…it pours. After no performances in about a decade, my toy piano piece Paris Intermezzo was played last week in Worcester, Massachusetts, by John MacDonald – a really lovely performance – and it’s about to be played again seven times. French pianist Wilhem Latchoumia will play it on November 18, 19 , 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26 with the Compagnie de Danse Stanilaw Wisniewski at the Centre Culturel Charlie Chaplin à Vaulx-en-Velin, near Lyon. If anyone’s in the area (I won’t be). Space is limited, and reservations are recommended, at 04 72 04 81 18 ou 19. Also on the program is toy piano music (some with electronics) by Bernadette Speach, P. Regana-Baron, and others. Paris Intermezzo dates from 1989, and it’s a piece I had rather forgotten about, but it held up beautifully in MacDonald’s ravishing interpretation, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it again. I have a performance of my Transcendental Sonnets coming up in Paris in the spring, so maybe the French have discovered me. Maybe I’m the Jerry Lewis of new music!

I’ve written a little keyboard work (for a retuned electronic keyboard, playable by human hands) that I’m proud of for reasons with which the reader has no reason to sympathize. One is that I’ve finally, after years of trying, broken past the barrier of the 11th harmonic to base a piece on the 13th harmonic and its resultant intervals. This will seem a small achievement to some microtonalists, many of whom run wild with 43rd and 79th harmonics and 53- and 72-tone scales, but I have always found myself unable to compose merely theoretically, without internalizing and being able to hear, almost more in my heart than in my head, the materials I’m using. Thus my approach to microtonality has always been slow and gradual, and I’ve had a devil of a time getting the 13th harmonic into my system. The other reason is that the scale is the simplest I’ve ever come up with (simplicity being an artistic virtue, if not inherently the best or most necessary virtue, and having been considered one for many hundreds of years, no matter how fervently the complexity mavens try to rationalize it out of existence). The scale, defined as ratios to a fundamental (this way of discussing pitch is explained at my just intonation page if you’re interested), comprises nothing more than all possible ratios among whole numbers 1 through 13:

13/12, 13/11, 13/10, 13/9, 13/8, 13/7 (13/6, 13/5, and so on, are merely octaves of those already mentioned)

12/11, 12/7 (12/10 is the same as 6/5, 12/9 = 4/3, and so on)

11/10, 11/9, 11/8, 11/7, 11/6

10/9, 10/7 (10/8 = 5/4, 10/6 = 5/3)

9/8, 9/7, 9/5

8/7, 8/5

7/6, 7/5, 7/4

6/5

5/4, 5/3

4/3

3/2

1/1

It’s 29 pitches in all, all with fairly simple relationships to the tonic, because of which the whole piece takes place over a rhythmicized tonic drone. I figured out that I could make different scales within this network by taking all notes expressible by the form 13/X, or 11/X, or X/7, and the scales with the smallest numbers would be closest to simple tonality, while the larger-numbered scales will have a much more oblique relationship. Thus, by wandering through the 29 pitches on these different scales, the piece goes “in and out of focus,” sometimes comically random-sounding, sometimes purely and simply in tune, with every gradation in-between – and all with a tremendous economy of means. I’ve put it up for you to hear it here. The duration is just under five minutes, the title: Triskaidekaphonia. More detailed information about the tuning and compositional strategy is here. Only a trifle, perhaps, but it provides yet another bit of proof of the miraculous nature of the whole number series.

There are two web sites that I think you should check out – not right this minute, but when you have some leisure time, for they both require and deserve a lot of time to get into:

1. The best paper I heard at the toy piano conference at Clark University last week was by the irrepressibly enthusiastic Helen Thorington, of NPR and radio sound art fame. She came to tell about her Networked Performance blog, a site where she and other bloggers keep track of internet performance projects from all around the world. The stuff she showed us ranged from unbelievable to hilarious, and mostly involved technologically brilliant attempts to get lay audiences more involved in art. The best approach to the site, I think, is to go down to the menu on the lower right hand side and look through the categories of different types of art. I was most tickled by the “Wearables,” new high-tech clothing, like:

Wearable Keyboards by a Professor Tsukamoto of Kobe University, piano key patterns sewn into the fronts of dresses, or the arms of shirts, that create sound when touched (giving new meaning to my oft-repeated expression that [French accent, please] “a beyootiful woman must be played like an eenstrument”);

Aware Cuffs, knitted cuffs for your wrists with lights that will light up when you’re within range of wireless internet service;

Random Search underwear, developed by Ayah Bdeir, that responds to metal detector searches in airports with rippling LED lights.

