For the first time I’ve repeated a work on Postclassic Radio. It’s Daniel Lentz’s The Crack in the Bell, and I aired it last September, but I listened to it again last night, and it’s just too beautiful, and not nearly enough well known. It’s a setting of e. e. cummings’s classic antiwar poem “next to of course god america i”:

“next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn’s early my

country tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead….

Lentz matches cummings’s irony with a deadpan but glitzy setting, with a driving pop energy breaking into passages of glorious Renaissance counterpoint on the word “beauty.” The piece is hilariously tongue-in-cheek yet sumptuously written, and its use of synthesizers and delay units in a large-ensemble context is elegant and innovative. Some people don’t like the voice and intonation of vocalist Jessica Lowe on this (the only) recording (originally on EMI, now rereleased on Lentz’s Aeode label), but those people’s expectations are too classical. I think she’s perfect for the piece, with just the cheesy insouciance to undermine cummings’s surface meaning. As far as I’m concerned, a society in which Le Marteau sans Maitre is famous and The Crack in the Bell isn’t has its values upside down, and so you can check out that opinion, I’ll also post the mp3 to my web page, here.

Greatly underappreciated though they are, negative comments in reviews are the sparks that illuminate your position with respect to the rest of the world. My Cold Blue recording of Long Night was described over by David Salvage at Sequenza 21 as “a bit Zen for my taste,” and it’s the best comment I’ve had since John Rockwell in the Times called my music “naively pictorial” in 1989, which led me to develop an entire aesthetic I call Naive Pictorialism, of which I am to date the sole exponent. Both are the kind of insights that indicate your message has gotten across. As a matter of fact, the last organized religion I participated in, years ago, was at Zen Buddhist temples in Chicago and New York. (The Chicago temple was great, but the New York one so smarmy, so more-meditative-than-thou, that I quit in disgust.) One of the earliest vocal works I wrote (Song of Acceptance of 1980, same year as Long Night) was a harmonically immobile setting of paragraphs from the Tao-te Ching:

The multitude are merry, as though feasting on a day of sacrifice…

I alone am inert, showing no sign of desires,

Like an infant that has not yet smiled…

Mine is indeed the mind of an ignorant man,

Indiscriminate and dull!

Common folks are indeed brilliant;

I alone seem to be in the dark.

Common folks see differences and are clear-cut;

I alone make no distinctions.

I seem drifting as the sea;

Like the wind blowing about, seemingly without destination.

The multitude all have a purpose;

I alone seem to be stubborn and rustic.

I can’t honestly say at this point whether it was John Cage’s writings that led me into Taoism and Zen and occultism, or whether it was my instinctive affinity for Asian religions that made me open to Cage’s writings. But I do know that, while Zen shouldn’t be made to take the blame for my music, the meditative state encouraged by Zen is a listening paradigm with which I am not uncomfortable. “A little too Zen” is praise that I would not have been so immodest as to confer on myself, but if someone wants to elect me to that august fraternity, I’ll emblazon it on my next poster.

The late Columbia professor Jonathan Kramer, in his great book from the 1980s The Time of Music, wrote at length about what he called “vertical music,” non-narrative, static music in which time ceases to exist, or rather that refuses to create a sense of virtual time, thus throwing the listener back on his own subjective time sense. This can range from music that doesn’t change at all – like Satie’s Vexations, Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis and Hymnkus, La Monte Young’s sound installations, Stockhausen’s Stimmung – to music that changes only very slowly, like Phill Niblock’s slowly unfocussing drone pieces, Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music, Steve Reich’s Drumming, Bill Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes, Elodie Lauten’s The Death of Don Juan, John Luther Adams’s Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, David First’s The Good Book’s (Accurate) Jail of Escape Dust Coordinates, Eliane Radigue’s incredible Adnos and Trilogie de la Mort (pieces I use as the acid test for judging a great stereo system), even some of Olivier Messiaen’s slow movements. For that matter, Morton Feldman’s entire output has a strong vertical component, “vertical” referring to the music’s refusal to significantly order contrasting events in the “horizontal” dimension of time.

Tell me that nothing happens in such-and-such a piece, and I am immediately intrigued. To say that all or even most Downtowners subscribe to an aesthetic of vertical time would be a gross exaggeration, but many of us do. Large swaths of Downtown music are devoted to gradual process, without events, or sometimes just directionless stasis without process, “like the wind blowing about, seemingly without destination.” (Actually, my music was more like this in the ’80s, and I’m recently getting back to it.) To outsiders, this music seems to be missing something: the emotional sine curve typical of Western music, the up-and-down European conceit of psychological cause and effect.

Since Beethoven, music has been paradigmatically based on our psychological life, and since Wagner, particularly on its sexual side. Obstacles appear, dissonances thwart us, events move toward a cathartic climax, and the hero strives and overcomes – or, beginning with Mahler, is sometimes defeated. Tension crescendoes, release comes in decrescendos, and all value consists in the intensity of the struggle. But starting with Cage, or even going back to Satie, came a different paradigm more akin to Eastern musics, based on a more meditative, Asian sense of all-at-oneness, of music experienced in the moment, not as going anywhere, but as Eternal Being. La Monte once tossed off to me the comment, “Contrast is for people who can’t write music.” When I quote this, it tends to make Uptowners, Midtowners, Out-of-Towners, and even some Downtowners very uncomfortable.

