That’s Phil Glass, Keith Potter. Photo by Jelena Novak.

I’m back from the Einstein on the Beach festivities in Amsterdam, and Friday at 3 I’ll be giving a reading from my 4’33” book at the National Academy Museum in New York City. [No, I won’t stand there without saying anything. Ha-ha.]

UPDATE: You can ignore the following. Frank Oteri wants to put my Einstein analysis on New Music Box, where it will reach a wider audience. Going commercial, at whatever modest level, is always better than going academic when you have the chance, if you can do so without compromises. So I’ve pulled the article off my website, and will announce when it’s on NMBx.

As for my paper on Einstein, I decided for now not to blog it, but to put it up on my web site, so you’ll find “Intuition and Algorithm in Einstein on the Beach” there. I’ve seen a lot of scholars post scholarly articles on their web sites, and it strikes me that it carries just a touch more gravitas than doing it on one’s blog. It would be nice to have it in a journal somewhere and be an official Phil Glass scholar, but it’s kind of an empty credential to play off against the advantage of people finding it easily on Google. As I’ve said before, I’m all for peer-review in principle, but it’s kind of a double-edged sword. The purpose of peer review is to make everyone conform, meaning 1. making everyone conform to the facts, which is great, and I’m happy to be fact-checked and have typos caught; and 2. making everyone conform to the conventions of academic writing, which can be deadly awful. Depending what “peers” review me (and while thousands of people write as well as or better than I do, only a handful of them are musicologists), I am likely to be told not to be so breezy, casual, and journalistic, and that I ought to be more interpretive, and properly mention Deleuze, and throw in some critical theory, and all that crap. I really think that after one’s published a certain number of books from academic presses (let’s just say five, for the sake of argument) one should get a permanent free pass from peer-review, and have one’s writings accepted verbatim thereafter. But, that’s what the internet’s for, right? The masses will, in time, catch my miscalculations and typos. I can’t quite believe that no one else has yet compared the two Dances in Einstein, but I couldn’t find it elsewhere, and perhaps someone will bring such a case to my attention. If not, now it’s been done.

UPDATE: And I’ve been remiss in not thanking Juhani Nuorvala for the nice Tom Johnson quote, which I used prominently.

 

My friend George is looking forward to a respite from Cage performances now that the centennial is ending. He says it got so bad he couldn’t even enjoy “Silent Night” anymore.

 

A week from today and tomorrow, I’ll be in Amsterdam for the University of Amsterdam’s conference on Phil Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. I’m taking part in a panel discussion January 5, and on the morning of the 6th I’ll give a paper on my analysis of Einstein, the writing of which I am interrupting briefly to make this announcement. My interest is in the intuitive and nonlinear (right-brain) structuring of the piece’s music, which was such a departure from the process-oriented minimalism of previous years. In fact, while it’s easy to see what’s going on in the music, it’s cost me considerable thought and some ingenuity to figure out how to describe it or chart it in some clear way. For each movement (scene) I’m trying to come up with a concise graphic that will encapsulate the relevant details.

For instance, the “Building” scene is a really simple continuum of eighth-notes for two organs in a pentatonic scale, something like Music in Contrary Motion. But the musical logic is not at all linear, and is difficult to spell out. I finally realized that the music can be reduced to four modules:

Of course, the fact that module A is included in module B, and C in D, is part of the apparent micro-complexity. But I figured out I could line up all the repetitive patterns in such a way that one can tell instantly what changes from one pattern to the next (each pattern in repeat signs represented here by one line):

What logic there is becomes evident, I think. The piece begins with the two 3/8 modules (B and D), and in the first half inserts module A in various and changing places. Unlike earlier pieces such as Music in Fifths, the process isn’t additive, but sometimes jumps the added module from one place in the pattern to another. The first half expands with added A’s and then contracts down to just B and D again, and then starts adding in module A at the beginning, and introducing module C toward the end, of each repetition. Then A drops out and it concentrates on BCD for awhile, gradually moving toward an emphasis on the 10/8 pattern ABCD before reducing back to BD at the end. Of course, what one hears are mostly the irregular rhythmic accents made by the highest and lowest repeating notes.

