Because I just never seem to have enough to do to fill up my time, I guess, I sometimes serve as a “reader” for publishers who want a professional opinion on whether a manuscript should be published. Right now I’m reading a personal memoir by the late George Rochberg – possibly because I was one of the few to express public sympathy for his music and aesthetics after he died. I must say I’m amazed, considering what a different type of composer he was from me, how simpatico I find his opinions.

One gratifying thing I’ve learned is that Rochberg had no patience whatever with Schenkerian analysis, nor with those courses of study comprised under the title “form and analysis.” There seems to be something that links Schenkerian analysis and the “form and analysis” curriculum together with 12-tone music and High Modernism, some kind of belief in absolute rationalism and a specious objectivity devoid of cultural influence or context. I studied Schenkerian analysis with a brilliant man (best not named in this connection), and all we did was argue over what I saw as the arbitrariness and subjectivity of what purported to be scientifically rigorous criteria. I hear that Europe quit paying attention to Schenker decades ago, but he’s still much in vogue in certain American college departments that want to see themselves as top rank. My employers would be prouder of me if I could buy into that whole pretentious mindset, and it’s refreshing to know that someone as academically respectable as Rochberg – only too honest to kid himself – was on my side.

The other thing I find attractive is Rochberg’s characterization of history. As he scopes it out, the history of music was always inclusive and cumulative, each era receiving what was valuable from the previous one and building on it – until the mid-20th century, which decided to exclude and prohibit aspects of the musical practice that preceded it. Rochberg felt that this negative new attitude was a sure road map to oblivion, that a prohibitionary approach to composing would inevitably become a dessicated practice that would blow away with the first wind. For me, this is why bebop harmony is a more sane continuation of the theoretical tradition than the sterile pitch-set analysis I learned in school, because it folds in, retains, and elaborates what came before. And I do find something weirdly schizophrenic in the fact that I spend my afternoons teaching students how to use a certain harmonic vocabulary, and that some composers tell those students that, having learned that vocabulary, they’re not allowed to use it. Old, Eurocentric curmudgeon Rochberg may have been, but like me he believed in a Post-Prohibitive Age, and he was elaborating that belief before I was old enough to know what the issues were.

UPDATE: I am told by an authoritative source that my comment about Schenker analysis being ignored by Europe used to be true; but that there has been a resurgence of the technique in England (which is sort of the Columbia University of Europe anyway), and in Finland and Estonia, whence it has been spread by expatriate Americans.

I love teaching with my external hard drive, which now contains 6844 mp3s, perhaps something like ten percent of my record/CD collection. Today we were analyzing Ives’s Concord Sonata. I wanted to make the point that Ives didn’t invent the tone cluster (or at least wasn’t the first to invent it), and so I plugged in my hard drive, pressed a couple of keys, and played the Combat Naval for harpsichord by Michel Corrette (1707-1795), which uses forearm clusters to simulate cannonfire. The students expressed surprise that something so wild could have been written in the 18th century, so I assured them that the Classical Era was a lot more varied than standard music history admits and, to illustrate, played a jew’s-harp concerto by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809), who was Beethoven’s composition teacher. (Having been a record reviewer for Fanfare magazine for many years, I know quite a bit of repertoire never run into by those whose education is primarily academic.) The downside of teaching this way is that I digress considerably more often, and for longer periods.

I have to say, though, that my first Maxtor hard drive suffered a very light fall onto a soft carpet, and quit working altogether, after I’d had it only five months. Maxtor made it extremely difficult to return: I had to download some voluminous instructions in fine print, and wrap it in foam (styrofoam peanuts were not acceptable for honoring the warranty) and an anti-magnetic wrapper that was difficult to obtain. Since then, the Maxtor’s icon sometimes fails to appear on my desktop when I plug it in. I’ve been told that La Cie makes the best external hard drives, and I’m thinking of getting one.

“Music nowadays is merely the art of executing difficulties, and in the end that which is only difficult ceases to please.”

