Search Results for: nancarrow

I’ll bet that if you ran a new-music series and gave composers the following choice – “We’ll either give you a $500 honorarium, or you can have $100 and talk about yourself to the audience for 20 minutes” – almost all composers who aren’t in dire financial straits would choose the latter option. When the subject is ourselves, we do not like to shut up. I was on a panel of composers last night preceding the Cutting Edge series concert at Symphony Space, and the desire to chatter on was palpable. William Bolcom was the grand old man of the group, and seemed accustomed to occupying a stage by himself; we all deferred to him and let him talk most. Two of the other composers had, in fact, been students of his. Composer Victoria Bond, who runs the series, has clearly been in the moderation business a long time. She cut off each composer as graciously as though he had come to the end of a prepared text.

Whence comes this intense desire for self-expression? The yearning to have our music played, the prestige of gigs, the need to get money for our work, are all easily understandable. But why do I want the audience to know, before it hears my music, that I studied with Ben Johnston? Victoria drew a tentative connection between a vernacular element in my work and the fact that I’m from Dallas, and I slightly bridled at being thought of as a “Dallas composer.” Why? How silly. Do we imagine we’ll be the more admired if we say something clever? that some credential we bring up offhandedly will convince someone to give our music a more serious listen? Why does the picture our music draws seem so incomplete? The desire isn’t quite universal. Conlon Nancarrow was famous for answering series’ of long questions with a bare yes or no. Frederic Rzewski seems to use the interview format to prevent people from learning anything about him. But most of us are pathetically eager for an opportunity to represent ourselves, to draw a picture of our character for the audience. And, being so, we naturally bend over backward not to appear so. Every composer learns to efface himself in such situations, to substitute for some unyielding conviction a gentle joke that signals that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. We take turns out-modesting each other. We sensitize ourselves to the slightest clue that the interviewer is ready to move on. We conform, chameleonlike, to whatever level of discourse our peers launch into.

I’m old enough to recall when composers spoke more dogmatically and aggressively in public. Back in the day when we tended more to be judged by the intricacy and objectivity of our systems, we were more given to explanation. Composers informed the audience what to listen for, detailed their patented pitch methods, proclaimed their allegiances to this school or that. Of course we all know why this went out of favor. The audience didn’t much care about those pitch systems anyway, and rarely heard what we told them to hear. We were shamed out of that dogmatic technical mode, and scarred by the aesthetic battles that were its context. Next, starting in the late 1980s, came the “influences” trope: “My influences include….” For the liberal among us, “my influences” generally included Arnold Schoenberg and John Lee Hooker, or Brian Ferneyhough and the Sex Pistols – to prove to the audience that though we were intellectuals, we weren’t snobs.

These days it’s all personal. Paul Yeon Lee heard his piece in a dream. Derek Bermel got his compositional idea from listening to foreign-language tapes. William Bolcom talked about underrated musicians he had known. Mark Grey extolled the colors of the light in the valley in Austria where he lives. I talked about visiting Nancarrow in Mexico City. After the bad old days in which composers used to impress their audiences with technical expertise and quasi-scientific musical mandates, we seem to be on a huge swingback, more modestly just trying to convince the audience that we’re nice, down-to-earth guys. (I don’t mean to single out this concert at all: I’ve been noticing this phenomenon for more than a decade, and used to write about it at briefer length in the Village Voice.) The prestige of the modern composer has fallen so far that I think the reflexive self-effacement is a true reflection of the perception that society doesn’t take composers very seriously anymore. Still recoiling from the days in which we were all trying to be the next Stockhausen, now we’re all trying to convince the audience members that we’re just like them, except we write music. In front of an audience of complete amateurs this has one effect, but seems a little different in front of the musically sophisticated listeners that the Cutting Edge Concerts seem to attract, or so it felt. Despite the thousands of hours we put into honing our compositional philosophies, we’re afraid to be leaders, or to pretend to be experts.

