My father sang in church choirs most of his life, and his favorite pieces were Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s Ninth. Once he sang in the chorus for the Dallas Opera production of Boris Godunov. Along with the Steinway baby grand he bought me when I was 15, which stands in my living room today, such was his contribution to classical music. He was an accountant for Mobil Oil, and spent the last three of his 29 years there as an office manager in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Having grown up dirt-poor on a farm in what is now a rather stylish section of Dallas, he landed at Omaha Beach three days after D-Day, and was a corporal in the 7th Armored Division under Patton at the Battle of the Bulge. He heard the gunfire of the massacre of American prisoners at Malmedy as he was frantically trying to fix a tire on his halftrack.

Luckily – since I was stubborn – he attempted his paternal duty only once. In my last year of high school he warned me that to be a musician was a difficult and insecure life. What would I do about retirement?, he asked. As an artist, I replied, I had no wish to retire. It seemed to me, at 17, unwise to plan one’s entire life around retirement. But Dad eventually retired at the age of 57, and enjoyed his leisure for 23 wonderful years. On my side, I know that he sometimes hated going in to work – whereas I, in my often financially precarious adult life, have never once woken up and had to go do anything for a living that wasn’t music-related. The jury on who won that argument is still out. Meanwhile, my son’s middle name is Marvin.

Dad died Saturday, and we buried him Monday, in Frisco, Texas.

Composer-songwriter Corey Dargel, of whose music I am unabashedly a fan, asks a question, with regard to my anti-objectivity post, that I feel like answering: partly to defuse a myth that’s growing up around me, partly because I’m supposed to be writing a very dull departmental report filled with statistics, and would rather be doing almost anything else:

What are the advantages and/or disadvantages to being entrenched in the scene you are writing about? Have you ever second-guessed your ability to maintain a “critical distance” from your subject matter, or is that just a fancy term for objectivity?

I think there’s a perception growing that when I became the Voice new-music critic, it was a tremendous boon for all my composer friends because they were all hailed as geniuses. The reality is, when I came from Chicago in 1986, I didn’t know anyone in New York. I was as “objective,” as “unentrenched,” as a Borneo tribesman would have been. For the first couple of years my family was still in Chicago, and I didn’t even have a friend who could put me up in New York; I stayed at the 23rd Street YMCA for $26 a night. Downtown (you will please excuse the expression) composers hated me because I wasn’t part of the scene. They complained that I was presuming to judge them without (as Elliott Sharp once put it) hanging out at their rehearsals. I was too much an outsider, too “objective.” So you will understand the curious irony that now, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, by the end of the book I, who never even lived in NYC except for eight months in 1992, have somehow become, in the new-music public mind, the quintessential insider.

I was loathe to make friends my first several years as a New York critic. Some may remember that I was always the last to arrive at a concert, and that I shot out like a bullet before the final applause ended. I started cautiously getting to know people, but never acted too friendly until I had heard a lot of a person’s music. I never wanted to find myself in a position of being personally beholden to someone whose music I didn’t like. One by one I found people whose overall talent impressed me, and whose musical aims seemed healthy and progressive, people whose musical instincts I came to implicitly trust.

Like Meredith Monk: her music has blown me away, brought me close to tears, again and again and again. If I have the great luck to become friends with her, why would I turn it down? If she were to produce a piece now that I didn’t like, what would it matter? Every brilliant composer has written an occasional dud (except for you, Corey – I love everything you’ve done so far, but you’re still young). When one of my friends, one of the composers whose music I strongly believe in – and those are virtually synonymous – writes a piece that doesn’t work, I’m as disappointed as anyone. I often just didn’t write about it; or else I’d pass over it as, “well, not their best work.” One likes a composer not only for the quality of his or her each individual work, but also for their aesthetic aims, their overall vision, their insight into what music needs at the moment. I never became friends with anyone on the (you will please excuse the expression) Downtown scene before getting a pretty complete idea of their aesthetic aims and vision. I’ve written the occasional negative review of a friend’s piece, and more often a positive review of music by someone I personally dislike.

Due to various contingent circumstances I have several dear, close friends who are (you will please excuse the expression) Midtown composers. They are all aware that I’m not much in sympathy with their aesthetic aims, nor they with mine, and we have wonderful conversations figuring out why. Some of those conversations have been grist for this blog. When they do occasionally write a piece I truly enjoy, a “crossover” piece if you will, I’m eager to record the fact. But I have never in my life come to feel that I had overvalued a piece of music because I liked, or felt loyal to, the person who wrote it. Hell, I know where the flaws are in my own music. I thought my recent review of my own Long Night CD was deadly accurate, both positive and negative. Just last week I named to a friend what I thought were my four best pieces, and he thought I was dead on.

