Search Results for: nancarrow

My three weeks at Atlantic Center for the Arts flew by in a pleasant blur. Getting tremendous free tech support from the composers who came to work with me, I achieved my long-delayed goal of being able to play keyboards off of my new laptop, and wrote and performed a little 13-limit tuning study, Fugitive Objects, to celebrate the fact. But I was kept busier than the other composers, and composing took second place to a very helpful kind of networking. The nine of us met every afternoon; I taught a lot about microtonality, and they coached me on technological skills, everything from programming the “Dashboard” on my laptop to how to get microtones in Logic, the music software program that’s been declared verboten in the Bard College electronic studio, but that I’m about to buy and start using anyway. The more significant meetings, though, were those we had between 10 PM and 1:30 AM, where, over liberal amounts of single-malt scotch, we listened to tons of music from half a dozen iPods, as well as from my 13,000-mp3 hard drive. I got to know my composers’ music very well, and I am happy to introduce you to them – listing them in reverse alphabetical order:

Scott Unrein, a doctoral student at University of Missouri KC, was the one whose iPod so matched my own new music list that I started exulting when I found a rare piece he didn’t know – a feat in which he reciprocated all too often. He is a devotee of the quiet, atmospheric aesthetic typified by Jim Fox’s Cold Blue label, and his own music has migrated from a rhythmic, Reich-influenced postminimalism to a sustained lyricism of tenatative saxophone lines over tremoloing chords and ostinatos quite elegant in their simply metamorphosing logic. Scott’s also an active podcaster of new music, and his Nonpop station runs parallel to my Postclassic Radio and garners many times as many listeners.

Maria Panayotova, originally from Bulgaria but completing a doctorate at Cincinnati College-Conservatory, used to write soulful, metrically fluid acoustic music, often with vocals that evinced an almost unconscious-seeming influence of Balkan folk music, falling into lovely patterns of quick 5/8. In recent years, however, she has switched entirely to electronics, and has started making her own video as well, based in one case on geometric patterns found in forest images, and in another on a cute children’s story about a traffic light that baffled a town by starting to glow blue. An accomplished pianist, she embedded a section of Schumann’s Kinderscenen in the shimmering electronics of her In the Forest video, which became clearly audible after she pointed it out. She kindly introduced me to Soundhack, showed me how she did it, and now I’m Soundhacking away like a hipster.

Matt McBane recently moved to New York City from Los Angeles, where he has started an ensemble of violin (himself – no fewer than three of our composers were violinists), cello, bass, piano, and drums. The ensemble is yet unnamed, but has several upcoming performances booked, to which I’ll try to alert you. One of his formative experiences was conducting a performance of Reich’s Eight Lines, and his music is often marked by a fanatically detailed sense of slow textural transformation. A new work, Drivin’, replaces rests with notes in a maniacal 5/4 rhythm demanding a concentration that only the fearless enthusiasm of youth could negotiate, but other of his pieces are simpler and more pop-influenced.

Due to her formidable resumé and creative prolificity, Caroline Mallonée, who’s got a doctorate from Duke and teaches at the Walden School, earned for the duration the nickname “Alpha Male.” Carrie’s ambitious chamber pieces, such as Throwing Mountains, play off of permutational schemes developed as an expansion of Reich’s technique in Piano Phase (notice how often that name comes up?). Capable of the kind of bristlingly impressive ensemble works that are good for getting commissions, she also has a penchant for simple pieces exploring clear tonal and microtonal phenomena with a Tom Johnson-like directness, and the violin trio she whipped up for herself and her fellow violinists in the last few days explored the harmonic series in a fetching idiom of light folk fiddling.

Andrea La Rose was familiar to me, and will have been to many readers, as the feisty flutist-composer from New York’s Anti-Social Music ensemble who weighs in with considerable fire at Sequenza 21. She’s completing a dissertation on Rzewski at CUNY, and when a horoscope reading attributed to her an “excess of vitality,” it was considered apt enough to become a running gag. She writes high-energy music that usually forays into improvisation at points – thus the Rzewski interest – combining it with minimalist tendencies, so that some of her pieces achieve the odd effect of differing considerably from performance to performance, but maintaining a strong sense of identity in any one reading. I particularly admire her Concerto for Anyone (PDF available at her web site), an entirely instruction-based piece that so reduces concerto form to its essence that a concerto is bound to result no matter what players are used. Prolific and an expert performer, she’s bouncing among a dozen good ideas, and wherever she lands will doubtless cause merriment, consternation, insight, and possibly the End of Civilization As We Know It.

No description of Teresa Hron will sound very credible. A Canadian living in Amsterdam, Terri plays the recorder, travels with a bass recorder almost her own height – and is one of the most challenging rhythmic minds of the age. She studied Carnatic Indian music in India, absorbed unnerving subtleties of rhythm, and came home to apply them to music she plays with her recorder ensemble, as well as more pop-oriented groups with which she’s associated. So she sets up these long, complex isorhythms (e.g., 7 + 5 + 3 + 3, 7 + 5 + 3 + 3, 7 + 5 + 3 + 1), within which certain rhythmic motives recur at tempos of 4-against-3 and 7-against-5, often over the barline. It’s a notational nightmare, though, as she insists, the music is quirkily melodic, and doesn’t sound complex. I’d have declared her crazy, except that she played recordings of herself and her Dutch Indian-rhythm-aficionado friends performing her scores quite competently. Suffice it to say: I nearly fried my brain trying to disentangle her rhythmic structures, and I wrote the Nancarrow book.

