Search Results for: nancarrow

My summer hobby, as it turns out, pursued in-between writing a string quartet and finishing my Ashley book, will be relearning the history of music at the feet of Richard Taruskin. That is, from his five-volume Oxford History of Western Music. I should have bought it earlier, and I know what a brilliant writer he is, but I thought it would be full of things I already knew, perhaps kind of a super-Grout (and no former music student will need to be told that I am referring to Donald J. Grout’s omni-required and stultifying A History of Western Music). But, stuck in New York City recently without my Kindle and with a few hours to kill, I bought Taruskin’s Volume Five, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, and learned within minutes how groundless any such fears were. It is a thorough and creative rethinking of all of Western music. I could hardly put it down, and weeks later, going backwards, I’m halfway through Volume Four.

Volume Five’s opening chapter is the most transcendent music history writing I’ve ever read, along with Rosen’s The Classical Style – and possibly above it.
He starts with the bombing of Hiroshima, using it as a grand metaphor for what he calls “Zero Hour” – the attempted total redefinition of music at Darmstadt. And yet, he brilliantly juxtaposes this with the Zhdanovshchina, the official rebuke that Zhdanov made to Soviet composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, calling on them to eschew abstraction and write accessible music using folk
tunes. Through several long chapters Taruskin charts the century’s most amazing
musical paradox: that under a totalitarianism that mandated simple, melodic
music, the mechanical algorithms of total serialism came to represent freedom.
And at the same time, on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, total serialism
came to express mankind’s existential despair in the face of the possibility
of nuclear annihilation. What a head trip!

For instance, here he is on Stefan Wolpe, whose early music was often political
agitprop:

[Wolpe’s thorny late] music no longer communicates with the directness of a Kampflied. A listener would be hard-pressed to paraphrase its “message,” or guess its precise motivation, with any confidence. But if it thus frustrated willing listeners, it also frustrated would-be censors, and that may well have been the
point. The hermeticism of Wolpe’s postwar – or rather, Cold War – music was a
deliberate and demonstrative refusal to comply with the directives of the
Zhdanovshchina. And yet, the question nags, how did an artist with Wolpe’s
social conscience feel about a decision, however honestly arrived at, to
insulate his artistic integrity within a music that eventually became so
abstract that its content would be a riddle, its style so advanced that few
except fellow musicians could take pleasure in it, and so demanding of its
performers that almost no one could play it? [p. 14]

Adorno, he says, in his Philosophie der neuen Musik,

added an existentialist argument to the older doctrine of progress… If, as the
existentialists argued, authenticity can only be personal and justified from
within, never collectively asserted or justified from without, then a music
that by virtue of its difficulty shunned popularity had to be a more authentic
music than one that potentially spoke for the many. Responding only to what
Adorno called “the inherent tendency of musical material” rather to any call
from the wider world, twelve-tone music seemed to embody a perfect artistic
autonomy. [p. 17]

And yet, in another sharp irony, the collective pressure put on composers to switch
to dodecaphony would have seemed to destroy the autonomy of the composer, and
thus the authenticity of his music. Referring to Boulez’s infamous “Schoenberg
is Dead” article,

The violence that Leibowitz had predicted certainly came to the fore in Boulez’s
frantically coercive and intolerant rhetoric. No one who has read the article
has ever forgotten its frightening climax [the line about any composer who
hasn’t understood the necessity of the 12-tone language being USELESS]…
Not even Zhdanov had ever voiced a judgment more categorical or intransigent (and
indeed it is obvious that Boulez’s rhetorical model was the Communist
journalism of his day). [p. 19]

Further:

…rather than an expression of simple nihilism, or belief in nothing, the renunciation
total serialism demanded might rather be seen as expressing existential
despair. It was the passionately intense reaction of artists who could no
longer believe in the supreme value of the individual self, the “autonomous
subject” exalted by romanticism, at a time when a hundred thousand selves just
as individual as theirs might vanish at the push of a button. [p. 43]

