Search Results for: nancarrow

The biggest tourist thing I did in Vienna was visit the Zentralfriedhof, the big cemetery where many famous composers (more than I’d realized from my research) and artists are buried, even though some of them were first buried elsewhere and then moved. So here are some photos. It seems silly to include so many photos of myself (taken by my wife Nancy), but after all, you can probably find most of the tombstones on Wikipedia, and the point is to prove I was there. (Click on photos for better focus.)

Here I meet the Great Man himself:

But here was where I got sentimental and weepy:

and with Johannes I felt a little confrontational (that damn lullaby, dontcha know):

Alex Ross told me to make sure I found Ligeti, and I did:

The monument is odd in that, if you look from the right angle, and only then, you can read his birth and death dates:

I’ve been told that Ligeti looked at my book on Nancarrow and pronounced the verdict: “Too American.” Thanks, György. Nearby was Ernst Krenek, whose name on the lower, flat rock has unfortunately become almost illegible:

Zemlinsky’s tomb, if attractive, was rather pretentiously jazzy, I thought, for someone whose music I usually find a mite turgid; there are some lovely songs and Die Seejungfrau is nice, but the Lyric Symphony has never impressed me:

I was surprised to run into Hans Erich Apostel, a name you don’t hear much these days (if indeed one ever did):

And also Egon Wellesz; I realized with a start that, for so familiar a name, I couldn’t remember ever having heard a note of the old man’s music, so while I was there I snapped up a disc of his 1st (unabashedly Mahlerian) and 8th (unconvincingly near-atonal) symphonies:

While we’re at it, Wellesz’s teacher the musicologist Guido Adler:

I actually fulfilled my threat of having my photo taken at Schoenberg’s tomb with a sign that read “LONG LIVE HAUER” – but I’m going to save that one for some future special purpose; it would give too much ammunition to all those who consider me the nefarious enemy of everything great in music.

I was amused to run across the arrogant-looking Franz von Suppé, whose Light Cavalry Overture I quote in my piece Scenario, so I do owe him something:

Gluck was there:

and Hugo Wolf, looking menacing despite the nude couple making out nearby:

Also Johann Nepomuk David, whose music I once had to write a program note for:

and Johann Strauss, whose waltzes I am fond of, though I found it inexcusably lazy that all the local Muzak systems relied solely on “Blue Danube” and “Wine, Women, and Song”:

His dad, too:

And to tell you the truth, one of the tombs I most wanted to visit was that of Franz Schmidt, whose chamber works and last two symphonies I’m very fond of (I hummed the Fourth the rest of the trip); I’m sure it’s supposed to be his muse, but the design suggests that he dreamed of scantily-clad young women, which I do too, but it’s not what I’d want to be immortalized for:

The only composers I had read were there and couldn’t find were Pfitzner and Czerny, but I’m not sentimental enough about either of them to consider the trip unfulfilling. I felt like I had seen enough of the old gang.

 

 

I am not a particularly prolific composer, and have always been a little sensitive about it. The sensitivity started in college. In high school I spewed forth inept sonatas and chamber pieces by the ream with a frightening incapacity for self-criticism, and I swept into Oberlin with guns a-blazing. But my undergraduate composition teacher was intimidating and unsympathetic, and after a few months with him I found myself too petrified to compose anything. It took me many years to fully overcome the sense of insecurity that took root in me under his weekly lack of enthusiasm. It is common among a certain type of professor to say that, if a student can be dissuaded from becoming a composer, he should be; but if he can’t be dissuaded and you try for years anyway, the damage can be considerable and long-lasting.

At any rate, later there were other excuses for my relative lack of productivity. I’ve had to work like a dog to make a living all my life. The early years of being a high-profile critic took up a lot of psychic energy; it wasn’t like selling shoes while secretly working out musical plans in my head. And I got into the habit of writing books, which bring me more professional advantage than my music does these days, and writing them is so easy for me that I’m not likely to quit. I am selfish enough that I will deny the world the music I could be writing if I’m getting more jollies somewhere else.

