You’re not going to believe this, but tomorrow night – Thursday, October 21, at 8 PM at New York’s Cooper Union – I’m going to play Abraham Lincoln in a new work by Gloria Coates. The piece is titled Abraham Lincoln´s Cooper Union Address, and I’ll be reading, in costume, a speech that Lincoln delivered in Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, disputing the notion that the framers of the U.S. Constitution supported the furtherance of slavery. I suppose what qualifies me for this role, beyond my enthusiastic support for Coates’s music, is my past performances in my one-man theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull. In short, I’ve developed a reputation for impersonating people who eventually get shot.

The concert, organized by Birgit Ramsauer, is titled “Spinet: an experiment on Gesamtkunstwerk – Totalart.” The rest of the European program comprises:

Pär Frid, Totentanz für Spinett, 2004 (Sweden)

Stefano Giannotti, L´Arte des Paesaggio, 2000 (Italy)

Heinrich Hartl, Cemballissimo, 2003 (Germany)

Horst Lohse, Birgit´s Toy, 2004 (Germany)

Katharina Rosenberger, Echo, 2004 (Switzerland)

Coates is American, but has lived since the 1970s in Munich. Complete info about the concert here.

By the way, some may note an irony in a Southerner like myself reading the part of Abe Lincoln. In the first place, Gloria wanted a Southern voice because Lincoln was born in Kentucky and grew up in southern Indiana. Secondly, what little genealogical research we’ve received indicates that the Ganns of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were Northern sympathizers, and that, in fact, one of my ancestors was hung by the Confederacy for giving aid to a Union soldier. So I reckon I’m not too far out of line, and I’m fixin’ to do it regardless.

Less than a month after it went on the air, Postclassic Radio has won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for internet service to new music. Actually, it’s a co-winner along with Iridian Radio, whose virtual DJ Robin Cox has been doing a fantastic job of coming up with really obscure yet attractive new music, stuff even I’ve never heard of. Thanks, ASCAP (and I’m a member).

With my performance in New York last week I didn’t have time to pay any attention to my station for several days, but I’ve made up for it: twelve new works have been added to Postclassic Radio in the last 24 hours, including two cuts from Pamela Z’s brand new CD A Delay Is Better (Starkland), and the 56-minute entirety of David First’s The Good Book’s (Accurate) Jail of Escape Dust Coordinates, Part 2, a 1992, slowly evolving continuum piece of chords going slowly out of tune. The piece gets more active, even rock-oriented, in the last half-hour. And there’s so much more to come.

My criticism class got lively today. There are a couple of jazz players in the class, a smattering of classical musicians, and the rest are all destined for the Village Voice, if not worse. I use anthologies by Virgil Thomson, Gary Giddins, and Lester Bangs as my textbooks. And one of the things I’m most interested in exploring is the differences in persona, tone, and expectations among jazz, classical, and pop writing. The students agreed that it can be hip, nonchalant, to profess ignorance in a pop review, but to express ignorance in a classical review would be like admitting a mistake after invading Iraq – you’d be dead meat. A classical critic, as one grindcore fan put it (and I just learned that word today), is supposed to come off as a well-educated, middle-aged, upper class white guy who’s heard everything and has exceedingly hard-to-please taste. The classical critic rarely reveals anything about his personal life (save for his exasperating problems of CD storage). The pop critic, by contrast, is supposed to be living on the edge, going to clubs at ungodly hours, inhaling substances, living the whole rock ‘n’ roll life. The essence of rock, they claimed, is attitude. Pop critics (except in the Times) frequently write about where they’ve been, who they saw hanging there, what they were doing, and who got arrested. Pop reviews are more often about action and worldview than music.

Relationship to the “canon,” if any, is different. Jazz critics have a vast and mandatory repertoire of specific recordings they have to have heard. Imagine being a jazz critic and knowing every Coltrane disc except one: you’d be crucified. For classical critics, the canon of works is pretty fixed, though subject to ongoing debate among experts. You can get away with not knowing the Wilhelm Stenhammar piano concerti, but you’d better be able to identify every last Chopin nocturne as such. The idea of a rock canon is not entirely nonsensical, but far more personal. Everyone agreed that to be unfamiliar with Velvet Underground and Nico would generally be humiliating, though if your obsessive specialty was death metal, they said, you might get away with it. The main difference between pop versus jazz and classical seems to be that pop music is far more Balkanized into a few hundred subgenres, so that hiphop, jungle, Mbase, and grindcore fans (love the word) might possess fanatical expertise without overlapping much. With all those subgenres, pop critics also make a fetish of detailing stylistic family trees.