This being a rather formal paper, I once again have the decision to make as to whether to submit it to an academic journal or just publish it here. I like the journal American Music, and have connections with it, but its articles aren’t always accessible on JSTOR, and access is the whole point. Musical Quarterly is terribly slow, taking years between submission and publication. Perspectives of New Music was the prestige music journal of my youth, but while they might publish it for variety’s sake, the editors really seem antipathetic to this kind of music; they tried to slightly sabotage my Well-Tuned Piano article 20 years ago, and I’ve never been tempted to send them anything else. So I have to weigh whether having another résumé line is worth limiting the article’s circulation. Meanwhile, I get a trip to Amsterdam out of it, and there are few places I love more.

People are telling me they’ve received their copies of my Robert Ashley book from Amazon. (I still have only one myself.)

There’s one story Bob told me that I didn’t include in the book, just because a scholarly book like this didn’t seem the right place for it. (Well, there are several stories, but one he didn’t ask me to keep to myself.) When Bob was a toddler his mother and grandmother were giving him a bath in the sink, and he managed to stick his finger into an empty electrical socket. He lost consciousness and they frantically tried to bring him back. He watched the whole scene, he remembers, from above them in the kitchen. He came to, and ever since he’s believed in the soul’s ability to leave the body.

For reasons not yet clear to me, the Oxford University Press blog has been doing a series of articles about Mars, and they asked me to write an entry on Mars and music, from an astrological point of view, which is now up. They are plotting some major announcement about Mars, and apparently I am one of the few musicologist-composer-writer-astrologers around since the death of Dane Rudhyar. I almost declined, but then reflected that Uranus is trining my ascendent, which suggests that benefits may come my way from totally out-of-left-field sources, so thought I’d better grasp the opportunity. Who knew that the Grove Dictionary of Music people needed a staff astrologer?

From the Society for Minimalist Music website, here’s the invitation for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013:

You are kindly invited to submit proposals for the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism, jointly hosted by UCLA and the California State University, Long Beach on the campus of CSULB in Long Beach, CA, 3-6 October 2013.

All scholars interested in music and minimalism are invited to submit paper proposals. The conference welcomes all papers concerning minimalist and post-minimalist music as well as the many subsequent styles they inspired, and is committed to the broadest methodological scope, including analytical, historical, cultural, philosophical, composer-centric, and performance-oriented presentations. In honor of the conference’s West Coast location, the organizers would especially like to encourage papers (or session proposals) on the theme of “Minimalism and the Left (Coast),” including such topics as:

• California minimalism (composers, labels, scenes, trends, institutions like the SF Tape Music Center, Cold Blue Recordings, etc.)
• Minimalism and the Pacific Rim (Japan, China, East Asia)
• Minimalism and Hollywood
• Countercultural minimalism (minimalism, popular music, altered consciousness)
• Minimalism and leftist (or rightist) politics (the 1960s and after)

The Society is also interested, as always, in new research on the core minimalist, post-minimalist, and “totalist” repertories; engagement with the work of lesser-known composers, especially from outside the USA, the United Kingdom, and Europe; and position papers on the larger implications of musical minimalism in contemporary world culture:

