Search Results for: nancarrow

Prefatory note: I’ve always wanted to write an essay on this topic for my blog, so, having the excuse to do so for the Critics’ Conversation, I post it here as well.

“Artists hate terms” is a truism, but not one of the eternal truths of music. It is too often proved false – artists occasionally find terms very useful. Debussy repudiated “Impressionism,” Glass and Reich disavow “Minimalism,” and in the current climate these examples are triumphantly thrown in our face at every turn as though they embody an unalterable principle. But artist George Maciunas coined “Fluxus” (over Yoko Ono’s objections), a group of artists met at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to choose the word “Dada,” Cowell and Antheil embraced “ultramodernism,” Schoenberg plumped for “pantonality” before “atonality” won, and “Minimalism” itself was the coinage of either Michael Nyman or Tom Johnson, both composers who fit the bill. No sooner did “ambient” lose its novel flavor than Paul Miller (or somebody) launched forth with “illbient.” I don’t know who came up with “New York Noise” for free improv of the 1980s, but the improvisers didn’t seem ashamed to wear it.

Terms can be helpful to artists, especially those better remembered for where they were than what they achieved. If I mention Alison Knowles and Yoshi Wada, some of you who don’t know who I’m talking about will instantly place them in an era and milieu if I refer to them as “Fluxus artists.” The smaller the range a term includes, the more evocative it is. “Expressionism” is a vague catch-all, but “Der Blaue Reiter” is intriguing. The “Biedermeier style” so wonderfully connects the figurative inconsistancies of Hummel and Kalkbrenner to the overstuffed furniture of the early 19th-century German middle class, and both to a cartoon. No one can resist referring to Haydn’s “Sturm und Drang” period, and everyone instantly hears what it means in the “Farewell” Symphony. Discontinuities in the application of “Rococo” make it fortunate that we can divide that benighted stylistic era into the “empfindsamer stil” of the Berliners like C.P.E. Bach and the “style galant” of Galuppi and so many others, the latter so sardonically evoked a century later by the “Romantic” Browning:

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,

Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — “Must we die?”

Those commiserating sevenths – “Life might last! we can but try!”

(Browning undoubtedly meant “sixths augmented.”) And if “Ars nova” recurs too often to be helpful, “Ars subtilior” is a wonderful euphemism for the mysteries of early 15th-century rhythmic complexity.

Now, imagine musical discourse stripped of such terms. Imagine replacing every recurrence of the word “minimalism” in the literature with “that steady-pulse, doodle-doodle style of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.” Of course, even that becomes a term, just a cumbersome one, and if you forbid terms, you really forbid generalization. So now you have four pieces written in the 1960s – Music in Fifths, Piano Phase, Philomel, and In C – and you are not allowed to say that one of them stands out from the other three, you are forced to describe each individually. It would save so many words to say, Three of those pieces are minimalist and one serialist, and a cultured person would understand you – but no, no, that would falsify the sacred particularities of each piece. You’d gain insight from hearing survivals of the style galant in Mozart’s rondos, but you can no longer say that – you can only refer over and over to a recurrence of quick 6/8 meter and a certain type of figuration. No more do you get to divide Stravinsky’s output into Russian, neoclassic, and 12-tone periods – just a continuum in which each piece merits its own description.

In general, two kinds of people make up musical terms: composers and music historians. I am both – or rather, I was hired as the latter because as a “Downtowner” (another term) I have no credibility as the former, and please don’t mention my little charade to the administration. Musicology is alleged to be a science of some kind (thus the “-ology” suffix), and part of its science is dividing up a gigantic chaos of historical phenomena into manageable bits based on similarity and contrast. As the first person to write a book about Nancarrow I had to come up with terms (“convergence point”) with which to analyze his canons, or else I would have gotten lost in a sea of awkward verbiage (imagine “that point at which all the voices coincide on the same analogous note in their isomorphic sequences” over and over on every page). Writing a book that focused on American music of the 1980s and 1990s when no one had ever done so before, I was obliged by the demands of the task to separate composers into categories based on similarity. The term “postminimalism” was already in the air, and the late Rob Schwartz had used it as a chapter heading – I just tightened up the definition. “Totalism” was a word coined by the composers themselves. I didn’t just go to a few concerts as a critic to hone my own definitions; as a musicologist I studied an entire file cabinet’s worth of home-bound scores elicited from the composers.

Terminology is the musicologist’s creative medium. Get too creative and the term won’t stick to the phenomena, but not evocative enough and it will lack resonance. No one pretends that terms are perfect. Some are so broad and contradictory in application as to be stumbling blocks, like “classical.” “Neoclassic” usually really connotes “neobaroque,” but every cultured person knows that and makes allowances. Luckily, terms come and go in a very clear survival of the fittest. “Postromantic” used to be useful for distinguishing Mahler and Strauss from the generation of Brahms and Wagner, but has fallen out of favor, as has “Fauvism” for the primitive style of Stravinsky and… well, perhaps that’s why it didn’t survive. One interesting recent development, acquiesced to by even the term-haters, is that “modern,” which used to just mean “up to date,” is increasingly bracketed for the challenging, dissonant music of the mid-20th century. We teach terminology, -isms, in the classroom, and we’re not likely to stop – for the very good reasons that we would become more verbose, we would be able to say less, and we would sound stupider.

Of course, artists don’t like thinking about terms. Nothing is more fatal to creativity than to already know the answer before you frame the question. Artists have good reason to be suspicious about what terms you yoke them to, because terms wield power. Tom Johnson, a critic, was the only composer who ever flatly called himself a minimalist, and I consider myself more or less a totalist. But I don’t think, as I start each piece, “Now, how to once again embody the principles of totalism?!” Only an idiot would do that. Kyle the composer couldn’t care less whether his piece turns out to be what Kyle the historian and critic calls totalist. It’s not an artist’s business to think about terms – unless needed for sometimes very practical career purposes, and even then not while in the act of creating. Still, I find it sort of hilarious that just now, as composers run from terms as though they carried viruses, the young pop musicians are churning out new terms almost monthly – jungle, illbient, drum and bass, liquid funk, and many others I can’t remember and that those who use them can’t even seem to distinguish in meaning when asked. What are the classical composers so afraid of that the pop musicians have so much fun playing with? I thought we were invited to learn from the pop musicians.