But we composers have more to say than this. What did it mean that Bolcom’s trio had clear, vernacular-tinged rhythms couched in a bracingly dissonant pitch language? Or that Grey’s A Rax Dawn for piano was precisely the opposite, lushly Romantic in its harmonies but fluidly mercurial and complex in its rhythms? What do such choices have to do with our strategies for reaching an audience? In 2009, each of us can choose any musical language he fancies; what philosophic or social concerns guide our choices? How are composers responding to the world financial crisis? The response in 1933 couldn’t have been starker: abstract, dissonant music was abruptly discredited, writing music for the masses was in, and quoting Appalachian folksongs got you extra credit. What’s our response now? Some of us pitch our music toward audiences, quoting or appropriating whatever elements might draw them in. Others devoutly believe in autonomous personal expression, and are content with however small an audience their idiosyncrasies attract. How are we dealing with the ascendence and hegemony of commercially supported pop music? 

No one wants the aesthetic battles of the 1980s to return, but by now we ought to be able to address big issues without dogmatism. I, personally, regret the lack of substantive dialogue in the current new-music scene, but it seems symptomatic of our current condition. Privately, I imagine we are all still inspired by Big Ideas – I know I am – but publicly, we hide their effect. Perhaps we’re in too mushy a period to draw coherent distinctions. We’re split into subcultures, and no one wants to offend anyone else. Everyone feels a little helpless. No generalizable new language beckons. The personal seems safe, unthreatening. But where are the important issues facing early 21st-century music to be delineated? Certainly not by critics, who don’t understand the compositional issues at stake. Some of us composers are desperately trying to reach the audiences who fled from late modernism, but reluctant to admit that fact. Others continue in a straight line determined by their education, and don’t want to confront the popularity issue at all. I envy the discourse of novelists reviewing other novelists in the Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books: writing words about someone else’s words, they take on big issues, and are not reduced to personalities. I’ve spent thousands of hours contemplating what kind of music I ought to be writing, and I wish I could get out in public with other composers and work out the why and wherefore, rather than retreat into whatever personal tidbits of my life seem relevant to the piece at hand.

I came home and dreamed that I was ineffectively singing the Grandpa role in a school production of Copland’s The Tender Land (of which I bought a vocal score last week). The second act was taken up by a long monologue by the heroine Laurie’s rebellious little brother, whom I’d never noticed in the opera before – because he doesn’t exist. I’m still trying to figure that one out.

If you’re in the Bard area, tomorrow afternoon I’m sponsoring a talk on Serbian music by my musicologist friend Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, who’s in the States researching Cage’s early music for one of her many projects. She’s a fantastic scholar, obsessed with detail, and has taught me a lot about Nancarrow from his correspondence – I’m trying to convince her she’s the perfect person to write a biography. Here she’ll be going through the variety of 20th-century Serbian music, talking most importantly about Ljubica Maric (1909-2003), Serbia’s national innovative modernist. The talk’s Thursday, April 16, at 4, Room 217 in the Blum music building at Bard College.

We in American music owe a great debt to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Those two have so cheapened and tainted the word “maverick” that it will be at least a generation, maybe two, before anyone will be able to use the word non-ironically again. And that means, surely, that there will be no more talk about the “American maverick composers.” 

Please pardon my self-indulgence in mentioning this, but musicologist Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic sends me an excerpt from a letter she found in the Paul Sacher Stiftung from Nancarrow to Charles Amirkhanian, and she insists that I blog it. It says,

I forgot to tell you, Kyle Gann is going to do my biography. Before I went to Germany he was here for a few days and we had a very pleasant visit. I had never heard of him before, but he brought a cassette of his music, and apart from being very simpatico he is a very good composer.

…and that is commercialism as I need it. I have ongoing doubts about the propriety of taking off three months of my life to write a Cage book. I never aspired to be a Cage scholar. By the late ’80s so many people were doing excellent work on him that I just bowed out. I have a phobia about competition, and I despise duplicating the work of others. I got a blast from analyzing all of Nancarrow precisely because I was learning so many things no one else yet knew. Years ago Oxford asked me to write a Charles Ives biography. Few things would have given me greater pleasure than spending two years immersed in Ivesiana, but Jan Swafford’s superb biography had just appeared, and the idea of taking all that time away from composition to awkwardly paraphrase what Jan had already said so eloquently just wasn’t conscionable. Yet here I am, and I have nothing to say about 4’33” that hasn’t been said before, and better. If I come up with a single original insight by the time I finish this book, I’ll be as surprised as anyone. 

