five-against-eight cross-rhythm. I think we may have to call Your Money My Life Goodbye the most hard-core minimalist opera since Einstein on the Beach.

In addition, Ashley’s second recording of Atalanta, made in 2010, twenty-five years after the first recording, shows how far Ashley’s style moved towards minimalism in that quarter-century. The 1985 version is particularly chaotic by Ashley’s standards, though there are passages, such as this one, in which the six repeating chords and the recurring melody are clearly audible. By the 2010 recording, though, improvisation is absent, and the electronic backgrounds engineered by Tom Hamilton are consistent and predictable. In the first scene, “The Etchings,” each chord lasts five minutes. In “Empire,” of which we’ll hear an excerpt here of the first chord going into the second, the music takes more than half an hour to move through the six chords only twice. The second compact disc that contains the series of stories called “Au Pair” (text by Jacqueline Humbert) is entirely on an E-flat chord. Ashley unifies the stories by a motive of two rising half-steps, and each story continues the upward chromatic scale where the previous one leaves off, a very subtle kind of additive process.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Ashley’s lifelong commitment to both complexity and the drone concept make him an interesting, not-very-minimal-sounding minimalist. Over the decades, the drone concept has remained a constant in his music, while the complexity, if never absent, has gradually become more transparent, a randomization of details rather than an overloading of layers. Ashley’s born-again Feldmanism in later life may have colored his early intentions through 20-20 hindsight, but his relentless pursuit of uneventfulness has eventually turned him into a wary, reluctant, perhaps even unintentional minimalist, but a minimalist nonetheless.

 

“Your Name Here” As Minimalist

I will be spending next week in warm, sunny Long Beach, California, at the Fourth International Conference on Minimalist Music, sponsored by the Bob Cole Conservatory at Cal State Long Beach. It’s the great biennial social event of my life, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m delivering my paper “‘Eventfulness Is Really Boring’: Robert Ashley as Minimalist” on Saturday morning, October 5, at the 11:30 session, and there’s another Ashley paper as well, by Charissa Noble. In addition, on Oct. 3 pianist Bryan Pezzone is giving a piano recital of composers associated with the Cold Blue label, and something of mine is included. I have no idea what, because they’ve never contacted me. It’ll be a nice surprise, and an honor, which I hardly deserve, because even if I do perversely consider myself a minimalist, I could hardly argue with those who insist that I’m not. (To be more exact, I swerve between postminimalism and totalism, depending on the medium.)

I’ve decided every book I write will provide my material for the subsequent minimalism conference. So look forward to the 2015 event, at which I will undoubtedly present “Charles Ives as Minimalist.” I can make the case!

UPDATE: The complete schedule of papers for the conference is up here, with the individual titles and presenters at the bottom of the page.

Typical Gannian Phase-Shifting

Displaced quintuplets in apparent 4/4 meter, from my new piece Sang Plato’s Ghost (click for better focus):

Platos-example

 

A Teacher Fondly Remembered

Today at a local hangout I met Hudson Valley composer Brian Dewan. I knew the name. We got to talking, and he mentioned a composition teacher of his who had enlarged his view of modern repertoire. Idly curious, I asked who it was. “Joe Wood,” he replied.

I think my glass of wine hit the bar with a thud. “Joe?! Wood?! You went to Oberlin?”

He had, eight years after I did. Joseph Wood (1915-2000) was a composer who had come mainly from the commercial music world. Wikipedia credits him with an arrangement of “Chiquita Banana” for Xavier Cugat, a career in Muzak arrangements, and the choral writing for the musical Brigadoon. Yet he had a 1950 orchestra piece, simply called Poem for Orchestra, on a CRI record. He was my first composition teacher in college, and taught the only orchestration class I ever took. As Brian and I both remembered, he was looked down upon by the hot-shot Oberlin comp students as an old fogey, but we each thought of him as a kindly gentleman. There was a persistent rumor that he had written the Looney-Toons cartoon theme. I never quite believed it, and Brian had actually asked him if it was true. He said Joe looked off into the distance for a long moment and replied with some melancholy, “I never did that.” His taste did seem quite wide-ranging considering his personal Romantic aesthetic; I remember being assigned to orchestrate an early Stockhausen klavierstück, though I can’t imagine what the criteria of success would have been. Brian remembered him praising Ligeti as someone who had never written a bad piece.