But there’s tons of more stuff – sites that you can draw on and have the drawings turn into sound, mirrors that can recognize your identity and give a personalized digital response, communal iPods, and tons more. A few hours’ immersion will make the timid old 20th century seem to fade away from consciousness, and will bring to life the famous statement by science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

2. Composer/video artist/whatever-he-wants-to-be-called-these-days Henry Gwiazda has just inaugurated a web site to accompany (and sell) his imminent Innova DVD titled, “She’s Walking….” But this is more than an informational web site: it’ll let you listen to excerpts of Gwiazda’s music and watch clips from the DVD, but will also ask you personal questions and offer bits of wisdom like, “Perhaps each day is about the same because we need the time to practice what to see and what to hear.” And you can upload a photo of yourself (or anything else) and have it diffracted via Gwiazda’s abstracting imagery. Gwiazda’s music is made up of samples of real-life sounds combined with a humorous sense of poetry; his videos focus over and over on details from daily life in an attempt to make us see the world around us differently. Beautiful, touching stuff. And there’s also a link to the program notes I wrote for the DVD, though not to my filmed interview with Gwiazda that comes with it.

Enjoy!

The American Composers’ Orchestra is performing a transcription of Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No. 7 (perhaps the best of his early works) at Zankel Hall on November 11. They asked me to write a little article for their web site about Nancarrow as a person, and it’s now posted here.

My Rochberg talk out of the way, I am now focused on this week’s events. First, as previously noted, the premiere of my microtonal quintet The Day Revisited occurs this Wednesday, November 2, at Bard College’s Olin Auditorium. My son Bernard and I will be performing with the Da Capo ensemble, and other Bardian composers are featured, including faculty members Joan Tower and Thurman Barker, temporary faculty Keith Fitch, a very talented student Marcus Parris, and local composer Jonathan Talbott.

Then I’m giving the keynote address at a festival/symposium called The Extensible Toy Piano Project. The brainchild of directors David Claman and Matt Malsky, the event takes place Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5, at the Razzo Recital Hall at the Traina Center for the Arts at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussetts. My speech is Saturday evening at 7. I’ve never given a keynote address before, and have spent the last couple of weeks thinking about what the toy piano means to me. A lot, actually: on the Saturday concert will be my 1989 toy piano piece Paris Intermezzo, and I also used the instrument (sampled and microtonally retuned) in So Many Little Dyings. Naturally, my talk, as the festival itself, probably, will revolve around John Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano of 1948, which first brought the instrument to serious attention – and which I have added to Postclassic Radio as an homage.

Some readers have a few issues with the “comments” option, and I have a couple of disappointments about the new format myself – or rather, with what the new format does to the old entries. I thought that rather than post them as comments I’d forward them to Doug McLennan and post them here.

First, my issues. Somehow, in moving all my files to the new space, an awful lot of apostrophes and quotation marks got swallowed up, making the posts look a little illiterate. I’ve been restoring those in the articles I care most about, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to all of them. Also, internal links from one post to another are now all incorrect (as are, one presumes, all links ever made to one of my blog entries from the outside). I’m trying to correct those – if you find one that no longer works, I’d appreciate knowing about it.

Readers are concerned that the “Preview” button doesn’t work when you post a comment – you apparently just get a blank screen. I’ve been asked if it’s possible to provide some kind of “your comment is awaiting moderator approval” message to those who try to post, and also if I can create a list of “approved commenters,” so that some people will get carte blanche after the first couple of posts. I’m not so sure about the latter – I’d hate to have to create a two-tier system of people I trust and people I don’t. But I’ll pass the other concerns on to Doug. It’s like any time you move to a new house or new computer or new office, for awhile nothing seems to work right.

