As late as 1986, the year before his death, he confessed, “I have no complaints about my career, but I always wondered why it really doesn’t take hold.” (H/T David Beardsley) It was later, in April of 1987, by the way, that I wrote in the Village Voice that "some people consider [Feldman] the world's greatest living composer." He read it, and died in August. … [Read more...]
Word.
Today's Pearls Before Swine: … [Read more...]
Making the World Safe for Julius
I have just received my own copy of the new book about Julius Eastman: Gay Guerrilla, edited by Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach. I'm afraid my own contribution to it is a little perfunctory, probably containing nothing that you haven't already read in my blog or in the liner notes to the New World CD. I had attempted to do some musical analysis and then found I was crowding someone else's territory, and so retreated into my moment of fame as the author of Julius's obituary. But Renée's biographical chapter, which she gave a presentation … [Read more...]
Cribbing from Frankie
I have never been one to post lists of what I'm listening to lately, for quite a number of reasons. One is that it would often be embarrassing. Right now I'm driving around listening to old Frank Sinatra records from the fifties. I feel like my music needs occasional infusions of vernacular music, specifically music that was tremendously popular at some point, music that people paid for because it was attractive and entertaining. I can supply the complicated cross-rhythms and microtonal voice-leading myself, but I need some DNA from the … [Read more...]
Boulez est mort
I have little to say, but I couldn't pass up the chance to use a headline I've been holding in reserve for three decades. When I interviewed Pierre Boulez in Chicago in 1987, we touched on his notorious 1952 article "Schoenberg est mort," and I asked him if someone would someday need to write an article "Boulez est mort." He laughed, and said, "Maybe I should write it myself." And then he lived another 28 years. A lot of his music that we studied closely back in the day I find forgettable, but, oddly, I was just thinking yesterday how much I … [Read more...]
Technically Definable, Therefore Existent
Having been unexpectedly drawn into writing here about grid-pulse postminimalism, I've decided to publish my most important article on the topic here, because the book it's in is prohibitively expensive, and I need people to be able to refer to it to see exactly what I'm talking about. It's from the Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, which I coedited with Pwyll Ap Sion and Keith Potter, and the succinct title of the article is "A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, its Characteristics, and its … [Read more...]
The Perennial Fiction of Nature
I found something I liked yesterday in an interview with Robert Wilson: He eschews “the lie” of naturalism on stage and sees artificiality as “more honest”. Hence he was a perfect fit with Lady Gaga, herself a master of avant-garde showmanship. It nudges me to write about something I've been intending to ever since the minimalism conference in Helsinki. Composer Matthew Whittall interviewed me onstage prior to the concert of my music. I forget what he had asked, and this bit I rescued from a Finnish Radio broadcast didn't include the … [Read more...]
Screw Conventions
Liturgy's new album, The Ark Work, wins the number one "avant" album of 2015 over at Rolling Stone. They even mention John Luther Adams in the description. It is a remarkably original album, strongly compositional, and apparently controversial for ignoring some of the conventions of black metal. … [Read more...]
Smyth: Early, Late, and Best
I've found what I think is the best available music by Ethel Smyth: this recording of her Serenade in D (1890) and Double Concerto for Violin and Horn (1927). (Pardon the generic suffragette image on the CD cover, kind of a cheap shot.) Curiously, the Serenade marked her debut in the London music world, and the Double Concerto was one of her last works as she succumbed to deafness. Her Mass is magnificent, but liturgical works don't leave as much room for personality. The Serenade is melodious and varied enough that I'd rather hear it than … [Read more...]
Not Who We Were
You know, continuing the thought from last post, my generation of composers (Downtowners at least) was the "no guilty pleasures" generation. For some reason I associate the phrase first with Anthony Coleman and a subsection of Downtown improvisers, but I remember the slogan becoming quite common circa 1990. "No guilty pleasures" meant that any music we liked, we were going to like openly and use as perfectly legitimate source material and models for our music, whether it was cartoon music, easy listening, C&W, space age bachelor pad music, … [Read more...]
Misreading
Please don't read this unless you read me regularly. I had gotten my blog readership down to about 150, 200 hits a day, and the commenters are almost all regulars, and I'm comfortable with that, because I can't explain my entire philosophy of life in every post. But for some inscrutable reason my recent anecdote about a student composer concert took off like wildfire, and was read by thousands of people. I always noticed, as a critic, that people have an amazing capacity to convince themselves, when they read something, that it says what they … [Read more...]
Bringing the World’s Most Difficult Quartet to Life
The intrepid Kepler Quartet is trying to finish their recording of the complete string quartets of Ben Johnston. Ben's health is failing rapidly, it seems, and the project has taken on a race-against-time quality. This is possibly the most ambitious string quartet project in history. They've got the 6th, 7th, and 8th quartets to go, and the 7th has a reputation as the most difficult quartet ever written: the third movement, based on a 183-pitch row in the viola with no repetitions, employs more than 1200 pitches to the octave: I haven't … [Read more...]
What We’ve Come To
Yesterday I attended a concert of music by student composers. None of the pieces were atonal. None were minimalist. None were postminimalist. None were spectralist. None were written according to any kind of system. All except one had big romantic gestures. Chords crashed down in the piano. If there was a cello, which there usually was, it came barreling up off the C-string into its highest register and then played harmonics. Everything was big, impassioned, virtuoso gestures. And before, during, and after the concert the faculty ran around … [Read more...]