In my Village Voice column this week, I review the Sequitur ensemble playing four works, two of which I possess recordings of. And so, in an experiment aimed at making music criticism more accessible and relevant, which I have long wanted to try out, I temporarily post those two works so, having read the article, you may then listen to them if you like:

Eve Beglarian: Creating the World

Bunita Marcus: Adam and Eve

Both pieces are also posted on Postclassic Radio as noted in the article, but rather than tune in and wait several hours for them, you may want to derive more immediate gratification.

In addition, new-music maven and entrepreneur Herb Levy sent some comments in response to my minor dissatisfaction with Sequitur’s sound production. I suspected something like what he says, but he knows more than I do about the technical end:

Reading your article about the Sequitur Ensemble made me think about
what makes bands like those led by Glass & Dresher work & it’s more
than (or really I think, other than) the instrumental doubling you
cite.

Dresher tour
with a sound technician who knows exactly what the composer wants the
ensemble to sound like. Without knowing any of the people involved,
it’s likely that the sound technician for the Sequitur concert was
less experienced with sound reinforcement and/or recording of
instruments that are more often amplified or just didn’t hear the
disparity of the sound sources as presenting a problem.

With bands like Glass’s & Dresher’s, nearly everything you hear,
whether the original source is acoustic or electronic, comes from the
same set of speakers, just as it does in the recording of the
Beglarian piece (or any recording) you’d heard before the concert.
Because the sound all comes from one source, whatever signal
processing and other coloration the sound system may have is applied
to all the instruments, and the ensemble sound is more unified.

In the picture running with the Voice article, it looks like the
acoustic instruments are amplified with overheard boom
microphones. Letting all that air & room sound into the mix instead
of using close miking is going to give the acoustic
instruments a more distant sound than the direct input of the
electric instruments. By enabling the audience to hear the strictly
acoustic sound of the acoustic instrument, as well as the mix of
amplified sounds, the acoustic instruments retain more of their
separate character. The psycho-acoustics of this also include the
fact that the acoustic sounds are perceived as coming from the
specific locations of the actual instruments, rather than through the
sound system.

In the Glass & Dresher ensembles, the acoustic instruments are
more closely miked (sometimes using contact mics or, in Paul’s band
at least, electric versions of some of the instruments) and little if
any of the sound of the acoustic instruments is heard outside of the
speakers, so the sounds blend more easily with those of the wholly
electric instruments.

I appeal to my experienced readers to settle a dispute. I have been told by a couple of artists that the only way to break through the wall of public indifference and get attention in the press is to have a lot of work come out at once. A CD will pass unnoticed; release three CDs in quick proximity and people will suddenly think you’re on a roll, and treat you as important.

Now, it just so happens that I may have the opportunity to put out three CDs in 2005. And one of the record producers just told me exactly the opposite: that if you put out two CDs in quick succession, one of them will compete with the other, and each will only get half the attention it might otherwise have. Both of these opinions have been given to me in the strongest possible terms, with the presumed weight of vast experience behind them. Personally, as a critic I am more likely to pay attention if I suddenly receive three CDs by one artist, because I can write a more in-depth piece – but at the Village Voice I set my own agenda, and I am told that I am so atypical in that regard that I don’t count.

So, for my own sake and to settle a disputed point for us all, which is better? If you have three CDs to make, do you space them one a year for maximum exposure? or do you try to time them to come out all at once?

Composer Lawrence Dillon, who keeps me honest, and who now has his own blog to assist in that interminable quest, notes an ambiguity in my Where are the Philistines? entry. It seemed to him that I was making a sour grapes gripe for certain composers who weren’t getting their fair share of the pie, whereas my intent was to make a more general plea for my own generation, who seem to be the first generation to come of age after the officially defined end of music history.

