Search Results for: nancarrow

It shows my naivété, after 20 years of teaching, that I still hold any illusions about academia. Until recently I had nurtured a belief that electronic music was one area of music in which the otherwise pervasive distinctions between academic and non-academic did not apply. After all, electronic music is the only department in which (you will excuse the term) Downtown composers have been able to find positions in universities. As far as I know, there are currently only two Downtown composers in the country who have ridden into permanent teaching positions on skills other than electronic technology; one of those, William Duckworth, did so on his music education degrees, and the other, myself, masqueraded as a musicologist. All the others work in electronic music, where, I fondly presumed, open-mindedness prevailed.

It’s not true. I’ve been becoming aware that, even among the Downtowners, there is a standard academic position regarding electronic music, and am learning how to articulate it. I’ve long known that, though much of my music emanates from computers and loudspeakers, I am not considered an electronic composer by the “real electronic composers.” Why not? I use MIDI and commercial synthesizers and samplers, which are disallowed, and relegate my music to an ontological no-man’s genre. But more and more students have been telling me lately that their music is disallowed by their professors, and some fantastic composers outside academia have been explaining why academia will have nothing to do with them.

The official position seems to be that the composer must generate, or at least record, all his or her own sounds, and those sounds must be manipulated using only the most basic software or processes. Max/MSP is a “good” software because it provides nothing built in – the composer must build every instrument, every effects unit up from scratch. Build-your-own analogue circuitry is acceptable for the same reason. Sequencers are suspect, synthesizers with preset sounds even more so, and MIDI is for wusses. Commercial softwares – for instance, Logic, Reason, Ableton Live – are beyond the pale; they offer too many possibilities without the student understanding how they are achieved. Anything that smacks of electronica is to be avoided, and merely having a steady beat can raise eyebrows. Using software or pedals as an adjunct to your singing or instrument-playing is, if not officially discouraged, not taught, either. I’m an electronic amateur, and so I won’t swear I’m getting the description exactly right. Maybe you can help me. But at the heart of the academic conception of electronics seems to be a devout belief that the electronic composer proves his macho by MANIPULATION, by what he DOES to the sound. If you use some commercial program that does something to the sound at the touch of a button, and you didn’t DO IT YOURSELF, then, well, you’re not really “serious,” are you? In fact, you’re USELESS because you haven’t grasped the historical necessity of the 12-tone language. Uh, I’m sorry, I meant, uh, Max/MSP.

Where does this leave a composer like Henry Gwiazda, whom I have often called the Conlon Nancarrow of my generation? He makes electronic music from samples taken verbatim from sound effects libraries, and you know what he does to them? Nothing. Not a reverb, not a pitch shift, not a crossfade. He just places them next to each other in wild, poetic juxtapositions, and it’s so lovely. From what music department could he graduate doing that today? Is he rather, instead of Nancarrow, the Erik Satie of electronic music? the guy so egoless (or simply self-confident) that he doesn’t have to prove to you what a technonerd stud he is with all the manipulations he knows how to apply?

Now, there is one aesthetic fact so obviously incontrovertible that it hardly merits mentioning: a piece of music is not good because a certain type of software was employed in making it, nor is it bad because a different type of software was applied. Compelling music can be achieved with virtually any kind of software, and so can bad. You’d have to be a drooling moron to believe otherwise. Given that patent truth, it would seem to follow that there is no type of software a young composer should be prevented from using. The question then follows, are there pedagogical reasons to avoid some types of software and concentrate on others? I am assured that there are: 1. Since softwares come and go, it’s important that students learn the most basic principles, so that they can build their own programs if necessary, rather than rely on commercial electronics companies. And, 2. Commercial software doesn’t need to be taught, all the student needs to do is read the instruction manual and use it on his own.

Let’s take the second rationale first. As someone who just struggled six months with Kontakt software just to get to first base, I don’t buy it. There are a million things Kontakt will do that, at my current rate, it will take me until 2060 to figure out. Even after wading through the damn manual, I’d give anything for a lesson in it. But even given that some softwares, like Garage Band, are admittedly idiot-proof, there are a million programs out there, and a young composer would benefit (hell, I’d benefit) from an overview of what various packages can do. How about a course in teaching instrumentalists or vocalists how to interact with software? A thousand working musicians do it as their vocation, but academia seems uninterested in helping anyone reach that state. It’s unwise to base one’s life’s work on a single, ephemeral software brand, Max as well as anything else – but knowing how to use a few makes it easier to get into others, and some of my more interesting students have subverted cheap commercial software, making it do things for which it was never intended.

Rationale number one is more deeply theoretical. I’m all for teaching musicians first principles. You don’t want to send someone out in the world with a bunch of gadgets whose workings they don’t understand, dependent for their art on commercial manufacturers. Good, teach ‘em the basics, absolutely. You teach ‘em circuit design, I’ll teach ‘em secondary dominants. But why should either of us mandate that they use those things in their creative expression? Creativity, like sexual desire, has a yen for the irrational, and not every artist has the right kind of imagination to get creative in the labyrinth of logical baby steps that Max/MSP affords. I’ve seen young musicians terribly frustrated by the gap between the dinky little tricks they can do with a year’s worth of Max training and the music they envision. I heard so much about Max/MSP I bought it myself, and now have a feel for how depressingly long it would take me to learn to get fluent in it. I thought it must be some incredibly powerful program, from what I kept hearing about it – it turns out, the technonerds love it because it’s incredibly impotent in most people’s hands, until you’ve learned to stack dozens of pages of complicated designs.