(At the final concert Andrea and Terri played duets they had written using copious quantities of 4/6 and 5/6 meter, and if you think that’s impossible, then go back and read the “Rhythm” chapter of Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources.)

Jim Altieri I’ve written about here before, for he’s the genius who implemented John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen installation in Max/MSP. He’s the kind of guy who, if you muse aloud about some weird transformational effect you’d like to hear, will come to you the next day with a disc containing software he devised to effect it. One of the heirs to the James Tenney aesthetic, he’s writing (among other things) string pieces that glissando slowly through various overtone and undertone series’, elegantly simple in conception and quite sensuous and surprising in effect. He was also the third violinist, and much of his compositional technique is based on the fact that, like Tony Conrad, he can play microtonal intervals on his violin and bring out the difference tones and missing fundamentals quite clearly. (Jim and Carrie play together in a band called Glissando bin Laden and his Musichideen, but you didn’t hear about it from me.)

Along with Mike Maguire, whom I’ve already written about, that was the group. They impressed not only me but the poets, architects, and administrators at ACA with their omnipresent energy and professionalism. The final concert, in which most of them performed, was remarkable for its absence of reference to any 20th-century idiom – no hint was left that modernism had ever existed, and the future sounded wide open. I imbibed their musical optimism and curiosity like a healing nectar, and washed it down with 12-year-old Bowmore. You’ll be hearing more about them all, and not only from me.

(I’d also like to mention two alternate composers, who, had we had world enough and time, I wish could have joined us: Paula Matthusen, a composer of lovely music for voice and electronics, and Jacob Barton, a young take-no-prisoners microtonalist who’s already attracted attention in the pitch-splitting world. I hope to get to work with them someday as well.)

One of my expected pleasures of being here at the Atlantic Center for the Arts has been the opportunity to learn more about the music of M.C. Maguire. (I’ll introduce you to all my ACA composers presently, but Maguire, older than the rest, deserves his own day.) Mike’s a Canadian composer, used to live in Vancouver, but moved to Toronto four years ago, and makes his living making soundtracks for films, commercials, and the like. His work for hire is rather amazingly sophisticated, and you can hear his imaginative commercials for Nike, Smirnoff, Fruit Loops, and others here. But I first became aware of him via a torrential sound continuum called Seven Years on the 1989 Bang on a Can marathon, and I’ve been trying to figure him out ever since.

Because his music – wild, noisy, intense, relentlessly high-energy – is nearly opposite in style to most of the music I like, but it is nothing at all like most modernist music characterized by those qualities, and I always have to admire fanaticism. Most of his pieces are what he calls “concertos,” by which he means pieces for solo instrument accompanied/obliterated by tape or electronic soundfile layered with from 200 to 400 tracks. The noise periodically parts for pop references and quotations: lightly-altered pop songs, the scherzo from Bruckner’s Eighth, Brazilian pop, heavy metal, all cascading by like someone trying to find his favorite radio station during a hurricane. Two of his pieces, which he analyzed for us – Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ for guitar and tape and Short History of Lounge for piano and tape – will be released on the Tzadik label in May, and he had to alter some of the quotations to avoid copyright infringement. He claims that he replaced the vocal parts with vocalists singing software manuals in Portugese, but Mike’s humor is so dry that it’s hard to discern where reality ends and satire begins – probably somewhere within his music.

It turns out, though, that beneath all the wildness runs a detailed sense of proportion and structure as obsessive as that of the Berg Chamber Concerto or the middle studies of Nancarrow. Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ is based on 49 tonalities that alternately rise and descend by thirds. As Mike helpfully charted out on a blackboard for us, the piece ascends to chord 7, returns to 1, slogs its way up to 14, returns to 1, and so on until it finally climbs the mountain of 49. The central tonality is the E power chord of the guitar solo, and you can sometimes hear the music dramatically return to it via a circle of fourths – though Maguire’s moments of repose and respite start about where Mahler’s climaxes end. Short History of Lounge, its title notwithstanding, is – at least on paper – a conventional three-movement concerto form, though enlivened by background quotations and sections that greatly accelerate and decelerate. The finale runs through an incredible gradual deceleration from quarter note = 900 to quarter note = 4. The magnitude of such gestures leaves you exhausted. In retrospect, though, I should have figured that his sense of form was knitted together by obsessively detailed structure, because it would be extremely difficult to make music of such rich complexity without a plan to generate all the various moments: the musical analogue of Bruno’s Theater of memory.

I’ve included some Maguire on Postclassic Radio, but I’ve also uploaded Short History of Lounge here on my website, so you can hear it. It’s the easier-listening of the two pieces, if that term can be used in this case, and I’ll take it down when the CD appears in May, and remind you that it’s out. I can see why Zorn likes the music – perhaps a rare point at which our tastes overlap. Maguire’s not completely isolated in Canadian music, for his friend Paul Dolden also makes take pieces of mammothly superimposed hundreds of tracks, and has gained a little more attention for doing so. But with his peculiar blend of postmodern style juxtapositions, pop appropriations, and fanatical intellectual structure, I think Maguire’s the most original Canadian composer since R. Murray Schafer – and I don’t know Schafer’s music well enough to be certain the qualifier is necessary.