Joe Wood gave me what was, for its timing, one of the most comforting compliments I have ever received. We were at the Midwest Composers Symposium in Iowa or some godforsaken place, and ended up walking back together after a concert. He was complaining about some horrible piece we had just heard. The previous evening, I had had a piece played that was a godawful improvisatory graphic score filled with theatrical silliness. Pausing after his diatribe, Joe said, by way of contrast, “Your piece was young, but it had talent.” To say my piece was young was an understatement; it was pompously puerile. To say it showed talent was an outright lie; whatever talent I have, that youthful experiment did not reveal. But for him to say that to a freshman conferred a touching dignity upon me at a time in my life in which dignity was still an unfamiliar thrill. I have not heard his name often in the intervening years, but when I have I have always conferred a reflexive blessing upon it.

I am listening to Poem for Orchestra as I write; I digitized it a few years ago for old time’s sake, and keep it on my hard drive. And I drink a toast tonight to a composer mostly forgotten now, but one whom two former students could think of fondly decades after he gently touched their lives.

 

Our National Corporate Racket

CahillSweeterI am in receipt, today, of a few copies of pianist Sarah Cahill’s new compact disc on the Other Minds label, A Sweeter Music. It’s a compilation of eight pieces from her project commissioning composers to write music that protests war and urges peace – out just in time for our Nobel-winning president to bomb the hell out of Syria. On it Sarah plays (and speaks) my War Is Just a Racket, on a 1933 speech by General Smedley Butler, along with other pieces by Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, Carl Stone, Phil Kline, Yoko Ono, and the Residents. There’s a lot of sensuously beautiful stuff on this disc; my piece and the Residents’ are the only ones to use text. Sarah does a magnificent job, as always, and will be recording the other ten pieces from the collection at a future date.

 

The End of Music History

Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat?

Because really good teaching is not about seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call counterintuitive, but to the teacher simply means being honest.

– Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, p. 181

At the request of my department chair – and he so rarely asks me for anything, I could hardly have turned him down – I am teaching a 20th-century music history survey course, or rather, music since 1910. I’ve been dreading it, and my fears are so far confirmed. First of all, I have long been convinced that you can’t do the entire 20th century in a survey course. To me, third-semester music history should be 1900-1960, and the fourth semester should take over after that. Not only is there way too much material, there’s no unifying idea to the first and second halves of the century. The year 1976 seems to remain a popular stopping point for many professors and textbooks, and I wonder if anyone (besides me) has ever taught a 20th-century class in which the last three decades got as much attention as the first three.

Secondly, while it’s always easy to know where to start, and has always been tricky knowing where to end, these days ending is impossible. Forty years ago, when I took this course at Oberlin, you could begin with Stravinsky and Schoenberg and work your way up, decade by decade, through the various movements and major figures. It was assumed that the language of music was evolving, and that that evolution could be traced, with a few detours and parallel streams. But of course, now we know what happens: past 1970 the idea of a mainstream evaporates, and – as musicologist Leonard Meyer so shrewdly predicted – we entered a kind of stasis in which many, many styles compete and continue. Everything is permissible; a million things have been done, anything we can imagine will be done eventually, and many things that had been done get done all over again. I suppose if you’re a hard-core traditionalist it’s easier to draw your boundaries, but the Downtown music I like to focus on blends into jazz and pop around the edges. I have to argue with students for the right to teach Laurie Anderson, Pamela Z, and Mikel Rouse as postclassical music. Just deciding what music to include within the definitions of the course requires a whole separate section on the philosophy of music.

And I am finding that the philosophical difficulties extend into the past retroactively. I know perfectly well what I’m supposed to teach, and in fact, I am quite lucky in my mandated choice of textbook: the new Taruskin/Gibbs Oxford History of Western Music. The book itself has revisionist leanings and casts its own sly suspicions on orthodox pedagogy, and so is more in sync with me than any other textbook I could use. The best thing I can say about it is that its pronouncements never make me wince, which I consider high praise in this context. We use it for the entire music history sequence because its quality is so high; the fact that Professor Gibbs is on our faculty is, of course, entirely coincidental (as is the fact that I am heavily quoted in the final chapter).

