Following the fiasco in which my audio files disappeared from Live365 a few months ago, I was pretty slow in getting Postclassic Radio back up and in running order, and it sat pretty stagnant for the month of August. (By way of apology, Live365 gave everyone affected a free month’s broadcasting.) But people kept adding on as listeners, and I finally took time out from other work to rev it back up. Having started with Eve Beglarian as July composer-of-the-month, the playlist took a female-intensive turn, and I thought about moving to an all-woman-composer playlist by September. I haven’t quite gone that far – there were some Noah Creshevsky pieces I wanted to play, and I refuse to take down John Cage’s In a Landscape, which some of you may have noticed is the station’s ever-present theme song. Nevertheless, September will be Women’s Month on the station, and I’ve got pieces up by Allison Cameron, Amy Knoles, Annea Lockwood, Annie Gosfield, Bernadette Speach, Connie Beckley, Eliane Radigue, Elizabeth Brown, Elodie Lauten, Eve Beglarian, Janice Giteck, Jewlia Eisenberg, Judith Sainte-Croix, Julia Wolfe, Maggi Payne, Maria de Alvear, Mary Jane Leach, Pauline Oliveros, Sarah Peebles, and Wendy Mae Chambers – plus I’ll soon be taking down some men’s pieces to add in Belinda Reynolds, Beth Anderson, Carolyn Yarnell, Laurie Spiegel, and Meredith Monk. Not that there’s ever any shortage of women composers on my playlist, in my writings – or in my heart (sigh).

Today happens to be the second anniversary of this blog. I notice that I wrote a little fewer entries this year than last – I suspect that decline will continue. I’m not finding a blog to be the most effective means for getting my ideas out, because I can’t accompany my arguments with sufficient evidence. I’m sitting on hundreds of scores by young composers, making statements about new music based on what I find in them, and it feels sometimes like all I do here is draw arguments from people who don’t know the music I’m talking about and won’t believe it exists. When I wrote my Nancarrow book I could include loads of score excerpts, and no one has ever accused me of not knowing what I was talking about with Nancarrow. It strikes me my time would be better spent on my proposed book about Postminimalism, with my assertions backed up by incontrovertible examples, rather than just sitting here drawing fire from skeptics.

Interesting development at Sequenza 21. It turns out I’m not the only opera composer who feels hampered by the ubiquity of bel canto singing. Composers in general, the discussion suggests, at least those my age and younger, like their texts enunciated, don’t object to amplification on principle, and are a little sick and tired of the Europe-y sound of wide vibrato, preferring something a little more pop. Some would rather use untrained singers and amplify them than settle for the usual conservatory product. Last time I staged an opera, I tried to find singers with straight tones, good diction, and little vibrato – recruit them from early-music groups, I was told. But there are damn few around. Now we’ve got a whole generation of composers saying we want a different kind of singer for our operas. Where’ll we find them?

Maybe they’ll appear when classical music finally dies, which classical musicians keep promising me is about to happen, so I keep waiting for the final announcement. It’s been dying longer than friggin’ Generalissimo Franco.

After 36 years, I finally heard Roy Harris’s Third Symphony live last night, conducted by Leon Botstein at Bard’s Copland and His World festival. I had discovered the piece when I was 13, and it blew me away. The smooth sweep of the piece’s organic form is masterful (or maybe just lucky, because Harris had trouble ever achieving it again), and the middle, “Pastoral” section had a deep impact on me: time stops as the orchestra floats on a directionless sea of polytonal arpeggios. In some ways I’ve spent my life trying to duplicate the effect of that “Pastoral” section, especially the amazing effect of stopping time, in the middle of a piece that’s moving somewhere, to float for awhile. I think I’ve achieved something similar in the “Venus” section of my The Planets and my Unquiet Night for Disklavier, though that Harrisian texture also haunts the last movement of my Transcendental Sonnets, Time Does Not Exist (naturally), and other works. The piece is lodged deep in my psyche as an archetype. It was a kind of religious experience finally hearing it live, physically and in three dimensions, at last – I anticipated every timpani blow, every brass fanfare, as though I had written the piece myself but only held it in my imagination until now. (In fact, I note that Maestro Botstein played the original version of the piece, re-inserting about a dozen measures that Harris had excised after the premiere. I thought that was a permanent change, and am surprised you can get orchestral parts of the old version.)

