Musico-scientific omnivore Brian McLaren points me to an interview with Malcolm Gladwell that debunks the significance of child prodigies. Gladwell was a child prodigy athlete who, as a teenager, found that his native talent was actually little better than mediocre. Becoming fascinated by the phenomenon, he studied it and found that the correspondence between remarkable early achievement and adult success in a field is actually almost statistically insignificant:

…the young Mozart’s prowess can be chalked up to practice, practice, practice. Compelled to practice three hours a day from age three on, by age six the young Wolfgang had logged an astonishing 3,500 hours — “three times more than anybody else in his peer group. No wonder they thought he was a genius.” So Mozart’s famous precociousness as a musician was not innate musical ability but rather his ability to work hard, and circumstances (i.e., his father) that pushed him to do so.

“That is a very different definition of precociousness than I think the one that we generally deal with.”

A better poster child for what precociousness really entails, Gladwell hinted, may thus be the famous intellectual late-bloomer, Einstein. Gladwell cited a biographer’s description of the future physicist, who displayed no remarkable native intelligence as a child but whose success seems to have derived from certain habits and personality traits — curiosity, doggedness, determinedness — that are the less glamorous but perhaps more essential components of genius.

The classical music world would do well to keep this in mind. We have a lot of brilliant composers going unperformed because their breakthrough came in their ’40s – while we are relentlessly subjected to lousy music by composers who wrote a seemingly precocious piece once in grad school. Penderecki comes to mind – has he written anything worth sitting through since the ’60s? And was his Threnody, penned at 26, anything more than a frisson of novel sounds? Therefore we are subjected to his uninsightful conservative mimickry, his pseudo-portentous Lisztian paeans to the chromatic scale, forever, as he racks up music awards a handful at a time? In classical music, precocity is an ironclad predictor of adult success – only because no one ever notices if you don’t live up to your early promise.

I actually had an experience similar to Gladwell’s. I was the “math genius” of my high school. I would occasionally look at an algebra problem and the correct answer would fly into my head, after which I’d have to work it out and prove it was correct. I’d catch my trigonometry teacher’s mistakes. My teachers all urged me to go into math until I got into calculus, where it abruptly became apparent that my talent for all higher-level math was pedestrian at best. (Turns out, the math I had facility in was exactly the type needed for working in just intonation.) The difference between me and some of our Pulitzer hacks is that I am not enabled to inflict my mathematical expertise on the world just because of some deceptive early successes.

(By the way, don’t just take my word on Penderecki. Even his bio in Grove Dictionary expresses doubts: “In 1998 he wrote in a foreword to a catalogue of his sketches that he felt he was getting close to the essence of music. By implication, these views are somewhat dismissive of his music of the 1960s, arguably his most distinctive contribution to 20th-century culture. Penderecki is a composer who has consistently engaged with the issues of the outside world, sometimes with piety, often with apparent anger and never without passion. Nevertheless, his stylistic shifts have often raised more questions than answers.”)

Mikel Rouse’s music for Merce Cunningham’s dance eyeSpace, which I witnessed at the Joyce Theater in New York last night and is playing again tonight, was brilliantly post-Cagean. Cunningham and John Cage, as you know, made a decades-long joint career by making music and dance whose interaction was unplanned. Cage would make 20 minutes of music, Cunningham the same length dance, then just combine them, so that random coincidences could happen beyond the control of the creators. Mikel took the idea a step further – the dancers don’t even hear the music, because it’s on iPods. So the entire audience sat there listening with headphones to Mikel’s music, and because each iPod was on shuffle mode, each audience member was hearing different tracks and experiencing a different accompaniment to Merce’s dance.

And to make it even more interesting, Mikel and Merce’s sound designer Stephan Moore were playing tracks of environmental sounds into the hall – car horns, people talking, subway noise – at greatly varying volumes. Sometimes the environmental sounds would intrude into the iPod music, either because the noises got very loud or Mikel’s music very soft. So it was a partly communal experience, and more unpredictable than just listening to a series of Mikel’s gently ambient songs, because the noises and songs interacted randomly, and you weren’t always sure which sounds came from where. The whole concept realized Cage’s kind of unpredictable liveliness on a new level, one that allowed for Mikel’s pop-flavored beat. And one of the advantages to Mikel’s and my kind of multitempo music, as we semi-joked afterward, was that no matter what kind of rhythm the dancers were making, there was probably some background tempo being articulated by the music that went right along with it.