But I will, to even out the score, make an ameliorating comment about my own generation, which I have long kept under wraps. Namely: I think one of the disadvantages we labor under is that there are so many good composers in my generation, and hardly anyone who consistently stands out above all the rest. The very quantity is too overwhelming for a non-specialist to deal with. When I wrote my book American Music in the Twentieth Century in 1996, I had to choose eight composers, almost arbitrarily, as emblematic of my generation. Nine years later, I would have even a harder time whittling down my choices to that number. And while a lot of my favorite music – music I go around humming, that I listen to for pleasure and without professional compulsion – is by people my own age, I admit that it is specific pieces I’m drawn to more than any particular composer’s sensibility: Mikel Rouse’s Failing Kansas, Elodie Lauten’s Waking in New York, John Luther Adams’ In the White Silence, a bunch of specific David Garland songs, Beth Anderson’s Piano Concerto, Carl Stone’s Shing Kee, Rhys Chatham’s An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, William Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances, John Maguire’s A Capella, Diamanda Galas’s Plague Mass, Janice Giteck’s Om Shanti, Daniel Lentz’s The Crack in the Bell, and on and on and on. Some of these composers are fairly consistent in the quality of their output, others (myself included, I fear) notably not so; every one of them has produced something for which I’d have to apologize and murmur, “Well, not really his best work, you know.” To pick one or two or three of these people and say, “This is the Boulez or Stockhausen of my generation, this is our leading genius,” would be as impossible for me as it is for the public at large. And in America, at least, the way the star system works that has taken over the classical music world, somebody has to be Numero Uno, for if audiences are going to take the trouble to pay for tickets and drive to the concert hall, they want to be assured they are hearing The Very Best. It’s an extremely unfortunate, Philistine, artistically infantile need, but that’s a rant for another day.

What’s confusing is that, to tell you the truth, except for the quantity, I don’t see any difference between my generation and the previous ones. Out of the Darmstadt crowd of the 1950s and ‘60s, I would not have picked out Boulez and Stockhausen as top dogs: I always found Maderna’s music far more beautiful, Pousseur’s and Ferrari’s more interesting. Reich and Glass were not the most fascinating minimalists, just the only ones left standing when the dust cleared. In either repertoire, it’s specific pieces I gravitate toward, not the composer’s entire output. I love Boulez’s Pli selon pli and scorn his Le Marteau, take Koyaanisqatsi very seriously and get bored by Satyagraha, turn my nose up at Reich’s Desert Music though I adore Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. The composer whose every note is sterling is a bird so rare as to possibly not exist; Beethoven wrote some drivel, and there are Bach works I find dreary. If we’re waiting for the composer whose every work is magical, we’re going to wait till global warming has melted our CD collections.

I have often felt that it was one of the great strengths of my generation that our stylistic enterprise is so collective, that we build on each other’s achievements, and have not arbitrarily elevated isolated figures among us to stardom. Unfortunately, it is not a strength that accords well with the American need for celebrity. I suspect what it would take for postclassical music to enter public consciousness would be some sacrificial lamb to get touted as the genius of the age. Every composer would want to be that person, but if it were me, I am scrupulous enough that I would get a guilty twinge every time I heard some gorgeous piece by one of my peers that I wish I had written. How much better if we could short-circuit the star system altogether. Every artist knows, and cites, the reason you can keep crabs in a shallow bucket without them escaping: because if one crab succeeds in getting close to the top, the others will pull him back down. What my generation has been working on, but hasn’t figured out yet, is how to pull together and get everyone out of the bucket all at once.

When I was in high school my best friend Marcus McDaniel was working on an opera about a scientist who generated music from the digits of pi. The crisis in the opera (which sounded to be a very brief work) came when the music came to an unexpected halt, indicating a final digit to this transcendental number. The opera never came to fruition, but a web site just forwarded to me allows you to be that scientist. You can either choose your own pitches to relate to the Arabic numbers, or the program will do it for you.

Marcus also had another opera planned, based on the life of Maurice Chevalier, titled Der Mauricekavalier. The world hasn’t caught up with that one, nor did I ever complete my own contribution to musical punnery, Das Knaben Zauberflöte, though I did eventually write Das Knaben Wunderklavier.

We all know what was wrong with modernist music: it had no melody, it was so dissonant you couldn’t tell whether people were playing the right notes or not, it expressed only anxiety, it was either loud and savage and unpleasant (Stockhausen), or it was dull, gray, too technical, and unmemorable (Babbitt). And so audiences stayed out of the concert hall when it was played, and wrote angry letters to orchestra managements. The music itself is widely taken to justify audiences’ lack of interest in it.

