Oaxaca was a blast. It’s in the mountains and doesn’t get hot, and in the tropics so it doesn’t get cold. The peso is really low at the moment, so we felt like we could buy anything that caught our fancy. The worst meal we had was better than the Mexican food we get at home, and that includes the ones we scarfed down at Mexico City airport. At the best restaurant in town (so we were told), Los Danzantes, we had mezcal margaritas and wine, fantastic mole entrees, and as appetizer I had one of my favorite foods, octopus – not rings of calamari, but a big slab of pulpo with ancho chile sauce. We ate and drank like there was no tomorrow, and the bill for two was $855 – that’s pesos, about 50 American dollars at today’s exchange rates. Other scrumptious meals didn’t even cost us twenty bucks. Waiters were relieved that we gringos could take it as spicy as they could dish it out.

Protovecka, an arts advocacy organization run by Juan Alaya that’s only been around for a couple of years, had invited me and about a dozen other art, film, and music critics for a specifically non-academic conference trying to make connections among the arts. Protovecka and its staff reside in Mexico City, but they kindly decided that the participants would have more fun in Oaxaca. The accommodations were generous, the events well organized, and the refurbished convent in which the latter took place quite lovely. Here are Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, music critic and moderator José Wolffer (who knows everything about new music and with whom I had a great time), music critic and prolific author Paul Griffiths, and film critic Richard Pena, colloquy-ing on Sunday’s panel, with expert simultaneous translation for the various languages:

That foregrounded black rectangle is actually a fountain, a thin film of water over a black marble surface, creating a nicely asymmetrical open space in front of one side of the stage. In the U.S., there would have been yellow cones warning people of the danger of stepping on it, but Mexico seems more civilized than that; people are treated like adults.

It’s difficult bringing the arts together these days, and the problems were as I expected, though I applaud the effort. Film is so much part of everyone’s cultural life that the film critics get to live in the real world, even if they endlessly wish that the general public shared their rarefied tastes. The visual arts seem isolated in a self-ratifying loop in which artists, curators, critics, and rich collectors speak a language full of familiar words used in a way that the rest of us hardly comprehend. And the music critics, Paul, José, and myself, share a jaundiced view of how irrelevant (post)classical music has become to the rest of the culture. We struggled gamely to speak the same language (metaphorically) for a few days, and enjoyed each other’s company even when we failed. I was one of only two or three Americans, and it was viscerally comforting to spend a few days conversing with professionals from Mexico, France, Italy, and England, who seem free of the defeatism and pessimism that pervades the U.S. worldview these days. I left with a feeling that things will eventually be all right here, too.

And to get the really long view of cultural change, Nancy and I took a cab (24 bucks round trip) out to Monte Albàn, the mountain site of the center where Zapotec civilization flourished strangely from 500 BC to about 850 AD:

As many as 17,000 people lived in this space at some time, which took us an hour and a half to circumnavigate; there were underground tunnels through which priests could run from temple to temple, and an altar for human sacrifices. Certain sites were dotted with carved figures which, when originally discovered by Europeans, were referred to as “the dancers” – Los Danzantes. Turns out they seem to have been portraits of neighboring kings who were castrated and mutilated upon capture:

I guess if the Zapotecs could last here for 1350 years, we Americans can hold on for a few more centuries. Aside from maybe our minimalism conferences where I get to see all my old friends, I can’t think of a cultural event I’ve ever been invited to that I enjoyed more. Next week: Minimalists in Helsinki!

UPDATE: A couple of things. One refreshing difference between this and most of the American conferences I’ve been to lately is that there was almost no mention of critical theory. I didn’t attend every lecture, but only the name Deleuze came up, and only once. There was a lot of talk about Heidegger, whom I’ve read a lot of and took a graduate course in once, and Vattimo mentioned the aesthetician Mikel Dufrenne, whom I read a lot of in college but hadn’t heard of since. So, in terms of intellectual history, I felt rather at home. And it made me wonder if critical theory is only an American obsession.

Also, I always buy Cuban cigars in Mexico, and in every other country I visit. But in Oaxaca I didn’t see a single cigar store, or even anyone smoking a cigar, and when I asked at the front desk, the bewildered employees couldn’t think of anything, and finally located on a map a kiosk in the zocalo. Well, I wasn’t going to go search out a crummy kiosk for a cigar, so for once I came home without any. I was surprised to find that there are places in Mexico where cigars are virtually unknown.

 

When Pluto splashed into our collective consciousness last month suddenly ready for its closeup, I learned a lot I hadn’t known. For instance, that although the orbits of Pluto and Neptune overlap, they are prevented from colliding by the stable 2-to-3 ratio in their rotations around the sun; Pluto goes around the sun in 247.94 earth years, and Neptune in 164.8, and 247.94/164.8 equals 1.50449…. This kind of mutually influenced periodicity, as it turns out (how was I an astrologer for thirty years without learning this?), is common among pairs, trios, quadruples of planets, moons, asteroids, and so on, and is called orbital resonance. Three of the moons of Jupiter exhibit rotational ratios of 1:2:4, and there’s even an asteroid that has a 5:8 dance going with respect to the earth. This is truly the harmony of the spheres, the surprisingly simple mathematical relations that planets in a rotational system fall into in response to each other’s gravity.