But the real reason for the slow growth in my opus numbers, or probably more real than these other reasons anyway, is that I’m something of a conceptualist with a populist conscience. That is, to get inspired with a piece I need a concept, an idea, some friction of irreconcilables, that applies only to that piece. I do not have a habitual musical language that I can turn on and off like a spigot, or roll out by the yard, as so many composers do. So I get these inspirations like, hey, what if you had a rhythmic structure like this, but a harmonic rhythm that was totally independent of it, and you had to make it work and sound good anyway. Sounding good is the sticking point. I’ve had some compositional ideas I’ve carried around for decades, and I just can’t make them work, so I start a lot more pieces than I finish. And I am not like some of my fellow experimentalists I could name, who will find the concept sufficient and roar ahead with the work whether the listener can afterward tell what what the hell the piece was about or not. I conceive each work in some kind of arcane musical algebra, but if the initial results don’t sound wonderful and seductive, to me, I just won’t go through with it. Sometimes I try the same idea over every few years, and in several cases I’ve eventually figured out how to bring a recalcitrant concept to heel, usually by making my grandiose, austere premises simpler and/or more flexible.

Somehow I got, rather early, the idea that as long as I wrote over a hundred pieces in my career, I would consider that a respectable output. For some reason I did not want to be one of those composers known for their miniscule worklists of only 20 or 35 works: Webern, Varèse, Ruth Crawford, Ruggles, even Nancarrow (65, officially). For one thing, to make an impression with such a small catalogue requires not only a high consistency of quality but a trademark idiom, and I’m a little too variable in style and quality for that. And on the other hand, Beethoven only has 138 opus numbers, and though many of them are multiple works, anything over a hundred sounded vaguely in the ballpark. And some time in the past year, depending on what early works I feel like copping to in any current mood, I passed the one-hundred mark. With the two works I’m finishing up this week – a septet for the Ghost Ensemble called Sang Plato’s Ghost, and a chamber suite called Catskill Set – my official list has 105 titles. I made it!

And neither would I have wanted to be one of those composers who bombards the world with his or her fecundity. Darius Milhaud is one of my favorite composers, but a large percentage of his music sounds phoned in, and past the sixty or so fabulous pieces you quickly run into works that make you wonder why he bothered. Alan Hovhaness, similarly. I’m trying to figure out how much of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s music I really need to get familiar with. Composers like these need someone to write a book covering their complete output and letting all of us know what the gems are. It seems to me that extremely prolific composers create a perceptual barrier for themselves, because nobody after Schubert writes 500 masterpieces, and even a listening fan gets discouraged trying to profitably fill in the complete profile.

So “over a hundred” sounds good, and I can psychically relax a little. Breathes there the composer, today, who doesn’t occasionally stop and reflect that there’s already way too much good music in the world anyway, and that it seems either sadistic or masochistic to continue adding to it? I can keep composing when I’m really enjoying it, without the tad of psychic pressure in the back of my mind that I haven’t yet written enough. My worklist looks sufficiently respectable; a dozen or so of the works exceed a half-hour. And with having passed ten years as a blogger today as well, and finished the five chapters of my Ives book (out of fifteen, six of them already done) that I was determined to write before the semester started, I think that’s enough landmarks achieved for one summer.

REMINDER: Until the domain name transfers, my web site is currently here.

The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) has asked me to give a talk on the state of American music at their November conference in Vienna – which strikes me as analogous to making Noam Chomsky the U.S. ambassador to the UN. I had to write a statement for their catalogue, which will be translated into German. Since it won’t appear in English, since the tenth anniversary has inspired me to think more about potential purposes for this blog, and since I have to expand it into a fuller paper, I thought I’d run it up the flagpole here and see who shoots at it. Also, the core of the argument relates to a book I’ve been asked to write and am mulling over, so feedback might help push me one way or another. Warning: the paper includes the words Uptown and Downtown, which is a blood-pressure hazard for some composers.

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The Uneasy, Unarticulated State of American Music

The term “American music” is devoid of specific connotative content today, even if we limit it to composed music in the concert tradition. If it means music made by Americans, Americans today come from all over the globe – and some whose ancestors were born here are working in global traditions. The American educational system pretty reliably exposes young composers to analysis of European modernist masterworks; jazz harmony; musical software; indigenous innovators such as Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Conlon Nancarrow; and a number of third-world musical traditions, most notably Indonesian gamelan, African drumming, Japanese gagaku, and Indian classical music. In addition, young composers absorb pop music and mass culture on their own. From this increasingly de-centered pedagogic tradition, they are understandably flung in all directions, flowing into a sea of aesthetic proclivities with myriad flavors but few demarcations or distinct categories.