The relations to the people written about are very different. What’s always impressed me about jazz criticism is its underlying assumption that every figure written about is a legend, somehow larger than human in both talent and suffering. Critics write not just about Billie Holiday’s singing and recordings but about her hard life, and how the pain of her youth comes through her interpretations. I’ve read few negative jazz reviews in my life; Miles Davis may have a bad day and a rocky session, but it’s not that he’s faltering (as a classical maven would allege) – he’s wrestling with inner demons, and every setback forecasts greater glories to come. Classical critics maintain both more reverent and more condescending attitudes toward their charges. Mozart was a divine genius, not to be questioned, but Beethoven’s astounding Missa solemnis is “a profound, though deeply flawed work.” The life of a classical musician is kept scrupulously separate from his or her music, except in selected cases marked by a whiff of scandal: Wagner’s anti-semitism, Schubert’s alleged homosexuality, Strauss’s Nazi connections. Classical critics make a reputation by seeming impossible to please (why I’m in academia instead of at the Times – I’m impolitic enough to show enthusiasm). A totally positive classical review, at least in a high-class uptown paper, is about as rare as a negative jazz one.

Some of the older classical critics, in fact, like to talk about themselves as “gatekeepers” – the idea being that they should discourage every newcomer as much as possible, and if a composer succeeds in leaping over their wall of disapproval, that person has proved himself worthy of entering the canon. I consider this a stupid, pompous, anachronistic view of the critic’s role, analogous to George W. Bush’s sense of macho entitlement. And pop reviews treat their subjects as giants and targets at once, fated symbols for one part of the culture or another, but also media creations not to be taken too seriously. When John Lennon was shot, Lester Bangs wrote, “I don’t know the guy. But I do know that when all was said and done, that’s all he was – a guy.” No jazz critic would have said that about Charlie Parker. No classical critic would have said that about Mozart. But it would have been no more or less true in either case. Jazz critics, I think one could say, view the musicians they write about from below; classicals from above; pop critics as parallel equals.

Pop musicians have to be discovered young, and fare better when they die out young, too. Jazz musicians seem to get to mature at a slower rate: you see Coltrane’s name first as sideman on a Charlie Parker disc, then as equal with Miles Davis, and later fronting his own albums, sort of the way you see Marilyn Monroe do a bit part in All About Eve before she’s the star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Classical composers follow one of two invariable career trajectories: they either get scooped up by the establishment at 28 or 30 and made famous, whether anyone continues liking their music or not; or they’re ignored until they’re 60 or so and suddenly discovered as undersung geniuses. (I’m working, I reassured the students, on the latter plan.)

That’s one reason I wanted to teach this class. I think musicians in all genres buy into a whole complex set of interlocking myths invisibly woven into the genre. Why, when a composer gets lionized at 28, does he remain lionized at 45 even if his music hasn’t improved? Many composers mature and find their own voice at around age 40 or a little after; why do you never hear of 40-something composers becoming famous? What would happen if you reviewed classical music the way pop reviewers write?: talk about the scene, admit ignorance or indifference or antipathy to certain repertoires? What would happen if you wrote about pop as though it were classical?: talk about harmonic structure, compare melodies from one song to another? What if we could approach the irreverent Haydn irreverently ourselves? Viewing art forms through each other’s lenses, I think, could reveal much about our unacknowledged, even unconscious assumptions, and maybe begin to free up some of the malaise that fans of each seem to agree infect all three genres.

