I hope that the music world has been focusing plenty of attention on Sarah Cahill’s recent concert at San Quentin of works Henry Cowell wrote while he was incarcerated there. The more I read about it, the more historic it sounds, not only in terms of an understanding of Cowell’s life, but also in terms of touching the musically talented inmates held there now. Apparently there’s a long tradition of music as an outlet for prisoners there, Cowell being only the most celebrated (if that is the proper word yet) example.

Minimalists in the news: The Society for Minimalist Music now has a Facebook page, where the Society’s events will be publicized along with various performances and analyses of minimalist music. (I am on Facebook under an assumed name, so you won’t know me when you see me there.) The buzz at the moment is about Tom Johnson’s series of radio programs about composers of his generation, Music by My Friends. Not mentioned on the Facebook page yet, though it should be, is a festival this weekend at Wright State University, “Steve Reich and the Heritage of Minimalism.”

Juhani Nuorvala tells me that my Finnish debut, his playing of Fugitive Objects, went well. But he adds, “the problem with these microtonal concerts is that the intervals are so small there’s never enough time for a decent drink.”

(Sigh.)

I find out too late to make the trip, but Juhani Nuorvala informs me that he’s playing my retuned keyboard piece Fugitive Objects on a program of experimental music in Helsinki tomorrow. There’s also music by Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Roger Smalley, Maija Hynninen, Timo Tuhkanen, and others, plus a celebration of Alvin Lucier that extends through the 26th. Helsinki, of course, will be the site of the 2015 minimalism conference, and I’m much looking forward to being there myself in a year and a half.

Pardon a little self-indulgence, but wow, what a great gig I had in Buffalo today. It was a Gann/Ives program at the Unitarian Universalist Church; Paula McGirr sang my song “Faith” (which she’d sung 25 years earlier) and Ives’s “Serenity,” and Daniel Bassin conducted The Unanswered Question and my Transcendental Sonnets, with the UUCB Choir and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic. TS was a stretch for the choir, but they sang their hearts out, were totally focused, the momentum grew with each movement, and it was one of those occasions in which I was touched deep down by the emotionality of my own music. One thing I loved was that the Buffalo News critic said in an advance article that the piece might remind listeners of Benjamin Britten. I’m proud of the fact that I can use ostinatos of seven against eleven going out of phase, quintuplet polyrhythms, postminimalist structures of tritone-related harmonies, and still pass as a conservative. And quite a few singers told me afterward what I’m used to hearing from performers: “At first I thought the music was impossible and you were asking too much from us, but then I suddenly got a feel for how to do it.”

I have two public gigs this month. The first is this Sunday, Jan. 12, at 2, when I will appear on a panel at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum called “John Cage and the Contemporary Cultural Landscape,” being presented in connection with an art exhibit on the theme of silence. I appear to be the only musicologist, along with featured artists Xaviera Simmons and Simon Blackmore, and Fluxus curator Jon Hendricks. The Aldrich is at 258 Main Street in Ridgefield, CT.

The more ego-gratifying event will be a performance of my Transcendental Sonnets the following Sunday, Jan. 19, also at 2 PM. Dan Bassin, who graduated from Bard’s master’s conducting program and who now directs the U. of Buffalo orchestra, will conduct the UUCB Choir and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, 695 Elmwood Avenue. It’s only the second performance with full orchestral accompaniment, the first having been the Indianapolis premiere in 2002. The Transcendentalists having broken off from the Unitarians, I like to think of this as something of a rapprochement.

Make sure you don’t miss David First’s cosmic and bumptiously entertaining article “The Entertainer” that went up on New Music Box today. Along with his own personal view of music history, it’s a plea for composers to start making music that actually heals people and makes life better, a return to the Renaissance concept of music as magic. As someone who’s followed David’s career closely for a quarter-century, I can attest that this is an endpoint he’s been visibly and aurally heading towards for decades. And I’m very sympathetic. It was reading about the astrological healing music of the 15th-century Marsilio Ficino that led me to writing The Planets, and I have bought and tried out Chinese healing CDs that are supposed to lower your blood pressure, balance yin and yang, and stuff like that. But in my own music I’ve always been content with metaphor, ambience, and suggestion; David’s actually hoping to rearrange your molecules. Somebody’s gotta try it.

UPDATE: Also, make sure you listen to the drone piece clickable at the top of the article. It made very cool interactions with my tinnitus, seeming to draw my usual drone pitches into it and make them go in and out, neutralizing them at times. It’s the first time I’ve ever noticed my tinnitus while listening to music and could actually enjoy it.

