QUESTION: I have noticed that you write durations that are beyond the possibility of performance.
ANSWER: Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?…
QUESTION: And timbre?
ANSWER: No wondering what’s next. Going lively on “through many a perilous situation.” Did you ever listen to a symphony orchestra?…
QUESTION: Then what is the purpose of this experimental music?
ANSWER: No purposes. Sounds.
QUESTION: Why bother, since, as you have pointed out, sounds are continually happening whether you produce them or not?
ANSWER: What did you say? I’m still - 
QUESTION: I mean – but is this music?
ANSWER: Ah! You like sounds after all when they are made up of vowels and consonants. You are slow-witted, for you have never brought your mind to the location of urgency. Do you need me or someone else to hold you up? Why don’t you realize as I do that nothing is accomplished by writing, playing, or listening to music? Otherwise, deaf as a doornail, you will never be able to hear anything, even what’s well within earshot.
QUESTION: But seriously, if this is what music is, I could write it as well as you.
ASNWER: Have I said anything that would lead you to think I thought you were stupid?

Q: What is the Way and how must it be followed?
A: What sort of thing do you suppose the way to be, that you should wish to follow it?
Q: What instructions have the Masters everywhere given for dhyana-practice and the study of the Dharma?
A: Words used to attract the dull of wit are not to be relied on….
Q: If that is so, should we not seek for anything at all?
A: By conceding this, you would save yourself a lot of effort.
Q: But in this way everything would be eliminated. There cannot be just nothing.
A: Who called it nothing? Who was this fellow? But you wanted to seek for something. 
Q: Since there is no need to seek, why do you also say that not everything is eliminated?
A: Not to seek is to rest tranquil. Who told you to eliminate anything? Look at the void in front of your eyes. How can you produce it or eliminate it?…
Q: Why do you speak as though I was mistaken in all the questions I have asked Your Reverence?
A: You are a man who doesn’t understand what is said to him. What is all this about being mistaken?

[UPDATED BELOW] Tomorrow night my son Bernard is playing at Lincoln Center. That is, he’s one of 200 electric guitarists performing Rhys Chatham’s The Crimson Grail at Lincoln Center Outdoors. I had no idea the piece was already recorded (with 400 guitars) on the intrepid Table of the Elements label, which makes me suspect they don’t have my current address. The program is called “800 years of Minimalism,” and includes the Beata Viscera organum of the 12th-century Notre Dame composer Perotin (whom Steve Reich cites as an influence on his early music), along with E2-E4 by Manuel Göttsching, about whom I know nothing at all. I suspect that if you live within two miles of Lincoln Center there’s no need to show up, you’ll be able to hear The Crimson Grail from your apartment. But it’s free. And Rhys has finally one-upped Glenn Branca in the size of his guitar ensemble. 

If the purpose of American grad school, as I’ve long maintained, is to teach young people to write badly, then the function of intellectuals in American life is to paralyze discourse. Take the common and useful words subjective and objective. I used to give a lecture on how to write about music in which I would distribute the various types of journalism along a continuum from most subjective to most objective. And some young Turk who’d been in grad school would inevitably pipe up with, “There’s no such thing as objectivity, ultimately everything is subjective.” Well, OK, that’s true, Decartes Junior, physical reality is not utterly knowable or expressible in words, and ultimately the Encyclopedia Britannica is simply an outpouring of the human imagination, and we might as well all get into lotus position and become One with the Universe. But in everyday life, in which people do things for money and get paid and buy food, there are Grove Dictionary entries to write in which one does one’s best to avoid foregrounding his opinions, and record reviews ending in thumbs up or thumbs down, and objective and subjective are fine words for describing that quotidian difference. At least, if I were to ask an editor how objective she wanted me to be in an article, and she came back with, “There’s really no such thing as objectivity, you know, ultimately your subjective perceptions will reveal themselves in your word choices and emphases blah-de-blah-de-blah,” I would consider her something less than professional.

