John Cage used to enjoy what repeating what he said was a quotation from Thoreau. Thoreau’s first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers did not sell, and at some point the publisher sent him back the remaining 700 copies. According to Cage, Thoreau said in response, “It makes me feel so good that no one is interested in my work, because it leaves me free to go in any direction that is necessary.” I fear that I have played some role in the dissemination of this misquote, for when I Google it my name often comes up. But for a long time I searched through Thoreau’s writings and biographies for it in vain. (Those journals can be quite a haystack when you start looking for needles.)

Today, in Henry S. Salt’s gratifying 1896 biography of Thoreau (of which I bought a frail copy at Concord this week), I ran across what Thoreau actually wrote:

I can see now what I write for, and the result of my labors. Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night, to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed, I believe that this result is more inspiring and better than if a thousand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less, and leaves me freer.

Fairly different, is it not? You can see what a paradoxical spin Cage put on it; it sounds much more like Cage than like Thoreau. Cage would think of what direction to go next, and do something necessary; Thoreau would find his direction, if any at all, as the day inspired. Cage was aggravatingly fuzzy in his quotations, even more than Ives was, and I regret the role I played in spreading this around, though I enjoyed the defiant quality of the sentiment. I’ve spent many days recently trying to track a common Ives misquotation to its source as well, and I’ll have more to tell you about that shortly.

[UPDATE: Even so, I had a devil of a time finding the exact source in Thoreau’s Journal: Oct. 28, 1853. The PDF search engine in Thoreau’s online Journals is not reliable.]

And while I’m at it, documentary filmmaker Cambiz Khosravi reshot the film footage he had taken of me talking about 4’33”, which is part of his film on Woodstock history being premiered there Wednesday night. If nothing else, you can see how much weight I’ve lost recently.

After a dry spell, I’m suddenly having eight nine performances in five months, with six world premieres included. (I guess for a lot of composers, nine in five months still sounds like a dry spell.) Two of the premieres slipped by me because I’m not very good at keeping track of dates. On June 23, Aron Kallay premiered my Echoes of Nothing at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. Last Friday, August 17, Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli premiered my Earth-Preserving Chant on a program of American Indian-inspired music by Peter Garland, John Luther Adams, Mort Subotnick, Martin Bresnick, Michael Daugherty, and Huang Ruo. Hopefully recordings of my two pieces will be on my website soon, but don’t have ’em yet.

I’ll try to get the rest straight in case you want to go. Two of them are at Bard College.

Sept.7: Relache premieres the live-performed version of my The Planets with video by John Sanborn in Philadelphia at the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway 6 PM. I can’t be there, dammit.

Sept. 9: Johnny Reinhard and I are sharing a concert in New York City at Spectrum, 121 Ludlow St. I’ll play some microtonal keyboard works. Lord knows what Johnny’ll do. Play pitches even closer together than mine, probably.

Sept. 13: Relache repeats the Planets-with-video performance in Olin Auditorium, at Bard College, 8 PM.

Sept. 19-21: I give the keynote address for a Harry Partch conference at Northeastern University, and my piece The Unnameable will be played. Don’t know the schedule yet.

Sept. 27: Nicolas Horvath will premiere my Going to Bed: Homage to Glass at the Variety Theater in Monaco, in a Glass concert with the Nice Instrumental Ensemble.

Oct. 5: Aron Kallay will play microtonal keyboard works, including Echoes of Nothing, and soprano Martha Herr will sing American and Brazilian new music including my S.J. Perelman-based electronic mini-opera Scenario, in Blum Hall at Bard, 8 PM. I wrote Scenario seven years ago, and hadn’t been able to get a singer to perform it, but I think it’s one of my best works. And very funny. S.J. Perelman is a hero of mine, and Martha (who premiered Feldman’s Beckett-opera Neither) is one of my oldest friends.

Oct. 19: My orchestra piece Serenity Meditation, based on two songs by Ives, will be premiered at the Bowling Green State University new music festival.

Need to get more attentive to my PR.

