Bridge Records has just released a recording – the first full recording – of the Fourth Symphony, “Arcadian,” by 19th-century American composer George Bristow. This recording would never have happened without me, but you’d never know that from the CD itself.

In college I studied with Delmer Rogers, who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on Bristow (1825-1898). He introduced me to the “Arcadian,” and I kept the piece in the back of my mind for decades. In 2020, in preparation for teaching a course on American symphonies, I photographed Bristow’s messy manuscript of the Arcadian at the NYPL, and began preparing a publishable edition. I mentioned it to Leon Botstein, my boss and a conductor, who took an interest in performing the piece, and subsequently recording it. I spent five or six months inputting the symphony into notation software from Bristow’s sometimes difficult-to-read manuscript, extracting the orchestra parts, double- and triple-checking everything against the original score, and then sat in on rehearsals to listen for mistakes. (Of course, I received not a cent for any of this, so Bridge is making money off my unrecompensed, now uncredited work.) Consequently, Maestro Botstein and The Orchestra Now were able to present the first performance of the piece in decades, at Bard College and at Carnegie Hall, and then record the piece for Bridge Records.

Naturally, I was asked to write the liner notes. Along with them, as usual, I submitted a brief bio, including the fact that I had prepared the edition of the symphony that made this recording possible. The Orchestra Now, in their submissions, also included a statement that this performance was based on a new performance edition by professor Kyle Gann. But for some reason the Bridge Records people didn’t want to give me credit. They nixed the paragraph from the orchestra, and, even more inexplicably, rejected the bio I had sent them and substituted another one from my web site. And so on the published compact disc I am credited only as the author of the liner notes – on a CD that wouldn’t have existed had I not devoted half a year to the mammoth job of making it possible.

Why did the people at Bridge not want me to receive credit? Old grudge? Disliked me as a critic? (In twenty-five years as a critic you make more enemies than you’re aware of.) Ungenerous and unprofessional, to say the least. The score to the Arcadian Symphony will be published soon by AR Editions, on which publication I will be listed as co-editor (with Bristow scholar Katherine Preston). So I can document that I did the work to bring this fine symphony back from the grave and into the repertoire, despite the people at Bridge not wanting you to know I did it.

My good friend the philosopher Richard Fleming has written a wonderful, long essay called “Want of Sense” – or, alternatively, “homerjoycecage” – and I return to the blog after a long absence to draw some attention to it. In it, he draws an epic historical thread from the Iliad and the Odyssey to Joyce’s complex use of them in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and further to John Cage’s use of Joyce in Muoyce and Roaratorio. It’s a wonderful celebration of how language can accrue layers and layers of meaning as words are fused together to allow a multiplicity of references. As always, Richard makes me hear Cage differently, and makes him seem like a glorious next step in a centuries-long process. You can read it here.

At Robert Carl’s urging I finally read Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo. He told me it was a lifelike novel about a composer, but it’s more than that: I think just to understand the novel you’d have to be a composer, or at least an inveterate new-music fan, because the contemporary music references fly thick and fast. One whole long scene takes place within a played recording of Steve Reich’s Proverb. The protagonist, Richard Els, is a composition professor who studied at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, and actual people I knew like Ben Johnston, Sal Martirano, and James Tenney make cameos as characters. Cage is quoted frequently. I don’t want to review the book, except to say that it is indeed a gripping read. But I do want to quote two passages that show how elegantly Powers limns the trajectory of a composer’s life within the vicissitudes of aesthetic fashion. The first is a scene from Els’s early college period:

In the sixth week of his twentieth century formal analysis class, he arrived breathless over the previous night’s performance of Barber’s Hermit Songs. The class hooted. A stunned Els appealed to the professor.

It’s a great piece, don’t you think?

The man stifled his amusement and looked around for the hidden camera. Sure, if you still dig beauty.

Els sat through the session humiliated. He raged against the man at the grad student Murphy’s happy hour, but no one backed him up. When he checked out a recording of Hermit Songs from the music library the following week, he found them banal and predictable.