But given the sequence of the textbook, I have to start out with Schoenberg, and for me, to start with Schoenberg already puts everything on the wrong track. (If this offends you, read further at your own risk, because it’s only downhill from here.) The assumption of Schoenberg’s importance, given the continuing unpopularity of his music, is founded on the further assumption that what we’re teaching is the evolution of the musical language. In fact, the very title of our music history sequence, The Literature and Language of Music (“lit’n’lang” in departmental parlance, reminding me of “live ‘n’ learn”) presupposes that there is a language of music evolving through its canonical examples. If you want to trace a certain absolutist attitude toward atonality, and the development of the 12-tone row as a technical device, Schoenberg is of course essential to the sequence of events. But does his music, therefore, deserve pride of place in the literature?

I consider it the most important thing I can teach my students, assuming I ever succeed in getting it across, that a lot of music that seems nonsensical or off-putting at first is well worth putting the effort into assimilating. Nothing irks me more than the reflexive resistance they put up against music they don’t “like” on first listening. When I was their age, any piece I didn’t understand represented a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down to my musical intelligence. There was not going to be any piece I couldn’t fathom. (Many fine “conservative” pieces I could superficially comprehend, I now realize I dismissed rather too easily.) And yet, there is now tons and tons of difficult, complicated, obscure music, and after 45 years of deciphering it I am aware that not all of it eventually repays the effort. I was determined to master the intricacies of the Concord Sonata, Le Sacre du Printemps, Pli selon pli, Turangalila, Mantra, Philomel, and I love them all, I’m devoted to them, thrilled to introduce students to them. Other works that I committed many, many listening and analytical hours to – almost all of Schoenberg, everything by Berg except Wozzeck, all but a few pieces of Elliott Carter – simply bore me today. I know that Op. 31 Orchestra Variations and that damn “Es ist genug” violin concerto inside and out, but they strike me as awkward and pedantic. I listen to them with acute understanding of how they’re made, but never admiringly. A lot of that music I feel I was brainwashed into taking very seriously, and the effects of my youthful brainwashing are largely worn off.

So, of the music I cannot honestly advocate to students on account of what I perceive as its inherent virtues, by what criterion do I urge it on them? If historical importance is the guideline, then one needs to climb the ladder of influences, but it turns out that that ladder frays into a maze at the top. And actually, looking back from 1970, any sense of a mainstream had pretty much died as soon as neoclassicism was pitted against dodecaphony. The moment Scriabin, Ives, Stravinsky, Varése all separately agreed to use sonorities never heard in music before, everything really became permissible instantly – it just took a few generations to realize the implications. People today still write neoclassic music, still write 12-tone music. Partch leaped into just intonation only 15 years after The Rite of Spring, seven years after the first 12-tone row, and that’s the course I’m still on. 4’33” is closer in time to Pierrot Lunaire than it is to the present. If we’ve had a hundred years of multi-subcultural stasis, how much does it really matter who did something first? My students get a much bigger kick out of Gruppen and Sinfonia than they do from Webern, and since I agree with them, why not simply detail the pedigree of the 12-tone idea as part of a discussion of serialism? Why play the first 12-tone music instead of the most rewarding?

In fact, to present 12-tone music as a major movement at all, I have to attempt to explain why certain composers considered it so crucial to have some universal new system to replace tonality. And the truth is, I don’t understand why they felt that way. I’m so much more in sympathy with what Ives wrote: “Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see. Why it should always be present, I can’t see.” Tonality is so widely evident in much well-regarded music of recent decades that my students and I share the same incomprehension on this point. It sounds like an episode that belongs in the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Some people in my position would make a countercharge about minimalism, but they would have to contend with the Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt fans among my students; and minimalism never tried to corner the market. (I’m also teaching my minimalism seminar this semester, and the students in there are passionate about the subject, so well-informed that they’ve brought up more obscure pieces than I had planned to address.)