And we all know what was wrong with minimalism: it was trivial, predictable, simple-minded, dumbed down, doodely-doodely and aimless. To this day, mention in educated company that you like something by Philip Glass, and you’re guaranteed at least an involuntary sneer or two. The music is too stupid to merit attention from serious listeners.

So, people: what’s wrong with postclassical music? What’s wrong with the musics of Mary Ellen Childs, John Luther Adams, Walter Zimmermann, Nick Didkovsky, Laetitia Sonami, Bill Duckworth, John Oswald, Janice Giteck? You certainly can’t say that Elodie Lauten’s music lacks melody. You can’t call Michael Maguire’s music simplistic. You can’t say Carman Moore’s music is unpleasant. There’s no denying that Paul Epstein’s music is intricately constructed. You can’t accuse Mikel Rouse of being out of touch with pop culture. You can’t listen to Postclassic Radio and say that every piece expresses only anxiety, or even that they all express the same thing. And yet there must be something wrong with it, because 1. every new music is inevitably met with a chorus of disapproval from those who prefer the old music, and 2. institutions and large audiences ignore this body of music, and when that happens it’s always the music’s fault. Besides, every musical movement truly is one-sided in some way or another, and the criticisms are often just, as far as they go. I always think of Schoenberg’s brilliant comment: “So it is with all great men. At each is leveled every accusation of which the opposite is true. Yes, all, and with such accuracy that one is quite taken aback by it.”

But no one’s leveling accusations at this music. So, let’s put postclassical music on trial, and Postclassic Radio is as good a place to start as any. Why haven’t the Philistines made their pronouncement? One of the ways in which new music works its way into public consciousness is through the negative, disapproving recognition of its new qualities. And on the other hand, if there isn’t anything wrong with postclassical music, then there’s no justification for ignoring it, excluding it from the concert halls and from history, is there?

The following e-mail that I just received from Michael Wittmann, a physicist who has his own radio show at the University of Maine, is not too atypical of responses I get:

This is wonderful…. For the past few days, I’ve spent all day listening to your feed. I haven’t tired of it…. I’ve been seeking this music for years. It touches a place in me the way Mondrian, Frankenthaler, Rothko, Baer, Tufte and Smithson do in art…. This is absolutely incredible to listen to. Piece after piece is in the zone where I drift off at the astonishing beauty of it. Like right now: Bunita Marcus, Adam and Eve. Oh my GOD. I want to capture the audio feed so that I can listen again.

Now you’d think that if I get a totally objective and unsolicited reaction like that every couple of weeks, and I do, that the composers I’m playing, like Dan Becker and Belinda Reynolds and Daniel Lentz and Chas Smith and David Garland, might start to become famous and taken very seriously in the music business. But they don’t, much, and the Philistines must know what’s wrong with this music that it should be ignored. Why won’t they speak?

From Salon.com:

Twenty-seven percent of online adults in the United States said in November they read blogs, compared with 17 percent in a February survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project….

Though blog readership jumped [in 2004], the percentage of online Americans who write blogs grew only slightly – to 7 percent in November, up from 5 percent early in the year. Blog creators tend to be male, affluent, well-educated and young [two out of four ain’t bad, I guess]; 70 percent of them have high-speed connections at home, and 82 percent have been online at least six years [but not blogging for six years, surely?].

Despite the attention to blogging, a large number of Americans remain clueless – only 38 percent of Internet users know what a blog is….

I think we found out November 2 exactly how clueless “a large number of Americans remain.” But what jarred me was the thought that for every million Americans on the Internet, 70,000 of them are writing blogs….

Postminimalist, neoclassicist, meditationist, New Ageist, improviser, jazzer, opera composer, Elodie Lauten is one of the most Protean composers of recent years, with many sides to her personality, but they all sound like her. I think of her a little as the female Terry Riley, though her music is a little more muted in tone, and more recognizably hers regardless of genre than Terry’s sometimes is. In making her January’s composer of the month on Postclassic Radio, I tried to include something from all sides. Two long works I’ve posted in their entirety: her opera The Death of Don Juan from the mid-1980s, and her quasi-oratorio Waking in New York from the late ‘90s, based on poems by her friend Allan Ginsburg (and selected by him for that purpose before he died). The Death of Don Juan epitomizes what I think of as her quintessential mystical style, while Waking in New York has more of a pop sensibility, with singers drawn from Broadway, gospel, and operatic idioms. I’ve always told Elodie that Waking in New York reminds me of Erik Satie’s masterpiece Socrate in its impassive melodies over kaleidoscopically changing harmonies, and I’ve added the first movement of the latter work to the playlist for comparison. (Socrate strikes me as a seminal postclassic work anyway, even if it was written in 1917.)