Mikel’s wife Lisa Boudreau (pictured) is one of Cunningham’s dancers, and this was the first time she’d ever had the chance to dance to Mikel’s music. The dancers were forming and reforming in pairs, and wore elastic bands that they would tie each other together with intermittently. Forgive me for not describing more: dance is the most difficult art form for me to grasp, and I’ve never had any vocabulary for it. It looked like the picture.

As if that weren’t enough excitement for one evening, the concert also featured the original choreography (as recalled by Carolyn Brown and others) of Merce’s dance, titled Crises, for Conlon Nancarrow’s first seven Player Piano Studies, done back in 1960. The Cunningham Dance Group kept that in their repertoire until 1964, and there’s apparently a primitive video that they were able to use in the reconstruction. (This Cunningham Dance tour eventually led to the short-lived 1969 Columbia recording of the early Studies.) The dance was kind of robotic and hiply modernist, in skin-tight yellow, red, and salmon tights. In Cage-Cunningham fashion, switches from one Study to the next were not synchronized with sections in the dance. I was paying especially close attention because next May in Boston, Mark Morris is choreographing some of my Disklavier Studies, and I was curious for something to comare with.

The strange thing, that several of us had a big powwow about afterwards, was that one of Conlon’s Player Piano Studies was one no one recognized. Trimpin had supplied MIDI files of the early studies so they could dance to a Disklavier (Cunningham always uses “live” music), but they found that the current MIDI files (which I also have) didn’t match the early tape. So they had to use the old tape, in the middle of which was there was a three- or four-minute Nancarrow study that I’d never heard before. Its melodic quirks sounded exactly like Nancarrow’s style, except that the tune was a little more repetitive and sing-songy, more influenced, perhaps, by the jazz that Conlon had played on trumpet in his jazz gigs of the 1930s. Various theories were advanced, including the possibility that David Tudor had improvised something, but given Conlon’s tendency to become dissatisfied with works and disown them, I strongly suspect that this was an early study that he threw away, probably because the jazz influence was too undigested. I’m going to get a recording and see if I can analyze the tempo relationships. Had they asked me a couple of months ago, I’m sure I could have supplied them with a MIDI version.

Performances are coming thick and fast and sneaking up on me. Da Capo is playing my Hovenweep at Hofstra University this afternoon at a 3 PM concert: sorry I don’t have the details, but I assume if you can get to Hofstra you can find it.

This Sunday, October 15 at 4, Sarah Cahill will give the West Coast premiere, and I guess the official public world premiere, of my new piano piece On Reading Emerson, which she commissioned. It’s at “one of the most idyllic places on earth,” the Point Reyes Dance Palace at 5th and B Streets, Point Reyes Station. Works by Grainger, Cowell, and others also included.

Then, on Friday, October 27, at 8, Sarah will repeat On Reading Emerson at the Berkeley Arts Festival, at the Jazzschool, 2087 Addison St., Berkeley. The all-brand-new program, no musty old 20th-century music allowed, is as follows:

Snippets 2 (2006) – Frederic Rzewski (premiere)

Almost a Quintet (2006) – Larry Polansky (premiere)

On Reading Emerson (2006) – Kyle Gann

Tango (2006) – Andrea Morricone (premiere)

Improvviso (2006)- Andrea Morricone (premiere)

“Le Crepescule” Rag (2006)- Elizabeth Lauer

Pleasant Dreaming (2006)- Phil Collins

The pieces by Rzewski, Polansky, as well as Morricone’s Improvviso, were, like my piece, written for Sarah. She’s amazing.

On October 26 at 8, two of my Disklavier Studies will be played on a concert of mechanical piano music, lots of Nancarrow, Wolfgang Heisig, and others, at the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden. Composer Alexander Plötz is putting the whole thing together; more details later.

My good friend the brilliant composer Larry Polansky, who was closer to Jim Tenney than I was, weighs in nicely on his life and death.

Gratifying unsigned item on the New York Times editorial page today:

It’s easy to see why New Yorkers, being who they are, would like to claim Steve Reich as their own. He is widely considered one of the most important living composers, who along with contemporaries like La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and John Adams — and Charles Ives and John Cage before them — changed the course of music in the 20th century. And he is still very much a force in the 21st.

Incidentally, I also notice that Maureen Dowd was allowed to use the word “fart” in her column today. Does anyone know if that’s an official shift of editorial policy? In 2000, in an article on the history of electronic music for the Times, I wasn’t allowed to refer to the 1970s genre of electronic music, full of old-fashioned bloops and bleeps, universally referred to as “squeakfart music.” “Censorship!” I cried, and pointed out that any synonym would be less precise and a weak euphemism, but to no avail. If I ever have the article reprinted, I will reinsert the correct term.