Virtually every argument Taruskin makes is buttressed by telling details from obscure
corners of history. He analyzes Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel, an early work I’ve always
heard of, but have never actually heard (and there seems to be no currently
available recording). Because it has a steady drumbeat running underneath it,
it was attractive, and Stockhausen suppressed it:

Within the ascetic world of “total serialism,” at any rate, Kreuzspiel counts as easy listening.
That may be one reason why Stockhausen supressed constant pulsation in the
works that followed, and also withheld Kreuzspiel from publication for
nearly a decade, despite positive audience reactions. [p. 48]

Later, Taruskin credits the anti-Communist backlash in the U.S. as having partly
motivated a turn toward 12-tone music, since “accessibility” had earned a
politically suspicious reputation. Evidence? The month in which Aaron Copland
was first denounced by a rightwing group for his Communist connections happened
to be the month he began his first 12-tone piece, the Piano Quartet. The
contradictions of the age had made over-intelligibility politically incorrect. I hadn’t realized that Erno Lendvai had been dismissed from his Academy post in Budapest for writing his book about Bartok’s axis system and Golden Sections.
The book made Bartok sound like a decadent formalist, but Ligeti broadcast
Lendvai’s ideas at Darmstadt to revive Bartok’s flagging reputation among the
12-toners, and thus add prestige to his own lineage.

This is history written in very broad strokes, and they are dazzingly creative,
flexible enough to be encompassing, while supported in enormous detail. The major theme Taruskin brings out for the
postwar era is the question of whether a composer is indebted to history or to
society. If to history, then the important thing is to build on past music and
to keep progress going; if to society, then musical style doesn’t matter, even
to the point of seeming anachronism, as long as the point gets across. I
vividly remember feeling crucified on this exact point in the 1970s, torn
between systematic composing methods and Cardew-esque political critique. (In
fact, my have-your-cake-and-eat-it solution to that puzzle – making my music lyrical and harmonically
simple on the surface, while hiding my secret innovations in the backgrounded
rhythms and tuning – occupies me to this day. I spent the morning wrestling
with it.) Interestingly, Taruskin brings all this out in the volume’s center
with a contrast between Benjamin Britten and Elliott Carter, two composers
whose “followings tended to be mutually exclusive.”

This is a revisionist history, but unlike Carl Dahlhaus’s otherwise wonderful Nineteenth-Century
Music, it is not a revision that requires one to have read the original first. It
explains everything clearly enough from the ground up that I think undergrads
could deal with most of it (I gave that first chapter to my modernism class to
read). The only things that might daunt them are the rather detailed analyses
of Boulez and Babbitt, which do contribute to Taruskin’s overall points. In
fact, the book ripples with musical analysis. This is a history book by someone
who loves to analyze music, and does it very well, capturing the essence of
musical styles with a few well-chosen and deeply plumbed examples. The sections
on pitch relationships in Debussy and Scriabin have greatly deepened my
understanding of two composers I’d never gotten around to looking at closely. I
can’t escape the impression, actually, that it is a history of music written
specifically for composers: I can’t quite imagine any other group getting as much
out of it. Virtually every historical generalization eventually gets pinned down to specific instances of compositional technique. (I’ve told the story here before that Taruskin was one of the
external evaluators for my tenure; he made such penetrating comments about my
compositional technique that I changed my style in response to them. It was the
best composition lesson I’ve ever had.)

Of course, I’ve been policing Taruskin like a hawk on the American composers I’m most invested
in. He sometimes looks likely to overdo an emphasis, and never does; every crucial point is hit, every ameliorating factor noted. His parsing of Ives, for instance, is that he was a maximalist but not a modernist: that is, he shared the early 20th-century tendency for ramping up levels of complexity and dissonance (maximalism), but
conservatively held to a 19th-century view of music’s appropriate expressive
ends; I’ve said something similar myself, though without documenting it nearly
so well. (In fact, Taruskin quotes me at some length on music after 1970, so a few of my agreements with him approach tautology.) He even collects Ives with composers like Crawford and Rudhyar as Americans who used technical innovations toward spiritual ends, which is a nice point I’ve never seen anyone make. People get left out –
Nancarrow, for instance, isn’t mentioned – but his framework is so
all-encompassing that the reader can fit them in for himself later.