The upshot is that I can no longer teach the canon of early/mid-20th-century music, as it was taught to me, in very good faith. The only criterion I could defend, if challenged, is how much fulfillment I still get from the music today, with some scholarly lip service granted to what pieces posed an influence on the composer’s contemporaries. Certain composers who don’t get much academic attention – Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre, Busoni, Wolpe, Sorabji, James P. Johnson, Vermeulen, Blomdahl, Rochberg – seem to me infinitely more appealing to present than some of the usual suspects. After all, we’ve already gone through this revisionist process for 19th-century music: if we hadn’t, we’d still have to be putting Hummel and Spohr on the listening tests. At the other end, I have only the flimsiest of rationales for teaching all the wonderful array of postclassical music I love while still excluding jazz and pop, the ultimate one being my faulty or nonexistent expertise in those latter fields. I resorted to describing the history of my idiosyncratic career as justification for my particular view of recent history, and while I’m happy for student input, I hardly want to surrender my hard-earned historical understanding to the chaos of 22 variously-informed student perspectives.

So it’s a mess, and an enforced experiment with few visible guideposts. I’m afraid I know the last hundred years of music so well that I no longer know what the history of it is.

 

Confessions of a Fed-Up Old Fart Academic

I picked up Mark Edmundson’s book Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education because of a Times review that mentioned his complaint about a college culture in which professors give slim homework assignments in return for good course evaluations from students. Boy, did that strike a nerve. Those student evaluations carry enormous weight. I do well on them. I’m a pretty good song ‘n’ dance professor. I bring up episodes from The Simpsons to make a point. I slip quotations from The Big Lebowski into my lecture and glance around the room to see who perks up. I am famous for my digressions, and occasionally a student evaluation will even admit, “His stories go wildly off-topic, but somehow they end up being relevant and adding to the discussion.” I like to hear my jaw rattle, and when allowed a captive audience I can get a little manic (as a lot of people who know me socially would have trouble believing).

But you know what? At Northwestern I studied medieval music with Theodore Karp, a round little man with a distinct whisper and a slow, deliberate air. He had no song ‘n’ dance in him at all. Students beyond the front row could hardly hear him. Yet he knew every music manuscript of the 11th through 16th centuries top to bottom, and the calm, munificent way he dignified every student question, no matter how misguided, with a meticulous and carefully qualified reply, at whatever length necessary, made him a glowing presence. He was the Yoda of musicology. I was devoted to him, and after his 15th century class knew that period almost as well as the 20th century. As an undergrad I had an aesthetics professor, too, whose pause-studded lectures could cure insomnia, but we had great discussions in his office afterward. And the music theory teacher whose knowledge I most pass on to my own students today was distinctly lacking in charisma. As I look back, I was impressed by academics who could keep a class laughing, but there wasn’t much correlation between how clever a lecturer a professor was and how much impact he or she had on me. It had to do with something else – perhaps a dogged determination to impart knowledge.

As a result, when I sit on faculty evaluation committees, I’m the one who ends up defending the boring but expert professors, the ones who get poor write-ups from non-majors who just took the class for a distribution requirement, but whose senior project advisees think of them as gods. And I’m a little ashamed of myself for feeling smug about my ability to entertain 19-year-olds. Though perfectly successful by the available metrics, I am not yet the type of professor I most admire.

One of the problems with college culture throughout the field, I think, is that teaching well is not rewarded much. Everyone smiles indulgently when a student raves about a professor, but it’s publishing (mostly), committee work (somewhat less), and professional honors that raise one’s profile in the institution. I resent switching my focus from my current book project to my next class, partly because it’s the book that’s going to impress my superiors and colleagues. That’s kind of sad. Edmundson is exercised about college devolving into a credential factory, in which we entertain young people for four years and then declare them qualified for a job without having changed their lives, transforming their sense of who they are. He waxes eloquent on the way we present to them the great minds of the past condescendingly, without acknowledging how much superior they were to most of us today. My school recently lost a wonderful music teacher who had come from studying and teaching in Asia, and she was horrified by how lazy American students were. She wouldn’t bend on her assignment workload, and her student evaluations suffered as a result; now she’s teaching in Beijing, where she’s more justly appreciated.

