I’m writing about politics now not because I believe I know more about it than anyone else, but because after November 2 – an even darker day for America than September 11* (better 3000 Americans killed than 59,000,000 voting their approval to genocide and sexual torture) – I couldn’t find anything on the internet to make me feel better. For many hours there was just nothing, then the articles started rolling in, predictably, by Democrats blaming themselves. The Repugs eat this up, that every time they cream us we act like it’s our own fault. I refuse to play into it. We can discuss strategy and what to do next time, but before we take the slightest iota of blame on ourselves, let’s be very clear about one thing: anyone who thinks it’s a bigger crime for two men to get married than to invade a country and kill 100,000 of its citizens to get its oil is just SICK. Sick, sick, sick. We can later get really cynical and figure out how to attract sick voters, but bewail how we failed to reach high enough moral ground? Puhleeeeeeeeeeeze.

So I’m trying to throw out some tidbits to comfort the sane and thoroughly depressed. Including a couple of poems, the first by Mikhail Horowitz of Bard College’s publications office, cleverly based on the all-too-familiar letters of its subject:

Bush

Betrayal! United States has

Been usurped, stolen, hustled

By ugly shrub! He

Bamboozles us, sets his

Battalions upon Saddam Hussein

But undermines social health

By unhappily sanctifying Homeland

(Bullshittin’ us?) Security. His

Bromidic, unintelligible speech hides,

Barely, undiluted slyness; he’d

Bomb Utopia, serving his

Beastly, ultrafascistic Satan. He’s

Bellicose, unbalanced, shameless; he’s

Breaking Uncle Sam’s heart.

Brothers, unite! Sisters, help!

Band up! Stop him!

– Mikhail Horowitz

And on a calmer, more thoughtful note, one sent to me for consolation by composer John Luther Adams, from the poet John Haines, who wrote it before the 2000 election:

The Last Election

Suppose there are no returns,

and the candidates, one

by one, drop off in the polls,

as the voters turn away,

each to his inner persuasion.

The frontrunners, the dark horses,

begin to look elsewhere,

and even the President admits

he has nothing new to say;

it is best to be silent now.

No more conventions, no donors,

no more hats in the ring;

no ghost-written speeches,

no promises we always knew

were never meant to be kept.

And something like the truth,

or what we knew by that name-

that for which no corporate

sponsor was ever offered –

takes hold in the public mind.

Each subdued and thoughtful

citizen closes his door, turns

off the news. He opens a book,

speaks quietly to his children,

begins to live once more.

– John Haines

*A friend warns that I’ll be jumped on for this comment, but it’s based on a moral principle that I, an acknowledged liberal, believe in: that the evil a person does is more damaging to that person than the evil that is done to him. Terrorists can hit us and we can still hold our heads up high in the world, but if we perpetrate the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, I insist that we no longer can. In fact, I think that our national willingness to commit any crime, ignore any moral law, sweep aside any international treaty, rather than risk another 9-11 is an unparalleled example of national cowardice. If you disagree, then of course 9-11-01 will seem like a much worse day than 11-2-04, and maybe you sleep better than I do.

One thing I’m not going to do is take part in the Democrat circular firing squad, wringing my hands about what wasn’t done, or where we went wrong, why our message didn’t get across. Why not? Because I’m from Texas. Unlike most of my New York friends, I don’t have to give red-staters the benefit of the doubt. I was raised devoutly in the Southern Baptist Church – in fact, First Baptist of Dallas, the south’s largest Baptist church, and the one Billy Graham belonged to. I know these people who voted for Bush. Some of them are bullies. Some are outrageous hypocrites, girls who would savage each other’s reputations and then get up in front of the choir and give the most sincere-sounding pious homilies. Many use their so-called Christian “faith” as an excuse to assume their own infallibility and never examine their own motives – just like W. When I was 15 I was taken to a week-long convocation, in a huge stadium filled with believers, called the Bill Gothard Seminar. Gothard was a charismatic guy who preached that the Christian life consisted of sound business practices, and that if you lived it, God would make you rich – in fact, you could tell who was really godly, because by the logic of the belief, they had the most money. I was thoughtful enough at 15, and familiar enough with what Christ was actually quoted as saying, to be somewhat horrified by this as it sunk in.

