Maxing Out on Minimalism in Kansas City

David McIntire, Andrew Granade, Andy Lee, Scott Unrein, Jedd Schneider, and the UMKC gang have been doing magnificent work getting the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music (September 2-6) together, and I, in my role as wise WASP co-director, have been sending them good vibes and the occasional encouraging e-mail, and generally nodding sagely, even when they can’t see me. Mikel Rouse will present and talk about his films Funding and Music for Minorities; Charlemagne Palestine will perform his organ masterpiece Schlingen-Blängen; Neely Bruce will play a Tom Johnson organ piece that consists of 70 percent silence; and Sarah Cahill and I will give Dennis Johnson’s five-hour November for piano its first performance in what has to be some 47 years. In addition, Sarah will play the following concert:

Hans Otte: Das Buch der Klange (excerpt)
Harold Budd: Children on the Hill (long version, transcribed by me from a 1982 performance at New Music America)
Mamoru Fujieda: Patterns of Plants (excerpt)
Bunita Marcus: Julia
Meredith Monk: St. Petersburg Waltz
Elodie Lauten: Adamantine Sonata
Eve Beglarian: Night Psalm (world premiere)
John Adams: China Gates
Harold Budd: Children on the Hill (short version, from the recording)
Terry Riley: Be Kind to One Another

Kansas City’s NewEar ensemble will perform the following pieces:

Tom Johnson: Twelve for solo piano
Terry Riley: Autumn Leaves for flute, violin, alto sax, bass clarinet, cello, piano, percussion (the piece just after In C, only heard once since the ’60s)
Phill Niblock: Tow by Tom
Vladimir Tosic: Arios for cello and piano
Barbara Benary: Sun On Snow for soprano and mixed ensemble
Jakob ter Veldhuis: The Body of Your Dreams for piano and boombox
Tom Johnson: Narayana’s Cows for flute, violin, alto sax, bass clarinet, cello, piano, percussion (Tom Johnson, narrator)

Tom Johnson and Robert Carl will give keynote addresses. And there will be 49 papers presented, on topics from Feldman to Eric Richards to David Lang to Phill Niblock to Jim Fox to Julius Eastman and many others. I’m excited. The papers are listed below, in approximately the order presented, though we’re still moving things around. (Note the paper by my friend Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic: she’s reporting on a Serbian composer, Vladan Radovanovic, who claims to have been the first minimalist.) Or you can just go see everything at the official web site and register to show up and join us. The student rate, by the way, gets you into everything for 90 bucks, so it’s a steal. 

‘The music you write is about the composers you like’: Intertextuality in the work of Louis Andriessen – Maarten Beirens (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Metamorphic Meanings? Exploring Glass’s Intertextual Soundtracks – Tristian Evans (Bangor University, Wales, UK)

‘Taking a Line for a Second Walk’: Mapping Intertextuality in Nyman – Pwyll ap Sion (Bangor University, Wales, UK)

Phill Niblock and identity in reductionism -  Richard Glover (University of Huddersfield)

Phill Niblock: Documentation, Analysis, Listening – Keith Potter (Goldsmith College, London)

Minimalism and the Moving Image: The films and music of Phill Niblock – Rich Housh (University of Kansas)

Same Music, Different Perceptions? Steve Reich’s Six Pianos and Six Marimbas as Case Study – Kyle Fyr

Tehillim and the Fullness of Time – Gretchen Horlacher (Indiana University)

Early Steve Reich and Techno-utopianism – Kerry O’Brien (Indiana University)

Perceptible Processes in Reich’s Ostinati: Arch Form and Multiple Downbeats in
Music for Eighteen Musicians – Brad Osborn (University of Washington)

Samples and the Material they create in Steve Reich’s City Life – Abigail Shupe (University of Western Ontario)

Good Trains and Bad: Steve Reich and the Holocaust in American Musical Life – Sumanth Gopinath (University of Minnesota)

Images of Lincoln: Glass’s Minimalist Contribution to American Historical Memory
of the Civil War – Thomas J. Kernan (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music)

Meaning in minimalist opera: Investigating the subtext of Doctor Atomic – Sean Atkinson (University of Texas at Arlington)