So rail against terminology, rail, rail, rail, rail!! Everyone expects it of artists. Critics, expunge “minimalism,” “neoclassicism,” “empfindsamer stil” from your vocabulary, and see if you enjoy being less literate. But I believe that in this era of exponentially expanding numbers of composers, the opportunity for chaos is so great that the need for terminology will become more important than ever. For – and here’s my one sane opinion, in case you had lost all hope that I retain any grasp of reality – it is unimaginable that some mainstream style is going to coalesce in the forseeable future. And also undesirable – can you imagine 50,000 composers writing in the same style? Jesus, it’d be like the 17th century cubed. You’d have to distinguish John Aloysius Brown’s Ricercar No. 27 in E-flat from John Lothario Brown’s Ricercar No. 27 in E-flat by the fact that one uses mutes. The obvious current in culture today, vastly facilitated by the internet, is toward greater fragmentation of subcultures. And subcultures need to be identified, and distinguished – defined, which is not the same as frozen or calcified or engraved in granite. The pop musicians are on the case. But you classical musicians, rail! Rail! Unless the culture as a whole lapses into barbarism, those oh-so-beside-the-point terms, -isms, categories, style names, will continue to be used, and will multiply. They’re how we make sense of our world.

I await, with amusement, your undoubted unanimous dissent. I’ll call you the “antitermists.”

This note from the ever-vigilant Herb Levy:

Thought you’d be interested/amused/whatever: the clue for 24 across
in the NY Times Crossword puzzle for June 5, 2004 is “Piano composer
______ Nancarrow.”

While I don’t see the puzzle everyday, I think this is the first such
mention of Nancarrow.

Thomas Arne, move over.

On a boat going up the Spree River in Berlin, Tom Johnson introduced me to Wolfgang Heisig. Heisig punches player piano rolls and writes music for player piano. Naturally, he has a strong interest in the music of Conlon Nancarrow, and we agreed to trade MIDI files of my own music for computerized piano, his music, and Nancarrow’s. Wolfgang doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak German, but we managed a warm conversation nevertheless. Afterward, Tom expressed surprise that Wolfgang and I managed to chat for so long. “But Tom,” I replied, “the language we speak is universal: MIDI.”

London Gatwick Airport – I allowed myself one heady self-indulgence in England: I bought facsimile editions of Dr. Charles Burney’s travel books, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany, The Netherlands, and United Provinces (1773). I not only found them at Travis and Emery, the delightfully overcrowded little used-music-book store on Cecil Court near Leicester Square, they are published by Travis and Emery in the last few months, in the store’s move to branch out into reprint publishing.

It might seem odd that a critic of postclassical music is so excited about Burney (1726-1814), but I’ve always felt a special kinship for the peripatetic old music scholar. Burney was a composer of sonatas and theater music whose career pressures pushed him into writing music history – in itself, this description does not distinguish him from me. Moreover, as a composer-historian Burney projects a delightful sense that history was being made all around him, and that the most worthwhile thing a scholar could do was chronicle his own time – deficient and superlative, the ephemeral along with the enduring. Had the Village Voice existed in 1770, Burney would have written for it. Aside from Gretry, Traetta, and other relatively trivial theater composers of his day, he reported on military bands and pipe organs in each new town, visited C.P.E. Bach, and chronicled the beginnings of the symphony in the hands of Wagenseil, Canabich, and the celebrated Mannheim Orchestra. One has to remember that these two books appeared before either Haydn or Mozart had written the works for which they are now remembered, during one of music history’s most forgettable lulls, yet one does not get the feeling that Burney is disappointed with his era, nor considers it inferior to music of the past – another point of resemblence.

The only problem with the edition is, being a facsimile, it follows the the 18th-century English practice of using for every “s” not at the end of a word the character that looks like an “f” but with the right half of its cross-line missing. So “founding” and “sounding,” “finger” and “singer,” “foul” and “soul” are difficult to distinguish quickly, “bassoon” turns into “baffoon,” and one does a series of double-takes in sentences that look like, “all was fo diffonant and falfe, that notwithftanding the building is immenfe, and not very favorable to found,… in fpite of two or three fweet and powerful voices among the boys, the whole was intolerable to me….” Like reading someone with a speech impediment. Aside from that, Burney is as entertaining as his reputation suggests, if quite a complainer about travel conditions, and as 18th-century musicology goes, it’s a quick read.

Today, when the musicological community has almost totally turned their backs on recent creative music, deciding en masse that music history ended in 1976 with Einstein on the Beach, we need more of Burney’s spirit, his conviction that searching libraries for old manuscripts was fine but not nearly as exciting as visiting living composers and documenting their activities. It reminds me of a remark composer Larry Polansky once made to me. Polansky and I were comparing notes, talking about his work on manuscripts by Harry Partch and Johanna Beyer, and mine on Conlon Nancarrow and Mikel Rouse. Finally he said, “Composers today are doing what musicologists used to do, while all the musicologists are off doing gender studies.” Perhaps that was true for old Burney as well. So I toasted him in the most English way I could think of, reading him in a London pub over beef-and-ale pie and a few pints of Theakston’s Old Peculier.

I’m off to England. I fly out tomorrow for two and a half weeks of teaching at Dartington College of the Arts down south in the moors of Devon, courtesy of my good friend Bob Gilmore (he wrote the Partch book, I wrote the Nancarrow book, we both want to write a Rudhyar book). I don’t know what the e-mail situation will be, how much free time I’ll have, whether there will be anything to blog about. So don’t necessarily expect to hear from me before I’m back January 25, though I may surprise you earlier with a wealth of anecdotes about English musical life. And Totnes is a short cab ride from Torquay, so I’ll be making my usual pilgrimage to the land of Basil and Sibyl Fawlty.

Matt Wellins add his own words to my account of his postclassical approach to writing for classical instruments:

Just wanted to clarify: The piano does speak to me as a cultural icon, though not necessarily one that reeks of “high European culture.” As you said, it is very much in any number of different worlds. I think we even discussed several other composers in addition to Cage and Feldman today, I think Nancarrow and Zorn came up. But hell, any number of 20th century composers seem to have reinvented the piano, I can’t believe Messiaen hasn’t been mentioned yet.

The question, then, for me, is which piano history do I choose? This is that “postclassical” dilemma again, even the genre mash-ups of any number of Downtown composers seem dated (I mean, with Ives’ work, another great piano mind, going back to the early 1900s, let’s face facts, even ‘post’ isn’t so ‘post’). I wonder if the problem isn’t every composer’s problem. That is, to find an approach that is decidely personal, in face of a detrimentally influential history. This, however, only deals with half the issue. What I want to achieve and what I imagine listeners hearing are two very different things.

