The remainder of May is hereby proclaimed Finish-My-Piano-Concerto-and-Get-On-with-the-Rest-of-My-Life Month, so don’t expect much else from me. The job has taken on the terrible proportions of Alex Ross’s recent book. I’m 18 minutes into a first draft with at least five more minutes to go, and then a deluge of polishing details. I’ll tell you about it soon, but everything beyond its barlines is outside my focus for a while.

The world according to Wikipedia, as told by David Malki at Wondermark.com (thanks to B. McLaren):

I’ve finally figured out what I want to do when I grow up: write Disklavier pieces for dance. The music is irreproachably acoustic, the performances endlessly perfect and unchanging, the audience superbly friendly and impressionable, you get to watch nice-looking people transfer your rhythmic ideas into three-dimensional space in gestures surprising, comical, and poignant, and then you stumble onstage and bow at the end. What could possibly be better? The gratification-to-work ratio is through the roof. In fact, having seen the Mark Morris Dance Group perform to my music last night, I’m convinced now that dancers, as intermediaries, create a sympathy for the music that it could never inspire by itself. The audience enjoys the dancers, the dance is visibly indebted for its energy to the music, therefore, the music must be something special; or, perhaps, the dancers so underline the ideas in the music that they come across with an immediacy no simple audio presentation could achieve. In any case, I received an outpouring of enthusiasm from total strangers at intermission far beyond anything I’d experienced before, and that I don’t believe could possibly result from a mere music concert.

My music has been choreographed a couple of times before, but never by someone who translates the music phrase by phrase with the thoroughness that Mark Morris does. Taking five pieces from my Nude Rolling Down an Escalator CD and repeating two of them, he fashioned a seven-movement dance called Looky all around the general theme of actors versus spectators. Tango da Chiesa became a group of people taking a tour through a museum as a guard sat idle but vigilant. Folk Dance for Henry Cowell became two rows of statues who surreptitiously changed position for each new group of tourists. Most hilariously, Bud Ran Back Out became a four-minute Western movie, with gun-slinging hero (female), Mae West-style hooker (male), poker game, floor show, drunk, and final gun fight in which everyone died but the principals. And in Texarkana, I saw my oh-so-clever 29-against-13 cross rhythms translated into arm and leg movements with a precision of which I thought only computers were capable. Those five pieces melded into a ballet with beginning, middle, and end, as though Mark was Martha Graham and I was Aaron Freakin’ Copland. Never before has my music been so savored, so analyzed, so complimented.

Dance is the artform I least understand (I probably should harbor more of a grudge than I have against the pretty girl who told me in high school I couldn’t dance and shouldn’t try, for I took her advice), and I’ve never felt I possessed the vocabulary to distinguish Fred Astaire from Merce Cunningham. But I know what goes into my music, and to see dance come out taught me more about it than I’d ever known. What struck me most was how much Mark had to think, as much as any composer, in terms of time proportions. Some moments were drawn out in slow motion, others so hurried that I feared the music wouldn’t be long enough, and I was quite impressed by the variety of tempos, and the counterintuitive imagination of Mark’s pacing. Equally impressive was his associative imagination. I think of Bud Ran Back Out, my Bud Powell homage, as pure New York, but its transformation into a tawdry western was inspired. Mark also played a lovely joke with the Disklavier: the piece opened with 50 seconds of darkness, and the audience chuckled appreciatively when a spotlight faded on to reveal a piano playing by itself. But within 25 seconds, the simultaneity of independent lines in the high treble, middle register, and low bass implied the presence of at least three hands on the keyboard if any at all, and posed a conundrum for the ear.

Whenever I play those Disklavier pieces at a concert, a few people inevitably come up and irritatingly ask, “Wouldn’t you rather have them played by a piano duo?” (As if that were possible. And the answer is “no.”) But with the dancers providing the human element, no one asked any such thing. A good dance audience is amazing: they expect empathy and surprise, and, unlike a classical music audience, they are exhilarated rather than upset by divergences from traditional boundaries. Personally I think classical music audiences should be fed the uniform diet of endless Schubert they crave until they die, thus vindicating my friend Greg Sandow. But dance lovers aren’t afraid of creativity and innovation, and these people, led by Mark’s sensitive orchestration of my rhythms into movement, connected with me in a way no audience ever had before. It was extremely generous of Mark to share his perfect-vintage audience with me, as one would share a $200 bottle of rare single-malt scotch.

There are reviews in the Boston papers here and here. The climax of the concert was not Looky, but Grand Duo, set to a powerful, impressively memorable, emponymous work for violin and piano by Lou Harrison that seems not to be available on recording at the moment. If I thought I could do the dance justice in words, I would try. It was unforgettable.