It’s much the same with musical uses of complex and simple. (I’m incited to write this by Colin Holter’s response at New Music Box to my recent complexity article – not particularly because he says anything I disagree with, but simply because he brings it up and I figured I would have to address this eventually anyway. Such are the obligations of blogging.) We have everyday things we mean when we say a piece of music is simple, or that it’s complex, but ahh, these meanings are never good enough for our musical intellectuals. What rings in my mind is a line from Richard Toop’s 1990 lecture “On Complexity,” published in Perspectives:

People sometimes ask, ingenuously or otherwise, “Why do composers today want to write complex music?” Looking at the broad history of Western music, I would be tempted to reply, equally simplistically yet not inappropriately [what a grad-school-induced useless phrase], “When have the talented ones ever wanted to do anything else?”

You can just see the smirk, can’t you? Well, OK, a Beethoven sonata is a complex thing. Lots and lots o’ nested relationships there, and you can tease them out forever, and people have. But back when I was 16 years old and had a memory, I could play through a Beethoven sonata movement twice from the score, and then play it the third time from memory – because its progression was so clear and logical, so honed down to a single elaborated thought, that my memory could grasp the thing as a whole. By contrast, a shorter Chopin nocturne took twice as much effort. So you can prove to me with Schenker diagrams and motivic derivations that a Beethoven sonata is complex, but boy, when I was 16, I certainly don’t remember experiencing it as complex. If anything, its simplicity was kind of overwhelming. Meanwhile, George Rochberg’s wonderful Sonata-Fantasia, a sprawling 12-tone piece I was also working on – no contrapuntally thicker than much Beethoven – was not something I was ever going to be able to commit to memory. Nor did I ever quite memorize “Thoreau” from the Concord Sonata, a piece I dearly love. Sophistry can make a case that those pieces were no more complex than Beethoven, but they sure seemed more complex to me.

I know, good lord I know from measureless experience, that the moment you describe a piece of music as complex, a raft of the grad-school boys, the Swift Boat Graduates for Obfuscation, rise up and say, “Welllll, nowwwww, ultimately all music is complex, and isn’t a Bach fugue complex, and isn’t the brain processing lots of information as a Debussy tone poem goes by, and so what’s the difference between the Carter Double Concerto and a Satie Gymnopedie, really?” So that cuts off discussion, which is its purpose – to prevent certain obvious issues from being talked about. And so in my blog entry, with great rhetorical deliberateness, I almost never used the word complex in isolation, but fused it into “thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand,” or “complex/opaque.” I was specifically trying to prevent the Swift Boat Graduates from playing Gotcha!, and I was pleased that there wasn’t much of that. (In the interest of refusing to discuss complexity as a monolithic concept, McLaren added a long, revelatory comment about the perceptual constraints on audio complexity that’s well worth reading. He’s a brainy guy, not academic. There’s a difference.)

The denotation I wanted for the word complex in that article was exactly the distinction I experienced at 16 between Beethoven and Rochberg: that some music gets stored in the mind very quickly and in great detail, and other music resists such storing. No value judgment intended – I was just as excited about working on Rochberg at 16, if not more, than I was on Beethoven. Nor – and this seems so bloody obvious that to have to mention it fills one with a certain despair about how pedestrian the level of our musical discourse is – nor is complexity level a monolinear continuum. Satie’s Pieces Froids are far simpler than Beethoven’s Appassionata in form and texture, but they are more complex in being less logical and therefore more difficult to memorize. There are a hundred or more types of musical complexity. I was trying to write about perhaps the most obvious of those types without writing a second article to clarify what I was referring to. Didn’t work.

Of course, the Swift Boat Graduates always have a point: a lot of complex things go on in the brain in response to a Satie Gymnopedie, and ultimately the Encyclopedia Britannica is just a record of billions of subjective impressions upon which doubt could be cast. Those are interesting, important issues to ponder, but they are rather divorced from everyday life, and few of us can afford to leave everyday life for long. Subjective, objective, complex, simple, are all comparative terms whose absolute endpoints lie outside human experience; and if you’re going to swallow up those words into their intellectually derived absolutes, then we still need other words for the everyday meanings those words hold in conversation. What’s wrong with the Swift Boat Graduates is that they sometimes wax fascistic about disallowing naive uses of their pet words, as though once you’ve discovered a more sophisticated concept for the word, what the naive use once referred to disappears. This tendency threatens to bring musical discourse down to a grad-school level. Part of intellectual maturity is knowing when the exalted meaning is appropriate and when the quotidian meaning is just fine.