The discomfort is understandable. As Kramer would say, most classically trained musicians (it’s not necessarily true of your average audience member) are locked into a meta-narrative in which one never challenges the assumption that a piece of music should contain contrasting sections and high points and low points. What’s surprising is that, after so many great, successful, historically important individual examples of vertical music that doesn’t contain those things, vertical music still remains unacknowledged as a genre, as an ever-present possibility, and has to be refought for with every new piece. Reich and Glass wrote vertical music, but they got away with it. Young and Palestine, well, OK, but that was back in the ’60s when everyone was doing drugs. That aesthetic is supposed to be over now, everything back to “normal.” The great achievement of Morton Feldman was that he wrote so much strongly vertical music that appealed to young composers, who in turn forced many of their reluctant professors to concede that one Downtowner had indeed entered the canon of the Greats.

To this day, I play static, vertical music by Downtowners of my generation for my more dyed-in-the-wool classical colleagues and their faces fall into a look of patient indulgence of my naivete. I have to understand, after all, that the music doesn’t really “do anything.” It’s never presented as an issue of style or intent or idiom, but as one of quality. These composers are OK at creating atmosphere, but they haven’t learned yet to build up climaxes, have they? Where are the pitch motives, where the colorful contrasts of orchestration? They’re still amateurs, and perhaps they’ll someday learn to write “real music.” I wish, instead of acting so goddamned self-assured in their convictions of what music is supposed to do, these people could step out of their own meta-narrative enough to have the graciousness to admit, “Well, it’s a little Zen for my taste.” I wonder if it’s partly because I live in the still-Europe-tinged Northeast; I fantasize that out in California people sit around grooving to slowly-moving drones, but I don’t know whether I’d find it different out there or not. Probably academia is the same on the West Coast as it is here, and I’ve come to believe that musical academia is never, ever going to step out of the classical meta-narrative, Jonathan Kramer’s most brilliant arguments notwithstanding. Like the music it roundly rejects, musical academia is permanent and unchanging.

I think Young’s right, that contrast makes composing easier, and that to get by without it (think of the great Renaissance composers, like Ockeghem and Palestrina, whose music is so seamless) requires more skill. I’ve written plenty of “real music,” sometimes on commission from classical performers whom I fear couldn’t appreciate anything more hardcore, and I find it less of a challenge than a piece that manages to stay focused on one idea. “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” wrote Kierkegaard. “All of man’s troubles stem from his inability to sit still,” wrote Pascal. With every new piece I try even harder to keep my music from changing. (Of my mature pieces that have climaxes, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator for Disklavier is a joke about climaxes, and literally laughs at them; Hovenweep was written for the elegantly Midtown St. Luke’s Chamber Players, and I was being a good boy.) After all, to listen to music is to temporarily identify with the emotional/psychological persona it presents. Music that goes up and down a lot, that creates arbitrary anxiety only to resolve it, that drives itself into frenzied crescendos, feels, to me, sort of immature, unenlightened, not a persona I would be eager to internalize – and I think that lay audiences generally find it a chore to get through anxious modern music that seems to be about emotional instability. I do love the slowly graduated emotional catharses of Mahler’s music, but experience them as a kind of throwback to music’s (and my own) turbulent adolescence. Today I prefer music that can keep its calm, that aims at something deeper, more spiritual, perhaps, than a fluctuation of violent emotions.

It’s a personal preference, not an ideological position, but it keeps me and my friends from ever feeling at home in the world of contemporary classical music. Fifty-three years after 4’33”, 47 years after La Monte Young started working with drones, 20 years after Jonathan Kramer introduced the concept of vertical music into theoretical discourse, several centuries into the histories of Indian classical music and Tibetan chanting, you’d think there would be more frequent recognition that music can be something other than a calculated sequence of contrasted events. But I alone seem to be stubborn and rustic, for every contact with classical musicians reminds me that a lot of the music I relish most is still considered “a little too Zen.”

UPDATE: Reader Joseph L. confirms that they do still listen to drones out in California, and points me to this recent Oakland concert as evidence. Always knew I landed on the wrong coast.

Lawrence Dillon’s official Sequenza 21 list of 111 influential post-1970 musical works is worth taking a look at, as representing a diversity of tastes (including mine, and I appreciate his including it though I’m not a Sequenza 21 contributor). As he notes, there are a lot of celebrated composers that no one claimed as a compositional influence. Henry Cowell, I think it was, used to say there were “two kinds of music in America: the kind people talk about and don’t play, and the kind people play and don’t talk about.” Played or not, here’s a list of 111 new pieces people talk about (numerologically auspicious, since both Beethoven’s and Brahms’s Op. 111’s are important pieces for me).

While we’re at it, and since I’ve mentioned Duckworth recently, at the end of the 20th century (how well I remember it) (not really), Bill Duckworth wrote a book called 20/20: 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century. Similarly to Dillon, he queried all his musical friends and came up with 20 works that seemed to be the century’s most important, using the criterion, “Which works matter most to you personally?” Here’s the list he came up with:

Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

Joplin: Maple Leaf Rag

Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire

Ives: Concord Sonata

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue

Ravel: Bolero (personally? Well, OK)

Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

Copland: Appalachian Spring

Cage: Sonatas and Interludes

Hovhaness: Mysterious Mountain

Riley: In C

Reich: Drumming

Lucier: I Am Sitting in a Room

Johnston: String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace”

Glass: Einstein on the Beach

Ashley: Perfect Lives

L. Anderson: O Superman

Pärt: Miserere

M. Monk: Atlas

He also includes the 86-piece “long list” from which he culled the 20, but you’ll have to buy the book to read that. I can’t do everything for you.