One of the things I’m most ashamed of in my life is something I did for the Church. The First Baptist Church of Dallas grouped us choir members in pairs and sent us out on the streets to proselytize. We were handed sheets of questions, and instructed to tell passersby that we were conducting a survey. So the nice people would stop to be helpful by answering our questions, and we would gradually lead up to trying to convert them, getting them to pray there on the street and dedicate their life to Christ. It was really embarrassing – lying to strangers as instructed to by the church. Bait ‘n’ switch is a perfectly acceptable strategy to the Southern Baptist Church – no wonder W. doesn’t understand why anyone should object to it. The absolute desirability of the end always justified any means, no matter how dishonest, which is exactly the pathology we see in the White House today.

My break with the church came in several stages. One turning point came in 1976, when I came home from college, went to First Baptist, and the pastor Wally Amos Criswell instructed the congregation not to vote for Jimmy Carter, who was a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, but the Republican Gerald Ford. Another was a few years later when NBC aired a made-for-TV movie called The Day After, about the speculative aftermath of a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. Fundamentalist church groups protested the movie on the grounds that it might scare away Americans from continuing the massive nuclear buildup we’d need for Armageddon. That’s when I realized that the church wasn’t merely a harmless anachronism, but the actual enemy.

Of course, only 64 percent of Texans voted for Bush, and you can’t tar every resident there with the same brush. But the state is populated by enough smarmy, dishonest, arrogant, bullying, jingoistic, homophobic, bigoted people that I’m not going to flagellate myself wondering why they didn’t go for someone as noble, introspective, intelligent, and fair as John Kerry. They went for the arrogant asshole created in their own image. No broader theme, no simpler message, no more quotidian concerns would have ever won those people over – it would have taken an army of psychotherapists, some straitjackets, and a few cattle prods.

And so it really pissed me off tonight when I’m sitting here listening to WAMC, our local NPR station, in hopes of some comfort, and some guy starts lecturing Democrats on how Bush won because he had a “moral vision,” and the Democrats didn’t come up with any “moral vision.” What moral vision? Invading a country that posed no threat, and killing 100,000 people, most of them innocent women and children? Outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent for revenge on her husband? Sneaking around the Geneva Convention to torture and sexually humiliate Iraqis randomly dragged in off the street? Stripping people of their civil rights to spy on them? Suppressing minority votes? Lying to destroy the reputations of war heroes? Raping the environment? Well, I don’t know if you’d call it a moral vision, but it’s certainly the Baptist Church I recognize from my youth. And while I admittedly wish Kerry were going to be president, I feel better knowing that my liberal friends in New York and I occupied the moral high ground in this election, than if we had sunk to Bush’s level to win. We had our own moral vision, which genocide, election-stealing, and lying played no part in.

Sorry, my European friends, this is no aberration: you’re just finally seeing the real America, or at least half of it. People steeped in a warped religion prefer the warped guy, and the unscrupulous rich do the rest. Maybe Clinton won because Bush 41 and Dole weren’t warped enough, and Clinton looked like enough of a good ol’ boy to maybe be a little warped underneath. What were we supposed to do this time, convince them that Kerry is more warped than he looks?

UPDATE: Here’s an article by someone at Salon.com who agrees with me about the “heartland.”

I’m hearing whispers in blog forum conversations that the exit poll percentages match the final vote percentages in areas where voting took place with a paper trail, and do not match in areas where voting was done on paperless electronic machines. I can’t yet find any hard numbers or analysis, but it’s early, and people were up late last night. I certainly hope it’s true, because I am reluctant to think that 58,000,000 hateful bigots whom I am obliged to call my countrymen decided to proclaim to the world that the torture at Abu Ghraib was acceptable; that killing 100,000 Iraqis, most of them innocent women and children, was a good policy; that there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. unilaterally imposing its will on the rest of the world; that a political party that systematically works to disenfranchise minority voters deserves to be voted for; that it’s fine to destroy the world’s environment in order to make a few phenomenally wealthy white men even richer; and that Americans no longer possess the “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” that Thomas Jefferson once assumed. The more of those votes that turn out to have been supplied by Diebold, the better I’ll feel about my country.

