I’m going to talk about myself as a composer for a moment, so if my own music isn’t what you read Postclassic to learn about – if you agree with the blogger who recently complained that my blog is too introspective – this is one to skip.

I’ve written about 60 musical works, or a little more, depending on which pieces I’m in a mood to acknowledge on a given day. Nominally, 20 of those pieces, one third, are now available on commercial CDs, ten of them on this most recent disc. It’s ironic how much getting a CD out feels like having just scaled a mountain – considering that the bulk of the work was done years ago, and I’ve hardly done anything to bring this one about in recent weeks, it just arrived in the mail. Unrecorded pieces feel like children still living at home. I’m directly responsible for whatever exposure they get, I tell them when to get up and when to go to bed, I exercise control over how they’re presented to other people. Now that they’re on CD, they’re like children who have left home and are living somewhere else. In a way they are no longer my pieces, they have to make their own way in the world based on what merits they possess. And the world will soon judge them, which I guess accounts for the mountain-scaling feeling – the echo of my achievement is about to come back to me, and I will be forced to accept, with humility, whether the world thinks it was a large achievement or a small one.

Very different from giving a concert, especially one in New York. New-music concerts, at least the Downtown, non-orchestral variety, are given largely for one’s friends, and it is primarily one’s friends who walk up afterward and say something. What they say, of course, is mostly flattering, or at least only unintentionally discouraging. Rare is the Downtown concert reviewed by more than one critic, and a single critic is an unreliable barometer. A CD on a well-distributed label, though, will be written about by people in Lafayette, Arkansas and Spokane, Washington, people who have never met me and never expect to. I’ve always said that a review is like a snapshot – you can always claim that it caught you from an unflattering angle, but only in rare cases of patent incompetence can you claim that it contained no grain of truth. In the welter of reviews that arrive I will have to look at the average between the best and worst as some kind of objective index of what resonance the music has found publicly. At age 49, I have been thickly involved in this process for 23 years, but I have not been much on the receiving end. The majority of the reviews I’ve had in my life have all come from one CD – my recent Long Night on Cold Blue. They have far outnumbered all the concert reviews I’ve ever had, and the existence of the internet has vastly increased their number. I can’t say that any particular review of Long Night has nailed the piece, with its strengths and weaknesses and achievements, the way I hear it and them. But I can say that, on balance, the proportion of positive and negative comments has pretty precisely matched what I hear as the proportion of strengths and weaknesses in the piece.

But I wrote Long Night when I was 24, 25 years old. The present disc, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, is far more representative and intensely personal. Representative, because I wrote these pieces between ages 42 and 48, and no excuse is permissible. Personal, because I produced every note of these Disklavier pieces myself, and don’t even have a performing intermediary to share the blame with. That’s not to say the “performances” are perfect: the Disklavier is a less tractable machine than you’d expect. You move the damn thing into a recording space, it gets jostled, the acoustics have changed, and all the subtle balances you labored to achieve are now a little different, and there are thousands of notes, and you do your best to reshape the nuances, but the recording engineer is waiting, the recording space time is limited, and at some point you have to say, “Oh well, close enough.” But I chose the medium, and the medium is no excuse. It is commonplace to assume, presumably rightly, that the dozens of little imperfections I notice will not garner much attention from those who know the music less intimately.

Being such a personal collection, the reaction will feel like a referendum on my personality itself. My sense of humor is much in evidence, also my morose streak, and my innate melodic tendencies, some of them arguably sentimental, are everywhere. I fret that the stylistic variety will prove confusing – inside, I feel like I keep writing the same piece over and over, but they come out almost as though composed by different people. The disc begins in chaotic hilarity and dies away in pensive mourning, which is much more me than the other way around would have been. And there are places (most recently the last minute or two of Tango da Chiesa) that make me shout, “Yes! Yes! That’s exactly the effect I’ve been aiming at my entire life!” The possibility is always there, as it is for every composer, that, as Charles Ives worried, “my ears are on wrong.” But to learn that once and for all will be infinitely preferable to sitting and wondering. Best of all, I feel like I suddenly have loads of psychic space available for new composing – because that’s ten fewer pieces I have to carry around with me anymore.