My biggest regret about my life is that I didn’t continue practicing piano. In 1982 I started typing instead, and that was that. Now I’m writing a piano concerto, and it would be energizing to imagine myself playing it with an orchestra someday – but that’s not going to happen. When I was 19, playing Chopin polonaises and Brahms rhapsodies along with my Wolpe and Rochberg, it would have seemed a possibility.

My other big regret is how seldom my intensely busy life allows me to see my close friends, who are scattered out from Alaska to Germany. A related regret is the difficulty of even keeping in sufficient touch by e-mail. The longest, most meaningful, most searching e-mails are the hardest ones to find time and mental space to answer. The succinct e-mails that require no reflection have a split-second turnaround time:

“Did you ever find a punching score for Nancarrow Study 13?”

“No.”

“Thanks.”

The e-mails that deserve a long, thoughtful response, not only from close friends but from strangers with strong mutual interests, pop up as I’ve just finished editing a recording and have to dash to the post office before it closes, and I make a mental note as I’m off to a concert, and I don’t get back to them that night while fifty more e-mails come in, and they start drifting down my e-mail box, and someday I have an hour to spare and I go searching for the e-mails I most wanted to answer. I imagine it’s the same for us all – the messages most deserving of a response hang in the ethernet as unanswered questions. The feeling of muted, unfulfilled, but tangible connectedness that remains, which the internet does much to reinforce (even if it also heightens our awareness of the facile negativity that flows around the world), will have to be sufficient consolation.

My “Progress Versus Populism in 20th-Century Music” class became a focus group for trying out recent musical styles. Time and again the students surprised me, never more than by their resistance to the attempt to fuse classical music with pop conventions. They just didn’t seem to see it as a worthwhile goal. The way I approached it was, many composers today grow up being trained in more than one genre – playing in a garage band in high school, playing jazz in college, studying classical history and composition – and they’re tired of having to compartmentalize. They want to be able to use all their chops in their music, and also to break down this wearying high-art/low-art divide that relegates fun and physicality to one arena and intellectual respectability to the other.

But my students couldn’t see it that way. They almost inevitably heard any attempt on the part of a classical composer to integrate pop elements as condescending. The very fact of notating a trap set pattern or a bass guitar riff seemed to locate a composer on the classical side of the divide, and render him guilty of appropriating something that wasn’t his. No amount of anecdotal evidence would convince them that these composers (we’re talking Mikel Rouse, Nick Didkovsky, Diamanda Galas, Michael Gordon, Mason Bates) had just as much respect for Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix as for Reich and Ligeti. They challenged me to find out what these composers really listened to at home for pleasure, and felt certain it wasn’t Metallica.

This biggest reaction came against someone I had considered an easy sell. I’d always thought that Nick Didkovsky’s music for his Doctor Nerve ensemble was the most seamless fusion of rock, jazz, and classical ingredients anyone ever pulled off. I started with Nick’s piece Plague, which you can click here to listen to. A few students liked the music, but the nay-sayers were vociferous. They thought he had stolen those guitar sounds from heavy metal and was, so to speak, emasculating them by scoring them in a tightly-played, notated arrangement. Some made a big issue about the music being played from sheet music (as I assume it is, it’s pretty complex) rather than being memorized – as if playing music from memory is the only way to give it pop authenticity. Some students were really indignant that a bunch of conservatory-educated musicians were stealing these precious pop drum and guitar riffs and sticking them in their sterile, intricately-notated scores.

I don’t quite know what to make of this. One thing that occurred to me is, the students have grown up with the commercial boundaries of pop and classical music starkly demarcated by the commercial industry; maybe asking them to rethink their boundaries on a first hearing is too much to ask. What I really can’t grasp, though, is how anyone can think that a particular sound can be reserved only for a certain kind of music. What’s so holy about an electric guitar pitch bend with distortion that no one outside of a rock group is allowed to use it? It’s like the objection, which I’ve often encountered, that no one should ever use a synthesizer because it sounds like ’80s rock. Imagine objecting to someone using a prepared piano because it sounds like John Cage’s music of the 1940s! And upon hearing Diamanda’s spine-tingling Plague Mass, they dismissed her for using so much reverb, “kind of an ’80s sound.” (I replied, “Well of course it’s an ’80s sound, it was made in 1988!”) Sometimes I think they’ve become so attuned to listening to production values that they can no longer perceive the basic content of pitches, rhythms, and text. I reflexively listen to a recording as a document of live music, but they clearly listen to an mp3 as having its own ontological status. But what are we supposed to all do, remaster our recordings every few years to keep up with changing fashions in technology?

I can’t tell whether I’ve got legitimate complaints or whether there’s some true pop sensibility that I and the music I love have fallen out of touch with. But the students do confirm, more violently than I might have wished, what I’ve long suspected: that we new-music composers don’t automatically win over new listeners among the pop crowd by using sounds they’re used to. It was easier to sell them on music that was just weird in its own way (Feldman, Nancarrow, Ashley’s Improvement) than on music that dared tread on sacred pop-music territory. Many good composers feel honestly driven to mix the elements of pop, jazz, and classical music to create new hybrids, and they’ve gotta do it. The problem has always been, where do you find an audience that wants them mixed, that wants their beloved genre diluted? Not in my classroom, apparently.

I’m composer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in February and March. I had announced here that the deadline for applying to join me there was October 20, but somehow it got extended until October 27, which is tomorrow. If you’re still interested but hadn’t made up your mind, or were afraid all those terrible things Ann Coulter is saying about me might be true (they’re all false except the online casino addiction), you can still sign up through tomorrow here. I’d love to see you, it’s been too long.