Voltaire, Candide

I had a meeting with an editor from a major publisher today, as happens frequently. They want to know what textbooks I’m looking for, and are polite enough to ask what books I’m planning to write. My esoteric plans don’t generally thrill them. But this one asked what kind of textbook I’d like to see. I told her that I’d love a beginning music theory text that isn’t so exclusively classically oriented, one that would have examples from Broadway tunes, folk music, and pop music, like maybe some musical examples from the Beatles, so that I can connect the theory to music that my students, of whom only about half are classical musicians, already know. And she told me that, the way things are legally right now, nobody, but NOBODY is allowed to quote Beatles songs in a textbook. She said that her company even published a book on pop music, and were prevented from using a single example from the Beatles. This explains a lot – how can you have a theory textbook that includes pop music if the stuff’s all under copyright, and pop musicians won’t let you use their work? Thus we end up with all-classical music textbooks. Very interesting. How do we get past this impasse, Sherlock?

UPDATE: Carl Voss writes to inform me that Robert Gauldin’s Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music “liberally cites folk, pop, and jazz tunes along with the classical repertoire,” including a passage from the Beatles’s “Something” to illustrate the use of bVII. I will check, it, out!

Joseph Horowitz’s article on Gershwin in today’s Times reiterates the usual historical positions on him. One one side are the musicians (Copland and Thomson are quoted) who considered Gershwin’s music lowbrow and never took it seriously. On the other side are those who find in longevity irrefutable evidence of artistic success, and therefore consider Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris among the great classics of American music. As usual, allow me to distance myself from both sides.

I have always taken Gershwin completely seriously as a composer. As a matter of fact, when I was a 11-year-old fan of Mozart and Schubert and Grieg and Rachmaninoff, it disturbed me that there were, seemingly, no composers from America. Then I discovered Gershwin, and it was like a window opened into a wonderful world I had thought I could only look at from outside. I remember in grade school being so intently absorbed in a biography of Gershwin that it took a teacher yelling my name most of a minute to get my attention. I played the solo piano version of Rhapsody in Blue at 12, and ingested it as ravenously as though it had been a succulent cheese and I a starving man.

As my taste matured, however, I came to feel that Rhapsody in Blue – Gershwin’s first major work, after all – and An American in Paris were kind of inept in their piecemeal pastiche technique, a new tune every few measures, attempts to write classical music by someone who hadn’t figured it out yet. I graduated to the Concerto in F, the piece with which I think Gershwin hit his stride, and I also came to love the Cuban Overture and even the little-played Second Rhapsody. And of course Porgy and Bess is one of my favorite operas (and to those who claim it isn’t “really” an opera, I would ask, what are the meanings of “isn’t,” “really,” and “opera” in that sentence, and what do you get out of making such an empty argument?). So today I find Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris kind of painful to listen to – but otherwise I remain a tremendous Gershwin fan. And, as with the bulk of my opinions, I never find this position echoed anywhere in the repetitive media discourse about the subject.

Alaskan composer John Luther Adams and I were out grouse-hunting the other day, and got into a conversation about our generation of composers. We had flushed out a couple of coveys we weren’t expecting, peppered the air with some 7 1/2 shot, and my spaniel Nellie had done a noble job of scouring the bracken for anything we might have hit – but came up empty. Finally, dropping my gun, I suggested that maybe the reason composers our age hadn’t gotten enough attention was that we showed too much respect for our elders, and hadn’t presented ourselves as individuals worthy of attention ourselves. John removed his orange cap, wiped his forehead with a weary arm, uncocked his 20-gauge, and asked what I meant.

OK, we weren’t actually grouse-hunting, we were drinking at the Broome Street Bar after a La Monte Young concert, but it was just as picturesque, believe me.

