I’m pretty swamped by writing jobs at the moment. Mostly for money – Bard pays the mortgage and electricity, but if I want to continue smoking Padrone cigars and drinking Old Vine Red, those liner notes and program notes have to keep coming. But one job I’m doing I’m very excited about: liner notes for the first commercial recording of music by Julius Eastman. Eastman (1940-1990) was a brilliant singer, fabulous pianist, politically aggressive gay African-American, outrageous personality, and one of the important musical figures of the generation just after the minimalists. Peter Maxwell Davies wrote Eight Songs for a Mad King for his versatile, sepulchral voice. [CORRECTION: Oops, this is in dispute, and I’m told the piece was written for Roy Hart; but Eastman became famous for the amazing recording.] Julius somehow let his life go to hell after 1983; at one point he was evicted from his New York apartment, his scores and belongings thrown out on the street by the sherriff, and he ended up sleeping in Tompkins Square Park. He died all alone in a hospital in Buffalo in 1990, and no one on the music scene even knew about it. But I got wind of a rumor, called Julius’s family, “broke” the story, and wrote an obituary in the Village Voice eight months after he died.

Julius’s music has been difficult to reconstruct, but thanks to Mary Jane Leach, Peter Gena, and others, New World has gathered enough good recordings from Julius’s lifetime to put together a well representative three-CD set. Three of the pieces are from a concert at Northwestern University that I attended and assisted in as a student there: three huge, hammering, pent-up-energetic essays for multiple pianos called Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla. As far as I know, the only place they’ve been heard publicly in 20 years is on Postclassic Radio, because I saved the recordings. Without having heard those pieces, I probably wouldn’t have written my Long Night for three pianos just afterward; and an echo of Gay Guerrilla survived in the primary motive of my chamber piece Hovenweep. Julius was a big musical influence on me, and then he nearly disappeared to history.

I first heard Julius perform in 1974, last ran into him in 1989, and got to know him somewhat in several encounters in-between. Some of my stories about him I can’t use in my liner notes, like the time at New Music America 1980 when I unwittingly let him lead me into a gay bar in Minneapolis – it took me a moment to figure out why all these burly men were wearing midriff shirts, but I kept calm, stayed 15 minutes before excusing myself politely on account of other commitments, and thought I handled it pretty coolly for being only 24 and very inexperienced. He used to try to talk me and Peter into trying out gayness in that mellifluous deep bass of his. He griped at us for using deoderant, saying, “Only straights use deoderant these days,” to which Peter would yell, “Julius, whaddaya think we are?!” He was an incredible character. I’m so glad his music is coming out in a big chunk, and proud to be involved. Look for it on New World in a couple of months.

Vivian Perlis, the great pioneer of oral music history, and Libby Van Cleve, expert oboist-turned-musicologist, are coming out with their first volume of oral American music history, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale Univ. Press, two compact discs included). I got an advance copy, and it’s fascinating reading; can’t put it down. Here’s an excerpt from some 1977-78 interviews with the great Virgil Thomson:

I came from Europe in the fall of 1940. I didn’t have any money, and wasn’t going to be earning any, so I came home. I took a job as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune and stayed there until I had nothing more to say – fourteen years. I had not any experience at all with newspaper routines, but you learn those overnight. [How true.] I’ve always been a fast writer. I had no trouble meeting deadlines – I like them. If you know how much time you’ve got, then you know what you can do. I think music reviewing should be a serious musical job. You must try not to be a victim of your power or start throwing your weight. Whenever I wrote about music, I was writing about my own profession and speaking from a responsible point of view. I wasn’t teaching music appreciation not knowing anything about it. I was explaining music as I knew it and believed it to be my duty. All living musicians, including critics, are part of one great band or conspiracy for the defense of musical faith and its propagation. They are always treading on each other’s toes, but they all have membership in the professional world of music. Their quarrels are family quarrels.

I can write quite easily, almost without correcting, except what you correct as you go along. Perhaps the only time I made extra drafts of things was on the [auto-]biographical book [Virgil Thomson, 1966], because you don’t know how to write about yourself. You have to find an attitude, and it takes some trial….