As a philosophy student I spent years immersed in existentialism and Continental phenomenology, taking courses in Heidegger and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and ranting about the ding-an-sich and the quasi-for-itself and the at-hand, and terrorizing my friends with this invented terminology everyone had to learn just to talk to me. At the end of grad school I learned about the ordinary language philosophy epitomized by John Wisdom (that’s his name, no kidding). Much like minimalism, it came as a breath of fresh air. One of my former Bucknell colleagues, Richard Fleming, does ordinary language philsophy, and gave a brilliant lecture once on the question, “Can computers think?” His rather Wittgensteinian strategy was to insert the word computer into common phrases using the word think:

Can a computer think again?

Can a computer think better of something?

Can a computer think badly of someone?

Can a computer think it’s right?

And so on, the upshot being that the word think in everday use has a hundred connotations, only a handful of which can be applied to a computer, so, of course, in any reasonable, public sense of the word, a computer can’t think. His argument was more elegant than my cursory reiteration of it, but the point is that I similarly refuse to restrict subjective, objective, complex, simple, to their elevated grad-school uses. It aggravates the Swift Boat Graduates, but if we’re going to connect the music we love with the world we live in, it’s not helpful to get in the habit of justifying ourselves with a special, circumscribed vocabulary. That way dishonesty lies.

I now saw harmony, for which I had never had any natural feeling, as a device to make music impressive, loud and big, in order to enlarge audiences and increase box-office returns. It had been avoided by the Orient, and our earlier Christian society, since they were interested in music not as an aid in the acquisition of money and fame but rather as a handmaiden to pleasure and religion. (“A Composer’s Confessions,” 1948)

There used to be a town called Annandale-on-Hudson where Bard College is, but the school has pretty much devoured it; only about three non-college houses remain. Here are some of the new-music personalities who crowded around tonight. First, Stephen Scott of bowed piano fame, upstate postminimalist composer Mary Jane Leach partaking of the fest’s official Magic Hat beer, and in the background my son Bernard wearing the official New Albion festival T-shirt (temperature tonight wasn’t much above 55):

I have never had so many old friends converge in my home territory as this week for the New Albion festival at Bard – and it’s only half over! The pic below is a poor-quality cell-phone photo (I’ll bring my camera this next weekend), but it gives some idea of the festivities outside the Spiegeltent where everyone’s performing. From left to right: pianist Joe Kubera, mystic poet Ione, composers Pauline Oliveros and Larry Polansky, pianist Sarah Cahill, and electronic sampling maven Carl Stone (Update: Sarah has written a lovely precis of the festival so far at NMBx, with a photo more in focus but sadly with me in it instead of her):

The Society for Minimalist Music, of which I am a proud founding member, is having an appropriately minimal conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, on September 13, as a kind of appetizer to tide us all over until the big conference coming in September of 2009. The poster with official information is below. As it says, you can contact Keith Potter (estimable author of Four Musical Minimalists) for registration details at the e-mail given. I won’t be there, but rather in Kansas City at the time, scouting out strategies for next year. 

Thankfully, we live in an area that has not yet been visibly hard hit by the economic downturn. But on Sunday our fanciest local liquor store – the only one where I can find really high-end single-malt scotches – closed down after eight years, the first seven of which were quite prosperous. The owner told me that he’s dependent on New Yorkers coming up from the city on weekends for much of his business, and they’re just not coming this year – which has to indicate that other local businesses are suffering as well. Then yesterday, the lady who runs the fish counter at our mega-grocery store advised me to make a big grocery run on Thursday, because the prices are about to go up storewide on Friday. It feels like a wave of disaster just about to hit.

Nice interview by Daniel Wakin in today’s Times with one of my favorite oddly low-profile composers: Paul Lansky. The money quote: “I basically don’t like electronic music. I like to compose it. I’m just not a big fan of it.” And yet, no one has done more than Lansky to demonstrate how seductive, engaging, and memorable electronic music can be. Maybe it takes someone who doesn’t really like it to bring out its best potential – just like I think I’m a good theory teacher because I don’t really take theory seriously. There are areas of human endeavor in which, if you fall for the company line, the results can be too deadly earnest.