I just received an excellent CDR recording of a new piece of mine, Private Dances for piano, played exquisitely by Sarah Cahill – in her hands, in fact, a couple of the movements are more beautiful than I imagined they could be. I wrote the piece because for years I’ve been such a big fan of William Duckworth’s multi-movement pieces like The Time Curve Preludes and Imaginary Dances, and they made me want to write a piece as a series of brief movements, something I’d never done. What Duckworth achieves that I didn’t was a way to link the pieces convincingly as a series, like Schumann; my dances are more self-contained, but I’m happy with them. I’ve posted the piece to my web page and on Postclassic Radio, and I post it here as well. You can listen to the whole piece:

Private Dances (timing – 23:44)

or to individual movements:

1. Sexy

2. Sad

3. Sultry

4. Sentimental

5. Saintly

6. Swingin’

and you can find the scores here as PDFs if you want. Hell, you can take ’em and play ’em on your own piano. [UPDATE: My PDFs, made via Sibelius on a Mac, download and print just fine on some computers, but on others either won’t print correctly or possibly won’t download at all. I don’t know what the problem is, or what to do about it, except that friends have had luck trying it on different computers until they find one that works. Advice appreciated.]

Over at New Music Box, Frank Oteri is rather amusingly astonished at the silence greeting the announcement that, after all the talk about the music Pulitzers changing their focus and allowing jazz and film music, this year’s prize went to one of the usual suspects, Steven Stucky. Stucky is one of those orchestra-circuit guys who’s such an obvious shoo-in for that prize that my immediate reaction was, “Wait, hasn’t he won it before?” I guess not, though his reported reaction was aptly blasé, like, “Oh, gee, forgot it was that time of year already .” There’s a group of composers who have the circuit of big-league orchestra commissions in their pocket, and despite the occasional surprise winner like Henry Brant, that crowd owns the music Pulitzer. The question for them is not whether, but when. Like Jennifer Higdon: why’d they pass up her Concerto for Orchestra, and how many more years will it be? Where’s Tobias Picker’s Pulitzer? Augusta Read Thomas’s? Roberto Sierra’s? They’re coming.

But two factoids Frank came up with made my eyes bug out. One was that he listed this year’s judges, which I always thought had been a well-kept secret: composer Christopher Rouse, conductor David Zinman, music critic Mark Swed, jazz composer Muhal Richard Abrams, and last and least, octogenerian composer Gunther Schuller, whose conservative tastes and vast behind-the-scenes influence have single-handledly cast a pall over this nation’s music for decades. So that’s how the “opening up” works: put Abrams on the panel as the token jazz guy, and when a jazz score comes through, he can vote for it. Woo hoo!, we’re liberal now.

Even more surprising was the statistic that only about 100 pieces a year get nominated, and that the total this year went up to 135 – allegedly because of the more “open” rules, although only four jazz scores were submitted and no film scores. 100 pieces a year? I hear a lot more new works than that, probably five times as many back in my heyday at the Voice. Given the stuffed shirts who think their chance at this lottery is worth a $50 admission ticket, that’s probably a pretty glum 100 pieces, and I doubt that I could find a better piece to honor in that turnout than the judges usually do. So it makes me wonder: What if 700 Downtown composers all submitted pieces for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize? Just absolutely overwhelm them with entries. Might an enjoyable piece of music actually win?…

Nahhh, just a fantasy.

Here’s a hint of Gannisms to come, hitting the stores this September.

Composer Lawrence Dillon, over at Sequenza 21, is trying to determine, for pedagogical reasons I guess, what were the pieces of music from the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that most changed the way composers think about composing. I demurred offering my own choices, feeling a little out-of-mainstream in that milieu, and also having an innate proclivity for huge, long, relentless lists instead of brief, exclusive ones. He said, “Awww, c’mon!,” which I found a sufficiently compelling argument for a lazy Sunday afternoon. It’s an odd request as worded, because those pieces from the ’60s formed my conception of music, those from the ’70s changed it, but by the ’90s, very little was really going to change the way I compose – though I’ll admit, Mikel Rouse’s Failing Kansas did. Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s my personal list for Lawrence, as short as I dare make it, and posted on my own blog so I can add important things I forgot:

1960s:

Pierre Boulez: Pli selon pli (1962)

Terry Riley: In C (1964)

Igor Stravinsky: Requiem Canticles

Harry Partch: The Delusion of the Fury (1965-66)

John Cage: Variations IV (1963)

Luciano Berio: Sinfonia (1967)

Henri Pousseur: Jeu de Miroir de Votre Faust (1968)

Bruno Maderna: Grande Aulodia (1969)

Philip Glass: Music in Fifths (1969)

1970s:

George Crumb: Black Angels (1970 – no big impact on me, ultimately, but still wows my students)

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra (1970)

Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano (1971)

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel (1972)

Frederic Rzewski: Coming Together (1972)

Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace” (1973)

Steve Reich: Music for Mallet instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973)

Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach (1976)

Morton Feldman: Why Patterns? (1978)

Robert Ashley: Perfect Lives (1978)

William Duckworth: The Time Curve Preludes (1978-79)

1980s:

Harold Budd/Brian Eno: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980)

Morton Feldman: For Philip Guston (1984)

Conlon Nancarrow: Studies Nos. 40, 41, 47, 48 (1980s)

Daniel Lentz: The Crack in the Bell (1986)

Janice Giteck: Om Shanti (1986)

Carl Stone: Shing Kee (1986)

Morton Feldman: For Samuel Beckett (1987)

La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano (begun in 1964, but perhaps not totally impressive until the 1981 and 1987 performances)

Larry Polansky: Lonesome Road: The Crawford Variations (1988-89)

Bunita Marcus: Adam and Eve (1989)

Art Jarvinen: Murphy-Nights (1989)

1990s:

Meredith Monk: Atlas (1991)

Frederic Rzewski: De Profundis (1991)

David First: Jade Screen Test Dreams of Renting Wings (1993)

Mikel Rouse: Failing Kansas (1995)

Mikel Rouse: Dennis Cleveland (1996)

John Luther Adams: In the White Silence (1998, or alternatively the piece it’s expanded from, Dream in White on White, 1992)

Elodie Lauten: Waking in New York (1999)

There should be pieces by Phill Niblock, Beth Anderson, and Peter Garland, but it’s difficult to narrow it down to one.