Tonight’s concert of Disklavier music in the Leonhardi Museum at the Carl Maria von Weber Hochschule in Dresden boasts the following program:

György Ligeti: Etude 3, Touches bloquées

Conlon Nancarrow: Study No. 24

Ligeti: Etude 8, Fém

Nancarrow: Study No. 4

Michael Jordan: RANKEN (UA)

Nancarrow: Study No. 31

Kyle Gann: Petty Larceny

Gann: Texarkana

Nancarrow: Study No. 18

Ligeti: Etude 13, L’escalier du diable

Nancarrow: Study No. 26

Ligeti: Etude 9, Vertige

Nancarrow: Study No. 11

Wolfgang Heisig: Ringparabel

Heisig: Opus 70

Nancarrow: Toccata for violin and piano

Luc Houtkamp: Duo for Man Alone

Nancarrow: Study No.33

Ligeti: Etude 11, En suspens

Nancarrow: Study No. 20

Ligeti: Etude 14A, Coloana fara sfarsit

Wish I could be there, hangin’ out with György, Conlon, Wolfgang, and Alexander Plötz, who organized it.

Performances are coming thick and fast and sneaking up on me. Da Capo is playing my Hovenweep at Hofstra University this afternoon at a 3 PM concert: sorry I don’t have the details, but I assume if you can get to Hofstra you can find it.

This Sunday, October 15 at 4, Sarah Cahill will give the West Coast premiere, and I guess the official public world premiere, of my new piano piece On Reading Emerson, which she commissioned. It’s at “one of the most idyllic places on earth,” the Point Reyes Dance Palace at 5th and B Streets, Point Reyes Station. Works by Grainger, Cowell, and others also included.

Then, on Friday, October 27, at 8, Sarah will repeat On Reading Emerson at the Berkeley Arts Festival, at the Jazzschool, 2087 Addison St., Berkeley. The all-brand-new program, no musty old 20th-century music allowed, is as follows:

Snippets 2 (2006) – Frederic Rzewski (premiere)

Almost a Quintet (2006) – Larry Polansky (premiere)

On Reading Emerson (2006) – Kyle Gann

Tango (2006) – Andrea Morricone (premiere)

Improvviso (2006)- Andrea Morricone (premiere)

“Le Crepescule” Rag (2006)- Elizabeth Lauer

Pleasant Dreaming (2006)- Phil Collins

The pieces by Rzewski, Polansky, as well as Morricone’s Improvviso, were, like my piece, written for Sarah. She’s amazing.

On October 26 at 8, two of my Disklavier Studies will be played on a concert of mechanical piano music, lots of Nancarrow, Wolfgang Heisig, and others, at the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden. Composer Alexander Plötz is putting the whole thing together; more details later.

A box of paperback copies of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow has just been delivered to this office. This means that all of you who have avoided buying the book all these years because it was horribly expensive will now have to avoid buying it because it’s too technical and doesn’t contain enough pictures.

Good lord, what a superb crop of comments my last post elicited! I seem to have stumbled on a topic – the mandates of “historical progress” – that many composers think about a lot and rarely get to discuss. My readers have outdone themselves, most beyond my capacity to improve on with further comment, notably Galen Brown’s points about film music. But I’ll respond to a few.

Matthew Guerrieri (whose thoughtful blog is worth checking out) pinpoints a dilemma that often has me dancing around in circles:

It’s not so much the choice of vocabulary (out of the composers I went to school with, I can only think of one who wrote in a classic mid-century serialist style; the rest of us were too in love with John Williams to ever give up tonal centers) as the attitude among a lot of student composers that they simply don’t need to know anything about non-tonal music that I find ridiculous. If you already think you know everything you need to know, what are you doing in school? And I’m deeply skeptical of any composer who isn’t curious about the inner workings of every single piece he or she comes in contact with–and who doesn’t constantly re-listen, and reassess, the entire repertoire. (If I had settled on my 19-year-old opinions, I would like neither Brahms, Barraque, or soul music.)

It’s a big problem for me: at one point I rejected the premises of serialist and related music, but it was tremendously important in my development, and I still love a lot of it. So how do you teach a body of music that you’ve rejected as a creative artist, but still feel your students need to encounter and learn to understand, especially when the music exhibits a difficulty that raises automatic resistance in most of them, and seems so irrelevant to their prior interests?

This morning I went to Patelson’s Music in New York and bought the score to the fifth movement of Boulez’s Pli selon pli – for $100, which means I now own scores to four of the five movements, at considerable financial commitment – along with Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, Wuorinen’s Piano Sonata, and Ligeti’s Continuum (not one of my favorites, but only ten bucks and a great teaching piece). Though I criticize a lot of this music, you can’t say my attitude is unaffectionate, let alone unknowledgeable. It bugs me when I don’t know how a piece works, or don’t understand why it was written, and I study the music that perplexes me. I want my students to learn to do the same. I teach lots of serialist music, and present it as enthusiastically as I can, though I make it clear that, as with any body of music, there is a wide range of quality. I love Babbitt’s Philomel, sort of like his Canonical Form, and don’t care for Sextets. Nono’s Contrappunto Dialettico alla Mente is fantastic, but Il Canto Sospeso leaves me cold. Stockhausen’s Mantra is terrific, and I enjoy Kontrapunkte, but I wouldn’t bother playing the first four Klavierstücke. The first two movements of Carter’s Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harspichord are lodged in my heart, but his Variations for Orchestra seems empty and clichéd.