I emphasize that my own school is not extreme in this regard; Edmundson makes it clear, with reports from colleagues at schools all over, that college culture is fairly uniform, and heavily conditioned by mass culture and the internet. I’ve adapted too well to this undemanding milieu, and I’m trying to figure what to do about it. I cut the kids too much slack because they are just like I was at that age: arrogant, fragile, neurotic, and affronted by criticism. They come in having had their self-esteem artificially pumped up in high school, and their expertise in certain things I know little about – technology, pop culture, stuff they’re read about on Wikipedia – is indeed impressive (as, Edmundson insists, our liberal relativism makes us all too quick to admit; wisdom has been reduced to knowledge, knowledge to information, and all information is equal). Yet they’re also personally insecure enough that to hammer them about their cultural ignorance, their inability to think critically, would feel cruel. As one of my more perceptive colleagues put it (who paid his own way through college), “I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to spend my career patting rich people’s kids on the head.” In one respect, many of them are not like I was: I am miserably astonished at how few of them really want to take pride in how good a theory or history paper they can write. Outside their performance major, meeting the bare minimum requirements is too often good enough. As a writer myself I want to push and push them to express themselves clearly and dig beneath the obvious facts, but pressing them too hard goes against the culture, and they’re already insulted by a B-plus that I thought of as a gift.

I do not remember being nearly as focused on social life as kids seem to be today. Parties were a terrible trial for me, and I was little enough socialized that solitude was often preferable (and still is). I’m embarrassed today to recall how many classes I skipped, but I was constantly reading and studying for self-improvement. I remember reflecting that very little learning actually took place in classrooms (a self-fulfilling prophecy in my case), and that the main thing I could absorb from my music profs was their attitude, their jaunty disregard for things that didn’t matter and their laser focus on things that did. That does seem to work for some students (and I seem to be the perfect teacher for the lackadaisical hot-shots who were most like me), but it doesn’t work for them all.

On the other hand, Edmundson – several years older than I am – remembers a college culture in the 1960s that was different from the one I found. He had professors who challenged him, risked offending him, and changed the way he thought. I went to Oberlin in the ’70s, and things, if he is correct, had changed. With the rapid rise in student population in the ’60s, a slew of new young faculty got hired quickly. As I think back, many of them – even some of my favorites – seemed breathtakingly irresponsible. One of my professors spent an entire class reading us a crazy satire of musicology articles someone had written. He was brilliant, and tremendously entertaining. He was also the teacher who warned me that Cage was a charlatan and minimalism a scam, but I didn’t think him less brilliant for that, only limited in perspective. It was not uncommon, at the time, for professors to require almost no work at all. There was a war in Vietnam; guys who flunked would get snapped up by the draft board (actually that ended the month before I turned 18); and grade inflation was through the roof. My GPA was 3.78, and I’ve always sworn I was in the bottom half of my class. In other words, if American college culture has really gone so far downhill, it seems to have begun happening after Edmundson went to school, and before I did.

Perhaps unfortunately, I developed my teaching style in conscious imitation of some of those professors, but I don’t dare be as slipshod as some of them were; the climate has changed. Nevertheless, I’m going to try to see how much more I can push my students this year, without injuring their delicate self-esteem. The student evaluations can no longer concern me, because I’ve exhausted all the honors the school can bestow. As the old-timers tell me, I’ve only got two promotions left: “emeritus” and “dead.” Unlike my more vulnerable younger colleagues, I no longer need the students to be my friends. I’m three times their age now, and I’d much rather they astonish me with their commitment, enthusiasms, and bursts of originality. Their lack of intellectual ambition is a perennial disappointment, and I’m going to try to focus on changing that, if I possibly can, rather than on keeping them entertained. I may even have to become boring.

 

Passionate Dinosaur in a Laid-Back New World

From Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education:

It’s his capacity for enthusiasm that sets [a favorite student he has described] apart from what I’ve come to think of as the reigning generational style. Whether the students are fraternity/sorority types, grunge aficionados, piercers/tattooers, black or white, rich or middle class… they are, nearly across the board, very, very self-contained. On good days they display a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there’s little fire, little passion to be found.