I had five hours yesterday to program the Disklavier for Mark Morris’s dance Looky, which is being performed to my Disklavier music tonight. Had I had a clue how Disklavier technology has changed in the last few years, I would have known I didn’t need nearly so much. Yamaha used to employ a proprietary file format for the Disklavier. It wouldn’t read standard MIDI files; you had to record a special Disklavier file by playing a MIDI file from your computer. It took me, Mark’s excellent tech crew, and someone at Yamaha tech support two hours to learn that the new Disklavier grands won’t even record a MIDI file from a computer anymore, so we had spent a lot of time trying to do the impossible. Instead, the Disklavier can now read MIDI files directly – and once we realized that, all I had to do was burn a MIDI file to a CDR and pop it in. It worked beautifully at rehearsal last night – as easy as playing an mp3.

The thing is, Yamaha gives the impression that it works according to a completely utilitarian paradigm: it sells (or loans in this case) these marvelous computerized pianos to schools and performance spaces for purely workaday purposes, like recording song accompaniments and providing background music. They no longer provide a manual, there’s no how-to info on the internet, and the tech support people were difficult to reach because they were out traveling. There’s no assumption that someone might be trying to transfer a file from an old Disklavier to a new one, nor that anyone might be trying to do anything more elaborate than pressing “record” and playing a tune on the keyboard. The idea that a composer might actually write pieces for the instrument and tour with them doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Still, now that Disklaviers read MIDI files they’ll be a lot more versatile to use, and with luck – as long as they don’t keep altering the way the thing works every year or so – I won’t run into any of these problems again.

Geez, there are 18 dancers in Looky! It’s like being played by a chamber orchestra, very exciting.

My arm twisted by my ACA chum Andrea La Rose, I went to hear Anti-Social Music in New York last night. I’m not going to review them, because the opinion-forming center in my brain burned out a few years ago and doesn’t work any more. But I think I can convey in this space the extraordinary quality of their program notes, which give the appearance of having been produced in the same amount of time it takes to read them – as though they were read into a dictaphone hooked to a computer with instant voice-transcribing software. The general feel is not so much stream-of-consciousness as extemporization under extreme pressure:

Berry Seroff wrote Guitar Duo #2 for two rockin’ guitars. I can’t find any program notes for this piece, so I’ll just say that Barry Seroff is a jerk who once shunned me on MySpace. Sure, he’s befriended me since then, but the bruises will never heal….

Pat Muchmore is a complete douche bag, but sometimes he writes pieces too. This one is called:

[an ornate wordless diagram follows]

See what I mean?

Peter Hess may or may not have written a Voiceprint. If he did, you should be hearing it now. If he didn’t, you should be hearing the next piece. If you’re hearing your mother’s voice telling you to kill small animals, you are awesome….

Jean Cook has played violin since 1979. She recently started buying stamps online and thinks it’s fabulous. www.usps.com

Brad Kemp (bass) would rather talk about YOU….

What can I say about Ed Rosenberg that hasn’t already been said?

Scrapworm did the art. who is scrapworm? what’s the point? a new worldview is possible. art is a function of such energies. activate the noosphere. resonate in the 5th day….

What can I say about Pete Wise (vibes) that hasn’t already been said about Ed Rosenberg?

The ensemble patter between pieces was identical in tone and apparent speed. I enjoy these guys. Unlike classical composers they don’t flash their credentials at you, but unlike rockers, they’re not so cool that they have to keep mum and leave you wondering, either. The underlying message – “Who gives a shit where we went to college?” – is a healthy one for postclassical music. The patter filled up the spaces between the pieces and left no room for boredom. The show was a fast-paced circus, and the actual music, performed with an attractive looseness and the occasional rough edge, was interesting, savvy, and intricate enough to prove that the surrounding irreverent verbiage did not indicate any superficiality of compositional intent.

An incidental note to all those New York spaces whose managers think that the way to keep audiences entertained between pieces is to turn on recorded music in between the live performances: I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! Die! Die! Die! Anti-Social Music’s solution was infintely smarter.

A comment from Scott, a former Bard student, brings to mind ideas about teaching composition that I wonder if anyone else shares. I’ve never heard of anyone being taught how to teach composition, except indirectly and by example. We’re all winging it, aren’t we? I had one composition teacher who never said a word I understood, and seemed to enjoy keeping me confused; another who disliked every piece at first and thought it was lovely as soon as you copied it out neatly; another who was brilliant but considered Cage and minimalism hoaxes; another who merely tinkered with my orchestration (Feldman); one who changed my life simply by telling me about just intonation (Johnston); and another who did me a world of good simply by enthusing about everything I did. Little of that activity seemed like teaching, though by default that’s what we have to call it. I know of teachers who start out, “Here’s how you compose a piece,” and actually show you how to do it, step by step. I think that would have driven me nuts. It always seemed to me that what you mainly absorbed from an older composer was attitude, and you gravitate toward the attitudes that appeal to you.

