[This entry has been updated, 9-19-05]

Ben Wolfson weighs in with a contrasting view to the Keith Jarrett quote in my last post:

I was reminded by the Keith Jarrett quote you posted on Saturday of Derek Bailey’s description of learning to improvise in Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, where… he basically says that one must do it by apprenticing oneself to a more experienced interviewer. He quotes from an Indian correspondent whose description of how he learned to improvise
(granted, within a particular tradition), was explicitly mimetic:
“What happens is that your teacher, when he’s in the mood to teach you
a particular raga, won’t say to you, ‘this is the scalic structure of
the raga and these are the notes used in that raga’–what he will do
is to play to you and tell you to listen and perhaps ask you to
imitate certain phrases that he is playing. And gradually, after
hearing him do this several times, what you do is to acquire a feeling
for that raga …”. He also compares it to being like learning a
language, saying that it’s natural, in that case, for one to add one’s
own phrases–which I think makes for an interesting contrast with
Jarrett’s claim that all a player needs is a teacher to show him how
to use the instrument, since it’s not as if you can be instructed in
an instrument without being instructed *in a particular way.*

Well, OK, I guess that’s the difference between a traditional musical style like Indian ragas and an individualistic one like jazz. The question is – which is classical? My hunch (I can’t very well leave you to thrash this out on your own) is that European classical music might be considered a relatively traditional style, and postclassic music, or Downtown music, or American music, is individualistic. Until somebody comes up with a better quote.

UPDATE: All right, so superb jazz pianist Ethan Iverson has thickened the plot by breaking down some of our nice, careful distinctions:

Keith Jarrett has a VERY individual style, but he has also been VERY
influenced by Paul Bley, Bill Evans, and early jazz (especially
ragtime)….he studied with them by listening to them and imitating,
for sure! In other words, I firmly admire KJ’s playing, but I think he
protests too much in that quote. He copped plenty!

I can’t argue with that. I might add that what’s important to me about the original Jarrett quote isn’t its literal truth, but its inspiring implied admonition to go deeper and deeper into oneself for the source of one’s music, never settling for anything you’ve merely been taught. The extent to which studying with a teacher aids in that process or detracts from it is probably subject to a trillion individual variations – and fertile as the subject is, I’m feeling a need to move on.

With reference to all the hoopla lately (here and at Sequenza 21) regarding whether or not composition can be taught, singer-composer Emily Bezar (whose lovely music you should check out) tenders a relevant quote from Keith Jarrett she read in last month’s Downbeat magazine:

Schools cannot create innovation. Innovation and schools are almost
diametrically opposed. A jazz player cannot study with jazz people because
you become a part of who you study with. So, you can’t become yourself. No
one will help you on that issue. If you’re improvising and it’s not coming
from you, it’s not worth playing because it’s been played before, probably
by the people who taught you.

And as for the school of thought of emulating people to find your own voice,
I don’t think so. All a pianist needs is a piano-teacher to teach you how
to use the instrument. After that, it’s nobody’s game but yours.

Forgot to mention that my review of the new recording of Johnny Reinhard’s realization of Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony is in the Village Voice this week.

Q. What’s Bush’s position on Roe versus Wade?

A. Actually, he doesn’t care how the poor get out of New Orleans.

OK, so I wasn’t the first to get it on the internet, but I was in the top ten. This isn’t my only job, you know.

There’s a fairly interesting interview in Salon today with an anthropologist in Arizona who enrolled in her own school as a freshman, anonymously, in order to study her own school’s students as an anthropologist, and figure out what made them tick. (She tried to publish the book under a pseudonym, but got outed by a reporter who figured out who she must be by process of elimination.) The interview isn’t terribly substantive, and it’s difficult to tell whether the book is more so. But two things she says ring a bell with me.

The first is that the students themselves estimated that they learned only about 35 percent of what they learned in classrooms, and the other 65 percent outside the classroom. She’s surprised by this; I’m not. Thinking of my own education, I had always estimated about 20 percent in, 80 percent out. It’s true that I skipped more classes than I should have. But even so, I never found classroom teaching a very efficient communicator of knowledge. I always felt that the most important things professors told me came from one-to-one meetings, especially chance encounters in the hallway, or at the intermissions of concerts. I still believe that learning from a composition teacher has less to do with technical points, or criticism of individual scores, than with absorbing the attitudes of a “real” composer: observing how one’s teacher responds to criticism of his music, for example, or how they react to the public success of other composers. As a teacher, a composer is of limited value, but as a personal model, it’s fascinating to absorb his or her attitudes towards life, towards other composers, professional opportunities, disappointment, and so on. I know I learned a lot of things from Morton Feldman and Ben Johnston that had little to do with what they were explicitly trying to teach me. It was their attitudes that were helpful models.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that I would advocate abandoning the class structure of college. I can’t imagine what you’d replace it with as a pretext to bring students and professionals together, to allow the students to get to know the professionals well enough to ask the important questions outside of class. I’m a strong believer in peripheral learning: just as our peripheral vision takes in certain kinds of detail better than direct vision, and I learn things about my own music from peripheral listening that intent listening would miss, I think a lot of the most profound learning occurs in situations in which one doesn’t expect to be learning anything.