Ultimately, I believe it’s high time to treat this music like any other historical repertoire. My students need to learn all the subtleties of sonata form, too, though Schumann and Brahms are difficult to interest them in. The difference between me and some of my colleagues is that I immerse them in the music – and then don’t bother them about whether they want to apply anything they’ve learned from it to their own music. As trained musicians they have to understand why it was important to write this music, but as artists, they are free to ignore not only it, but all “historical progress,” and anything else that doesn’t touch them deeply. Still, the question, “Well, if this music is so freakin’ wonderful, why doesn’t your music resemble it in any way?” – can be difficult to evade.

Guerrieri adds:

I always get my best ideas when I’m sitting through a piece I don’t like: I start to think of all the sounds I’d rather be hearing, and the imagination takes off. I know at least a couple colleagues who have had the same experience. Are we the only ones?

Absolutely not. I find nothing more inspiring than sitting in a concert and listening to bad music. As a critic-composer, I’ve started some of my best pieces while listening to music that bored or disgusted me. Often when it looked like I was taking copious notes, I was actually drawing staves in my little notebook and sketching out chords and melodies in a burst of anti-cliché inspiration. The opportunity to hear lousy music live is greatly underrated.

The always sincere John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop confesses:

I’m uncomfortable with the equation of aesthetic esotericism and political conservatism.

There’s nothing “elitist” about esoteric interests. But feeling bitter that “the masses” don’t share your esoteric interests does reflect — or lead one to — an elitist attitude.

I will have to ponder for a while, uncomfortably, why Aaron Copland may have felt that esoteric aesthetics were akin to political conservatism, and why he may have been justified at that time.

Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that so many of these guys are politically liberal, yet manifest such authoritarian views in their music, or at least in the rhetoric with which they surround it. If a composer is fascinated by esoteric musical goals, but humbly realizes that his perceptions lie outside the range of the average listener, that strikes me as a perfectly reasonable attitude. That seems true of many of the best “advanced” composers: Nancarrow, Scelsi, Sorabji, even Partch. But the serialists, and the New Complexity guys who inherited their hubris, often sound like the musical equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld: “We’re the experts, we know what’s best, so just shut up and take what we give you, and if you’re smart you’ll learn to appreciate the bold new world we’ve created for you.” And that bold new world, whether Rumsfeld’s or Wuorinen’s, is usually a hell based on theories that they’ve done a great job of rationalizing for themselves, but that are based on self-delusions that most people have too much common sense to accept. Given the assumption that their political views are sincere (though I’ve been told that Wuorinen and Babbitt express horribly right-wing opinions in private), I can’t imagine how they reconcile that for themselves, or even how they look themselves in the mirror each morning. It’s true, too, of not only the serialists (nearly extinct at this point, after all), but of my immediate colleagues who insist that their students use the proper modicum of “20th-century-sounding” dissonance, atonality, and pitch complexity whether it expresses what they want to say or not.

Finally, Ryan Howard asks:

I’m curious what you make of Charles Rosen’s comments (in Piano Notes) of what he terms “neotonal” music. Rosen seems to advance the argument that the gradual move toward equal temperament destroyed one of the fundamental elements of 18th century tonality–the directionality of modulation in either the sharp or flat direction–and that “neotonal” music, consequently, can provide only a “hollow simulacrum” of 18th or 19th century tonality, in which classical tonal structures are “either abandoned or given a simplistic form which does not recognize the emotional intensity of full triadic tonality.”

Unlike some of Rosen’s comments about 20th-century music, I think this is a really profound point, and one that many microtonalists have made in one way or another as well. Lou Harrison liked to say that 12-tone music was the only style that 12-tone equal temperament supports. I myself gravitated toward microtonality partly because I was so interested in minimalism, and I always get a gnawing feeling that a lot of Reich’s and other minimalist music (Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, for instance) would sound so much better in meantone or just intonation. Those of us not attracted to writing strictly atonal music confront an unconscious conflict, I believe, in the fact that the conventional tuning we use is at odds with the underlying meaning of the harmonies we use. My non-microtonal music (which is most of it) has been influenced to some extent by my work in just intonation, but not as pervasively as I’d like. When writing piano music, for instance, I often revert to a considerable amount of half-step clashes because simple harmonies just don’t sound that good on a modern piano. It’s a problem – one my teacher Ben Johnston feels is well-nigh insurmountable until we start moving away from the bland out-of-tuneness of modern 12-pitch tuning.

Thanks to all for a fascinating dialogue.

The other day on New Music Box some guy, a young guy I presumed, characterized composers who write tonal music as having ignored all the progress made in the 20th century. That was certainly the kneejerk complaint my old-fart college professors were making in 1975 when minimalism first reared its diatonic head. It didn’t take too many years for the charge to get laughed out of court, so I’m always surprised to hear of someone still learning it in school now – like those Japanese soldiers stranded on desert islands who went months without hearing that World War II had ended.

The new course I’m teaching that I wrote about recently is titled “Progress Versus Populism in 20th-Century Music.” It describes classical and postclassical music since 1913 as racked between two contradictory convictions. One is the idea that music should continually increase in subtlety and sophistication, each new generation learning everything that came before and moving continually forward in a linear evolution. The other is the idea that music not understandable by untrained listeners is elitist and therefore politically suspect; that by appealing only to the super-educated it marginalizes itself and becomes safe, soaking up cultural resources without doing anything to break down the advantages that the elites – financial, corporate, cultural, and otherwise – have over the common man.