This absolute openness in terms of aesthetic choices contrasts markedly, though, with drastic limitations on what kind of visibility or impact the composer can expect to achieve in American society. Major record labels continued to promote new music as a public service through the 1960s and ‘70s, but the corporate-friendly Reagan years made any such altruistic principles a thing of the past. Corporations now so heavily push kinds of music that can be easily categorized and that return a reliable profit that the amount of public distribution accorded new classical (or postclassical) music has decreased to a tiny trickle. It was reported during the 1980s that there were 40,000 self-identifying composers in the U.S. – by now the number must be considerably more than that. A few hundred of those, perhaps, can expect to become visible within a particular musical subculture. Those who manage to get a foothold in the orchestra circuit will receive marginally the most attention, for the capitalist reason that orchestras, which advertise heavily in newspapers, therefore get dependably reviewed by said newspapers. But even here, the bulk of the general audiences of those orchestras are more likely to consider the occasional living composer a necessary evil than a cultural leader.

It is arguable, I think, that there are no American composers today who have achieved the same public stature since 1980 as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams did just prior to that date. While the obvious conclusion to be drawn from this would be that the generations of composers born after 1950 are rather lame, I suggest that another explanation is more compelling. The creativity of the best composers continues at a high level. But the skewed economics of distribution, combined with the sheer numbers of working composers and their smoothly-modulated rainbow of styles, makes it increasingly unlikely that any major figures commanding a wide consensus will emerge in the near future.

In 1967, musicologist Leonard Meyer published a fiery book that was widely read at the time: Music, the Arts, and Ideas. In it he predicted “the end of the Renaissance,” by which he meant that there would cease to be a musical mainstream, and that instead we would settle into an ahistorical period of stylistic stasis in which a panoply of styles would coexist. This seemed an outrageous forecast at the time, but Meyer’s prescience has been greatly confirmed.

The first stage of the breakup of the mainstream in American music was a separation in the 1960s and ‘70s into three large trends. The first was the stream of serialist music along an American adaptation of European 12-tone principles, which grew in political power and visibility during those decades. Almost at the same time, minimalism grew from the world of ideas John Cage had opened up, and offered a more timeless, less articulated aesthetic parallel to certain non-Western musics. Minimalism found a home in the lofts of Downtown Manhattan, and the music of the freer post-Cagean world came, by the late 1960s, to be called “Downtown music.” Serialist music grew to be mostly associated with academic music departments and ensembles, and after awhile – partly due to its association in Manhattan with Columbia University – earned the back-formation “Uptown music.” In the 1980s, some composers who rejected both minimalism and serialism, opting instead for a continuation of a more intuitively Romantic, conventionally orchestral modernist aesthetic, insisted on being called “Midtown” instead. Several of the most prominent “Midtowners,” such as George Rochberg, David Del Tredici, John Corigliano, and William Bolcom, actually returned to employing the conventions of late Romanticism (Mahler’s idiom being especially popular) with an accompanying dose of irony, satire, or collage. In 1983 the term “New Romantic” was coined for this development.

These divisions played havoc with the paradigmatic modernist duality of conservative versus avant-garde. Most obviously, the prior association of tonality with conservatism and atonality with avant-garde fell apart. The Uptown serialists could claim to be avant-garde for posing the most challenges to the audience’s perception. The Downtown minimalists could claim avant-gardeness by having transcended European genres and embracing a world aesthetic. And the Midtown New Romantics could claim avant-gardeness for having jettisoned even the modernist assumption of stylistic homogeneity. A composer writing a highly tonal piece might be taking Benjamin Britten (conservative) as a model, or Arvo Pärt (avant-garde); and who cold tell for sure?