The items you see me holding above are my old vinyl copies of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno (1981) and Talking Heads’s More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978), both bought when they were brand new. There is a riff going around the internet that I don’t know who David Byrne is, or didn’t have any idea that he ever had any connections to experimental music. In fact, in addition to knowing the above albums I saw David Byrne play at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis at New Music America in 1980 – where his three-minute set drew a loud cry of “too short!” from an angry audience member. (Consensus at the time was that he hadn’t taken our underfunded little experimental festival very seriously, and had blown it off with a lackluster piece.) And, back when people bought cassettes, I had a cassette of The Catherine Wheel, the dance he wrote for Twyla Tharp, and even read some of the book it was based on because I was trying to get into it. It’s new to me, this thing about not being allowed to disagree with a document until you know all about the author; and that if the author is a famous and well-loved figure, you’re not allowed to disagree at all. But I’ve known for 30 years who Byrne is and where his career has connected with avant-garde music. 

It is sometimes suggested, as lately, that I have a classical elitist’s antipathy toward pop songs. In fact, I have often mentioned that my early music was heavily influenced by Brian Eno, but perhaps I’ve never said it entirely in caps. FROM 1978 TO 1984 I WAS RATHER OBSESSED WITH BRIAN ENO, BUYING EVERY RECORD HE PUT OUT – WHICH I STILL DO (JUST A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I ACQUIRED BEYOND EVEN, HIS LATEST COLLABORATION WITH FRIPP, RELEASED LAST FALL) – NOT ONLY HIS AMBIENT ALBUMS BUT HIS POP ALBUMS, AND I ALSO CHECKED OUT EVERYONE HE COLLABORATED WITH, PARTICULARLY FRIPP, CLUSTER, AND BYRNE. Short of tattooing “Blank Frank is the messenger of your doom and your destruction” or “More for me, bless my soul” on my forearm, I don’t quite know what else to do. If being able to sing from memory all the lyrics to Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Here Come the Warm Jets, and Before and After Science isn’t enough to kill this elitist reputation, then you just want to think ill of me, so go ahead.

I shook hands with Eno once, at the 1988 Composer-to-Composer Festival at Telluride. There was a beautiful woman standing just behind me, so Eno and I didn’t actually make eye contact. He had showed up at the festival a couple of days late, and in the meantime, Lou Harrison and Terry Riley had enjoyed some wonderful public discussions about microtonality – different kinds of scales, the problems of retuning a piano, gamelan tunings, and so on. Eno arrived, and was on a panel with the other composers. Someone mentioned microtonality, and Eno instantly blurted out, “Ohhh, microtonality, that just produces a lot of good theory and a lot of bad music.” Every composer’s eye in the house shot toward Lou and Terry, who exchanged commisserating glances.

This is relevant to the reactions (not only mine) to the recent Byrne article. I yield to few in my enthusiasm for Eno – but I can’t help but be aware that, personally, he is too high up in the musico-social stratosphere to deign to notice that he was on stage with two of America’s greatest composers who just happened to be microtonalists, and that he insulted their entire outputs with an offhand comment. I’m not mad at him, I still listen to and imitate his music (I just finished a month’s repeated listening to his The Plateaux of Mirror with Harold Budd – an album I prefer, by the way, to Bush of Ghosts, sorry). But for all his experimental-music street cred, which I find vastly impressive, Eno is a pop elephant trampling on us poor classical ants without noticing it.

Likewise, I think of Byrne as one of the good guys, his blog often full of populist common sense – I quoted it approvingly during the internet radio crisis of 2007 – and I maintain that I treated him respectfully. But you see how casually he dissed and dismissed two entire genres of composers, and the fact that he does have experimentalist bona fides doesn’t ameliorate his minor sin, but makes it the more insulting. I was not moved to think, as some apparently did, “Well, Byrne sure made all us classical composers look like self-deluding losers, but since he’s such a creative experimentalist himself, I guess that’s just fine!” He ought to know better, just as Eno should have in 1988. But these guys – wonderful, creative human beings though they may be in general – are not focused on us postclassical musicians. We are way too far down in the dirt beneath them for it to even occur to them what effect they might have on us, good or bad. Thank goodness we at least have the right to disagree with them – though some in the blogosphere are telling me that’s not true either.