I am not a careless writer. As I say, I don’t mind correcting indefinitely and finding a better word or a more courteous way of saying something, but the main draft goes straight through. There is no point in getting angry to colleagues. Those are the people that you are going to live with all your life, whether you like their music or not, and liking it or not is the least interesting thing you can say about it. The most interesting thing you can do is describe it because your attitude will come through automatically in your choice of words. You know as well as I do that in writing it’s a willingness to tamper and correct until you get it acceptable to yourself, and you try it out on people – I have not been the least bit afraid of editorial help. I like it. You find out (I tell this to students all the time) you not only have to say what you mean, you have to be willing to mean what you have said.

And elsewhere:

Anybody can use anything he wants to, but the twelve-tone period is a very strange one in the history of music. Every time I’ve tried serialism, I’ve found it deadening. There is no audience for it anymore. There never was. It was in the composers’ minds that there might be. If Schoenberg and his two pupils, Berg and Webern, had not been such wonderful musicians so that some kind of expressive thing came through from time to time, the serial business would never have got anywhere.

One of my favorite pieces that I got to hear live for the first time on the recent Bard Music Festival was Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune. I knew every note by heart, but I wasn’t prepared for the unsettling live effect of Thomson’s whimsical orchestration. A chorale would suddenly be taken over by the three trombones in the back, or the entire orchestra would sit there silent as a cello played a long simple solo; then the concertmaster would play by himself, and a piccolo would start up behind him. Nor could I have anticipated how hilarious it was to watch an entire orchestra rip along through “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” A recording flattens out these incongruities, and you just don’t notice them. It was absolutely audacious music, radical in its use of the orchestra, which revealed the orchestra not as an illusion of a great blended mass, but as a group of individuals, any one of whom might have his or her own points to make. No wonder so many professional composers didn?t respect his music: it abandoned illusionistic expertise in favor of humorous realism. I admired Copland for accepting that. When a friend mentioned that Thomson’s music was “dumb,” Copland replied, “Yes, I know, but it’s intentionally dumb. He’s the American Satie.”

In fact, I’ve been thinking lately that, despite all our magnificent innovators that my ilk make such a big deal about, the American classical music audience is actually a dull, pedestrian audience, like the British audience. They actively prefer music that is expert, prestige-oriented, conventional, and forgettable to music that is imaginative and audacious. They give complexity a condescending pat on the head, and are affronted by frank simplicity. I’ve always tried to believe that it is due to composer politics that great composers like Thomson are shamefully neglected (why had I never had a chance to hear Symphony on a Hymn Tune live before?). But sitting in that audience, relishing every confrontational asburdity of that nose-thumbing score, I got a feeling that the people around me were uncomfortable, and wished they could get back to something like the bland, sedately “serious” thickness of Copland’s Symphonic Ode, which allowed them to daydream undisturbed.

Over at Sequenza 21, composer Galen H. Brown has written an essay explaining where my blog fits into musical politics, and arguing eloquently for my continuing it. He transplants into the musical realm David Brock’s argument from his book The Republican Noise Machine that the Republicans took their own lunatic fringe overly seriously in order to alter the public perception of where the center of the political spectrum lies, moving it far right from where it used to be. Therefore, argues Brown, substituting the concept of Mainstream Classical Media for that of Mainstream Media, I need to be pushing the most extreme Downtown elements in music, no matter how much resistance I encounter, in order to move the public perception of the Uptown-Downtown spectrum Downtown-ward so that it more accurately matches the current reality – since the MCM (Mainstream Classical Media) has the perception skewed way in the direction of Uptown. And the time to do this is now, while internet coverage of classical music is still in a nascent and malleable state. It’s an elegant argument. I acquiesce to my fate.

UPDATE: Brown had called me “the Rush Limbaugh of Classical Music,” but Jerry Bowles now pipes in and claims that I’m not a “fat, stupid druggie.” Shows how much he knows.