Chalk it up to my personal eccentricities that this suddenly gave me a whole new way to compose. I have an obsession with repeating cycles at different tempos, and it has sometimes been an aesthetic problem for me when the articulation points of those cycles coincide by chance. But the solar system, as it turned out, had been waiting with the solution all along. Inspired by this new knowledge, I realized I could use simpler ratios than I had been attempting (3:4, 5:6:7 instead of 17:19:23), but shift each one a slight amount so that the articulated beats would never coincide. It gave me a new way to create melody from the beats articulated among the different cycles. I immediately started a new piece, and five weeks later here it is, an extended pitch-and-rhythm study for three retuned Disklaviers:

Orbital Resonance (2015), 11:31

This is in what I call my 8×8 tuning, eight harmonic series built on the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, and 15th harmonics of Eb, making 33 pitches in all. This is a complicated way to compose. First I had to write the piece for 17 pianos, one staff each, because I sometimes had 17 different pitch bends at once, and each pitch bend requires its own channel. After finishing the piece I had to figure out a workable retuning for three pianos to accommodate the 33 pitches. Next I had to map all those thousands of notes (sometimes in several different tempos achieved by tuplets) onto a three-piano score of six staves each. So I composed in something that looks like this (and if you can see all the little grayed-out numbers, those are the pitch bends on every note, along with harmonic series numbers so I could keep track):

Then I transferred the notes to my three retuned pianos. The solution I came up with for distributing the pitches came out serendipitously. The harmonic series’ on 1 and 7 are mostly on piano 1, those of 11 on piano 2, and 13 on piano 3; the other harmonic series’ get divided up somewhat, but I use polytonal contrasts of 7, 11, and 13 a lot, so I tried to group those notes. It’s really not a piece for three pianos, but for one piano with 264 keys, but it could (after I’m dead and if someone ever wants to put the money into retuning three Disklavier grands) be played “live” on three pianos. And I like the fortuitous and wildly scattered way the sonorities bounce back and forth, like some whacked-out serialist extravaganza:

I think I can rest assured that no humans will ever attempt to play this. (If you look closely, you could find that, aside from the bass line articulating the 9-rhythm, there are always nine notes in every “simultaneity,”* and that the voice-leading is extremely chromatic; it’s pretty minimalist.) In order to get the kinds of rhythms suggested by the orbital resonance inspiration, I had to offset each cycle by a 32nd-, 64th-, or god help me 128th-note (I almost got used to double-dotted 16th notes) so that no points in the cycles would ever coincide. So it’s a sustained study in a quality of rhythm I’d never used before, and one which better allowed for melodic connections among the cycles. If you follow me. If you’re technically inclined I’ve got program notes that go further into the form, which is more logical than may appear on first hearing.

For years I’ve been trying to write something more elaborate both microtonally and polyrhythmically (and polytonally) than Custer and Sitting Bull (1999), and this is it: Nancarrow fused with Ben Johnston and La Monte Young with a dash of Piano Phase thrown in. (And by the way: this is not spectralist music, which approximates the harmonic series. This music actually employs the harmonic series, as Harry Partch, Ben, and La Monte were doing decades before the spectralists got started. The piece opens with the 65th and 66th harmonics of Eb and closes with the 54th, 55th, and 56th. Neither European 1/8th-tones nor Bostonian 72tet are sufficient for such distinctions.) I’ve got several other pieces for this setup started, and hopefully I’ll finish some of those as well. I’m hoping I might so well internalize the outlay of notes on the three pianos that I can skip the pitch-bend step and reduce the tedious part of the workload. There’s a PDF score on my score page if you’re technically intrigued. And as with Custer, I’ve dedicated the piece to Ben, who in 1984 started me down this incredibly labor-intensive road.

*I am a professor.

 

I figure everyone who’s interested and lives within driving distance of Lewisburg, PA, already knows about this, but Monday evening at 7 I’ll be giving the opening talk at a tribute to the late William Duckworth in the Weis Music Building at Bucknell University, where I taught for a few years in the 1990s. (The linked press release, unless they fix it, misstates my tenure at Bard College: I’ve taught here since 1997, not 2007.) The event is part of the Gallery Series, a series of new-music concerts that Bill founded many, many years ago. He taught at Bucknell from 1973 until the onset of his cancer in 2011. I’ll be playing some excerpts from interviews I did with him soon after he received his diagnosis; I was afraid listening to them so soon would be difficult, but his enthusiasm was contagious and his life history fascinating. In addition to honoring one of the late 20th century’s most elegant composers (in a music building that wasn’t yet built when I taught there), I’ll be seeing a lot of old friends.