I’m moving a topic from a reply I made in the comments up to a new entry, because it strikes me that it may explain some things. I piss people off all the time by making what people think are generalizations, that might more charitably be characterized as descriptions of collective behavior. As someone rather hyper-aware of peer pressure and who reflexively recoils from it, perhaps collective behavior is something I’m more sensitive to than others. 

Let’s take that mythical animal, “the audience.” “You can’t talk about the audience, there is no such thing as the audience.” Well, these days I live like a hermit, but keep in mind that for many years I attended five concerts a week, often two or three in an evening, at ten or 15 usual spaces all over New York. I became very aware, among other things, of how a performance that drew cheers from one audience might get blank stares from another, and it was to some extent predictable. I saw the audiences more regularly than I did the individual performers, and got to know them better. I ranged the city from Avery Fisher Hall to King Tut’s Wa-wa Hut; if you only get your new-music fixes at, say, Miller Theater and Carnegie Hall, you may never have learned enough about audiences to realize how much, and how predictably, they can vary.

I knew the BAM audience (best, most nuanced audience in America), the NY Philharmonic audience (worst and rudest), the Kitchen audience (hip but not very spontaneous), the Experimental Intermedia audience (all friends, and undemonstrative), the Chicago jazz audience (very savvy and good-humored, intense listeners). I sat in the Chicago Symphony audience among people who’d made up their minds before they came in, half believing that Georg Solti was a god who could do no wrong and the other half convinced the orchestra would never again be what it used to be under Reiner. I sat at Roulette in the middle of an early ’90s John Zorn audience indistinguishable from a Barack Obama rally today – you betrayed divergence from the prevalent riotous approval at your peril. I sat, or stood, in the Knitting Factory and CBGBs (on new music nights) among audiences whose members, aside from myself, ranged in age from 21 to 23. These toddlers made no distinction between one act and another, one piece and another – they weren’t appraising the music, they were learning the scene, mindful to show a hip level of enthusiasm, but afraid to look uncool. I would observe the audience’s reactions as a counterpoint to my own, and these post-pubescent audiences were worthless for that – it was like I was the only subjective consciousness in the room.

I’ve seen audiences lie, in both directions. I’ve seen audiences spend the duration of a performance bored and restless, flipping through their programs, and then burst into a standing ovation when it was over, because the music was something they were “supposed” to approve; and I’ve seen audiences get caught up curiously and very attentive, and then applaud tepidly and speak slightingly of the music during intermission, because the composer’s reputation was still in doubt. On the other hand, I’ve seen a sophisticated audience all start backward at once at a daring turn in the middle of a fantastic ROVA sax quartet improv, and another all suddenly burst into a guffaw when Rzewski slyly quoted Beethoven. We all like to believe in free will and have faith in the integrity of our individual judgments, but you put 300 people in a room together, point them at a stage, and give them a stimulus, and certain kinds of groupthink take over, except perhaps for an intransigent, peer-pressure-hating curmudgeon like myself. Add to that that audiences tend to be fairly self-selecting, based on venue. If the audience generates a groundswell of enthusiasm, nothing can afterward shake the faith that that reaction was directly attributable to the music itself. That’s often how reputations get made, and then you move the same music to a larger, more formal venue where it falls flat, and everyone gets confused. But if the audience is a well-tuned, sensitive instrument, its behavior can draw a revealing map of how the music works.