The battles among these three segments of the composing community, each trying to take on the mantle (and attendant funding and distribution) of the new mainstream, were fierce, played out in newspaper diatribes, college classrooms, and lecture halls. After a few years, though, this state of things began to dissolve. First of all, the number of 12-tone pieces (or at least the number of composers publicly extolling 12-tone principles) fell off dramatically in the late 1980s. Minimalism, entering the orchestra world through commissions given to Glass and Adams in particular, became somewhat watered down from its original hard-core principles, and morphed into a textural lingua franca. The extremes declined, as did the prestige of being on the extreme. The shape of American music went from looking like three separate streams to more like a bell curve. There are still adherents of the “New Complexity” in the U.S., Jay Alan Yim possibly the best known. At the other end of the curve, there are those attached to the Wandelweiser school of silence and extreme duration and simplicity, like Michael Pisaro. But that the guru of New Complexity is a British composer, Brian Ferneyhough, and the Wandelweiser a European group, may further suggest how un-American it is to be an extremist these days.

It is against the background of those battles that many of the composers born after 1975 have defined themselves. The new generation of composers is conflict-averse, its discourse reduced to a broadly tolerant pragmatism. However much the young composers believe they have blessedly transcended ideology and partisanship, though, they have nevertheless inherited some of the previous attitudes in a less articulated form. Instead of distinct categories, what we have is a continuum of opinions along the accessibility/difficulty scale: how much should the composer keep the audience in mind? What should be the relation, if any, to pop music? Is the educated elite of academia a sufficient audience? Should the composer ignore all questions of perceptibility and follow his pleasure? Is there, indeed, any way to predict what music will go over well with an audience and what won’t? Does the long tail phenomenon of internet distribution render all such questions moot? What is most typical of American music at the moment, I would argue, is a large-scale, implicit, almost publicly unarticulated debate on the social use of music, of what it is made for.

For obvious reasons, the composers who actively court public relevance have been the most visible. Starting in 1987, the Bang on a Can festival, run by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, has championed music of a hard-hitting, exciting profile. The baseball-cap-wearing founders have distanced themselves from the perceived elitism of classical music presentation, presenting in unusual and informal spaces and replacing the formality of program notes with personal appearances by each composer performed. A certain amount of rock-star wanna-beism is in evidence. The much quieter Common Sense collective, a bicoastal group of eight composers including Dan Becker, Carolyn Yarnell, Belinda Reynolds, and others, has banded together to seek group commissions from ensemble to ensemble, like a roving herd of compositional locusts. With these new paradigms begin the strategies of most composers who have become visible since. 1. Eschew elitism and traditional formality in presentation, regardless of what the music is like. 2. Control your own distribution and the means to create your own performances. In either case, take your music into your own hands and be independent of existing institutions.

The Bang on a Can people eventually formed their own label, Canteloupe. Probably the most visible group of younger composers in recent years is that united by another such startup, the New Amsterdam label, including Judd Greenstein, Nico Muhly, William Brittelle, Corey Dargel, and others. Brittelle’s theater music tackles the conventions of television. Dargle’s works are elaborately composed pop songs on texts of sometimes shocking personal honesty. Anti-Social Music, despite its ironic name, is a group (including Pat Muchmore, Andrea La Rose, and others) that has specialized in extreme informality of presentation, often setting off the music with abundant humor and surreality. ThingNY, run by Paul Pinto, is an ensemble that has tried publicity stunts such as commissioning brief works via mass e-mailings. The resulting styles of all this music are not always predictable from the format, the emphasis being on finding a new presentation paradigm free from associations of either conventional classical music performance or the stylistic subcultures of the 1980s.

That these groups have garnered the most publicity does not mean their approach is numerically dominant. A probably larger number of composers still move through more traditional channels, attending the most prestigious possible grad school, studying with influential teachers, applying for prizes and awards, and angling for orchestral commissions. Even here, a correlation with style and idiom cannot be assumed. One of the most successful young composers on the orchestra circuit, Mason Bates, moonlights as a club DJ. His orchestral works such as Omnivorous Furniture (2004) typically include him playing a noisy music of pop beats from his laptop in the center of the orchestra. Even so, there is an intermittent streak of lyric romanticism in his music, possibly drawn from his studies with one of the seminal New Romantics, John Corigliano. Some mention should also be made of how widespread the influence of John Adams has become on young musicians’ orchestral music. His propulsive repeating brass chords, dotted by abundant and explosive percussion, have become a rather well-defined style of their own. And since so many commissions for living composers are in the form of ten-minute concert openers, this style/format combination has acquired the jocular nickname “subscriber modernism.”

