A friend sent me this old 1960s photo of five composers. If you can identify half of them, you’re more of a 20th-century music wiz than I am:

Give up? Recognize any of them?

They are, from left to right, William Duckworth, Paul Creston, Sydney Hodkinson, Iain Hamilton, and Martin Mailman. Duckworth is the close friend who had the photo. Creston’s music I’ve never gotten excited about, but I’ve always been curious because he was one of the few composers, along with Schoenberg, Ives, and Ruggles, that Henry Cowell championed with lengthy analytical articles. Mailman was Duckworth’s composition teacher, and later the local composing celebrity around Dallas, where I grew up, as long-time composition professor at North Texas State U. I remember in high school my composition teacher, the band director Howard Dunn, bringing in Mailman with great reverence, as the star composer of north Texas. The only incident I remember is that Mailman chewed out a fellow student of mine for beginning Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata on the piano and playing it softly, when the dynamic marking, Mailman assured us, was ff.

Of course, the actual dynamic marking is pp. Little surprise that Mailman, who died in 2000, is forgotten today except in the symphonic band arena, but he was someone who, as Southern composers, Bill and I got to experience in common. The student who earned his disdain by playing Beethoven at the correct dynamic was Robert Hunt, still a friend and a superb musician, and, last I heard, conductor of the Midland-Odessa Symphony Orchestra in west Texas.

Via The Rambler via Alex Ross (and sired by Seattle Slew), here’s the video of the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Cage’s 4’33” at the Barbican in 2004. For inscrutable reasons that I imagine would have perplexed Cage, the audience suppresses their coughing until between movements (I mean, they don’t often hold back much during normal symphonic works, now, do they?). Swelled to such proportions, the piece really does become an enormous joke, but one that the polite British seem eager to appreciate.

I’m writing a piece for piano four hands. The first four movements are already 25 minutes, and I’m adding at least one more. They’re sort of sketches for pieces I’ve been wanting to try, and because they’re not particularly related, I’m using the generic title A Book of Music. It’s for a couple of students who have a piano duo, but it’s also a project I’ve wanted to work on for more than a decade. I’ve always had a soft spot for two-piano, or four-hand, works, and it’s rather remarkable the number of such works that are either my favorite, or near-favorite, work by that composer:

Ligeti’s Monument – Selbst-Portrait – Bewegung

B.A. Zimmermann’s Monologe

Stockhausen’s Mantra (my favorite pieces by all three composers)

Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica

Satie’s Trois morceau en forme de poire

Wallingford Riegger’s Variations Opus 54

Kevin Volans’s Cicada

Tenney’s Chromatic Canon

Bach’s The Art of Fugue

Years ago I wrote a two-piano piece, I’itoi Variations, which was a huge, ambitious, take-no-prisoners monument of tremendous ensemble difficulty, not the sort of thing that two pianists can sit down and breeze through in an odd moment. Since then I’ve always wanted to write something more approachable, closer in spirit to Trois morceau en forme de poire. It’s a great medium. It shares with solo piano music that you can set tone color aside for the moment, yet it also frees one from the limitations of ten fingers, and opens up the entire range of the instrument for simultaneous use. No wonder it’s the chosen medium to substitute for the orchestra in a thousand transcriptions.

My students will premiere A Book of Music this fall, and then I’ll make it generally available. It’s refreshing to write a little gebrauchsmusik, thinking at least as much about the enjoyment of the performers as that of the audience. I love playing four-hand music myself, and one of the best things about it is that it offers such opportunities for seduction. What better association for musicians to have with my melodies than that they were prelude to an evening of unexpected passion?

UPDATE: That working title was too dull to impose on a piece I’ve come to like as much as this one. The new title is Implausible Premises.