Despite all of these reinventions of the piano, could I lightly tap birdsong on the keys, and expect people to think of Messiaen? Did Messiaen’s audience honestly confuse the piano with birds? Even our perceptions of Cage as the liberator of ego-driven approach or Feldman as the liberator of timbre and space, seem possible for an audience to completely ignore. In fact, even fans of Cage and Feldman, in general, might not have the fetishistic dedication to their work that truly reveals the mentioned distinctions.

I’m completely cognizant of the great tradition of experimentations within the boundaries of piano. I’m worried that at the end of the day, people will hear the tritest aspect of my work. That they won’t be listening from the “bottom upwards”, as opposed to me working from the “outside inwards”, that instead they will be hearing the “High European culture” if I compose a piece to be performed at the Fisher Performing Arts Center, or the “Jazz” culture if I’m playing Bud Powell, or the “Rock” if I’m playing Jerry Lee Lewis. They will hear the piano in regards to any of those cultures, any of those lineages, any of those worlds..but they will not HEAR the piano in the sensual, Feldman way, they will hear it in regards to something else. Who knows exactly what.

Maybe my fears about the audience are unfounded or condescending, I don’t know. Some of these feelings are drawn from my own skepticism in listening. Everything seems to point back to attempting to re-establish a dominant folk culture – something regional, instead of historical, something participatory, but not hokey, something shared, remembered, and collectively created..Something that exists for the pure joy of music and music-making, rather than the hierarchy and the historical constraints.

North Carolina composer and faithful reader Lawrence Dillon also weighs in with an interesting perspective, traditional yet perhaps in today’s climate bracingly revisionist:

I enjoyed your musings on Matt Wellins’s problems with writing for piano. You correctly call his misgivings “nonsense” because the piano is capable of so much flexibility, but there’s another level of nonsense to his position: one can make a case that any medium of artistic expression is tainted by cultural associations. Electronic music, with its reliance on technology, is an easy case in point: technology distances us from one another, lines the pockets of unscrupulous corporations, employs near-slaves in foreign sweatshops, finds ever more effective ways to wipe out entire populations, destroys the environment, etc.

The piano, on the other hand, served as one of history’s most effective means of connecting amateur with professional musicians, enabled countless members of oppressed races to sidestep segregation, provided a cultural connection for young people who couldn’t excel at sports, wedded the mental, emotional and physical acts of making music through a single, consistent sonority, etc.

Rather than not buying into the illusion of transparency, we should encourage our students not to buy into rationalized constructs of political necessity. These constructs are usually used to give the illusion of objectivity to what is, and should be, a subjective choice. The composer’s job is to write what s/he wants to hear. Period. It’s not necessary to consider any type of music-making outdated or culturally inferior in order to justify ones tastes and artistic needs.

It’s certainly true that “rationalized constructs of political necessity” are all around us today, and there is much pressure to buy into them. For instance, the recording companies tell us that the extremely constricted range of what they intend to sell is coextensive with what the public wants; of course, no intelligent, naunced research is done to determine whether this is true, and for decades we composers assumed that the public’s taste was devloving toward lowest-common-denominator pop. Only in the last few years have I seen people realize and assert that the corporate drive toward drivel is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps the alleged association of classical music conventions with upper-class elitism has its origin in similar political motivations.

[P.S. – or P.B., or whatever the correct abbreviation might be for an updated blog entry: Responses are leading me to think that I may have inadvertantly misrepresented Matt’s point. It’s not that it’s difficult to write for piano because of its European, elitist connotations – as he puts it, it’s “Which history do I choose?” For composers used to dealing directly with sampled sounds that carry specific extramusical connotations, the idea of merely using simple notes and abstract intervals comes to seem rather meaningless. The same might have been said for composers of musique concrete 40 years ago, but the feeling is far more prevalent today among young composers who have grown up with recording software. Music, in this respect, has become more like painting, photography, theater, and performance art, which have long dealt with social realities. Especially coming from a pop music world in which every sound, every chord, every timbre, every singing style seems to point to some social provenance, today’s young computer composers deal with more connotative aspects of sound. Trying to paint a picture in the undifferentiated notes of a piano, then, must feel like painting entirely in one-inch squares, or in black and white.]

Somewhere between me and Matt Wellins lies the postclassical dilemma. Matt, you’ll recall, is a student of mine at Bard, of aggressively postmodern tendencies. He writes mostly electronic music, with samples and environmental sounds: old recordings, noises outside his apartment, kids playing in Central Park, old TV cartoons. He thinks about the cultural provenance of each noise he includes, and is politically aware of the sonic associations he invokes. Now he’s writing a piano piece, though, and having a predictable problem. The piano, to him, is a cultural icon that speaks of European music, of high culture, of industrial mass production, of the elitism of virtuosity. He’s having trouble making it matter what he writes for piano, because the very fact of it being a piano overwhelms any nuances in the musical material. The medium’s message drowns out its ostensive content.

Of course, on one level this is nonsense. Piano pieces do differ: the grace of a Mozart sonata, the languor of a Chopin Nocturne, the fluid pile-up of sonorities in Art Tatum’s version of “What’s New,” the frozen abstractions of Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck Nr. 9, the athletic banging of Jerry Lee Lewis in “Great Balls of Fire,” the fireworks of Nancarrow’s Player Piano Study No. 25 – these mean different things, and evoke different worlds, activities, audiences, even social classes. But I’m speaking from inside the illusion that the piano is a transparent medium; I take its 12-equal tuning, its late-medieval-Germanic 7-white/5-black keyboard, its industrial cast-iron frame, its European manufacture, its expensive price, its relative immobility, its history of elephant tusk exploitation, its canonic repertoire, for granted. I shut them all out, ignore their imperialist origins, their contingent nature, their imposition of a worldview. (Composers haven’t always done so. The 16th-century Nicola Vicentino was acutely aware of the homogeneity imposed on the world’s melodies by a 12-pitch keyboard, and invented his own 31-pitch keyboard as a multicultural alternative.) Having grown up within classical music I can easily believe in the piano as an a priori structure, a transparent transmitter of intentions. But Matt comes to the piano from the outside. Used to dealing with sound itself, not the intervals between sounds, he can’t hear the tone of a piano as innocent. “The moment I write a note on paper,” he says, “I enter into the illusion.”