From my minimalism seminar, I received analysis papers on Reich’s Double Sextet, Dan Becker’s Gridlock, Rzewski’s Coming Together, Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Fratres, Laurie Spiegel, and Mikel Rouse’s Dennis Cleveland. My 20th/21st-century history class yielded papers on Ives; Laurie Anderson; Julius Eastman (an analysis of Evil Nigger); a comparison of Emeralds, Eliane Radigue, and La Monte Young as drone groups/composers; Steve Reich (by a kid who had sworn he had no interest in minimalism); Cage as postmodernist; Henry Flynt and Milton Babbitt compared (!); and text usage in Schoenberg, Berio, and Ashley. I have certainly taught my share of Beethoven, 19th-century, and Renaissance counterpoint classes, but I spent this semester doing what I spent my life training to do, which is an opportunity not to be sneezed at.

It is instructive and often gratifying to see what my students choose to write about, for I give them wide latitude. That their choices show evidence of my influence is rarely the correct assumption. When I started to bring up Becker’s Gridlock, the student who wrote that paper instantly begged me not to analyze the piece in class, because he had his heart set on writing his final paper about it. The violinist who wrote about Coming Together had played in it many times before taking my class. Henry Flynt was not someone I had thought of mentioning. Two students in the history class brought up Julius Eastman before I did, and regaled me with the story of how he took off a man’s clothes during a performance of Cage’s Songbooks; I enjoyed responding, “Yeah, I was there.” Some of them harbor their own obsessions with exactly the history of music I’m most involved with, and I can’t always tell how much they connect me with it. It is certainly reassuring, though, to see young people independently attaching tremendous importance to the same things that were important to me.

Holy shit. Critic Steve Smith of the Times has proclaimed Dennis Johnson’s November, which I reconstructed and Andrew Lee recorded on Irritable Hedgehog, as the number one best classical recording of 2013. Of all of the ventures I’ve taken on in my life, I would not have picked this one to garner as much public resonance as it’s received. I was talking to my good friend, radio personality, and songwriter extraordinaire David Garland about it recently, and pointed out that I had also resurrected Harold Budd’s Children on a Hill, which is incredibly beautiful. “Incredibly beautiful by itself is never enough,” he said. There’s something about Dennis Johnson being an underappreciated underdog, he thought, that made a story that resonates with people. It’s not just that November‘s a wonderful piece, but that it disappeared for fifty years, that it anticipated so many of aspects of minimalism, and that Dennis didn’t get credit for all that. The public (and critics) don’t just want great music, they want a stunning narrative to go with it. If I go down in history as primarily the resurrector of November, I will be very disappointed, but it will make a certain kind of sense.

[I should clarify that while Steve Smith does write for the Times, this particular list appeared in Time Out.]

I took my boxes, paper, empty wine bottles, and what have you to the local recycling place after Christmas. The overweight old guy who runs the plant directed me to put all my trash in the garbage because the huge recycling bins were too full – the amount of recyclables people had brought in were off-the-chart voluminous. Obviously there had been a ton of Christmas presents locally (and it is a fairly upscale neighborhood). I faintly joked, “Well, I guess the economy must not be too bad.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, “there’s nothing wrong with the economy. People who want to work are going to work, and those who don’t want to work aren’t going to, whatever the economy’s doing.”

I had no ready answer to this, and he pressed me: “Don’t you think that’s the case?”

Wanting to disagree with him without being rude, I finally said, “Well, I don’t want to work, and I’m working.”

He said, “Yeah, I’m working. And I’m going to be 74 next month!”

I have nothing to add to that that you can’t as easily supply yourself. Happy new year.

There are authors of true originality in whom the least boldness offends because they have not first flattered the tastes of the public and have not served it the commonplaces which it is used to; it was in the same way that Swann roused M. Verdurin’s indignation. In Swann’s case as in theirs, it was the novelty of his language that convinced one of the darkness of his intentions.
– Proust, Swann’s Way

The semester never rounds off to an end; it unravels. At some point you realize you’ve lost your students’ attention; their roommates have scheduled their ride home during your final class in which you were going to sum everything up, or else they’re skipping in favor of the graduation barbecue and their summer job; their final paper topics are not what you’d hoped, revealing that they weren’t on the same wavelength as you after all; a couple of kids, sometimes the most eloquent, freak out or overdose and disappear from class; you yourself are too harried by student concerts and conferences to prepare an adequate lecture; hasty requests for incompletes are e-mailed by young scholars whom you will not see again. And so in the penultimate week you quit kidding yourself and start closing up shop, shedding your expectations for even the most formerly gratifying semester as if it were an alcoholic houseguest who was so charming earlier in the evening, but now must just be trundled off out of sight as discreetly and safely as possible, and in the last moments only you and a couple of colleagues are left to stare at each other sardonically as the whole thing fizzles.

