I’ve been absent because of school duties and computer problems. (When I moved from a 4GB computer to a 40GB, I laughed at the idea of ever filling it up – now I’m realizing it’s too small to play fast and loose with aiff audio files the way I need to.) But I stumbled across a cache of my rare cassettes, and I’ve put up some recordings on Postclassic Radio that you’d have a hell of a time finding anywhere else. One is the sole work by Conlon Nancarrow that isn’t commercially recorded: his Trio No. 2 of 1990, for oboe, bassoon, and piano, close to being his last work (at least, the last he composed without ransacking previous material). Another is the Wittgenstein Cycle (1980) of the inimitable Jeffrey Lohn, who was the third leg of the art-rock trio he shared with Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca in the ’80s, but who detoured out of history for a decade or two and is now reportedly composing again. Lohn set Wittgenstein’s entire Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to music, in German, in a bouncy, Stravinskian idiom, and this is an excerpt. It’s wonderful. And on top of that I’m uploading a mystery bootleg recording that I’m not even going to advertise, not having any desire to be visited by disgruntled musicians’ union goons. The Mad New-Music Broadcaster strikes again!

An article in The Guardian linked from Arts Journal suggests that, since the best-selling albums do not match up to critics’ top-ten choices, the public clearly pays no attention to music criticism, which is thereby demonstrated to have become irrelevant. The obvious retort to this was published decades ago by Virgil Thomson, and since Googling it produces no results, it seems advisable to trot it out again here: “Music criticism may be unnecessary. It is certainly inefficient. But it is the only antidote we have to paid publicity.” The fact that paid publicity is so massively effective these days does not mean that criticism has become unimportant; on the contrary, it is more crucial than ever that it be written and supported. We need a name for this ubiquitous and debilitating fallacy that, even in a corporate fascist state like ours, what the people buy a lot of must therefore be what the people like.

Hey, it’s December, and Postclassic Radio‘s composer of the month is Mikel Rouse! Tonight at Walter Reade Theater in New York City I’ll be receiving my ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for the station, along with Robin Cox of Iridian Radio. I told ASCAP that the station was Robin’s idea and I stole it from him, and that he should get the award alone, but they split it between us. It confirms what I’ve said all my life: you don’t get the things you deserve, but you get other things you don’t deserve instead, so it evens out. In college I got C’s in the courses I deserved A’s in, and A’s when I deserved C’s. Something similar keeps happening. My mother always called it Emerson’s Law of Compensation.

This article by Mel Gilles is the most solid advice for the Democrats and the Democratic party I’ve seen.

The music classroom of the future, they say, will possess a computer on which the professor can scroll through a menu and select any significant piece from the history of music, click on it, and have it immediately heard over the classroom sound system. I forget who “they” are, or where I heard or read this, or who was supposed to upload the utopian CD collection, nor do I yet know of anyone living in this fantasy world. The technology is there and would be easy to install, but my department isn’t putting the money into it yet, nor is anyone else’s I know.

But, taking matters into my own hands, I’ve come as close to it as anyone I know of. For my birthday (which I share with Coleman Hawkins, composer Judith Shatin, Rene Magritte, Bjork, Goldie Hawn, Marlo Thomas, and Voltaire, you could look it up) my parents bought me (I was very specific in my request, and went through my tech-literate brother) a 250-gigabyte external hard drive. (I’ll give the commercial: the brand is Maxtor, and it’s really sturdy-looking.) The device advertises the capacity to hold 4100-plus hours of music MP3s, and I’m putting it to the test. As of this writing I’ve filled 13 GB with more than 1400 tracks, trying to think of every piece I’ve ever used in class or even mentioned to a student. This is going to be the iPod from hell, and I’m planning to carry it into class knowing that there’s no piece I could possibly want to play that isn’t on it. I’ve loaded it with all the Mahler symphonies, the last seven Bruckner symphonies, the last four Sibelius symphonies, the complete Berwald symphonies (don’t ask), most of Haydn’s symphonies, the complete Nancarrow player piano pieces, all of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, two of Sorabji’s complete works including the four-hour Opus Clavicembalisticum, the complete Beethoven sonatas, the complete Mozart Piano concerti, most of the Brahms piano music, the complete Hummel sonatas, all the available Dussek sonatas, lots of Josquin, most of Stravinsky, lots of Cage, and so on and so on. It will be my push-button repertoire machine. I’ve already tried it out – a major-minor motive in the Brahms first concerto reminded me of a similar moment in a Mahler symphony, and I played the beginnings of several movements before getting the one I wanted, the fourth movement of the Mahler Seventh. For years I’ve walked into class fumbling a tall stack of compact discs. Now I walk in with my laptop and Maxtor hard drive, and play anything from my CD collection I can think of.