Subsequent experience has suggested to me that there are two kinds of composition students: those who write too little music because they’re too self-critical and those who write too much because they’re not self-critical enough. (Those who write just the right amount are unheard of.) I feel much more useful with the ones who don’t write enough, because that’s the problem I worked through myself. First of all, I hardly make any suggestions on the first piece or two, because I need to learn what their reflexes and aims are before I can tell what they’re trying to do and figure out where they’re not succeeding. Then, when I see them turn down the same road a third or fourth time, I can say, “Aha! You always do that, don’t you?” Not to prevent them, but just to make them conscious. Sometimes I’ll play them, and analyze a little, pieces that do something similar. In rare cases, if they’re really stuck, I’ll assign specific compositional problems to attack (like, write a trio only using five pitches). I’ve only had one case in which that strategy really lit a fire under the student; more often, they start composing their own pieces faster to induce me to stop.

Typically I try to isolate the essential idea of a piece and write my own little variations on it, to look for ways to continue. Sometimes, like all composers, I’ll pull out a piece of my own, show the original problem I struggled with, and show how I solved it. I almost never write notes on their score, because that drove me nuts when I was a student. But I love taking their Sibelius files, “saving as” something else, and tinkering with changes. Occasionally they like the changes, but it seems to me that most of this activity simply serves to focus them and make them think harder once they leave my office. As an ongoing influence, I harangue them to turn off their superegos, to silence the constant critical carping in the back of their minds that tells them, as soon as they’ve written three notes, that those notes aren’t good enough, that compares every line they write with Bach and finds it wanting. If they can do that, they can do anything. Sometimes, if they’re obsessed with a certain composer they worship, I’ll forbid them to listen to that composer any more. I had to quit listening to Cage in college for that reason.

The students who write too much are much harder for me. They often come in with a new completed piece every week, which suggests a certain success that’s hard to argue with. It’s difficult to convince them that revision is golden, that even when it’s going well you shouldn’t always settle for the first idea that presents itself. And then, there’s little opportunity to direct the course of a piece when it comes in with the final double bar already in place. Of course, like all composition teachers, I pound away at notation, and describe at length how performers respond to, especially, rhythm and articulation markings. That’s the easy part, though they won’t always believe that you can’t start a 4/4 measure with an 8th-note followed by a half-note. My teachers’ generation often taught little besides penmanship and types of manuscript paper. Similarly, I end up teaching the finer points of Sibelius (the software).

I’ve taught mostly undergrads, and am happy with that, because they’re more pliable and need more advice. What I’m not sure is practically helpful is trying to prepare them for the way a composer’s process changes with the years. I think it seems pretty well established – though I don’t know that I’ve ever read this anywhere – that young composers tend to get inspired by a sonic image and then just start out without knowing where they’re going. At some point, in a person’s 20s or 30s, those sonic images become less spontaneous, and it seems to me that a composer has to learn to quit waiting for that inspiration. Typically, I think – and I ask this as a question – college age composers tend to have tremendous bursts of inspiration, and be almost incapable of composing when not inspired. As your psychology changes in your 20s, you start thinking less of individual moments (or melodies, or motives) and more about strategies for entire pieces (like chord progressions or rhythmic structures). Then it becomes easier to just sit down and start writing, inspired or not, and at some point inspiration creeps in and lifts the piece off the ground.

I’ve interviewed dozens of composers for my articles and books, and I’ve heard one process described over and over again. A young composer will find some method to generate his music, and use it strictly. At sometime in his 30s, he or she will have internalized the method enough to quit using it consciously. My favorite example like this was Petr Kotik, who, in his early years (Many, Many Women is the famous example) based all his melodies on graphs he had found discarded in a science department that showed the rates of alcohol-level response in experimental rats. For years all his music went back to those found graphs as a kind of chance process based on “found” contours. Then, he said, at some point he learned to intuitively write melodies that had those characteristics without using the graphs anymore. I think you find the same pattern – overly strict at first, then later freer and more intuitive – in most of the good serialist composers, Boulez and Stockhausen in particular. Then, many composers also go through another tremendous shift during their 40s, in which many of the compositional ideas they studiously avoided in youth begin to appeal to them, and their music finds a whole new level as they start playing with the devices they swore they’d never use. It certainly happened to me, when around 1999 I started allowing myself to borrow stylistic paradigms from jazz and other composers. (Make sure to shy away from some great ideas when you’re young, so you’ll have great new toys to play with in old age. I have an article in Music Downtown. “Mistaken Memories,” quickly tracing this phenomenon through a wide range of composers.)