We’ve fought the bastards for four years, and we’ll fight them for the next four – not only the unscrupulous politicians, but the 58,000,000 minus: the greedy corporations, the America-right-or-wrong bigots, and their hateful, lying, homophobic churches. I’ve been criticized for turning a music blog political, but every vote for Republicans is a vote for increased corporate power, and every increase in corporate control tramples the living creative arts further underfoot. You can’t have a healthy artistic scene in this fascist climate. The Bushites will learn that we do not flip-flop.

UPDATE: Apparently the buzz-du-jour on the TV stations (and I don’t get TV, which is one of the nicer things about my life) is all the talking heads’ surprised bemusement about how wrong all the Florida and Ohio exit polls turned out to be. Why it just discredits the whole idea of exit polls, doesn’t it?

Sort of like Florida four years ago, when the exit polls said Gore, and the votes said Bush. Hmmm….

Anyone thinking about it yet?

Allow me to scoop all other publications with the results in my home precinct, the Barrytown section of Red Hook, New York:

Kerry/Edwards 522

Bush/Cheney 82

Nader/Camejo 20

Four years ago it was something like:

Gore 243

Bush 80

Nader 160

Indicates something about how far Nader has descended in the collegiate milieu.

For my last theory class prior to election day, I took the subtle precaution of teaching a hymn whose words (and also harmonies, as I needed a minor-key piece with a homophonic texture, and they’re rare) were appropriate to this particular election week, Be Glad Then, America, by our founding national composer William Billings (1746-1800):

Darkness and clouds of awful shade

Hang pendant by a slender thread,

Waiting commission from God the upholder to fall,

Fall, fall, and distress us.

Great God, avert th’impending doom,

We plead no merit of our own.

For mercy, Lord, we cry.

Bow down thine ear to our complaints,

And hear from heav’n thou king of saints,

O let thine aid be nigh.

Still, I’m optimistic.

The votes are in: in my criticism class, I mean. I have two kinds of student writers. One kind is very good at style and atmosphere. They can talk about music in relation to their lives, tell how certain songs make them feel, relate their likes and dislikes. The other type knows musical terminology, and can describe music in intelligent detail. The first type of writer is entertaining to read, but ultimately merely subjective; the second is more persuasive, but a little dry and lacking in color and emotive effect. Almost none can yet combine the best of both worlds. The first type are almost all pop music aficionados; the second type tend to be classical and jazz musicians.

The big question for me is, is this an inevitable correlation? Are pop-music preferences necessarily subjective, or could they, given the criteria of a certain genre, be grounded in objective distinctions? Can one prove, if only on paper, song by song, that the Beatles were better than the Stones, or vice versa? What I sometimes love about the subjective pop style is its sense of how important music is to listeners. They really love the stuff, it’s crucial to their sense of self-identification. The classical/jazz people are better at proving they know what they’re talking about, but less good at making the music sound important to them. There is a rather obvious correlation here to the music business in general. Pop music accounts for something like 94 percent of all CD sales, classical and jazz for about 3 percent each – or at least, that was the case a few years ago. If classical and jazz writers worked harder at identifying with the music, making it sound life-consuming and identity-defining (as, God knows, it generally is), could those percentages improve? Do classical music and jazz stay under the radar because they inspire a technical, specialist sensibility? or just because we talk about them that way?

Rose Rosengard Subotnik, a musicologist at Brown University, is the leading inheritor of Theodore Adorno’s musico-sociological methodologies, though she’s a lot less snobbish than he was. She’s written persuasively (and I’ve written a lot about her saying) that what “normal,” i.e. lay, listeners want in music is a reflection of their values, an externalization of the qualities they care about in the world. “What the public hears,” she wrote in her book Developing Variations, “is what is always heard, not autonomous structure, but the sensuous manifestation of particular cultural values.” One girl loves Guns ‘n’ Roses for their rebel attitude. Another loves Pearl Jam because their music helped her release the anger she felt as a teenager. They listen to the music, cling to it, wear T-shirts advertising it, because it crystalizes and thereby ratifies their inner feelings. Likewise, people who fancy themselves serious intellectuals listen to Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, not because they understand the music necessarily, but because it reinforces their self-image.