I know what Matt means, partly because that’s the way I feel about the orchestra. I grew up with a piano in the house, but the orchestra is something my parents dressed up to go hear, as if it were church, in a big hall in downtown Dallas. There was something infrequent, inconvenient, and foreign about it. Its overture/concerto/symphony repertoire was cumbersome and inflexible, each concert more or less like the last in emotive expression (though I must say, I remember one special American music concert I heard as a teenager featuring works by Feldman, Varese, and Ruggles). I can think in piano terms and find it transparent, but when I write for orchestra I am heavily conscious of passing through a veil, of threatening to impinge on a social world in which I am neither comfortable nor, as a living composer, entirely welcome. The orchestra is a hierarchical structure: the violins are most important, strings play most of the time, winds are for color, brass for climaxes, percussion for punctuation. The tuxedos, the applause for the concertmaster, the exaggerated respect for the conductor, even the dignified demeanor of the men who move the music stands, all remind me that the orchestra was a product of a different age and country, geared to please the aristocracy that supported it. The fact that my friend Sandow can campaign to save the orchestra while I always instinctively considered the orchestra moribund I attribute to the facts that he grew up in New York, with culture all around and orchestras within walking distance, while I grew up in Dallas.

But back to the piano. Matt and I found common ground in the piano works of Cage and Feldman. Cage’s Music of Changes and Etudes Australes, while they do not remove the veil from the piano’s illusion of transparency, do not blindly play into it, either. Cage’s chance techniques articulate the piano, causing its keys and hammers to create sound, but the end result is not expression, but merely the sounds of a piano. He does not make a point of the piano’s social context, but neither does he invite you to imagine that it is anything more or less than a piano. Feldman’s piano works, from Out of Last Pieces to Triadic Memories and beyond, are more specific: drawing attention to physicality, they demonstrate that the piano is not truly a melodic instrument, but that its notes instantly begin decaying, and that the instrument can produce nothing but rapidly decrescendoing sound envelopes. Feldman fashioned an entire aesthetic around the piano’s inability to sustain, a kind of continuous metaphor for our lifelong propulsion toward death.

So what of electronic music mavens of Matt’s generation, for whom Cage and Feldman may represent the earliest piano music that doesn’t seem foreign and artificial? I’m more and more thinking these days that traditional music theory is bound to give way to acoustics and the technology of sound reproduction. More and more we find young composers who can string chords together without needing to know what they’re called, but whose more detailed expertise is invested in reverb, delay, filtering, sampling, 3-D sound placement. Pitch theory (except for microtonality, and that’s a long article for another day) had pretty much reached a dead end in the 1970s anyway, and I consider much of the “pitch set” theory I learned in grad school a waste of time, worth telling my students about only as an example of intellectualism gone awry. Harmonic relationships between pitches, lamentably finite, are today taking a back seat to sound processing, and while I’m not always technologically savvy enough to follow along, I?m not convinced it’s a bad thing.

Nevertheless, I encouraged Matt to write for the piano and also for the orchestra, from the outside. Think of its sounds, think of its cultural associations, and perhaps you’ll find a new way to use those instruments and give the medium new life. The challenge is to write those notes on the page, but not think of them merely in terms of idealistic musical logic, but as concrete sounds connected to cultural realities. I’m fascinated to see what he’ll come up with. Me, I’m old-fashioned in terms of the piano, I still write piano tunes, and I can buy the illusion untroubled. But somewhere in here is the disjunction in lived experience that will separate the classical from postclassical worlds. Just as white-maleness can no longer be taken as emblematic of human experience in general, the musical media we use are losing their transparency, their veneer of political neutrality. It’s gradually becoming impossible to write for the piano without thinking of the piano as just a piano.

I’ve been remiss in blogging this week, but it was out of my hands. I’ve overcompensated at New Music Box – if you go there you’ll find my 17,000-word essay on political music, Making Marx in the Music. But that was mostly written in August. I wish I could say I’ve been caught up in some wild project that I’ll soon tell you about, but truthfully, I’ve had the familiar academic experience of being up to my neck in committee work. I’m “evaluating” my fellow but untenured professors, and find myself every day now in some new and unfamiliar world. One writes about post-Stonewall strategies for gay self-identification. Another is a leading expert on typologies of citizenship throughout the European Union. Another wrote an enlightening article about “Stereoselective oxidative addition of methyl iodide to chiral cyclometallated platinum(II) compounds derived from (R)-(+)-1-(1-naphthylethylamine).” At least I assume it enlightened someone – I can only deal with such texts by reading them for word rhythm, and imagining how they’d sound set to music.

I’m a conservatory product of the ultraliberal, no-course-requirements 1970s, and I can’t say I had a very broad education. I took almost as much philosophy as music, several dead languages, one poetry class (which, like the languages, was mainly for finding texts to compose music to), and fencing. That’s it. My last science class was in 11th grade in 1971 – I think the periodic table was up to aluminum – and from hearing too many lousy pieces of new music based on scientific models, I’ve developed a possibly unfortunate bias that science has nothing to offer art. As I walked across the stage with my doctoral diploma in 1983, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and structuralism were just getting off the boat at Ellis Island, with unsuspected plans to invade. So I’ve had a lot of opportunity this week, recalling the Thoreavian motto with which I began this blog, to “remember well my ignorance, which my growth requires.” But mostly I’ve thought, “Gee, these guys get to teach all this neat, complicated, real-life stuff, and I spend my days explaining the dominant seventh chord.”

I’m sure my colleagues have their own gripes – the chemistry prof must smack his forehead every time a sophomore forgets the valence of radium, and the poli sci prof may get tired of pointing out that Slovakia and Romania don’t share a border (or do they? and when did Slovakia get on the map?). But people expect chemistry to be difficult and dry, and are sometimes delighted when it’s more fun than they realized. Music is in the nearly unique dilemma of being a “sexy,” hip, creative, fun-sounding course of study that, when you start to examine it, turns out to be a mass of numbers and precise terms. “I feel like I need to bring a calculator to this class,” whined one freshman in Fundamentals of Music. I hear myself tell the class about a “six, five-six-of-five, five-four-two, one-six progression with a chromatic neighbor note,” and think to myself, “who invented this idiot system, anyway?” Actually, I’ve been know to say it out loud. How can something as soulfully emotional as music demand such intricate number systems? And the necessity and slowness of imparting such complicated basics prevents us from teaching music as a humanistic discipline, related to other collegiate subjects, as often as we’d like.

It would feel so collegiate to teach symphonic narratives the way lit profs do novels, and offer thematic courses with titles like “Images of ‘The Other’ in Instrumental Music from Haydn to Steve Reich.” Certainly lots of musicologists at larger institutions started doing such things in the 1980s, under pressure to keep pace with the other interpretive disciplines. But for music majors, understanding the details of, say, gamelan influence on Debussy requires some solid foundation in the theoretical basics, and the pressure we feel to turn out technically equipped young musicians leaves us with little time to reflect on what music tells the world about itself. I did have the opportunity, this morning, to let freshmen figure out, with guidance but somewhat on their own, what the correct chords are for the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” and it did seem to elicit in some a sudden epiphany that “one, seven-seven-half-diminished, five-seven-of-six, six” packs a certain kind of emotional wallop capable of thrilling the world (and earning the number-cruncher a shitload of money). How long before all those wacky numbers recede into their subconscious where they belong? In time for graduation? In time for me to enjoy the resulting philosophical insights?