UPDATE: I’m assured that the preview problems are fixed – at least posting comments works like clockwork for me and Doug – and there’s a message explaining that comments are screened before posting. Let me know if you have a recurring problem, and tell me what browser you’re using so I can check if there’s some compatability problem. Thanks.

Robert Ashley’s brand new recording of his opera Celestial Excursions is up in its 111-minute entirety on Postclassic Radio. I think it’s his most musically beautiful opera ever, even though there’s not particularly much more music in it than in the other ones – something about the rhythms of the words, the way the repeated phrases make music. It’s his opera about old people:

Old people are special because they have no future. The future is what to eat for breakfast, or where did I leave my shoes. Everything else is in the past. Is this understandable?

So, sometimes old people break the rules. Especially the rules of conversation and being together. They laugh a lot. I mean real, full laughter. Did you ever notice that? They break the rules because, for one reason or another (illness, anger, damage, enough of that, whatever), the rules no longer apply for them.

Or to quote the song about the baguette:

The plate was taken away. The heavy door shut. I heard the lock.

I thought to myself, if Beckett wrote in French,

He must have had to have a baguette for breakfast.

You can’t write in French after a breakfast of oatmeal.

That is, when Beckett decided to write in French,
He had to have a baguette for breakfast.

No, I thought to myself, think clearly. This is your chance.

Beckett wanted to have the baguette for breakfast, though he knew this desire would lead

Him irrevocably to writing in French.

You can’t have the baguette for breakfast and write other than in French.

He chose. It takes courage to be a writer.

Yep.

I neglected to notice that the Village Voice turned fifty this week – the first issue was dated Oct. 26, 1955, and I was born soon afterward. My editor Bob Christgau gives a capsule history of music criticism there. True to form, he doesn’t sugarcoat anything:

In 1985 I became a parent and relinquished the editorship to a talented series of successors who know why I’m not name-checking them—they experienced firsthand the space cutbacks that have continued for 20 years (and hey, now pay rates are dipping too!). [I came to the Voice in November 1986. – KG] Many claim our section lost authority around the time I left, and they’re right. This had nothing to do with editing. It was structural. The professionalization and expansion of music coverage, together with the DIY-ization and expansion of music production, topped off by the online DIY-ization of music coverage, have rendered authority, which in any aesthetic matter is provisional at best, an utter chimera, no matter how many 100 best this-es and 50 top thats music media sell ads with….

This is not a great time in alternative rock or alternative journalism—mainstream pop or mainstream journalism either….

Douglas McLennan calls my attention to a nice review of my new CD, by composer Christopher DeLaurenti in The Stranger, out of Seattle (halfway down the page): “Like Stravinsky, composer Kyle Gann has an astounding ability to forcibly deploy complex rhythms without sounding cluttered or pretentiously convoluted.” Woohoo! The West Coast always seems to love me better than the East Coast, and you know what, West Coast? I love you better too.

As many of you have quickly noticed, this new format allows for the possibility of comments (I can set this option or not set it per individual post). The way Arts Journal’s comments work, the ones you send go into a holding pen until I OK them. Most people, so far, have kept repeatedly sending, trying to get their comments to appear, but they won’t, automatically. This is as it should be – I’ve spent enough time cleaning obscene nonsense out of my web site guest page to know that you don’t just hand total strangers a can of spray paint and invite them to express themselves. Your comment will appear when I get time to go into the software and publish it, assuming I find it well-intended and insightful.

The way I look at this is as a time-saving feature. I’ve always tried to post and/or respond to helpful comments I get, but sometimes this takes up lots more time than writing the original post did. Now people can do their own writing – I don’t have to paraphrase or edit, and I don’t have to go through the time and delay of writing people back and asking if it’s OK to quote them. I don’t have to answer, necessarily, either. I’m hoping this will more fully acknowledge the range of wonderful responses I get, while meaning a little less work for me.