The “Sounds Like Now” festival coming up this week looks like old home week for the Downtown scene. Microtonalist David First and electronics maven Tom Hamilton curated the festival, and text composer Chris Mann is emceeing. The schedule, running from Thursday through Sunday, October 14 to 17, at La MaMa Etc., 74A East 4th St. in New York City, is as follows:

Thursday, Oct 14 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

Annea Lockwood

Petr Kotik

Alvin Lucier

Thomas Buckner

Friday, Oct 15 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny & Jon Gibson

Jin Hi Kim

David Behrman

Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell

Saturday Oct 16 2PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson & Peter Zummo

Robert Ashley

Jim Staley

David Rosenboom

Douglas Ewart

Saturday Oct 16 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo & Leroy Jenkins

Joshua Fried

Pauline Oliveros/Deep Listening Band

Phill Niblock

Downtown Ensemble (William Hellermann/Daniel Goode/Mary Jane Leach/Peter Zummo)

Sunday Oct 17 2PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo, Leroy Jenkins & Mark Dresser

William Duckworth/Cathedral Band

Fast Forward

Carl Stone

Nicolas Collins

Michael J. Schumacher

Sunday Oct 17 8PM

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Jon Gibson, Peter Zummo, Leroy Jenkins, Mark Dresser, & Roscoe Mitchell

David First & Tom Hamilton

Joan La Barbara

Kyle Gann

48nord & George Lewis

Morton Subotnick

That’s right, that’s yours truly in there on the final concert, and it’s my only New York performance this fall. (I have some San Francisco performances November 3 and 6 that I’ll tell you about later.) At “Sounds Like Now” I’m playing three of my Disklavier pieces, Bud Ran Back Out, Petty Larceny, and the world premiere of Unquiet Night – although if you’ve been listening to Postclassic Radio you may have already heard the last-named piece. [A Disklavier, since many people have no idea what one is, is an acoustic piano, with real strings struck by real felt hammers and vibrating in real air, played by a computer via MIDI cables. The sounds are not electronic, and do not play through loudspeakers.] So show up at La MaMa Etc., 74A East 4th St., and you’ll hear many of the stalwarts who inhabited the new-music scene of the 1980s and ‘90s with me.

“I don’t really believe in program notes, I think the music should speak for itself.” Boy, do I get this from composers a lot. I’ve made a living for 22 years from explaining music in words, and I’d say half the composers I meet consider it a dishonest living – justified only insofar as I can praise them in print and help them get future gigs. Music should speak for itself, should communicate what it’s about, and thus the veiled hostility of the statement passes without notice. When music fails to communicate, it can be the music’s fault, and it can be the listener’s. If it’s the music’s fault, then program notes are of little avail. A program note for a poor piece is a lawyer defending a guilty client. But what if the defendant is innocent, and it’s the listener’s fault?

In an audience of any size, there will be a certain proportion of well-intended people who do not process new auditory information as accurately as they do verbal and visual information. Those people appreciate, and benefit from, a nudge in some direction as to how they should understand the music they’re hearing for the first time. It doesn’t even have to be the right direction, they’ll self-correct through experience soon enough. The most gratifying comment I’ve ever gotten is, “I didn’t really know what to think about that piece until I read your review.” As Virgil Thomson so incisively wrote, “The purpose of music criticism is to aid the public in the digestion of musical works. Not for nothing is it so often compared to bile.” It is a composer’s professional deformation to forget that, for most people, hearing a new piece of music in an unfamiliar style is a rare experience for which they have not spent any time mentally preparing. You can go through your career secretly despising these people, but the composer who despises the vast body of well-intended lay listeners amply deserves to fail – and will, unless he or she succeeds in a superficial sense by clever politicking in musical society, as so many do.

There are many routes to an interest in music, and the music-should-speak-for-itself crowd inexplicably want to close down all but one. I had a student from Danbury, Connecticut, who took up a particular interest in Charles Ives because he was from Danbury. Is that an ignoble reason to make a hobby of someone’s music? Had I told the class, “Who cares what city he was from, dammit, the music should speak for itself!” – she would never really have heard Ives’s music. Program notes can put a human face on strange-sounding music. Composer Jennifer Higdon told me that she once caught 41 bluegills in a pond in Tennessee where she grew up; that may reel in a segment of the audience less impressed by the 410 composition prizes she caught later. Music also, as we all ought to have learned by now, sometimes carries an ideational content that doesn’t register with unpracticed listeners until it’s pointed out to them in words. Another student didn’t care for Cage’s music at first hearing, but became fascinated with the I Ching. Everyone rightly respects the paradigmatic experience of suddenly hearing a piece of music and being so overwhelmed that you have to know more about it, but I have to admit that not every composition I now dearly love came into my heart through that direct route. And my favorite use of program notes is for after the concert – by listeners so impressed they had to know more. Pure experience is a wonderful thing, but to have a shared artistic culture we have to fit our experiences into a narrative. Program notes can be the humble building blocks of that narrative.