Microtonality is a steadily growing field, more so on the West Coast. Composers working in equal-step scales are far more numerous, and their music tends toward esoteric complexity; those fewer working in just intonation, with Ben Johnston and La Monte Young as models, often opt for meditativeness. Boston has its own microtonal subculture based on a 72-pitch-to-the-octave scale, based on the practice of Ezra Sims and the late Joe Maneri. This overall trend remains impeded by technological hurdles and performance difficulties. John Adams, though, made an unusually public microtonal statement with his 2003 orchestra work The Dharma at Big Sur, which incorporated natural harmonics in the brass.

Moving outward from these recent, more definable trends, it is fairly impossible to generalize further about what’s going on in American music. American composers write for Javanese gamelan with or without orchestral instruments and electric guitars (Evan Ziporyn has been active in this area); perform music from their laptops; write symphonies; create sophisticated MIDI versions of orchestral music; subvert pop-music conventions (a specialty of Mikel Rouse); base their music in Balkan singing styles. While many composers make an ambitious bid for social relevance, many, many others are content to accept their marginalization in American culture in return for total autonomy. One thing we all grow slowly more aware of is our increasing disadvantage, as individual low-subsidy artists, in terms of technological sound production compared to the massive resources of corporate film and popular music. Wealth brings a sonic sophistication that the autonomous sound-experimenter can only envy.

One can only report that musical creativity continues at a high level in the United States, pursued under a troubling and sometimes debilitating set of circumstances. At one end is the corporate world of commercial music with its untold riches and aesthetic co-optation; at the other end, the rarified air of the unpublic career totally subsidized by academia. In between are thousands of composers trying to strategize an artistically fulfilling career in a capitalist society run amok, poisoned by money and ruled for the benefit of the richest 0.1 percent. In short, we are all, every one of us, trying to discern what kind of music it might be satisfying, meaningful, and/or socially useful to make in a corporate-controlled oligarchy. The answers are myriad, the pros and cons of each still unproven. We maintain our idealism and do the best we can.

 

Here I am, the third-string composition teacher at a small undergraduate college. I write uncontroversial, peer-reviewed books about Nancarrow, Cage, Ashley, Ives, three of whom are dead. I never sit on the Guggenheim committee, the Fromm commission committee, the Pulitzer committee, and I can count the prize committees I’ve been on with less than one hand: the Grawemeyer one year, and no one I voted for won; the Herb Alpert Award about ten years ago; and the ASCAP Young Composer Awards about 18 years ago. I used to be a music critic and have some influence over people’s careers, but that was years ago, and I closed up my dwindling shop in 2005. I’m in two small musicological organizations, the Charles Ives Society and the Society for Minimalist Music, neither of which plays any role in the composition world, and in neither of which I wield any power. I amuse myself by restoring the occasional forgotten composition to the repertoire. My music isn’t played often. The only current outlet for my opinions is this blog, which has been mostly inactive these many months. In short, if you listed all the people who have power over what happens in the world of new-music composition and performance, you would list hundreds and hundreds of people before you came to me, if indeed you ever did.

My views on composition are heterodox and far outside the mainstream of what most composers believe these days. And yet when I express those views, some people become absolutely livid and write in to damn me and tell me what a horrible person I am, expending tremendous emotional energy as if I must be stopped at all costs. People gather at composers’ web sites to bewail my pernicious opinions. And the only possible explanation I can think of, that makes any sense, is that I am hitting a nerve – that I am telling a truth that someone doesn’t want to think about. Because unless I am persuasive solely because I am right, why would anybody in the world give a damn what I think?

UPDATE: One thing that no one has mentioned about my nefarious academic/professional post, which has some people clutching their pearls, is that I gave the new-music community a free lesson in how to write more effectively. No one thanks me (well, one commenter slyly alluded to it), but I bet that some of the people who think I’m the Snidely Whiplash of composition will not be too proud to avail themselves of my suggestions. I hope so, I’d like to see more fluent writing in the new-music discourse.

You’re welcome.