I’ve ordered a vocal score to Salome and downloaded from IMSLP (because the available scores cost
a fortune) one of Elektra, two operas that impressed me when I was a teenager but that
I’ve hardly listened to since; Taruskin’s analyses resparked my interest. I’m
beginning to get out recordings I haven’t listened to for years, and I’ve taken
up an interest in Andrzej Panufnik, whom Taruskin contrasts curiously with
Ligeti. In short, I am swept up in the irresistible flow of Taruskin’s vastly creative musical logic, and, with 3000
pages to go, the rest of my summer is pretty well planned out.

[May I conclude with a didactic point for those whom it may concern? You’ll notice I’ve quoted Taruskin heavily, and
allowed him to make his points with his own words. This is how you write a book
review. Read a book through once, describe it from memory, and you’ll
invariably falsify it. This is what happened with that idiot who reviewed my
Cage book, and it’s not the first time. As you read a book for reviewing, copy
out things you’ll want to quote, and add the page number. Look at them again in context while you’re writing. It’s astonishing how often you’ll find that the author didn’t actually say what you first imagined he said. If you want to damn the author, do it with his own words and he can’t complain. In fact, I’ve overdone it a little here for emphasis; people don’t like to read too many long quotations. A book review without quotations, however, is never,
ever to be trusted.]

[UPDATED BELOW, + FINAL UPDATE] Literarily, if not always musically, I am something of an Anglophile, a frank worshipper of that scepter’d isle, that earth of majesty and seat of Mars, the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Dickens, and Trollope. But I have now had three book reviews from English critics, and they have been appalling in their incompetence.

BELGRADE – Saturn is sextiling my Sun and ascendant from my tenth house, if you know what that means. What it means is, I’m kind of difficult to escape at the moment. The always impressive Frank Oteri has a wonderful interview up with me today on New Music Box, in honor of my new book and two recent CDs. I always knew Frank was sort of ridiculously brilliant, but I didn’t realize how brilliant until he started digging into my music and making me see it from a different angle than I’d ever seen it before. In addition there’s another interview with me by John Ruscher on BOMB magazine about my Cage book. There’s also a nice review of my Cage book by Robert Birnbaum at The Morning News. I’m all over the internet today. This, too, shall pass.

Here are two of the best tracks from Nada’s latest CD:

Vuk Kulenovic: Virginal (he lives in Boston now; some of the best Serbian composers escaped during the ’90s)

Irena Popovic: Silence and Nothing

It’s a small but rich and vibrant music scene, pretty much hidden away from the rest of the world due to unfortunate political developments of the last 20 years. One told me that their devotion to this exciting little scene is what keeps them going from day to day. My growing affection for the Serbian music world has taken me by surprise. I’ve tried my darndest to learn some Serbian, which they don’t expect any Westerner to do; their startled delight when I answer “Drago mi je” (“Glad t’ meet you”) is touching. And they found it hilarious that I thought Radno Vreme must be the Donald Trump of Serbia, because his name is on practically every downtown building. “Radno vreme,” it turns out, means “Hours of operation.” (Sava River in the evening, under a full moon:)

Ba da da da dum (bum, bum – bum, bum):

In case you didn’t get the onomatopoeia, that’s the blue, or grayish-blue, Danube. It begins at Donaueschingen (“fount of the Danube”) in Germany, and, unusually for a European river (they mostly flow north or south), flows eastward into the Black Sea. In the 1770s, ur-musicologist Charles Burney sailed down it to document musical activity in eastern Europe. Me, I’m currently lecturing at the University of the Arts of Belgrade. Half of the students I’ve met are doing projects in American music (Gershwin, Weill, Glass), and I have to assume with them a more detailed level of knowledge than I do with my American students. On the left, in front of her school, is my sponsor, Professor Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, a Nancarrow/Ligeti/Carter expert:

The school is across the street from this park:

Beograd means “white city,” and there must be some kind of zoning laws to keep it that way:

The National Museum is on the left here, the National Theater on the right, and a statue of 19th-century Serbian Prince Mihailo Obrenovic:

There’s a wonderful fortress and park where the Sava and Danube rivers flow together. Because of its strategic position, the city of Belgrade has been involved in 115 wars over the centuries, and razed to the ground 44 times, which explains to me why the drivers (I’ve been driving here) are so nervous and aggressive:

I love the way Serbians transliterate foreign names into their own language as we used to do, so that tabloids write about Dzordz Kluni (George Clooney), Sandre Bulok, and Meril Strip. (Mine would be Kajl Gen.) And it extends to scholarly publications about rock stars as well, as one can see in this biography of – can you guess the singer (name at the bottom, Dz being their letter for “J”)?:

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The paprika-packed Serbian meatballs are to die for. I’ve learned to say “Zelio bih casu viskija sa ledom, molim?” (“Can I get a whiskey on the rocks, please?”), and aside from that and a couple of legal Cuban cigars, what else do I need?

Today I ran across a box of audio cassettes that has been misplaced for years. Among many treasures are my interviews with Boulez, Yoko Ono, Trimpin, Ashley, Branca, Mikel Rouse, and a few others, plus about ten cassettes’ worth of Nancarrow. I thought the Boulez interview might be of particular interest. It took place in a hotel room in Chicago on October 27, 1987, when Boulez had come to perform Repons and conduct the Chicago Symphony in his Notations and other works. This was back when I’d only been at the Voice a few months, and I was interviewing him for the Chicago Reader, where I’d been free-lancing for five years. The whole interview is 67 minutes, and some of it is a little dated, talking about the impending possibility of classical music’s dying, which of course 22 years later we know is apparently not going to happen. But I’ll put up the most interesting snippets, totaling almost half, from the interview here:

Your generous responses to my little outburst about being tired of blogging certainly made it clear what most useful direction this blog can continue to go in. I may be out of ideas I haven’t expounded, but my file cabinets and hard drives are still chockablock with music that’s not in general circulation, and listeners are eager to have their experience widened. If I do no more than satisfy that longing, I will have felt that my trip to this planet was not in vain. If I become in the process sort of the Dick Cavett of avant-garde music, so be it.

One of the themes of my life has become something I never expected. I’ve based some large part of my career around documenting recent music not adequately represented by its score notation. It started with Nancarrow. His scores contain all of his notes, of course, but many of them, especially the late player piano studies, don’t provide as much explicit rhythmic notation as is actually inherent. After some brief acquaintance with Nancarrow’s music I formed a theory that, even when it looked like he was rather intuitively splashing notes onto the page, there was always some underlying tempo and even isorhythm to which everything referred. Some painstaking analysis with a little plastic millimeter ruler quickly bore me out, and I found further confirmation when I was able to consult his punching scores – from which he made his final scores, but omitted the messy tempo-grid information.

Since then I have stumbled upon a wealth of music whose score notation, if it exists at all, doesn’t adequately represent it. I reconstructed Dennis Johnson’s November from the recording and score fragments, and have spent time transcribing improvisations by Harold Budd, Elodie Lauten, and others. I’ve reconstructed some of Mikel Rouse’s ensemble music from parts and mathematical models. Harry Partch’s music is indecipherable as to pitch unless you know the various tablatures of his instruments, and, in the case of his Kitharas, I’m told that you can’t figure out the music without knowing how to play the instrument.