Notice that these two convictions do not directly contradict each other. The belief that music should continally become more subtle and complex – though where that “should” acquires its moral force is difficult to ascertain – does not deny the proposition that complex music removes itself from the sphere of political action. One can believe that music should remove itself from political action. But the way I’m characterizing the first two thirds of the century is that, for those decades, the contradiction seemed unresolvable. In 1933 – which, as a historian, I see as the year of the century’s most abrupt and diametrical change in musical attitudes, at least in America, the year that the repercussions of the stock market crash began to affect American lives in a widespread way – the idea of writing complex, dissonant, increasingly shocking music became about as totally discredited as an aesthetic attitude can become. It became “self-indulgent.” Every American composer who continued writing in the Depression simplified his or her style to reach out to the masses, starting with Copland’s El Salon Mexico. Some of the composers most committed to modernity, like Crawford, Rudhyar, Varèse, and Arthur Berger, temporarily ceased composing. Others, like Cowell, Antheil, and John Becker, felt forced to switch to an undistinguished conservatism. Those who managed to simplify their styles without weakening their music (or who were already writing simple music anyway), like Copland, Thomson, Barber, and Harris, took over the lead. Interestingly, Soviet composers of the same era had the exact same change forced on them by governmental fiat. Later, after the next war led to an era of financial prosperity, between 1948 and 1960, a tremendous countercharge swung the pendulum back toward complexity and increasing sophistication, in both America and Europe.

In any case, it seemed a foregone conclusion in those post-1920s decades that one could not be both politically and musically progressive. One either believed in participating publicly in musical life by writing music for the masses or in retreating from public presence by writing the most sophisticated music possible and hoping that society would eventually catch up. Political convictions and musical aspirations became extremely difficult to reconcile.

Around 1960, however, an interesting new possibility seemed to open up – at least that’s the way a lot of composers I know saw it. Minimalism, at least once its early, noisy, austere phase was over (by 1967), was certainly a move toward widespread understandability. It also made claims in terms of musical progressivism. The “metamusic” in those early Steve Reich pieces began to elicit subtle new listening modes not known before. Process pieces by Philip Glass and gradually retuning continua by Phill Niblock stretched musical perception – just as serialism had stretched musical perception, though in a different direction, one not closed off to the lay listener. Many composers, like this guy at New Music Box, denied that returning to pitch simplicity in any respect constituted a perceptual stretch. I remember a friend saying circa 1974 that he liked what Reich was doing in Piano Phase, but wished he had used more dissonant pitch sequences to make the point. For many of us, however, that phase of minimalism from 1967 to 1979 created a whole new perception of how music could be progressive and increasingly sophisticated without being elitist. Then Glass wrote Satyagraha and Reich wrote Desert Music, and those who saw minimalism as musically regressive seemed, for awhile, to have won their point.

But the seed had already been sown. For a lot of (you will excuse the term) Downtown composers, that 1964-to-1979 phase of minimalism was the movement’s only creatively exciting phase. By 1983, a small segment of the generation born in the ’50s had begun developing minimalist ideas in the direction of greater sophistication. Limitation of harmonic materials (either consonant or dissonant, it hardly mattered) allowed an increased focus on more interesting kinds of aural illusions. Rhythmic dissonance and formal process appeared to be more fertile avenues of new perception than intricately convoluted pitch structures. Elliott Carter-type rhythmic complexity, with no beat-grid to hear it against, seemed tame compared to beats at different tempos running at the same time. Though left in the lurch by minimalism’s subsequent development, we felt emboldened to believe that one wasn’t forced to choose between political and musical progressiveness. Employing electric guitars, drum beats, and other materials borrowed from pop music in processes derived from Nancarrow and the unrealized visions of Henry Cowell, we felt we could have it both ways at once.

And that will be the surprise ending of my course: that it just might be possible that the “versus” in “Progress versus Populism” can eventually be dissolved away.

Of course, the progress made by the totalists (as some of us call the rhythmically complex/harmonically simple composers who tried to have their cake and eat it too) has been ignored by the great majority of composers, who either never recognized the inherent political pitfalls of elitism or took a defeatist attitude toward them. And that’s the great tragedy – that the decisions get made by composers rather than by the public. The corporate dictatorship unleashed by Reagan’s policies drew a curtain between newly evolving music and the wider public, with the result that by the late 1980s we found that the audience for new music primarily consisted of fellow professionals – other composers.

Personally, I don’t write my music for composers. I don’t expect other composers to appreciate my music, and most don’t. There is no way I could impress, or would want to impress, composers superficially trained to make a kneejerk association of pitch complexity (even the watered-down, New Romantic type) with forward-looking musical thinking. The number of composers whose taste I trust enough to learn anything from their reactions to my music is relatively tiny – I could name them in a brief paragraph. Yet I learn tons from the reactions of colleagues in other fields, from unbiased listeners, from students, from nonmusicians who come up to me after concerts. Unfortunately, those people – whose perceptions I deliberately aim to expand and seduce, and who frequently express delight with what I’m doing – are not the people making decisions about what music gets supported. The world of new composition, of commissions and awards and grants that make creative work possible, is run by composers, the vast majority of whom have ignored the types of progress made by my kind of music, and who oppose its dissemination.