I just paid $35.10 for six mp3s, and I don’t know whether I feel like a chump or 21st-Century Man, but I wanted the experience. I went to Peter Maxwell Davies’ web site, written about in an article linked from Arts Journal, and downloaded six pieces, his Symphonies No. 5, 6, and 8, his Piano Concerto, his Strathclyde Concerto No. 9, and Worldes Blis, totalling about three and a half CDs’ worth of music. I enjoyed Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King when I was a kid, which introduced me to Julius Eastman as a singer, and my old vinyl of which has mysteriously gone the way of so many of my possessions, seeking its own way out in the world, no doubt. Since then, Davies had almost completely fallen off my radar, for reasons so trivial as to be embarrassing: a vague prejudice that great music doesn’t often come from England, and an equally vague sense that the people who champion Davies and those who champion the music I love don’t overlap much. But I’m always tempted to remove swaths of my ignorance when I can do so in bulk, cheaply, and with immediate gratification, and I was fascinated by the fact that so august a figure was offering his music direct to the public without intermediary. I have my Visa card number memorized, and I was there.

Unfortunately, when I want immediate gratification, I mean immeeeeeeeediate, and the WorldPay link you use to pay wasn’t working at first. It kind of soured the experience I wanted when I had to wait more than four seconds between entering my card number and hearing the first notes, but an hour later it worked. What you get for your virtual money is nice PDFs of the program notes (a quaintly termed “Owner’s Booklet”), a PDF invoice for your tax records in case you’re a professional blogger [pause to let that concept sink in], and the privilege of downloading, apparently repeatedly, mp3s of the works in question at various file sizes and quality levels. Frankly, I wasn’t too impressed by the price. These are mp3s, after all, and for about the same wampum I could have gotten two CDs with nice booklets and better sound quality (though I have to admit, transferred to CD and played on my system, these orchestra pieces sound pretty splendid, if a touch harsh in loud passages). But the speed appealed to the impatient four-year-old child in me, and the quantity to my Scorpio need to know everything about a subject at once if I’m going to bother knowing anything at all. Also, I wanted to see whether this was a possibility I might want to pursue for my own music. It seemed strangely personal, after all, to get my music straight from The Man Himself.

To my slight disappointment, Eight Songs for a Mad King wasn’t available – I suppose Nonesuch still owns the rights [UPDATE: no, rereleased on Unicorn]. Davies’s later music, though, certainly possesses qualities that make it listenable and interesting. There is a consistent lyricism of diatonic lines despite the generally (almost) atonal idiom, and a tendency to lead the ear by echoing motives so that it’s never difficult to keep one’s place in the piece. My misgivings are the same ones I have with Roger Sessions’s symphonies: the feeling of a facile, personal compositional language which risks becoming formulaic, as though the composer wakes up and says, “I think I’ll compose another piece in my style today.” While each work is full of variety, Davies always uses the brass the same growly way, always has some dancelike rhythmic passage for contrast, is always slowly building up towards some timpani-studded climax or receding regretfully from one. In other words, the musical ideas aren’t strongly differentiated from work to work, and I suspect that it would take many, many listenings before I could drop the needle (if that is not too passé an expression) and tell whether a passage comes from the Fifth, Sixth, or Eighth Symphonies. It isn’t a function of the music’s complexity, for the European serialists, for all their emphasis on theoretical consistency, never fell into this problem; one would never, knowing them, mistake Boulez’s Pli selon pli for Rituel, or Berio’s Corale for Points on the Curve to Find, Laborintus II, or Sinfonia. Still, it’s hardly the worst fault a composer can have.

Oddly enough, the one piece so far that transcends this critique is the earliest, the darkly Romantic Worldes Blis from 1969 (the others pieces are from the last decade or so). Davies was one of the first “postmodernists” (in Eight Songs for a Mad King too, if memory serves) to play off of historical styles in his music, and Worldes Blis begins with reference to Renaissance monody. The excellent and detailed Owner’s Booklet essay by Nicholas Rampley states that Davies’s pre-1970 works (he famously moved to one of the Orkney Islands that year) are “his most uncompromising and challenging,” and that his “spare means” in those years proved too much for many listeners. But to the contrary, I find the sensuous dwelling on sustained tones here memorable and individual, almost Feldman-like except for the undercurrent of ever-seething passion. Perhaps I’m mainly a fan of the early Davies – or more likely, I simply like spare means. The later symphonies I will try to develop a taste for. In the meantime, I am re-adding Davies to my critical repertoire, and congratulate him on an effective PR strategy.

Renovations on Postclassic Radio are complete, and the playlist is back up to around 17 hours. Also, I’ve finally updated the playlist on my web site, so if you look quick you can actually find out what’s playing tonight. (Offer limited.)

Pauline Oliveros wants to start a blog for composers to write about new music. She deplores the current trend of newspapers refusing to hire composers as critics. So a week ago Sunday she put together a panel on the subject at her Deep Listening Space in Kingston, consisting of Sarah Cahill, Beth Anderson, Al Margolis, and myself. Virgil Thomson was the ghost of honor, and Pauline invoked the 1940s and ’50s, when Thomson used to hire his fellow composers (Lou Harrison, Paul Bowles, Peggy Glanville-Hicks) as critics at the New York Herald Tribune.