On the other hand, I don’t get paid to blog here, and this is my space. I don’t owe nobody nuthin’. Anonymous comments will be deleted without becoming public, likewise abusive ones, as well as comments I don’t see the point of. No one will grandstand in this space but me. I’m all for collective wisdom – but if you want to prove how brilliant you are at length, you can start your own damn blog (are there are places that will give you the space for free). If you want to get a group dialogue going, join some new music forum like Sequenza 21. This is my turf, period, end of sentence.

I’ve been warned, by the way, against going wild with the photos, which take up loads of web space and make the site difficult for some people to access. So sorry about those promised photos of Alex Ross’s cats, it looks like you won’t be seeing them here after all. (Too bad, I paid a pretty penny for them on the black market, and some of them caught the felines in real compromising poses.)

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the composer George Rochberg since he died last spring, and now, by some amazing coincidence, I’ve been asked to speak about him this weekend. The Colorado String Quartet, who are, or which is, in residence at Bard College, will perform Rochberg’s Quartet No. 6 (1978) at 3 PM this Sunday, Oct. 30, at Olin Auditorium here, at Annandale-on-Hudson off of Route 9G. It’s the last of the “Concord” Quartets, with which Rochberg boldly inaugurated postmodernism under the shocked eyes of the classical establishment, and the one that famously contains a theme and variations on Pachelbel’s infamous Canon. So I’ll give a little talk about Rochberg and the piece before they play it. They’re also playing stuff by Haydn and Beethoven (Op. 127), but I don’t know anything about them.

UPDATE: Oops – somehow Franz Joseph Haydn changed into Richard Wernick. I HATE it when that happens.

Thanks to Douglas McLennan, from whom all blessings flow, I have now joined the newer, sleeker ranks of Arts Journal bloggers whose wisdom is couched in the snazzy new format. No longer will I turn from Jan Herman’s blog to my own and hang my head in shame! And before, somehow because I’m on a Mac, I could never post images. Now, with the new software, I can! and I celebrate this newfound ability with an experimental post of Erik Satie, the first postclassical composer and patron saint of all who have come since. Coming up soon, I have a lot of never-before-seen photos of Alex Ross’s cat!

It seems like every month another young composer shoots out of grad school and starts blogging, brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez. I have nothing against that music. And if I did, what would it matter? Might as well rail against Brahms. What depresses me, and makes me feel trapped in an age of endless musical conservatism, is the ever-renewed enthusiasm, the sense that that old, old, well-known music, music with no more secrets to divulge, music of a past century, needs ever to be championed by the young, the young of every era and for all time.

In 1973 I came out of high school brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez. By the time I graduated college, I had discovered the next generation – Reich, Riley, Glass, Oliveros – and by the time I was through grad school I was grappling with Adams, Lentz, Meredith Monk. That means that during seven years of higher education I went from studying music by composers 30 years older than myself to those who were 20, 15, even 10 years older than me. Now I mainly pay attention to the music of my numerous brilliant contemporaries, and I’ve even had my music influenced by people younger than myself.

Did this happen because staid, prim Northwestern University was exposing me to Meredith Monk? HA! That’s a laugh. Most of the faculty there still considered Hindemith a little outré. My generation didn’t trust our teachers to tell us everything, and we did our own research.

Now, in an endless stream, come the 21st-century postgraduates, children of the 1980s, who brush me aside as irrelevant because I don’t fawn over the important music of our time: Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez! And I think to myself, “Kids, those people are your grandparents’ generation, except for Carter, who’s your great-grandfather.” Had I followed that pattern, I would have come out of college all excited about Copland, Hindemith, Milhaud! instead of the postminimalists. If the young composers were on my timetable, I’d be considered old-fashioned by now, and they’d be grappling with music by composers born in the 1960s and ’70s. There’s a big difference between thinking about music that has been irrefutably validated by history, and music that is still in doubt, music that needs to be examined, music that no one in power will yet vouch for, music that makes your teachers uncomfortable. How do you become a composer wrestling only with a history already etched in granite, rather than interacting with still-pliable movements and a repertoire whose course you will be called upon to alter and direct?

Of course, what’s obvious is that grad school teachers are pushing Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez!, and doing so very persuasively. But – why are these young composers listening to their teachers? My generation rebelled against our teachers, and so today’s young generation is rebelling against us by – not rebelling?