As I say, I don’t know to what extent it helps a young composer to be aware of the eventuality of these changes coming in later in life. I like to think that they’ll accept the changes more easily if they know it’s a lifelong process of evolution, that they won’t get stuck clinging to the process that always worked in the past. The most important thing of all, I think, is to get them used to the process of trying to extend their technique into some area they’ve never tried before, getting stuck, feeling helpless, and just living with their failure until some imaginative breakthrough suddenly makes them see where their imagination had been too limited. It’s a process that can cause considerable despair when young, and, as you gain experience, you learn more (or I have) to accept that “stuck” feeling as the necessary prelude to a creative breakthrough.

These, off the top of my head, are my thoughts about teaching composition – almost as much, or more, a process of emotional therapy than actual musical instruction. I am curious as to whether other teachers find this same dichotomy between young composers who write too little and those who write too much. I wonder if other composition professors muse as often as I do that training in psychotherapy might have been more helpful for this line of work than musical training has been. And I wonder if the process of “switching gears” in your 20s, relying less on sudden inspiration because it doesn’t come as often and you no longer need it so much, is as universal as I imagine. It seems to me that we composers don’t talk about these processes enough, that we all live in ignorance, blindly feeling our way, having to figure out how it works through self-examination and anecdotal evidence. Perhaps the blogosphere is the arena in which to shed some light on the categories of artistic evolution. I yield the floor.

I have an interesting and unusual student graduating this year whom I’m fond of, and I don’t think he’ll mind my writing about him here. Coming to college later than most, he was blown away by 16th-century counterpoint early in his education, and his music has remained intransigently tonal. In his more characteristic moments it begins to resemble the sustainedly consonant music of Arvo Pärt, with the same kind of self-conscious spirituality; at other times, it resembles a kind of diatonic romanticism, veering close to John Williams-type film music.

One of my colleagues, with whom I had a mild and friendly disagreement about him, considers it a problem that this student doesn’t seem to have absorbed the music of the 20th century – meaning, of course, dissonance, atonality, abstract structural techniques. I pointed out that not only has Pärt made a career out of diatonic music, but that one of the most widely-performed orchestral works of our time – Tobias Picker’s Old and Lost Rivers – is entirely couched in the D-flat major scale, with only one accidental in the entire piece, a D-natural in the violins. If living composers as disparate as Pärt and Picker can become incredibly successful staying within a single diatonic scale, who am I to tell my student that what he’s doing isn’t “modern” enough?

Of course, I am also sympathetic to my colleague’s point. A student composer should learn some versatility in college, and trying out different styles is part of the process of finding one’s own voice. (God, I hate that facile, heavily-laden term “a composer’s ‘voice,'” but that’s perhaps a subject for another day.) My colleague teaches a course in which students practice composing in the style of various 20th-century composers. But I tried many times to write a 12-tone piece in college, and could never manage to finish one. The limitations seemed arbitrary and ridiculous. I was the type of student for whom composing in a style I couldn’t feel as my own would have seemed a wasted enterprise.* Consequently, I feel that the place to expose students to 20th-century styles is in theory class, not composition lessons, and I try to make all the composers take my course “Analysis of the Classics of Modernism,” which starts with Socrate and The Rite of Spring and runs up through Rothko Chapel. I take them inside works like Gruppen, Quartet for the End of Time, Bartok’s Sonata for pianos and percussion, and Nancarrow’s Study No. 36, and figure, if they find anything that attracts them, they’ll incorporate it into their own music. I try not to send a message that this is how you’re supposed to compose – my emphasis is more, these are things that have already been done.

Of course, the bigger picture, as my colleague pointed out rather glumly, is that there is no longer a single route to one’s own musical style. What we call “20th-century music” is now a historical period. Why, at this point, is it any more necessary that a student composer internalize Messiaen than Brahms? What does either composer offer the 21st-century sensibility – or why not Brahms as much as Messiaen? My students may come up through Bartok and Stravinsky, but they are just as likely to arrive at their musical taste via Pärt and Reich; or Eno and Captain Beefheart; or Bjork and Sigur Ros; or Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman; or Sibelius and Britten. There is no longer a privileged mainstream. Yet what are we professors here for, except to lead them through some tradition they would never have discovered on their own?