There are at least two types of creativity that apply to electronic music, probably more, but at least two. One is the creativity of imagining the music you want to hear and employing the electronics to realize it. Another is learning to use the software or circuitry and seeing what interesting things you can finagle it into doing. There are certainly some composers who have excelled at the second – David Tudor leaps to mind. Perhaps there are a handful who have mastered the first in terms of Max/MSP, but it’s a long shot. Of course, if you’ve got the type of creative imagination that flows seamlessly into Max/MSP, by all means use it. “Good music can be achieved with any kind of software.” But why does academia turn everything into an either-or situation, whereby if A is smiled upon, B must be banished?

There’s an analogue in tuning. I’m a good, old-fashioned just intonationist with a lightning talent for fractions and logarithms. I can bury myself in numbers and get really creative. In nine years of teaching alternate tunings, I can count on one hand the students who have shown a similar talent. Faced with pages of fractions, most would-be microtonalists freeze up and can’t get their juices flowing. Were I a real academic, I would respond, “Tough shit, maggot – this is the REAL way to do microtonality, and if you can’t handle it, then you’re on your own.” But I’m not like that, and I let students work in any microtonal way they can feel comfortable, whether it’s the random tuning of found objects or just pitch bends on a guitar – as long as they understand the theory underlying it. Likewise, some young composers get caught up making drums beat and lights blink in different patterns in Max/MSP, lose sight of their goal, and never make the electronic music they’d had in mind.

In fact, many years of listening to music made with Max/MSP, by both professionals and students, have not impressed me with the software’s results. I’ve heard a ton of undecipherable algorithms, heard a lot of scratchy noise, and I’ve heard instrumentalists play while the MSP part diffracts their sounds into a myriad bits whose relevance I have to take on trust. In the hands of students, the pieces tend to come out rather dismally the same – and not only students. The only really beautiful Max/MSP piece I can name for you is John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen, and you wanna know how he did it? He worked out just the effects he wanted on some other software, and then hired a young Max-programming genius, Jim Altieri, to replicate it. He envisioned the sound, the effect, the affect, but he knew he didn’t possess the genius to create the instrument he needed. Meanwhile I hear lots of beautiful music by Ben Neill, Emily Bezar, Mikel Rouse and others using commercial software that does a lot of the work for them. If we can talk about software as an instrument (and we should), there’s a talent for making the instrument, and there’s a talent for playing the instrument. To assume that one shouldn’t be allowed to exist without the other is to claim Itzhak Perlman isn’t really a violinist because he didn’t carve his own violin. It’s ludicrous.

In short, it appears that academia has applied the same instinct to electronic music as to everything else: find the most difficult and unrewarding technique, declare it the only valid one, take failure as evidence of integrity, and parade your boring integrity at conferences. Whatever happened to the concept of artist as a magician with a suspicious bag of tricks? Art is about appearances, not reality, so who cares if you cheat? Our society is truly upside down. Our politicians and CEOs, whom one could wish to keep honest, dazzle us with virtuoso sleight-of-hand, while our musicians, who are supposed to entertain us, meticulously account for every waveform. It’s completely bass-ackwards.

Do I overgeneralize? I hope so. Please tell me that there’s an electronic music program that doesn’t make this pernicious distinction, and I will send droves of students applying to that school. I was living in a fool’s paradise, and I’m only reacting to what I’m hearing – from disenfranchised young composers, from electronic faculty who proudly affirm the truth of what I’m saying as though it’s a good thing, from fine composers who are wizzes at commercial software. One brilliant electronic student composer this year insisted that I advise his senior project: me, who can barely configure my own MIDI setup. I had nothing to teach him; our “lessons” consisted of me grilling him with questions about how to get the electronic effects I was trying to achieve. But I gave him permission to use synthesizers, and found sounds, and let him play the piano in synch with a prerecorded CD. I didn’t emasculate his imagination by forcing him back into a thicket of first principles from which he would never emerge. His music was lovely, crazy, expressive. Another student, a couple of years ago, enlisted me for a children’s musical he made entirely on Fruity Loops. It was a riot.

And so I say to all composers who got excited in high school about the possibility of musical software but feel intimidated by their professors’ insistence on doing everything from scratch: go ahead, use Logic, and Reason, and Ableton Live, and Sibelius, and Fruity Loops, and synthesizers, and stand-alone sequencers, and hell yes, even Garage Band, with my blessing. Be the Erik Saties and Frank Zappas and Charles Iveses of electronic music, not the Mario Davidovskys and Leon Kirchners. Resist the power structure that would tie anvils to your composing legs, with a pretense that they’re only temporary. The dogmatic, defensive ideology that‘s in danger of being callsed Max/MSPism is merely an importation of 12-tone-style thinking into the realm of technology. Who needs it?

[N.B.: In the comments, some confusion is caused by the fact that there are two Paul Muller’s, with different e-mail addresses. At least they agree with each other.]

Hundreds of hours of my life have been spent retuning synthesizers. It’s the last task, once I’ve figured out a tuning I want to explore, before I get to hear anything. It’s a tedious, mind-numbing job, usually lasting anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, plus a break to give my brain a rest. I’ve got about 50 tunings stored on my Yamaha DX7-IIFD, four Proteus’s (one keyboard and three rack-mount) whose dozen-each user tunings have been tuned and retuned countless times, and many floppy disks with various tunings for my creaky old Akai sampler. Each one represents a half-hour of repetitive, meticulous number-crunching.

But now I’ve got Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven, Jeff Scott’s tuning software. [UPDATE: Mac format only! Shoulda mentioned that.] The time-intensive part was the four or five weeks it always takes me to brace myself to read the instructions. But once I got over that hurdle, they turned out to be the clearest, best-written software help text I’ve ever seen. Five minutes later I had entered a 30-pitch scale into my Kontakt II sampler software, and was playing it. The actual transferring-the-scale part didn’t take half a minute. I am astonished. And now I can use that script to retune any of my synths as well. You can define scales as cents, ratios, hertz, srutis, as scales that repeat at the octave, that don’t repeat, and that repeat within any other interval. It’s software conceived by a microtonalist, anticipating anything a microtonalist may want to try out. Conlon Nancarrow used to muse regretfully about how much easier his player piano studies would have been to write if he had had today’s sequencing software, and I feel like I just gained a similar advantage in mid-career. Never again will I have to perform that tedious task between conception and audition. Microtonal music just got easier to make than it probably ought to be.