Today the larger daily papers do avoid hiring composers as critics. My friend at the San Francisco Chronicle Joshua Kosman recently made a case against composer-critics (as having divided allegiances) in New Music Box, and, startlingly, Phoenix composer-critic Kenneth LaFave was recently told by his paper that a commission he’d accepted from a local ensemble was a conflict of interest, and that he had to choose between the commission and his job; he chose the commission. So the issue is in the news, and since the audience that gathered for us at Kingston, though vocal and interested, wasn’t much larger than the panel, I thought I’d record my thoughts on the subject here. I’ll let you assume that I was just as eloquent there, speaking extemporaneously, as what I write here, and no one will be the wiser.

“The purpose of music criticism,” wrote Thomson, “is to aid the public in the digestion of musical works. Not for nothing is it so often compared to bile.” That’s always been my guiding principle as a critic, that criticism has a role to play in a healthy musical society. We at the Village Voice are sometimes described as doing what is called “advocacy journalism,” and I’ve never understood what that was supposed to mean. I do indeed advocate a lively music scene, with artists producing new work, spaces producing it well, and audiences reacting to it. I would have no respect at all for a critic so “objective” that he didn’t give a damn whether the music scene was healthy or not, and I assume that my colleagues in the critical profession are decent enough people that they prefer good things happening in the arts to bad. That doesn’t mean that one writes only favorable reviews, as might superficially be assumed. Writing unapologetically positive notices of concerts that fall flat alienates the audience and makes them distrust your motivations and other judgments; one need not agree with the rest of the audience, but you should acknowledge and account for their perceptions if evident. So rather than cheerlead for every new work that comes by, I advocate that beautiful and interesting music be praised, problematic music be analyzed, and unsuccessful music be exposed as such if it has significant corporate money and publicity behind it, or ignored if no good can be done by drawing attention to it. That’s been my position at the Voice, and at the Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

But other critics, and newspaper editors, have different conceptions of the role of the critic, and it is from these, I think, that a concern for a specious kind of objectivity arises. There are certain critics, especially at the more prestigious newspapers and magazines, who consider themselves gatekeepers, defenders of the culture. Their job, as they see it, is to damn everything that can be damned, to keep any composer or composition from entering the Canon of Great Composers and Works that can possibly be kept out, so that only those of the very highest quality will eventually get in. “Kill them all, God will recognize His own,” is the attitude. Unlike in jazz and pop music, classical critics have often risen to the top by seeming impossible to please, projecting a facile persona of extremely high standards – and correspondingly, other classical critics have hit a career ceiling from being too forgiving. But I always admired Leighton Kerner, my classical colleague at the Voice, because, alone among his generation of major critics, he would compare a recent La Traviata with one he heard in 1959, and quite often prefer the newer one. (Claiming that everything was better in 1959 is an easy pose when half your audience wasn’t yet culturally aware that year and those who were have embellished it in memory.)

Gatekeeping has declined somewhat, seems to me, and what’s more common today is the notion of a critic as consumers’ guide. Editors in particular have been allowed to conclude, with little counter-opinion, that the reason people read critical reviews is To Decide Whether To Go To The Show And Plunk Down Their Money. The critic is an adjunct to an economic process, and his role is to increase the income of organizations that have succeeded in providing quality entertainment, and to punish those that haven’t. This is one reason review space keeps getting shorter and shorter – because how many words do you need to say “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”? Two – and it’s also why music reviews are disadvantaged, because plays and movies regularly run for days or weeks, while concerts usually happen once or twice and then vanish from consciouness. It’s also why papers have come to overwhelmingly prefer advance features to reviews, because an article coming out before a concert has a chance to increase ticket sales and justify the concert presenter’s having taken an ad out in the newspaper, while a review afterward has no (immediately observable) financial effect. If the reviewer, reduced to an economic cog this way, enhances the liveliness of the music scene, it will be only as an accidental side-effect; his function is to complete a circle, raising money, when possible, for the corporate backers who buy the newspaper’s ad space.

Now, whether you’re a gatekeeper or a consumer’s guide, objectivity is an issue. If you’re a gatekeeper who has a friend who’s a composer, you may be sorely tempted to unfairly make your friend an exception, to let him into the Gates of the Canon while others you don’t know are kept out. If you’re a consumer’s guide, your decision might make or cost your friend some money. Conflicts of interest are possible. But both of these types assume that the end result of criticism is a binary decision: you’re in the canon, you’re not, your show is worth the money, yours isn’t. Neither places any emphasis on nuanced analysis, on placing music in context, on elucidating a work’s meaning without comparison, on revealing one’s own range of experience and point of view so that the reader can judge for himself accordingly.

The charge is that composers aren’t objective, that we’re wrapped up in our own aesthetic struggles, we want our own sides to win, we hang out with other composers and have too many friends affected by our reviews. The flip side of that is that non-composer critics are assumed to be, then, models of objectivity, untainted by their own agendas. But I have never found non-composers different from composers in this respect. Look at Paul Griffiths, who wrote for the Times a few years ago: though not a composer, he had written a good book on the Darmstadt serialist composers, and he made it clear over and over again, week after week, that they were the really great generation of composers. Ligeti’s own mother couldn’t have had more of an agenda. And before him, Donal Henahan (ex-sportswriter, Segovia fan, and accidental accedant to the lead critic spot) spent more than a decade lambasting us with his perception that classical music had died in 1940, and there wasn’t any any more, and there was nothing we could do about it, and that all those composers who thought one could still compose should go home and quit kidding themselves and die. If this was objectivity, let us have nothing but subjectivity from now on. It was the opposite of the purpose for criticism I propose above, and one that offered nothing but harm to our musical health.