Performances of my own music in New York in those years, and I mean prior to 1997, were very few. John Kennedy and Charles Wood surprised me by giving my first NYC performances in 1989, but after that there were only a handful, and most of my performances were in Philadelphia and on the West Coast. Composers even told me that they’d considered programming my music, but didn’t want to be seen as “sucking up to the critic.” The number of people who supported my music, to whom I arguably owed favors, was, and remains, extremely small, and the majority of them – like Joseph Franklin and the Relache Ensemble, and Sarah Cahill – weren’t in the scene I was reviewing. Of the hundreds of musicians I wrote about, five or ten gradually became close friends, and on the rare occasion I ended up writing about a friend, it was always someone whose music I had championed before getting to know them. I simply continued developing points I had already made before meeting them.

By 1997, reviewing was quickly declining in my life. I began teaching full-time, the Voice cut me way back, and soon I was writing more scholarly articles than journalistic ones. The scholarly articles were analytical, not evaluative, and required extensive familiarity, not “critical distance.” I let down my guard, and relaxed into being just friends with a lot of wonderful composers whose music I had praised years earlier. I also gave up writing negative reviews, only positive ones about stuff I liked. So the perception that I was “entrenched” in the (you will please excuse the expression) Downtown scene between 1986 and 1997, the years in which I took on an explicit role as aesthetic judge and tastemaker, is a humorous illusion, one that would have surprised anyone involved, had it been expressed at the time.

So what is it that seems so “subjective” about me as a critic? There is one big difference between me and all the other classical music critics. Every other classical critic in America, without a single exception that I know of, has one thing in common: they all trust that the classical music world does a pretty good job of rooting out who the best composers are. They all assume that the composers who fight their way to the top, who get the most commissions and performances, who have the most presence in the orchestra world, must be, by and large, the ones who write the best music. They all assume that the composers who don’t get heard about much must not be very good. They all assume, in other words, that the Daniel Gregory Masons and Leo Sowerbys and Howard Hansons of our day are the only composers worth serious consideration, and that no latter-day Charles Ives’s or Harry Partches will ever emerge. They don’t do the homework that I consider basic to a music critic’s job, and scour the periphery of the music world for great composers who might be overlooked. They don’t consider that there are plenty of ways to get celebrated as a composer without writing great music. They don’t doubt the public illusion.

In other words, they buy into the system, and they play the game. Some of them want the big critic jobs – which you get by proving you understand Elliott Carter, not by waxing eloquent about some unknown genius whose CDs no one can find. (When Ed Rothstein was retired as chief critic at the Times, the Times asked me and Paul Griffiths, great champion of the Darmstadt High Modernists, to both apply for the job. I did. Guess who got it. Figure out why. And then tell me why no one calls Griffiths “subjective” for having written the libretto to Elliott Carter’s opera, which is a closer collaboration than I’ve ever had with a composer.) They want to interview big-name conductors. They want to feel important, part of the visible music world – and you don’t get there by befriending composers whose major performances are at Roulette. And so they train themselves, or come to believe, that the music they really like, the music they can intellectually approve, is the music that is celebrated in that world. Oh, not every piece and not every composer, they’ll exercise a little free will within the choices given. But they will not deny that Thomas Adès is a young genius. They will not argue that Elliott Carter’s music is not music for the ages. They will applaud Jennifer Higdon’s orchestration. They will not reject the range of choices offered, nor will they pay serious attention to choices not offered. That’s what’s called objectivity.

And what about me? I’m subjective. I am no respecter of awards or reputations. I rely completely on my ears, my heart, my brain, and when the Pulitzer committee or the Times music section contradicts my inner voice, I say to hell with the Pulitzer committee or the Times music section. Had I wanted to be loved (you will please excuse the expression) Downtown in 1986, all I needed to do was hop onto the John Zorn bandwagon. Instead, I didn’t like his music, and fought him all the way. Some of the composers who became somewhat known in the ’90s did so because I championed them – it wasn’t that I championed them because they were big names on that scene.