My remaining problem, in the 2006 Complete Technical Makeover of Kyle Gann, is Kontakt II. On either my Mac laptop or new G-5 desktop, the sounds clip and quickly overload the CPU meter. Ian Turner, our brilliant sound tech guy in Bard’s electronic music department, says that Kontakt requires a separate internal hard drive with a 10,000 rpm rate to keep the samples on. I’m sure he’s right – Ian has a lot of experience with Kontakt – but can anyone confirm or disconfirm this from their own experience or offer alternatives? I loaded the samples on an external firewire drive, and that didn’t help. It’s hard to believe that everyone who’s ever bought Kontakt also bought an extra internal drive, and I’m really curious whether there’s any other way to make it work, so I appeal to the masses.

In any case, even if you’re not a microtonalist, EVEN IF YOU HATE MICROTONAL MUSIC, you must purchase Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven, just to be able to say you have it, and so that Jeff Scott (whom I don’t know, but have already erected a small shrine to, with incense) can make a million dollars for having invented this. It’s only $165, postage included.

UPDATE: I had forgotten that LMSO (Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven) is only for the Mac at present. I also should have mentioned Scala, a free tuning software that’s been around forever for the PC, and became available for the Mac a year or so ago. A student of mine had tremendous luck making microtonal music with Scala. It’s a very intelligent program, invented by the helpful and highly literate Manuel Op de Coul, but I played around with it for a few months, and never quite succeeded in retuning anything. LMSO was easier to figure out. I used to have a nice old Mac program called Unisyn that sent tunings to synthesizers, which became obsolete; LMSO is hardly the first software to fulfill that particular function, but I’m wowed by its usability and documentation. I don’t know enough about this stuff to be reviewing software, but you can say this for sure: if I have success with a piece of software, any idiot can figure it out.

As for Kontakt, I’ve already received an endless litany of technical issues. It doesn’t look like I’m going to get it to work without spending a couple thousand more dollars. I do wish that the people at Manny’s Music who sold it to me had warned me that the advertised technical specifications were nowhere near adequate to actually run the thing. Be warned.

I don’t understand why the electric guitar orchestra hasn’t become a compositional focus for more composers, for practical reasons alone. It certainly looked like it was going to in the 1980s, with works and ensembles by Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, John Myers, Wharton Tiers, Phil Kline, and Todd Levin. The old joke is,

Q.: How do you get a guitarist to stop playing?

A.: Put some sheet music in front of him.

and certainly dealing with guitarists who don’t read was part of the challenge, especially starting in 1989 when Rhys Chatham initiated the 100-guitar tradition with An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, premiered in Lille, France. “Guitarists who can’t read can at least count,” Rhys liked to say, and this insight led the guitar-orchestra genre into totalist territory, however inadvertently. Glenn Branca couldn’t read music himself until he had finished several guitar symphonies, and at least his Sixth Symphony (also 1989), notated on graph paper, has rhythmic grids showing some players how to change chords every four beats while others are changing every five beats and still others every six. His 1994 Tenth Symphony for nine guitars, more normally notated, contains at one point an approximated Nancarrovian tempo canon at tempos of 7:8:12.

In An Angel Moves Too Fast to See Chatham solved the reading problem by dividing his 100 guitarists into an inner and outer circle, with the musically literate in the inner circle. In the fifth movement (he now calls the piece his First Symphony, though I think he avoided that at the time because Branca was for some reason being criticized for calling his pieces symphonies), he divided the orchestra into six rhythmic layers, each repeating a chord or phrase at diverse regular intervals (monomial or binomial periodicities). As you can see in the example below, one rung of guitarists played E and B every 7 beats; another E and G# every 8 beats; another an octave A every 9 beats; another, after a pause, A and F# every 5 beats, and then two more groups on longer patterns:

Put them all together, and the following process-generated melody is clearly audible:

What you can’t get from the recording (excerpted here, and available on Table of the Elements) is the totally original correlation of space and pitch that resulted. (I just missed the Lille performance by hours, but heard the North American premiere in Montreal.) A hundred guitarists, each with an amplifier and enough room to swing around and look cool, take up a tremendous amount of space; and since each group was herded together, the E-B chord might come from the middle, while the A-F# came from 60 feet away on the left, and the G# an equal distance on the right. Note by note, the melody bounced over wide distances as though the audience members were ants sitting in the middle of an enormous keyboard. Listening was like watching an arrhythmic tennis game.

This is not new information, by the way; it’s all in my book American Music in the 20th Century. Now that Branca is gathering 100 guitarists to reprise his 13th Symphony in Los Angeles, it may be worth recirculating at the moment.

At about the same time I was experimenting with a similar process to generate textures in a considerably more modest setting. My Windows to Infinity for piano (1987) was a reflection on Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence. I had been amused to read philosopher Arthur Danto parse out the statistical likelihood of eternal recurrance in his book on Nietzsche, and in response wrote a piano piece stretching out to infinity, tracking a recurring combination of notes as it gathered coincidences through millions of repetitions. As you can see below, there’s a middle D# every 5 8th-notes, a middle C# every 7 8th-notes, a lower F# every 29 16th-notes, and so on up through four-digit primes. Every phrase comes back to the C#-D#-E-G# “theme” found in the 4th and 5th measures (a motif also used in my two-piano piece Long Night):

In theory, this nine-minute piece would eventually repeat itself if extended for thousands of years. No one’s ever played the piece but me, and as I’m not terribly satisfied with my one recording, I think I won’t post it here. I used a similar technique soon after in the first movement of Cyclic Aphorisms for violin and piano. I’m sure others have stumbled across this interference of pitch-periodicities concept, but I don’t know of any examples of such an atomistic totalist technique past 1989. It may be worth noting that Nancarrow used the interference of much longer, more complex periodicities in his Study No. 9, way back in the 1950s.