Unfortunately, I live in the Hudson Valley, which, aside from Boston and Uptown Manhattam itself, is the world capital of Uptown musicians, who worship only music of a prestigious European pedigree, and consider woefully deficient any music that isn’t at every moment entertaining them by audibly heading toward some obvious goal. And so, predictably enough, though in my Harris-induced daze I failed to brace for it, a famous musician accosted me as I was leaving the hall, assuming because I am intelligent enough to be teaching college that my tastes must inevitably mirror his, and bellowed, “GAAAAAWWWD, what a BOOOORRRRING piece, he should have cut half of it, especially that TERRIBLE middle section!”

I have spent my life trying to convince people that there are many different ways to enjoy music, and that there is a tremendous wealth of new music to enjoy. And the response I characteristically get, especially from “educated” musicians – which suggests that education is a process of drastically curtailing one’s capacity for enjoyment – is, no, no, no, I’m wrong, great music is dead, music can only be listened to one way, there’s no great music anymore, and I should just give up. My refusal to acquiesce in this has given me a certain reputation for negativity.

This is from one of the program notes I wrote for the current Bard festival, “Aaron Copland and his World”:

Some of the musical intelligentsia decried Copland’s return to tonality, but one of the remarkable things about Billy the Kid is how well it integrates his technical achievements of the 1920s. Bitonality is rampant: Scene 2, “Street in a Frontier Town,” plays off the cowboy tune “Great Grandad” in A-flat major against “Whoopie Ti Yi Yo” in F major; and then plays the latter in major and minor at once, with some clashes reminiscent of the Piano Variations. Rhythmic ingenuity in the “Mexican Dance” and the treatment of “Goodbye Old Paint” is the more audible for being drawn out at greater length than in the early works. As Larry Starr has aptly written, “not only is this ballet score as sterling an illustration of Copland’s basic methods as either the Piano Variations or Music for the Theatre; it also reveals these methods at a stage of greater maturity and refinement.”

All serious musical intellectuals, a company from which I have become happy to exclude myself, consider Copland’s Piano Variations the top-shelf evidence of his modernist bonafides. I’m sure I have once again alienated myself from the rest of musical academia by going public with the fact that I consider Billy the Kid a better piece – but after careful examination of both scores over many years, I do believe that Billy the Kid is the better-written work.

Charles Ives wrote, “Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.” Today we need an addendum: “Profundity in music is too often confused with something that forces the ears to lie on a bed of nails.”

From recordings, I’ve known and loved Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land for over thirty years, but I had never seen a production of it until last night at Bard’s Summerscape Festival. It’s true the piece is a little more stage-awkward than I’d imagined: some of the lyrics are more pictorial than dramatic, and the first love scene between Laurie and Martin takes place at an otherwise racuous party, which must be imagined silently continuing in the background. (Staging also failed to clarify Top’s peculiar second-act story, which scandalizes Laurie’s mother, and which must have some underlying denotation I can’t discern – please explain for me if you “get” it.)

Nevertheless, the piece is far tauter and more cogent than Blitzstein’s Regina, and I find myself more than ever baffled by its continuing negative reputation. The score is gorgeous, deftly woven together in a web of both background and foreground motives, and the emotional emphases are in all the right places. As a mere love story it would be unconvincing, but Laurie’s line when she leaves home to look for Martin – “I don’t leave for that alone, maybe I don’t leave for that at all” (which soprano Anne Jennifer Nash unfortunately rushed through in an otherwise stirring performance) – elevates it to a more potent American archetype, the young person stifled by a narrow upbringing. It’s a lovely yet fearlessly unsentimental picture of Depression-era rural America – a lyrical one full of stock characters, though, not realist as this production tried to make it. After seeing it at last, The Tender Land remains probably my second favorite conventional opera ever (leaving aside Robert Ashley for a moment), after The Mother of Us All. And yet the musical intelligentsia came out shaking their heads and clucking their tongues about how poor Copland “couldn’t write an opera.” More evidence, if more were needed, that I hear things upside-down from the rest of the world.