Portraits of the Chinese Landscape in John Adams’s Nixon in China
Timothy Johnson (Ithaca College)

From Arles to zaftig: an introduction to the operas of Michael Gordon – Jedd C. Schneider (University of Missouri – Kansas City)
 
Disorientation and Loss as a Response to Arvo Pärt’s festina lente – David Dies

“They Just Go Round and Round”: Circularity and Dystopia in The Truman Show – Rebecca M. Doran Eaton (The University of Texas at Austin, Texas State University-San Marcos)

A Postminimalist Analysis of Julius Eastman’s Crazy Nigger – Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek (University of Iowa)

Julius Eastman’s Musical Worlds – Ellie M. Hisama (Columbia University)

Becoming Temporal and Entropic: The aesthetics of time in Tenney’s Having Never
Written a Note for Percussion and Robert Smithson’s earth work – Joseph Di Ponio

David Borden’s Double Portrait: Minimalist Aesthetic With Linear Time – R. Andrew Lee (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

A Personal Encounter with the Shaman of Vertical Temporality: Charlemagne
Palestine – Phillip Henderson (The University for the Creative Arts)

La Monte Young: Time and identity of the work – Jean-Pierre Caron

Reconstructing November – Kyle Gann (Bard College)

Mikel Rouse’s Failing Kansas – David McIntire (University of Missouri at Kansas City)

An Ethnography of Acoustical Positivism – Jeremy Grimshaw (Brigham Young University School of Music)

La Monte Young’s 1960’s: The Black LP – David McCarthy (University of Minnesota)

Process as Means and End in Minimalist and Post-Minimalist Music – Galen Brown

Prime Times – Paul Epstein

Beyond Drumming: Process in the Music of David Lang – Kevin Lewis (College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati)

Metal as a Gradual Process: Minimalist Rhythmic Practices in the Music of Dream Theater – Greg McCandless (Florida State University)

David Lang’s Postminimalist Work: the so-called laws of nature and the Influence of
Steve Reich – Andrew M. Bliss (University of Tennessee at Martin)

The Fear of Forgetting: Decasia and Contemporary “Memory Culture” – Jason Hibbard (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music)

Morton Feldman, Proto-Minimalist
Brett Boutwell (Louisiana State University)

Dialectic of Dialects: American Minimalist Composers Talk Tradition – Sara Melton (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music)

Minimal Music and the Influence of Abstract Expressionism – Elisa Weber (Florida State University)

Painting in Time and Music through Space: A Comparative Analysis of the Music of
Phill Niblock and the Art of Ad Reinhart, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, and Carl Andre – Erika King (Bennington College)

An artistic paradigm realised: Negative space, musical minimalism and
compositional technique – Christopher Garrard (University of Durham)

Speaking Through Singing: The Spoken In the Vocals of Steve Reich’s Different
Trains and Arnold Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 – Andrew McIntyre (Indiana University)

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” – John Pymm (University of Wolverhampton)

The Reductionist Model as the Forerunner of Minimalist “Action”: Six Two-part Chorales by Vladan Radovanovic – Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic (University of the Arts, Belgrade)

Jim Fox’s The City the Wind Swept Away: Considering Juxtaposition and Decay as
Structure – Scott Unrein (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

Sample Savvy: Identification and Structure in Electronic Dance Music – Travis A. Allen (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Phasing and Form – Ryan Tanaka

Maximizing Minimalism in Michael Torke’s Four Proverbs – Kathy Biddick Smith

Eric Richards and the Empirical Search for Truth and Beauty - 
Eric Smigel (San Diego State University)

The String Theory of Repetition in Sound: From the mid-20th century to the Post digital – Greg Shapley (University of Technology, Sydney)

Young Avant-Gardists at Play

Anyone remember this?