So let’s correctly interpret what “the music should speak for itself” usually means: “I just want my music played, and I’m too busy and important and self-absorbed to bother helping anyone who doesn’t get it. If they’re not sophisticated enough to understand it just by listening, SCREW ‘EM!” Is that really the image you want us poor music critics to think you intend to project to the world?

I just realized that, on Postclassic Radio, I’ve been playing my own music theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull with the vocal part missing from the second, Sitting Bull scene. I must have accidentally uploaded that movement from the performance CD, which is a kind of “Music Minus One” version. (Does anyone besides me remember “Music Minus One” records, which would allow you to practice a concerto with a recorded orchestra?) I apologize for the confusion – most of all, to myself.

That piece is now followed by a beautiful 1992 work for multiple electric guitars – Sunrise over Fields of Withered Grain – by the great, undersung Paul Sturm, whose web site you should check out.

I liked one question Gwen Ifill asked Cheney and Edwards, and was disappointed neither answered it: “What’s wrong with a little flip-flopping?” I keep hoping someone will quote Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” A foolish consistency, which is the word missed by many people who quote the line. Of all the faults, misdeeds, and crimes against humanity that can be laid at George Bush’s door, for which a special roasting pit in hell is doubtless being prepared for him, what would be easier to convict him of than a foolish consistency?

Then, I guess the very fact that I would quote America’s greatest 19th-century thinker marks me as some kind of effete East-Coast elitist commie pinko Francophile child-molesting liberal. If every small mind in America votes for the guy who’s been foolishly consistent, we’re doomed.

Of all the slow, stationary, eventless recordings on Postclassic Radio, Elodie Lauten’s Harmonic Protection Circle is the slowest, most stationary, and most eventless. And absolutely gorgeous. It features the Elodie Lauten Ensemble: the composer herself on synthesizer, Jonathan Hirschman on guitar, Mustafa Ahmed on percussion, and Mathew Fieldes on contrabass. The brand new Studio 21 recording arrived in my mail last week, and is already up for your listening pleasure.

All through my avant-garde-obsessed youth I heard about the notorious Nam June Paik, but there were no recordings of his music, and, given its conceptual nature, there didn’t seem likely to be any: one of his most famous performances was to leap into the audience with a pair of scissors and cut off John Cage’s tie; another (never confirmed) was that he interrupted playing a Beethoven sonata to moon the audience; and one published score consisted of the words: “Creep into the vagina of a living whale.” However, in the early 1980s I finally ran across a record on Block Gramavision, from Germany’s prestigious René Block Gallery, titled “Klavierduett: In memoriam George Maciunas,” by Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys. It’s a three-side (the fourth record side is blank) performance that these two Fluxus artists gave to comemmorate the death of George Maciunas, Fluxus’ chief ringleader. In this crazy but strangely attractive recording, the two improvise on pianos, hit things, make mysterious noises, and mingle Gershwin’s “Summertime” with Chopin’s march from the Funeral Sonata. They decided in advance to play for 74 minutes (since Maciunas died at 47 – typical Fluxus logic), and at 74 minutes an alarm clock rings, ending the performance.

This recording, which is still obtainable on vinyl in Germany but has never made it to CD, can now be heard every 17 hours, starting this evening, on Postclassic Radio. I’ve been putting up some long pieces on the station, and this is the longest yet. That’s one of the problems in presenting new music (for example, trying to publish a book about it with an accompanying CD) – many of postclassical music’s most important strategies and innovations are length-dependent, and if you restrict yourself to pieces under, say, 15 minutes, you just can’t give a representative picture of what’s going on today. I hope listeners aren’t disappointed when a piece they don’t care for runs on forever, but I just can’t fulfill the station’s mission without adding some major works in their entirety. I’ve even been toying with the idea of uploading the five-hour 1981 recording of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano someday, or Feldman’s six-hour String Quartet II. But to kick off Postclassic Radio‘s second month, this rare Fluxus audio document of Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik is sufficiently momentous.

