Two books I've read recently had a notable impact on me. One was Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford) by Douglas Shadle, who's at Vanderbilt. It's a history of the relationships among 19th-century American composers, critics and conductors, and particularly of the Europhile bias American composers had to face at every step. Music critics were enamored of what came to be called The Beethoven Problem: a composer of symphonies had to both imitate and expand on the Master's principles. … [Read more...]

This week, for the first time, I analyzed Ethel Smyth's music in my 19th-century harmony class. I used the Kyrie from her 1893 mass as well as the beautiful slow movement of her Second Piano Sonata, written in 1877 when  she was only 19: I found her use of the German sixth to pivot between Db major and F minor rather original. I also used, in addition to Rachmaninoff's First Piano Sonata slow movement, the intro to the slow movement of his Third Piano Concerto. I find Rachmaninoff's harmony subtle and quite innovative; he's not all all … [Read more...]

The major thrill of my trip to Santa Barbara last week was the chance to spend time with the extraordinary composer Clarence Barlow, who kindly took off an entire day to spend with me (click to focus, dammit): I got to tell him that the familiarity with, and ability to pronounce, his piece Çoǧluotobüsişletmesi is my litmus test for whether someone is a serious new-music maven. (He was impressed with my pronunciation.)   … [Read more...]

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One of the things that surfaced upon cleaning out my mother's house was a small garment that I apparently wore as a toddler. It has, on the front, a symbol of a football and the letters SMU: And, on the back, another football and some stitched words: "Gonna Be a Football Hero." I was named for Kyle Rote, who was quarterback for Southern Methodist University in the early 1950s. I am as clumsy as anyone I know, sucked at sports, and have never felt at home in the physical world. And my earliest enthusiasms, from an age hardly older … [Read more...]

Death is not taking a holiday. I learned on my way to California that my good friend Martha Herr died on Halloween. She had survived breast cancer twice, and this time succumbed to a brain tumor. She was a phenomenal singer, and though she started out working with the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo, she spent the bulk of her career teaching at The University of São Paulo, where she became the world's leading authority on Portugese diction for singers. She and her then-husband John Boudler commissioned an early work from me, Cherokee Songs … [Read more...]

Next week I'll be in Santa Barbara giving the Karl Geiringer Lectures, named for a famous musicologist who taught there, one (public) on microtonality, and the other (for musicologists) about what we can learn about Ives's compositional process from his sketches. The latter is mostly about the First Piano Sonata, since we have many more preliminary sketches for that than for the Concord, and there's really only one page I'm discussing at length: the presumptive first sketch written at Pine Mountain, CT, and dated Aug. 4, 1901. But it's a … [Read more...]