The other thing this anthropolgist said is:

Anyone who said they did have a philosophical conversation might qualify it, like, “Yeah, we were really drunk that night, so we got into all this deep philosophical stuff,” or “Yeah, sometimes I get into this dorky mood and then I talk about deep topics.” When you hear that as an anthropologist, you think the students are responding to a criticism that isn’t even being made, that is in their head.

The interviewer suggested that there might be a big difference between students at Northern Arizona University and Yale in this respect, based on differences in student intelligence and ambition – but the anthropolgist didn’t think so, and neither do I. Here at Bard I’ve noticed that students express some embarrassment about their serious conversations, and some purported connection between being drunk and talking philosophy is common. And that’s a shame. When I was a student, I spent a lot of time arguing with my friend Marcus McDaniel, who had been my best friend in high school and with whom I roomed for a year in college (and who remains one of my best friends today), about philosophy, epistemology, politics, the nature of the world, and the ultimate meaning of life. I and a lot of my friends spent a considerable amount of time (cold sober) in such enlightening conversations, learning which arguments held water and which ones didn’t. It was a kind of knowledge that we couldn’t entirely learn from professors, if much at all, and I owe a lot to it. But it does seem to me that today’s students are a little ashamed to argue about such abstract matters, and pass off such conversations as a little masturbatory and unimportant – as if it weren’t crucially important for each new generation to remake the world on its own terms.

I have to quote, in its near-entirety, this story that composer Jeff Harrington tells over at Sequenza 21, in a continuation of an ongoing argument, about professor pressure in composition grad school:

…This period is history and needs to be remembered. I was told throughout my student years, even during my graduate studies in 1987-88 at Tulane that I had to write in certain styles. During my graduate studies then, my graduate teacher told me that she would not give an MFA to somebody who wrote ‘tonal music’. I remember coming home to Elsie, my wife and she burst out in tears, ‘She can’t make you do that…’. I went on to write a Stravinskyan piece, entirely out of place with my current aesthetic (and I was 35 at the time and had been composing for 17 years) because I wanted that MFA. Strangely enough, that post-tonal Stravinskyan aesthetic is what I was later to embrace (with a few mods) and forms my current musical language. Ouch!

I had no choice as to whether to continue or not, we were broke living in New Orleans, and my only way out as I could see it was to go back to school and get a Doctorate. My sole income was the teaching assistantship.

When I told Elliott Carter that I had no interest in writing expressionistic music, that I thought expressionism was played out and pointless (I was writing kind of Vivier-esque pieces at the time, very slow and weird) he said I might as well give up composing as I would never have a career, never get performed and never amount to anything. He was adamant. Atonal expressionism was the future, period.

Again, we need to preserve these memories as it’s too easy to make it seem like a few bad eggs, when in fact practically the entire American musical education environment was Stalinist in this regard.

I’ve never met Elliott Carter, never wanted to, but I’ve heard a lot of stories about him being a dictatorial son-of-a-bitch and telling young composers that there was only one way to write music.

You’ve GOT to see this priceless photo/caption combination that Jan Herman got hold of. Sometimes the truth just suddenly appears in our midst and announces itself.

I received interesting responses to my post on the “Post-Prohibitive Era,” about why some composers still push their students to write music in mid-20th-century styles.

Matt Malsky quotes Cage’s paraphrase of Sri Ramakrishna in Silence:

“Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words, with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time)?”

Cage’s ambiguous answer [Matt continues] is, “In order to thicken the plot.” But, in a
post-prohibitive age, what is the plot? And what thickens it?

Carolyn Bremer, prof at Cal State at Long Beach, has kind of a stunningly simple answer as to why the big music schools hire more intransigent modernists than the less well-known ones:

University faculties are hired by university faculties. At big composition programs, search committees are stacked with composers. They’ll hire someone they like, which too often translates into someone who will like their music.

At smaller programs, search committees are staffed with musicians of all sorts: performers, conductors, historians, whatever. They have no trouble with diatonic music.