My new CD on the New World label, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, has just arrived – at my house, anyway. Details, including cover and liner notes by John Luther Adams, here.

A.P. wire story:

Bursting into tears, eighth-grader Anurag Kashyap of California became the U.S. spelling champ Thursday, beating 272 other spellers in a tough two days of competition. He said he felt “just pure happiness.”

Anurag, 13, of Poway clinched “appoggiatura,” a melodic tone, to take home some $30,000 in prizes. He won in the 19th round of the 78th Annual National Scripps Spelling Bee.

“A melodic tone,” my ass. But after all these years of trying to teach students how to spell “appoggiatura,” I can finally prove that it can be a helpful thing to know.

George Rochberg’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth String Quartets, written for the expert Concord Quartet and thus referred to as the “Concord Quartets,” represented a return to startingly traditional tonality in the dissonantly 12-tone 1970s. Composer Mary Jane Leach tells a story of their premiere:

I was at the premiere of Rochberg’s 4-6th String Quartets at Alice Tully. People’s jaws were dropping right and left. However, the funniest thing happened on the way out – I was walking behind two older women after the concert and one of them said “that group didn’t make nearly as many mistakes as the other modern music groups we’ve heard.”

John Bolton in his own disgusting words.

Are you ready to chill out for the summer? I sure as hell am. That’s why I’ve made Charlemagne Palestine June composer-of-the-month on Postclassic Radio, so you can lie on your deck in the sun and get lost in 50 minutes of Strumming Music, or 70 minutes of pipe organ drones in Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone. (That’s probably some kind of litmus test – if you can’t take seriously any piece titled Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone, no matter how transcendent it sounds, you’re no Downtowner.)

If you don’t know Palestine’s music, consider yourself lucky that you can catch up. He was notorious in the ’70s underground for long, long performances in which he hammered away on the piano for hours with relentless endurance, creating masses of overtones that seemed to give his music relevance in microtonal circles. Then, circa 1979, he left music and New York at once, and disappeared to Amsterdam. For years he was a famous name whose music you couldn’t hear for love or money. Finally, in 1995 CDs of historic and even new performances started coming out, and now there are at least six on labels like New Tone, Barooni, and Organ of Corti – you know, the important labels that you have to go to Other Music in New York to find. And at last, in September of 2000, Charlemagne appeared in New York in person to give one of his historic performances, with cognac and teddy bears, just like old times, an experience I documented with a review in the Village Voice – and I even got to have lunch with him! (In the on-line review the Voice has replaced the nice photo of Charlemagne with an ad, dammit, but I don’t make their policies.)

Interestingly, born in 1945, Charlemagne is ten years younger than La Monte Young or Terry Riley, half a generation removed from the original minimalists with whom he’s associated. There’s a lot of time left to study his music with his cooperation, and I hope someone’s doing it. Meanwhile, enjoy getting the sounds for free that I longed for for 15 years.

You might assume that the late George Rochberg (1918-2005) was not the kind of composer a Downtowner and experimentalist like me would be interested in, but you’d be wrong. In everything I’ve ever written about Rochberg – and there has been a lot, notably the long lead section of my chapter on the New Romantics in my book American Music in the Twentieth Century – I always cited him as one of the best 12-tone composers ever. His works from the 1950s, notably Serenata d’Estate and the Sonata-Fantasia, were important to me as a teenager, and I still think of them first as intriguingly introverted and thoughtful modernist works, only secondarily as examples of “12-tone music.” I worked hard on that Sonata-Fantasia in high school, and performed the first section publicly (the rest was a little much for my technique at the time). The sheet music has been sitting on my piano for the last few months, and I still enjoy reading through its craggy counterpoint.