And aside from their starting point, what about their ending point? It strikes me that my “conservative” student might do well writing film music, and even better tapping into the huge choral market that most college-trained composers bypass. Knowing as I do how few resources there are for the ambitiously avant-garde composer these days, why would I try to funnel him into the life of the same kind of “professional” composer as myself? I do tell him that he’s not going to make it in the academic composing world writing whole-note triads and elegantly resolved suspensions, and he gets it. But if he can head off to Hollywood and write like John Williams, why would I deflect him? Or if he’s one of the few people with smooth enough contrapuntal technique to compete with someone like Morton Lauridsen on the choral circuit (where copies of a singable psalm can well sell in the 25,000 range), why would I deflate his marketability by pressing him towards “modern” techniques that even I consider dated? Not every composer is aiming at Guggenheims, orchestral residencies, a Harvard teaching gig, and the Pulitzer Prize. Excuse me, I meant to say the goddamned Pulitzer Prize (which I’m certainly not aiming at myself, either).

At the heart of all this is something I wrote about recently, that professors desperately yearn to feel useful. We want to pass on what we know that was useful to us – and yet it comes so soon that the creative student is involved in a world in which our own knowledge becomes irrelevant. Of course it’s crucial that the student become conversant in the body of 20th-century music and its ideas of structure and method. It’s just a historical period, though, a toolbox of techniques. For that matter, last month was a historical period. In what possible way does it obligate us this month? “We are not slaves of history,” George Rochberg wrote; “we can choose and create our own time.” There is the dismaying possibility that a young composer will become a slave to the 19th century, or the 18th, or the 16th. I regret that, but why substitute one period of slavery for another? I do not agree with my colleague that a composer is under any constraint to write music “of his own time” – “his time,” that is, as defined by the ubiquitous clichés of the all-too-conformist composing fraternity. “Let no year go by,” intoned the great Harry Partch, “that I do not step one significant century backward.” We in the classical composition world cherish a little-examined theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that each student finds him- or herself by working his way up through the history of music (as indeed I did myself, from Copland to Harold Budd). But whose history? Which history? Some of my students are recapitulating histories that I’ve never lived through.

Another of my students wrote an “opera,” in the most unconventional sense, which turned out to be quite original and interesting. At a faculty board he said that he didn’t know anything about opera, but decided to try one anyway, and all three of us agreed that it seemed to be a good thing that he didn’t know anything about opera, because those who do know about opera tend not to come up with as intriguing results. And I thought, What am I doing here? If ignorance and experimentation, mixed with energy, are such fertile ground, why am I trying to remove the first and set limits to the second? Of course, I’m not, really. As a scholar I provide background which ought to be interesting to anyone, even if not useful. As a composition teacher (such a common oxymoron) I’m here to provide assistance when asked for, and as a reality check. And when the student is propelled by his or her own enthusiasm – even if it leads to music that sounds like Bach – I do my level best to stand out of the way.

*[Of course, the irony here is that since I hit my 40s I’ve taken a Stravinskian glee in imitating the styles of Billings, Brahms, Bud Powell, Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, and so on.]

One of my coolest gigs ever begins a week from tonight. Mark Morris (pictured) has choreographed a dance called Looky to five of my Disklavier studies, and it’s being presented at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. Performances are May 15, 17, 18, 19, and 20, and I’ll refer you there for location and times. Because the commission was for a Museum (the ICA), Mark has supposedly made the dance about looking at paintings in a museum, thus the title Looky – cute, huh? Mark is famous for using live music for his dances, and this will be presumably the first dance involving a “live” Disklavier as accompaniment. (Even Yamaha, who makes Disklaviers, has gotten involved in publicity, which is more than they’d do for my CD last year.) The other composers represented on the program – and pardon me for savoring this for a moment, since I may never get to write another sentence like this in my life – the other composers represented on the program are Schumann, Stravinsky, and Lou Harrison.

So eat my shorts.

Nah, I didn’t mean that.

[Writing new book in head:] One of the problems in discussing minimalism clearly is that the word gets used in a few different senses. Judging from recent debates on the subject, I’d say it has three interrelated meanings:

1. Minimalism was a movement of people who knew each other, worked together, influenced each other, and created variations of a particular common language. In that specific sense, the movement began with La Monte Young’s String Trio of 1958 and lasted until the late ’70s, or certainly no later than around 1983. Pronouncements that minimalism is dead began around 1978 – I was there – and are only meaningful insofar as the word is applied to that definable scene.