Griffiths’ harping advocacy for the Darmstadt composers was no more tiresome, of course, than my own truculent fascination with Downtown music. I bring it up to point out that an agenda and a lack of objectivity are not the same thing. After all, how did I end up as a Downtown critic? When I was 16, Cage and Babbitt were paired at the top of my Pantheon of composers. I eventually found that those composers influenced by Cage seemed cheerful and whacky and fun, while those influenced by Babbitt were authoritarian, schoolmarmish, and bitter. I made my choice accordingly; what about it was unobjective, given the extent to which a human being can be objective? After all, short-term self-interest would have dictated I go with the Babbitt faction, which was ascendant at the time and could have procured me a more lucrative career. I voted against my self-interest and went with my musical judgment. Had I given up composing and devoted myself to criticism, my preferences today would remain the same.

Having gone in that general direction, I am in no way committed to bolstering that judgment at every step. The last couple of days I’ve been revisiting, via piano and recording, George Rochberg’s Sonata-Fantasia, a 12-tone work from 1956 that I played in my youth and that has always fascinated me. I am perhaps the leading critical advocate for the greatly misunderstood Ralph Shapey, a relentless atonalist supposed to be one of the “academics.” Piece by piece, my opinions about 12-tone, atonal, and Uptown music are not often out of line with those more committed to that repertoire than I am; I greatly prefer Schoenberg’s Serenade to his Violin Phantasy, I consider Philomel by far one of Babbitt’s best works, and devout 12-tone apologists usually agree. “God is in the details,” and on the details I’m as good as anyone. Meanwhile I am not blind to the foibles of much Downtown music, and for some of my Voice articles I will evermore be considered a harsh and grumpy reviewer in certain circles that you might have assumed revered me. My career looks lopsided now because the Voice hired me specifically to review the Downtown scene, but before that, in Chicago, I chronicled both sides of town equally, with occasion to praise Boulez and fault Glass, and no one ever cried “foul” or even seemed sure which “side” I was on.

Critics have agendas, or any interesting critic does, and given enough column inches, those agendas emerge. The problem is sometimes with young critics, who fear some blight on their future if their side doesn”t “win.” They cherry-pick their evidence, overlook weaknesses in their own side of the argument, and overstate their holy crusades. When I was young, I cherry-picked my evidence, overlooked weaknesses in my own side of the argument, and overstated my holy crusades. But the problem is inexperience, rather than whether you’re a composer or not. Past 40, you realize that no side ever really “wins” for good, that there are advantages to being in the outsider’s camp, that pendulums swing and some things never change. It doesn’t mean you give up your agenda. My agenda is that I want to live in a lively, healthy music scene. One component I see as essential to that agenda is that composers whose creativity takes them outside the strictures of the classical music business should be encouraged and brought to public attention. It does not mean that I want the orchestral composers to disappear overnight. What a mess we’d be in if they did, with the world’s attention suddenly focused on frail, fallible Downtown. What in all this is “unobjective”? Is the fact that I benefit from living in a lively, healthy music scene a “conflict of interest”?

Objectivity is not an absence of connections to the music world, but a quality of writing. “Verbs imply action and can be libelous,” wrote Thomson: “it is the adjective that characterizes music neither in sorrow nor in anger.” In his articles for the Herald Tribune, Thomson bent over backwards aligning himself with the Stravinsky camp and did his level best to squash Sibelius’s popularity, but there is still a wonderful quality of objectivity in his style. He advised not giving a personal evaluation of the music you write about – the evaluation, he said, will come across in your choice of words anyway, and is the least interesting, most dispensible part of the article. He was the opposite of the thumbs-up/thumbs-down critic. It is possible to draw out the ideas from a piece of music, to explain it so clearly in its own terms that the reader will get a positive impression if he likes that sort of thing, and a negative impression if he doesn’t. I’ve managed it, and sometimes been thanked by a composer for capturing him so accurately in a review that most readers regarded as negative. That’s objectivity.

A composer can be a perfectly objective critic if he can develop an objective writing style, and not unless. Thomson is considered a great critic not because he was doing it as a composer, but because he wrote so damn convincingly, even with his thumb on the scales. Secondarily, if criticism has enough space to give context, to discuss the network of ideas called upon by a piece of music, and to give some impression of the critic’s own biases so that the reader can adjust his own opinions accordingly, then objective criticism can be written. Limit a critic to five or six column inches, 500 or 600 words, and criticism is once again forced into the thumbs-up/thumbs-down mold, and objectivity becomes a vexed issue. You could write about your own wife’s music with a surgical accuracy that would allow the reader to form his own opinion, but if you’ve only got space for, “Her piece was fantastic,” then of course conflict of interest is an issue. (I think of composer-critic Deems Taylor, who once wrote a negative review of a piece of music he had written 20 years earlier, on grounds that he was no longer the same person who had written it.)

This is all to say that there is nothing about being a composer that should disqualify one from being a critic, assuming that one can write well. (I can’t stress enough the value of serving an apprenticeship with a good newspaper editor. To the extent that I write clearly and sometimes even colorfully, it is due to seven years with Doug Simmons breathing down my neck, who was music editor at the Voice from 1985 to 1993, and phenomenal at his job. This crucial element of music criticism is one that we can’t duplicate at present in the blogosphere.) But do composers make the best critics, as Pauline averred at our panel? I don’t think we have enough evidence to form a generality. Certainly, composer-critics bring a wealth of understanding about the current music scene, and they make new works stand out in bold relief. What composers very reasonably prefer about composer-critics is that they emphasize new music, while non-composing critics usually do not, but there’s no inherent reason that non-composer critics couldn’t start “usually” doing that. Composers bring a knowledge of the full repertoire of a composer’s motivations, plus a vocabulary that enables them to get the ideas of new music across; they also have a tendency to think too technically, and to not always see the forest for the trees. I think we composers also need the perspective of cultured non-composing critics to get a sense of what we superficially look like in the mirror, for superficial impressions are not unimportant. If composer-critics are better at explaining new music to audiences, non-composing critics are probably better at explaining audiences to composers, and we benefit from both.