Lately I’ve finally been studying a rather sketchy 392-page score to Meredith Monk’s 1991 opera Atlas that she was kind enough to give me years ago. Meredith refuses to have her singers learn music from notation because it detracts from a lively performance; she prefers to sing their lines and have them sing them back, as in Indian music. The Atlas score pretty much contains the instrumental parts verbatim, but some of the vocal parts are left blank on the page, indicating that they were to be developed in rehearsal. Scores to two of the most beautiful sections, “Choosing Companions” and “Agricultural Community,” contain no vocal parts at all. The “Ice Demons” music, when compared with the recording, shows how precise some of her notation is, how free it is in other places, and how free the singers were to ignore it in either case:

The whole score is a fascinating document of Meredith’s working method. Occasional passages are blanked out, omitted in rehearsal, and where the vocal rhythms (heard here) are exactly notated, the actual performance is often much freer:

It’s difficult to imagine improving on the unconventional notation of the “Shing Way” section, in which the singers sit in a circle and pass each pitch or figure linearly from one to another (recording here):

I don’t know whether, since 1991, Meredith has made a nicer, more complete score of Atlas, but why should she? This was adequate for a series of stunning performances, and it represents a starting point for the piece, not an end product in itself. Some musicologist could certainly prepare a nice final score using this and the recording as guides, but this one tells more about Meredith’s working method than an engraved Universal Urtext ever could.

The lack of scores is a big issue for studying Robert Ashley’s music as well; or rather, the discrepancy between his spare working scores, his “production notebooks” as he calls them, and the information overload on the recordings. Years ago when I analyzed Improvement: Don Leaves Linda with a class, Bob kindly gave me the complete MIDI files for the piece, but correctly warned me that they wouldn’t be much help. They were used to trigger events in primitve 1980s software that no current computer still supports, and it’s only here and there that one finds telling correspondences between the MIDI and the recording. Translated to notation, the MIDI files look something like this:

It’s possible that some tracks triggered only markers heard by the performers through headphones, and not by the audience.

More typically, Ashley’s actual scores contain the libretto marked out in numbered lines, surrounded by harmonic or melodic notations where needed, like this page from Dust:

Ashley takes on the problem of how someone else could perform his operas in an article called “Style and Technique: Performance Practice,” which is collected with his other writings in a dazzlingly huge and mind-challenging new collection of his writings from MusikTexte titled Outside of Time: Ideas about Music, which I will surely be writing more about later. “The solution,” he writes,

is to get all of the operas recorded in a finished form in the most recent format (now, compact discs). Anybody who wanted to produce one of the operas could work from the compact disc, which represents the way the opera is to be performed and how it is supposed to sound. Except for the rhythmic treatment of the words, which remains a notated constant, there is no score from which to make the orchestra. As I have said, the studio production notes for any opera will make little sense in the future, even if I could decipher them now, because they refer to instruments that will be long gone. 

He talks about a student writing a dissertation on Perfect Lives, to whom he had to explain that a score did not exist.

Kyle, please keep blogging regularly. Your metametrics posts literally changed my life when I was starting my undergrad. I am now waiting to hear from grad schools after sending them applications and writing samples covered in the names Branca, Chatham, and Gordon.

This comment to my last post sticks acupuncture-like into my reasons for blogging or not blogging, my attitude about teaching, and a lot of other aspects of my life. I never press minimalism, postminimalism, or totalism on my students. Some of my composition students are very ambitious, and want to go to grad school. I know that a knowledge of, let alone strong interest in, Partch, Branca, Diamanda Galas, Glass, Young, Mikel Rouse, Ashley, Art Jarvinen, and all these other nutcases I’m fascinated by – what I consider the great music of my time – will not be assets to an academic composing career. I know my students should be able to analyze Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Nancarrow, Webern, and what academia considers the canon. I feel guilty even trying to interest them in the music I most believe in, because while it might excite them artistically, I know that the best composition careers go not to the most exciting composers, but to those who follow the academic/classical script. Of course, if they come to me interested in that music, I eagerly supply them with all they want. I have two file cabinets bursting with unpublished and self-published scores of “my kind of music.” A handful of students, mostly grad students from other schools, have come to me precisely for that, but not one has ever taken advantage of more than a fourth of what I could offer in that area. Consider:

A few years ago, a few students asked me for a tutorial on minimalism, which I happily provided. One of my colleagues, finding out, became incensed with me, and shouted, “See? You’re influencing them! You’re influencing them!” – as though I weren’t supposed to do that. But in fact, the student who led the tutorial request was the son of a woman whose favorite composer was Steve Reich. I try not to influence my students toward my own aesthetic direction because I know it won’t help them career-wise.