As a performer – and I was a pretty good pianist in college, it’s the regret of my life that I didn’t keep it up – I never liked the feeling of complicated tuplets that couldn’t be expected to be played exactly right. I imagine you know what I mean: septuplet quarter-notes over a 4/4 measure, or an 11-tuplet with a couple of notes missing, and the composer says, “It doesn’t have to be exact, just make sure you end the phrase on the downbeat.” I never liked cheating, and I was so obsessed with polyrhythms that I didn’t want to fudge them, I wanted to feel them and feel secure playing them. Even with an ornamental quintuplet in Chopin, I worked to get it mathematically right. I had fallen in love with the three-against-four, two-bands-at-two-tempos section of the “Putnam’s Camp” movement of Three Places in New England, and at age 14 I said to the Universe, “Sir, it will be an honor to devote my life to replicating this effect.” So the fake polyrhythms, the little flurries that didn’t need to be accurate to achieve their goal, bothered me.

Judging from the music of my contemporaries, I wasn’t alone. The evolution of multitempo music in the wake of minimalism during the 1980s was an exploration of playable tempo relationships. When Conlon Nancarrow went this route, not relying on performers, he followed the arithmetical logic of numbers, going from tempo contrasts like 14:15:16 to 17:18:19:20 to 60:61. Those were impractical for the guys of my generation who wanted their bands to play multitempo music. Instead, they started out with simple relationships anyone could play, like 3-against-2 and 4-against-3, and then nested them. For example, take four drummers:

No. 1 plays a steady beat.

No. 2 plays a triplet against every two beats of 1.

No. 3 plays a triplet against every two beats of 2.

No. 4 plays a triplet against every two beats of 3.

This triply-nested 3:2 yields a pretty complex tempo resultant of 8:12:18:27, Drummer 4 playing 27 beats to every 8 by Drummer 1. This is exactly what Art Jarvinen does in one section of his Ghatam for sculptural percussion (1997), as you can hear here. He builds up the rhythm slowly, as a process, and doesn’t try to notate it, just gives instructions, because the notation would be needlessly complex.

This is also the same rhythm, though, that Ben Johnston used in the first variation of his “Amazing Grace” Quartet, No. 4 (1973). Going up one more 3:2, to 16:24:36:54:81, Ben did notate it, using different simultaneous meters to handle the overload. (You can hear that variation here, in the brand new recording by the Kepler Quartet.) Two variations later, Ben achieves (with great difficulty for the performers) a large-scale rhythm of 35:36, the same way one arrives at it in tuning pure pitch intervals: as the difference between a 9:5 and a 7:4 (or, rhythmically, 9 in the space of 5 and 7 in the space of 4). For Ben, as for Cowell in New Musical Resources, the methods of extending rhythm flowed by analogy from traditional ways of handling pitch, which was one of the core meanings of the word totalism in the first place.

In fact, Ben (who was my postgraduate composition teacher) could be taken as one of the leading and underacknowledged pre-totalist composers, perhaps even the most influential one. It was he, after all, who, in 1967, translated a 12-tone song in pure tuning into analogous rhythmic ratios, and those ratios into a rhythm-only piece of conceptual theater that was to be beaten on the outside of a piano with any available mallet-like objects. Titled Knocking Piece, the work was played all over the Midwest in the ‘70s, and was an obligatory virtuoso showpiece for young percussionists. It always had two tempos going at once, in ever-changing ratios determined by the 12-tone row the song had been based on:

The equal signs between measures indicate that the same pulse continues across the barline at that point. (No recording I know of available, unfortunately. If you know something about tuning, you can figure out the original pitches from these rhythms: taking the first as C, it continues G, E, B, D#, A#, F#…) Ben’s reputation never took off on the East Coast to nearly the same extent. But insofar as some of the totalists had been educated in the Midwest, Knocking Piece may well have been a seed that quietly (or rather, noisily) blossomed in the music of 1980s New York.

The piece that went furthest in exploring this kind of performable tempo layering, as far as I know, was Michael Gordon’s Four Kings Fight Five of 1988. Scored for three winds, three strings, percussion, electric guitar, and synthesizer, the work starts out with a melody that pits quarter-notes against dotted quarters in 6/4-slash-12/8, because the other rhythms (the four kings who fight against five) are going to be drawn from this concurrent contrast. The pounding opening, with much unison, is the part most relevant to the piece’s dedication, which is to Glenn Branca – of interest to those of you who may doubt whether the Branca/Chatham artrock of the time had any immediate connection to totalism. (Branca produced Gordon’s first record, as well.)

At 3:08 (three minutes, 8 seconds) into the recording of Four Kings Fight Five, the music pauses, and a rhythmic continuum starts to build up that will proceed through eleven different tempos, as many as seven of them at a time. The tempos are represented by the following note values, repetitively articulated:

quintuplet 16th-notes in the space of 6 (a dotted quarter)

triplet 8th-notes

dotted 16th-notes

8th-notes

triplet quarter-notes

dotted 8th-notes

quarter-notes

quarter-notes tied to 32nd notes*

dotted quarter-notes

half-notes

half-notes tied to 16th-notes

*(Gordon notates the quarter-notes tied to 32nd notes as dotted 8ths in a tuplet over the three 8ths of a dotted quarter beat, but it works out the same. Don’t worry about it.)