Classical (and postclassical) music express personal values as well, if perhaps or perhaps not on a different plane, but we don’t talk about that as much. To take a work that’s been crucial to my own self-definition (so much so that I keep an MP3 of it on my computer): Roy Harris’s Third Symphony. When I write about it, I tend to emphasize Harris’s mastery of one-movement symphonic form (and less competent handling of multi-movement form), the way he can crescendo within a texture to the point of exploding into a different texture. That has to do with technical expertise, but not much to do with values. What I more secretly get from that work, which I consider music’s The Grapes of Wrath, is its vision of America as a thrilling tragedy, its epic sweep and nobility in disillusionment. It seems to embody the promise of America’s westward movement in mid-century (Harris’s parents were Okies who sought greener pastures in California), a glorification of activity and hard work, yet at the end a realization that, human nature being what it is, America’s promise of transcendence is fated to remain merely an elusive yearning. I get a sense from the Third Symphony that, even if humankind is not perfectible, one is ennobled by the struggle – and, perhaps even more, the piece’s broad orchestral strokes and suggestions of grand emptiness evoke a landscape that attracts me (more than, say, Copland’s busily detailed urban rhythms).

We don’t talk about classical music this way much, and I’m not doing a very impressive job of it now. To do so sounds like an old-fashioned music appreciation text, in which Beethoven’s Fifth represents Fate knocking at the door. We’re a little too embarrassed these days to write that the “Jupiter” Symphony gives listeners a sense of noble optimism, but that’s probably what’s most important about it for nonmusicians. Ultimately (and this is my nagging pedagogical point), I feel that criticism reaches its greatest strength in linking the objective and subjective, when it can point to specific moves in a piece of music and pinpoint their expressive power in inevitable subjective reactions. This takes some modicum of musical training, and also a quasi-naive recognition of what music expresses in its most visceral qualities. For a critic, or any musical commentator, to merely react to music’s energy on a naive emotional level is not enough – but it’s necessary, and an awful lot of musicians forget how to do it.

The November Composer-of-the-Month at Postclassic Radio is, logically enough, William Duckworth, whose elegant musical logic has been a tremendous influence on my own music. I’ve uploaded two major Duckworth works, The Time Curve Preludes (1978-79) for piano, played on Lovely Music by neely Bruce, and Southern Harmony (1980-81), a choral piece sung by the Gregg Smith Singers and the Rooke Chapel Choir of Bucknell University. The latter work is in 20 movements divided into four books, and I’ve separated the four books out among other works in the playlist. Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances (1986) is also being aired, performed by pianist Lois Svard. These are all classic works of the postminimalist movement. There’s no reason to upload performances from Duckworth’s vast internet work Cathedral, because it’s already on the web here, and you can hear it (and play it) yourself.

To upload a couple of pieces to Postclassic Radio every night is easy. What’s proved more daunting, in my mid-semester work overload, is keeping the playlist current. My apologies for lagging behind in that area. Corrections coming shortly.

I was listening to NPR on my way to New York today. I wouldn’t believe what I heard if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears. Our Potemkin President (as Doonesbury has finally called him – someone had to) was responding to Kerry’s charges that he goofed in allowing 380 tons of munitions to be stolen in Iraq. And he shouted, in slow, emphatic words, as though explaining the simplest common sense:

“The president… needs to collect ALL the facts… before making politically-motivated statements!”

I laughed so hard I nearly drove off the road. I’m not sure I would feel better even if Bush DID collect all the facts before making his politically-motivated statements. I’d rather he just told the truth. But maybe, this once, he was.