I apply frequently for senior composition, theory, and history jobs, but I almost never get interviewed. My publication record is superb, I have excellent references from friends who chair departments at other schools, and my student satisfaction ratings are very high. I can only conclude that it is the content of my publications, my academically incorrect aesthetic position, that scares away other departments from considering me. Sure, I directed an international conference on minimalism – but minimalism remains a dirty word in academia. And why would I want to burden any of my students with the same disadvantages under which I labor?

And yet, aside from writing my music, which I secretly think is very good – one of my guilty pleasures – I think the most useful and fulfilling role I could play would be as a distribution channel for the commercially and academically unviable music I love. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than for someone to provide me with the money and wherewithal to scan those files cabinet’s worth of scores to create a Free Internet Library of Downtown Music, where students who have an interest in it, like Patrick above, could feast their eyes and ears on all this alternative music. But how could I do that in a world in which copyright difficulties won’t even allow me to write, “Creep into the vagina of a living,” etc., and in which even the word “Downtown” raises the hackles of the vast majority of musicians? As long as there was a Downtown scene in New York that provided an alternative career path for composers who don’t write the kind of music orchestras and those oh-so-precious classical musicians will program, there was a reason to continue this work. Incorrigible heretic that I am, I believe that there still is a Downtown scene: you’ll find it in organizations like Anti-Social Music and New Amsterdam Records, among others, in which young composers take the distribution and performance of their music into their own hands, which is virtually a definition of Downtown. But even the young composers involved today seem uninterested and unknowledgeable about the music I’ve spent my life immersed in. Downtown New York has always been that way: each new crowd comes in, and has little feeling of connection with the dominant crowd that preceded it. Bang on a Can shrugged off free improv, just as Zorn shrugged off minimalism. And I find myself working night and day for a musical generation that has been shrugged off Downtown, and of course doesn’t exist for academia or the classical music organizations.

Frankly, I’m 54, and I’m dog-tired of working as hard as I’ve worked all my life. But more accurately, I think I would be happy to continue doing the work if considerably more reward and acceptance came as a result. I’ve been on a big scanning spree during this winter break – mostly of scores I plan to teach in upcoming semesters, and largely because I save a ton of trees by projecting the music on a screen in class rather than Xeroxing it. But I also keep scanning scores of the postminimalist music I like to lecture on, and one score I scanned this week was Carolyn Yarnell’s The Same Sky, which I think is one of the most fantastic keyboard works anyone’s written in the last 20 years. I’ve made it available here before on mp3, and I do so again here, also with part of the score, which I think Carolyn will be rather complimented than annoyed by:

Kathleen Supové is the pianist. [UPDATE: By the way, notice that the sole dynamic marking is the mf at the beginning. The second dynamic marking is a pp on page 8. Welcome to postminimalism.] I hope to get time to analyze the piece sometime, so I’ll have more to say about it. What would be even more gratifying would be if I inspired some student to analyze it and send me the paper. I wish I could direct this activity specifically toward the younger musicians who would find it interesting, and not toward those who reflexively find it Not Serious. I rarely get to feel that such efforts are worth the amount of work I put into them. I seem more often penalized for my expertise than rewarded for it. But to the extent that this blog has a purpose, this is where I see it. It is not a very efficient medium, but it is almost the only medium I have, aside from the laborious producing of books.