The overture to Lauten’s brand-new opera Orfreo (that’s not a typo: the subtitle is “The Orphic death of Ray Johnson”) demonstrates how Baroque she can sound when working with classical instruments like harpsichord, as do two lovely excerpts from her large-scale cantata Deus ex Machina. Three movements from her synthesizer improvisation Tronik Involutions show her at her most sparklingly cosmic – New Age, you might dismiss it as, but more richly textured and more harmonically motionless than any New Age music I’ve ever heard. And I’ll continue adding some of the early pieces from which I first knew her work, the early piano pieces and Concerto for Piano with Orchestral Memory. I’ve also put up one movement from Variations on the Orange Cycle played by pianist Lois Svard, a haunting, Riley-ish, reconstructed improvisation, and someday I’ll post the entire piece. It takes at least this much music to demonstrate the tremendous range of Lauten’s universalist imagination.

Other offerings for the new year are all works not commercially available, as far as I know:

Vagina, an intense, 47-minute, multi-lingual monologue for herself and orchestra by the Spanish-German Maria De Alvear;

Strange Attractors for string quartet, drums, and sampler keyboard by Diana Meckley, a classically totalist work from that classically totalist year 1989;

String Quartet No. 1, “In Praise of Poor Scholars,” by Peter Garland, in its sole performance by the Kronos Quartet – sorry about the hiss, I SoundSoaped it as much as I could, and the piece deserves to be heard; and,

Autumn Resonance for piano and two digital delays, an early piece by Wayne Siegel that I discovered working for New Music America, as detailed in my last post.

Siegel is American, born in 1953, but in 20 years I haven’t run across his name again except when I’ve gone explicitly looking for it. He moved long ago to Denmark where he is apparently enjoying a successful local career as an electronic music professor, and his native country has virtually forgotten about him. His music is excellent, though, and I’ll be playing more of it. This early work has obviously minimalist origins, but it’s always been one of my favorite pieces from the early 1980s, and I’ll bet the farm you haven’t heard it. Again, the point here isn’t to sell CDs, but to convince you that a hell of a lot of the best music around never bubbles out into the public sphere – except maybe on Postclassic Radio.

I finished my doctoral courses at Northwestern in spring of 1981. The summer found me lounging around in my apartment, drinking vodka tonics in the afternoon and taking down phone numbers from truck-driving schools and bartending schools, as advertised during Leave It to Beaver reruns. In the middle of this, the phone rang, and my composition teacher Peter Gena asked, “Do you want a job?” Peter had taken on the temporary directorship (with Alene Valkanas) of the New Music America festival, which moved from city to city. It had started in New York in 1979, then moved to San Francisco and Minneapolis, where I first attended it. Now, in Chicago, I would be the festival’s administrative assistant.

That means, if you submitted some music to NMA ‘82, I was the guy who opened your package, catalogued your vinyl records and cassettes, and first listened to them. My job wasn’t to filter stuff out, but I did advocate (without much success) for the music I really liked. Some of the recordings were submitted by composers, some brought by members of the advisory committee. I remember George Lewis brought along cassettes of two guys I’d never heard of: Rhys Chatham and John Zorn. Zorn’s Mauricio Kagelesque game improvisations struck me as old hat, but the Chatham excited me – combining minimalism and rock had never occurred to me. I sat at my desk absorbing the music of my generation: Beth Anderson, David Garland, Wayne Siegel, Carl Stone, Bruce Odlund, Michael Byron, Lois Vierk, Jeffrey Lohn, Peter Garland, Stephen Scott, Glenn Branca. Some of the names (Tom Cameron, Joseph Paul Taylor, Bill Seaman) have since disappeared, and I’ve never heard of them again. Others, once I moved east, eventually became close friends. Some of them have recently released CDs for which I wrote the liner notes. One of them, Bruce Odland, my son recently assisted in a musical production.