Following the fiasco in which my audio files disappeared from Live365 a few months ago, I was pretty slow in getting Postclassic Radio back up and in running order, and it sat pretty stagnant for the month of August. (By way of apology, Live365 gave everyone affected a free month’s broadcasting.) But people kept adding on as listeners, and I finally took time out from other work to rev it back up. Having started with Eve Beglarian as July composer-of-the-month, the playlist took a female-intensive turn, and I thought about moving to an all-woman-composer playlist by September. I haven’t quite gone that far – there were some Noah Creshevsky pieces I wanted to play, and I refuse to take down John Cage’s In a Landscape, which some of you may have noticed is the station’s ever-present theme song. Nevertheless, September will be Women’s Month on the station, and I’ve got pieces up by Allison Cameron, Amy Knoles, Annea Lockwood, Annie Gosfield, Bernadette Speach, Connie Beckley, Eliane Radigue, Elizabeth Brown, Elodie Lauten, Eve Beglarian, Janice Giteck, Jewlia Eisenberg, Judith Sainte-Croix, Julia Wolfe, Maggi Payne, Maria de Alvear, Mary Jane Leach, Pauline Oliveros, Sarah Peebles, and Wendy Mae Chambers – plus I’ll soon be taking down some men’s pieces to add in Belinda Reynolds, Beth Anderson, Carolyn Yarnell, Laurie Spiegel, and Meredith Monk. Not that there’s ever any shortage of women composers on my playlist, in my writings – or in my heart (sigh).

Today happens to be the second anniversary of this blog. I notice that I wrote a little fewer entries this year than last – I suspect that decline will continue. I’m not finding a blog to be the most effective means for getting my ideas out, because I can’t accompany my arguments with sufficient evidence. I’m sitting on hundreds of scores by young composers, making statements about new music based on what I find in them, and it feels sometimes like all I do here is draw arguments from people who don’t know the music I’m talking about and won’t believe it exists. When I wrote my Nancarrow book I could include loads of score excerpts, and no one has ever accused me of not knowing what I was talking about with Nancarrow. It strikes me my time would be better spent on my proposed book about Postminimalism, with my assertions backed up by incontrovertible examples, rather than just sitting here drawing fire from skeptics.

Interesting development at Sequenza 21. It turns out I’m not the only opera composer who feels hampered by the ubiquity of bel canto singing. Composers in general, the discussion suggests, at least those my age and younger, like their texts enunciated, don’t object to amplification on principle, and are a little sick and tired of the Europe-y sound of wide vibrato, preferring something a little more pop. Some would rather use untrained singers and amplify them than settle for the usual conservatory product. Last time I staged an opera, I tried to find singers with straight tones, good diction, and little vibrato – recruit them from early-music groups, I was told. But there are damn few around. Now we’ve got a whole generation of composers saying we want a different kind of singer for our operas. Where’ll we find them?

Maybe they’ll appear when classical music finally dies, which classical musicians keep promising me is about to happen, so I keep waiting for the final announcement. It’s been dying longer than friggin’ Generalissimo Franco.

After 36 years, I finally heard Roy Harris’s Third Symphony live last night, conducted by Leon Botstein at Bard’s Copland and His World festival. I had discovered the piece when I was 13, and it blew me away. The smooth sweep of the piece’s organic form is masterful (or maybe just lucky, because Harris had trouble ever achieving it again), and the middle, “Pastoral” section had a deep impact on me: time stops as the orchestra floats on a directionless sea of polytonal arpeggios. In some ways I’ve spent my life trying to duplicate the effect of that “Pastoral” section, especially the amazing effect of stopping time, in the middle of a piece that’s moving somewhere, to float for awhile. I think I’ve achieved something similar in the “Venus” section of my The Planets and my Unquiet Night for Disklavier, though that Harrisian texture also haunts the last movement of my Transcendental Sonnets, Time Does Not Exist (naturally), and other works. The piece is lodged deep in my psyche as an archetype. It was a kind of religious experience finally hearing it live, physically and in three dimensions, at last – I anticipated every timpani blow, every brass fanfare, as though I had written the piece myself but only held it in my imagination until now. (In fact, I note that Maestro Botstein played the original version of the piece, re-inserting about a dozen measures that Harris had excised after the premiere. I thought that was a permanent change, and am surprised you can get orchestral parts of the old version.)