• The minimalist and post-minimalist “core” repertoire (Young, Reich, Riley, Glass, Adams, etc.)
• Minimalism outside the USA (Louis Andriessen, Simeon ten Holt, Gavin Bryars, Hans Otte, Eliane Radigue, Karel Goeyvaerts, Zoltan Jeney, Steve Martland, Kevin Volans, Jo Kondo, etc.)
• Global minimalism and world music (minimalism in East and South Asia, Australasia, Africa, and Latin America; the influence of these and other non-Western musics on minimalist composers in the West)
• Crucial but less public figures in the minimalist story: William Duckworth, Tony Conrad, Phil Niblock, Jon Gibson, Rhys Chatham, David Borden, Glenn Branca, Julius Eastman, Terry Jennings, John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Read Miller, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, Phillip Schroeder, Chas Smith, etc., etc.
• Minimalism, opera, new music theater (Robert Wilson, George Coates, Mikel Rouse, Paul Dresher, Rinde Eckert, etc.) and dance (Anna Halprin, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, etc.)
• The significance of minimalist and post-minimalist music as cultural practice
• Minimalism, space, ecology, the environment (ambient music, John Luther Adams, deep listening, etc.)
• Minimalism, sexuality, and gender (female composers [Monk, Oliveros, Speech, Lockwood, Radigue, Ustvolskaya]; repetition, cyclic process, and gender; etc.)
• Aesthetics/listening/analysis: discussions of the particular ways in which minimalism invites listening attitudes and their impact on music analysis
• Minimalism, post-minimalism and their influence on contemporary music composition (see lecture recitals, below)
• The performance practice of minimalism and post-minimalism (see lecture recitals below)

Contributions are welcomed in the form of individual papers (20 minutes). Abstracts containing a maximum of 400 words should be sent as email attachments, by February 1, 2013, to LongBeach2013 at minimalismsociety.org. The conference is also happy to present lecture-recitals, including the possibility for composers and/or performers to present their own minimalism-related work. Those considering a proposal for a lecture-recital (or any other type of non-traditional session, paper, or event, such as a listening environment or poster session) are strongly encouraged to contact Robert Fink (rfink at ucla.edu) and Carolyn Bremer (carolyn.bremer at csulb.edu) as soon as possible in order to discuss their plans informally, prior to submitting a formal proposal.

More information will be posted on the conference website: http://minimalismsociety.org/

A recording of my 2011 orchestra piece Serenity Meditation has arrived, courtesy of the Bowling Green State University New Music Festival, and conducted by J.J. Pearse. The piece, curated for this event by John Luther Adams, is based on three Ives songs, mostly “Serenity” and to a smaller extent “Sunrise” and “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” It’s dedicated to Neely Bruce, who commissioned the keynote address in which I mentioned those three songs as examples of Ivesian stasis. I’ve had so little experience with orchestras that it’s still a thrilling shock to hear an orchestra play something and realize I wrote it. I wish the microphone had been a little closer to the celesta, which plays a major role, but the performance is quite nice.

When I moved my web site I didn’t re-upload the four-plus-hour recording Sarah Cahill and I made in Kansas City of Dennis Johnson’s minimalist piano classic November. Several people have asked me to reinstall it and I keep forgetting, but it’s up here now. Andy Lee is recording the piece for the Irritable Hedgehog label, so there will be an excellent commercial studio recording out soon. I’ll let you know.

“I might end up never firing the pistol. Contrary to Chekhov’s principle.”
“That’s fine, too,” Tamaru said. “Nothing could be better than not firing it. We’re drawing close to the end of the twentieth century. Things are different from back in Chekhov’s time. No more horse-drawn carriages, no more women in corsets. Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music.”

– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, p. 1108

And I started reading the book because it mentioned Janacek’s Sinfonietta in the second sentence.

Since his memorial service I’ve been desperately longing to hear William Duckworth’s Simple Songs about Sex and War, but I couldn’t find my old tape of it. (There’s a commercial CD, but the performance is weird and too disappointing to listen to.) Finally I ran across an mp3 on a hard drive – he and Nora must have given it to me last time I visited – and for all those similarly susceptible I post it here. Based on poems written for Bill by Hayden Carruth, it is the perfect postclassical song cycle, sung by the incomparable Barbara Noska (a Relache member when it was written) in a consummate postclassical vocal style, and with lovely synth accompaniment by John Dulik. Anybody who could write this deserved far more acclaim than the Pulitzer hacks.