2. Minimalism is a style of music based in audible structure and relative stasis and/or slow transformation. In this sense, certain composers, such as Phill Niblock and Tom Johnson, have continued writing minimalist music up to the present day. Some would say the same of Reich and Glass, both of whom, however, have claimed that around 1980 their music quit having anything to do with minimalism strictly speaking. One can argue, then, that a piece made outside the 1958-1983 time frame – say, Carl Stone’s Shing Kee – can be referred to as minimalist, despite the fact that Stone was too young to be involved in the original movement. I’ve described the outlines of this style at greater detail in a New Music Box article that won a Deems Taylor award and got reprinted in the book Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, so I am led to conclude that my views on the style do not lie outside the mainstream of scholarly understanding.

3. Minimalism is also more vaguely ascribed to any piece that sustains a specific texture, rhythm, tonality, and so on, from beginning to end. In this sense it is often said that Feldman was a minimalist, that certain pieces of John Cage are minimalist, ditto for pieces by Erik Satie and Federico Mompou, Gregorian chant and gamelan music and a ton of pop music all turn out to be minimalist, also the C Major Prelude from the W.T.C. Book I and many of Schubert’s songs, and in fact we find minimalism traversing all centuries and many styles. And let’s never, never neglect to mention the first six minutes of Das Rheingold – which, once it finally modulates (or resolves) from E-flat to A-flat at the entrance of the Rhinemaidens, sounds in retrospect just like an inordinately prolonged dominant preparation, about as relevant to minimalism as the Eroica Symphony is.

The first two meanings are what I think of as the scholarly, precise connotations of minimalism. The third sense looses the word from its historical referents and renders it a universal quality, like romanticism or classicism. We can find romanticism in the medieval epic The Song of Roland, or the music of Messiaen, works that lie well outside the boundaries of what has been defined as the Romantic Period, and we can contrast romanticism with classicism in any historical period. We have a long cultural tradition of what romanticism and classicism mean, so that arguments imputing those two qualities to various works of art are subtle, polemical, not simple, and carry a lot of historical weight.

I don’t believe it is clear yet that minimalism is going to evolve into the same kind of term. We can call Gregorian chant minimalist, but in that sense the word becomes something of a tautology; that is, the general qualities we associate with minimalism in the broad sense predate the actual historical style by centuries, and were once taken for granted. Unchanging texture and tonality became strikingly associated with minimalism only because the contrast with the musical complexity of the previous century and a half was so dramatic. The qualities of romanticism (emphasis on the individual, subjective, spontaneous, and visionary against the idea of rationally imposed order) and classicism (the dependable restoration of harmony, clarity, restraint, and universality) can be spoken of as innate impulses within the human soul. It’s not at all obvious that minimalism’s relatively extreme limitations of texture and tonality are ever going to achieve any similar psychological status. There’s nothing wrong with using minimalism this way, so long as the user understands that the burden of proof is on him to make a case for some universal applicability of the word. Most instances of such use, however, just strike me as intellectual laziness – anachronisms fallen into by people who are so little familiar with music outside the European common practice period that they are naively surprised to find texturally static music in any other milieu.

Another complicating factor is that many amateurs are only familiar with the tip of the minimalist iceberg – i.e., the works of Reich and Glass plus Riley’s In C – so that repetition becomes minimalism’s defining feature. Were one familiar with other minimalism of the 1960s – the droning improvisations of the Theater of Eternal Music, Niblock’s slowly moving drones, Young’s sine-tone installations, Jon Gibson’s and Barbara Benary’s change-ringing note permutations, and so on – it would become clear that repetition is only one strategy in minimalism’s arsenal, and not the sufficient core of a general definition.

An additional problem with taking staticness as the primary criterion is that minimalism grew out of a conceptualist movement started by Cage, whose works tended to be calculatedly static over a period of time. Minimalist music shares its static quality with many works by Cage, Lucier, Ashley, Berhman, Feldman, Wolff, Mumma, and others that predated or were contemporaneous with the minimalist movement; but minimalism self-consciously differentiated itself from that music by embracing various techniques of audible process, in fact deliberately rebelling (as Reich’s early writings document) against the hidden quality of Cagean processes. Without taking that differentiation into account, one arrives at a version of minimalism that inaccurately represents what was going on at the time.

Add to this that we now have an entire generation that has come to minimalism through its reuse in DJ music, remixes, ambient music, and so forth, so that there is now a widespread popular image of minimalism that is only a rough caricature of the way the movement looked to those of us who followed it as it was still going on. This will all pass. Until it does, though, I think it’s impossible to imagine that any meaningful definition or description of minimalism could be achieved through the consensus of people unfamiliar with the issues, repertoire, and writings of the range of composers involved in the movement itself.

