I am not much given to commemorating accidents of the calendar – anniversaries, centenaries, and so on – but given my history with the subject, I would be remiss, I think, if I failed to note that Conlon Nancarrow was born a hundred years ago today. Next weekend I will be in Berkeley for the Nancarrow at 100 conference/festival being presented by Other Minds. I have been interviewed frequently these last few months for radio programs and newspaper articles on Cage and Nancarrow, and I haven’t received many of the URLs at which those interviews ended up; perhaps you’ve heard or read a couple of them. Most recently composer/critic Andrew Ford interviewed me for an Australian radio program on Nancarrow that was supposed to air yesterday or today, whichever it is down there. I don’t really have much to say about Nancarrow that wasn’t in my book on him, but, as I did in London in April, I suppose I’ll play my edited versions of a few of the “unknown” rolls found unlabeled in his studio. He was – in case anyone missed the point – an amazing man.

 

In 2004 I completed a setting, for soprano and soundfile (tape? CD?) of a wild text by humorist S.J. Perelman called “Scenario.” I haven’t been able to find what year the text was first published, but I suppose Perelman (one of the funniest writers ever, and with an unparalleled genius for wordplay) had been slaving away in Hollywood, where he worked on the scripts for the early Marx Brothers movies. “Scenario” is a stream-of-consciousness satire of a scenario for a movie, a hysterical profusion of not only scene descriptions and actions but bits of dialogue, stage directions, director’s complaints, Hollywood gossip, and other miscellanea. Since, after immobility, stream-of-consciousness collage is my favorite type of musical continuity to compose, I couldn’t resist, and wrote it for the virtual orchestra of my dreams, with impossible tempo overlays and crossfades, occasional microtonality, and including banjo, guitar, harmonica, and a complete set of chromatic timpani. I hired my old friend composer Michael Maguire to realize the recording for me and started looking around for a soprano.

Well, it took eight years to get one to take the bait, and not until Martha Herr came back into my life did I get to premiere the piece, which we did Friday evening to a rather ridiculously small audience (Bard being on fall break). The next day we went into the studio and recorded it, and now you can finally hear Scenario. I’ve always thought it was one of the best, and funniest, things I’ve ever done. Martha started out with the famous Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo, and first sang my music soon after that period. She sang Babbitt’s Philomel on her college senior recital, with Babbitt in attendance, and was selected by Feldman to premiere his opera Neither, so I was honored to have her premiere Scenario as well. It’s a really difficult piece, 17 minutes with few rests, and dotted throughout with sudden shifts of tempo. She does a superb job, and I can’t tell you what a relief it is to hear, in the flesh, a piece I’ve been singing to myself for eight years. The crazy text is up here, and Perelman’s vocabulary is so arcane that, even with Martha’s excellent diction and a good recording, you probably can’t figure out all the words without reading it.

I think of it as a 17-minute pocket opera for soprano and CD. Some will object to my use of the term, some to the with-CD format, some to the synthetic creation of orchestral textures, some to the constant intercutting, and many to many other things about it, but I hope a few will be able to hear it for what I consider it, a musical amplification of a wild and comically surreal text, in the intended same vein as Walton’s Facade and Virgil Thomson’s operas.

[UPDATED] It strikes me lately that there are basically two types of performances in a composer’s career, or at least in a half-assed composing career like mine. One is, you’re invited to an event, they offer to play a piece of yours, it gets one rehearsal the day before, maybe, and they nominally play it. The other is, a performer (in my case, Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, Relache, Aron Kallay) chooses to tour with a piece of your music, and he/she/they is/are highly motivated to show the world what wonderful performers they are, and so of course they work their butts off and do a magnificent job, and the piece benefits from repetition in ways that no single performance could effect.