After all, John was just about to premiere a piece titled For Lou Harrison, dedicated to one of his mentors. I had just released a CD of basically player-piano music, after having written a book about Conlon Nancarrow. I describe John’s music as a kind of cross between Henry Cowell and Morton Feldman, and he’s always been OK with that. My microtonal music doesn’t sound like that of my teacher Ben Johnston, but I use his notation, and I inherited his approach to harmony. Our mutual friend Peter Garland has evolved an entirely original musical idiom, but he’s always staking his claim to the Partch/Cowell/Rudhyar aesthetic. Our friend Larry Polansky is the continuation of James Tenney experimentalism, and his greatest piece yet is a set of variations on a Ruth Crawford-harmonized folksong. Mikel Rouse dedicated his most groundbreaking opera to his pioneer-predecessor Robert Ashley. The great composers of my generation, at least the ones I think are great, have not exactly revolted against their elders. We have not reinvented the wheel nor the world, nor announced that all music before we arrived was worthless and should be forgotten.

That’s part one of the argument. Part two is that we have also not excommunicated anyone. We have not indulged in the age-old gambit of announcing that our way of writing music was the only way. We have not penned manifestos declaring that “Anyone who has not felt – I do not say understand – but felt the necessity of the postminimalist/totalist/microtonal language is USELESS.” We haven’t done the Stockhausen/Boulez thing, the Picasso/Braque thing. We haven’t even claimed, as John Zorn did, that Carl Stalling, not John Cage, was the REAL father of the avant-garde. I remember in the mid-80s Zorn starting off a liner note, with a startling lack of prescience: “Like it or not, the era of the one-composer piece is just about over….” He seemed to abandon that tack soon after.

There are several things I feel in response to all this. First, I am proud of my generation for not excommunicating anyone. We were scarred by the battles our teachers fought, which appear stupid in retrospect. We absorbed pluralism with our mother’s milk. We learned 12-tone music and sometimes loved it, while nodding our head to the Beatles, while zoning out to Terry Riley, while feeling a warm kinship with Virgil Thomson, while absorbing amazing rhythmic complexities from Henry Cowell, while buying up one Coltrane record after another. I had always felt that working as a critic robbed me of the luxury of believing that my own aesthetic was uniquely privileged, but more and more I find all my peers in the same boat. Many of us may feel (John certainly more than I) that THIS is the way I must write my music, but I’ve never met a composer my own age or younger who feels like only one kind of music is valid today for everyone. Minimalism nurtures no mandates. There were a couple of years back there that the Bang on a Can composers went around saying that new music, to be relevant today, must be based on the vernacular – but what vernacular they meant was a question no one could answer, and the argument petered out quickly in the face of non-vernacular-based great music by Feldman, Varese, Tenney, Niblock, and others. Thank the gods for my generation of composers: we are, by and large, a goddamned tolerant bunch.

The other part is harder to answer. Beethoven claimed that he had learned nothing from Haydn – I will not say that about Nancarrow, nor John about Harrison – quite the contrary. This does not mean that John’s music isn’t a whole different kettle of fish from Harrison’s. Peter Garland can go on about the mantle of Varèse all he wants, but his own gentle, subtly non-repetitive style couldn’t be further from the acerbities of Octandre and Hyperprism. And there’s been little notice that, while Nancarrow’s player piano music is laced together with brilliant large-scale canonic and isorhythmic structures, my own Disklavier music is almost the opposite: whimsical, intuitive, stream-of-consciousness. We’re proud to be card-carrying members of a Maverick tradition (if that is not an oxymoron), but that doesn’t mean we haven’t each staked out his own territory.

My own take on the 20th century was that it was a tremendous unearthing of new ideas – and that now those new ideas are ready to be knit into a more elaborate language. In particular, for me there are four (or five) composers whose music created a space that younger composers could inhabit for several generations:

Nancarrow, for rhythmic structure;

Ben Johnston (or, alternatively, La Monte Young) for pitch structure;

Robert Ashley for text setting and theater; and

Morton Feldman for texture and continuity.

Personally, I feel like a composer could run wild for decades through the rainbow canyons opened up by these composers, without repeating anything they did. In my Nancarrow book I list 26 devices that he used only once each in his output, any one of which is susceptible to further development in other, quite different contexts; plus several ideas implied by his music that he never used at all. It seems silly to walk away from all those untouched riches in search of more pristine ideas. The modernists opened up new continents to musical habitation, and there’s little point in that if someone doesn’t come live in them.