It’s certainly true that you get a more diverse search committee in a small department. It’s also true that search committees made up of composers invariably claim that they’re looking for diversity in the make-up of their department. But they never mean it.

Rodney Lister of the Sequenza 21 crowd notes that each of the schools I mentioned offers at least one professor who will be receptive to whatever style of music a student wants to write in. That might be true. But why is that good enough? Why should, for instance, any student encounter a single composition teacher who tells him he can’t use key signatures, when some publicly successful music has been written in recent decades with key signatures (I might mention Steve Reich’s Octet, or Adams’s Nixon in China)? If a student went to school for chemistry and four of the chemistry professors wouldn’t deal with any element in the periodic table higher than Plutonium, because that was the highest element when they graduated, why should that student be forced to seek out and only study with the fifth professor, who’s heard of Bohrium? Shouldn’t those other professors be pushed into retirement if they can’t keep up with the field? And shouldn’t a composer who seeks to prevent others from using key signatures, majors scales, etc. have the onus placed on him to provide a rational justification for such prohibition, or else put a lid on it? Besides, a lot of damage can be done if the first professor a student encounters lays down some ridiculous law. I had the chutzpah to blow off my teachers’ mandates, but not every freshman is so confident.

Rodney feels that the New Romantic composers have been, in general, more dogmatic than the serialists, and from what little evidence I have, that might be true, too. He and I agreed, though, that the problem is often not intrinsically stylistic, but a result of composers trying to turn their students into clones of themselves. There are two possible motivations – increasing one’s fame down the road by virtue of one’s apparent influence (or simply keeping one’s style current), or the laziness of not having to get inside another creative person’s head. Personally, I find the tactic very foreign. I find it easier to teach a student whose music is very different from mine, because I can come up with more objective solutions to their problems. If a student’s music has a lot in common with mine, I’m too tempted to show them what I’d do in my music, which ends up being a distortion of what they’re trying to do. Of course, for a lot of composition teachers, succumbing to that very temptation is probably exactly the point.

And although Shostakovich and Britten are two composers I never personally warmed up to, I like Lawrence Dillon’s suggestion that their music should have been analyzed in composition departments right along with Carter and Cage, as important members of the same generation. Certainly the ideological bias with which academia separates out acceptable composers from unacceptable ones bears some self-examination. Even the pre-20th-century ones: Brahms is the darling of academia; Bruckner, a genius of large-scale harmonic structure, is ignored, and Liszt, a protean figure who wrote a ton of groundbreaking music among his lesser works, is scornfully dismissed, except for his Sonata. Schoenberg, of course, is rated many times higher in college music departments than he is elsewhere on the planet. Music professors are occupied with primarily the left-brain aspects of music: structure, syntax, motivic development, pitch set transformation. This encourages them to neglect half of the musical virtues, and for most music lovers, it’s the more important half. Given academia’s miserable track record at turning out composers of enjoyable music, they could certainly stand to look their left-brain bias square in the face and make some correctives.

From Bernard Holland’s generally positive review of Diamanda Galas in today’s Times:

Diamanda Galas is, on the other hand, a genuine original and a living, breathing survivor of a largely vanished downtown.

UPDATE: Downtowner Tom Hamilton asks, “Why are we now characterized as ‘survivors?’ Is ‘evacuee’ next, followed by ‘refugee’?”

I was 19 when I wrote the first piece that I still, today, consider worth performing. A 180-degree departure from my previous music, it was all on the C major scale, with no sharps or flats. My composition teacher at the time, one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, utterly disapproved. He told me I should be using “good 20th-century intervals like tritones and sevenths and ninths.” Even at that age, I had enough common sense to wonder how in the world a brilliant guy like that could hold a notion as silly as the fiction that there was some kind of mystical link between certain intervals and certain historical eras. In the moment he said that, I kind of realized that the last remaining strings that tied me to 20th-century modernism had been cut.

Today young composers come and tell me that their professors won’t let them write the kind of music they want to. What’s wrong with the music they want to write? It’s too… tonal, or too consonant, or too triadic, or it doesn’t have climaxes, or it’s not tense enough, or not gestural enough, or it’s too slow, or too happy, or too static, or too pop-influenced, or it doesn’t have enough dynamics marked. One student from a prestigious grad school said, “Will you take a look at my music? The faculty and other students make fun of it because I use key signatures.” None of this is any less silly than “use good 20th-century intervals like tritones and sevenths and ninths.” They come to me at my school, from other schools, sometimes even across the country, because they’ve figured out somehow that I will let students compose any kind of music they want.