I’m tired of the first category, but luckily I’m about to get a dose of the second, because Los Angeles pianist Aron Kallay, who specializes in microtonal MIDI keyboard, is starting a eastern-half-of-the-country tour this Friday night with some of my music under his arm, including the most recent piece I wrote for him, Echoes of Nothing. Here’s his schedule:

September 28 – Chicago – Heaven Gallery
September 29 – Champaign, IL – SoDo Art Gallery
September 30 – Fishers, IN – Fishers Public Library
October 3 – Hartford, CT – Hartt School of Music
October 4 – Pittsburgh, PA – Carnegie Mellon University
October 5 – Annandale, NY – Bard College
October 6 – NY, NY – The Spectrum New Music Space

The Bard performance on October 5 (in Blum Hall, 8 PM) will include three works I wrote for him, plus a performance by soprano Martha Herr, an old friend of mine and an illustrious singer who premiered Feldman’s opera Neither. Martha is premiering a music theater piece for soprano and electronic background that I wrote seven years ago, called Scenario, based on a surreal S.J. Perelman text.

I’ve been looking forward to these premieres for a long time, and I finally have Aron’s lovely recording of Echoes of Nothing for you. Both movements based on the same tuning, a kind of microtonal, Clementi-ish two-movement sonata, an adagio and a rondo, so to speak:

1. Nothing
2. Something

 

One sentence in Essays Before a Sonata has already cost me more time and trouble, I think, than the entire sonata:

 “And there sits the little old spinet piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.”

The full paragraph sounds as though Ives is describing Orchard House in Concord, Mass., after a visit there, which is entirely plausible; Orchard House opened to the public as a museum in 1912, Ives wrote the essays in 1919, and he and Harmony liked to visit Concord. But I can find no evidence that Sophia Thoreau ever gave the Alcotts a piano. We know from Edward Emerson’s much later article about Thoreau that the Thoreau family scrimped and saved to buy a piano so that Henry’s sisters, Sophia and Helen, could learn to play. It seems doubtful that Sophia was ever in a position to give away a spinet, and there’s simply no record of it. The Thoreau scholars are mystified when I mention it. The first mention of Sophia in almost any Alcott biography is in 1877, when Anna and Louisa May bought the Thoreau house from her.

Of course, Beth in Little Women was based on Louisa May’s sister Elizabeth (pictured), called Lizzy (and spelled that way in family correspondence, which I’ve been reading in manuscript at Harvard’s Houghton Library). Beth is described as devoted to her piano. But while Little Women takes place entirely in a fictionalized Orchard House, the desperately poor Alcotts actually lived in twenty different places before finally achieving stability there in 1858, and poor Lizzy died a few months before they moved in. It’s difficult to imagine them carting a piano around. Moreover, in Orchard House today there is no spinet piano, and the staff there tells me there has never been one. Instead, there are a melodeon and a big square piano. Ives grew up with a square piano in his own house, and surely knew the difference between that and a spinet.

The Alcotts literature is maddeningly cavalier about occasionally referring to a nearby piano with no thought of explaining how they afforded one; the melodeon is never mentioned. The few facts I’ve been able to assemble are these, and keep in mind that Louisa May was born in 1832, Lizzy in 1835:

1843: The family is at Fruitlands, the badly thought-out Transcendentalist communal living colony. Louisa May writes in her journal, “Had a music lesson with Miss P. I hate her, she’s so fussy.” Miss P is Ann Page, the only woman at Fruitlands besides Mrs. Alcott. No mention of what musical instrument, if any, was involved.

July 24, 1846: Lizzy writes in her journal for 1846, the only year that survives: “I went to the post office. When I got home, Lydia Hosmer was here. I taught her a tune on the piano.” The family was then living at Hillside, which Hawthorne later bought and renamed The Wayside. (And by the way, the Alcott children’s journals are a real hoot. “Did my spelling lessons yesterday, and some long division. Mr. Emerson and Miss Fuller came by to see father. Today Mr. Thoreau took us daisy-collecting.” Geez, kids, name-drop much?!)