This point came home to me a few weeks ago when I was wandering across the university grounds. There, beneath a classically cast portico, were two students, male and female, having a rip-roaring argument. They were incensed, bellowing at each other, headstrong, confident, and wild. It struck me how rarely I see this kind of full-out feeling in students anymore. Strong emotional display is forbidden. When conflicts arise, it’s generally understood that one of the parties will say something sarcastically propitiating (“Whatever” often does it) and slouch away.

How did my students reach this peculiar state in which all passion seems to be spent? I think that many of them have imbibed their sense of self from consumer culture in general and from the tube in particular. They’re the progeny of a hundred cable channels and videos on demand. TV, Marshall McLuhan famously said, is a cool medium. Those who play best on it are low-key and nonassertive; they blend in. Enthusiasm… quickly looks absurd. The form of character that’s most appealing on TV is calmly self-interested though never greedy, attuned to the conventions, and ironic. Judicious timing is preferred to sudden self-assertion….

Most of my students seem desperate to blend in, to look right, not to make a spectacle of themselves. (Do I have to tell you that those two students having the argument under the portico turned out to be acting in a role-playing game?) The specter of the uncool creates a subtle tyranny. It’s apparently an easy standard to subscribe to, this Letterman-like, Tarantino-inflected cool, but once committed to it, you discover that matters are rather different. You’re inhibited from showing emotion, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. You’re made to feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code will get you genially ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm. (pp. 7-9)

I wouldn’t try to vouch for how aptly this description applies to student culture today in general; I try never to assume that Bard is typical. But it certainly explains to me for the first time why so many young composers hold it against me that I took an outspoken part in the serialism-minimalism feud of that allegedly horrible decade the 1980s. Composers in academia went on the attack against minimalism and Cagean influences, and I fought back, almost never so much against their music as against their intolerance. That my part in that fight is remembered today somewhat better than the original attacks is due to three reasons: Babbitt, Wuorinen, Davidovsky, et al attacked via scholarly journals and I was in a popular newspaper; much of their power was wielded behind the scenes via prize-giving organizations; and, since I am a better writer than they were, my words have achieved a longer shelf-life. Among the New Music America types Downtown, the situation unified a lot of us together for a glorious cause to which we were devoted. The collective feeling, the sense that we could make something exciting happen, energized and inspired us. If I had it all to do over again, I would change virtually nothing.

But the young, laid-back composers are horrified by all this. They find public argument distasteful; standing up for one’s aesthetic viewpoint an embarrassing faux pas; generalization about a style or repertoire impolite. As Edmundson goes on to say,

What my students are, at their best, is decent. They are potent believers in equality…

What they will generally not do, though, is indict the current system. They won’t talk, say, about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery. That would be getting too loud, too brash. For the pervading view is the cool, consumer perspective, where passion and strong admiration are forbidden. (p. 9)

No one has ever called me cool. A certain perennial emotiveness has been noted, also the presence of passions and enthusiasms. A total insusceptibility to peer pressure was observed in my youth, and I have never blended in. I find the current system unfair, and I’m always on call to help blow it to bits. I’ve always been willing to stand up publicly for what I believe, and I’ve always considered the willingness to do so one of the signal virtues. But I can see now from this laid-back viewpoint what an embarrassing throwback I must seem, as Edmundson, in the book, suspects he is too, with his own passions and principled stands. One is no longer allowed to believe in his or her own aesthetic path so strongly as to extol it above others. Like Robert Frost’s liberals, we are too open-minded to take our own side in a quarrel. I have long known that my style of being a musician had become deeply unfashionable, but not until reading Edmundson did I grasp the process by which all of my most cherished virtues had become reinterpreted as social indelicacies.