Luckily, the book is intended for a general audience. It’s part of a Yale University Press series called “American Icons.” The other volumes in process so far concern the Empire State Building, the Superman comic book series, and the Marlboro Man. This last sounds like the one to bet on: the Marlboro Man was invented because Marlboro started out as a women’s cigarette, and they started trying to market it to men. But then the Marlboro Man (before he got lung cancer) became a gay icon, so in a sense he came full circle. How much more fun does that sound like than a book on five minutes of silence?

The sad fact is, though, that this book will advance my reputation in musicological circles far more than the postminimalism book I should be working on. As I’ve noted often before, a musicologist’s reputation is proportionate to the square of the fame of the composer he’s an expert on. Explaining Mikel Rouse and David First and Eve Beglarian to the world will make me more an oddity than an expert. Writing a Cage book won’t put me up with the Beethoven and Bach savants by a long shot, but it will zoom me up near the top of the relatively small 20th-century heap. Quality and content play little part in this dispensation.

And yet that’s not at all why I’m doing it: I’m more doing it in spite of that. I would rather spit in the eye of every musicologist in Christendom than lift a finger to achieve status in such an artificial, unthinking heirarchy. A couple of friends have been kind enough to tell me that I’m a better composer than writer, and I would like to think so. Personally, I believe that my most important contribution to the world is the extent to which I have developed just intonation into a broader musical language, with deep roots in tonal practice and tremendous ramifications for future usage, and if I had my druthers, which I don’t, I’d infinitely prefer to be remembered for that. I have no ambitions at all as a musicologist, beyond righting the wrongs that good composers of my generation have suffered.

So why am I doing this? Because the opportunity arose, offered by an editor who’s an old friend, with a generous advance attached, and, in a Cagean spirit, I grabbed it. Because Cage played a tremendous role in my youth and only a peripheral role in my adulthood to date. Because Zen was a wonderully energizing influence on my life in the ’70s and early ’80s, and I’ve been too long divorced from it. Because he was a wonderful man, and his personal example laid an indelible imprint on my life. (Among other things, I think I absorbed from Cage the lesson that being a prolific and controversial writer can help augment one’s reputation as a composer.) So ultimately my motivations are self-serving, in the deepest possible sense: to get back to my roots, to backtrack over where I came from, to figure out why, at age 17, performing 4’33” in public seemed like such an important thing to do. To revisit those high school days in which I enthusiastically played the Everest recording of Variations IV for my theory class, with my teacher and classmates all terribly dubious as to whether that was actually music. As of June 8 I’m at the beginning of a new 30-year astrological cycle in my life, and I needed to reorient myself. I’m at a lull in my compositional activity, with many large projects just completed and new ones still vague in my mind. And I’m hoping, hoping against hope, that newly understanding 4’33” and the rest of Cage’s post-1950 output, as an adult, will propel me, as a composer, in a new and hopefully completely unexpected direction.

At long last composer Julio Estrada tells me that my book on Conlon Nancarrow is now available in Spanish, from the University of Mexico Press. I’m awaiting a copy in the mail. Here (in the right column) is the only advertisement I can find for it. Espero que seas ayudado por esta publicación.