The eleven available pulses are given here with the ratios of their relative tempos and durations:

These ratios can be seen as analogous to pitch. If we take the quarter-note as C and the triplet quarter as G, we get the following “harmony” of tempos:

A – 60 tempo – quintuplet 16th-notes in the space of 6

G – 54-tempo – triplet 8th-notes

F – 48-tempo – dotted 16th-notes

C – 36-tempo – 8th-notes

G – 27 tempo – triplet quarter-notes

F – 24-tempo – dotted 8th-notes

C – 18 tempo – quarter-notes

Bb – 16-tempo – quarter-notes tied to 32nd notes

F – 12-tempo – dotted quarter-notes

C – 9-tempo – half-notes

Bb – 8-tempo – half-notes tied to 16th-notes

Note the self-inversional character of this harmony, except for the fastest A-tempo. At the work’s most complex point (long before the halfway point, at about 5:47), there are seven tempos going at once:

You can sort of see that everyone else is playing off either the quarter-note beat or the dotted-quarter beat, which are unified in the keyboard part. The viola and bass clarinet play triplets off the quarter-note beat. The violin, less obviously, is playing 2 beats to every 3 dotted-quarter beats. The oboist, poor dear, is having to play 4-against-3 to the dotted-quarter beat, or 16 even pulses over three measures; actually twice the tempo of the violin, but not lined up in rhythmic unison with it. Here six of the lines are cued to the dotted quarter beat and three to the quarter-note beat, but one assumes that elsewhere the ratio is four lines against five, as per the title.

From here on, the piece gradually floats into a more static continuum, which became typical of Michael’s music about this time. At 19:22 a viola starts up in free rhythm over the throbbing G major continuum underneath, and at 20:56 a snare drum rhythm in military time joins it, and the piece dies away. You can hear Four Kings Fight Five in its 23-minute entirety here; the rhythmic points I’ve been making are all illustrated within the first seven minutes.

Please don’t get too exercised over whether you “like” the piece or not. Frankly, I don’t find it, overall, one of Michael’s most compelling works, though I certainly love parts of it – I somewhat prefer Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not!, Yo Shakespeare, Trance, and the Van Gogh Video Opera, among others. The question is not whether you “like” it, but whether you understand what it offered in terms of multitempo composition. In that respect it was not only remarkable for 1988, but offered possibilities that have still not been fully explored since.

What’s common to all three pieces, by Jarvinen, Johnston, and Gordon, is that the performers achieve a remarkable degree of rhythmic complexity – a true “harmony of rhythms” in Cowell’s sense – by selectively listening to some performers within the ensemble whose pulses they play off of, and having to ignore others. The ability to maintain a 4-against-3 rhythm over a steady-beat reference point, and the relative impossibility of securely maintaining a more difficult 27-against-16, is the same in rhythm as it is in pitch: a perfect fourth (4:3 pitch ratio) is easy to tune, a Pythagorean major sixth (27:16) extremely difficult. Gordon could still have gone a little farther than he did by factoring in more 5-against-4 rhythms, both as quintuplets and as quarter-notes tied to 16th-notes. I have sometimes succeeded in getting a class of students to clap 25-against-16 by conducting a quarter-note beat and having half clap quintuplet quarters while the other half clap quarter-notes tied to 16ths. Gordon goes only so far as a quintuplet over the dotted-quarter beat. I don’t know of a piece that went further in drawing so many competing rhythmic layers at the same time in a large, live-ensemble texture. It wouldn’t surprise me if Gordon’s Trance does, but I haven’t seen the score.

I thought I’d put up a more detailed example of an early totalist piece, to show precisely how composers started breaking away from minimalism in the early 1980s. Mikel Rouse’s Quick Thrust of 1984 is a work that both reaches back into minimalism’s most formalist concerns and also forecasts ideas that would later become widespread. For one thing, it was one of the first fully notated pieces for a pop instrumentation, written as it was, like most of his music of the ‘80s, for his rock-instrumentation quartet Broken Consort, consisting of soprano sax, electric keyboard, electric bass, and drum set. Secondly – it’s a 12-tone work. The composers whose work would later be called totalist loved minimalism’s formalism, hard-edged textures, reduced range of materials, impersonality, and amplified ensemble concept, but were not much enamored of its pretty, diatonic tonality (at least as manifested in the work of Reich and Glass). Few turned to 12-tone technique, nor did Mikel ever repeat the experiment as far as I know, but Quick Thrust is a bona fide piece of 12-tone totalist rock – perhaps the only one.

Thirdly, Quick Thrust is an example of music drawn from Schillinger technique, for Mikel studied with a Schillinger specialist when he came to New York in the early 1980s. Today Joseph Schillinger’s technique is more widely known by reputation than example, but in the 1930s and ‘40s, it was particularly picked up by Tin Pan Alley composers as an aid to churning out music in a hurry. Gershwin studied it; so did, later, Earle Brown. (Schillinger’s hefty two-volume exegesis of his methods is forbidding, but quite clear if you persevere. It tends to introduce a new principle and work its way up to a musical example, and is actually easier to follow if you kind of start with each musical example and work your way backward to the principle.) The technique is based in a faith in the ability of number systems and arithmetical techniques to generate musical forms of innate aesthetic attractiveness, and some of its devices had been presaged in Henry Cowell’s precocious book New Musical Resources.