If anyone could have continued the 12-tone idiom with integrity, I thought it was Rochberg, but when his son died, and in his grief he came out and railed against the technocratic, obfuscatory music of his peers, I watched his courage with admiration. I wasn’t always wild about the directions it led him in – as an ambitious grad student, I didn’t see aping the styles of Handel and Mahler as any key to the future. But I was in awe of the thoroughness with which he cast off ideology from his shoulders, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt as he stumbled about in the uncharted, ahistorical wilderness outside the academy. Rochberg’s book of essays The Aesthetics of Survival was a heartfelt plea for musical sanity, and even though it excoriated Cage along with Boulez and Babbitt, I found myself nodding in agreement with its compelling common sense.

Of course, in retrospect Rochberg’s neo-tonal and quotation-based music has fallen into an ironic genre popularly understood as postmodernism, but he never claimed that title for it, nor pursued the directions he did trying to be hip. Today the Third through Sixth Quartets with which he abandoned modernism sound no longer like pointers to a potentially sterile future, but like bold thought experiments of someone trying desperately to breach the present crisis. To have arisen to prestige through the academy and then apostatized against it as Rochberg did, threatening what could have been career suicide – except that he was so palpably right – was a move as brave as Monteverdi’s embrace of the “secunda prattica” around 1600. I remember even Time magazine documenting the charges that Rochberg had “sold out,” but he never faltered or looked back.

I never had contact with Rochberg but once. When I reviewed The Aesthetics of Survival in the Voice, he sent me a letter taking thoughtful disagreement, and telling me I had misunderstood the gist of some of the essays. In my youthful arrogance I was prepared to argue, but needed to reread much of the book, and, in the haste of carrying on three careers while raising a son, never got around to rereading, and thus never answered. I’ve always regretted that. Because of all the composers who inhabited points distant from me on the spectrum of musical politics, he alone exhibited an honesty and courage that transcended all differences of ideology. “We are not slaves of history,” he wrote; “we can choose and create our own time.”

I’m told that among Latin American countries Costa Rica is second, after Chile, in its standard of living, and that due to the excellece of its health care system, the country has now surpassed Japan to become number one in the world in the average longevity of its population. Certainly a lot of Americans flock to Costa Rica for dental work and plastic surgery, for professionals in those fields are well-trained in the U.S. and Europe, and their fees significantly cheaper than those at home. Americans are also buying up land for retirement purposes, the country is considered favorable for business investment, and, most tellingly, the number of Costa Ricans who live abroad in Europe or the U.S. for years and then nostalgically gravitate back home is quite remarkable. Some decades ago (so I was told by a seemingly knowledgeable tour guide) the government took 80 percent of the land away from the wealthiest landowners who were basically enslaving the rest of the population and made it available for the poor to afford at cheap rates. The constitution does not permit the country to maintain a standing army. The Costa Rican Cumbres cigars I brought back legally are smoother and richer in flavor than the bandless Cuban Cohibas that, to my surprise, turned up in one of the shoes in my suitcase when I got home. Aside from the nerve-wracking craziness of trying to drive in San Jose (no worse than Manhattan, and no better), Costa Rica does seem like a jewel of the Western hemisphere.

I say all this up front to mitigate the negative PR value of the fact that within ten hours of my arrival, two men jumped out of a cab, pointed pistols at me, and took my wallet. This was apparently a fluke. Pickpocketing and petty crime are common, as in all Latin American countries and many U.S. cities, but violent confrontation is extremely rare, especially in the neighborhood around the Universidad de Costa Rica where I was staying. At six foot two I am taller than the average Central American male by several inches, and thus identifiable as a presumptive American from blocks away. Moreover, foreigners have often told me that I am the most American-looking and -sounding person they’ve ever met, and so in countries where Americans are pinpointed by thieves, beggars, and police as likely to be carrying cash and credit cards, I?m a sitting duck. Attempts to cultivate a swarthier, more Mediterranean persona have not met with success.