The experience didn’t make me a composer, for I had been that since I was 13. The piece of my own that was performed at that NMA festival, in fact, is coming out on a Cold Blue CD in a couple of months. But it was my first immersion in the music of my peers across the country, people who were reacting to the same music I had been consuming in college. I found out whom I stood with and whom against in the great aesthetic battles that would come later. And, looking back from an otherwise indistinguishable New Year’s Eve, it’s astonishing to reflect how much of my future life was forecast in my contact with those cassettes and records in the basement of the Museum of Contemporary Art in October and November of 1981. As PR person for the festival I got to know the superb Chicago jazz critic Neil Tesser, and it was he who helped me get started as a critic myself in the Reader. The rest you know.

Many of those cassettes are in a cabinet a few feet away from me right now. I kept the ones I could, and taped all the ones I couldn’t. I was probably, as administrative assistant, supposed to mail them all back to the composers. I didn’t. But now I’m transferring them onto CD, making mp3s of them, and playing them on Postclassic Radio. Sorry for any inconvenience. I hope, after 23 years, you don’t mind that I held on to them. They’ve meant a lot to me, and I knew someday I’d get a chance to release them back into the world.

This article by Roy Rivenburg in the LA Times suggests that digital technology is gradually making the world quieter, to an extent that makes movie sound effects engineers rethink the way they give audio cues in soundtracks:

Electronic cash registers eliminated the ka-ching of their ancestors; digital cameras erased the traditional shutter-click and advancing-film noises of their predecessors; PowerPoint presentations chased away the clunks and whirs of slide projectors.

The lifespan of sounds seems to be shrinking, Valentino said: “We sent our engineers to Ft. Bragg 25 years ago to record military tanks. All those sounds are now totally historical.”

So are old pinball machines, car horns and pull-chain toilet flushes. Even the scratch of chalk on a blackboard is being exiled by the squeak of markers on dry-erase boards….

Right now, sounds such as creaking doors help create drama on the screen, he said. But the day is coming when door technology, which hasn’t changed in centuries, will switch to an airtight, silent mechanism like something out of “Star Trek,” he said….

It’s happening with shoes. Although the clip-clop of leather soles against sidewalks is still a movie staple, in real life the sound of walking has largely been anesthetized by rubber soles.

To a musician, this sounds delightful. There’s a wonderful little book no longer in print (naturally), The Third Ear by German jazz entrepreneur Joachim-Ernst Berendt, that I used to use in teaching, all about how we relate through the world through hearing. He wrote that the technology exists to create silent vacuum cleaners and even silent motorcycles, but that people doubted that silent vacuum cleaners were really picking up dirt, while motorcycle riders didn’t get the feeling of power they wanted from silent engines. (Yeah, power to impose their own brand of noise on an entire neighborhood.) I hate the unnecessarily shrill beep that ATMs make to alert you that your card is coming out, and I could eagerly look forward to the day when all of our appliances are silent, and the foreground of our audio life is occupied primarily by… music.

Merry Christmas: I updated my Postclassic Radio playlist on Christmas Eve – strikes me as kind of a festive activity – for the first time in awhile. Putting new pieces on the station is a cinch, but keeping the playlist current turns out to be the tedious part. I’m streamlining the process to make it easier.

Anyway, I recently got access to an old box of cassette tapes that’s been in storage for ten months, and it’s a cornucopia of new music mostly from the 1980s that never got commercially released: works by Todd Levin, Bunita Marcus, Maria De Alvear, Carman Moore, Elodie Lauten, Diana Meckley, and especially a large cache of recordings by Peter Garland. So Postclassic Radio will start the new year with another influx of commercially unavailable recordings. The sole complaint I’ve received about my timing indicated that I’m taking pieces off too quickly, so I’m actually sitting on a gold mine of material and trying to hold back. But to whet your appetite, I’ve just posted two lovely pieces by Bunita Marcus, her 1987 chamber piece Adam and Eve and her charming arrangement of the Beatles’ song Julia, written for Aki Takahashi’s Beatles project and played by her. Enjoy.

And for those who read me on a phone-line modem, unable to access internet radio, my apologies for writing about so little else lately. Happy holidays.