My North Carolina weekend gigs were a pleasure, and I had a wonderful time with composers Mikel Rouse, in Chapel Hill, and Lawrence Dillon in Winston-Salem. With the latter, at the North Carolina School for the Arts, I performed with the Philidor Percussion Quartet (which I will put on my resume from now on) in my Snake Dance No. 2. The piece is one of my perennial exercises in playing complex rhythms in unison, and I had forgotten how much I love performing in it.

Professor Dillon, whom I’ve corresponded with for years but had never met in person before, has written his own complimentary account of the event, so gracious that I won’t even make any of the jokes we had contemplated pulling on each other.

At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill I saw Mikel Rouse’s new opera The End of Cinematics – actually, I’d been familiar with the music for seven years, but his operas take so long to come into production that this was only first staged a year ago at the Krannert Center. The work plays at Brooklyn Academy of Music this week. Go see it: in addition to featuring Mikel’s intricately structured pop songs, it uses an elaborate set with live actor/dancers in front of huge video monitors and behind a scrim on which both live and prerecorded film is shown, using theater to comment on the film medium in ways that perplexed and delighted the audience I saw it with. Though the piece takes shots at commercial culture, it is less directly political than Dennis Cleveland, and its mystery makes it something of a Rorschach test for the audience.

My purpose there was to speak about Mikel on a symposium beforehand, for supporters of the arts in Chapel Hill. Once it was over, we were to dine with the guests, and the organizer caught my arm and said, “Hodding Carter III wants you at his table.” Those my age will remember the name, and Google reminded me that he was assistant secretary of defense under Jimmy Carter, afterward president of the Knight Foundation; and I found myself surrounded by former employees of the Carter White House, who spent the meal trading eye-opening personal anecdotes about Bill Clinton. I won’t repeat any of them, but I found my company more impressive than they had any reason to find me.

A box of paperback copies of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow has just been delivered to this office. This means that all of you who have avoided buying the book all these years because it was horribly expensive will now have to avoid buying it because it’s too technical and doesn’t contain enough pictures.

I’ve got three conflicting events coming up the end of this week:

— Pianist Sarah Cahill will premiere my brand new work, On Reading Emerson, which she commissioned, at the Harvard Faculty Club inCambridge, Mass., on Friday morning, September 29. It’s part of the Boston Research Center’s conference “Emerson and Imagination.” Looks like you have to register for the conference to attend, though. She’ll be giving a couple more performances in the Bay Area in October; info here, but I’ll post about those later.

— Also this Friday, I’ll be on a panel with Mikel Rouse to discuss his new work The End of Cinematics, being performed afterward at Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The panel’s from 5 to 6 at the Carolina Inn.

— The Philidor Percussion Group will perform my Snake Dance No. 2 this Saturday, September 30, at 7:30 at the Watson Chamber Music Hall of the North Carolina School of the Arts. I’ll also be lecturing on Great Rhythms of the 1990s to composer Lawrence Dillon’s students earlier that afternoon.

(It kills me that I can’t hear Sarah premiere my new piece in Boston, but I’d committed to these North Carolina gigs months ago. Can’t be everywhere at once.)

This afternoon at 5:45 PM Greenwich time, which if I remember my time-zone conversions correctly is 12:45 PM New York time, BBC Radio will air a special edition of the show “Music Matters” on Steve Reich’s legacy in honor of his 70th birthday. The show examines Reich’s influence in – brace yourself – the context of Uptown and Downtown, the angle being that a disreputable Downtown composer is now the darling of places like Lincoln Center. Music journalist Tom Service, who does the show, also interviewed me for local color; we drove around to Lincoln Center, the Kitchen, and the Knitting Factory. If you miss it live today, it’ll be in the archives for one week. Presumably I will be quoted.
Had I known that I would also be photographed for the web site, I wouldn’t have worn a bright pink shirt – I thought I was dressed just fine for radio.

For all those Downtown-deniers – those determined to pretend the Downtown scene never existed, those who want all memory of it obliterated, those who claim there was never any difference, those who think La Monte Young might have been a great composer if he’d only studied with Roger Sessions, those who’ve convinced themselves that Young actually did study with Sessions – the BBC interview’ll be just something else to hate me for. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

[UPDATE:] Interesting…. Carnegie Hall artistic director Ara Guzelimian, interviewed on the show, mentions that there was some thought of inaugurating Zankel Hall with the slogan “Downtown now begins at 57th Street.” I guess he hasn’t heard the news that Downtown never existed.