Of course, I do also get to teach pitch-set analysis of The Rite of Spring, tempo charts of Nancarrow and Stockhausen, and even (thanks to being at a highly liberal institution where faculty judgment is given free rein) a very popular course in microtonality. As my friends and I often note, it’s a lot easier to teach the advanced stuff than the basics, and twelve-tone technique isn’t nearly as mysterious or hard to convey as the more necessary dominant seventh. But in 1875, John Knowles Paine convinced Harvard to hire him as America’s first professor of music, over the objections of faculty members who protested that music wasn’t a proper area of university study. And I have had many opportunities, over the years, to reflect that Paine might have been wrong, and the protesting Harvard faculty just might have been right.

Is it really necessary for a string quartet to be six hours long? Of course not – it would be an easy matter for someone to take a pair of scissors to Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 and cut it down to a far more efficient, concise, nonredundant piece of three hours or less. But one of the points Feldman made with his usual breathtaking eloquence is that art is one of those areas of human life in which efficiency is not an asset. As author John Ralston Saul has argued, efficiency is not a good thing in itself, but something we should apply only to aspects of life we don’t care about. It’s the opposite of love. We want our garbage taken out efficiently, we want our driver’s license renewed efficiently, but someone who advocated efficient child-rearing – eliciting maximum good behavior in return for a minimum of parental attention – would be a heartless brute. Likewise, it would be brutish to want efficiency in our artistic experience, and Feldman’s panoramic quartet is a celebration of inefficiency, of what art could become had we only world enough and time.

Just in case you’ve missed out on the last 25 years of contemporary music – and I could hardly blame you, so little attention is drawn to it – Morton Feldman was the greatest composer of the late 20th century. Or at least he looks that way. More significant than the accuracy or prematurity of the assessment is the fact that a remarkable percentage of young composers would concur with it. In the current Babel of musical styles, Feldman is almost the only composer (another might be Nancarrow, whose mechanical methods of writing for player piano, however, have not been as widely assimilated) whose music appeals across stylistic boundaries, among minimalists, postserialists, 12-tone holdouts, electronic composers, academics, Downtowners, MAX programmers, DJ artists, and other miscellaneous wastrels. His cross-cultural appeal comes from the fact that he created a postmodern sense of form – long, slow musical continua played in uniformly quiet dynamics – while holding onto the basic modernist pitch vocabulary of dissonant intervals. In other words, he deftly sidestepped the crisis of ever-increasing modernist complexity without giving in to what was seen as the vapid anti-intellectualism of minimalist consonance and tonality. Even more than that, by writing in his late years works of a continuous 90 minutes, three hours, four hours, even six hours in length, he reclaimed for the disspirited modern composer a sustainable measure of magnificent ambition, a pride in occupying an audience’s time. Quietly but vehemently he asserted for all of us that new music is worth sitting still for, practicalities be damned. In addition to which, as his friend John Cage said, his music is “almost too beautiful.”

The Second Quartet, dating from 1983, is a vast musical quilt of recurring sonic objects – ostinatos (repeating melodic snippets) of four chromatic notes over and over; brief, returning atonal melodies; rotating progressions of three chords with a waltz-like feel; Webernesqe motives that cancel each other out in quiet arguments; quick, rustling pizzicato textures; even one extended moment of jazzy syncopation. The work was given a truncated, hurried runthrough by the Kronos Quartet at New Music America in Miami in 1988 (the full piece was beyond their physical stamina), but received its real full-scale premiere in recent years from Manhattan’s fearless Flux Quartet, who were brought back to recap the achievement in Zankel Hall October 25 as part of the festival “When Morty Met John” (as in Feldman and Cage). The instantaneous standing ovation and outburst of bravos that greeted the Flux players after six hours of pianissimo intensity was as rousing a recognition of heroism as I’ve ever heard at a concert. Violinists Tom Chiu and Jesse Mills, violist Max Mandel, and cellist Dave Eggar played from 6:12 to 12:05 without any but the most momentary break, yet if they were any more tired during the last hour than during the first there was no audible sign of it, just an occasional neck or shoulder stretch. Hour after hour they played harmonies and little fragments of counterpoint in exact rhythmic unison, as with one heart, and with the extraordinarily sustained tension that Feldman’s music requires. Through this and other recent feats, the Flux – if they can only keep their personnel together – have proved themselves an American Arditti Quartet: not as hip, pop, or vernacular as the quartet Ethel, perhaps, but the people you need to bring in when someone’s given the quartet repertoire a particularly difficult nut to crack.

A couple years ago I wrote an article about the String Quartet II for the New York Times – about the best thing I’ve ever written for them, I think – which can be found here (for a small charge via Qpass), and I refer the reader to that for a fuller description of the piece. (Also, Chris Villars maintains a fantastically helpful Morton Feldman home page, including a list of works that as far as I know isn’t published elsewhere.) What interests me more today, finally having heard the Second Quartet live, is the strange social situation of being psychically trapped in a hall with dozens of other audience members and a six-hour sonic boa constrictor. Before beginning, cellist Eggar invited the audience to move around, and even to come up onstage and occupy the rugs and extra chairs that had been provided. When he was done, an audience member shouted “Good luck!,” and Eggar responded, “Good luck to you too. You have to work as hard as we do, or it isn’t fair.” There were those (besides the quartet, I mean) who sat in one place for the whole 353 minutes, but most seemed to enjoy the freedom to move, and as soon as someone left a position on those rugs, it was quickly filled again. I doubt that anyone scoped out more acoustic vantage points than Times critic John Rockwell, who’s had a long history with the piece (he tried to bring the Kronos to play it at Lincoln Center, and they reneged), and who checked out Zankel Hall from every angle. Me, I value comfort over acoustics, and I moved only once, to a side seat that offered leg room.