Speaking of music in which nothing happens, I got a superb new NAD amplifier yesterday, and today I gave it what may be one of the supreme stereo system tests: I played Eliane Radigue’s Adnos I. This tape work from the late ’70s by a reclusive French composer of almost mystical reputation (released a couple of years ago on Table of the Elements) is a gorgeous continuum of analogue electronic tones, changing in slow and subtle ways. The texture is extremely rich, with pulsing tones going in and out of tune in the bass and a layer of ringing overtones in the treble, with soft bell-like tones adding a less continuous event-structure. It really demands a lot of one’s stereo system. And because of that, it’s one of the works that I’d love to post to Postclassic Radio and probably never will, because I don’t think the piece’s subtleties would survive the reduction to mp3 and deficiencies of computer playback. There are several such composers that I don’t include, notably Phill Niblock – I don’t think the internet radio medium can yet do them justice. Gorgeous music, but it wouldn’t be represented well.

Meanwhile, there are some other additions I’m pleased with. One is the first disc of La Monte Young’s 1981 performance of The Well-Tuned Piano – if you’ve searched high and low for this recording without success, here’s part of it, and some day I may put up all five hours’ worth. Also a lovely multiple guitar work by a young New York composer I admire named Christian Rober, and a new Golden Research recording of Charlemagne Palestine’s Piano Drone from 1972, one of his most enchanting works. And my own Hovenweep, which was a commission from the St. Luke’s Orchestra chamber series, and an attempt to write a piece that Uptowners would understand, i.e., very expressive with lots of detailed dynamics.

My complaint about people who listen to new music and automatically respond, “I know a rock group sounds just like that!” brought an excellent anecdote from a reader who said that it

reminds me of an exchange I heard while auditing [Fred] Frith’s composition class at Mills; he’d play examples of various music and ask students whether the music was “rock” or “classical.”

He played the beginning of Tony Conrad & Faust’s Outside the Dream Syndicate, (monolithic 2/4 bass & drum stomp). Girl instantly says aloud, “rock.” Frith says “what if I told you that this goes on for another 50 minutes, much like this?” She then instantly said, “Oh well, then it’s classical.”

This echoes a remark I’ve quoted many times. In the 1980s, when new music groups were playing at New York rock clubs while rockers were playing at the Kitchen, postclassical music and rock seemed all mixed up. One night at a bar, Robert Ashley gave me his ironclad definition: “If it’s over five minutes it’s classical, under five minutes it’s pop.” That definition has only come to seem more relevant over the years.

After all, it seems to me that the formal issues of, say, a Beatles song are not particularly different from those of a Schubert song in, say, Die Winterreise. To write a three-minute song that states a single musical idea is a different project from writing a 20-minute piece that goes through a journey of transformation. Each requires a particular talent, and many composers who are very good at one don’t do the other very well; I love Schubert’s piano sonatas and chamber music, but I’d have to say his long forms aren’t quite as flawless as his songs. Much of the classical prejudice against taking rock seriously in the ‘60s was not so much the energy or instrumentation as the habit of placing song-writing on a lower scale of difficulty than larger forms. That prejudice is dying out, and rightly so. But the simple distinction between songs and longer forms may remain, transcending all pop/classical definitions – much as writing short stories requires a different talent than writing novels, or watercolors versus oil paintings, or portraits versus murals, or houses versus skyscrapers. Whether “pop” and “classical” are the appropriate words is another issue. (I have to admit, I felt slightly mendacious referring to Sonic Youth’s Female Mechanic Now on Duty as a pop song – successful or not, it’s kind of an extended work.)

I’ve returned from the dead – the dead of semester-end academia, when one’s life is no longer one’s own. A friend wrote to tell me that my blog fans are near suicide, and while I don’t flatter myself that such is even metaphorically the case, I can take a hint.

The last day of class the students played their compositions (it’s a theory class – harmonic correctness is required, creativity isn’t). Then they, not unreasonably, demanded that I play something of my own. So I complied with the one piece of my own I can play on short notice, No. 1 of my Private Dances, which is kind of a tango. Afterwards, two students swore that my piece sounded exactly like the background music to a scene in some movie they’d watched, and that I should check it out.