 

Opus Triple-Digit

I am not a particularly prolific composer, and have always been a little sensitive about it. The sensitivity started in college. In high school I spewed forth inept sonatas and chamber pieces by the ream with a frightening incapacity for self-criticism, and I swept into Oberlin with guns a-blazing. But my undergraduate composition teacher was intimidating and unsympathetic, and after a few months with him I found myself too petrified to compose anything. It took me many years to fully overcome the sense of insecurity that took root in me under his weekly lack of enthusiasm. It is common among a certain type of professor to say that, if a student can be dissuaded from becoming a composer, he should be; but if he can’t be dissuaded and you try for years anyway, the damage can be considerable and long-lasting.

At any rate, later there were other excuses for my relative lack of productivity. I’ve had to work like a dog to make a living all my life. The early years of being a high-profile critic took up a lot of psychic energy; it wasn’t like selling shoes while secretly working out musical plans in my head. And I got into the habit of writing books, which bring me more professional advantage than my music does these days, and writing them is so easy for me that I’m not likely to quit. I am selfish enough that I will deny the world the music I could be writing if I’m getting more jollies somewhere else.

But the real reason for the slow growth in my opus numbers, or probably more real than these other reasons anyway, is that I’m something of a conceptualist with a populist conscience. That is, to get inspired with a piece I need a concept, an idea, some friction of irreconcilables, that applies only to that piece. I do not have a habitual musical language that I can turn on and off like a spigot, or roll out by the yard, as so many composers do. So I get these inspirations like, hey, what if you had a rhythmic structure like this, but a harmonic rhythm that was totally independent of it, and you had to make it work and sound good anyway. Sounding good is the sticking point. I’ve had some compositional ideas I’ve carried around for decades, and I just can’t make them work, so I start a lot more pieces than I finish. And I am not like some of my fellow experimentalists I could name, who will find the concept sufficient and roar ahead with the work whether the listener can afterward tell what what the hell the piece was about or not. I conceive each work in some kind of arcane musical algebra, but if the initial results don’t sound wonderful and seductive, to me, I just won’t go through with it. Sometimes I try the same idea over every few years, and in several cases I’ve eventually figured out how to bring a recalcitrant concept to heel, usually by making my grandiose, austere premises simpler and/or more flexible.

Somehow I got, rather early, the idea that as long as I wrote over a hundred pieces in my career, I would consider that a respectable output. For some reason I did not want to be one of those composers known for their miniscule worklists of only 20 or 35 works: Webern, Varèse, Ruth Crawford, Ruggles, even Nancarrow (65, officially). For one thing, to make an impression with such a small catalogue requires not only a high consistency of quality but a trademark idiom, and I’m a little too variable in style and quality for that. And on the other hand, Beethoven only has 138 opus numbers, and though many of them are multiple works, anything over a hundred sounded vaguely in the ballpark. And some time in the past year, depending on what early works I feel like copping to in any current mood, I passed the one-hundred mark. With the two works I’m finishing up this week – a septet for the Ghost Ensemble called Sang Plato’s Ghost, and a chamber suite called Catskill Set – my official list has 105 titles. I made it!

And neither would I have wanted to be one of those composers who bombards the world with his or her fecundity. Darius Milhaud is one of my favorite composers, but a large percentage of his music sounds phoned in, and past the sixty or so fabulous pieces you quickly run into works that make you wonder why he bothered. Alan Hovhaness, similarly. I’m trying to figure out how much of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s music I really need to get familiar with. Composers like these need someone to write a book covering their complete output and letting all of us know what the gems are. It seems to me that extremely prolific composers create a perceptual barrier for themselves, because nobody after Schubert writes 500 masterpieces, and even a listening fan gets discouraged trying to profitably fill in the complete profile.

So “over a hundred” sounds good, and I can psychically relax a little. Breathes there the composer, today, who doesn’t occasionally stop and reflect that there’s already way too much good music in the world anyway, and that it seems either sadistic or masochistic to continue adding to it? I can keep composing when I’m really enjoying it, without the tad of psychic pressure in the back of my mind that I haven’t yet written enough. My worklist looks sufficiently respectable; a dozen or so of the works exceed a half-hour. And with having passed ten years as a blogger today as well, and finished the five chapters of my Ives book (out of fifteen, six of them already done) that I was determined to write before the semester started, I think that’s enough landmarks achieved for one summer.

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So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]

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American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

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