That’s been the tragedy of new music for more than 20 years. We invented a new music that we thought would create a new audience. Then our potential for influencing any mass audience (which Cardew accurately notes is the composer’s true means of production) was taken away by the corporate elites. It’s extremely difficult for us to understand how so many composers can cling to a musical elitism that is precisely analogous to the corporate, financial, and cultural elitism that keeps new music out of the public ear. That false conception of “musical progressivism” does seem tied to political regress, to an ultimately right-wing notion that only the experts should be in control. Society doesn’t need to “catch up” with our music – it only needs to hear it. And the composers commited to elitism, who would rather consolidate their power within the professional institutions than by eliciting love and admiration from audiences, prevent audiences from hearing it – on the grounds that it “ignores all the progress made in the 20th century.” It looks to me like they’re the ones ignoring the progress.

Reader Amy Bauer responds with mild indignation to my post on composers overlooked by academia:

I think you’re unfair to music academics! I love Sibelius, Dvorak, Martinu, and many other supposedly ‘unacademic’ composers, and loathe the music of. . (um, afraid to say, as it may get me in trouble 😉 )

Seriously, many of my musicologist friends adore much of the music you’ve noted
above. I fear you may confuse academic taste with what are acceptable topics of
research, which – as in any other field – are subject to changing fashion.

There are plenty of Nielsen scholars now; he represents only one of the many composers
rehabilitated by academia in recent years. It is true that there are egregious conventions
regarding what is worthy of study, and it takes a paradigm shift by those with power
and influence to let new works into that particular canon (Taruskin’s influence
is a case in point). But in my experience, what academics write about and what
they actually listen to often have very little overlap.

I will leave tilting at the windmills of compositional fame to those in the know.

Well, there’s some truth in this. I was primarily not thinking of musicologists, but of theorists and composers, who seem loathe to subject to analysis any music not granted paradigmatic status. And I was also thinking not so much of “academic taste” as much as “acceptable topics of
research.” I’ve never quite gotten over how perplexed my fellow grad students were that I lowered myself to write an analytical paper on Bruckner.

Still, while I haven’t spent much time consorting with musicologists, I have spent enough to learn what a strict composer-based hierarchy the world of musicology is. I was once on a panel with some big names, and highly complimented a famous scholar on his book on Muzio Clementi, which had been a great help to me. He seemed almost irritated that I had brought it up, as though it were some secret from his past that he didn’t want mentioned in front of his colleagues. He had now written a book on Beethoven, which meant he had climbed a couple dozen steps up the musicology ladder. And I have learned in that world that to have written the first book on Nancarrow was a miniscule accomplishment, almost negligible, compared to writing the 67th book on Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms. In the world of music historians, your stature is exponentially proportional, not to the quality of your research and writing, but to the prestige of the composer you can claim to be an expert on.

(Many years ago I spent a pleasant evening with a new acquaintance who was writing a book on Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. I’d love to hear from him, and learn how that project went. We had a better time, down there at the bottom of the musicology ladder, than the bigwigs were having up above.)

I bought, because a reader recommended it, The Pimlico Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Composers (1999), by Mark Morris – not the famous dancer, of course, but a Welsh music critic resident in Canada. It is organized by country, which creates some curious ambiguities: for instance, Foss is listed under the U.S.A. and Wolpe under Germany, even though both were born in Germany and emigrated to America. (I think of Wolpe’s late music as highly American, while Foss retains his German accent.) But it has certain advantages, such as listing Iceland’s Thorkall Sigurbjörnsson, New Zealand’s Douglas Lilburn, and Norway’s unfortunate and distinctly underrated Geirr Tveitt, whom most survey histories are unlikely to mention at all.

What’s interesting is the opportunity to see our music world in an exceedingly British mirror. For example, this comment in the section on the U.S.A.:

“It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that in terms of musical impact, and in the reflection of the wider human condition and the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day, none of the American composers has yet matched their European counterparts.”

This is refreshingly frank, and brings up two Eurocentric criteria with which I might have been sympathetic when I was 20, before I became more acclimated to the changes that came with postmodernism. On one hand we have “the wider human condition,” i.e., the programmatic holdover from Romanticism that music is supposed to encapsulate some echo of the bourgeois man’s relation to society. On the other, “the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day,” which seems to reflect a modernist belief that the Hegelian World Spirit, moving ever westward (and stopping for the time being in London, at least until the trains are in better repair), is embodied in a mainstream of music on which all “serious” composers must comment, and to which they all contribute. No dirty rumor of “pluralism” taints these pages. British composers, from that country which the Germans used to call “das land ohne musik,” occupy 72 pages; Americans only 50; Germany gets 49, and Russia 45. Harry Partch, La Monte Young, and Morton Feldman (the most influential composer of the last 25 years) are mentioned only in passing, not granted separate entries, while the names Conlon Nancarrow and Robert Ashley appear nowhere. Meanwhile, the entry on the United Kingdom begins, “The history of British music in the 20th century is a remarkable one,” and includes separate essays on William Alwyn, Ivor Bertie Gurney, Daniel Jenkyn Jones, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Grace Williams, all of whom surely outrank the marginal Feldman.

To an extent, the book indeed complements my own American Music in the Twentieth Century. But I have trouble thinking how I’ll explain away its anglophile exaggerations, and I have ended up taking Paul Griffiths’ more equitable Modern Music and After for my 20th-century music survey class.