[T]he $1,800,000 that I made, though made openly, legally, and in accordance with rules etc. of the business, was all out of proportion to the “idea,” to the service that I rendered society. A blacksmith who has made a shoe so that a horse will slip less, and incidentally $18 per week, has come nearer earning that $1,800,000 than I did.

– Charles Ives, “George’s Adventure,” 1919 (in Memos, p. 226)

 

Last time a commenter called me a fascist, I wrote an Idiot’s Guide to PostClassic. Guess it’s time to remind people it’s there. Thugs from the Conventional Wisdom crowd do fall in here accidentally from time to time. I’d rather they just go here and leave us alone.

I just received Michael Hicks’s and Christian Asplund’s book on Christian Wolff, part of the University of Illinois Press’s “American Composers” series in which my Robert Ashley book will be coming out in October. Don’t have time to read it at the moment (my current summer pleasure reading is another wolf: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando), but I’m looking forward. Browsing through it I immediately notice two startling things.

The first is a reprint of one of Wolff’s early exercises in first-species counterpoint with parallel and hidden fifths and octaves marked for correction by – John Cage! That’s right, apparently Wolff’s first composition lessons with Cage were in species counterpoint, like they were frickin’ Haydn and Beethoven or somebody! I had no idea Cage ever insisted that a student learn counterpoint. My entire mental universe is in flux at the moment. “The purpose of these technical studies, Cage explained, was to learn how one develops discipline.” (p. 10) Right on! Right on! I guess.

Less earth-shaking yet peculiar is that there is a footnote quoting one of my replies to a comment on this blog. This is a whole new way to get quoted. Maybe I’d better watch what I say to people.

Will Robin over at New Music Box had the inspired idea to write an homage to the Pierrot ensemble, since the centennial of Pierrot Lunaire is upon us. The flute/clarinet/violin/cello/piano combination took a few decades to take off, but it has conquered: we are awash in such ensembles, and no student achieves professional status until he or she has written his or her “Pierrot piece.” It’s the lingua franca of the (academic) new-music performance world. As I mentioned in a comment there, I’m not thrilled about the development. I wrote one piece for it (Hovenweep, 2000) and found it gummy to work with, though I think I succeeded in making into something; Da Capo has played the piece many times, and it’s been done by the Seattle Chamber Players and St. Luke’s Orchestra Players as well. It’s on a New Albion CD.

Half of what I dislike about the instrumentation is a lot of little built-in tendencies. The strings don’t really balance the winds. The winds provide a dollop of color, but nothing exotic. The piano fits like a table-top over the combined ranges of the other pairs of instruments. Everything’s centered toward a homogenous middle, with few extremes of register or timbre. The symmetry is both oppressive and deceiving. Making the ensemble work is a problem, but doesn’t seem like one because the instruments are so normal and speciously balanced. One’s initial idea is to write for the strings and winds, leaving the piano to function as ornament, pointillistic percussion, or filler; or to basically write kind of a piano chamber concerto, though the wind/string quartet isn’t really a strong balance for a virtuoso piano part. I watch my students struggle with it, thrashing between polyphony and homophony. My solution, which took much rewriting to arrive at, was to write almost in rhythmic unison for the entire ensemble at the beginning and end, while breaking the group up into smaller subsets in a middle section. It comes off well in performance, but the piece feels like an outlier in my output, because I had to bend to meet the instrumentation.

The other half of what I don’t like are the ensemble’s virtues, which are all academic. It teaches students to write, or, alternatively, proves they can write (because everyone has to prove that, don’t they?), for both strings and winds. (No one feels bad if they graduate without brass experience.) It’s kind of a mini-orchestra that gives a full sound without stretching the school budget. Get the winds to double on piccolo and bass clarinet, and the student gets a range of experience that stands in, in the professor’s mind, for a much larger range that they might well never receive access to. In other words, it’s a great compromise medium that doesn’t challenge the imagination and makes modest institutional demands. (I think of Wolpe’s Quartet for trumpet, tenor sax, piano, and percussion – an oddball grouping that makes originality mandatory.) And the more composers write for it, the more advantages there are in continuing to write for it because ensembles can make up a repertoire.