You enter into any concert with some expectation of when you’ll be getting up again, but there’s a special kind of crisis in knowing that the music is going to last six hours, nonstop. Such music mandates more informality than the general classical concert: the fact that I could have laid down was comforting, even if I didn’t avail myself of it. At any given moment a few audience members were in motion, but everyone was as quiet and reverent as a room of typically clumsy homo sapiens could possibly be. For me the most difficult point was around 8 PM, the point at which a normal concert would have ended. I took a restroom break, and a longer one around 9:45. At 9 I counted the audience members: there were 149, not counting the people I couldn’t see in the balcony above me, in a hall that seated (I was told) 750. That was a slightly smaller crowd than we had started with, I think, though in the evening’s final two hours it appeared to me that we didn’t lose a soul. Everyone in that hall knew what they had come for, and even for the one or two people who read the Times and Village Voice while listening, staying to the end was patently a badge of honor. (Not at all like the New York premiere of the hour-long Feldman First Quartet in 1979, which, according to Sandow’s Voice review, lost much of its audience.) I really wasn’t bothered by Zankel Hall’s soft rumble of subway trains that’s been so widely written about – I’m used to that from lots of New York venues – but there was one bad, long moment in which a booming bass line from the Emmylou Harris concert upstairs imposed a tonality on Feldman’s texture that he never intended. I like Emmylou Harris as much as anyone (that’s a bald-faced lie, actually), but “no C&W during Feldman festivals” might be a sane policy for Carnegie to pursue.

By 10:30 something interesting had definitely happened to the audience. Fidgeting stopped, and focus had palpably increased. Sleepiness was very little in evidence; my only bout with it came in the first half-hour, I having just finished dinner. In that last 90 minutes the audience was reduced, or elevated, to a kind of religious awe, or freed from the usual need for action, as if resigned to some fate. Musical ideas repeated, but there was no way to keep track of chronology. Was that melody one from the beginning ot the work, or had it only occurred a few moments ago? Like walking though a vast, undulating prairie landscape, we had only the vaguest and contradictory notion about where we were – until about 11:55, when suddenly the music switched to quiet chords that had an indistinct air of finality about them. Intermittent silences grew longer, and finally one arrived that seemed endless, until we broke it with a fortississimo of applause.

Unlike Feldman’s music for piano, percussion, voices, and other things (For Philip Guston, Three Voices, Triadic Memories, Palais de Mari, Why Patterns?, Crippled Symmetry), his music for string quartet isn’t pretty – it’s grainy, rough, scratchy with harmonics and occasionally even harsh. It’s phenomenal how little his conception of string quartet changed over a lifetime: so many passages in String Quartet II echo images from Structures, the repetitive little quartet he wrote in 1951 and which establishes his claim as a precursor of the minimalists. There are early passages in SQII that just wave back and forth on a whole-step for many seconds at a time, and several times in the first couple of hours I couldn’t concentrate well, and started wondering what I was doing trapped in Zankel Hall on a lovely, crisp evening. But by that final two hours I was, however, not exactly caught up in the music, but surrounded by it, subdued by it, quelled. If I could have the magical experience of that final two hours without going through the first four, I would, but how would that be possible? The music’s effect is cumulative, creeping into your soul as it hardly deigns to notice you exist. And by the time those final chords come, filling you with an unexpected panic that the music is about to end, the sonic images you remember have become – almost too beautiful… almost too beautiful.

As somehow who knows how difficult it is to balance the conflicting roles of artist and scholar, I’ve long thought of Charles Rosen as a hero and a model. He’s not a favorite pianist of my pianist friends, but for me the structural sense he brings to Bach and Beethoven etches their works in granite, rendering his powerful interpretations indelible – I don’t share the common opinion that he is scholar first, artist second. As scholar, I’ve always admired his refusal to rely on second-hand information, his relentless efforts to scour an entire repertoire, no matter how obscure, to back up his irrefutable pronouncements.

That makes it feel all the more like a betrayal, then, that he can be so casually mendacious when it comes to the 20th century. In the penultimate chapter of Piano Notes he goes through the history of composing for piano and, brilliantly as usual, details the contributions of each composer who had an impact on piano technique: Beethoven, Chopin, Schuman, Liszt, Debussy. But then, when he gets to American music, aside from his predictable paean to Elliott Carter, he sums up the entire field in these words:

[Speaking of the 1920s, after discussing Bartok and Stravinsky:] The experiments with clusters and polytonal effects by Charles Ives’s music for piano began to be obscurely known in these years, but found real understanding only later. The new ideas in the use of tone color on the piano developed by Olivier Messiaen in the 1930s remained hidden from the general public until the early 1950s. By that time, several composers, John Cage in particular [italics mine], had experimented with prepared pianos, placing different kinds of material on the strings of the piano to make unusual sounds. These experiments have not survived very well, nor did the novel technique of requiring the pianist to stand up and reach into the piano to strum the strings have much of a future. As I have remarked, it is significant that no purely mechanical attempts to make the sound of a piano more varied and more picturesque have survived except for the soft pedal.

At the end of the 1940s, however, the sonatas of Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and Samuel Barber once again called for the sonority of the grand piano. Composers began to invent novel contributions to piano technique, principally Pierre Boulez and Karl-Heinz [sic] Stockhausen….

Excuse me? Let’s start with a name conspicuous in its absence, the name famous in the 1920s for having introduced more novel ways to play a piano than anyone since, arguably, Franz Liszt: Henry Cowell. Cowell’s kaleidoscopic array of tone cluster types – with the fist, with the forearm, with the fingers, all black keys, all white keys, all chromatic, sometimes with a top note brought out melodically, sometimes accompanying a left-hand melody in parallel – are mentioned only once, early in the book, lumped as “Cowell’s tone clusters” into a list of percussive effects (not all clusters are percussive), and then utterly ignored in this detailed resume of piano technique. Cowell’s equally colorful variety of inside-the-piano effects (muting, plucking, harmonics, lengthwise stroking) are anonymously dismissed as “strumming,” something that “doesn’t have much of a future” (no matter how many composers have imitated it since, most notably George Crumb, Stefan Wolpe, Annea Lockwood, and Frederic Rzewski). Cowell’s cluster notation alone has become universal, changing the very look of piano music. No less a figure than Bartok wrote to Cowell to ask permission to use tone clusters.