One technique in particular resonated with Cowell: generating rhythms via what Schillinger called the interference of periodicities. This meant repeating several rhythms of different lengths, and using the sum of their resultant attacks as a melodic rhythm. For instance, the pattern made by the simultaneous repetitions of a dotted 8th-note at the same time as a repeated quarter gives the resultant 3-against-4, the rhythm known by the mnemonic device “PASS the GOD-damned BUTter.” Since only one rhythmic value is used for each rhythm, this is an interference of monomial periodicities. In Schillinger technique, one could also have a rhythm of two notes (say, quarter + 8th) against another two note rhythm, creating a binomial periodicity. The song “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” in fact, starts with an interference of a sexonomial periodicity (8th, 8th, 8th, 8th, 8th, quarter, totaling 7 8th-notes in duration) against a 4/4 meter. (That Gershwin wrote the song long before studying Schillinger suggests why he was drawn to the technique.)

Quick Thrust is entirely a product of interferences of monomial periodicities. Mikel rather fanatically derived all of his rhythms based on periodicities of the Fibonacci numbers 2, 3, 5, and 8. Every rhythm was either the result of the sum attacks of repeated notes of these durations, or else of a larger rhythmic unit divided into 2, 3, 5, and 8 parts. For instance, the bass line was frequently the result of dividing a duration of 30 8th-notes into 2, 3, and 5 equal parts:

Note that the 12-tone row is run through the eight-note rhythm in a phasing relationship, the pitch row and rhythm row returning to their original relationship every 24 notes. This is, of course, a recurrence of medieval isorhythmic technique, in which a pitch row (called a color) and a rhythm (called a talea) go out of phase with each other. The practice was the structural basis of the 14th-century motet, died out around 1450, and was resurrected again by Messiaen in the first movement of his Quartet for the End of Time (1941) and Study No. 7 by Conlon Nancarrow (early 1950s). It has appeared in several totalist works, my own Desert Sonata (1994) included.

The upper lines of Quick Thrust, also treated isorhythmically, tend to be drawn from patterns of recurring small durations, such as this line made up from the summed attacks of notes 3, 5, and 8 8th-notes long:

At the beginning of the piece the entire 12-tone row is heard as an introduction, upon which the bass line enters, and then the keyboard and saxophone, creating a texture of three Schillinger rhythms at once, the same tone-row cycling through all three:

Notice that the high hat rhythm follows that of the keyboard, basically doubling it, and that the drums follow the bass line. Mikel never used any other transposition or form of the row (no retrogrades or inversions), for an effect that has always reminded me of the second movement of Stravinsky’s Threni, where he does something very similar. Others will be reminded of the young Steve Reich in the ‘60s, using the same row form over and over until his teacher Luciano Berio finally asked, “Steve, if you want to write tonal music, why not just write tonal music?”

And now, ladies and gentleman, you can hear Quick Thrust in its five-minute entirety here. (By the way, there has never been a score to Quick Thrust – Mikel gave me the individual instrumental parts for his music from those years, and I’ve had to assemble the scores myself.)

I emphasize that this piece represents one of the initial starting points of what has been called the totalist, or metametric, movement. Like so much postminimalist music of the early ‘80s, it is minimalist compositionally, but not perceptually. Its repetitiveness is intricately disguised. Its strict processes are not linear but global, real to the composer but not heard by the listener. (Many movements of Bill Duckworth’s earlier Time Curve Preludes are similar in this respect.) Quick Thrust is a fantastically clear example of a certain kind of rhythmic and structuralist thinking that was pervasive, “in the air,” in the mid-1980s among a certain kind of minimalism-impressed-but-not-quite-impressed-enough composer – not characteristic of the totalist movement as a whole, but quite typical of several months in 1983/84.

This kind of intense structural fanaticism was soon left behind. Number patterns remained in use in the works of many composers, such as Michael Gordon, Art Jarvinen, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Ben Neill, Evan Ziporyn, Diana Meckley – but usually in textures of more intuitive freedom. The interference of periodicities became the basis of the fifth movement of Chatham’s An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, at least part of Branca’s Sixth Symphony “Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven,” and several pieces of my own in the ‘80s, most concentratedly my 1987 piano piece Windows on Infinity – though my interest was always in longer time stretches and larger prime numbers, with events occurring every 53 8th-notes, every 71, every 103, and so on. When Mikel heard a concert of my music by Essential Music in 1989, and I heard his Quick Thrust and other Broken Consort works soon afterward in 1990, we got together, started talking, and realized that we had been on the same track. You could look it up.

Subsequently I wrote about Quick Thrust and other works with similar rhythmic tendencies in an article in a 1994 issue of the academic journal Contemporary Music Review. Possessing entire file cabinets full of unpublished scores by composers of my generation, I could write another article like this every month. But very few people have seen that article, and articles in academic journals pretty much disappear into libraries, to be scoured at rare intervals by the occasional researcher. I’ve got tenure, I don’t need any more resumé lines, thanks. Now that I can put both score examples and recordings on the internet, I would far rather publish here, where I am am actually read. And since few people who weren’t immediately involved in the scene were aware of techniques used by the music I’ve spent my life writing about, I hope that with this method of presentation I can bring the underground history of the 1980s and ‘90s out into the open and help the world catch up. Does it sound like I’ve finally begun that book on Music After Minimalism that I’ve been threatening for years? I guess I have.

The most frequent and bitter complaint I’ve gotten about my book on Nancarrow over the years has been about the price. But I’ve just learned – over the internet, with the rest of the world – that a paperback edition is finally appearing this coming May. No price has been set yet, but I figure this should bring it down to no more than £150,000,000,000, or, in US dollars, approximately the monthly salary of an Exxon/Mobil CEO. So hold on a few more months and you’ll save.

I wish I could also correct a few of the errors in the book, most of which have been helpfully dredged up for me by subsequent Nancarrow scholar Margaret Thomas. The most egregious is that, in the charts that show the structure of Nancarrow’s canons, Study #43 is inexplicably missing. There are also some pitches wrong in Example 8.33, which analyzes the bass line of Study #41b. Maybe I can put together a list of errata for the web. Even so, there are fewer errors in the book than there were in Thomas Adès’s pissy review of it in the London Times Literary Supplement.