I’ve seen Marc Blitzstein’s opera Regina staged in its entirety. Not many people living today can say that; the number will swell another thousand or two by week’s end, as the work continues to run at Bard’s Summerscape Festival. Far be it from me to review a work presented by an institution which keeps me on its payroll, but it is worth reporting something about so rarely performed an opera. We have so many operas that possess some underground reputation, but that are performed less often than once per generation, due to presumed flaws whose severity we rarely come into a position to gauge. American music is rich in these known-of but unheard works: Antheil’s Transatlantic and Helen Retires, Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe and Carrie Nation, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Bernard Hermann’s Wuthering Heights, and on and on. Probably they are all unstageworthy to varying extents; but how few people are in a position to confirm this! – and meanwhile it sometimes seems like the bulk of our American operatic heritage is packed away in mothballs.

So, let it be reported that, yes, Blitzstein’s Regina is a deeply flawed work. It is vastly overambitious – the plot, based on Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes, is a complex one that revolves around money (a less stageable theme than love or murder), and the dialogue is necessarily wordy. It is to Blitzstein’s credit that he did as well as he did. Much of the libretto is spoken over the music, and with one exception (the final climax, unfortunately) the transitions between speaking and singing seem natural and motivated. The strangest flaw, though, is that the music for the second and third acts is noticeably more memorable than for the first, as though, after finishing Act I, the composer, gripped by a twinge of conscience, suddenly said, “Uh-oh, I’d better put in some tunes.” The tunes would have served him better in the first act than where they are; the loveliest music – self-consciously lovely, written to be lovely and sweet and Coplandy – comes at the beginning of Act 3, where it dissipates the dramatic tension built up at the end of Act 2.

Other failings may be charged to the historical period rather than the composer. The middle of Act 2 is a sort of minstrel-show “jazz” number somewhat akin to those obligatory but embarrassing scenes in every Marx Brothers movie in which Harpo plays to an appreciative crowd comprising some condescendingly depicted minority group. I’m sure Blitzstein, good Communist that he was, thought he was being extremely liberal here; today, the effect is almost the reverse. Director Peter Schneider dealt with this issue well by including the African-American musicians as onlookers in the background throughout the work, rendering the racial issue both better integrated and less politically charged.

Beyond that, there is the matter of Blitzstein’s lack of a really personal style. Regina was in that kind of late-Antheil, mild-Shostakovichy idiom that mid-century Americans were trapped into who were too populist in their sympathies to follow the atonal line, and too progressive in their aesthetics to fall back on romanticism. It was a hard spot to be in. (The difficulty of fusing leftist politics with progressive ideas about art continues to torture many of us to this day, but there are a few more alternatives since minimalism came along.) Blitzstein’s jazz passages were credible, and, if anything, so true to the vernacular that one noticed their limitations as notated music all the more. His kind of cleverness in style-mimicking and lack of a personal aesthetic agenda were assets in writing a populist musical like The Cradle Will Rock – still one of the great achievements of the American theater, a piece that ought to be revived somewhere in this country at least once a year. In the high art world of stage opera, though, Blitzstein’s impressive cleverness was writ large indeed – if only cleverness were enough to sustain three acts of intensely sung emotion.

But I’m glad to be in a position to say that, and I appreciate that my boss, conductor Leon Botstein, had the bull-headed tenacity to put the whole thing up there for us, warts and all. The stage design by my art department colleague Judy Pfaff, with glass doors of different shapes and an ethereal spiral staircase, was lovely, and imparted delicacy to a work that badly needed some delicate touches. Lighting by Kevin Adams was dramatic and quickly changing, which actually helped give the piece some structure where the music lacked it. Lauren Flanagan sang the title role well, and the piece was well cast. That’s fortunate, because Blitzstein was a little too scrupulous about making sure that every character got a big aria to him- or herself. In short, I can’t imagine how any better argument on Regina‘s behalf could be made than was made here, and the bulk of the deficiencies must be laid at Blitzstein’s door. It was reasonably entertaining, extremely informative evening, and now I won’t spend the rest of my life wondering how unjust the neglect of Regina is. Now if someone would perform that service for me vis-a-vis Transatlantic.