Winter Music, a book of the essays of John Luther Adams, has just appeared from Wesleyan University Press, with a foreword by yours truly. The title is from John Cage’s music, the publisher the same as Cage’s seminal tome Silence. Adams is the most geographically-identified of recent composers, the composer who writes from Alaska about Alaska, filling his scores with vast, white, sometimes featureless but luminous surfaces. A little reminiscent of Morton Feldman but less nettly, John writes like an artist, not analytically or even literally, but in evocative epigrams that give insight into his wonderful music:

We hear sounds in measurable space. And in physical terms, sound is audible time. But we perceive sounds as something qualitatively different, less like objects and more like forces. This dynamic quality of sound creates its own kind of space and place….

In visual space there’s a phenomenon called ganzfeld. Immersed in pure color, the viewer loses all sense of distance and direction. I long for a similar experience in music. I want to find that timeless place where we listen without memory or expectation, lost in the immeasurable space of tones.

He also writes as a concerned citizen of the world (and environmental activist by former profession) who can see things going on that we lower-48-ers can’t, and even here he writes with no journalist’s argument, but an artist’s eye:

Some say the world will end by fire. Others say by ice. Here in Alaska, the land of snow and ice, we’re beginning to feel the fire.

In the summer of 2000 the I̱upiaq community of Barrow Рthe farthest-north settlement on the mainland of North America Рhad its first thunderstorm in history. Tuna were sighted in the Arctic Ocean. No one had ever seen them this far north before.

The following winter Lake Illiamna on the Alaskan Peninsula didn’t freeze over. No one, not even the oldest Native elders, could remember this happening. In Fairbanks for the first time in memory the temperature never dropped to 40 below. Months of unseasonably warm temperatures, scant snowfall, and constantly changing winds were followed by an early spring. This was not the exhilarating explosion, the sudden violence of the sub-Arctic spring. It was the slow attrition of dripping eaves and rotting snow.

Once again this year, winter never really arrived. South central Alaska experienced a violent storm with the highest winds ever registered there. The Iditarod dogsled race had to be moved hundreds of miles north because there was not enough snow. Here in Fairbanks the mean temperature from September through February was the warmest on record. In November and again in February, we had freezing rain. As the small community of Salcha, the ice on the Tanana River broke free of the banks and jammed up, flooding nearby homes and roads. This is something that happens in April or May, not in the middle of winter.

What this all refers to, of course, is that global warming, of which we receive only vague intimations in lower latitudes (like multiple hurricanes?) is a fact of daily life nearer the poles. John’s article was completed a year ago and the news it brought depressed me then; more recently I’ve read similar descriptions in Salon and National Geographic. At a reading last night John said if he wrote the article over this year, the picture would be even darker. On the bright side, as temporary consolation while we prepare to bid farewell to our habitat planet, the book comes with a CD of three previously unreleased John Luther Adams works: Roar from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, Velocities Crossing in Phase-Space from Strange and Sacred Noise, and Red Arc/Blue Veil. This last will be up on Postclassic Radio very shortly.

I’m somewhat number-obsessed, and the core idea of my music has always been melodic loops of different (mutually prime, in fact) lengths going out of phase with each other. (This is also generally true of John Luther Adams, Mikel Rouse, and to a lesser extent Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca – a lot of the totalist composers, in fact.) And so programming a repeating playlist on Postclassic Radio offers a comforting continuity with the rest of my life. I’ve bought 500 MB of web space, which offers me about 18 hours’ worth of music, and I limit it to 17, to have enough “give” room to add new works easily.