The Stefan Wolpe Society has just sent out its 2007 newsletter (PDF), which is worth reading if you like Wolpe’s music. I do, immensely. Of all the modernist-atonalists of the mid-century, he was my favorite, yet of all the composers whose music I’m nuts about, his is the most difficult to justify to people who don’t get it. I think of his as the music I wanted Elliott Carter’s to be, but Wolpe’s seems tremendously more focused, more taut, more playful, and easier to follow intuitively – if still, at times, mystifying. I’ve always liked the story that Wolpe used to compose while watching fish in his fish tank, making his notes dart, freeze, and scatter as the fish would do. Sometimes he could use abstract hexachords in a way that jumped out and made you notice. Studying piano with a Wolpe student at Oberlin my freshman year (Tom Simon, anyone know his whereabouts?), I was assigned the piano piece Form, and fell in love. That opening little six-note motif – Ab F Bb A G E – returns so playfully as theme, chord, pitch set, riff, tone row, that you really hear it come back in a dozen unexpected guises. Form IV: Broken Sequences is even better, and I love the Trio, the Quartet with saxophone, the Chamber Piece No. 1, the elegant String Quartet, the enchanting Ten Songs from the Hebrew. Such brash, brainy, acerbic music, yet not afraid to be completely obvious at times. I like Enactments for three pianos, too, though without understanding it; I feel like an ant crawling across a late Jackson Pollock mural. I am told that the Mario Davidovsky crowd did not like to hear Wolpe’s name mentioned – he wasn’t systematic enough – and if true, I’m not surprised. He was out of their league.

The Wolpe newsletter’s major offering is a detailed account of the origins of his one Symphony – not one of my favorite Wolpe works, and a little stiff, but the article (without admitting that) explains why: Leonard Bernstein insisted that he greatly simplify the notation, which, originally, was presumably in his usual metrically fluid style. It’s difficult to orchestrate goldfish.

My fondness for Wolpe brings up a point about Bernard Holland’s bittersweet review yesterday of George Perle’s music, whose atonality-bashing will probably earn him another broadside from Counter-Critic (a website that, no longer being a critic, I thoroughly enjoy). I’ve always sympathized with Holland on this issue, yet I disagree with his terminology. Much of Holland’s take is thoroughly common-sensical:

It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off. I admire the Webern; I even like it for its strangely satisfying space-age spirituality. I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms.

Touché! On the other hand:

Until the 20th century musicians obeyed natural laws of physics. Pick up a rock, drop it, and it falls to the ground. Music was the same. Send a piece of music up in the air, doctor and twist it, make it major, minor or modal; in the end it wants to come down to where it started. You can call the process tonality or music’s law of gravity.

Of course, almost no composer is going to accede to this. (In fact, psychological studies have shown that musicians couldn’t care less whether a piece comes back to the same key it started in.) Atonality is not the problem. Taking my students as a pristine and unncorrupted audience, there’s loads of wonderful atonal music that they glom onto at first listen, and beg for copies of (Ruggles’s Sun-Treader, most of Varèse, second movement of Berio’s Sinfonia, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, much of Nancarrow, Babbitt’s Philomel, Xenakis’s Pithoprakta, Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna, Branca’s Tenth Symphony), and a lot of atonal music that instantly turns them off (Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet, Webern’s Symphony, Babbitt’s Post-Partitions). Hell, there’s a lot of atonal rock music. 

As Philomel, Sinfonia, Gruppen, and Piccola Musica Notturna show, even 12-tone organization is not the issue. It strikes me that the deciding factor is whether or not the listener senses that there is some organizational factor that you’re supposed to be hearing that can’t be located by ear, whether the meaning of the piece is buried somewhere underneath the surface. That quality seems to be more what Holland objects to about Perle than the mere lack of tonality. I was dumbfounded by the quotation Alex Ross in his book unearthed from Boulez; asked why the serial pieces of the ’50s never became standard repertoire, the meister admitted, “Perhaps we didn’t pay enough attention to how people listen.” In general, and as evinced by a thousand film scores, atonality tends to express anxiety, and much of the music, like Sun-Treader, that freely acquiesces to that is extremely effective. But Wolpe’s output is Exhibit A that music can be relentlessly atonal and also whimsical, jaunty, and attractive. 

Our critics need to find a rhetoric in which to discuss the issue that does not make atonality the fall guy. For a splendid counter-example, I highly recommend Justin Davidson’s recent review of Elliott Carter, which elegantly captures, in words I couldn’t better myself, my own disappointed feelings about that composer’s post-1954 music.