Italian electronic composer Walter Cianciusi (q.v.) has made available an engine he’s designed for playing La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations – 23 of them so far, ranging from his early Composition 1960 No. 7 to The Prime Time Twins… from the current MELA Foundation Dream House. Download Cianciusi’s Dream House package here, and it installs Max/MSP on your computer if you didn’t already have it. Then you select an installation you want to hear, type in an appropriate base frequency and hit return so you can hear it, and press “Start.” (For the late, complex installations, the base frequency should be 7.5 cps; for the others, something more in the 100-250 range, depending.) Of course, to get anything resembling the real installations, you’d then have to run this through a big sound system with superb frequency response. If you have that available, though, this offers the chance, I guess, to live with these intervals experimentally as La Monte has long done, and maybe – with pristine enough sonic conditions – to experience these fascinating mathematico-minimalist works without traveling to New York City.

My office speakers aren’t nearly sophisticated enough to render the more complex installations with any realism, but I’m getting a kick out of the simpler ones. How can you tell whether you’re getting it? The volume level should be basically steady, without a pronounced regular crescendo/decrescendo beat, and you should be able to refocus your ears on different pitches by moving your head slightly. Kids, try this at home!

If I were to ask you which composer from history seemed to embody emotional uncertainty in his music, what names would spring to mind? Mahler, maybe? Bartok? Dallapiccola?

I was initially heartened by Nicholas Kenyon’s article in the Times demythologizing Mozart. Not that I have anything against Mozart – quite the contrary. In fact, I’ve long been interested in saving the guy from his father’s slanderous picture of him as an eternal idiot child, someone who wrote heavenly music without effort. Mozart HATED that image of himself. Leopold Mozart created it as a way of controlling him, and it gained ground because Leopold’s letters happened to get published just after Mozart died, when Europe was suddenly interested and trying to get a grasp of who this Mozart fellow was. Kenyon provides several humanizing correctives:

Not until Wolfgang Plath studied the handwriting in the autograph scores did we realize quite how much of the early works was written down (or edited? or half-composed?) by Mozart’s father, Leopold. Much is made of Mozart’s admission to the famous Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna when he was 14, but the documents that survive show that his entrance composition was heavily corrected.

Mozart himself claimed that his music arose not by divine inspiration, but through hard work and study. Kenyon further claims that Mozart was not as good a composer at 15 as Mendelssohn would later be, and he’s right: I have yet to find any music Wolfgang wrote before age 19 that I felt I needed to hear again. The Mozart myth, I’ve always felt, was 1. a condescending image created by his father, and 2. a distant, divine image intended to make all future composers feel inferior, and to reinforce a public feeling that musical genius is something distant and fated, not something we should ever expect to meet up with on a daily basis.

But ultimately even Kenyon can’t resist perpetuating the myth. He ends his article:

[A]s we approach the next anniversary period, 2006 to 2041, there is no sign that Mozart has lost his relevance among composers. He still matches with uncanny precision the temper of our troubled times: our emotional uncertainty, our ability to perceive serenity fleetingly but never to attain it.

Does this sound right to you? Is there something about living in the age of iPods, terrorism, and corporate dictatorship that makes Mozart now more relevant than ever? Does Don Giovanni embody a cautionary tale that young people of the 21st century need to hear? Does The Magic Flute provide insight into Republican deceptiveness? Does Mozart’s music contain anything that we, today, would understand as emotional uncertainty, the troubled temper of our times, or the fleeting quality of serenity? Or do our classical mavens just feel an overwhelming need to reinforce the status quo, by recentering our musical life on a distant figure with whose music we have pretty much lost any capacity for real intellectual and emotional engagement? Isn’t the real significance of Mozart’s music today that his is the easiest for the classical music industry to turn into a commodity and sell?

A question came up at Sequenza 21 recently as to whether a composer should respond to a negative review. I know the answer to this one. My playing both sides of the game for 22 years has given me some insight into how to treat critics – as a critic myself I’ve had some blundering composers alienate me for years, and others charm the pants off me (only metaphorically speaking, of course). And as a composer, I’ve responded to many a review, with such surgical expertise as to never occasion (so far as I know) any negative consequences. It strikes me that composers may benefit from knowing the rules. (I’ll refer to the critic as “him” rather than “him or her,” because they’re always men anyway, right?)