But the University music department’s fourth annual Seminario de Composicion Musical, in which I participated, ran smoothly and without further disturbing incident. The music students at the University are hard-working, curious, and uninformed, an odd blend of innocence and innate musicality. According to their teachers they are well trained in the European classics but have had little chance for contact with contemporary music; names such as Reich, Glass, Ligeti, and Feldman drew only the slightest recognition among a student or two. Yet pieces I saw and heard by young composers, if uniformly tonal, were sophisticated in both counterpoint and especially rhythm – and I don’t mean the stereotypical kind of 3+3+2 “Latin” rhythms one associates with music south of the border, either, but more complex cycles of 11 or 21 beats. One would almost call such pieces postminimalist, though they seem to have arisen from a blend of classical tradition and pop guitar, with no discernible influence from either modernist or anti-modernist sources.

Similarly, in the Costa Rican music on the Composition Seminar, I heard among my own generation an attempt to create a new music not noticeably indebted to either the USA or Europe. The best, freshest pieces were by Eddie Mora – professor at the University, and my host – Alejandro Cardona, and Carlos Michans. All three composers are capable of a sustained Impressionist quiet dotted by outbursts of melody, though Mora has a more active rhythmic side as well, and Cardona’s earlier music is couched in a pensively muted Expressionism. Mora (born 1965) studied violin in Russia for ten years, and his music inherited something of the Shostakovich/Schnittke sense of humor. (Russian-Costa Rican links are common; apparently the Soviet Union used to court Central Americans with generous scholarships to Russian schools.) Rather than try to characterize Mora’s music from the sampling I heard, I am posting two pieces from his recent CD, Concierto “Amighetti” for strings, piano, and percussion and Girl and the Wind for strings, synthesizer and piano (both 2003), to Postclassic Radio; I also upload the latter work here so you can check it out at your convenience.

I wish I could play you Mora’s Dos Retratos for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, which I heard played in concert by the Seattle Chamber Players (with whom I was traveling, and who also premiered my own Minute Symphony Friday evening). It was a series of calm, still textures, through which little recurring melodic figures kept reacclimating themselves. Very beautiful, and original. Mora has gigs coming up in Austin and at Cornell in 2005, and may well become the first Costa Rican composer with an international rep.

I also wish I could play you La Delgadina by Alejandro Cardona (born 1959) for clarinet, viola, and piano, a lovely work of sustained tones breaking into bits of Italian opera melody. The three string quartets on the CD he gave me are a little less postclassical, a little more modernist, yet highly musical and not really reminiscent of anyone. I post to Postclassic Radio his Third, subtitled “En el Eco de las Parades” (1999-2000) – because 21st-century Costa Rican music is making a strong bid for independence and international relevance, and it’s high time you heard some.

One of my now-rare Village Voice articles appeared this week, a review of Charles Amirkhanian and Paul Epstein on the Interpretations series. I’ve uploaded to my website one of the Epstein pieces I talk about so you can listen to it, the lovely Palindrome Variations.

Anyone out there reading me in Costa Rica? Hello? No?

This Wednesday I’ll be appearing at the fourth annual Seminario de Composiciòn Musica organized by the University of Costa Rica in San Jose, May 25 at 7 PM. I’m performing Custer and Sitting Bull again for the thirty-somethingth time (if I still can remember the words – yikes!), along with several of the Disklavier pieces from my upcoming New World CD. I’ll also give a composition master class and a lecture on American (Yankee) music later in the week. If any of you happen to be in San Jose, well, drop on by.

No more changes to Postclassic Radio, probably no more blogging, until I return June 1. Imagine me sitting on a hot beach, worrying about how my e-mail is piling up.

New on Postclassic Radio this week: Jenin, by Frank Abbinanti, an hour-long, partly improvisatory piano work. Abbinanti is a political composer somewhat in the Rzewski mold, and a Chicago associate of the late Cornelius Cardew. I’ve uploaded some tracks from Phil Kline’s new CD Zippo Songs, with found texts from Vietnam GI’s, and a couple of pieces by Eve Beglarian that aren’t commercially available yet. Also, music by two composers in their early twenties, John Brady and Bernard Gann (no relation to me, aside from direct descent).