To the extent that the arbiters of musical discourse have not recognized the musical leaders of my generation because we don’t kick ass in the musico-political discourse, that’s their loss. Our commitment to pluralism is a commendable ethical position; our refusal to chase after empty novelty while so many barely-unwrapped new ideas lay waiting to be developed means we are living in a reality that the taste-makers just haven’t caught up with. There are times for innovation, and times for assimilation, and critics and entrepreneurs need to be on their toes when the paradigm shifts.

But I’d be willing to admit that our rhetoric is perhaps not sufficiently self-serving. Every time we justify our willingness to stand alone in some weird sonic territory by pointing to Tenney or Feldman or Young, perhaps the world understandably dismisses us as epigones. We fought the academy, but maybe we forgot to psychically kill off our father figures – at least the ones inside us. Perhaps Peter needs to make a more belligerent case for Garlandism without reference to Cowell, perhaps a manifesto telling what Polansky renounced in his teachers’ music is in order. It’s time for a “Cage Is Dead” article. John, in between puffs on his meerschaum (oops, not true, sorry), admitted that he once told Tenney how much he owed to his music, and Tenney practically got mad: “But John, you’ve gone way beyond what I’m doing, the music’s all yours now!” He was right. We’re too proud to make like Stockhausen, none of us yearns to play the Grand Inquisitor. But we all have strong reasons for making our music precisely the way we make it, for reasons that apply to this exact historical moment that wouldn’t have been relevant 40 years ago. And maybe we need to state our own cases with a little more ego, and less reverence for the composers who meant so much to us – but whose music we’ve indisputably grown beyond.

My, oh my – it turns out the good people at New England Conservatory are reeeally touchy about that Charles Ives line I quoted in connection with them (“You never hear negro spirituals mentioned up there to the New England Conservatory!”). I got blown away by my own little personal Hurricane Katrina of sarcasm, via e-mail from their PR department. Number one, Charles Ives said it, not me. Number two, it was more than 80 years ago – you think they’d laugh it off by this point. Number three, I didn’t really consider the line a reflection on NEC – it was Ives, fairly or not, making fun of a hypothetical schoolmarm who considered NEC the respectable final arbiter on all things musical. I suppose I shouldn’t have referred to it as “Ives’s complaint,” then, and I happily withdraw the term.

Number four, I’m from the wrong side of America’s musical tracks, and that quote is about all I have to connect with NEC. The school doesn’t come up often in discussions of Harry Partch, or Diamanda Galas, or Charlemagne Palestine. If I had some historical quotes like the following, I would surely have used them instead:

Harry Partch: “I can never thank New England Conservatory enough for supporting my work on the instruments I needed to complete Delusion of the Fury.”

Glenn Branca: “It was New England Conservatory that nurtured my efforts to write symphonies for electric guitars.”

You go into a blog entry with the historical references you have, not the ones you wish you had, or might hope to have at a later time.

I drove 190 miles to Boston last night to hear a concert of John Luther Adams’s music at NEC, as I’ve learned they call New England Conservatory. I had never been there before, and all I could think about were Charles Ives’s complaints about the place: “[In an old lady’s voice,] You never hear negro spirituals mentioned up there to the New England Conservatory!” But anyway, pianist Stephen Drury, famous for performances of Cage and Zorn piano works, has an ensemble there, and had organized a wonderful Adams program: Strange Birds Passing for flute ensemble of 1983, Red Arc/Blue Veil for piano, percussion, and tape of 2002, and the world premiere of For Lou Harrison.

This last piece is for two pianos, string quartet, and string orchestra. It opened with a riveting opening gesture, in which all of the instruments swept upward through their full ranges in huge, lush arpeggios at different tempos, settling at last into a calm chord. That gesture came back again and again and again, initiating each new phase of the piece. For an hour several rhythmic levels flowed in contradiction to each other, the string quartet launching into a new crescendo while the orchestra was still, the pianos booming into new arpeggios as the string quartet was still, some lines doubled in unison but otherwise hardly any two levels of activity ever at the same speed. It seemed to me that the entire piece was all within a single diatonic scale, though apparent changes of harmony entered with each new drone note in the bass; John tells me, though, that the key changed a few times, though so discreetly that I never caught it happening. At last the rhythmic levels dropped out one by one, and the piece died away with a radiant, pp chord in the orchestral violins.