One of my most unusual personal qualities has always been, since childhood, an absolute imperviousness to peer pressure. I took it to such an extreme that it was a failing in many respects, and an obstacle to my social life. A student once asked me, “You don’t know what it’s like to be intellectually intimidated, do you?” With a surprised grin, I answered, “No, I don’t.” And so, somewhat arrogantly perhaps, I have put together my own musical Pantheon completely from my own aesthetic judgments, influenced of course by my own perceptions as a composer, but without regard for fame or friendship or self-interest or credentials or “objective” reinforcement from the established commercial world of classical music. That’s why I’m a “subjective” critic. My opinions must come from the fact that I’m “entrenched.” To have your opinions formed by the social world you want to be accepted by is to be “objective.” To form them yourself, and then take the consquences, is “subjective.”

I have sometimes been described as a critic who refuses to observe the usual professional standard of objectivity. That fit the paper I wrote for, of course, since the Village Voice was always known for its “advocacy journalism.” I never figured out what “advocacy journalism” meant – or rather, what was supposed to be the alternative. I always advocated a healthy, lively, diverse music scene, whereas if I had been a truly “objective” music critic, I suppose, I wouldn’t have given a damn whether new music concerts thrived or ceased to exist. In any case, this excellent article by Michael Kinsley at Slate perfectly expresses my feelings about objectivity, that it is a self-delusion, an unattainable goal, and a goal that would be inhuman if obtainable; that it is a dishonest foundation on which no truth can be erected.

Nobody believes in objectivity, if that means neutrality on any question about which two people somewhere on the planet might disagree. May a reporter take as a given that two plus two is four? Should a newspaper strive to be open-minded about Osama Bin Laden? To reveal–to have!–no preference between the United States and Iran? Is it permissible for a news story to take as a given that the Holocaust not only happened, but was a bad thing–or is that an expression of opinion that belongs on the op-ed page?….

Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism because it doesn’t have to hide its point of view. It doesn’t have to follow a trail of evidence or line of reasoning until one step before the conclusion and then slam on the brakes for fear of falling into the gulch of subjectivity. All observations are subjective. Writers freed of artificial objectivity can try to determine the whole truth about their subject and then tell it whole to the world. Their “objective” counterparts have to sort their subjective observations into two arbitrary piles: truths that are objective as well, and truths that are just an opinion. That second pile of truths then gets tossed out, or perhaps put in quotes and attributed to someone else. That is a common trick used by objective-style journalists in order to tell their readers what they believe to be true without inciting the wrath of the Objectivity cops.

Factual accuracy, he points out, is something different, and is vitally important. But objectivity is, after all, the principle on which Republicans have managed to finagle equal time for creation science whenever evolution is mentioned, as well as the principle by which the Pulitzer Prize winners continue to be presumptively regarded as America’s greatest composers. If “opinion journalism” indeed becomes the norm, maybe I’ll suddenly find myself in fashion.

For those interested in what tuning software will make microtonality most convenient for them (assuming you can be seduced down the primrose path, my pretty), microtonal programming expert Bill Sethares has offered an authoritative comparison, over at the tuning list, between Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven (LMSO) and Scala:

[W]hile they do overlap in some functions, they
do differ. The similarities: both will generate scales, both will save
to a variety of formats, both are written by dedicated people who have
done a lot to make it easier to explore microtonality. Strengths of
Scala: many analysis features, huge library, available on all
platforms. Strengths of LMSO: easy to use with a large variety of
synths and softsynths, great manual (clearly written and easy to
follow). For my personal taste, I think of Scala as better for
analysis and LMSO as better for performance. With specific reference
to Kontakt support, both work by writing a Kontakt script file that
can be added into any instrument. Scala’s implementation is limited to
a single scale at a time (I know — I helped Manuel debug the Kontakt
scripts). LMSO can have many tunings available instantly in a single
script, and you can switch between them slickly and easily. It’s
biggest liability is that it is Mac-only.

The estimable Frank Oteri asked me for a report on John Luther Adams’s sound installation The Place Where You Go to Listen for New Music Box, so instead of rambling about it here, I wrote it up real good for him, and it’s now over there. The title, “A Long Ride in a Slow Machine,” comes from a joke John made about the difference between his career and that of the other John Adams, whom we tend to refer to as John Coolidge Adams. After you go read that article, you’ll get more of a kick out of this message I just got from John:

Yesterday evening Jim and I were working in The Place. Suddenly the
drums started kicking. We looked online to see that a 4.7 quake had
just rocked the Alaska/Yukon border area, then listened as the waves
hit each of our seismic stations, one by one. It was pure magic. Talk about your rock ‘n roll…

Hundreds of hours of my life have been spent retuning synthesizers. It’s the last task, once I’ve figured out a tuning I want to explore, before I get to hear anything. It’s a tedious, mind-numbing job, usually lasting anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, plus a break to give my brain a rest. I’ve got about 50 tunings stored on my Yamaha DX7-IIFD, four Proteus’s (one keyboard and three rack-mount) whose dozen-each user tunings have been tuned and retuned countless times, and many floppy disks with various tunings for my creaky old Akai sampler. Each one represents a half-hour of repetitive, meticulous number-crunching.