Now, 17 is prime, and (trivially) mutually prime with 24. What I imagine (and I have no idea what people’s radio-listening habits really are) is someone getting up every morning and listening to Postclassic Radio from, say, 8 to 9 AM (or in Manhattan, 11 AM to noon). Under this listening pattern, the person will hear everything on the playlist in 17 days. Of course, if you listen two hours a day, you’ll hear everything twice. If I only programmed 16 hours’ worth, you’d hear the same music at the same time every two days (16 x 3 = 24 x 2), and at 18 hours you’d hear the same music every three days (18 x 4 = 24 x 3), so staying around 17 is crucial. Even so, one friend wrote to tell me that it seems like every time he tunes in, Tom Johnson’s Bonhoeffer Oratorium is playing, and I’ve had pretty much the same experience – with that same piece. (It’s a great piece, but I finally replaced it.) I’ve been replacing about two tracks a day on the average, and since I have between 80 and 90 tracks up, that means a complete playlist turnover every 40 to 45 days. From my vantage point, I get a little tired of hearing the same pieces over and over again, but then, I frequently have it on five or six hours a day, which I imagine greatly exceeds the listening time of the average listener. On the other hand, I’ve included a lot of tracks from the to-be-listened-to stack of CDs that perennially occupies the side of my desk, and I’m gotten familiar with a hell of a lot of music I’d been meaning to get around to for months, in some cases years. One way I look at it is that I’m paying 35 bucks a month to listen to my own CD collection. But I learn a lot.

Statistically speaking, if you listen an hour a day, you should hear each piece two to three times before it’s replaced. I’ll appreciate hearing whether people think I’m replacing pieces too quickly or too slowly.

Conventional wisdom would hold that my playlist represents only one slender strand of new music – the Downtown variety – but I think the diversity is pretty remarkable, far greater than you’d get from any similar roster of recent orchestral commissions. There is much postminimalism, much totalism, but other things that don’t fit, including quite a bit of atonal music (Petr Kotik’s Asymmetric Landing, Morton Feldman’s Flute and Orchestra, and Clarence Barlow’s Çogluotobusisletmesi, for instance). A lot of music with pop influences, and a lot of music with no pop influences at all, mostly American but some from Finland, Korea, Holland, Japan, Italy, Russia, and other countries. I recently wrote that the typical prize-winning Uptown orchestra piece is brief, hyperactive, filled with rhythmic momentum, tonal but not too tonal, and dotted with splashes of orchestral color. The “typical” Postclassic Radio piece, if there is one, is precisely the opposite: long, often nearly motionless, extremely tonal or at least limited in pitch content, and monochromatic. No wonder these composers don’t fill their bios with prizes they’ve won.

Listeners can rate the works frm one to five stars, and the ratings so far have made no sense at all. A piece that has one star one day will have five stars the next, and while some pieces I didn’t expect to be popular get five stars, others by celebrated composers, like the Feldman, will get half a star. One Mikel Rouse song gets five stars, the next half a star. So I don’t know what to think about that; I tried leaving up the more highly-rated pieces longer, but it didn’t make any sense. The statistical sample seems too small to take seriously. If my audience has little inclination to divide works on the “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” principle, I can certainly appreciate that.

Recent additions, since I last blogged about them, that might interest you: Chas Smith’s Scircura is a gorgeous continuum that I wrote about here several months ago, and I’ve been especially attentive to uploading music I’ve written about. Tom Hamilton’s Sebastian’s Shadow is a lovely electronic work based on the harmony of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue No. 4, BWV 542. Terry Riley’s Journey from the Death of a Friend is the flip-side (really) of the old Warner Brothers recording of Happy Ending. The first movement of Gloria Coates’ Symphony No. 4, if you’ll listen long enough, reveals a basis on Dido’s lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, “When I Am Laid in Earth.” I’ve added in Jeff Beal’s soundtrack to the film Pollock, which I mentioned during the Critics’ Conversation as the first postminimalist film score; I wanted to see how it would sound in the context of other postminimalist music. As a slight joke, I added Max V. Mathews’ 1961 computerized realization of “Bicycle Built for Two,” which was used in the movie 2001. And you’ve got to hear Prent Rodgers’ Resolution in Blue for slide piano, meaning a piano computer-altered so that it sounds like it’s played with a gigantic whammy bar. The diversity of Postclassical music is endless, the quality very often remarkable. And the classical mavens are all convinced it doesn’t exist.