Someone afterward ventured an opinion that JLA’s music does best on recording, that hearing such long, still, sustained textures in live performance distracted one from the gorgeous surface. I see the point, and I look forward to the recording that the group was scheduled to make today. You just don’t necessarily want to be sitting confined in a chair, surrounded by strangers, as those intermittent waves of sound wash over you. Still, it was lovely to watch how the piece worked. The pianists (Yukiko Takagi and Keith Kirchoff) kept up a magnificent independence, the quartet sang through their rising lines heroically, and I think the audience members felt that they had been present for an important premiere. For Lou Harrison is the third in a trilogy of Adams orchestra works, the first two being Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowning and In the White Silence. I think In the White Silence might still be slightly my favorite (perhaps because I’m addicted to the way John uses celesta), but For Lou Harrison could easily grow on me. John claims that he’s through writing for orchestra; we’ll see. He is currently working on a big electronic sound installation for a museum in Fairbanks. And he recounted, in the program notes, a conversation he’d had with Lou Harrison:

…At the time Lou was enjoying a surge in performances of his orchestral music, and I suggested that this must be gratifying to him.

“It’s nice,” he said, “but it’s not really what we do.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“The orchestra is a glorious noise. But the heart and soul of our music lies elsewhere. We’re the ones who form our own ensembles, makes our own tunings, build our own instruments, and create our own musical worlds. We’re the ‘Do It Yourself’ school of American music!”

I was humbled. Here Lou was finally starting to receive from the classical music establishment some measure of the recognition he deserved, yet he wasn’t seduced at all.

And that is what being a postclassical composer is all about.

Donald Rumsfeld comes into Bush’s office to give him his daily briefing. Among other things, he says, “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”

“OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!”

Bush goes into a display of emotion that stuns his staff, who nervously watch as he sits with his head in hands.

Finally, Bush looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”

I’m writing program notes for Toru Takemitsu’s Fantasma/Cantos, which is being played by the Cincinnati Orchestra this season. I find the title inelegant, but it’s a gorgeous work. Written in 1991 for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, it makes the orchestra sound like physical clouds of tones through which the clarinet solo sweeps, stirring up waves of subtle harmony. Crotales and harp limn the clarinet’s high notes, while woodwinds, including the orchestral clarinets, respond with an ambiguating halo of echoes. What really distinguishes the piece from a large repertoire of equally subtle and complex postserialist works, though, is the tonality-suggestive chords in the lower strings, which make the rest of the texture sound almost like ephemerally flickering upper overtones. The chords are orchestrated at times like harmonic series’, with the fundamental and fifth in the basses, ninth and eleventh harmonics in the violins. It makes me surprised that I’ve never heard Takemitsu mentioned in connection with spectral music, which makes widespread use of such sonorities; and in fact, I’ve never yet heard a spectralist piece as beautiful as Fantasma/Cantos.

At the same time, reacting empathically as a composer, I’m a little disturbed by a disparity of ends and means in Fantasma/Cantos, and would never be tempted to write a piece like it. Looking at this oversized and extremely complicated score, there are thousands of details I can’t hear on the recording, and that would seem to me to obscure the beauty if I could hear them. Hardly any two consecutive measures share the same meter, and the tuplets and subdivisions snake circuitously within them, preventing any audible hint of meter, or even of temporal periodicity, from ever emerging. It’s as though Takemitsu went to elaborate lengths to make it sound as though the music simply happened, with no human agent – which, given what little I’ve read about his aesthetics, is, I feel sure, precisely the case. The music is supposed to sound, and does sound, like a natural, elemental force in motion.