But now I’ve got Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven, Jeff Scott’s tuning software. [UPDATE: Mac format only! Shoulda mentioned that.] The time-intensive part was the four or five weeks it always takes me to brace myself to read the instructions. But once I got over that hurdle, they turned out to be the clearest, best-written software help text I’ve ever seen. Five minutes later I had entered a 30-pitch scale into my Kontakt II sampler software, and was playing it. The actual transferring-the-scale part didn’t take half a minute. I am astonished. And now I can use that script to retune any of my synths as well. You can define scales as cents, ratios, hertz, srutis, as scales that repeat at the octave, that don’t repeat, and that repeat within any other interval. It’s software conceived by a microtonalist, anticipating anything a microtonalist may want to try out. Conlon Nancarrow used to muse regretfully about how much easier his player piano studies would have been to write if he had had today’s sequencing software, and I feel like I just gained a similar advantage in mid-career. Never again will I have to perform that tedious task between conception and audition. Microtonal music just got easier to make than it probably ought to be.

My remaining problem, in the 2006 Complete Technical Makeover of Kyle Gann, is Kontakt II. On either my Mac laptop or new G-5 desktop, the sounds clip and quickly overload the CPU meter. Ian Turner, our brilliant sound tech guy in Bard’s electronic music department, says that Kontakt requires a separate internal hard drive with a 10,000 rpm rate to keep the samples on. I’m sure he’s right – Ian has a lot of experience with Kontakt – but can anyone confirm or disconfirm this from their own experience or offer alternatives? I loaded the samples on an external firewire drive, and that didn’t help. It’s hard to believe that everyone who’s ever bought Kontakt also bought an extra internal drive, and I’m really curious whether there’s any other way to make it work, so I appeal to the masses.

In any case, even if you’re not a microtonalist, EVEN IF YOU HATE MICROTONAL MUSIC, you must purchase Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven, just to be able to say you have it, and so that Jeff Scott (whom I don’t know, but have already erected a small shrine to, with incense) can make a million dollars for having invented this. It’s only $165, postage included.

UPDATE: I had forgotten that LMSO (Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven) is only for the Mac at present. I also should have mentioned Scala, a free tuning software that’s been around forever for the PC, and became available for the Mac a year or so ago. A student of mine had tremendous luck making microtonal music with Scala. It’s a very intelligent program, invented by the helpful and highly literate Manuel Op de Coul, but I played around with it for a few months, and never quite succeeded in retuning anything. LMSO was easier to figure out. I used to have a nice old Mac program called Unisyn that sent tunings to synthesizers, which became obsolete; LMSO is hardly the first software to fulfill that particular function, but I’m wowed by its usability and documentation. I don’t know enough about this stuff to be reviewing software, but you can say this for sure: if I have success with a piece of software, any idiot can figure it out.

As for Kontakt, I’ve already received an endless litany of technical issues. It doesn’t look like I’m going to get it to work without spending a couple thousand more dollars. I do wish that the people at Manny’s Music who sold it to me had warned me that the advertised technical specifications were nowhere near adequate to actually run the thing. Be warned.

This Thursday evening at Connecticut College, March 30 at 8 PM, the Da Capo ensemble is playing my The Day Revisited, along with my son Bernard Gann on fretless bass and myself on synthesizer. Presented in Evans Hall of the Cummings Arts Center in New London, CT, it’s part of a symposium on art and technology, and the program runs as follows:

In Ida’s Mirror by Stan Link (alto flute and electronic sound)

Response by Panayiotis Kokoras (electronic sound)

Meeting Places by Arthur Kreiger (ensemble and electronic sound)

New York Counterpoint by Steve Reich (clarinet and electronics)

The Day Revisited by Kyle Gann (ensemble and electronics)

Pan of the Landscape by Christopher Becks (16 mm film)

Synchronisms No. 6 by Mario Davidovsky (piano and electronic sound)

Old Mario and I haven’t been on the same program together since… well, forever, actually. I’m kind of a low-tech guy for this high-tech context, but The Day Revisited is my mellow ambient quintet in a 29-pitch scale, easy for me to play on the synth, a tremendous challenge for the flute and clarinet.