I was once told, on the good authority of someone who played his music, that there were no extant photographs of the reclusive Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi – he didn’t like having his picture taken. I printed this factoid in the Village Voice, and in response someone sent me an indistinct photo of an old man in a wool cap, which the sender claimed was the only known photo of Giacinto Scelsi. Now, courtesy of Chicago critic Marc Geelhoed, whose name has graced these pages before, I find a photo of a young, dapper Giacinto Scelsi.

Please send me all remaining photos of Giacinto Scelsi c/o Arts Journal, and I’ll print the best twenty.

Frank Oteri has asked for my reaction to an article by artist/critic Matthew Collings about the experience of being an artist/critic. It starts out, “For a long time I’ve led a double life. I’ve been an art critic and an artist.” Well, the experience he describes isn’t mine. I get a little pissed off when people describe me as “wearing two hats.” Literally as well as figuratively, I only wear one. “Kyle Gann” is a construction of musical and other experiences reaching back into the 1950s, and those experiences condition every article he writes as well as every piece he composes. I don’t draw on one set as a reviewer and a different set as a composer, and I have never had the experience of moving from composition to reviewing, or vice versa, and feeling, “OK, now I’m a different person, or have a different point of view.” To keep these functions separate would emasculate both. My life as a reviewer has had a salutary effect on my music, and I’ve always felt that my writing started to suffer when I wasn’t composing enough. Of course, the composer KG rarely composes according to the directions of the critic KG, but that’s because one is the function of the subconscious and the other of the conscious – and I’m as much at the mercy of my muse as anyone. In fact, I’ve even written reviews that ran away with me and seemed scary-crazy when I wrote them; I’d screen my phone calls the day they appeared in print, but these are invariably the ones I got the most praise for. I do hope that after I slough off this mortal coil my work gets considered, if at all, as a unity, even if one containing contradictions. The keys to my music are in my writing, and vice versa.

So is there anything I can add to this dialogue besides, “Baloney!”? Well, there is a critical function which, in many young composers, sets in too quickly and makes composing difficult. With half my composition students I have to tell them to turn off the critical voice in their heads long enough to get enough notes down, to see how the piece is growing before you start chopping it up evaluatively. I was particularly susceptible to this as a young man, with an aggressive superego that would damn anything I did before it could get off the ground. Perhaps that had something to do with my penchant for criticizing. But the balance between taking creative chances and self-criticism is one that every creative artist has to work out for himself, regardless of his day job. Right now there’s nothing I want to do more than quit being a critic – not at all because I think writing criticism detracts from my composing, but because people treating me as a critic quite definitely detracts from their treating me as a composer. I can handle the contradiction just fine. It’s others who can’t.

UPDATE: On reflection, I’m not sure this disagrees with the original article, because I can’t tell for sure what the point of the original article was. I was asked to respond, and these sentences flew to mind.

Alex Ross, who has a nice article on Morton Feldman in this week’s New Yorker, quotes, on on his blog, the late György Ligeti on his view of music history:

“Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.”

I agree completely. But escaping from a room with only two walls has never struck me as particularly difficult.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest song title ever was that of Hoagy Carmichael’s 1945 ditty, “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with my Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-o, Beat-o Flat-On-My-Seat-o, Hirohito Blues.” I think I may possibly hold the record for the longest title of an orchestra piece: The Disappearance of All Holy Things from this Once So Promising World. Like several of my titles, it’s a line from a poem by the great underrated poet Kenneth Patchen. The piece is being played next Thursday, June 15, in Paris, conducted by Elizabeth Askren on a program of American music:

It’s the work’s first performance since the premieres by the Woodstock Orchestra in 1998. I, alas, won’t be there. But I’m having such a blast making microtonal orchestras with Li’l Miss Scale Oven and Kontakt 2.1 that it would take more than a mere Continental premiere to crowbar me away from my computers.

UPDATE: Art Jarvinen says he has a chamber orchestra piece with a longer title: Mass Death Of A School Of Small Herring (The Natural History Of Deductible Rooms). Personally, I think having a subtitle in parens is cheating.