Composer Kyle here. We just finished a very successful two days of recording sessions for my piece Long Night, which will be an upcoming release on Cold Blue records, an underground West Coast label that I’ve admired since its vinyl days. The piece is for three pianos, but since the piano parts aren’t synchronized, we recorded it with one pianist, the amazing Sarah Cahill – though on three different pianos. And we did it in the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard, which European newspapers have called acoustically the best concert hall in North America, and which is across the street from where I sit. I wrote Long Night in 1980, revised it in 1981, and it hasn’t been heard publicly since New Music America 1982. You can listen to the 1981 performance here if you want, though it sounds so inferior to the recording we just made that I’m ashamed of it now.

Anyway, we recorded all day yesterday, and gathered this morning to hear the results. The first piano tones that came over the loudspeakers were just gorgeous. Tech Director Paul LaBarbera had turned off all the air conditioners in the building for us, and we had achieved absolute silence, like an anechoic chamber; I could hear my tinnitus, which is so faint as to be drowned out by almost anything. In the playback, those pristinely recorded piano tones emerging from total silence were just delicious, like perfect blueberries in first-run maple syrup, even where Sarah was just practicing a fingering. Suddenly it didn’t matter what I had written, and I said so, and Sarah replied, “It doesn’t matter how well I played.” The piano would have sounded beautiful even if a cat had been walking on the keys. Thank goodness perfect sound conditions are so rare, or composers, arrangers of sounds, would become unnecessary – as, indeed, John Cage thought they were.

As though to demonstrate the flip-side of my argument (does the very word “flip-side” date me?), an e-mail arrives this morning announcing the appearance of Lukas Ligeti’s new web site. Ligeti is a Hungarian-American who’s performed and studied a lot in Africa, but who’s made his home in New York’s Downtown scene. His biography runs thusly:

Lukas Ligeti’s music is a unique fusion of acoustic and electronic, traditional and avantgarde, Occidental, African, and other influences. [Immediately he tells you what kind of music he writes. What a great idea!] With his uncompromising musical vision and his collaborations ranging from contemporary music groups to free-improvisors to traditional musicians, he has established himself as one of today’s foremost musical innovators.

Lukas Ligeti was born in Vienna, Austria, to Hungarian parents [one of them a famous composer named, uh… Stockhausen, I think]. He studied composition (with Erich Urbanner) and jazz drums (with Fritz Ozmec) at the Vienna Music Academy (University for Music and the Performing Arts), obtaining a Diploma in composition and a Certificate in jazz drums (1993). He also holds a Master of Arts degree from the Vienna Music Academy (thesis on “World Music and Improvised Music”, 1997), and took part in workshops led by John Zorn, George Crumb, and David Moss, and in the Darmstadt Ferienkurse.

From 1994 until 1996, he lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was a visiting composer at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. In 1998, he settled in New York City….

Ethno-musicological recordings and analyses, especially of African music, were a great influence on him from the beginning on; other areas of interest include experimental mathematics, architecture and visual art, geography and traveling, as well as sociology and politics. Musically, he is interested in creating new forms of ensemble interplay, non-tempered tunings, and the possibilities generated by electronics and by cultural exchange.

He is equally engaged in composition and in improvisation and is fond of many kinds of combination of these two extremes. An interest in jazz led him to the “downtown” New York avant-garde, and on the whole, in his attitude and development as a composer, he probably has more in common with the so-called American “mavericks” (including composers like Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, the so-called “minimalists”, John Zorn, and others) than with any European contemporary tradition.

Then, after you’ve gotten some idea what he’s about, he names the awards he’s gotten. There’s a long paragraph listing all the musicians he’s worked with. At the top of the page, this would have looked boastful, but it’s buried down at the bottom, where you’ll run into it if you’ll still interested that long. Overall the whole web site radiates enthusiasm, a sense of Ligeti’s passion for music and why he makes it the way he does. You want to hear the stuff. Compare this with any Uptown symphonist’s list of their awards and residencies, and – without any value judgment made about a single note of music – you’ll get a vivid sense of the European/Downtown eagerness for innovation and creativity versus Uptown prize-validated pretentiousness.