Unfortunately, I live in the Hudson Valley, which, aside from Boston and Uptown Manhattam itself, is the world capital of Uptown musicians, who worship only music of a prestigious European pedigree, and consider woefully deficient any music that isn’t at every moment entertaining them by audibly heading toward some obvious goal. And so, predictably enough, though in my Harris-induced daze I failed to brace for it, a famous musician accosted me as I was leaving the hall, assuming because I am intelligent enough to be teaching college that my tastes must inevitably mirror his, and bellowed, “GAAAAAWWWD, what a BOOOORRRRING piece, he should have cut half of it, especially that TERRIBLE middle section!”

I have spent my life trying to convince people that there are many different ways to enjoy music, and that there is a tremendous wealth of new music to enjoy. And the response I characteristically get, especially from “educated” musicians – which suggests that education is a process of drastically curtailing one’s capacity for enjoyment – is, no, no, no, I’m wrong, great music is dead, music can only be listened to one way, there’s no great music anymore, and I should just give up. My refusal to acquiesce in this has given me a certain reputation for negativity.

This is from one of the program notes I wrote for the current Bard festival, “Aaron Copland and his World”:

Some of the musical intelligentsia decried Copland’s return to tonality, but one of the remarkable things about Billy the Kid is how well it integrates his technical achievements of the 1920s. Bitonality is rampant: Scene 2, “Street in a Frontier Town,” plays off the cowboy tune “Great Grandad” in A-flat major against “Whoopie Ti Yi Yo” in F major; and then plays the latter in major and minor at once, with some clashes reminiscent of the Piano Variations. Rhythmic ingenuity in the “Mexican Dance” and the treatment of “Goodbye Old Paint” is the more audible for being drawn out at greater length than in the early works. As Larry Starr has aptly written, “not only is this ballet score as sterling an illustration of Copland’s basic methods as either the Piano Variations or Music for the Theatre; it also reveals these methods at a stage of greater maturity and refinement.”

All serious musical intellectuals, a company from which I have become happy to exclude myself, consider Copland’s Piano Variations the top-shelf evidence of his modernist bonafides. I’m sure I have once again alienated myself from the rest of musical academia by going public with the fact that I consider Billy the Kid a better piece – but after careful examination of both scores over many years, I do believe that Billy the Kid is the better-written work.

Charles Ives wrote, “Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.” Today we need an addendum: “Profundity in music is too often confused with something that forces the ears to lie on a bed of nails.”

From recordings, I’ve known and loved Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land for over thirty years, but I had never seen a production of it until last night at Bard’s Summerscape Festival. It’s true the piece is a little more stage-awkward than I’d imagined: some of the lyrics are more pictorial than dramatic, and the first love scene between Laurie and Martin takes place at an otherwise racuous party, which must be imagined silently continuing in the background. (Staging also failed to clarify Top’s peculiar second-act story, which scandalizes Laurie’s mother, and which must have some underlying denotation I can’t discern – please explain for me if you “get” it.)

Nevertheless, the piece is far tauter and more cogent than Blitzstein’s Regina, and I find myself more than ever baffled by its continuing negative reputation. The score is gorgeous, deftly woven together in a web of both background and foreground motives, and the emotional emphases are in all the right places. As a mere love story it would be unconvincing, but Laurie’s line when she leaves home to look for Martin – “I don’t leave for that alone, maybe I don’t leave for that at all” (which soprano Anne Jennifer Nash unfortunately rushed through in an otherwise stirring performance) – elevates it to a more potent American archetype, the young person stifled by a narrow upbringing. It’s a lovely yet fearlessly unsentimental picture of Depression-era rural America – a lyrical one full of stock characters, though, not realist as this production tried to make it. After seeing it at last, The Tender Land remains probably my second favorite conventional opera ever (leaving aside Robert Ashley for a moment), after The Mother of Us All. And yet the musical intelligentsia came out shaking their heads and clucking their tongues about how poor Copland “couldn’t write an opera.” More evidence, if more were needed, that I hear things upside-down from the rest of the world.