1. Never insult a critic, go ad hominem, or counter his negative opinion with any negative emotionality of your own. Be clear, neutral, objective, factual, professional. He knows he’s pissed you off – if you can avoid showing it, he’ll be impressed. If you can’t, he’ll be reluctant to review you again, or, worse, come gunning for you. There’s only one exception to this rule, given below.

2. If he’s made an error of fact, correct it, cleanly and without rancor or condescension. Condescension is unnecessary when you’ve got the poor guy by the balls. Factual errors are critics’ Achilles’ heels. Critics don’t really consider themselves reporters, but they work in the same milieu as reporters, and the comparison is unavoidable. There is a spurious but compelling assumption abroad that a critic who can’t be trusted for his facts can’t be trusted for his opinions either; no logical reason why this should be true, but it remains the soft underbelly of the critic’s self-esteem. In many publications, he’ll have to issue a correction, which makes him and the paper look bad. Misstatements in negative reviews, unless they are totally trivial, should always be corrected – it keeps the critic on his toes and makes him as humble as he’s capable of being.

3. If you’re a living composer and the critic is not Kyle Gann, chances are 9 out of 10 that he doesn’t understand what you’re doing in your music. This in itself can be interesting; you’re doing more in your music than you realize, and the insights from offbeat perspectives can be illuminating. But if you get negatively reviewed because he thought you were doing something different than you were, which happens a lot, treat this as a factual error. In analytical terms worthy of an encyclopedia article, explain to him what it was that interested you in the music, what you were trying to achieve – you might even concede that he was right about what the music failed to do, since it’s not what you were trying to do. In the short term, this will produce no effect, and the critic will cling to a right to his own subjectivity; but it is not impossible to bully (gently) a critic into some modicum of self-doubt that he maybe he really doesn’t understand your kind of music.

3a. In endemic cases of this kind, one might write to the editor instead, informing him in objective, unemotional terms that the critic who’s covering your kind of music really doesn’t have any expertise in the genre, and wouldn’t it be better to hire some other critic for that beat – someone like, say, Kyle Gann? In this case I wouldn’t write the critic as well, because you’re trying to push him out of part of his job, and he’ll feel betrayed when he finds out.

4. If the critic’s opinion is completely subjective and boils down to an indisputable matter of taste, there’s no point in arguing. Instead, send the critic a note thanking him for attending, for choosing your concert to review (if he had that option), for taking your music seriously enough to wrangle with, and/or for getting something about your work out to the public. Feign a belief that all publicity is good publicity, and that you and he are two fellow professionals ultimately involved in the same task. You won’t believe how effective this can be. Some of the most negative reviews I’ve ever written were of operas by Philip Glass – yet whenever he sees me, Phil has always been friendly, affable, and talkative, though dropping the occasional hint to let me know he read those reviews. This baffles the critic; he starts to suspect (as I always did with Phil) that you’re such an important composer that noticing negative reviews would be beneath you, since you get so many positive ones elsewhere; most importantly, he will be unafraid to review you again, and to do so honestly; and he might even subconsciously start wanting to like your music because he’s unable to dislike you.

5. The exception to number 1: If a critic hates new music but constantly writes about it anyway just out of malicious glee, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that you or anyone else is ever going to get a good review out of him, and it would make you feel better to tell him what an ignorant, lowlife, tone-deaf son-of-a-bitch he is, go ahead and do so. (Clearly, I’m thinking of Donal Henahan at the Times in the 1980s.) Get as many cosigners as possible.

Why respond? Because more communication is always better than less, and for the critic’s own good. A critic who never gets responded to paradoxically starts to think both that, 1. no one’s reading him anyway, and so he doesn’t have to worry about the consequences of his words, and 2. he’s the isolated high-and-mighty authority whose word no one would dare question. I got responded to a lot in my early years at the Village Voice, and it made me sort through my musical convictions with a fine-tooth comb, and express them with razor-edged precision. Not a bad thing.