Today we presented the Herb Alpert Award to David Dunn. Dunn is an “electronic composer” – though I put the term in quotes because it falls so far short of doing him justice. He makes sound installations, but a lot of his work borders on biology. One of his available recordings, Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond, is a recording of minute underwater creatures, and sounds like an elegantly complex piece of musique concrète. More recently he’s invented a microphone that can be inserted into tree bark to record the sound world of the bark beetles that have been devastating the conifer woodlands of the western U.S. Tiny as these creatures are – the size of a grain of rice – they emit a wide range of sounds, some gender-specific, from the backs of their necks. Dunn told me today that, with global waming, these insects have increased from having one or two generations a year to four or five. As the global temperature rises, they move to higher elevations, and are in danger of infesting mountain forests that have never developed defenses against them. These high-altitude trees are the ones that hold snow in place that feeds the great rivers of the west. And so the unnatural spread of bark beetles is a real menace to the ecology of the western U.S., threatening massive droughts, and his recordings help monitor changes in the beetles’ habits. As he wrote in his application statement:

I wish to argue for the necessity of an art that sometimes turns outward instead of only reifying our obsession with human self-consciousness. It is an art that desires to foreground the non-human world. This requires a merger of art and science that places the human back into a measured position within the biotic world and encourages both to contribute to a collective activism of real world problem solving.

While my trust in science is tempered by all of the familir criticism directed at it for its true limitations, I still believe that it is one of the only tools we have for transcending the basic human condition that we cannot perceive what we do not believe. At the same time, many of my colleagues will accuse me of being too grandiose in believing that art must contribute to real world problem solving by enriching the communication of what science reveals through seeking the facts of nature.

Given the avalanche of messages that we are now receiving from the Earth in the form of disrupted natural cycles, increasing natural disasters, unprecedented loss of biological diversity, global warming, etc., it seems apparent that we are truly beginning to pass through the eye of the environmental needle. It occurs to me that the best use of my time as a musician is to spend it simply listening to some of those messages and to pass them along to others.

Dunn’s wife told me that when they told friends about the Herb Alpert Award, some of them replied, “Oh, I didn’t realize David was a composer.” But he is, and his music has a fascination born of unfamiliar yet natural processes. Right after the panel met in January to decide the award, I gave a hint of the winner by playing Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond on Posclassic Radio. (The Alpert panelists for a given year are kept secret until the award is given, but I’ve already been outed in the Times, so what the heck.)

So today we had a nice little ceremony at a private apartment in Manhattan to present the awards, also given for film, dance, theater, and visual art. Dunn doesn’t often present his sonic findings in public, and was extremely surprised to win. He told me that when he got the letter telling him he’d been nominated (it’s a $50,000 prize, far more appealing than the Pulitzer though less well-known) he threw it in the trash, assuming someone whose work was so esoteric could never win. But he mentioned it to his wife and she made him fish the application back out and complete it. Improvising harpist Zeena Parkins and composer/entrepreneur Gustavo Matamoros were on the panel with me, and we reached a unanimous decision. Dunn’s an amazing guy. He started off his career as factotum for Harry Partch from 1970-74, and inherited much of Partch’s integrity, and his complete unconcern for the rewards of his labor. And his music carries such vast implications for our future on this planet – it makes me feel so trivial, just looking for good tunes and interesting new rhythms.

[UPDATE: The morning after I wrote this, the exterminator came over, because I’ve got carpenter ants. He went along the wall finding them by listening, his ear against the wall. I told him about Dunn’s microphones, and he replied, “Yeah, we have headsets that we can place against a tree and find out what’s going on.” Seems like the sound world of insects is something we could maybe all stand to pay a little more attention to.]

Don’t anyone miss Anne Midgette’s nice profile of composer James Tenney in today’s Times.