I’ve seen Marc Blitzstein’s opera Regina staged in its entirety. Not many people living today can say that; the number will swell another thousand or two by week’s end, as the work continues to run at Bard’s Summerscape Festival. Far be it from me to review a work presented by an institution which keeps me on its payroll, but it is worth reporting something about so rarely performed an opera. We have so many operas that possess some underground reputation, but that are performed less often than once per generation, due to presumed flaws whose severity we rarely come into a position to gauge. American music is rich in these known-of but unheard works: Antheil’s Transatlantic and Helen Retires, Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe and Carrie Nation, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Bernard Hermann’s Wuthering Heights, and on and on. Probably they are all unstageworthy to varying extents; but how few people are in a position to confirm this! – and meanwhile it sometimes seems like the bulk of our American operatic heritage is packed away in mothballs.

So, let it be reported that, yes, Blitzstein’s Regina is a deeply flawed work. It is vastly overambitious – the plot, based on Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes, is a complex one that revolves around money (a less stageable theme than love or murder), and the dialogue is necessarily wordy. It is to Blitzstein’s credit that he did as well as he did. Much of the libretto is spoken over the music, and with one exception (the final climax, unfortunately) the transitions between speaking and singing seem natural and motivated. The strangest flaw, though, is that the music for the second and third acts is noticeably more memorable than for the first, as though, after finishing Act I, the composer, gripped by a twinge of conscience, suddenly said, “Uh-oh, I’d better put in some tunes.” The tunes would have served him better in the first act than where they are; the loveliest music – self-consciously lovely, written to be lovely and sweet and Coplandy – comes at the beginning of Act 3, where it dissipates the dramatic tension built up at the end of Act 2.

Other failings may be charged to the historical period rather than the composer. The middle of Act 2 is a sort of minstrel-show “jazz” number somewhat akin to those obligatory but embarrassing scenes in every Marx Brothers movie in which Harpo plays to an appreciative crowd comprising some condescendingly depicted minority group. I’m sure Blitzstein, good Communist that he was, thought he was being extremely liberal here; today, the effect is almost the reverse. Director Peter Schneider dealt with this issue well by including the African-American musicians as onlookers in the background throughout the work, rendering the racial issue both better integrated and less politically charged.

Beyond that, there is the matter of Blitzstein’s lack of a really personal style. Regina was in that kind of late-Antheil, mild-Shostakovichy idiom that mid-century Americans were trapped into who were too populist in their sympathies to follow the atonal line, and too progressive in their aesthetics to fall back on romanticism. It was a hard spot to be in. (The difficulty of fusing leftist politics with progressive ideas about art continues to torture many of us to this day, but there are a few more alternatives since minimalism came along.) Blitzstein’s jazz passages were credible, and, if anything, so true to the vernacular that one noticed their limitations as notated music all the more. His kind of cleverness in style-mimicking and lack of a personal aesthetic agenda were assets in writing a populist musical like The Cradle Will Rock – still one of the great achievements of the American theater, a piece that ought to be revived somewhere in this country at least once a year. In the high art world of stage opera, though, Blitzstein’s impressive cleverness was writ large indeed – if only cleverness were enough to sustain three acts of intensely sung emotion.

But I’m glad to be in a position to say that, and I appreciate that my boss, conductor Leon Botstein, had the bull-headed tenacity to put the whole thing up there for us, warts and all. The stage design by my art department colleague Judy Pfaff, with glass doors of different shapes and an ethereal spiral staircase, was lovely, and imparted delicacy to a work that badly needed some delicate touches. Lighting by Kevin Adams was dramatic and quickly changing, which actually helped give the piece some structure where the music lacked it. Lauren Flanagan sang the title role well, and the piece was well cast. That’s fortunate, because Blitzstein was a little too scrupulous about making sure that every character got a big aria to him- or herself. In short, I can’t imagine how any better argument on Regina‘s behalf could be made than was made here, and the bulk of the deficiencies must be laid at Blitzstein’s door. It was reasonably entertaining, extremely informative evening, and now I won’t spend the rest of my life wondering how unjust the neglect of Regina is. Now if someone would perform that service for me vis-a-vis Transatlantic.