1852: Manufacture date of the melodeon.

c. 1855: Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows takes a liking to “the twenty-year-old Lizzy” and gives her a piano, an incident that Louisa May will transpose to Mr. Lawrence in Little Women. This leads one to suppose, among other things, that the family no longer possessed the piano referred to in 1846.

1858: Lizzy dies while Orchard House is being renovated for the family to move in. The family is then given the square piano (manufacture date 1843) by “Auntie Bond,” Louisa Caroline Greenwood Bond, who was some kind of “foster sister” to their mother. The piano had belonged to Auntie Bond’s husband’s first wife, Sophia Bond; did Ives mix up these two Sophias? (The number of Sophias then living in Concord could have populated a good-size town by themselves.) Anna, the oldest sister, and Louisa May are written about as having played it.

1868: Louisa May writes Little Women. She depicts Laurie Lawrence, the love-interest, drowning his sorrows after Jo refuses his proposal of marriage in an angry performance of the Pathetique Sonata, presumably Beethoven’s. The sole mention of Beethoven by name is of a bust of that composer in a room in Vienna in which Laurie is trying to forget Jo by (and I find this rather unintentionally humorous) writing an opera.

The only volumes of music listed among Bronson Alcott’s books in Houghton Library are a few Italian operas. No Beethoven. That Beth/Lizzy may have played some Scottish tunes seems like a reasonable conjecture, but the only reference I’ve been able to unearth as to the kind of music the girls played is a folk song harmonized by Weber that Louisa May mentions in her 1843 journal: “Hail, all hail, the merry month of May.” That Lizzy “played at” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony I have always assumed was a flight of wild imagination on Ives’s part, more necessitated by the sonata’s program than inspiring it. Ives’s memory was notoriously unreliable and his quotations rarely accurate, but I can’t completely discount the possibility that he correctly reported something he was told at Orchard House, something that might have been known by family friends at the time, but that no one has ever bothered to document in the subsequent literature; or perhaps his tour guide was herself misled. I am sorely tempted to forge, in neat, feminine handwriting, the following letter and slip it in among the Alcott archives:

Dear Louisa,

Today I had a rollicking good time ripping through the Kalkbrenner piano transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth on the old spinet Sophie gave us, the score of which I then burned to make sure it didn’t end up among daddy’s papers at Harvard. MWA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Your crazy sister,

Lizzy

Meanwhile, hundreds of program-note writers for the Concord have taken Ives’s little story at face value. Personally, I wouldn’t. If you know of any relevant information, please contribute.

Wednesday morning at 9:15, Sept. 19, in Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, I’m giving the keynote address for a Harry Partch conference hosted by NEC and Northeastern University where my incredibly brilliant former student Anthony DeRitis runs the music department. It’s scheduled (my keynote, that is) to run until 10:30, and I’m making it as long as possible to leave no room for questions, and then I’m DONE. All I have to do for the next three days is listen to microtonal performances and papers on aspects of Partch. My piece The Unnameable is scheduled to be performed Wednesday night, by someone besides me, thank God. I don’t even have to teach the rest of the week. Boy, my life can be a frickin’ bowl of cherries sometimes.

I do wonder what brand of cigar Harry’s smoking there. I’m halfway through a smooth Romeo y Julieta Lonsdale at the moment.

 

This morning I lost one of my dearest friends and most important musical role models, and the world lost one of its best composers. Bill Duckworth was diagnosed with pancreas cancer a year ago last February. He got into a state-of-the-art therapy program, and had the disease in remission, and for quite a few months it looked like he was going to beat one of the fastest and most lethal cancers there is (and the same one that killed Morton Feldman). But he finally started having bad reactions to the chemo, and it wore him down. I had heard about a week ago that he had decided to go off chemo, and he went fast after that, slipping away about midnight last night, according to his wife Nora, who called this morning.