Composer Art Jarvinen, known as “the West-Coast totalist” (poor guy, he never got to come to any of the parties), writes to remind me, in detailing qualities of totalist music, that there was a characteristic totalist instrumentation as well as rhythmic style:

For totalist music to really work requires an edge. A lot of totalist composers have guitar or saxophone or electric keyboards (Rhodes, Hammond, Mini-Moog), or drum set, as their main instrument. I wrote for chromatic harmonica and baritone sax. I don’t want to hear a totalist piece for the Berlin Philharmonic, I want to hear Icebreaker, or the Berlin Phil-Harmonica Band! That’s why the Bang on a Can All Stars have an electric guitar. And Evan Ziporyn plays bass clarinet as if it were a Stratocaster! My totalist rhythmic/contrapuntal ideas and techniques might work with a string quartet, more or less. But my “totalist” pieces, if we are to call them that, work best with more vernacular (less standard/classical) instrumental combinations, that provide a certain edge not available in the standard instrumental groupings that are all about blend and balance. Balance? That’s why we have a guy at the mixing board!

When we recorded [Art’s piece] Clean Your Gun, I could hardly get the engineer to do what I wanted, which was, run the harmonica, cello, violin, and baritone sax through guitar amps, crank ’em up, and mic the amps. He didn’t want to do it, even though I was paying him to. I had to tell him, it’s my piece, we’re going to take a bit of paint off the walls, and you just get it on tape! There is a clarity in amplification, vernacular instrumentation, and players who play like rock musicians – i.e. with a soloistic attitude and stage presence – that I would consider a vital and indispensable factor in the development and successful delivery of the totalist style. I would probably not have written any of my totalist pieces if I didn’t have access to the instrumental doublings of the E.A.R. Unit. They just wouldn’t sound right.

It’s true, there was generally a kind of mixed, all-or-partly amplified ensemble sound that made those pieces come off. Just as Nancarrow had to harden his piano hammers to keep his counterpoint masses from softening into mush, totalist music needed amplification and instruments with percussive attacks to bring off the gear-shifting tempo contrasts.

Although I might also mention that one of Art’s most rhythmically inventive works, The Paces of Yu (1990), was scored for solo berimbau (a simple Brazilian stringed instrument) accompanied by pencil sharpeners, window shutters, plucked wooden rulers, wooden boxes, mousetraps, and fishing reels. Here’s a small excerpt from the score, showing a section for flicked and jiggled window shutters. It employs a fairly common totalist or metametric rhythm, triplets in odd-numbered meters, so that downbeats contradict the momentum set up by the triplets, and also a gradual rhythmic process, showing the inheritance from minimalism:

And here’s a recording, courtesy of the California Ear Unit and O.O. Discs. (Warning, the opening is very soft for a few minutes.) It’s hardly a sonically typical totalist example, but a suitably whacky bit of pure Jarvinen.

My post on the postclassical paradigm for meter, though it dealt with Janacek, was particularly relevant to progressive music of the last 20 years. The tendency to think about meter as quantity, without heirarchical subdivisions of the measure, was avidly developed by the composers who were part of the totalist movement of the 1980s and ‘90s: Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, John Luther Adams, Art Jarvinen, Ben Neill, Evan Ziporyn, Tim Brady, Diana Meckley, David First, Larry Polansky, myself, arguably Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, and a few others. In the wake of minimalism we created a new conception of ensemble rhythm that left the traditional concept of meter behind. (I speak of totalism in past tense now, because I have no clear evidence that the movement is continuing as such, most of its original proponents – myself included – having more or less moved on to other issues, relegating rhythmic complexity to the background.) Minimalism is still, to this day, ignorantly caricatured as a simplistic music. But by 1983, the young composers most impressed with it were hearing it as a technical basis for a new rhythmic practice so sophisticated that there are still only a handful of music ensembles who have learned to negotiate it.

In particular, totalism was, almost centrally, concerned with using conventional musical notation as a language with which to generate a feelable and performable rhythmic complexity. Some of the simple polyrhythms (usually 3-against-2 or 4-against-3) embedded in Steve Reich’s and Charlemagne Palestine’s music, as well as the irregular phrase rhythms found in Phil Glass’s early work, suggested that minimalism’s stasis might support even greater rhythmic complexity. Of course, the previous few decades had been awash in rhythmic complexity, but mostly of a conceptually abstract kind: the polyrhythms of Elliott Carter, Stockhausen, et al usually avoided articulating a steady beat for any period long enough to register tempo contrasts. Inspired by minimalism, rock, and world music, the totalists wanted a music of steady beats that allowed the listener to focus on tempo contrasts in a sustained way. Nancarrow’s player piano music offered a model, but his music generally wasn’t performable, nor was his emphasis often on sustained steady beats. What the totalists wanted was a new kind of ensemble performance that retained minimalism’s clear, doubled lines and motoric rhythm, but also offered a perception-stretching simultaneity of rhythmic layers, usually within the confines of comfortable live performance.

The trick was to use the inherent polyrhythmic implications of different note durations. The most common totalist strategy was to mix different pulses of quarter-notes, dotted quarter-notes, and triplet quarter-notes. Michael Gordon had gone down this road as early as 1983 with his Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not!. By 1993, in pieces like Yo Shakespeare, he had stripped down to almost pure rhythm (the doubled instruments here being guitars and electric keyboards):

(Hear the excerpt here. I have chosen the excerpts here for their rhythmic clarity, not because they are the most well-developed or beautiful examples of the style. If I were trying to convince the reader that totalist music is a compelling repertoire, I might in some cases have chosen other and more recent examples. My purpose at present is merely to prove that in the ‘80s and ‘90s, these composers were generating their music from strikingly similar rhythmic ideas.) Note the use of triplet quarter-notes in groupings of other than three. This was not unprecedented; Henry Cowell suggested it in New Musical Resources, Boulez toyed with the idea in Le Marteau sans Maitre, and I used it myself starting with my I’itoi Variations of 1985. What it means performance-wise is that the performer has to forget about the meter entirely (though it still conforms to 4/4 in this example) and, having internalized the tempo of the triplets, play them in tempo irrespective of bar lines. The meter’s 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 must be forgotten about.