The Nancarrow conference produced by the Trinity Laban Conservatoire at the Southbank Centre, London, was pretty spectacular, given its modest timeframe. All of the player-piano studies were played on an instrument virtually identical to Conlon’s, Jim Greeson’s documentary on Conlon was premiered (Alex Ross shows an excerpt here), the London Sinfonietta played transcriptions superbly, and Conlon’s widow Yoko presented a very touching portrait of him in words. What one drew from her talk, and also from a paper on the Nancarrow correspondence by Felix Meyer of the Sacher Stiftung, was that Nancarrow not only did not seek any recognition for his music during the 1950s and ’60s, but actively turned away offers from Elliott Carter and others who were trying to get him performances. He truly had no desire for any publicity. One of the most stupendous moments, though, didn’t happen in public. Pianola virtuoso Rex Lawson played a bunch of us, in his studio, a French film score for player piano from 1926 – 1926! – that sounded remarkably like Nancarrow, with plenty of dissonance and jagged lines ripping up and down the keyboard at lightning speed. I didn’t even catch the composer’s name, but Charles Amirkhanian filmed it, and I’ll give you more information as I get it.

Next I’m on my way to Lublin, Poland, for the Cage100 symposium, May 16-18. I deliver the opening paper, “Silence in the Rear-View Mirror,” at 10:15 AM on Wednesday, and there will be a host of Cagean luminaries: Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, David Nicholls, David Revill, Chris Shultis, and others. After that, it looks like I have five keynote addresses to give the rest of this year, and one already for next year. It’s my new niche. I tell people I walk around with a cardboard, hand-lettered sign that reads, “Will give lecture for free trip to Europe.”

I interviewed Philip Glass live in front of an enthusiastic student/faculty audience at Bard tonight. It’s the second time I’ve done such a thing; the first was about 15 years ago in NYC, and Phil and I couldn’t remember what school it was. But Phil insisted on writing my introduction for him, saying, “These students may not know who I am.” And here is the entirety of the autobiographical part he wrote: “He began, as a composer, at the age of 20, and has thus far spent 55 years in this general line of work.” I said to the audience, “If you didn’t know who Philip Glass was, you do now.” He absolutely refused to let me detail his “so-called,” as he put it, accomplishments. He was charming and insightful, as always, and the student enthusiasm was beyond my wildest expectations.

Let me add that I don’t write much about Glass, partly because I take him so much for granted. In the ’70s I was blown away by Music in Fifths, Music with Changing Parts, Music in Twelve Parts, and Einstein on the Beach, in that order, and afterward I almost quit paying attention, because his music had already had all the effect it could have. His rhythmic cycles and voice-leading became part of my compositional DNA, and into that I stirred Feldman, Nancarrow, Johnston, Young, Ashley, several other composers. At that earlier interview, I told him that I was still trying to rewrite the “Bed” scene from Einstein, and he replied, “So am I.” And a few months ago I was offered an opportunity to have a Glass-related piece performed at a Glass 75th-birthday festival which has now been postponed; but I wrote the piece anyway, titled Going to Bed, based on the chords from that “Bed” scene. The PDF is here. I find his output very uneven, as with all extremely prolific composers, but lately I’ve been enjoying Orion, the Eighth Symphony, and the Tirol Piano Concerto.

 

I have often written about the 1989 review in which John Rockwell called my music “naively pictorial,” and the fact that I liked it so much that I’ve ever since adopted “naive pictorialism” as my stylistic moniker. Recently I ran across the 1944 review in Modern Music in which Elliott Carter disparaged Charles Ives’s music as – guess what? – “naively pictorial.” This is company I will gladly keep. I wish Charlie and I could share a good laugh over that one.