If somebody wanted to commission another Pierrot piece from me, I’d happily accept, because overcoming technical challenges is part of the fun. But I find it disappointing that this rather drab, difficult-to-spark medium has become the new standard chamber ensemble, and that compositional academia is committed to pushing it for perhaps decades to come. A great Pierrot piece is a great piece period, but many students will rein in their imaginations to fit the requirement, and fail to make anything special. The string quartet, the former universal chamber medium, was a more neutral canvas to work on, though admittedly it’s become a difficult slog as well – partly because there are so many thousands of great string quartets to compete with, partly because the ensembles have their hands full with current repertoire. I’ve had a hard time getting my string quartets played, and my students do too. Sax quartet seems like an almost explosively fertile medium, or at least I’ve been impressed with most of the sax quartets I’ve heard; but I guess there aren’t that many non-jazz sax players around. So I don’t see any alternative. But neither have I ever believed in gamely pretending that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds.

Remember, Morton Feldman had a perennial challenge for his students: he’d buy dinner for whomever could come up with the worst orchestration. No one ever won, he said, because the more bizarre their orchestrations became, the more original and imaginative the music got. Last semester I made one of my students write a piece with accordion, melodica, harmonica, toy piano, mandolin, and other exotica – her result was amazing! But the Pierrot ensemble has become somebody’s idea of a sane, reasonable, one-size-fits-all orchestration. I think Feldman owes Schoenberg dinner just for thinking of it.

UPDATE: Just had a happy thought. Replace Pierrot with the Herzgewächse ensemble: celesta, harp, harmonium. Lovely!

I’ve been meaning to mention that my March profile of David Borden was my last “American Composer” column for Chamber Music magazine. It was a great gig, but in recent years it was becoming an onerous burden to interrupt my other projects every two months and have to get my head into someone else’s music. Overall I wrote 69 articles for the bimonthly magazine from 1998 to 2012, profiling 61 composers individually plus several others in the September articles I wrote about more general subjects. When I started, my predecessors in that column had, to date, profiled 70 composers – all of them famous, and 3 – three – of them women. For most of my years, I conscientiously split my articles equally between male and female composers, and also wrote about quite a few young composers and those who weren’t very well known yet. I’m proud of how much I expanded the column’s purview in several directions. Then, when we had the minimalism conference at UMKC in 2009, I got criticized because there were no papers submitted on women composers (as if I could have influenced that), and I decided to quit keeping count. I figured if women composers were going to damn me, after all I’ve done to publicize them at the Voice and elsewhere throughout my entire career, then they didn’t really want to be championed as much as they wanted to complain. I thought of listing here the 61 composers I wrote about for Chamber Music [26 of them women: I went back and counted], but I’ve learned that it pisses composers off (myself included) to see lists of celebrated composers that they’re not on. A lot of my favorite composers didn’t get written about, because given the venue and its presumed readership, I did try to focus on people who wrote chamber music, which quite a number of my musical protégés don’t do.

The upshot is that I’m finally no longer a music critic – my last such gig has ended. I worked as a critic from December 1982 to March 2012 – 29 and 1/2 years, which the astrologically minded will realize is a full Saturn cycle. Major life phases tend to come to an end after 29 and 1/2 years, and so this one happily did. Now I’m going through an odd period in which I don’t really know what I am, publicly, besides being a music theory professor. That happens when Saturn passes through the eleventh house in your horoscope – some new phase of your life starts up without you really knowing what it’s going to be, as one did for me in 1982. At age 56, I’m in the mood to only write about what I deeply feel like writing about at the moment. Criticism is a noble profession, or could be if we took it seriously enough and applied rigorous standards to it, but you get pigeonholed as a bystander, someone valued for your perspective on others rather than for your own potential contributions. I fell into the profession pretty much by accident, it did very well by me – I can only imagine I would have ended up pushing a broom somewhere if I hadn’t happened into it – and I’m relieved and happy to leave it behind.