Lawrence Dillon posts a charming anecdote from when he was in grad school, of having had three professors in a row begin classes by asking every student to define “music.” The first funny part is that all three thought it profound to begin with that question. The second funny part is that, after the students had stumbled through various answers, all three professors gave their own definitions to the effect that music is a form of personal expression. Lawrence calls this “nonsense” and “tough to defend as a thesis,” but it is one of those things that I’ve heard tumble out of composers’ mouths many times over the years as a well-learned cliché. Poke a preoccupied composer in the ribs unexpectedly, and certain phrases emerge spontaneously: “Program notes aren’t important, the music should speak for itself”; “Labels and -isms are limiting, it’s all just music”; “Music’s importance is as a form of self-expression.” None of these mean anything, and I’ve never seen anyone arrive at one of them through actual cogitation, they’re just things that composers pick up from the culture and learn to parrot in self-defense, or to avoid responsibilities they don’t want to deal with. 

The “personal expression” meme may be generational; it seemed particularly intense back in the ’70s when many composers were threatened by the “mathematical” techniques of serialism. I theorize, though my knowledge of the history is vague, that it got a tremendous boost from the “express yourself” philosophy of child education in the ’50s and ’60s. I remember as a child having colorful orchestral music played on a record in art class, and being told to paint whatever the music inspired. The liberational trends of the time decreed that discipline was stultifying, and that the glory of art was the freedom it allowed for self-expression. Zip ahead 20 years and you get the identity politics art of the ’80s: that lesbians make lesbian art, Blacks make Black art, and so on. Eventually even White men make guilty-White-male art, and I write an opera about Custer.

But in the more august tradition of the history of aesthetics, Lawrence is right: that’s not a thesis. Back in the ’50s, while we toddlers were being encouraged to slap paint onto posterboard to reveal what kind of mood we were in, one man was going to extreme lengths to remove any mark of his personality from his music: I mean, obviously, John Cage. If you read Cage’s Silence, compiled from essays written in those years, it’s curious how much of what he says was cribbed from ancient, Christian, and Eastern sources, from Meister Eckhardt, Diasetz Suzuki, Dame Julian of Norwich, Gita Sarabji, Zen writings. One of Cage’s models, whom I discovered through Silence, was the Ceylonese philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), who became curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and one of the leading early explicators of Eastern art for the West. (I quote in my previous blog entry a wonderful passage of his I ran across researching this one.) 

Coomaraswamy had written an important little book titled Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, in which he claimed that up until modern times the Eastern and Western worlds had shared a unified philosophy of art, from which the Euro-American world departed in favor of a shallow individualism. You get the impression in Silence that Cage and Lou Harrison were combing through this ancient worldview for some more permanent base for their aesthetics of music than contemporary culture offered. In Coomaraswamy’s view, which they encountered, beauty is “the attractive power of perfection.” (p. 28) He continues,

…beauty is objective, residing in the artefact and not in the spectator, who may or may not be qualified to recognize it. The work of art is good of its kind, or not good at all; its excellence is as independent of our reaction to its aesthetic surfaces as it is of our moral reaction to its thesis. (pp. 28-29)

This sounds like great comfort for 12-tone composers, but the Perennial Philosophy of which Coomaraswamy speaks also entails that every work of art be made for a social purpose, not as mere decoration or for aesthetic contemplation. Here’s what he has to say about self-expression:

There is also a sense in which the man as an individual “expresses himself” whether he will or no. This is inevitable, only because nothing can be known or done except in accordance with the mode of the knower. So the man himself, as he is in himself, appears in style and handling, and can be recognized accordingly. The uses and significance of works of art may remain the same for millennia, and yet we can often date and place a work at first glance. Human idiosyncracy us thus the explanation of style and of stylistic sequences: “style is the man.” Styles are the basis of our histories of art, which are written like other histories to flatter our human vanity. But the artist whom we have in view is innocent of history and unaware of the existence of stylistic sequences. Styles are the accident and by no means the essence of art; the free man is not trying to express himself, but that which was to be expressed. Our conception of art as essentially the expression of a personality, our whole view of genius, our impertinent curiosities about the artist’s private life, all these things are the products of a perverted individualism…. In all respects the traditional artist devotes himself to the good of the work to be done. The operation is a rite, the celebrant neither intentionally nor even consciously expressing himself. It is by no accident of time… that works of traditional art, whether Christian, Oriental or folk art, are hardly ever signed: the artist is anonymous… In traditional arts it is never Who said? but only What was said? that concerns us….