Dennisletter.jpg
This is the submission under the name “Dennis” in the 1963 book An Anthology edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, and of course it’s Dennis Johnson. (Sorry, I have an obsessive personality, and right now the latest of many, many obsessions is Dennis Johnson. Next up: Robert Ashley.) You may recall the book as a collection of outrageous avant-garde gestures and essays (I saw a copy on sale at Dia Beacon recently with a hefty price tag), and this letter from Dennis came as a loose piece of paper in an envelope pasted on one of the pages. I bought the book when I was in high school, probably 1970 or ’71, and have guarded my copy carefully for four decades. I didn’t instantly connect “Dennis” with Johnson, but the all-caps handwriting is identical to that on the score to November. Also, Young mentioned in his semi-famous “Lecture 1960” that Johnson had written him, in response to a famous Cage story, that “THERE’S TOO MUCH WORLD IN THE EVIL,” and that line comes from the back of this document. The envelope bears a postmark of March 11, 1960, and Dennis mentions on the back that he’s 21, which, assuming it’s not a joke, places his birthdate at 1938 or ’39 – the first mention I’ve seen of his age. He doesn’t have an entry in Grove, nor even in Wikipedia.
There are other references to Cage. “SOUNDED SO SADWIRROWTLEE” is doubtless a reference to a satire of Japanese poetry Cage included in Silence (1960). In the upper lefthand corner is a rather insulting reference to Stockhausen, and on the back Dennis mentions a desire to spit at Stockhausen (“YOU SEE I’M FULL OF DESIRES”). La Monte went to Darmstadt in 1959, and somewhere he mentions that Johnson was going to accompany him, but caught pneumonia and had to stay in New York with electronic composer Richard Maxfield, so he had already missed getting his wish. In March 1960, Terry Jennings was 19, La Monte 24, and Dennis apparently 21, and their lives clearly revolved around Cage and Stockhausen, with a curious mixture of attraction and antipathy for the two of them. La Monte had written his Trio for Strings in 1958, and, inspired by that, Johnson wrote November the following year. Later in 1960 La Monte started his avant-garde series in Yoko Ono’s loft, and Downtown music was born. 
This silly letter has stuck in my mind since I was younger than the brash avant-gardist who penned it, and it’s funny to think that 40 years later I would become so involved with the work of this irreverent youngster. I’m in love with November; I’m in the process of making my own four-hour recording of it, so I’ve been listening to it at home as music, and not just as a tape-hissy historical document with a dog barking in the background. (My dog Gita, named for the woman who taught Cage about Indian philosophy, responds in kind whenever the dog appears.) Forgive me for being so coy with the results, but I don’t want to steal too much thunder from our premiere at the minimalism conference. Give me a couple of months, and you’ll hear more about November, and the guy who wrote the above letter, than you ever thought you’d learn. Meanwhile, I’m all caught up in the mindset in which minimalism was born: not the Famous Four minimalists, but the pre-famous three from California, Johnson, Jennings, and Young.

Notating Dennis

I’ve come up with what I think is a comfortable performance notation for Dennis Johnson’s November. It’s all noteheads in a pulseless continuum, but I needed to preserve his motivically significant phrasing without imposing any kind of rhythmic grid. So I made a Sibelius score of 5/4 measures, each lasting ten seconds at 8th-note = 60, and within that placed each note where its attack point comes on the tape, to the nearest 16th-note. Then I went through and deleted all rests, stems, and bar lines, reducing the music to stemless noteheads. The result is pretty much in proportional notation; Sibelius shifts the rhythmic spacing for readability, but I used small-value rests throughout to squeeze the music into relative space-time uniformity, certainly close enough, I think, for intuitive performance purposes. (If there’s a way to make Sibelius absolutely proportional, I’d love to hear it.) Hoping you can read it squeezed into this space, here’s a sample of the result (each system represents one minute):

November45.jpg

And here’s an mp3 of this passage in the original 1962 recording so you can compare. (I suppose you might have to reopen Postclassic in an additional browser window to listen and follow along at once.) This is one of my favorite moments in the performance, where the relatively dense (by ’50s minimalism standards) section on the dominant of G# minor gives way to a kind of beatific deceptive cadence and much slower material. Each section of the piece, each tonality, has its own atmosphere and tempo that seems drawn from the intervals played around with.