The question is, of course, given 4100 hours of music storage space, what do you select? (Afterthought: I guess for people whose CD/vinyl collection doesn’t reach the five-digit range, this wouldn’t sound like a pressing concern.) Having copied more than 200 hours of music and only filled five percent of the disc, it’s not really an issue yet, but it will be. This is not a complete classical repertoire disc. There are composers I never refer to. I don’t see any reason to include Dvorak or Puccini, and I never mention Tchaikovsky in any flattering way. I play Mozart’s concerti and operas, but rarely his sonatas and never his symphonies. The name Verdi, though respected, goes unheard in my classroom. On the other hand, less new (postclassical) music has gone on the drive than you’d expect – as much as I love their musics, I don’t often get a chance to talk about John Luther Adams or Beth Anderson. It’s kind of a very generous desert island problem, preparing not the playlist that I’d want to listen to the rest of my life (though that inevitably goes into it), but what I can use to point out interesting things to students. And in case I want to play The Well-Tuned Piano or Feldman’s six-hour Second String Quartet, I have the luxury (if that is the proper word) or doing so without having to change CDs.

And so once again I spend dozens of hours changing formats for my recording collection: in youth I taped records on cassettes, in the ‘80s I bought compact discs to replace vinyl records, in recent years I transferred cassettes and vinyl to CDRs, and now I’m putting all of those onto one mega-drive. A composer friend of mine has gotten rid of her CDs altogether, after storing all of them on a similar hard drive. I worry that the entire culture is gleefully relinquishing something in terms of audio fidelity by settling for MP3s; if a new, more audiophile format emerges, I will doubtless spend yet more hours transferring once again. I’m not selling any CDs, because (as a frequent writer of liner-notes myself, after all) I need and enjoy the packaging. A colleague to whom I showed off my hard drive innocently asked whose recordings of the Mahler symphonies I selected, and I struggled to remember, with only partial success. With every transfer, it seems, something is gained, something is lost, and access to contextual information always seems to decline.

In the current climate, of course, an additional advantage forces its way to mind. In case the Bush administration succeeds in equating liberals with terrorists and outlawing them (which they certainly give every impression that they’d love to do), I may need to escape over the border to Montreal in a hurry. In that exigency, the Maxtor 250-GB offers a respectable fraction of my CD collection that I can carry in my briefcase when I’m forced to leave everything else behind. In the meantime, my teaching may be considerably enriched.

Having just had performances in San Francisco and Berkeley, I then had one in Seattle, and have one coming up in Pasadena on November 19. I meant to tell you about the one in Seattle, but I thought it was on Nov. 17 and I just noticed that it was Nov. 12. Anyway, the Seattle Chamber Players played a one-minute quartet that they asked me to write, in a series of such brief works to celebrate their 15th anniversary. So I decided the piece should be in four movements, and called it Minute Symphony. I haven’t heard how it went. Anyone hear it?

The Pasadena performance is this Friday. The ensembleGREEN kindly asked me for an instrumental arrangement of my sampler piece So Many Little Dyings, based on a Kenneth Patchen poem. The result will be performed Friday night at 8 PM, at the Neighborhood Church Chapel, 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena, CA. Here’s the program:

Arthur Jarvinen: DLL Canon (1993)

Mary Lou Newmark: Identity Matrix (2003)

Arthur Jarvinen: Brahms (1979)

Bruno Louchouarn: Flux (1999)

Henry Rasof: Witchita Falls 1

Frederick Rzewski: The Waves (1988)

Tom Johnson: Swena Lena (1976)

Philip Glass: “KneePlay2” from Einstein on the Beach (1975)

Tom Johnson: WoloYolo (1976)

Kyle Gann: So Many Little Dyings (1994)

I won’t be there, but let me know if you are. It all reinforces my feeling that I’m a West Coast composer trapped in the body of an East Coast composer.

This is too good not to spread around. I found it here first, but it’s scattered around the internet:

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, or self-respect, it is cruelly hard…

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even a mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second or third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

—H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

After a short hiatus, I’ ve finally gotten back to working on Postclassic Radio, and there are new pieces up by Linda Catlin Smith, Nicolas Collins, Molly Thompson, Paul Bailey, Joseph Koykkar, Dave Smith, Paul Dresher, and others. There was an article in the Los Angeles Times last Sunday, Nov. 7, about my station and Robin Cox’s Iridian Radio, due to our both winning the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. I couldn’t access the article without subscribing, but author Chris Pasles kindly sent me a PDF of it, and Cox e-mailed me the text. It quotes us as follows:

For Cox, the reason to start a station was simple: He couldn’t find
the music he wanted to hear on the radio.