As for responding to a positive review, a note of thanks is not called for nor, precisely, even appropriate – but it is never resented. Same goes for cash and sexual favors.

In Salon there’s a chilling report of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in the form of Suzy Hansen’s review of Jean Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season. It details how the Hutus became inured, over a three-month period, to getting up every day and hacking to death their neighbors, the Tutsis, without qualms and without remorse, just because they were Tutsis.

And then I read Karl Rove’s answer when someone asked him why he so ruthlessly set out to destroy and discredit Joseph Wilson: “Because he’s a Democrat.”

Thanks to Lawrence for this wonderful quote from Eric Hoffer (1902-1983):

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process
of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo’s
definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the
creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which
complicates and confuses a pattern.

Think of it as you’re listening to Brian Ferneyhough’s new opera at Lincoln Center this week.

In response to my new CD Nude Rolling Down an Escalator the questions have started pouring in about the Disklavier, some of them the same questions that Conlon Nancarrow spent his late life fielding about the player piano. Let me see if I can head some of them off at the pass.

I love the pieces, too bad the Disklavier sounds so electronic. Couldn’t you have used some really good piano samples? Actually, the Disklavier is a regular acoustic piano. Those are physical, metal piano strings being struck by felt hammers, just like any other piano. I can reach in and pluck the strings if I want. It’s exactly like an old-fashioned player piano, simply played by MIDI commands rather than by a paper roll with holes in it. If you think it sounds electronic, your false conception of what a Disklavier is may be misleading your perception.

The one odd thing about my Disklavier is its tuning: I keep it in an 18th-century well temperament, Thomas Young’s well temperament of 1799 (nearly identical to what’s called Velotti-Young on some synthesizers – you can read about the scale here). It’s a more subtly different tuning, to our ears, than something like Werckmeister III that Bach used; the greatest deviation from modern equal temperament is only 6 cents (6/100ths of a half-step). It is not a “microtonal” tuning, as some have thought, because there are only 12 pitches to the octave, all about a half-step apart. Nevertheless, while it’s difficult to notice the well temperament in any particular passage (though one reviewer’s sharp ears caught it in Folk Dance for Henry Cowell and Tango da Chiesa), it does create a slight but pervasive difference of timbre over the whole keyboard. Intervals that are purer, and lack the buzzy inharmonicity of the modern piano, are often perceived as unpianolike, and a little bell-like or electronic. I’ve had this perception myself with La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. If you think the piano sounds a little electronic, it might be that you’re not used to the temperament. I recently had my grand piano at home worked on, and it came back in equal temperament; I couldn’t stand the sound, which was buzzy and harsh and undifferentiated, and which everyone else is perfectly accustomed to. I was so relieved when my piano tuner came over and restored the 18th-century temperament.

[UPDATE: Composer Lawrence Dillon credits the electronic illusion to “an aural illusion caused by fast torrents of notes that I intuitively knew couldn’t be contained in 10 fingers — my brain… solved the riddle by hearing an artificial tint to the timbre.” I have to admit, there’s a moment at the end of Bud Ran Back Out that sounds electronic even to me. Perhaps instead of worrying about that I should cultivate it.]

The tempos sound so mechanical – shouldn’t you have randomized the attacks to make it sound more like a human is playing it? Actually, I randomized the attacks in every piece. Almost nothing on the CD is metronomically pure. Again, if you know you’re listening to a machine, you may be predisposed to hear it as mechanical. However, in writing music of different tempos, there’s a limit to how much rubato one can allow, and it is a much narrower range than is common in live performance. (This is a question that came up constantly regarding Nancarrow’s player-piano music, and my feeling about it is the same as his.)

Jonathan Kramer, in his book The Time of Music, reported that studies that analyzed performers playing conventional music showed that even the most accurate performer will frequently show variation in the durations of consecutive 8th-notes or quarter-notes of as much as 15 percent. One study showed that professional violinists played a 3/4 rhythm of alternating half- and quarter-notes at a ratio averaging 1.75:1. Now, for the kinds of tempo contrasts I use, and that Nancarrow used for the latter half of his output (up to 60:61), a 15-percent tempo deviation would be fatal to the subtle differences between lines. Take one of the simplest examples, my Texarkana. The tempo contrast throughout is 29 in the treble line against 13 in the bass line. The joke of the piece is that the melody, being indefinably just more than twice as fast as the bass, sounds out of control. 26 against 13 would be a pedestrian 2:1, something any human pianist could do. Yet a 26-tempo is only an 11-percent deviation from the 29-tempo, well within the range of typical human tempo deviation. For the 29:13 tempo contrast to mean anything, the random attack humanization needs to be kept well under 10 percent.