I’ve seen the light on Wikipedia, and I feel like a fool. I’ve used it, praised it, and, determined populist that I am, extolled it here as a model. I’m probably one of the few professors who has talked it up to his students and allowed them to cite it as a reference – carefully, with outside confirmation if possible, and judging the quality of an entry carefully. I started contributing to Wikipedia as a kind of spare-moment hobby, and I guess I was lulled into complacency by the fact that most of the entries I worked on were obscure ones, not likely to attract attention. But I had the temerity to do a little badly-needed clean-up on the dismally confused “Minimalism” entry, and learned more than I wanted to know about how the site operates. The articles that a lot of people think they know something about, it turns out, are a nightmare. I take back everything: Wikipedia is a playground for belligerent adolescents.

What pushed me over the edge was that a kindly editor finally directed me to a policy page called Expert retention. (One thing you’ve got to hand the Wikipedia community: they take self-analysis and self-examination to levels Socrates would have envied, and the site’s every foible is analyzed to within an inch of its life.) It turns out that Wikipedia has a difficult time holding on to experts to edit their articles. The site, with its ever-present Wikimania for lists, lists many scholars who have given up on the site, many more who are discontented, and only two who are happy with the status quo. The vandalism problem has received a lot of publicity, but that one’s actually fairly minor, or at least relatively fixable. More aggravating is “edit creep,” the gradual deterioration of a polished article by well-meaning but careless edits, and, even worse, “cranks,” which are classified with typical Wiki-precision as “parasites, scofflaws or insane.” And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article’s usefulness.

The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool’s errand. Many of the departing scholars note the incident that finally brought them to leave; mine was a truculent teenager who refused to acknowledge that minimalist music was considered classical, because, as he put it, “it sounds more like Britney Spears than like Merzbow.” Let that sink in a minute. A person who insists that Einstein on the Beach, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue cannot be considered classical because it sounds like Britney Spears is not a person one can seek consensus with. Because of that and his flippant rudeness I refused to argue directly with him, and appealed to the Wiki editors. Yet because of the Wikipedia policy about consensus, I couldn’t get around him, either. And when I checked the “Expert retention” page, I realized that this was not an isolated bit of bad luck, but that this recurring problem bars the dissemination of knowledge throughout Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is amateur-friendly, and that’s what I liked about it. Too many print reference works are hobbled by the exclusion of scholars and thinkers who are ahead of the curve, whose ideas (and even entire categories of knowledge) are not countenanced in the stodgier university departments whence many reference works depend. But Wikipedia is not only amateur-friendly, but expert-unfriendly. They pretend not to be, and give lip service to the importance of expert editors. But when you put the rules together, you realize that people who are actually authorities on a subject are forced to argue with one hand tied behind their backs.

For instance, there’s an “original research” rule: original research, i.e. facts you’ve dug up or deduced yourself but that are not verifiable in the scholarly literature, are not allowed. Well, I can see that. You don’t want every unpublished crank using Wikipedia to propagate his crackpot views. Most of what I do is original research, since I rarely write about things other scholars have already covered, but that’s all right, since I’ve published most of my research, and all I have to do is footnote my own books. Ah! but there’s another rule called “Conflict of Interest,” which disallows quoting yourself for the purpose of bringing public attention to your writings. Which means that any other person on the planet can write something in Wikipedia and quote me as an authority, but if I do it myself, that’s suspect. I have done it myself, and the citations stand if no one objects, but if a crank wants to contradict me, all he has to do is yell “Conflict of interest!,” and delete whatever he wants. After all, who knows what scruffy, fly-by-night vanity presses my books might be issued by (Cambridge University Press, Schirmer Books, University of California Press)? Editors are sympathetic – everyone agreed with what I was saying except this post-pubescent parasite – but rules are rules, and nothing could be done. There’s even an official “Ignore all credentials” policy, which explicitly disallows a writer’s credentials from being taken into account. I thought I was egalitarian enough not to mind. Turns out I’m not.

So the “Minimalism” article is wretched, and so it will remain. When I came to it, one of the definitions given was “From hippie to yuppie[,] minimalism is a drip-feed pseudo-art for cultural bottle-babies.” That no one objected to. I removed Petr Kotik from the list of minimalist composers, for the minor reason that there is nothing minimalist about his music, and there was a vehement protest. I removed a statement that minimalist pieces are known for their brevity, and there was a protest. Then I ran into the moronic crank, who wouldn’t agree that minimalism was the most controversial movement in recent classical music on the grounds that it wasn’t classical. He stonewalled. How can one verify that minimalism is part of classical music? No reference work will state as much, because everyone with an above-80 I.Q. simply knows it. I could have overlooked that and gone on, but the “Expert retention” page informed me that such problems are endemic throughout Wikipedia’s warp and woof. There is an apparently famous case in which one amateur crank defeated a group of professional scientists trying to describe facts about uranium trioxide. It’s kind of an intellectual’s worst nightmare: you find out your new editor is the dumb bully who used to beat up on you in seventh grade – and he hasn’t changed in any respect! He’s still in seventh grade, and imagines you are too.