I have two performances coming up in San Francisco and Berkeley next week – one I’ll be present for, the other I won’t. Red-headed pianists Sarah Cahill and Kathleen Supové – I call attention to their hair color because the title of the concert is “Two Redheads and 88 Solenoids,” although I think of Cahill as more of a strawberry blonde – are playing some music for piano and Disklavier plus piano, dotted with pieces for Disklavier alone. The premiere in my case is Private Dances, a set of dances of which I wrote two in 2000 and four more last summer, 25 minutes in all. Cahill is also playing pieces by Carl Stone and Tania Leon, while Supové is offering works by Dan Becker, John Adams, and Randall Woolf. During intermission some of Becker’s and my Disklavier pieces will be featured. (The Disklavier, by the way, is an acoust-, oh forget it.) Details for the two identical concerts are as follows:

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004

8 PM

The Slavonic Cultural Center

60 Onondaga Ave. (corner of Alemany Blvd; near Balboa Bart)

San Francisco

$12

and

Saturday, November 6th, 2004

8 PM

The Berkeley Arts Festival Gallery

2324 Shattuck Ave.

Berkeley

$12

To make the first concert I would have had to fly across the country on Election Day, and it occured to me that Dick Cheney might choose that day to order his Pentagon friends to shoot a couple more planes out of the sky and then claim he was mistaken again. So I’ll wait until President-Elect Kerry is securely ratified, and go out for the Saturday performance.

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.

– John Cleese

Q: What’s the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?

A: George W. Bush had a plan for getting out of the Vietnam War.

– courtesy of Antonio Celaya

I’ve had a couple of opportunities to play my Disklavier pieces lately, in New York and at Bard. A Disklavier, just to be very clear since so many get the wrong idea, is an acoustic piano, with real strings struck by felt hammers and vibrating in the air, but operated from a computer (or disc) via MIDI instructions. The keys move, just as though a pianist were playing them. It’s a modern player piano, only the paper piano roll is now replaced by a sequence of digital information.

Anyway, the response I get is kind of deadeningly repetitive. The pieces I usually play are jazzy, impressively fast, and sort of humorous, and generally make a good impression. But afterward, I’m invariably approached by two or three or four people who ask, “Gee, isn’t there some way to make it possible for live pianists to play those pieces?” They ask as though they suspect it’s a possibility I’ve never considered, as if they expect me to strike my forehead and shout, “Of course – a live pianist! Why didn’t I think of it?”

Now, number one: I get a big kick out of watching the Disklavier. It’s fun to watch all those keys ripple up and down the keyboard; I take the front cover off, when it’s an upright, and you can watch the hammers fly by as well. In Australia I also hooked up my computer to a projector, so the audience could watch the Digital Performer file scroll by, which looks exactly like a player piano roll, only with the notes running horizontally instead of vertically. I got the idea from watching Conlon Nancarrow’s player pianos, which were incredibly more fun to watch live than to listen to a recording of. You’d see a diagonal line of holes appear on the piano roll, and know that a huge glissando was coming, and it would blast in a split second later – it was like being on a sonic roller coaster, because you could see what you were headed for just a second before it happened. I love watching player pianos as much as I’ve ever loved watching a live pianist.

Number two: I’ve written a lot of piano music and a lot of Disklavier music, and I approach them with different mindsets, just as though they were different instruments. When writing for Disklavier I don’t even think about spacing the notes so that a human hand can reach them. If I want to write a melody in lightning-fast quintuple octaves, or a whole string of six parallel sixths, I go right ahead. And the whole point is to be freed from downbeats and meters, so the first thing I’ll do is lay out a whole set of nested tempo relationships, like 7-against-9-against-11-against-13-against-17, and then fill in the notes, knowing that notes in one line will coincide with notes in another line only at downbeats, and then I try to avoid putting notes on downbeats. By doing that I get exactly what I want, which I feel is a wonderful spontaneity of notes bubbling up, not randomly, but like corks bobbing up and down on brisk waves, with patterns that are repetitive but wholly unsynchronized.