You’ll recall Harry Partch saying something similar in the documentary The Dreamer that Remains, that, “Of course, I’d prefer to remain anonymous… Who cares what the name was?” 

Well, thank goodness we have this ancient philosophy to rescue us from the panicky responsibilities of self-expression. Because who among us has a personality fascinating enough that audiences will still want to hear an expression of it fifty years hence? Certainly not me. Balding, pot-bellied theory professor with few social graces, ranked as a scintillating conversationalist somewhere between Conlon Nancarrow and Calvin Coolidge, I’ve got no self-expression to offer that an experienced psychotherapist wouldn’t have heard dozens of times before. If I relied on my self-expression to make my music remarkable, I might as well quit writing it today. John Luther Adams is a lovely guy, but not the kind of larger-than-life character toward whom all heads turn as he enters a room; his music is great not because it tells us all about JLA, but because it takes on some of the largest issues the human race can tackle. His music is huge because he himself is so modest. Bill Duckworth is not so Oscar Wildish that his witticisms, once uttered, ripple through New York social society, but every time I play his music for friends they buy the CD: because his music achieves a kind of perfection of proportion and appropriateness of melody to form. He puts his music together from elements – chant, the Fibonacci series, bluegrass patterns, shaped-note singing, Messiaen-like rhythms – he found outside himself. Some of the most eccentric personalities I’ve met produced forgettable music. Yet Cage had one of the 20th century’s most fascinating personalities, and went further than anyone else in an effort to keep his music from expressing it. He was the living embodiment of something T.S. Eliot said: 

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

One might compare another quotation of a quotation from Charles Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata:

“The nearer we get to the mere expression of emotion,” says Professor Sturt in his “Philosophy of Art and Personality,” “as in the antics of boys who have been promised a holiday, the further we get away from art.”

Clearly, it’s the things outside ourselves that our music expresses that give it importance. The finer gradations of harmony that microtonality offers, the wheels-within-wheels implied by different tempos rotating against each other, echoing the motions of the planets, were there long before I came to them, and would have remained had I never paid attention. That Michael Gordon, Mikel Rouse, and I manifest those rhythmic constants differently is inevitable given idiosyncrasies in training and personality, but the random idiosyncrasies do not account for the effect of the music. Lawrence’s teachers may have been among those who feared that music would become too “mathematical,” but how much recent music is as lovely to hear as Jim Tenney’s player-piano piece Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow, based on a mathematical algorithm that anyone else could have calculated, had they thought of it? It is perfect of its kind, the number system made audible. By grasping something from the world of Platonic ideals and making it perceptible, we attempt on behalf of others that bridging of the subjective and objective realms that humans yearn for to ease the contradictions of conscious existence. To remain in our own subjectivity would be of no help to anyone. The nature of language makes it easier to express the principle in terms of mathematical phenomena, but I don’t mean to exclude those whose creative paradigms are more emotional or psychic than arithmetical. 

It’s tempting to argue that music has gone downhill with the arrival of the “music is self-expression” trope, that for too many composers music has become merely self-expression, and therefore forgettable. One could argue cases, but I think it more likely that most composers talk one way and vote another, chattering about self-expression but actually, instinctively, probably continuing to do what musicians have always done. Even if self-expression were good philosophy, it’s ineffective rhetoric, and I think composers should drop it. It’s trivializing. Who cares if you express yourself? That might have benefits for you, but how about the listener? That’s what we tell kids in kindergarten to go do. We are important as composers not because we get things off our chest, but because we ascend into the supersensible world, bring parts of it down, and make them audible. If in so doing we accidentally express ourselves, well, it’s hard to avoid.