This is a valid and effective musical archetype, and typical of the late 20th century. Some composers feel that all music should aspire to this condition, that it should imitate elemental forces with pristine exactitude. Yet this is an archetype that I and other postminimalist composers of my generation have rejected, often to the consternation of elder composers and our teachers. For this extreme literalism, which rejoices in music’s liquid ability to not only represent but embody entropic forces, we have reintroduced a frank admission of music’s artificiality. We use audible meters, rhythmic grooves, melodies along a perceptible scale, all those regularities and periodicities that remind the listener that this is something human-made. For the modernist composers this looks like a regression back to the bad old days when notation had too many limitations and thus too much influence, when you could hear the quarter-notes and eighth-notes in the rhythmic grid. The whole point of musical progress, so the scenario runs, was to torture and liquefy the notation so that it was no longer audible, so that it disappeared into a sound surface that resembled pure emotion. To go back from this perfect state to, say, 5/8 meter audibly accented as 3 + 2, or back to the major scale, seems so primitive, a perverse embrace of amateurism.

Yet for me – and maybe for others of my generation, I don’t know, I’ve never heard anyone else express it this way – the value of embracing that particular amateurism is that art has its greatest power as metaphor. Ultimately, I don’t want a work of art to be the thing – I want it to be a representation of the thing. The fact that it is a representation made by another human, with marks of its humanity still evident, is part of what gives the work its power over me. The illusionistic emotive/natural verisimilitude of Takemitsu’s Fantasma/Cantos is, indeed, dazzlingly impressive and enjoyable to hear – but just because of that the work doesn’t exert the same kind of grasp on my emotions as do, say, Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Roy Harris’s Third Symphony, John Luther Adams’s In the White Silence, or any one of a thousand more stylized works that speak to me human-to-human.

The one notation that, for me, has always most clearly symbolized the fetishistically literal approach to music is the note marked decrescendo “al niente” – “to nothing.” I would never, under threat of a horsewhipping, write that into a score. For a sound to gradually vanish into silence, and then reemerge from silence, seems like an attempt to make the music literally a natural phenomenon, and efface its status as a representation. The ceasing to ring of the final chord of a Beethoven sonata is a sufficient metaphor for the vanishing of sound into silence – one does not need to experience the literal slow dying away of the sound for the illusion to be complete. If I want to savor a wail disappearing into the distance, or the tentative whispering of the wind in the leaves, or the indistinguishable murmuring of a conversation on someone’s porch down the road, I can walk out in my yard and hear them. But if I am going to have a meaningful exchange with another human, it is best if he or she more or less faces me and enunciates with reasonable clarity. I will not mistake his voice for the decrescendoing caws of Canada geese, nor am I looking to.

Yet an absolute and unquestioned faith in literalism has made it difficult for artists in some fields to use, in good conscience, anything suggestive of artificiality. There was talk on Sequenza 21 recently that the academic poetry world looks down their noses at poets who still use rhyme – rhyme being an artificial aspect of poetry that separates it from actual conversation, and whose disciplined interplay is often responsible for a great deal of its charm. Likewise, it was mentioned that extreme realism in painting is frowned upon today. Now, from the way I described it one might think that detailed realism in painting is the visual-art equivalent of the Takemitsu piece above, but actually it is the recognition of a “realistic” painting being a representation that takes our breath away; the painting equivalent of Takemitsu’s emotive verisimilitude would be abstract expressionism, which sometimes tried to make the painting look like a naturally-occuring object untouched by human hand. Likewise, repetition and tonality and recurrent meter – let alone tunes – have encountered considerable objection from the older generation of composers because, I think, they reintroduce frank artificiality, and thus vulnerability. But it’s the fact that a composer has used his or her imagination to create a stylized representation of a natural force or emotion, to transform it from the natural realm into something that can speak with a human voice, that makes me want to hear it again and again.