I know that there are pianists, like Ursula Oppens, who have trained themselves to play some pretty complex rhythms; in fact, the Helena Bugallo-Amy Williams Piano Duo played some of Conlon Nancarrow’s early Player Piano Studies in New York this past Thursday, and I couldn’t be there because I was impersonating Abraham Lincoln that night. (Scroll down if you really have to know why.) But it’s one thing to play a 22-tuplet over a 4/4 beat in a Chopin nocturne, it’s something else to play steady lines of 13-against-29-against-31 for several measures at a time. I imagine it can be done. What I don’t imagine is that it would sound the way I want it to sound, with the same spontaneity and bubbly effect. I did, by request, transform one of my Disklavier pieces (Folk Dance for Henry Cowell) into a live-pianist piece (Private Dance No. 2), and I’ve never been totally convinced by the result. In addition, pianists fudge rhythms like these, and I frequently change harmony in mid-measure among several lines at once, the notes all changing chord suddenly like a flock of birds mysteriously reversing course with one mind. I don’t see how a pair or trio of pianists would be able to “sort of” play all these tempos at once, and also be able to so closely synchronize that when one switches to the E minor triad on the fifth note of a 17-tuplet, the other switches to that chord on the corresponding fourth note of a 13-tuplet.

Maybe it could be done. If someone can figure out how to do it, I’ll applaud. But the other thing I can’t understand is, why would anyone want to go to that much trouble? Why are so many people so dissatisfied watching the Disklavier, even people who visibly enjoy it? Sometimes the question comes from a pianist who is dazzled by the music and wants to play it, and that’s flattering. I wish I could interest these pianists in the eight or so piano pieces I’ve written for human players, but I rarely do. One person said that the Disklavier doesn’t give the feel that a live pianist can. Well, that’s a point, I guess; but unlike the old player pianos, I can adjust the dynamic (hammer velocity) separately for every note, and I do a tremendous amount of fine-tuning to accent just the right note in a phrase, humanize the attack points, create the effect of a live pianist hesitating on a high note or beginning a trill slowly. I simulate live performance with what strikes me as a high degree of realism, and I am strongly tempted to assume that psychology plays a role in perception here – the music often sounds nuanced, tentative, slightly irregular just the way a pianist would play it, but since there is no pianist, the listener fools himself into believing that it sounds regular and mechanical.

Or is it just that people don’t enjoy watching machines play music? I’ve seen an entire orchestra of MIDI-operated machines play music in Trimpin’s studio in Seattle, and it was one of the great musical thrills of my life. Computer-operated acoustic instruments are coming, folks – they’re part of your future. Get used to ‘em or ignore ‘em, but you can’t stop ‘em.

I know Conlon used to be bothered by similar queries. In his day, there was always the complaint (he got it from Aaron Copland, among others) that a player piano performance was the same every time, that there was no interpretive deviation from one playing to the next. Conlon’s usual response was, a Picasso painting is the same every time you see it; a Shakespeare sonnet is the same every time you read it; why is only music required to be different every time or you can’t enjoy it? Today’s audiences, however, are so inured to recordings and even near-identical performances that that objection seems to have disappeared. But for some reason people are just bothered by using a computer to do something that humans have always done, and they seem willing – as I am not – to put up with any compromise to transfer that activity back into the traditional realm of the performer-audience relationship. I wish I understood why. Because, sadly, I think people who strongly feel that way are just going to have to listen to someone else’s music, and there’s a lot out there.

I’m late in announcing this – things have been hectic – but there’s a memorial concert tomorrow for Jonathan Kramer: Sunday, October 24th at 2:00 PM at Miller Theatre, Columbia University. Several of Jonathan’s pieces will be performed, including Imagined Ancestors (of which this is the world premiere), Renascence, Whirled Piece, Remembrance of a People, and Atlanta Licks. All ticket money goes to a fund started in Jonathan’s honor to commission young composers, a cause he greatly believed in.

Today’s headlines:

The New York Times: The Year of Fear, by William Safire – “Fearmongers in the Kerry campaign are turning any breaking news story they can into a personal threat”

AP: Cheney: “terrorists may bomb U.S. cities”

UPDATE: Breaking news: Iran endorses Bush, because Democrats have this pesky concern with human rights. Not our Commander-in-Chimp! I mean Chief.