I know exactly what their previous teachers think of me because of that. They think that I have no standards, that I’m wishy-washy, that I don’t understand the Great Musical Tradition, that I’m not dedicated to quality. (I once heard second-hand what George Perle thinks of me: “I don’t get this Kyle Gann guy, he seems to only criticize every piece on its own merits.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. And a colleague recently accused me of “false-fueling” the students, i.e., letting the “untalented” ones think they were pretty good.) It’s not true. I criticize plenty of things in my students’ music. This week a composer working in pure conventional tonality came, and among other things I substituted a VII chord for his IV chord because his harmonic rhythm lagged in mid-phrase. A few years ago I had a brilliant guy writing a big, bangy Uptown piece, and I made sure that no extraneous gestures vitiated the noisy climax he was trying to create. One student wanted to write an atonal string quartet, and I stopped him, not because I don’t allow atonality, but because he had never even heard an atonal string quartet before, and was just dutifully fulfilling some expectation he’d gotten from somewhere. In all these years, after dozens of students, I’ve only had about three who wrote the same general kind of postminimalist music that I do. I’ll allow any kind of music I know how to criticize, and if I can’t criticize it, I’ll send them to someone else. One kid doing a kind of dance-oriented electronica was just out of my field, as was another student writing algorithmic Max/MSP charts. But God forbid any student should ever tell a composer, “Kyle Gann won’t let me write the music I hear in my head.”

I don’t pretend to be unique in this regard, but we are less numerous than is usually admitted. Lots of composition teachers say they never discriminate by style, only by quality, but in reality they consider the “wrong” style deficient in quality. And in my experience, the teachers who match my liberality tend to be at the lesser-known music schools. The young composers who complain to me about their repressive teachers don’t come from Tennessee Tech and University of Arkansas, they come from Peabody, Eastman, Columbia, UCSD. It does seem that the nearer you are to the top of the compositional heap, the more invested you probably are in a specious historical essentialism without rational foundation, an idea that 20th-century music MUST express a certain kind of tension and anguish, a certain dissonance and complexity. Earth to composers: the 20th century is over! Or they say, these are violent times, and our music must express that violence – a simplistic reflex that no reputable aesthetic theory of the last 3,000 years would support. Lacking any intellectual framework for their mandates, the only message they really have is: CONFORM. How depressing that composers, of all people, should push that particular button, and what vivid evidence that, though they may put notes on paper, they are not artists.

I talked to Peter Garland recently, a composer of gorgeously simple diatonic music, and he made a wistful comment that by now we ought to be living in a “post-prohibitive” age – that is, there should be nothing that is off-limits for composers to write. Certainly composing is a dialogue with the past, and any good composer should be extending or inventing some tradition, commenting on and building on and criticizing and rejecting some music he or she loves. But composers have so many different pasts now, and who are we to tell them their past is the wrong one?

“HEY YOU – you’ve got the wrong past. Get out, and don’t come back in here until you get a different one.”

The students who listen to their big-shot teachers and obey go out dutifully writing the kind of dreary, complicated, tension-filled, angst-ridden music they’ve been told to write, and their big-shot teachers get them commissions and orchestral premieres, and that timid, uncreative music sticks in our orchestral tract like an indigestible meal. I can’t believe that, thirty years after “good 20th-century intervals” were urged on me, I’m still fighting this laughable generational impasse. And when composer Cary Boyce, in Sequenza 21 this week, characterized late-20th-century music as “the sentimentality of despair,” I was thrilled to realize again that there are other composers out there rebelling against the conformity.

I was just interrupted in my writing by a couple of Christians of some stripe or another come to the door to hand me some inspirational literature, much as I was brainwashed into doing as a teenager. One of them brought up the inevitable subject of Hurricane Katrina, and asked if I believed that God intentionally allowed such massive suffering. I told him that I didn’t know about God, but that an awful lot of suffering was allowed by the human beings in charge that they should have prevented. He looked genuinely surprised, as though gripped by a quasi-Islamic fatalism convinced that all suffering is God’s will, and that there’s nothing the Hand of Man can or should do to ameliorate it.

I wonder what he would have done if I had knocked him down my porch steps with a good punch in the nose and said, sorry, that was God’s will. Reporting me to the police would have been a little inconsistent, wouldn’t it?

Holy crap! On top of everything else, Maynard G. Krebs died!

By the way, this is the first anniversary of Postclassic Radio. I moved a little closer to an all-woman-composer playlist by adding Diamanda Galas’s You Must Be Certain of the Devil in its entirety last night. Sorry the playlist on my web page is so divorced from reality.