The late, great Jim Tenney was someone who’d always tell me, “You can’t generalize about the audience, everyone listens differently.” Well, Jim probably rarely went to the local symphony or the Knitting Factory, but to small new-music concerts where he was surrounded by like-minded individuals who were unusually focussed on their own individual judgment, and, expecting to compare notes with their peers afterward, pretty free from collective bleed-through. Within his usual haunts, he was probably right – you couldn’t generalize about his audience. But Virgil Thomson says somewhere, and I don’t want to go look it up so I’ll paraphrase it and ruin it, that what being a critic teaches a composer is a realism about what can get across to an audience and what can’t, and the sad truth that an effect cannot be communicated simply by wishful thinking. When I talk about “the audience” I may have BAM in mind if I’m thinking of a perfect world, or the NY Phil in mind if I’m thinking of them as a bunch of shits who don’t deserve anything better than Kenny G, but I am thinking of an entity that possesses, for me, a palpable presence. Maybe it’s you who can’t generalize about the audience.

Likewise, I’m hyper-sensitive, perhaps, to the kinds of groupthink that run through the composing world, for which we composers bear, in my view, a collective responsibility. For instance, it’s kind of standard to say today, on one side of the line, that in the 1970s composition teachers pushed their students to write 12-tone music or some suitably complex-sounding equivalent. But I don’t think that’s quite what happened. It seems to me that the real pressure came not from faculty, but from peers and the general environment, and that a kind of macho competitiveness based on compositional systems became an inescapable undercurrent. Probably the professors, who in their own minds were trying to be fair and impartial, took a little more encouraging interest in the students whose music reflected their own interests, and that subtle preferential treatment spread throughout the student body as an emotional charge connected to compositional systems, to which some students gravitated and against which others rebelled, but no one was allowed to remain neutral. That would explain both why so many students remember a perception of having been pushed toward systematic thinking, while so many professors feel injured by any such suggestion. And I was at Oberlin; we’d have Midwest Composer Symposia, and I’d learn that the dynamics were a little different at U. of Michigan, and different again at U. of Iowa.

On composition panels, I’m always the one who notices that, out of 73 orchestral scores by young composers, 19 of them start out with a dramatic single tone crescendoing into a burst of percussion, and of course I immediately disqualify those 19 as composers who’ve succumbed to the clichés of their time. (One of Feldman’s talents was for identifying clichés no one else would recognize as such – like the facts that, in the ’70s, the standard orchestra piece had become 20 minutes, and the default tempo quarter-note equals 72.) Contrarily, I notice a 7-against-6 pattern running through a piece by Ben Neill, and then an 8-against-9 in Evan Ziporyn, and a 6-against-7-against-8 in Glenn Branca, and it occurs to me that there’s a movement going on, and I coin an -ism, and man, does that piss everyone off. I am not supposed to call attention to the things I notice – if they conflict with the article of faith that each one of us is absolutely unique like a snowflake, and impervious to outside suggestion or unconscious imitation, or even picking up ideas that are “in the air.” (Hey, have you noticed that all snowflakes have six sides?)

Among all good liberals, generalizations took on a bad odor in the ’70s, as though they were all of the same form as, “all Blacks are great dancers,” or, “Jewish people are good with money.” My mother had a great put-down line for people who drew conclusions from too little evidence; she’d respond, “All Indians walk single file. I saw one once, and he did.” More recently, though, the idea of groupthink has entered our political discourse as an attempt to describe what goes wrong within professional circles. We composers have groupthink too – and how are we supposed to identify groupthink if we are forbidden to generalize, or notice recurring patterns? The prohibition against generalizing can be a political tool for preventing the recognition and exposure of groupthink. No wonder certain people are so violently opposed to it.

Well, forgive me for being me. I just paint what I see as clearly as you’d paint a tree in your front yard, but being a Scorpio, I perceive the substrata more clearly than the surface. I see patterns, I draw connections, and since no one else sees them, or they’re all focused on other things instead, I must be up to something sinister, or perhaps just crazy. If my descriptions find no resonance they will fade away quickly enough, but I can only employ the talents I have.

Glory be, I am mentioned, quoted, and even pictured in tomorrow’s Times. It’s in Steve Smith’s advance piece on the New Albion festival that starts at Bard next Friday, August 1, and runs until the 10th. The ever-wonderful Sarah Cahill will play my Private Dances on the 2nd. You can read the entire program here (scroll down). Should be a fun ten days, with lots of Downtowners and California composers and musicians, all recorded on the New Albion label, running around in my (metaphorical) back yard.