I’m directing, this semester, a student ensemble for works of unspecified instrumentation. It’s above my accustomed course load, and takes up a chunk of my time, but I took it on out of guilt. I’ve felt terrible for years that our students graduate thinking that the sole available mode of modern music performance is faithful reading of scores elaborated in every detail of articulation and dynamics. Among the pieces we’re looking at and may perform are Riley’s In C (of course), Rzewski’s Attica and Les Moutons de Panurge, Glass’s Music in Fifths, Barbara Benary’s Sun on Snow, Christian Wolff’s Snowdrop, Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio (we have a lot of guitarists), and Samuel Vriezen’s The Weather Riots. (I directed the Dallas premiere of some of these pieces in 1976 at SMU.) It’s been a blast. Every music-reading level is accommodated, and people love working on In C and Music in Fifths. Plus, tonight we had our first read-through of Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla, for electric guitars (it can be played by multiples of any instrument). I wonder whether the piece has been played since New Music America 1980, or whether it’s ever been played on guitars. The performance, at Bard, is December 14. I’ll keep you posted.

I am going to be the composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts next February 19 through March 11, down in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. (February and March in Florida, can you imagine? I saw the location and accepted before I knew what it was they wanted me to do.) Composers are invited to apply to come hang out with me and be Associate Artists, meeting for at least two hours a day. The rest of the time, we’ll work on our own projects; I’ll be writing a Concerto for Piano and Winds commissioned by pianist Geoffrey Madge and the Orkest de Volharding. Poet Marie Ponsot and architect Steve Badanes are the other artists who’ll be in residence. The application deadline is Ives’s birthday, October 20. I am told by a former Associate that it’s a good idea to advertise this on my blog, to get the word out so people apply. You can read all about my ideas for the residency here, frequently asked questions here, and more general stuff about the Atlantic Center for the Arts here. If you’re reading my blog, you know what I’m all about, and did I mention it’s February in Florida? I’d apply even if I didn’t like my music.

I am proud to have been among the 17% of Democrats who voted in New York State today for Jonathan Tasini for U.S. senator – someone who did not support the invasion of Iraq nor has ever advocated an anti-flag-burning amendment.

Good lord, what a superb crop of comments my last post elicited! I seem to have stumbled on a topic – the mandates of “historical progress” – that many composers think about a lot and rarely get to discuss. My readers have outdone themselves, most beyond my capacity to improve on with further comment, notably Galen Brown’s points about film music. But I’ll respond to a few.

Matthew Guerrieri (whose thoughtful blog is worth checking out) pinpoints a dilemma that often has me dancing around in circles:

It’s not so much the choice of vocabulary (out of the composers I went to school with, I can only think of one who wrote in a classic mid-century serialist style; the rest of us were too in love with John Williams to ever give up tonal centers) as the attitude among a lot of student composers that they simply don’t need to know anything about non-tonal music that I find ridiculous. If you already think you know everything you need to know, what are you doing in school? And I’m deeply skeptical of any composer who isn’t curious about the inner workings of every single piece he or she comes in contact with–and who doesn’t constantly re-listen, and reassess, the entire repertoire. (If I had settled on my 19-year-old opinions, I would like neither Brahms, Barraque, or soul music.)

It’s a big problem for me: at one point I rejected the premises of serialist and related music, but it was tremendously important in my development, and I still love a lot of it. So how do you teach a body of music that you’ve rejected as a creative artist, but still feel your students need to encounter and learn to understand, especially when the music exhibits a difficulty that raises automatic resistance in most of them, and seems so irrelevant to their prior interests?

This morning I went to Patelson’s Music in New York and bought the score to the fifth movement of Boulez’s Pli selon pli – for $100, which means I now own scores to four of the five movements, at considerable financial commitment – along with Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, Wuorinen’s Piano Sonata, and Ligeti’s Continuum (not one of my favorites, but only ten bucks and a great teaching piece). Though I criticize a lot of this music, you can’t say my attitude is unaffectionate, let alone unknowledgeable. It bugs me when I don’t know how a piece works, or don’t understand why it was written, and I study the music that perplexes me. I want my students to learn to do the same. I teach lots of serialist music, and present it as enthusiastically as I can, though I make it clear that, as with any body of music, there is a wide range of quality. I love Babbitt’s Philomel, sort of like his Canonical Form, and don’t care for Sextets. Nono’s Contrappunto Dialettico alla Mente is fantastic, but Il Canto Sospeso leaves me cold. Stockhausen’s Mantra is terrific, and I enjoy Kontrapunkte, but I wouldn’t bother playing the first four Klavierstücke. The first two movements of Carter’s Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harspichord are lodged in my heart, but his Variations for Orchestra seems empty and clichéd.