Over at New Music Box, Frank Oteri, back from his world travels, finally weighs in with his own impression of the ISCM festival in Vienna. He emphasizes (and possibly exaggerates) my slender role there, and says very nice things about me, and I’m flattered. He writes, however, that some people “had their feathers ruffled” by me, and I’m a little sensitive these days about getting trapped in the feather-ruffling meta-narrative. I sometimes think people get shocked when I open my mouth because they’re trained to think that’s the proper response. I used to occasionally ruffle some feathers, and I’m proud that I did – much prouder than had I been some high-falutin’ whore for the status quo – but I’d rather emphasize that it’s been many years since I attended an event with any intent of antagonizing anyone. In the ISCM case, several other people equally ruffled feathers, and many people present expressed agreement with even the most radical things I’d said. The scholars who brought me in, Christian Utz and Nina Polaschegg, seemed to intend me to play a certain role, which I played, as did Sandeep Bhagwati, who was likewise calculated to express a non-Eurocentric viewpoint. It would be far more accurate to say that Christian and Nina ruffled some feathers by inviting me and Sandeep (and some other non-Eurocentrics) into this heavily Germanic and conventional context. In addition, a draft of my paper was published, before I arrived, in the accompanying Osterreichische Musik Zeitschrift, so people knew exactly what I was going to say before my flight touched ground in Vienna. Someone on the panel even quoted a line of mine from that publication that I had omitted when I gave the talk. In other words, I pretty much said what my hosts requested I say, and certainly surprised no one.

I just don’t want people thinking I show up at events and start shouting at people and kicking over the potted plants and insulting my hosts and making contradictions for contradiction’s sake. At this point in my life I attend these events for the pleasure of getting a vacation to someplace exotic, or else for money. I am who I am, I’ve had the experiences I’ve had, and I’m through trying to prove anything. Music composition is such a warped world these last few decades, that it’s easy to get some composers all riled up just by telling the simple truth. (Also, I admit, I tend to say things clearly, and without the accustomed obfuscations and academic qualifications – but that’s my journalistic training, and I refuse to lose it. There are a lot of scholars who’d piss you off if you could tell what the hell they were talking about.) So, yes, a lot of composers these days are resentful about what the world has become*, and deeply irritated by the fact that people like me exist, who describe the world as it is – and my presence, genial and mild-spoken as I am, might indeed ruffle their feathers. But the only way I could prevent that would be to stay home.

*Or, more likely, resent that the world never became what their delusional educations taught them it ought to become.

UPDATE: Corey Dargel comments on Frank’s article with a wonderful takedown of what he calls “Damnstadt”: “The opposite of ‘popular’ is not ‘inscrutable,’ and the opposite of ‘muzak’ is not ‘etudes.'” That’s feather-ruffling, if you needed a comparison example, and well done, too.

FURTHER UPDATE: Alex Ross says I was merely making waves. I’m always happy to make waves.

Composer Martin Bresnick gave a composers’ forum at Bard tonight that was absolutely fabulous. He played recordings of the most compelling music I’d yet heard of his – Every Thing Must Go for sax quartet, Prayers Remain Forever for cello and piano, Ishi’s Song for piano, and some faculty played his *** for clarinet, viola, and piano – and his manner of explaining his music was understated, humble, yet inspiring. When someone commented with surprise on the simplicity of his recent pieces, he replied, “I don’t write ‘modern music.’ I write my own music,” and I silently thought, “Yes! Yes! Yes! This is exactly what our students need to hear!” It renewed my faith in the value of bringing composers to talk to students.

But what moves me to write is a story my colleague John Halle afterward told me he’d heard about the composer Ben Weber. Maybe someone can confirm it. Weber (1916-1979) was an American twelve-tone composer who managed to make the technique sound energetic and jaunty; I particularly admire his Piano Concerto, and he seems all but forgotten today, partly because he worked as a copyist rather than in academia. So the story was, apparently Aaron Copland [or apparently Virgil Thomson – see comments] met Ben Weber. Both were gay. Copland started out, “So, Mr. Weber, I hear you’re ‘one of us.'” “That’s right, Mr. Copland,” Weber said. “And I hear you write twelve-tone music.” “Yes, that’s true too, Mr. Copland.” “Well,” Copland replied, “…you’ll have to make a choice.”

It had to be the ’50s; gay twelve-toners were not so rare from the ’60s on (and Copland later went dodecaphonic himself). But it encapsulates a certain moment in American music.