And that’s the problem: you can’t gather that from the original notation. The first three systems above are all drawn from this little bit of Johnson’s score labeled IIIa and IIIb:

NovemberIIIa.jpg

Wherever this material recurs, it’s the fastest part of the piece, with a kind of anxious melody leading down from F# to D# to C#. In some notes he apparently made later in the 1980s, Johnson singles this material out to try to figure out what his logical process was, which was a kind of ABACABACDCDB, and so on, among closely related figures. The E major material that follows, on the other hand, doesn’t appear in the manuscript score at all. The piece is intended to be improvised from the scores, and needn’t duplicate the tape; in fact, an alleged four hours is missing from the tape. So neither the score nor the tape is sufficient to construct a performance. Using the score, a pianist could play the work, but only after considerable study of the available 112 minutes on the tape, to find out how Johnson moved from one section to another and how he characterized the material in each section. It’s a peculiarly hybrid form of improvisation, in which you’re limited to what’s on the page, but the page isn’t enough. Hopefully my transcription will yield up enough analytical insight to resurrect some version of the whole thing.

All Politics Is Local

I live in New York’s 20th congressional district, upon which the eyes of the nation are riveted at the moment as Democrat Scott Murphy and Republican Jim Tedisco battle it out to fill Kirsten Gillibrand’s empty seat. Many are trying to make this a referendum on the Obama administration. But the truth is, nothing Obama has done since taking office could have swayed any vote in my county one way or the other. Half the county is local rednecks descended from families who’ve lived here forever, and they despise the other half: New York cityfolk who moved up here from Manhattan, along with academics like me at the local colleges. The cops are all Republican. Get stopped for speeding, and if you can prove your area code isn’t 212, you might get let off. Recently at a political rally, a woman Democrat started arguing with a Republican man, and the Republican punched her in the nose: the police, of course, arrested the woman for disturbing the peace, and the Republican judge ruled against her. Bard students peacefully protested after the 2004 election, and police wrestled them to the ground, after which the local Republican judge threw the book at them. At a city meeting at my town, a distinguished older gay citizen (formerly from the city, of course) spoke and got called “faggot” by one of the police, who hustled the gay man off to jail for the crime of speaking his mind – and the worse crime of not having originally been from around here.

So the district is divided just about exactly in half between long-time locals and displaced New Yorkers and academics. Who everyone voted for could have been predicted months ago, or years. (Democrat Gillibrand, whom I like, did well here by courting the NRA) The only insight one could possibly wring from this election is what the current proportion of rednecks and city folk is – a matter of some interest to locals, perhaps, but one that sheds no light whatever on the public reaction to Obama. 
A neighbor put up a huge hand-painted sign up on his property in November that said, “NOBAMA.” I thought of countering with one that read, “TediscNO.”

Theory Wonk Post

October is the cruelest month. Or rather, late October/early November: my first-year students know diatonic chords and a few non-chord tones, but it’s awfully difficult to find pieces of music (even hymns!) devoid of accidentals for people still stymied by secondary dominants. One piece that I’ve found wonderful for teaching around Halloween is Barber’s Adagio for Strings – I’m not a fan of Barber or the piece, but they all know it by heart, and the film industry has done very well by it. And a lot of it stays in B-flat minor and teaches the 4-3 suspension ad nauseum:

Adagio1.jpg
Also, that last chord in the fourth measure is good for driving home the point that inversions matter. Barber uses it all over the place, and as a major 7th chord with the third in the bass and seventh in the melody, the root gets a little buried, for a bittersweet effect that feels both D-flat major and F minor. No wonder it’s laid over so many muted scenes of handsome young men dying in battle. The chord in that position comes back over and over, including at the climax (third, fifth, and seventh chords here):
Adagio2.jpg
Plus, the climactic chord progression here, though it strays outside the key, pretty much runs through half the circle of fifths in the flat direction: Gb, Cb7, Fb = E, A7, D, B (instead of the expected G), C, F – and you’re back at the dominant. So I get to demonstrate how comforting it is to keep moving toward the flat side of the key. That opening 4-3 suspension, with its repetitious iv7-V chord movement, comes back eight times in one form or another (six of them literal) in seven slowly creeping minutes, which is partly why I don’t much respect the piece – Barber stumbled across a nice opening gesture and milked it for more than it was worth. But the kids learn, I think, that knowing how to use common harmonies effectively can become a well-remunerated skill in the film industry. Perhaps other theory profs might benefit from the suggestion.