Then let’s take that glib reference to Charles Ives: it seems to promise that more will be said, but the name never reappears; the Concord Sonata gained national fame in 1939 and was recorded in the 1940s, but Rosen hasn’t yet had time to assimilate the achievement (despite waxing eloquent for pages about how every pianist should acquaint themselves with the entire repertoire). First, Ives anticipated Cowell in not only the wild effect of playing with fists, but also in using a felt-covered stick of wood to delicately press down a couple dozen keys at once to let the overtones swirl around. Then – to do for Ives what Rosen does for Chopin and Schumann – there’s the Ivesian mega-chord, so humongous and polytonal that it feels slapped onto the piano in a frantic arpeggio; the use of quiet dissonant “overtones” above fortissimo chords; the use of contrasted dynamics to distinguish different layers of music played at the same time; and the practice of different layers of music at different tempos. Rosen credits these latter two innovations to Elliott Carter, someone who – surprise! – spent his impressionable years visiting Charles Ives and becoming more familiar with Ives’s innovations than just about anyone of his generation. Of course, Carter has notoriously done his best to smash Ives’s reputation as an innovator, and his friend Rosen is happy to help out. (Rosen also calls Carter “perhaps the only major composer of his time who has never written a single twelve-tone piece.” But neither did Conlon Nancarrow or Henry Brant – and “perhaps” they’re major composers, too.)

And while one might conceivably write off Cowell and Ives off as isolated cases, there were similar effects being paraded by Leo Ornstein, George Antheil, and, to a lesser extent, Dane Rudhyar. What we’re discussing is the new pianistic techniques of an entire American generation, and one whose work has remained continuously influential.

And then there are those “several composers” who used prepared piano, John Cage in particular. Forget that the story of Cage’s invention of the prepared piano in 1940 to accompany a dance at the Cornish Institute, where he didn’t have room for a percussion orchestra, is well known and widely printed. The experiment “hasn’t survived very well,” of course, despite the fact that Amazon.com currently lists 17 full or partial recordings of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (as opposed to only 8 recordings of any of the precious Boulez Sonatas), in addition to the recordings now out of print, in addition to all the myriad recordings of Cage’s other works for prepared piano, in addition to works for prepared piano by other composers, including most recently John Adams. Is Rosen even aware of the choreographic piano technique required by Cage’s Etudes Australes? I have to doubt it. And how about all the new pianistic discoveries of John Adams, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Frederic Rzewski, all of whom have written works now considerable as standard rep, let alone what’s become possible when one retunes a piano, as Ben Johnston and La Monte Young have proved? (I won’t even go into the expansions of piano technique and sonority spearheaded by Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans; since they weren’t writing scores for other pianists to perform, Rosen can justifiably consider them outside his territory, but an admission of deficient familiarity would have been gracious.)

Coming from some Rachmaninoff-playing piano hack at a third-rate college, I’d shrug this off as regrettable ignorance, but Rosen is famous for backing up his sweeping generalizations with encyclopedic experience. Yet he leapfrogs over Ives, Cowell, Antheil, Ornstein, Cage, and others to nuzzle up to Boulez and Carter, friends of his whose music he’s played, and who in his universe appear to have written the only worthwhile music to really, I mean really, use the piano in the last 80 years. There are so many ways he could have ameliorated the horrible bias of this impression: admit that American music isn’t his thing, that he never got into Ives, that he doesn’t enjoy playing Cowell?s Tides of Mananaun or Tiger, that he found Cage bewlidering or a charlatan, that he hasn’t studied the 20th century in the same amount of detail as former eras. Instead, he presents his history of piano technique as complete and definitive, off-handedly leaving the Americans out. And why not? His high-falutin’, Europhile friends in academia and the classical music world feel the same way he does, and will either not notice the omissions and dismissals, or grin in silent complicity. The truth is, Rosen is one of the most amazing scholars on 18th- and 19th-century European music in the world today – in addition to which he has played a lot of Schoenberg, Boulez, and Carter. But when he pretends to be a 20th-century scholar as well, he signs his name to an elitist lie that consigns many of the best-loved and most influential American composers (the Europhilic Carter always excepted) to the margins of history. As one of the biggest Charles Rosen fans around, I feel I had a right to expect better.

More thoughts on recording from Charles Rosen’s Piano Notes:

A record of classical music is supposed to be a reproduction. Like all reproductions it is a substitute for something else, and as a substitute it is thought to be inferior to the real thing, the live performance… However, this view carries with it a number of confusions and some obscure paradoxes.

A record of rock music is not a reproduction, but a creation. The realization of a new sound obtainable only by the machinery of recording is a constant ideal in this form of popular music. We may even say that a rock concert is generally a reproduction of a record, and often an inadequate reproduction at that. There is no aesthetic stigma attached in pop music to the use of multiple tracks, echo chambers, splicing, and all possible engineering sleight of hand….

The classical record, however, aspires to be something it is not: a recital, a concert, or a private intimate live performance. Whatever calculation was necessary to make the record is supposed to be concealed, not flaunted….

It has always struck me as a little odd, a little anachronistic on the part of the late 20th-century composer that an entirely different composing technique never arose for recordings different from that intended for live performance. Henry Cowell urged this in the journal Modern Music as early as 1931: just as he felt the player piano should give birth to a new kind of music that couldn’t be played by human hands (in which he was later obliged by Conlon Nancarrow), Cowell also felt that the medium of recording demanded a new kind of music specifically written for it. “A record of a violin tone,” he explained, “is not exactly the same as the real violin; a new and beautiful tone quality results.”

In the 1960s, there were some attempts to make music specifically for records, sometimes incited by record producers rather than composers. Nonesuch elicited such works from Morton Subotnick, which he called “a kind of chamber music 20th-century style: – Sliver Apples of the Moon (1967), The Wild Bull (1968), Touch (1969), Sidewinder (1971), Four Butterflies (1973), Until Spring (1975), and A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur (1978). Charles Wuorinen wrote an electronic piece for a record, Time’s Encomium (1968-9), which won him what I felt was one of the more questionable Pulitzer Prizes. In general, however (and I’ll mention some exceptions in a minute), these were experiments that didn’t significantly alter the thrust of new composing modes.

In the arena of live-performed music, the music that seemed ready to usher in a new era of “classical” music for recordings (or perhaps that should be postclassical, by definition) was minimalism. Recordings, after all, are rarely listened to straight through with continuous attention. One puts on a CD, answers the door, gets the incoming guest a drink, and returns having missed a moment or two. The early long works of Reich, Riley, and Glass were perfect for this listening mode: they went on for a quarter-hour or more at a time with only gradual changes in texture or harmony, and in concert the audience was even encouraged to come and go. (Of course, Uptown composers and critics find this diffuseness in minimalist music hilariously indicative of feeble-mindedness, because they insist on classical concert listening as the only valid paradigm – but why can’t our modes of listening evolve as our technology and social mores do, and why shouldn’t new music be written for new modes of listening, just as has always happened through the centuries?) With Reich’s Drumming (1974), Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts (1975), Riley’s Shri Camel (1978), new music had, we thought, entered the era of the perfect record.