FAIRBANKS – They drive on the rivers up here. In winter the frozen rivers are treated as extra streets and even shown that way on maps, until at some point the thaw suddenly sets in, a car or snowmobile falls through, and they close them up for the summer. People also ski pulled by high-speed dogs, sort of like waterskiing on land. It’s called ski-jouring, or something, and is not regarded as evidence of suicidal mental illness. Alaska is not like the lower 48. I’m told it’s homogenized considerably in recent years, but it will never be the same.

I’ll tell you about John Luther Adams’s inspiring new sound installation later – the opening is tonight – but I did get my dog sled ride. Tom and Cathy Dimon of Dimon Freight Dogs, North Pole, AK, run a wonderful business. I thought the clothing I had brought was plenty warm, but as the accompanying illustration shows, Cathy bundled me up in several extra layers, until I felt and looked much like Maggie on The Simpsons in her starfish snow suit. Good thing. The temperature’s been between zero and 20, not the 20 below John had gleefully predicted, but when you’re zipping down the trail at 8 mph pulled by eight eager huskies, you don’t want much more than your eyes exposed to the wind.

What surprised me was the enthusiasm of the dogs. The team selected for my trip were leaping with excitement, the 30 or so left behind visibly and audibly disappointed. Rambunctious but affectionate, they seem human: they understand a wide range of commands, well beyond “gee” and “haw” for right and left and “hold” for stop, and Tom Dimon – standing behind me on the sled – kept up a running conversation with them as though they were old and faithful employees, which they are. I finagled my 23-inch butt into the 20-inch-wide sled, sat on a plastic crate, and pretended to be a sack of provisions bound for Prudhoe Bay, which seemed the appropriate role. Tom released the anchors, and John tried to take a photo of me in the sled, but in their eagerness to stretch their legs the dogs shot off so fast that the photo came out an empty field of snow. The six-mile circular trail traced a rectangle through a flood plain, and so no hills were involved, but there was still a sharp two- or three-foot bump every 30 feet. I feared getting my bones rattled, but the sled was well built to absorb the shocks, and I was never uncomfortable. Jennifer, another employee, rode ahead on a snowmobile to watch out for moose. Moose don’t really distinguish between dogs and wolves, Tom explained, and sometimes a nasty fight ensues.

This had all been John’s idea and I, no seeker of physical thrills, was dubious until the moment I got in the sled. But from the first rush I was exhilarated. No eight humans could have showed more personal nuance than the dogs; Pepper was thirsty and kept grabbing mouthfuls of snow, Sherman wanted to look back at Tom rather than stay on his side of the line, and kept getting tangled up. The lead dogs were a little young, Tom explained, and though they took charge well, they sometimes paused to argue with commands. Once I slid far enough up an embankment that I expected to be tumbled out into the snow, once the dogs nearly took off without Tom while he was untangling the line, but disasters were avoided, and it was pure effervescence. It became easy to imagine that, years ago, this was the most efficient possible technology for negotiating Alaska’s frozen expanses. People in the back country still do it, for pleasure and for purely practical considerations. So I’m sold: DO NOT go to Alaska, DO NOT, without getting a dog-sled ride.

Look where I’m going:

Saturday morning before dawn I’m flying to Fairbanks, Alaska. John Luther Adams has a permanent sound and light installation opening this Tuesday, March 21, at the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The installation is a set of rooms called The Place Where You Go to Listen, which is a translation of an Iñupiaq word for a legendary place on the arctic coast. Called by its creator “a virtual world that resonates with the real world,” The Place Where You Go to Listen translates seismic activity, geomagnetism, cloud cover and visibility, and the movements of the sun and moon into soundscapes and changes of light. The image you’re looking at above is a set of five glass panes altogether 20 feet wide and 9 feet tall, coated with a diffusion surface and illuminated by LED floodlights that make it a rear-projection screen for fields of pure color. The colors change with the angle and position of the sun in real time. Bell sounds are activated by movements of the aurora borealis, noises ebb and flow with seismic activity, and harmonic series’ track the phases of the moon. It’s all done by computer, with data piped in from seismological stations and whatnot, and is intended to make the viewer/listener aware of where the earth fits into its environment and what it’s doing. It looks and sounds like it’ll be really beautiful.