“For all the possibilities that the Internet may provide, what was
actually out there was still very much what you would hear over the
airwaves much of the time,” he said. “The best you could hope for was
a John Adams piece squashed between early 20th century works.

“I’m putting what I consider the essentials out there. It’s been a
good exercise going through all the music I love and picking out the
desert island discs I feel most strongly about.”

Cox plays music by not only Adams but the Kronos Quartet, Bang on a
Can, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson. He bills it as “music that’s smart
but still warm to the ears,” and he has a playlist of more than 100
pieces.

For Gann, the issue is more serious.

“When I was younger, classical radio was the way I discovered a lot of
new music,” he said. “It was extremely important. Today, you can’t turn
on the radio and hear any of this stuff.”

What he and Cox do, he said, “points out the utter emptiness of most
radio and most classical radio. Certainly, it points out how much
better a job can be done on anything when commercial considerations are
taken out of the picture.”

Long Beach composer Carolyn Bremer agrees. She considers both stations
“extraordinarily important because they are giving voice to a niche in
music that generally requires a lot of work to find. If this
multiplied, it would be the best thing that ever happened.”

Well, I guess there are some even better things that I can imagine happening – world peace, perhaps – but I appreciate the sentiment. A friend commented that what he likes about the stations is that they are curated. There are ways to get on the internet and hear music by a hundred random self-promoting composers, and that’s great too – but sometimes, to get a more contextual and less splintered sense of the scene, you need to hear someone’s personal vision of the best of what’s going on.

Meanwhile, it’s been difficult to write about music or even think about it. In classes, for the first post-election week, I would start to teach, and end up just standing there, wondering if the guys in the class would be trudging through the deserts of Iraq carrying rifles in a year’s time; or if in 20 years they’d be living in caves somewhere, trying to escape the disasters of out-of-control climate changes that happened because the U.S. did nothing. What good would it do them to know how many ways Wagner came up with to resolve the Tristan chord? But I also think of the woman Alfred Brendel (I believe) wrote about, who survived the German concentration camps because she had all the Beethoven string quartets memorized and kept running through them in her head. Music is a survival mechanism, and we’ll need all the mechanisms we can get.

You’ve all seen it by now, but I’ve been kind of mesmerized by the Sorry Everybody.com web site, all those thousands of people speaking for the six billion willing to stand up against the 59 million American bigots and Jesus freaks who want to keep spreading hate in the world. (The Christian Right doesn’t want to be called the Christian Right anymore, so the old term Jesus freaks, which seems more appropriate than ever, should do just fine.) I like to think that Postclassic Radio is somewhat of a musical analog to Sorry Everybody, a survey of people who don’t want to cling anymore to the bad old ways of thinking, who’ve evolved beyond the need for pissing contests, musical, military, religious, and otherwise. No wonder the Jesus freaks don’t want evolution taught in the schools: as the man says, if evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve. At Sorry Everybody.com you can see thousands of the people who’ve evolved, and at Postclassic Radio and Iridian Radio, you can hear some of them.

If you find profanity offensive, you will not enjoy the message to our Southern brethren at fuckthesouth.com, but I find it heartwarming, which I suppose completes my transformation into a Northeastern liberal.

Young composer Keith Corbin has written a rather nice Elegy for America, inspired by what he correctly calls the horrible catastrophe of November 2, 2004: “59,459,765 Americans said that they favor a policy of Violence over Peace, Intolerance over Justice, Large Corporations over Economic Sanity, and Fear over Freedom and Liberty.” You can hear an mp3 of the MIDI version of Corbin’s piece, based on a funereal variation of our national anthem. One thinks of Charles Ives’s song “An Election: Nov. 2, 1920,” lamenting the country’s similarly cynical and ill-motivated election of another nobody, Warren G. Harding. Is November 2 a particularly inauspicious day to hold elections?