Italian electronic composer Walter Cianciusi (q.v.) has made available an engine he’s designed for playing La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations – 23 of them so far, ranging from his early Composition 1960 No. 7 to The Prime Time Twins… from the current MELA Foundation Dream House. Download Cianciusi’s Dream House package here, and it installs Max/MSP on your computer if you didn’t already have it. Then you select an installation you want to hear, type in an appropriate base frequency and hit return so you can hear it, and press “Start.” (For the late, complex installations, the base frequency should be 7.5 cps; for the others, something more in the 100-250 range, depending.) Of course, to get anything resembling the real installations, you’d then have to run this through a big sound system with superb frequency response. If you have that available, though, this offers the chance, I guess, to live with these intervals experimentally as La Monte has long done, and maybe – with pristine enough sonic conditions – to experience these fascinating mathematico-minimalist works without traveling to New York City.

My office speakers aren’t nearly sophisticated enough to render the more complex installations with any realism, but I’m getting a kick out of the simpler ones. How can you tell whether you’re getting it? The volume level should be basically steady, without a pronounced regular crescendo/decrescendo beat, and you should be able to refocus your ears on different pitches by moving your head slightly. Kids, try this at home!

If I were to ask you which composer from history seemed to embody emotional uncertainty in his music, what names would spring to mind? Mahler, maybe? Bartok? Dallapiccola?

I was initially heartened by Nicholas Kenyon’s article in the Times demythologizing Mozart. Not that I have anything against Mozart – quite the contrary. In fact, I’ve long been interested in saving the guy from his father’s slanderous picture of him as an eternal idiot child, someone who wrote heavenly music without effort. Mozart HATED that image of himself. Leopold Mozart created it as a way of controlling him, and it gained ground because Leopold’s letters happened to get published just after Mozart died, when Europe was suddenly interested and trying to get a grasp of who this Mozart fellow was. Kenyon provides several humanizing correctives:

Not until Wolfgang Plath studied the handwriting in the autograph scores did we realize quite how much of the early works was written down (or edited? or half-composed?) by Mozart’s father, Leopold. Much is made of Mozart’s admission to the famous Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna when he was 14, but the documents that survive show that his entrance composition was heavily corrected.

Mozart himself claimed that his music arose not by divine inspiration, but through hard work and study. Kenyon further claims that Mozart was not as good a composer at 15 as Mendelssohn would later be, and he’s right: I have yet to find any music Wolfgang wrote before age 19 that I felt I needed to hear again. The Mozart myth, I’ve always felt, was 1. a condescending image created by his father, and 2. a distant, divine image intended to make all future composers feel inferior, and to reinforce a public feeling that musical genius is something distant and fated, not something we should ever expect to meet up with on a daily basis.

But ultimately even Kenyon can’t resist perpetuating the myth. He ends his article:

[A]s we approach the next anniversary period, 2006 to 2041, there is no sign that Mozart has lost his relevance among composers. He still matches with uncanny precision the temper of our troubled times: our emotional uncertainty, our ability to perceive serenity fleetingly but never to attain it.

Does this sound right to you? Is there something about living in the age of iPods, terrorism, and corporate dictatorship that makes Mozart now more relevant than ever? Does Don Giovanni embody a cautionary tale that young people of the 21st century need to hear? Does The Magic Flute provide insight into Republican deceptiveness? Does Mozart’s music contain anything that we, today, would understand as emotional uncertainty, the troubled temper of our times, or the fleeting quality of serenity? Or do our classical mavens just feel an overwhelming need to reinforce the status quo, by recentering our musical life on a distant figure with whose music we have pretty much lost any capacity for real intellectual and emotional engagement? Isn’t the real significance of Mozart’s music today that his is the easiest for the classical music industry to turn into a commodity and sell?

A question came up at Sequenza 21 recently as to whether a composer should respond to a negative review. I know the answer to this one. My playing both sides of the game for 22 years has given me some insight into how to treat critics – as a critic myself I’ve had some blundering composers alienate me for years, and others charm the pants off me (only metaphorically speaking, of course). And as a composer, I’ve responded to many a review, with such surgical expertise as to never occasion (so far as I know) any negative consequences. It strikes me that composers may benefit from knowing the rules. (I’ll refer to the critic as “him” rather than “him or her,” because they’re always men anyway, right?)

1. Never insult a critic, go ad hominem, or counter his negative opinion with any negative emotionality of your own. Be clear, neutral, objective, factual, professional. He knows he’s pissed you off – if you can avoid showing it, he’ll be impressed. If you can’t, he’ll be reluctant to review you again, or, worse, come gunning for you. There’s only one exception to this rule, given below.