I’ve written many, many composer obituaries, but I don’t know if I can do Bill justice, at least not so soon. He was a quietly upbeat character, a Buddhist with a cynical but philosophical approach to life. I thought of him as a classic Capricorn, restrained and a little impenetrable, but mischievous and loyal. He had a tough early life. His father abandoned the family and never wanted anything to do with Bill, and his mother died, of cancer, while he was in high school. He was able to chuckle at adversity, and you got the feeling that whatever happened, he’d seen worse. He got all his degrees in music ed, because he had started out in that major, and (as he told me) it was the late Vietnam era in which, if you changed your major, the government suspected you were trying to extend your education to avoid the draft, so they drafted you. He taught at Bucknell from the mid-1970s on, loved by students (including my son, who studied composition with him), though considered a loose cannon by the administration, who couldn’t seem to deal with their nice young music ed guy becoming a famous composer. Bill gave me advice about surviving academia that I quote to myself every week: “Don’t talk to the adults.” Of the undergrads, he liked to say, “Everything you tell ’em is news.” He also said “We’re living in strange times” often, the whole 25 years I knew him, a phrase I associate with him. He was just about to retire from teaching when he got the cancer diagnosis.

Bill’s most famous piece is undoubtedly The Time Curve Preludes, and he seemed to always think it was his best as well, along with Cathedral, the huge interactive internet piece he spent his late years on. (Hard to talk so soon about those having been his late years.) The Time Curve Preludes is indeed a wonderful piece (there’s a lovely new recording by pianist Andy Lee on the Irritable Hedgehog label) and one of those pieces in which the way its composer thinks crystallizes and becomes indelible, but I never thought it was fair for Bill to come off as a one-work composer. Later pieces of his, I think, have more depth and dimension: Blue Rhythms, Imaginary Dances, Mysterious Numbers, Simple Songs about Sex and War, Gathering Together/Revolution, and, of course, Southern Harmony, which was kind of the choral companion piece to Time Curve. After he married technology genius Nora Farrell, Bill took on a new life as one of the pioneering internet composers; I wasn’t always tech-savvy enough myself to follow along, but he became famous in Australia and gained a worldwide following. I have frequently described Bill’s music as Mozartean, by which I mean it has a clear right-brain logic that is difficult to pinpoint but easy to hear. If the culture ever changes so that elegant design is once again as highly valued as macho eclecticism, I think it will be realized that Bill is a truly major composer; even as it is, there are many younger composers who think so. As far as I know, I’m the most Duckworth-influenced composer alive. Back when my music was rather impractically caught up in Herculean rhythmic complexity, Bill’s ensemble music gave me a new model for streamlining and spreading out the rhythmic interest for more grateful performability. Several of my pieces (Private Dances, New World Coming, movements of The Planets and Implausible Sketches) were explicit attempts to compete with him on his own territory and learn from him.

Bill hired me to teach part-time at Bucknell in 1989; without that early foot in the door, I would almost certainly not be in academia today, because everyone else in that world considered me a dangerous radical. For several years while I was at the Voice Bill and I had lunch at Bennie’s Burritos in the West Village almost every week. That was a fun time. “We’re living in strange times” was the final cadence to many a topic of conversation. Summer of 2011, after his diagnosis, we spent a couple of afternoons together and I recorded some long interviews about his life and music, so that he would have his own input to an eventual biography. We joked about death being the last desperate career move a composer had, because they never seem to take us seriously until we’re dead. After that, as recently as last spring, I really thought he was going to make it and we’d be able to have those lunches again.

Bill worked with Relache in the old days, and we’ll dedicate tonight’s performance of The Planets to him.

The times suddenly seem a lot stranger.

 

For those in the Hudson Valley or thereabouts tomorrow, September 13, the Relache ensemble is playing my suite The Planets live, with the amazing video by John Sanborn, at Bard College. It’s in Olin Auditorium at 8. Nothing like airing your astrological interests to your colleagues in the science division.