Now, that a tango of mine should resemble one in a movie – or every other piano tango in existence to some extent, for that matter – is hardly cause for surprise. However, without needing to watch the movie, I feel pretty secure in my doubts that the tango in the movie did what mine does. Mine is in a kind of verse and chorus format, repeated three times. The first pass through the material is firmly in B major/minor, chromatically nuanced by an occasional F major chord. The second time through it changes to some distant keys but keeps returning to B minor at cadences. The third time it takes off: Ab7, Gb7, E, G7, C#7, A minor. In addition, at the end of each chorus comes a C dominant 7th chord which twice acts as a German 6th back to B, and once as a dominant of F, so it’s kind of a theoretical joke, playing with your expectations. The piece does something, it ventures further and further out and gets lost, it playfully changes its mind. I doubt that the tango in the movie does that, or does it the same way.

What’s disappointing – and I mean it not just with respect to these two students but to their generation in general, for this is ubiquitous – is that for young musicians, momentary identity is often everything, and what happens in the piece hardly exists. For me, the cleverly-composed course of the tango was everything; to them, merely the general sound, the momentum, texture, and flavor of the tonality, mattered. From experiences in my criticism class, I’m tempted to think that this is a listening habit inculcated by pop music. Most pop songs retain pretty much the same sonic identity from beginning to end. The profile of a pop song is crucial to its instant recognition. You can’t have a pop song that starts out “We… will… we… will… ROCK YOU!” and ends up “God only knows what I’d do without you” – though in a sense, most classical music does something like that all the time. In class I even assigned them to write descriptions of some pop songs that went through tremendous changes – such as Sonic Youth’s “Female Mechanic Now on Duty” – trying to elicit recognition of, and maybe some interest in, the fact that some music transforms itself and goes through a variety of sections. It seemed pretty much in vain. I played entire movements from Mahler symphonies, and while they came up with loads of adjectives and even elaborate pictorial scenarios, not one, except under the most obvious prodding, ventured a description that took time-based changes into account. That’s why, in my Music After Minimalism class, I’d play part of an hour-long work by Robert Ashley or Meredith Monk or anyone, and someone would invariably shout, “I know a rock group sounds just like that!” And it would, for about 20 seconds.

The late Jonathan Kramer wrote about what he called horizontal time in music and vertical time. Horizontal time was what you experience listening to the recapitulation of a sonata differ from the exposition, taking account of before and after, hearing the consonant version of Beethoven’s Eroica theme 20 minutes after that version with the dissonant C# and realizing that something has changed. Vertical time is what one experiences in the moment, without before or after, and a lot of recent composers have written with vertical time as a goal – Jonathan listed Satie’s Vexations, Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge, even certain works by Stravinsky. In fact, as the critic who most champions music in which nothing happens, I feel a little hypocritical chastising my students for only listening that way. I have the opposite trouble trying to get my classical colleagues to appreciate the timelessness of La Monte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano, Charlemagne Palestine’s piano strumming, a Phill Niblock orchestra piece which might seem to remain motionless. I love pieces in which nothing happens. One of my own pieces is entitled Time Does Not Exist. But I think I love those pieces more because they negate my deeply embedded horizontal listening habits (sounds like I listen to music lying down), the way Waiting for Godot smashed the expectations of conventional theater because the title character never showed up.

Imagine applying this situation to literature. You read, “Though Mrs. Jennings was in the habit of spending a large portion of the year at the houses of her children and friends, she was not without a settled habitation of her own,” and someone shouts, “I know another novel reads just like that!” It wouldn’t happen, because people who read novels at all realize that what’s important is not so much the individuality of the sentences (some of which may chance to appear verbatim in other books) as what happens. And movies! How many movies have a scene in which the hero is running from a bomb and is thrown forward by the explosion? Who would yell out, “I know another movie goes just like that”? No one, because people are conditioned to experience movies in time.

But I think – and I realize I sound like an old grump but I merely note the phenomenon – we’re raising a generation who, by and large, do not think of music as something to be experienced in time. And it strikes me that the lack of that habit closes one off from the pleasure of a tremendous amount of music – even the music in which nothing happens, if not especially that music.

New on Postclassic Radio:

Night song by Raphael Mostel and his Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble

Steel Chords for pedal steel guitar and strings by Sasha Matson

Tukwinong for piano by Judith Sainte Croix, and played by her

Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto with Keith Jarrett as soloist

Alien Heart from Elodie Lauten’s early disc of piano works on Cat Collectors