And so I’m off Wikipedia. What’s more, now that I know how the background process chases away experts, I can no longer allow students to cite it. I’m holding out some hope for Digital Universe, which has been designed to elicit expert writing in order to circumvent such difficulties. Meanwhile, I have actual books to write, with adult editors willing to take my word for something. Between my Simpsons videos and The Comics Curmudgeon, I don’t need to spend my spare moments building sand castles of knowledge on a heavily-trafficked beach.

UPDATE: Forgive me for turning off the comments here, but some Wikipedians (Wikipediots?) are beginning to come here to continue arguments started over there, and, not having any earthly idea who’s right and who’s wrong, I don’t want to get stuck refereeing. The site clearly stirs violent emotions, sufficient reason for me to keep well away from it.

(AP) — The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.

Let me say that again:

(AP) — The National Rifle Association is urging the Bush administration to withdraw its support of a bill that would prohibit suspected terrorists from buying firearms.

The next time Democrats are portrayed by Republicans as aiding and abetting the terrorists, turn to someone near you and remind them about this.

Somehow I happened across a blog called The Comics Curmudgeon today. Its premise is that the author (I can’t even find his name) picks out the worst three or five comic strips in the newspaper every day and makes savage fun of how pathetic they are.

This. Is. The. Funniest. Thing. I’ve. Ever. Read.

Before this, I thought The Simpsons was the funniest long-running bit of humor on earth. But this guy’s running dissections of Mary Worth, Mark Trail, For Better or Worse, Cathy, Hagar the Horrible, and so on, have made tears of laughter, joy, vindication, malice, and restored sanity run down my cheeks more than a dozen times today.

The question is, of course, why are the large majority of comic strips, which supposedly exist to create humor, so miserably unfunny? When I was a kid I devoured them, and I read them avidly into my 40s. But now when I run across a comics page, it takes awhile to search out one that seems like its creator intended it to be funny, and as Comics Curmudgeon says repeatedly, they all look, even the newer ones, as though written by crusty nonagenarians steeped in Eisenhower-era morality who refuse to consider computers anything more than a nuisance. How can almost an entire industry continue decade after decade in such pathetic straits?

The personal angle is that, before I started composing music (at age 13), I wanted to be a cartoonist. In junior high I filled many a notebook with comic strips, and even took a cartooning course from a guy whose name, I seem to remember, was Charles Hamm – NOT the musicologist. I had no talent for it whatsoever. I still have the comic books, but I will make sure they are safely consigned to the flames before I die. Later, in high school, I ran into Charles Hamm at an amusement park. I told him that I had given up cartooning, and was now a classical musician. He thought a moment, rubbed his chin, and responded, “Well, that’s sort of an art too.” The bitter truth that The Comics Curmudgeon drives home is that I could have found something to do with my life infinitely more fun than defending music no one’s ever heard of.

[AFTERTHOUGHT: Say, what if I started a new blog called “New Orchestral Pieces Curmudgeon,” to make savage fun of… no, no, it’s too cruel to contemplate.]

The venerable (by new-music standards) American Festival of Microtonal Music is this week and next, three concerts at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. The concerts are Sunday, April 29; Wednesday, May 2; and the following Tuesday, May 8, all at (the-ungodly-hour-for-those-of-us-coming-in-from-out-of-town) 10 PM. I’m performing May 2. We’ll be playing my quintet The Day Revisited, for flute, clarinet, two keyboard samplers, and fretless bass, all in a 29-pitch unequal scale. Pieces by Elodie Lauten, Joseph Perhson, and Johnny Reinhard are on the program as well. The Bowery Poetry Club is at 308 Bowery at Bleecker St. Read more about it all here.

Of course, this means I drive down to NYC with a car full of equipment – two MIDI keyboards, three amps, two keyboard stands, three music stands, a fretless bass, my computer, and all associated cables and sheet music which I hope I can remember – for rehearsals and performance, and since it’s New York I can’t park outside the rehearsal space but have to go down the street and park in a garage and carry everything all at once up several flights of stairs and then carry it all back down again once rehearsal’s over. Many, many of you know what I’m talking about. I’m getting too old to make music this way. I went to study with Ben Johnston in 1983 saying, “I love his music, but I’m not getting into this microtonality stuff, because it’s too much work for nothing!” And I was half right: it’s too much work. (Frank Oteri has an article over at New Music Box called “Complaining Doesn’t Work,” and I wanted to test out his intriguing theory. I dunno if he’s right, though, I already feel better.)