2. If he’s made an error of fact, correct it, cleanly and without rancor or condescension. Condescension is unnecessary when you’ve got the poor guy by the balls. Factual errors are critics’ Achilles’ heels. Critics don’t really consider themselves reporters, but they work in the same milieu as reporters, and the comparison is unavoidable. There is a spurious but compelling assumption abroad that a critic who can’t be trusted for his facts can’t be trusted for his opinions either; no logical reason why this should be true, but it remains the soft underbelly of the critic’s self-esteem. In many publications, he’ll have to issue a correction, which makes him and the paper look bad. Misstatements in negative reviews, unless they are totally trivial, should always be corrected – it keeps the critic on his toes and makes him as humble as he’s capable of being.

3. If you’re a living composer and the critic is not Kyle Gann, chances are 9 out of 10 that he doesn’t understand what you’re doing in your music. This in itself can be interesting; you’re doing more in your music than you realize, and the insights from offbeat perspectives can be illuminating. But if you get negatively reviewed because he thought you were doing something different than you were, which happens a lot, treat this as a factual error. In analytical terms worthy of an encyclopedia article, explain to him what it was that interested you in the music, what you were trying to achieve – you might even concede that he was right about what the music failed to do, since it’s not what you were trying to do. In the short term, this will produce no effect, and the critic will cling to a right to his own subjectivity; but it is not impossible to bully (gently) a critic into some modicum of self-doubt that he maybe he really doesn’t understand your kind of music.

3a. In endemic cases of this kind, one might write to the editor instead, informing him in objective, unemotional terms that the critic who’s covering your kind of music really doesn’t have any expertise in the genre, and wouldn’t it be better to hire some other critic for that beat – someone like, say, Kyle Gann? In this case I wouldn’t write the critic as well, because you’re trying to push him out of part of his job, and he’ll feel betrayed when he finds out.

4. If the critic’s opinion is completely subjective and boils down to an indisputable matter of taste, there’s no point in arguing. Instead, send the critic a note thanking him for attending, for choosing your concert to review (if he had that option), for taking your music seriously enough to wrangle with, and/or for getting something about your work out to the public. Feign a belief that all publicity is good publicity, and that you and he are two fellow professionals ultimately involved in the same task. You won’t believe how effective this can be. Some of the most negative reviews I’ve ever written were of operas by Philip Glass – yet whenever he sees me, Phil has always been friendly, affable, and talkative, though dropping the occasional hint to let me know he read those reviews. This baffles the critic; he starts to suspect (as I always did with Phil) that you’re such an important composer that noticing negative reviews would be beneath you, since you get so many positive ones elsewhere; most importantly, he will be unafraid to review you again, and to do so honestly; and he might even subconsciously start wanting to like your music because he’s unable to dislike you.

5. The exception to number 1: If a critic hates new music but constantly writes about it anyway just out of malicious glee, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that you or anyone else is ever going to get a good review out of him, and it would make you feel better to tell him what an ignorant, lowlife, tone-deaf son-of-a-bitch he is, go ahead and do so. (Clearly, I’m thinking of Donal Henahan at the Times in the 1980s.) Get as many cosigners as possible.

Why respond? Because more communication is always better than less, and for the critic’s own good. A critic who never gets responded to paradoxically starts to think both that, 1. no one’s reading him anyway, and so he doesn’t have to worry about the consequences of his words, and 2. he’s the isolated high-and-mighty authority whose word no one would dare question. I got responded to a lot in my early years at the Village Voice, and it made me sort through my musical convictions with a fine-tooth comb, and express them with razor-edged precision. Not a bad thing.

As for responding to a positive review, a note of thanks is not called for nor, precisely, even appropriate – but it is never resented. Same goes for cash and sexual favors.

In Salon there’s a chilling report of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in the form of Suzy Hansen’s review of Jean Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season. It details how the Hutus became inured, over a three-month period, to getting up every day and hacking to death their neighbors, the Tutsis, without qualms and without remorse, just because they were Tutsis.

And then I read Karl Rove’s answer when someone asked him why he so ruthlessly set out to destroy and discredit Joseph Wilson: “Because he’s a Democrat.”