If you’ve e-mailed me recently and haven’t heard back, please be patient. I’ve had a few family things occupy me lately, and I am more than a month behind in my e-mail correspondence, absolutely inundated with legitimate messages that I’d like and need to answer (including three from bankers in Nigeria who are going to make my fortune, mark my word). If I did nothing else between now and September but answer them, I’d never get to them all, so some will undoubtedly fall through the cracks. Feel free to send a repeat message. Let me know if you’re independently wealthy yet seized by a desire to be a composer’s secretary.

UPDATE: A friend writes to commisserate, and brings up a good question: Why do so many people send us requests for information that they could easily find in reference works, or else by Googling? I’m always getting queries about Nancarrow, La Monte Young, tuning, and other subjects, some of which are already answered on my web site, in my books, or other easily accessed sites – and La Monte Young is still around to answer his own questions! I’ve even had high school students, assigned to write reports, write me for general info about American music. I’m glad to answer such questions when they require a specialist, but I do wish people would do a little research on their own, and not assume I’m sitting around with nothing better to do.

I just finished reading, and immensely enjoyed, A Talent for Trouble, the biography of film director William Wyler, by my fellow Arts Journal blogger Jan Herman. Two things at the end of the book struck me.

One was Wyler’s feeling about color photography, which he was late to switch to. “A red chair doesn’t look unusual in reality,” he once said, “but on the screen, you can’t take your eyes from it. That’s because the frame itself is not natural. It’s delimited by the blackness surrounding it. We don’t actually see that way with our natural field of vision. I was late in using color partly because I felt color could be phony, exaggerated.” More evidence of what I’m always saying, that art is about appearances, not reality. A lot of young composers, I think, as well as older ones, make bad music because they’re focussed on what the music really is, not on the way it appears to the audience.

The other point of interest was an encounter with Alfred Hitchcock. Wyler made all kinds of films: westerns (The Westerner, The Big Country), comedies (Roman Holiday), war films (Mrs. Miniver, Memphis Belle), social commentary (The Best Years of Our Lives, Dodsworth), suspense films (The Letter, The Collector), a musical (Funny Girl). One of Jan’s themes throughout the book is that this versatility worked against Wyler’s reputation, since in the ’60s an auteur theory arose that (over-) valued each director’s idiosyncratic viewpoint, and demanded that he turn out films exploring the same themes over and over. Hitchcock, “master of suspense,” benefitted from this, but Wyler called him “a prisoner of the medium.” Once Hitchcock admitted to Wyler that he was jealous: “You can do any kind of film you want. I can’t. They won’t let me.” (Watch Hitchcock’s late comedy The Trouble with Harry, and you might conclude that it was a good thing they didn’t let him.)

Auteur theory is a big subject in film criticism, but its musical counterpart, though quite patent, is hardly discussed. Many of the most well-regarded recent composers are those who evolved an immediately recognizable trademark in their music: Feldman, Reich, Scelsi, John Adams, Meredith Monk, Charlemagne Palestine, Branca, and most of all Phil Glass, who has taken recognizability to an extreme that has ruined him for more sophisticated circles. Interestingly enough, this seems more true of the famous Downtown composers than of the Pulitzer crowd – it’s difficult to imagine reliably recognizing a work by Corigliano, Zwilich, Harbison, or those guys in ten seconds of a drop-the-needle test. (Babbitt’s an interesting case – uniformity not necessarily leading to recognizability.) I suspect that this partly accounts for Europe’s preference of Downtown Americans over Uptown ones, since Europe is where auteur theory originated and flourished. They seem to like our composers who carve out their own distinctive groove.

This is a personal issue for me, because, creatively, I find myself much in sympathy with Wyler. I too write static minimalist pieces (Long Night, The Day Revisited), wild collages (Petty Larceny, Scenario), microtonal pieces (Triskadekaphonia, How Miraculous Things Happen), jazz harmony pieces (Bud Ran Back Out, Private Dances), atonal pieces (The Waiting, I’itoi Variations), grand pieces for chorus and orchestra (Transcendental Sonnets). (I’m not the only Downtowner in this boat; Jim Tenney and Larry Polansky have similarly kaleidoscopic outputs.) Inside my head, my musical reflexes are so fixed and repetitive that I feel like I keep writing the same work over and over again, but I have trouble believing that my music comes off that way to the listener, and I sense that people have trouble figuring out what my central style is. I have a repertoire of melodic tendencies that I’ve nurtured closely for 30 years, and a few rhythms that have become absolutely fetishistic, but they recur disguised by widely ranging contexts. In that respect I’m really a little like Nancarrow, who used the same melodic and rhythmic tics in every piece, but whose music – if you brush aside the fact that it’s almost all for the same instrument – runs the entire gamut from meticulous discipline to improvisatory abandon, and from modernist abstraction to boogie-woogie.

Since I so admire so many of the auteur-type composers, I had always intended to gravitate toward a small set of ideas and explore them over and over, as my friends John Luther Adams and Peter Garland have. If nothing else, it strikes me, in the current climate, as a good career move. But my muse doesn’t take directions very well, and it just works out that after writing a motionless Zen essay I’ll next get inspired to write a chaotic parody, and then a postminimalist dance. Jan discounts the claims of the auteuristes and praises Wyler’s versatile ability to adapt to each new genre. It’s in my own best self-interest to ride in that bandwagon myself.