Meanwhile, given the endangered-species classification of composer-critics in the wild, Pauline Oliveros plans to raise some in captivity, and is looking for the proper blog format. At the panel warnings were raised about the continuing debacle at New Music Box, where unmoderated composers carp at each other in endlessly bitter and usually anonymous diatribes. But I held up as a far better example the composers’ forum at Sequenza 21, which I’ve been dipping into regularly lately, and which has nurtured an admirably civilized, troll-free exchange of ideas. I even like the format for comments there, which pop up in a separate window, not as obstructions of the main commentary. Our public is decades behind in digesting new musical works, and whatever Pauline comes up with can only add to the liveliness and efficiency of that process.

I have time this week to perform a necessary makeover on Postclassic Radio, required by format changes on the web site. The reason I hadn’t used the mp3PRO format they recommend in the first place was because of a reported incompatibility with some Macs, so please let me know at kgann@earthlink.net if you start having any trouble that you didn’t have before. Theoretically, the sound is supposed to be an improvement. Anyway, I had to start over again with the playlist at six hours, and I’m slowly building it back up to 17. I’m re-uploading most of the mp3s that were already running, but changing over quite a few as well. Robert Ashley Month continues, and will run through April as well. I’ve put up his instrumental work for Relache, Outcome Inevitable, and added Charlmagne Palestine’s Strumming Music, an amazing document of 1970s minimalism. Enjoy! and let me know if you can’t.

Daniel J. Wakin interviews James Levine, Charles Wuorinen, and John Harbison today in the Times, devilishly playing off, as the Times insists on doing, Wuorinen’s 12-tone beliefs against Harbison’s neoromanticism. There are some delightful little knots in the conversation, this one being the most delectable, I thought:

WAKIN: You wrote in your book, “Simple Composition” —

WUORINEN: Never write a book.

WAKIN: Of course it was a long time ago —

WUORINEN: It’s still in print. People use it.

WAKIN: It was written in 1979, and you wrote that the tonal system could be found only in backward-looking serious composers, is no longer used by serious mainstream composers, has been replaced and succeeded by the 12-tone system.

WUORINEN: Well, that’s a categorical statement which cannot be – of course, it had more to it then, although to some extent it is obsolete now. But it depends on what you mean by the tonal system.

LEVINE: That is spoken by a man who is tired of how difficult it is to make anything understood, in any of these distinctions.

Undoubtedly.

When I went from Dallas to Oberlin at age 17, I told friends I was going to school on the East Coast. From where I lived, Cleveland looked like a short bus ride from New York. Imagine my confusion when I arrived and the students, mostly from Long Island, called it the MidWEST.

Composer Lawrence Dillon, who truly enjoys clearing things up and who has been a valuable sparring partner in internet new-music debates to more people than myself, writes with a well-considered objection. Pointing out that I use “Uptown” to refer to composers as diverse and even opposed as Elliott Carter and David Del Tredici, he continues:

Honestly, Kyle, I think that’s the weakness in your argument for Downtown aesthetics: if you simply argued for Downtown style without placing it in opposition to a single, monolithic Uptown, you might have an easier time convincing people who aren’t coming from the same place you are.

Probably true. To people whose view of new music comes through official channels, it must seem confusing that, to me, the ultracomplex Carter and the postmodernly neoromantic Del Tredici look no further apart on the map than Cleveland and New York did when I was 17. But while Uptown, agreed, isn’t stylistically monolithic, it is almost totally monolithic in one respect. Carter and Del Tredici can both be told: we’re giving you winds in threes, four horns, three percussionists, and strings 10 10 8 6 4 – and they can write for it and be happy. They both write for existing ensembles: orchestras, string quartets. Some other composer, given an orchestra commission, might say, I need five percussionists at least, and forget the violins and violas, I don’t need them, and I want an accordion, and a banjo, and I need two conductors because there are two tempos, and I need a tape of environmental sounds behind the orchestra. That person will end up in the Downtown scene, because the classical music world will rarely accommodate her.

For all the difficulty of describing differences between the Uptown and Downtown worlds as they exist, the origin of the difference is pretty simple. I watch it in process every year. At Bard, our senior composition students have the opportunity to have an orchestra piece played at graduation, by the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by our college president Leon Botstein, no less. It’s a plum gig, and students get excited about it. Nevetheless, they approach it cautiously, and some choose not to take advantage of it. And the process they go through applies to any young composer who faces the possibility of entering the world of composing for orchestra.

First, you learn that you get woodwinds in pairs, maybe four horns, one percussionist, and strings. “But I want to use bass clarinet.” Well, if one of the clarinetists has one, maybe you can do it. “I need more percussion.” Well, you can’t have it, because you’re a young composer, and we’re doing you a favor, and someday when you’re famous you can ask for five percussionists, and maybe you’ll get them. So the first thing you learn is to pare down your imagination to write for the existing ensemble.

