I've built up quite a backlog of unheard music, and now after a long dry spell it's beginning to flow public-ward again. On December 7 Michelle McIntire sang a pre-premiere of most of my Ezra Pound song cycle Proença (five songs out of the six) at Missouri Western State University, and I've got recordings! Here are the three that I thought came out best: 2. Na Audiart (7:05) 3. Alba (En un vergier sotz fuella d'albespi) (5:14) 5. L'aura amara (8:47) The first is a poem by Pound about Bertrans de Born; the others are Pound translations … [Read more...]
A Critical Conspiracy
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...]
New Developments in 19th-Century Harmony
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...]
Çoǧluotobüsişletmesi
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...]
Arcane Joke
[click to focus] … [Read more...]
Misplaced Destiny
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...]
Even the Most Brilliant Musicians Are Mortal
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...]
A Gentle Rain of Adjectives
My Romance Postmoderne has now been called gorgeous and calming; my suite The Planets has been dubbed weighty and cerebral. I can think of some award-winning composers who would be baffled by at least the second assessment. … [Read more...]
Like I Said
In The Atlantic: “Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don't think about the average person, and they don't even think about their students when they write... Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.” What have I been saying? … [Read more...]
How Ives Did it
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...]
There’s Doin’s a-Transpirin’!
Gannian events abound. This weekend I'll be in Philadelphia participating in workshops devoted to performing the works of Julius Eastman, run by the Bowerbird Ensemble. Sadly, my teaching schedule precludes my being there for the opening performance of Crazy Nigger tomorrow night. A week from Saturday, on Oct. 24, the NewEar ensemble is playing my 75-minute suite The Planets at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Kansas City, the first ensemble to do so besides Relache, who commissioned it. Lee Hartman is conducting the piece, which I think is a … [Read more...]
Memories of an Early Frost
My mother often told me, and I half-remember it, that when I was a toddler I would listen patiently to her reading poetry for as long as she would do it. It is to this that I attribute my love for writing vocal music. I have always been extraordinarily fascinated by the simple fact that words have their own inherent rhythms without which they can hardly be understood. For me to set words is like setting gemstones, and I always have to choose a setting that makes the sound of the word, not necessarily its meaning, shine to advantage. I know … [Read more...]
Diffident Leviathan
Accordionist Veli Kujala did a lovely job on my piece Reticent Behemoth for his quarter-tone accordion. Here's the recording from the world premiere last Thursday in Turku, Finland (duration five and a half minutes). I do love the accordion, and Veli made the piece sound more delicate and nuanced than I could have expected. I'm hoping to write him another piece or two. … [Read more...]