Besides, music that is completely liquified into fluidity can only represent one thing – feeling, or perhaps the natural processes of liquids which, to us, symbolize feeling. Undifferentiated feeling is not the only thing I want to hear in music. Usually I want to hear emotional life not in its id-controlled momentary fluidity, as though I were yearning to regress into pre-verbal infantility, but organized into something more stable and enduring. And usually, what is expressed by this extremely fluid “al niente” music is not really emotion, as in noble or sad or resigned, but a kind of sub-verbal tension and release, the vicissitudes of a violent, anguished reaction. To find a music that explores a particular emotion, as we usually define it, at a sustained length, we would have to go to Baroque music – or pop music, or postminimalist music. And postminimalist music does often attempt to ontologically approximate pop music, in which context the tentative whispering of “al niente” gestures would appear a trifle precious. As Richard Wilbur said in a fine poem,

…Let us have music again when the light dies,

(Sullenly or in glory), and we will give it

Something to organize.

As metaphor, music can indeed organize our collected emotions – it does little good to merely mimic their volatile ebb and flow.

All this is not at all to diminish Takemitsu. In fact, what makes Fantasma/Cantos so remarkably impressive is precisely its one aspect that shows evidence of human organization: those harmonic-series chords underlying the texture, or rather the contrast between those chords and the quasi-disorganized lines that sweep through them, giving the piece its wonderful tension. What’s irksome is the common prejudice that such detailed, literal music is somehow more “intellectual” than postminimalist music, with its artificial repetitive and grid-based features. By employing a formidable level of technique to expunge the appearance of human agency, the fluid, orchestrally detailed, anguished, precious, “al niente,” style purports to achieve a basic realistic naturalness that is self-evident and non-contingent; in reality, the music simply moves outside the range of criticism by restricting its expressive range to a single dimension. And a music that places itself beyond criticism also places itself beyond being much cared about, though it is deemed impolite to notice this. Like so many hypercomplex modernist works, Fantasma/Cantos is a kind of invulnerable piece, more impressive than lovable. Postminimalist music, wearing its artificiality on its surface, is far more vulnerable to criticism’s grasp, and in return more likely to exert a grasp on the listener.

More important to me at the moment, postminimalist music is not the result of a lesser, or less well thought-out, philosophical position. “All art is artificial,” said Stravinsky, which applies to both postminimalism and the “al niente” style, however much the latter tries to obscure the fact. In fact, I would argue that the “al niente” style isn’t the result of any philosophical position at all, but of a fanaticism about technique which was allowed to run away with the music. It’s a shame that composers don’t talk aesthetics much any more, and I mean aesthetics in the broadest philosophical sense. When I was young I studied every book on the subject I could lay my hands on, and the one that had most impact on me was Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art. “That a picture looks like nature,” Goodman wrote, “often means only that it looks like the way nature is usually painted.” He goes on to demonstrate that the artist cannot escape interpreting reality, since “there is no such thing as the way the world is.” We think that the detailed, gestural style represents some kind of bedrock reality because it’s the way nature has been painted for much of the 20th century. In reality, though, it’s the postminimalists who have moved beyond a specious literalism to embrace the inevitable artificiality of all artistic representation.

In 1995 I wrote a piece of music called Fractured Paradise. I’ve just been contacted by someone who wants to start a clothing line of that name, and is quasi-asking permission. I have no idea what to say. It’s true I wouldn’t, at this point, write a piece called Fruit of the Loom. I can’t figure out if this is a problem or not.

Yesterday I started to tell a class about this Greek composer named Iannis Xenakis, and someone piped up, “You mean Yanni?” Whew.

A former Peabody composition student tells me that I was mistaken to include that school on a list of schools where the professors limit what kinds of music their students can write. He recounts that the faculty there is entirely permissive, but says it’s most of the students who adhere to a homogenous, bland neoromanticism, while their professors leave them perfectly free to explore more interesting avenues. And now that he mentions it, I had heard the same story from another, current Peabody grad student.

Why do I have trouble believing this? Because I’m a baby-boomer, and for my generation the possibility of students being more conservative than their teachers is an affront to our entire worldview, a fatal threat to our optimism that things may someday improve. Young Siegfrieds should always break Wotan’s staff and demand to pass by. But I know it happens these days, that the young sometimes embrace a timid, backward-looking aesthetic despite faculty raving at them to be more adventurous. I’ve watched it. And yet, when I see student composers embracing musical anachronism, I reflexively form theories of repressive faculty to explain it. Not always the case – sometimes just my generational quirk.