Ultimately, I believe it’s high time to treat this music like any other historical repertoire. My students need to learn all the subtleties of sonata form, too, though Schumann and Brahms are difficult to interest them in. The difference between me and some of my colleagues is that I immerse them in the music – and then don’t bother them about whether they want to apply anything they’ve learned from it to their own music. As trained musicians they have to understand why it was important to write this music, but as artists, they are free to ignore not only it, but all “historical progress,” and anything else that doesn’t touch them deeply. Still, the question, “Well, if this music is so freakin’ wonderful, why doesn’t your music resemble it in any way?” – can be difficult to evade.

Guerrieri adds:

I always get my best ideas when I’m sitting through a piece I don’t like: I start to think of all the sounds I’d rather be hearing, and the imagination takes off. I know at least a couple colleagues who have had the same experience. Are we the only ones?

Absolutely not. I find nothing more inspiring than sitting in a concert and listening to bad music. As a critic-composer, I’ve started some of my best pieces while listening to music that bored or disgusted me. Often when it looked like I was taking copious notes, I was actually drawing staves in my little notebook and sketching out chords and melodies in a burst of anti-cliché inspiration. The opportunity to hear lousy music live is greatly underrated.

The always sincere John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop confesses:

I’m uncomfortable with the equation of aesthetic esotericism and political conservatism.

There’s nothing “elitist” about esoteric interests. But feeling bitter that “the masses” don’t share your esoteric interests does reflect — or lead one to — an elitist attitude.

I will have to ponder for a while, uncomfortably, why Aaron Copland may have felt that esoteric aesthetics were akin to political conservatism, and why he may have been justified at that time.

Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that so many of these guys are politically liberal, yet manifest such authoritarian views in their music, or at least in the rhetoric with which they surround it. If a composer is fascinated by esoteric musical goals, but humbly realizes that his perceptions lie outside the range of the average listener, that strikes me as a perfectly reasonable attitude. That seems true of many of the best “advanced” composers: Nancarrow, Scelsi, Sorabji, even Partch. But the serialists, and the New Complexity guys who inherited their hubris, often sound like the musical equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld: “We’re the experts, we know what’s best, so just shut up and take what we give you, and if you’re smart you’ll learn to appreciate the bold new world we’ve created for you.” And that bold new world, whether Rumsfeld’s or Wuorinen’s, is usually a hell based on theories that they’ve done a great job of rationalizing for themselves, but that are based on self-delusions that most people have too much common sense to accept. Given the assumption that their political views are sincere (though I’ve been told that Wuorinen and Babbitt express horribly right-wing opinions in private), I can’t imagine how they reconcile that for themselves, or even how they look themselves in the mirror each morning. It’s true, too, of not only the serialists (nearly extinct at this point, after all), but of my immediate colleagues who insist that their students use the proper modicum of “20th-century-sounding” dissonance, atonality, and pitch complexity whether it expresses what they want to say or not.

Finally, Ryan Howard asks:

I’m curious what you make of Charles Rosen’s comments (in Piano Notes) of what he terms “neotonal” music. Rosen seems to advance the argument that the gradual move toward equal temperament destroyed one of the fundamental elements of 18th century tonality–the directionality of modulation in either the sharp or flat direction–and that “neotonal” music, consequently, can provide only a “hollow simulacrum” of 18th or 19th century tonality, in which classical tonal structures are “either abandoned or given a simplistic form which does not recognize the emotional intensity of full triadic tonality.”

Unlike some of Rosen’s comments about 20th-century music, I think this is a really profound point, and one that many microtonalists have made in one way or another as well. Lou Harrison liked to say that 12-tone music was the only style that 12-tone equal temperament supports. I myself gravitated toward microtonality partly because I was so interested in minimalism, and I always get a gnawing feeling that a lot of Reich’s and other minimalist music (Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, for instance) would sound so much better in meantone or just intonation. Those of us not attracted to writing strictly atonal music confront an unconscious conflict, I believe, in the fact that the conventional tuning we use is at odds with the underlying meaning of the harmonies we use. My non-microtonal music (which is most of it) has been influenced to some extent by my work in just intonation, but not as pervasively as I’d like. When writing piano music, for instance, I often revert to a considerable amount of half-step clashes because simple harmonies just don’t sound that good on a modern piano. It’s a problem – one my teacher Ben Johnston feels is well-nigh insurmountable until we start moving away from the bland out-of-tuneness of modern 12-pitch tuning.

Thanks to all for a fascinating dialogue.