On November 3, the day after the election, 250 Bard College students staged a peaceful protest in the neighboring village of Red Hook. They sat down in the street in the town’s sole intersection, delayed traffic, attracted curious onlookers and a few insults, and left. That was it. Somehow the event came to the attention of the Kingston police force in neighboring Ulster county, across the river. Thirty Kingston police came to escort the students away. Twelve students were walking back to campus together, when one stepped over the white line on the curb. That was the signal for the 30 cops to jump out of their cars and begin beating the 12 defenseless students. One girl, upset by the violence, fell to the ground and a cop put his boot on her neck. Three students were charged with resisting arrest – one for putting his hand on the arm of a cop who was beating another student. One student ended up in the hospital with a concussion, others were bloodied and bruised. The local press claims that the students provoked the police, in direct contradiction to descriptions by adult witnesses present who are connected with the college. And this is in the relatively liberal enclave of Red Hook, NY. The coming police state has begun, and the only thing that keeps me from anticipating another Kent State is the fact that riot police use rubber bullets these days – I think.

Composer Lawrence Dillon, grad and former faculty of Juilliard but now living and teaching in North Carolina, cries out for the 25 million red-staters who voted for Kerry and sanity:

Don’t you think we’ve been depressed enough this week without taking all the blame for Bush’s resounding victory? And how do you feel about the 2.8 million New Yorkers who voted for Bush — more than in North Carolina and Arizona combined? What exactly is their excuse for being so stupid?

On the night of November 3rd [with my North Carolina colleagues] all anyone could talk about was how depressed they were, how hard they had worked in support of a losing cause, how completely stunned they were by the results. We had no idea that the next few days would bring about a situation in which every Dem in a state that scored 50% or more for Kerry would call us arrogant assholes for living in states where we represent something less than that magic 50% figure….

Kerry got 52% of New Jersey, 44% of North Carolina. That’s the difference between a majority and a minority, but it sure as hell isn’t the difference between enlightenment and ignorance.

Granted, and if it weren’t for the dumb electoral college, we wouldn’t be talking that way. I understand the logic of the electoral college, but more and more it seems like a relic of the day when state’s rights were an important political issue, when the people of Virginia had more in common with each other than Richmond did with Philadelphia, which is no longer the case. I’ve got cousins in Waco, Texas, medical doctors, who are just as horrified by Bush as I am. As for those 2.8 million New Yorkers, I suspect a lot of those are not so much stupid, just the fabulously wealthy voting their… short-term, perhaps,,, economic interests.

So here’s some sympathy and gratitude to the 25 million out there trying to talk sense into the bigoted and uneducated. I do too easily appreciate living in a precinct that voted for Kerry more than 6-to-1, where I can say anything I want about Bush and get only smiles and nods in return, and if my performance this past weekend had been any place less liberal than Berkeley, I would have cancelled. If I lived in a red state right now, I’d be in the hospital recovering from all the fist fights I’d started. I’m so pissed off at the religious right that I’m ready to marry another man, and I’m not even gay.

This concession speech by Adam Felber seems to me to strike exactly the kind of conciliatory tone we should take toward our mighty red-state conquerors. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll provide my favorite excerpt here:

There are some who would say that I sound bitter, that now is the time for healing, to bring the nation together. Let me tell you a little story. Last night, I watched the returns come in with some friends here in Los Angeles. As the night progressed, people began to talk half-seriously about secession, a red state / blue state split. The reasoning was this: We in blue states produce the vast majority of the wealth in this country and pay the most taxes, and you in the red states receive the majority of the money from those taxes while complaining about ’em. We in the blue states are the only ones who’ve been attacked by foreign terrorists, yet you in the red states are gung ho to fight a war in our name. We in the blue states produce the entertainment that you consume so greedily each day, while you in the red states show open disdain for us and our values. Blue state civilians are the actual victims and targets of the war on terror, while red state civilians are the ones standing behind us and yelling “Oh, yeah!? Bring it on!”

More than 40% of you Bush voters still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. I’m impressed by that, truly I am. Your sons and daughters who might die in this war know it’s not true, the people in the urban centers where al Qaeda wants to attack know it’s not true, but those of you who are at practically no risk believe this easy lie because you can. As part of my concession speech, let me say that I really envy that luxury. I concede that.

Healing? We, the people at risk from terrorists, the people who subsidize you, the people who speak in glowing and respectful terms about the heartland of America while that heartland insults and excoriates us… we wanted some healing. We spoke loud and clear. And you refused to give it to us, largely because of your high moral values. You knew better: America doesn’t need its allies, doesn’t need to share the burden, doesn’t need to unite the world, doesn’t need to provide for its future. Hell no. Not when it’s got a human shield of pointy-headed, atheistic, unconfrontational breadwinners who are willing to pay the bills and play nice in the vain hope of winning a vote that we can never have. Because we’re “morally inferior,” I suppose, we are supposed to respect your values while you insult ours. And the big joke here is that for 20 years, we’ve done just that.

Healing, yeah. Bend over.