Weather.com predicts it will be minus 11 degrees when I get there [oops, John just e-mailed that it was 26 below last night]. Have I ever mentioned that I’m a warm-weather kind of guy, and already resent that upstate New York gets down to 20 above? Anyway, John’s promised me a dogsled ride – I didn’t ask, but he volunteered – and after the opening we’re sure to retire to another hallowed Iñupiaq spot, The Place Where You Go to Imbibe Fine Single-Malt Scotches. I’m looking forward to that too, and, after I return on the 23rd, will report back to you on the beauty of the whole experience. Or what I remember of it.

I’d never applied for a Guggenheim before, and I found the wording of their rejection a little surprising: “Yeah, right, we’re gonna give you a Guggenheim, and George Bush is going to give Cindy Sheehan a cabinet post.” Can anyone tell me if this is their standard form letter?

Sunday the Da Capo ensemble performed a program here at Bard College of music by Russian composers who all attended: Elena Antonenko, Boris Filanovski, Alexander Radvilovitch, Vladimir Tarnopolski, Kirill Umansky, and my friend Dmitri Riabtsev, who three years ago was invaluable in helping me produce my opera Cinderella’s Bad Magic in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There was a panel discussion before the concert on the subject of how life has changed for composers since the fall of communism. Some claimed it had changed not at all, others that it was a little different, but all talked about the near-absence of support for Russian composers at home, having lost state support and having no tradition of private patronage.

In the question-and-answer period, I noted that those of us in new music are inundated these days with living composers from Estonia, the Ukraine, Georgia, and asked what was different about Russia that its composers couldn’t match the relative visibility of those of its satellites. Responses exhibited a liveliness born of frustration and complete recognition of what I was saying. All pretty much agreed that since the Baltic republics had been occupied by a foreign power, they turned to nationalism to preserve their self-image. It became a point of honor for Estonian conductors like Paavo Jarvi, Finnish ones like Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Ukrainian ones like Virko Baley to go out and champion their countrymen. Since Russia was the central power, it had no national image to defend, and Russian conductors and performers feel no similar mandate to perform their compatriots. Thus the perceptions, at least, of Russian composers, who think that even we Americans – having some tradition of private new-music funding – are better off than they are.

Since then I’ve received a very nice e-mail from Erkki-Sven Tüür, the leading Estonian composer of my generation, letting me know (I hope he won’t mind my revealing) that he reads my blog from his retreat on the Baltic island of Hiiumaa, which gives me even greater delight in recounting the above anecdote. From Moscow and St. Petersburg to rural Estonia via a small college in rural America – so travel the cultural perceptions of the internet age.

My Symphony magazine article on orchestral composer/DJ Mason Bates is now online: “Mason Bates, or someone like him, was bound to appear sooner or later….” Also, my profile of composer Melissa Hui is out in the current Chamber Music magazine, but not, alas, online.

And on a minor note, student flutist Sarah Elia performed my solo flute piece Desert Flowers tonight at Bard College. It hadn’t been heard publicly (that I know of) since 1989. I was 23 when I wrote it. Carter was president at the time. Sarah did a lovely job.

Barbershop quartet music, like ragtime, is a great source of common-tone diminished seventh chords, when it’s time to teach those. It’s also full of parallel tritones in chromatic descent implying root motion around the circle of fifths. It actually has a lot in common with postminimalism: a use of voice-leading so consistently circumscribed that it tends to generate the same consonant (but not always functionally-related) sonorities over and over again. But the style contains one common chord I haven’t seen in any other context: a dominant seventh built on the leading tone, nominally a V7/iii but never resolved as such – rather, a chromatic neighbor-note chord to the tonic triad, given here at the two X’s:

Does anyone have a name for this chord? It often appears between two tonic triads, and the use of the seventh (G, here) helps avoid parallel octaves that might otherwise occur between two B-flats and two A’s. It’s almost identical to a common-tone diminished seventh and serves the same function, only the common tone is done away with, which drops down to the leading tone. The entire assemblage also occurs a perfect fourth higher – i.e., as a D dominant 7th making a neighboring chord to E-flat. Anyone have a name or term for these dominant sevenths used as chromatic neighbors? Anyone ever see them in any other context besides barbershop quartet music?

UPDATE: Allow me to emphasize, since it keeps coming up in the comments, that the entire song is in B-flat major, with no other key ever noticeably implied, and that the chord in question occurs in several varied contexts: quick, drawn-out, passing, neighbor, and so on.