I wondered, when I was writing the 4’33” book, whether a renewed involvement with Cage’s music would have any effect on my own. I don’t think it did. But I do think my recent semester spent with the Concord Sonata has had some impact. Most noticeably, I’ve become more open to the idea of re-using material from piece to piece. I could never do it before. I hate repeating myself. I don’t like giving the same lecture twice, I don’t like repeating a class without a long time-lapse in between, and I’ve never been able to re-use material. Even quoting someone else’s music is difficult for me, though I’ve managed it several times. I get into a musical context and I’m feeling my way through it, and the idea of lifting a passage from a previous work or sketch and dropping it in (as Ives did with that Country Band March in “Hawthorne” and so many other pieces) just upsets everything. I don’t seem able to re-say sincerely something I’ve said before. The music leading up to it never quite fits, and I can’t hear the lifted passage as flowing naturally from the preceding new material. I’m amazed Ives could do it. It may come from a habitual tendency toward organicism, which I’ve tried to overcome, since I really don’t think organicism is an essential musical virtue. But if I write a lecture, the first time I read it publicly I feel impassioned; the second time, I feel like I’m lip-synching, like I’m slightly guilty for not having come up with something new to say. Isn’t that odd? As though I change so much with the passage of time that I couldn’t possibly mean the same thing twice (yet all my friends know what a creature of immutable habit I am).

Nevertheless, I have just finished making an orchestral version of the first movement of my Implausible Sketches for piano four-hands. Listening to the piece, I started hearing various lines played by strings, horn, harp, and so on. The piano wasn’t big enough for how I imagined the piece. So I started to orchestrate it. John Luther Adams had just done something similar with a chamber piece of his own, and he told me, “It’ll be a bigger project than you think.” Of course he was right. Starting a new piece from scratch might have been easier, because I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time whittling away at material I had already perfected, and relinquishing assumptions I’d already grown committed to.

First of all, since the Implausible Sketch (first movement: “The Desert’s Too-Zen Song”) was for piano four-hands, it used all seven octaves of the keyboard almost continuously. Some quarter of the music, if not more, would have had to be entrusted to contrabasses and piccolos, which would be ridiculous. The bottom had to be brought up, the top brought down, middle lines subsequently disentangled. Much of the piece has a drone on a low C, and keeping the basses so continuously on that pitch seemed ineffective, if not cruel. I had to reconfigure the piece’s long, long ostinato to let them move around. Then, at eight minutes, the piece seemed too brief for its orchestral incarnation, so I had to perform heart surgery, and move major events further apart. I had to produce three minutes of filler material that didn’t sound like mere afterthought. Repeated-note lines that sounded resonant on the piano sagged in the bassoon. Probably 90% of the piece had to be rethought. I’m still tweaking the details, but I do think I find the result – more simply titled Desert Song – grander than the original.

(To answer your next question, no performance is impending, I just followed an inspiration. But last summer I wrote three string quartets with little hope of performance, and now a friend’s quartet has offered to play them all. One big change in my life is that I’ve quit following Cage’s advice to never write a piece without a performance lined up.)

The only time I’d done something similar before was to base my string quartet Love Scene on the brief third act of my opera The Watermelon Cargo – though I did that because I noticed that I hardly ever had more than four lines going at once. The number of measures and basic content didn’t change, though I did have to make some lines more string-idiomatic. And I’m slowly orchestrating my octet The Planets, though since that has strings, wind, and percussion to begin with, it’s an easier conversion so far. As one gets older, I can imagine that it might be profitable to be able to rely on earlier, more vigorous inspirations. There was certainly a period after 1990 when Nancarrow’s inspiration failed him (he was 78 and had had a stroke after all), and he started pulling out earlier, unused sketches to rework. It does seem a useful part of a composer’s economy to have a cache of previously used or unused material to draw on, and with Ives as a model, I’d like to get over my reluctance.

Part of the problem with orchestration for those of us of a certain age – and it applies not only to writing orchestra music but to working with classical musicians in general – is that some of our music originates in an electronic paradigm. For instance, my “Neptune” from The Planets has a gradually changing synthesizer chord that plays solidly throughout, a kind of cloud from which the other lines emerge. In the orchestra, that cloud will get transfered to the strings. So I find myself wanting to use long, long chords with staggered bowing in the strings, though I had a rather disastrous experience trying this with a subprofessional orchestra in my piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things. I handled it better in Desert Song by having lines move around almost unnoticeably within the cloud. I notice, though, that in Alvin Singleton’s Shadows – one of my very favorite recent orchestral pieces, and there are damn few works I’d apply that phrase to – he keeps the strings holding notes for dozens of measures at a time, and the Atlanta Symphony does a great job with it. It is not very fair, though, to the string players that I want them to be a massive synthesizer. I’d be interested in hearing from others who’ve wrestled with this postminimalist technical dilemma.