I just finished reading, and immensely enjoyed, A Talent for Trouble, the biography of film director William Wyler, by my fellow Arts Journal blogger Jan Herman. Two things at the end of the book struck me.

One was Wyler’s feeling about color photography, which he was late to switch to. “A red chair doesn’t look unusual in reality,” he once said, “but on the screen, you can’t take your eyes from it. That’s because the frame itself is not natural. It’s delimited by the blackness surrounding it. We don’t actually see that way with our natural field of vision. I was late in using color partly because I felt color could be phony, exaggerated.” More evidence of what I’m always saying, that art is about appearances, not reality. A lot of young composers, I think, as well as older ones, make bad music because they’re focussed on what the music really is, not on the way it appears to the audience.

The other point of interest was an encounter with Alfred Hitchcock. Wyler made all kinds of films: westerns (The Westerner, The Big Country), comedies (Roman Holiday), war films (Mrs. Miniver, Memphis Belle), social commentary (The Best Years of Our Lives, Dodsworth), suspense films (The Letter, The Collector), a musical (Funny Girl). One of Jan’s themes throughout the book is that this versatility worked against Wyler’s reputation, since in the ’60s an auteur theory arose that (over-) valued each director’s idiosyncratic viewpoint, and demanded that he turn out films exploring the same themes over and over. Hitchcock, “master of suspense,” benefitted from this, but Wyler called him “a prisoner of the medium.” Once Hitchcock admitted to Wyler that he was jealous: “You can do any kind of film you want. I can’t. They won’t let me.” (Watch Hitchcock’s late comedy The Trouble with Harry, and you might conclude that it was a good thing they didn’t let him.)

Auteur theory is a big subject in film criticism, but its musical counterpart, though quite patent, is hardly discussed. Many of the most well-regarded recent composers are those who evolved an immediately recognizable trademark in their music: Feldman, Reich, Scelsi, John Adams, Meredith Monk, Charlemagne Palestine, Branca, and most of all Phil Glass, who has taken recognizability to an extreme that has ruined him for more sophisticated circles. Interestingly enough, this seems more true of the famous Downtown composers than of the Pulitzer crowd – it’s difficult to imagine reliably recognizing a work by Corigliano, Zwilich, Harbison, or those guys in ten seconds of a drop-the-needle test. (Babbitt’s an interesting case – uniformity not necessarily leading to recognizability.) I suspect that this partly accounts for Europe’s preference of Downtown Americans over Uptown ones, since Europe is where auteur theory originated and flourished. They seem to like our composers who carve out their own distinctive groove.

This is a personal issue for me, because, creatively, I find myself much in sympathy with Wyler. I too write static minimalist pieces (Long Night, The Day Revisited), wild collages (Petty Larceny, Scenario), microtonal pieces (Triskadekaphonia, How Miraculous Things Happen), jazz harmony pieces (Bud Ran Back Out, Private Dances), atonal pieces (The Waiting, I’itoi Variations), grand pieces for chorus and orchestra (Transcendental Sonnets). (I’m not the only Downtowner in this boat; Jim Tenney and Larry Polansky have similarly kaleidoscopic outputs.) Inside my head, my musical reflexes are so fixed and repetitive that I feel like I keep writing the same work over and over again, but I have trouble believing that my music comes off that way to the listener, and I sense that people have trouble figuring out what my central style is. I have a repertoire of melodic tendencies that I’ve nurtured closely for 30 years, and a few rhythms that have become absolutely fetishistic, but they recur disguised by widely ranging contexts. In that respect I’m really a little like Nancarrow, who used the same melodic and rhythmic tics in every piece, but whose music – if you brush aside the fact that it’s almost all for the same instrument – runs the entire gamut from meticulous discipline to improvisatory abandon, and from modernist abstraction to boogie-woogie.