What Conlon always said was that, in Romantic music, performers had to add rubato and tempo deviations to enliven the music because it was inherently rhythmically uninteresting. In his own music, he felt, the rhythmic interest inhered in the subtle complexity of close-but-not-identical simultaneous tempos, and therefore no further “enlivening” was needed – and, in fact, would obviate perception of the tempo relationships he was trying to capture. I agree. To gain the new rhythmic liveliness of simultaneous tempos, we have to sacrifice some of the old rhythmic liveliness of rubato. Imagine if player pianos had always been around, but people had only recently learned to play piano by hand: someone would be complaining that we lost the old rhythmic liveliness of multitempo, for which pianists were fractically trying to compensate by applying rubato.

Performers have begun arranging Nancarrow’s player-piano studies for live ensembles. Don’t you really hope someone will do that for your pieces someday? Number one, just about the only Nancarrow studies that have been performed live are those with fairly simple tempo ratios, like 3:4:5. No one has yet arranged (or at least performed) Study No. 33 with its ratio of 2 against the square root of 2, or No. 40 with its ratio of e-against-pi. Similarly, I doubt that an ensemble could play the 29-against-13 of Texarkana, or the 5:7:9:11:13:15:17 of Unquiet Night. If someone wants to try, that’s fine with me – but it sure seems like a lot of wasted effort. Personally, I find both the player piano and the Disklavier tremendous fun to watch, whereas I don’t really see much entertainment in watching most live pianists.

The thing is, if you presuppose that the raison d’etre of a Disklavier is that it can do anything a pianist can do and more, I guarantee you’ll be disappointed. I’ll go further than that: if you expect ANY new music to provide all the same pleasures as the music you already love, I promise YOU WILL BE DISAPPOINTED. The question with new music is always, Does it provide sufficiently plentiful and rich new pleasures to compensate for the old pleasures that have been lost? A human pianist is an amazing phenomenon, and the Disklavier is no substitute for one; nor is a living pianist a substitute for a Disklavier. Each can do things the other one can’t. The fact that the sounds are the same may create an unfortunate expectation, one that’s never bothered me, but it may bother you. In some of my Disklavier pieces (especially Texarkana and Despotic Waltz) I take great fun in mimicking the conventions of live piano playing with the Disklavier, and, to me, it’s funny because they’re so not the same. I’ve written a lot of piano music for live performers, and I compose very differently for pianist than I do for Disklavier. To me, they’re different instruments. You may be one of those people for whom the Disklavier can only remind you of a deficient live pianist. If so, there are a couple thousand recordings of live pianists I can recommend.

Some of us composers feel that in order for music to progress, we need access to rhythms and tunings and timbres and structures that humans can’t play. Something will be gained by achieving them, but something else will be lost. I guarantee it. You’re either interested in the search for new musical pleasures or you’re not.

Why don’t you refer to it as the Yamaha Disklavier, since it’s made by Yamaha? Because I tried to get Yamaha interested in putting some money or publicity into the project and they turned me down. Why should I supply them with any more free publicity than I have to?

I needn’t have called them Disklavier Studies, after all, because they can also be played on a Pianodisc system. The Pianodisc system can be installed on a regular grand piano (a Steinway or Bösendorfer, for instance), and runs just like a Disklavier – with the additional advantage that Pianodisc, unlike Disklavier, can be run from a floppy disc containing straight MIDI files. Yamaha’s Disklavier ain’t the only game in town.

A quotation I ran across from Virgil Thomson’s The State of Music:

When we made music that was simple, melodic, and harmonious, the fury of the vested interests of modernism flared up like a gas tank…. I am considered a graceless whelp, a frivolous mountebank, an unfair competitor, and a dangerous character.