This Thursday at 2:30 I’m delivering the Poynter Fellowship lecture at Yale University. I’ll be illustrating the problems of my career by mixing up musicology, microtonal theory, and composition in one big indecipherable melange, with some rare scores and manuscripts by Nancarrow, La Monte Young, and myself and my contemporaries. It’s at William L. Harkness Hall, Room 207, 100 Wall Street, reception to follow. See ya there.

The opportunity to speak in an endowed musicological lecture series inspired me to talk about musicology itself for the first time in my life. I felt like I was going out on a limb a little, but these are thoughts I’d been having about what we need from musicology lately, and I hoped that some young musicologist or two might see this as an opportunity to return to the cause of new composed music, and do some much-needed good. In that spirit I post it here for a wider audience. The topics are pluralism, minimalism as a new historical era, and the problem with calling American composers “mavericks.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

One night in New York City after a concert I was having a drink with my fellow composer Larry Polansky. He was talking about the musicological and restorative work he was doing on music by Johanna Beyer and Harry Partch, I spoke of my analytical writings on the music of Conlon Nancarrow and Mikel Rouse. Finally, Larry said, “Composers are now doing the work that musicologists used to do, while the musicologists are all off doing gender studies.”

I am a composer, and have been composing music continuously since the age of 13. I have three degrees in music composition, and none in music history. And yet I have published two musicology books and quite a number of musicological articles. I was even hired at Bard College as a musicologist, not as a composer. I’ve presented papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society. I have always had a rather fanatical interest in music history, but I have no specific training that could be called musicological. I always go to musicology conferences half expecting to be exposed and thrown out as a charlatan, and the fact that it has never happened has led me to think of musicologists as being universally generous and good-natured people with a shrewd sense of humor.

That I am invited here today to give the Rey M. Longyear Musicology Lecture certainly preserves that impression. When I started college, the first music history textbook I was assigned was by Dr. Longyear, so my consciousness of the honor of the invitation is wrapped up with some very old memories.

But I never had any particular ambition in the field of musicology, and as my anecdote about Larry Polansky suggests, if the needs that composers have from the world of musicology were being satisfied by music historians, I probably would never have ventured into the field.

Several years ago Wiley Hitchcock, who passed away recently, asked me to write a final chapter, “Music Since 1985,” for the fourth edition of his textbook Music in the United States. Several months later, we had lunch, and he broke it to me that he wasn’t going to go ahead with a fourth edition. No one wanted to read narrative history anymore, he said, everyone was doing gender studies and reception histories and sociologies of vernacular music. “But Wiley,” I argued, “just because people are doing all those worthwhile things doesn’t mean that we can quit doing what music historians have always done. If someone doesn’t write down the basic facts of what’s happening, there won’t be any contemporary accounts of history for future gender studies scholars to work from.” I like to think I brought him around, and the fourth edition of Music in the United States did eventually appear.

There is a perception abroad that in the 1980s musicologists dropped the ongoing narrative of composed music, and when a narrative is discontinued, an impression is created that the story has ended. We composers need musicology, for an objective view of our field from the outside that can create a narrative that will make our activities make sense to the outside world and to ourselves. But for all the good that gender studies, reception histories, ethnomusicology, and histories of vernacular music do, the near blackout of attention to contemporary composing creates a public illusion that the new creation of classical music has come to an end. One reads a lot of dire warnings these days about the death of classical music, and if anything in the world could finally kill classical music, it is this illusion.

What I have to contribute to musicology is data and insights from the composing world, and I would like to use such evidence today to make suggestions on how to get the narrative going again. Literary critics talk about the “master narrative,” the large story behind all the individual stories that largely goes unstated and unacknowledged. Stories that contradict the master narrative often go disregarded, all the more so because the narrative itself has never been made conscious or explicit. I’d like to talk today about three narratives, two master narratives and one more explicit, that prevent the world from getting an accurate view of what’s going on in composed music today, and ask for your help in replacing them with livelier and more accurate stories.

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