Since I so admire so many of the auteur-type composers, I had always intended to gravitate toward a small set of ideas and explore them over and over, as my friends John Luther Adams and Peter Garland have. If nothing else, it strikes me, in the current climate, as a good career move. But my muse doesn’t take directions very well, and it just works out that after writing a motionless Zen essay I’ll next get inspired to write a chaotic parody, and then a postminimalist dance. Jan discounts the claims of the auteuristes and praises Wyler’s versatile ability to adapt to each new genre. It’s in my own best self-interest to ride in that bandwagon myself.

Some months back Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann asked me to write an article on Edgard Varèse’s impact on American music for a book that the Paul Sacher Foundation would publish. Well, the book – Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary – is out, and rather than being the modest monograph I had envisioned, it is mammoth: a 500-plus-page coffee table compendium loaded with photos, diagrams, and manuscript facsimiles. Thirty-two authors are represented, and the articles cover Varèse’s student days, politics, patrons, personality, opinions of jazz, friends, influences, and other facets of this hard-edged figure.

Dipping into it at random (and I’m too immersed in composing to do more at the moment), I find some stunning quotes in Ulrich Mosch’s article about Varèse’s influence on Wolfgang Rihm: “Varèse [this is Rihm speaking] might have become much more of a key figure if he had only stood up more forcefully for his subjectivism and offset his image of the composer as objective architect with a different image: the artist as ‘manic-compulsive.’ As it is, we have to dig a long time before we reach him.” According to Mosch, Rihm feels that Varèse took on a self-protective cover of rationalism that was good politics for his milieu, but counter to his most basic compositional instincts. And he quotes something Varèse finally argued to Alan Rich in 1965: “Composition according to system is the admission of impotence.”

Whew! Well, the 20th century certainly needed a champion of subjectivity from the progressive side, someone to counter the then-spreading prejudice that subjectivity was the fetish of philistines. For my own article (and I hadn’t previously given Varèse much thought in 20 years), I found that that subjectivism made him forever suspect among the academics, who otherwise were delighted by his counterintuitive structures and extreme detail of notation. Meanwhile, the Downtowners loved him for his embrace of noise and that very subjectivism, though they resented his role in the imposition of a fanatical approach to notational exactitude. Exciting and original but thorny and personally off-putting, Varèse was a difficult figure to integrate into our musical landscape. This book looks like the most heroic attempt ever.

Every year I end up talking at some point about soggetto cavato, the practice of making themes from the letters of people’s names, the way Schumann used “S – C – H – A,” better known as “E-flat – C – B – A,” to stand for himself in Carnaval (S being German for E-flat, and H for B natural). I commented on the limited possibilities of my own name in this regard, but my student Ezekiel Virant came up with a possibility I hadn’t considered: a G and A followed by two Neapolitan chords, the Roman numeral analysis symbol for the Neapolitan being an N:

By this logic, I guess the first letter of Virant’s last name could be expressed by a V chord, or the submediant could cover the first two letters by itself.

While we’re talking about student takes on my name, for years I’ve been teaching the movements of the mass:

Kyrie

Gloria

Credo

Sanctus

Agnus dei

according to a mnemonic that a student named Jason came up with back when I was at Bucknell:

Kyle

Gann

Can’t

Sing

Anything

It’s also helpful in that I can use the movements of the mass to help me remember what it is that I can’t do.

I caught the last night of John Luther Adams’ sound installations, Veils and Vesper, at Diapason Gallery in New York Saturday night. Now, right off, how can you not like pieces with titles like that? Immediately Veils conjures up some Debussy impressionism, and is there a piece with “Vesper” in the title that anyone can not like? You think of Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin, and a little screwdriver pokes in and disconnects part of your critical apparatus before you walk in the door.