As always, the number one and inviolable rule of this blog is, if you don’t like the music, I don’t want to hear from you, and will not publish your response. It would be unfair to Carolyn to get criticized on the internet as a result of my momentary appropriation of her work. If you don’t like the music, ask yourself why you think it’s important for the world to know you don’t. What good does an expression of your disapproval serve? None of the composers I champion is getting rich off their efforts; most of them are eking out extremely slim careers. They and I wield no power over others that needs be combatted. By criticizing, you merely add your voice to an enormously well-supported status quo that will thrive nicely without your reinforcement.

In other words, if I can figure out how to get this blog to more efficiently serve the grandest purpose I can imagine for it, without wasting energy on all the other stuff that serves no purpose at all (like defending the music and my terminology), I will gladly keep doing that. And if I figure out some other medium that would be more productive and rewarding, I will switch to that – even if it turns out to be something less public.

What an amazing first day of the 2nd International Conference on Minimalist Music. Maarten Bierens from Belgium demonstrated how Louis Andriessen’s subtly subversive use of quotations gave his music a dialectical significance quite foreign to American minimalism; Pwyll ap Sion detailed the amazing range of self-quotation in Michael Nyman’s output. But what blew me away were three papers on Phill Niblock by Keith Potter, Richard Glover, and Rich Housh, who had gotten access to Phill’s files and could exhibit the varied ways he shapes his slowly moving drones. Apparently, Phill’s music has taken on a new life since he started working directly in ProTools, which gives him greater control over the out-of-tuneness of his pitch clusters. As UMKC musicologist Andrew Granade remarked to me, we’ve each known maybe three people in academia before now who had even heard of Niblock, and suddenly the room was full of Niblock aficionados, shouting answers to each other’s questions and deconstructing his music as matter-of-factly as if it was Mahler and we all had the Kalmus scores. Suddenly, “drone minimalism” is a topic that can hold its own against repetitive minimalism, as though it had been all along. What a feeling, sitting there and watching the official history of music reel, switch trajectory, and transform itself around you!

Curtis MacDonald has made a piece with samples of Conlon Nancarrow’s player pianos, which don’t sound like normal pianos. On one of them Conlon covered the hammers with steel straps, on the other he put leather straps capped with a metal tack. Like Lou Harrison’s tack piano, they sound harsh and kind of honky-tonk, almost like harpsichords, and Conlon clearly came to rely on the extra clarity they gave his thick polyphony; I once heard Study No. 48 on a regular big Disklavier grand, and it sounded like mush. MacDonald’s piece makes me realize that someone needs to go to Basel and sample the original Nancarrow player pianos, as Mikel Rouse did for the prepared piano of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes: partly so we can make our own true realizations of Nancarrow’s pieces, and partly to compose with those wonderfully wacky tones ourselves.

You know, I’m sitting here in my office doing creative work on Digital Performer, and I’ve had a couple of Nancarrow queries lately from people doing intensive analytical work on him, and it occurs to me that I’ve got all these Nancarrow player piano rolls as MIDI information on my computer, including more than 60 that were found in his studio that don’t correspond to the canonical studies (and I do mean canonical, not canonic). Nancarrow was hypercritical of his own music, and, I think, consigned to oblivion some pieces just as good as some of the ones everyone knows. Many of the unidentified rolls are mere fragments or tempo experiments, and some, highly restrictive in pitch, are presumably for the roll-driven percussion machine he invented that never worked right and was abandoned. But some are fully fleshed out, quite impressive pieces. These tend to be a little more abstract than Nancarrow’s usual style, and perhaps he thought the ideas didn’t come across strongly enough. So here are five of the unknown rolls to listen to, lettered the way Trimpin lettered the rolls as he found them:

Roll A
Roll MM
Roll R

Romantic roll
Roll with “hello”

I have to say, this has become one of the most richly fulfilling summers I’ve ever had. On one hand I’ve done all this work on piano recordings by Harold Budd and Dennis Johnson, plus a long John Luther Adams analysis I’m finishing and my Robert Ashley biography (3000 words written today, after hours of composing); on the other, recording my piece The Planets with Relache, and then a slew of music rushing out of me lately, with a ten-minute microtonal piece written this week (of which more soon), and two other new pieces begun in the same span.