He’d learn the truth from Thomas Mann later that semester: Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste. [pp. 90-91]

Later in the book, several decades later in Els’s life, he’s giving a composition lesson to a precocious student named Jennifer, a lesson described so realistically in its details that I felt like Powers had been watching secret videos of lessons I’ve given:

Jen’s duet swings upward into a sequence of stunning chords before settling into a cantabile. Then the cantabile broadens. He once put something similar into an ancient octet – the apprentice piece that won him the chance to work with Matthew Mattison. Back then he still clung to the vestiges of Neo-Romanticism. Now Neo-Romanticism, unkillable vampire, is back with a vengeance. His student outpouring was reactionary, anachronistic; Jen’s is hip and current. Other than that, the gestures are much the same. [p. 316]

Sure-fire Christmas gift for the composer in your life.

 

I actually dreamed this morning that Obama’s secret drone program was really a minimalist sound installation, a kind of soft Phill Niblock piece coming from concealed loudspeakers.

Liturgy, the band my son plays in, received an interesting review in the Times today.

I’m figuring out how to manage the Society for Minimalist Music web page. It’s now got information for applying to the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, which takes place in Kansas City September 2-6, 2009, as well as the specifics of the one-day conference at Goldsmiths coming up in London this September 13. Sorry information heretofore has been so… minimal.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sorry for being remiss lately in my role as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of classical music – it’s been more than a week since I’ve said anything my followers need distance themselves from – but I’ve been preoccupied with something peculiar. One of the things that has surprised me most in the last seven years is what a nurturing presence my early music has for me. I seem to go through a pattern. Of course, like most composers, I am dazzled by the brilliance of anything I’ve written in the last six months. Then after a piece becomes a year or two old, I begin to devalue it, and become more aware of what it doesn’t achieve than what it does. It starts to dissatisfy, embarrass me. Some pieces much more than others, of course. 

But I’m finding that pieces twenty years old or more suddenly become quite fascinating. Many pieces from the early 1980s that I had left off my official “works” list are quietly reappearing. It’s not that they’re great pieces, nor that I want them waved in the public eye again. I don’t even want to mention examples, for fear you’ll inquire or go listen to them, and be justly unimpressed. But many of them express, amid their faults, one perfect idea that I had forgotten about, some trick that I had worked up just for that piece and never used again, which today feels like it was written by someone else. In recent years I’ve based new works on pieces I wrote in grad school. In stealing those tricks back again, I feel like I’m plagiarizing another composer – but of course, the composer is the 25-year-old Kyle Gann, who wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, but was shrewder than he seemed, or than I had been giving him credit for. I keep responding creatively to that pathetic young composer as though he were a major influence on me. I own those ideas – and had forgotten they were mine. And, genius or not, they come back to me with a “certain alienated majesty.”

And so for periods in the last several years I’ve found myself – whether for eventual presentation or merely as therapy, I can’t tell – spending alarming amounts of time renotating, revising, rearranging pieces that I wrote before I went off to seek my fortune at the Village Voice. Some of the electronic ones are embedded in software that no longer opens in Mac OSX, and I’ve gone through a few panic attacks lately that I might not be able to completely reconstruct them. I’ll report on some of the results soon. It seems masturbatory, and I avoid admitting to people that that’s what I’m spending my time doing (except to you guys, of course, because I count on your discretion), but seeing these formal and rhythmic and harmonic ideas I started out with helps me correct my trajectory, and refind the reason I started out on this course in the first place. I speculate that perhaps composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass don’t have this experience, because their music has always built on its original principles more incrementally. I’m more like Nancarrow or Stockhausen or Terry Riley – once I’ve achieved an effect, like Thoreau refusing to make money on his improved pencil, I’m strangely, and perhaps self-defeatingly, reluctant to prove I can do it again. 

And this is why I don’t give a damn what my students’ opinions of their works are, and tell them so. That trio that some junior is so disappointed with and contemptuous of, and doesn’t want to include on his recital – he may well look at it again in 2033 and recognize some spark of genius to which he had, in the meantime, become unfaithful. The trace of his youthful psyche he finds written there might someday change his whole life.

Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on inside. And on and on.

The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage – and his children, and his cities too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still – I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

           – Kurt Vonnegut, “Graduation Address at Bennington College, 1970”

The new minimalism. Dedicated to Alex Ross.