As befits those titles, Veils and Vesper were lighter, less mammoth, easier to take in than John’s installation The Place Where You Go to Listen that I wrote about earlier this spring. Where that vast work continues to chart eternity via weather and seismological data, these two were on six-hour repeating cycles of slowly rising and falling tones. The sound source was all pink noise, filtered once again through Jim Altieri’s Max patches, but diffracted through what John calls “harmonic prisms.” And in fact, you were immediately aware of a kind of tonality, some chord or scale shimmering indistinctly through the slowly shifting web of pitch lines. Putting your ear against one of the loudspeakers, it was difficult to distinguish one tone from another, as though you were hearing C and B at once or in alternation, and within a minute’s listening you could get a feel that the range was gradually rising or falling, but without leaving the basic tonality. Irregularly pulsing low tones from the woofers seemed to enforce a drone on the D of a Dorian scale, so that, reduced to a single impression, Veils seemed to be an endlessly suspended ii7 chord awaiting a resolution that would never come. Meanwhile, within that was an almost imperceptible trickle of sound waves upward or downward, like – if it is not degraded by the comparison – one of those huge, quiet waterfalls over slabs of rock at a fancy restaurant or hotel. Calming, beautiful, and, with those titles to set you up, an invitation to a crepuscular frame of mind.

The effect of music is difficult to describe at best, and in this case seemingly impossible. It’s why, when you know something about how the music was made, it’s so much easier to fall back on technical descriptions.

Pardon me for using this space as a technical support forum in reverse, but I’m not suppose to bother our college Mac guy with problems concerning our personal computers, and Apple charges me an arm and a leg for advice. My G4 laptop, OS 10.3.9, has developed a condition wherein sometimes basic applications like iTunes and Quicktime won’t run. They’ll seem to start up, but the console will never appear, and eventually I’ll have to force-quit. The same thing happens to computer shut-down, it will pretend to begin and then simply won’t go through. I’ve tried re-downloading the applications, with no effect. Is there a simple fix? Any ideas? And thanks if you can offer help.

My umptillion-pitches-to-the-octave microtonalist cohort Brian McLaren sends me a link to a wonderful article on the deficiencies of “Computer Music” by composer Bob Ostertag. Ostertag does a concise job of explaining the snobbishness of those who divide off the “real” electronic composers from the composers “who merely use electronics”:

…it is a phenomenon seen time and time again in academia: the more an area of knowledge becomes diffused in the public, the louder become the claims of those within the tower to exclusive expertise in the field, and the narrower become the criteria become for determining who the “experts” actually are….

The cul-de-sac these trends have led “Computer Music” into is a considerably less enjoyable place to tarry due to a technological barrier that is becoming increasingly obvious: despite the vastly increased power of the technology involved, the timbral sophistication of the most cutting edge technology is not significantly greater that of the most mundane and commonplace systems. In fact, after listening to the 287 pieces submitted to Ars Electronica, I would venture to say that the pieces created with today’s cutting edge technology (spectral resynthesis, sophisticated phase vocoding schemes, and so on) have an even greater uniformity of sound among them than the pieces done on MIDI modules available in any music store serving the popular music market.

Ostertag, who burst onto the scene with All the Rage – a Kronos Quartet piece integrating recordings of a 1991 gay riot in San Francisco – is a good enough composer to trust on such opinions.

Also, based on comments I’m compiling a list of schools whose electronic music programs (or at least certain faculty) make no elitist distinction between scratch-built and commercial software, and that will allow and teach the latter. So far, apparently, they are

Mills College (I shoulda known)

CalArts

University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of Missouri Kansas City

University of Cincinnati

University of San Diego (not to be confused with the University of California at San Diego)

University of Wollongong (Warren Burt chimes in)

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane

I’m adding to the list as I get further recommendations (see comments – apparently the Australians are a little more open-minded than academic Americans), which will be helpful for all the requests I get about grad schools, and even undergrad schools. Mills College is where we’ve always had the most success sending our freedom-loving Bard students, and I always hear great things about the faculty there, who have a long tradition of musical liberalism.