Cage wrote a mesostic for Nancarrow that reads, “oNce you / sAid / wheN you thought of / musiC, / you Always / thought of youR own / neveR / Of anybody else’s. / that’s hoW it happens.” I think I probably could have been as reclusive as Nancarrow, had not economic necessity forced me into the public life of music criticism. But I certainly am not like Nancarrow in this other respect. A life exclusively focused on my own music seems unimaginable. My musicological work feeds my composition, and vice versa. When I’ve been doing too much critical work and not composing, I get cranky; and when I’ve been composing continuously, I dry up a little, and I start to need the interaction with the music of others. It’s not that I steal so many ideas from other composers, though of course I never scruple to do that. Nothing about the other people’s music I’m working on went into the piece I just finished, though I do absorb inspiration from the brilliant things Ashley says, and Budd always reconfirms my love for the major seventh chord. I just need that rejuvenation from other artist’s ideas, the mere presence of simpatico music I didn’t write.

I seem not to be unique in this respect among my close contemporaries. Larry Polansky, a far more prolific composer than myself, has done loads of important musicological work on Ruth Crawford, Johanna Beyer, and Harry Partch, not to mention running Frog Peak Music for the publishing of other composers’ music. Peter Garland, in between writing his own wonderful pieces, published the crucial Soundings journal for many years, and made available the music of many who didn’t seem so obviously important at the time as they do now. Some of us need this close interaction with the music of our contemporaries. Nor does it seem like just an American thing. Schumann certainly spent a lot of his career inside other composers’ heads, and seems to have enjoyed having a trunkload of Schubert’s manuscripts in his apartment, from which to draw for the occasional world premiere whenever he fancied. Liszt played the piano music of every significant contemporary except Brahms (who offended him by falling asleep at the premiere of Liszt’s B minor Sonata).

Part of it is what I think Henry Cowell sensed: that there’s no such thing as a famous composer in a musical genre no one’s heard of, and so one’s personal survival depends on a rising tide raising all boats. But Morton Feldman also tells a story of an artist in the ’50s who, after seeing Jackson Pollock’s first astounding exhibition of drip paintings, remarked, “I’m so glad he did it. Now I don’t have to.” And Feldman adds, for thoughtful emphasis, “That was not an extraordinary thing to say at the time.” Some of us do have this feeling that art is a collective activity, that it’s not all about ourselves. I hear an exquisite piece like John Luther Adams’s The Light Within, and I do think, somehow, “I’m so glad he did it, now I don’t have to” – partly because I want to hear that kind of ecstatic wall-of-sound genre, and he can so it much better than I could. Mikel Rouse’s music is so much more sophisticated than my intentionally naive fare, but listening to him gets me back on track. I listen to Eve Beglarian’s music, and I hear things I might have been tempted to do, but she’s got them covered. These aesthetically close colleagues free me up to pursue what I do best, but I somehow need to participate in their achievements by analyzing them and writing about them. 

We Americans are taught to worship individuality, in art above all, but there is a strong collective aspect to creativity that many composers strenuously ignore or deny. I have no idea why I’m so attuned to it, especially being as anti-social as I am by temperament. But I do know that if anyone ever regrets that I had to write all these books and articles instead of working non-stop on my own music, they will have missed the point. It’s all the same thing.

Here’s a query that came up with a student the other day. Decades ago, in the early ’80s, my wife and I attended the wedding in Chicago of a couple of Hispanic friends. The reception was marked by the most amazing music played by a huge mariachi band: over half a dozen brass players, multiple guitars, wild percussion. It was hot, rhythmically intricate stuff whose meters were difficult to parse, and whose melodies took several repetitions to pin down. Le Sacre‘s complexity paled before it. If it wasn’t in meters like 13/8 or 17/16, I couldn’t have proved it myself. The counterpoint had more voices than I could count. I was spellbound. I had never heard anything like it.