You keep writing. You learn other things. You’re only going to get 20 to 40 minutes’ rehearsal, depending on the orchestra. The piece has to be essentially sight-readable. You have to guess whether that mid-register trumpet solo will be audible over the horns if you mark it mezzoforte; there’s no chance to play around with dynamics at the reheasal. All dynamics need to be marked, as well as slurs and bowings. You get a piece or two played, you learn to write the kinds of gestures that orchestra players like to play, and play well. At a more advanced level, you learn what kinds of busy percussion parts impress audiences. You learn that pieces with tumultuous brass climaxes win prizes. It’s called “learning your craft”: what it really is, is learning to acquiesce to the existing institutional conventions. You are sharing the same playing field with Mozart and Brahms, and it is not going to be greatly rearranged for your petty efforts, which are already a PR nightmare and a pain to rehearse. You are a bit player, and you will learn to do as you’re told.

There is a kind of student who begins to sense this early on. The classical music world, she realizes, is like a series of prefab molds, ready for your music to grow into. There’s the orchestra mold, the string quartet mold, the string trio mold – and now there’s what’s called the “Pierrot ensemble” mold: violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano, sometimes “Pierrot plus percussion.” In the glacial movement of classical music, this constitutes progress, that the entire 20th century managed to increase the list of standardized ensembles to the tune of one. Of course you can express some individuality within these molds – but ultimately, the medium is the message, and unless you have a strong talent for subliminal subversion, your orchestra music, or string quartet music, is still going to sound “classical,” with a European tinge. What’s more, when you write for orchestra, you are going to hand over your music to a powerful organization that cares little about your needs or artistic vision, and you are going to give up considerable control over your own art.

It never ceases to amaze me how many young composers follow this path anyway, for it’s not an easy one to follow. But there are some young composers who look up the road and can’t bring themselves to take the first steps, who imagine their own wild, proliferating music and blanche at the thought of seeing it pruned with institutional shears. Like novelists and sculptors, they want to make art from their own personal experiences, from materials in their environment, and they want control over the results. They become Downtowners. For, quite simply, Downtown music is that which cannot be accommodated by the musical ensembles and organizations that are created and maintained to play 19th-century European music.

Consequently, the only complete way to define Downtown music is negatively, and with reference to Uptown music – or rather, to the world of classical music conventions. Downtown is largely a culture of escapees. The purpose of an academic music education is usually to prepare you to make your music fit those molds, to teach you how to acquiesce. Many young artists run away in horror. They find a Downtown music scene – the East Village, or in Chicago around the School of the Art Institute, or San Francisco around the Exploratorium – and there they feel at home, for they can do anything they want. That’s why there is no Downtown ideology, no Downtown aesthetic, because no common vision unites these runaways. The only thing they have in common is that they can’t stand for their artistic visions to be bounded by conventions that Haydn and Beethoven and Stravinsky put in place. There also can’t be much of a support structure for performance of their music, for if some conventional ensemble became codified, it would eventually become something else to run away from.

(Allow me to interject here that this is not an argument that Downtown composers are happy to never receive orchestra commissions. At some point in your life you feel a need to express yourself with a large ensemble, and as much as you’d love to have accordions and electric guitars and saxophones and sitars adding up to 75 players, there’s not much chance you’ll get it, and the orchestra remains the most efficient way of gathering large forces. As long as you’ve developed your music along more original and personal lines, it can’t be so bad, you start thinking, to file off a few of the sharper edges of your musical language to make it playable by an orchestra. By this point, however, you’re not on the “orchestra circuit,” and it’s probably not going to happen. It did, though, for Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and one need only study the difficult score to Reich’s 1979 Variations to see how incommensurate his music had already become with the stylistic norms of orchestral performance.)

It does happen, however, that certain types of expression have become popular Downtown and merged into various traditions. There are evolving streams of Downtown activity: minimalism, conceptualism, free improvisation, artrock, postminimalism, totalism, computer algorithm music, performance art, sound installations, interactive computer music, video opera, DJ music, postrock, and lots of other things too individual to generalize about. Many of the people in these movements have nothing whatever in common aesthetically except for their automatic tolerance of difference. (I was always amazed in the ’80s at how generously the original New York minimalists coexisted with the free improvisers who were in many ways their aesthetic antipodes.) There are a few composers who get sucked into some Downtown trend or another early, without even encountering the Uptown world – Glenn Branca comes to mind. Various Downtown aesthetics, looking something like ideologies, perhaps, arise and flourish for awhile, but no one clings to them, no one issues ultimatums or considers any aspect of them mandatory. Downtown styles evolve features very different from Uptown ones, because they are not reined in by constant reference to performance by the same musicians who play Brahms on the same concert. (In electronic music, which had no classical tradition to compete with, the Uptown/Downtown distinction is much fuzzier, and with a gun to my head I wouldn’t swear there’s a line to be drawn there at all.)

So one can’t define Downtown entirely without reference to Uptown, or rather, to the classical music world. I can define minimalism on its own, as a continuous tradition starting in 1958. I can define conceptualism, or artrock. But Downtown is a totally heterogeneous phenomenon, a conglomeration of excluded movements, and you can’t define the conglomeration without reference to who’s doing the excluding. If academic music departments and chamber music societies and orchestras allowed and encouraged composers to write six-hour works for organ drones, collages of live radio sampling, and pieces based on recordings of orgasms (Downtown examples that spring to mind), there would be no Downtown: people would just stay where they are. But they generally don’t. If you don’t like the terms Uptown and Down-, that’s fine. I take a Wittgensteinian approach to terminology, that terms are defined by their use, and the inexactness of terms never bothers me (and for some reason there’s nothing about me that pisses off more people than that).

But one should still recognize that classical music culture is sharply defined, with centuries of accreted conventions that very few people in that world want changed. Some composers find the structures and conventions of that world just fine, and they grow into them uncomplaining. Others, however, find them oppressive and impossible and totally out of line with their personal imaginations. That does not mean they are lesser artists. To some of us, minority viewpoint though it may be, it means that they are the original, the sincere, the more honest artists, because from the beginning they did not compromise.