The conundrum for me has been how few composers born after the 1930s, no matter how impressed and influenced by the minimalists, have continued that minimalist listening mode. After 1980 the younger generation went right back to writing detailed, intricate works clearly meant for the concert hall and only indifferently transferable to record. It’s as true of me as anyone else. Bill Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes are lovely pieces, and I enjoy Neely Bruce’s recording of them immensely, but the latter feels like a document of a performance, not made for record in the way that, say, Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi seems to be. (Duckworth’s Cathedral, an ongoing internet composition, is a little different story, but still with emphasis on its live components.) Since the mid-1980s, even Reich (City Life, Proverb), Glass (Symphony No. 5), and Riley (Chanting the Light of Foresight) have pulled back toward reproducing the concert-hall event.

My contemporaries, such as the Common Sense composers (Dan Becker, Belinda Reynolds, Carolyn Yarnell, John Halle, and others), the Bang on a Can composers (Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Steve Martland, Evan Ziporyn), the Downtown chamber music composers (Nick Didkovsky, Beth Anderson, Bernadette Speach, Elodie Lauten), are by and large writing concert music, documentable on recordings but not made specifically with that purpose in mind. And that’s a peculiar thing given the fact that mine was the generation that grew up with Sgt. Pepper and the first wildly influential pop concept albums. Why did that vinyl sensibility remain ensconced in the popular world and so rarely bleed over into new music? If Cowell could see in 1931 that recordings necessitated a new approach to composition, why, 72 years later, are composers no older than myself still composing as though we’re expecting our next gig will be Carnegie Hall?

The exceptions, predictably enough, are mostly electronic. Paul Lansky, I feel, has an exquisite sense for what kind of music to make for a CD – breathy, atmospheric, pieces interestingly interrelated to each other, rich and full of detail, but not structured in a linear way that requires continuous listening. Carl Stone’s sampler pieces are a little more linear in structure, but always feel comfortable heard through living-room loudspeakers. Outside that electronic realm, Robert Ashley’s magnificent operas will always be, for me, records – so much so that his concert performances of them in recent years at Brooklyn Academy and the Kitchen seem, as Rosen says of rock concerts, like slightly inadequate attempts to reproduce the recording. (Of course, they’re meant for video, and lack of funding has prevented us from seeing them in the form Ashley imagined them.) Then again, Ashley is of that Reich-Riley-Glass generation, and in so many ways has out-envisioned composers younger than he is by decades.

Morton Feldman’s two- to six-hour works, on the other hand, I find very ambiguous in this regard. As much as I love the recordings of For Philip Guston and the String Quartet No. 2 (each six hours), I find that I don’t listen to them as often as I generally intend to. They have the same sense of scale and nonlinearity as minimalism, but in the background they are too disturbing, too intrusively philosophical, and beg to be listened to closely even as they dare you to try. Nevetheless, one could imagine a music similar to Feldman’s, being made for the recording medium, as CDs and with little idea of live performance. Is someone out there doing it?

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) has long been one of my favorite artists. His cartoonish figures, often etched in thick paint and as if drawn by a child, with a child’s exaggeration of identifying anatomical features, have an archetypal immediacy, yet also betray sophistication in their uniform covering of the entire canvas. (Yikes! Now I see why art critics write the way they do.) As examples of two of his characteristic styles, for those who may be unfamiliar with him, I link you to Bustle 1 from the Cleveland Museum, and Gare Montparnesse Portes des Lilas from the Tehran Museum, no less (scroll down to #57).

In 1973 (the year Vietnam ended, Nixon resigned, I entered college, and all things still seemed possible, I remember it well), the Turkish electronic composer Ilhan Mimaroglu (interesting character, whatever happened to him?) released, on his small Finnadar label, a record of musique concrete pieces that Dubuffet had made. Dubuffet had gone into a room with an early Grundig tape recorder and a passel of noisemakers, and, with a friend, proceeded to improvise. “In my music,” the liner notes quoted Dubuffet,

I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him to express himself freely and for his own good pleasure. This is what I wanted to do in my painting too, only with this difference that painting, I know it – western painting of the last few centuries, I know it perfectly well – and I want to deliberately forget all about it…. But I do not know music, and this gave me a certain advantage in my musical experiences….

Putting aside a certain philosophical sleight-of-hand – How would a man of 50,000 years ago ignore western music, since it wasn’t there to ignore? How could anyone, let alone a primitive man, invent a music without any reference? How would a prehistoric man have arrived at the idea of music as organized sound, divorced from meaning or ritual? – Dubuffet’s concrete pieces live up to his description beautifully. They are noisy, pure, crazy, exuberant, yet also focused and inventive. Dubuffet creates an impression of frenetically playful improvisation, yet each piece has a strong concept, and even a form. As with his paintings, background and foreground seem reversed, the shape of each piece etched into a thick layer of scruffy noises.

In the liner notes, Mimaroglu noted that the eight pieces on his record were selected from 20 that were issued on six limited-edition LPs; he added that 11 other pieces were released on four more LPs in 1960-61 (he didn’t note what year the first set appeared). So the record contains eight wonderful, amazing, totally original pieces out of an alleged 31 – where are the other 23? Does anyone still own those recordings? Can they be released?

In the process of transferring the old Finnadar disc to CD, I got curious once again and searched the internet. There, on the fantastic site for all kinds of crazy new music, Ubuweb, I found 9 of the tapes, including three I already had and six new ones. Ubuweb is a huge, wonderful site with hours and hours of concrete poetry, tape pieces, Fluxus documents, and other oddities of the mid- to late 20th century (including, for instance, Robert Ashley’s Wolfman and David Behrman’s Wave Train). I should check Ubuweb more often for the obscure underground gems that I need to play for students, or that I’ve always wanted to hear; somehow I forget it’s there. But on their Dubuffet page I found six of the 23 pieces I’ve been waiting to hear for 30 years. Several of them are as exciting as the ones Mimaroglu had chosen, especially Coq a l’oiel, a frantically rippling piano piece that sounds like late Nancarrow; and Longue Peine, which uses two bassoons and a cello as cowlike drones beneath its continuum of scratching noises. There’s also a strange 24-minute piece Le Fleur de Barbe with Dubuffet (or his friend) singing in French over various noises, sounding a little like a drunken revel. At their best, these pieces are just as free, spontaneous, and amazing as Mimaroglu thought they were 30 years ago, with a rough, earthy energy that matches his paintings, and yet a sense of focus that sets them apart from all other musique concrete. I’m thrilled to now have 14 of Dubuffet’s tapes out of the 31.

Anyone know the status of the remaining 17?