The most fertile totalist contrast was that between triplet quarter-notes and dotted 8th-notes, either of which could easily be sustained against a dominant quarter note beat. The typical totalist ensemble circa 1993 would keep a quarter note beat in common by tapping their feet or nodding their heads, and achieve a faster 8-against-9 rhythm by having half the ensemble play triplet quarters and the other half dotted eighths. It was amazingly effective – even if the effect of everyone nodding their head to a beat no one ever played was, visually, a little humorous.

My own technique has often been not to play these tempos simultaneously, but to shift back and forth between them, as in my Snake Dance No. 2 of 1994:

(Hear the excerpt here.) By this point, of course, the “meter” has become an irrelevant bookkeeping activity: the fact that 13/8 follows 23/16 is of no importance whatever, for either the performers or the listener. One performs this music by getting a feel, throughout the piece, for how fast to go when the beats are quintuplet 8ths, how fast when they are dotted 8ths, and so on. It takes awhile to rethink your rhythmic sense this way. The day the group Essential Music started rehearsing Snake Dance No. 2, I came home to two answering-machine messages from percussionist Chuck Wood. The first was: “We just started rehearsing your piece. We hate you.” The second, from an hour later: “Actually, we’re getting the hang of it. It’s going to be all right.”

Some totalist rhythmic strategies bear a closer conceptual relationship to minimalism. For instance, one can see the influence of Reich’s Piano Phase and other phase-shifting pieces in Murphy-Nights by Art Jarvinen, in which the keyboard plays an ostinato in 8/4 (32 16th-notes long) while the bass simultaneously plays an ostinato in 33/16, thus going out of phase one 16th-note with each repetition:

(Hear the excerpt here.) The other instruments come in over this in 6/4 meter. To this day I have no idea how the California E.A.R. Unit achieved this in performance, since it doesn’t seem possible to conduct it.

Mikel Rouse has engineered some of the most complex effects of totalism, inspired by his readings in A.M. Jones’s Studies in African Music and also his early immersion in Schillinger technique. Early pieces like Quick Thrust (1984) were based entirely on rhythms generated from patterns like 3-against-5-against-8. Much of his 1995 opera Failing Kansas was energized by five-beat phrases falling across the 4/4 meter, or the superimposition of 4/4 in the accompaniment with 12/8 in the lyrics (the 8th-note being equal). Mikel has also used intricate isorhythmic effects in which lyrics (and/or pitches) go out of phase with repeated rhythms, such as this devilishly difficult passage from “Never Forget a Face” on his 1994 album Living Inside Design:

(Hear the excerpt here.)

Too, John Luther Adams has achieved more notationally conventional but still difficult polyrhythmic textures by dividing a standard measure into 4, 5, 6, and 7 equal beats, much as Cowell suggested and as Nancarrow continued doing his entire life. Simply from rhythms alone, Adams’s In a Treeless Place, Only Snow (1999) is not too visually different from Nancarrow’s Piece for Small Orchestra No. 2:

Unlike all the other totalists, though, John’s music is soft and gentle, creating cloudy textures rather than perceptible tempo clashes.

Much more loudly, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca used totalist rhythmic structures in their works for massed electric guitars. Glenn has used simultaneous tempos of 3:4:5 in his Symphony No. 6 (1987-88) and a quasi-tempo canon of 7:8:12 in the second movement of his Symphony No. 10 (1994). In An Angel Moves Too Fast to See for 100 electric guitars (1989), Rhys solved the problem of many guitarists not being able to read music by employing a totalist strategy. He gave various sections of the guitar orchestra single chords to play at varying rhythmic intervals: every 5 beats, another evert 7, 8, 9, 11, and 16, the music resulting naturally from the rhythmic process. (Hear the excerpt here.)

Not all totalist music is live-ensemble-oriented. Ben Neill and Larry Polansky have both made computer-generated tempo continua with rhythms similar to those of the enesmble composers. For instance, Neill in his 678 Streams performs on trumpet over a computer-generated ambient texture in which tempos of 6-against-7-against-8 are apparent. Among many other types of experiment, Polansky has made rhythmic canons of prerecorded samples, using similarly Nancarrovian tempo relationships. My own Disklavier pieces, notably Unquiet Night, have gone much further out than my ensemble pieces, articulating steady beats of 7:9:11:13:15:17. Even so, the principle remains the same: the fact that we use inherent notation-based properties of MIDI sequencing means that we’re still using notation to generate ratio-based tempo relationships.

In terms of live performance, however, there’s a limit to how far one can take these rhythmic relationships, which strikes me as one reason totalism has probably ceased to cohere as a movement. Rouse, having reached the perceptible extreme of his type of complexity, has become more interested in overlayings and spatial separation in his home-produced recordings. Gordon has been writing for orchestras, which can’t be trained to execute these rhythms in any reasonable manner. As I write more and more for existing ensembles, I’ve had to sublimate my rhythmic schemes to the more subtle background level of structure. Perhaps only Adams continues to write in the same rhythmic style, and he was always more interested in a certain kind of cloudy sound and texture than in discrete rhythmic perception anyway. Many of these rhythms can’t be conducted; Essential Music can feel my 23/16 followed by 13/8, but how would you indicate it with hand motions? I’m not convinced there’s not a way, but the gung-ho incursion of strictly totalist music into the repertoire of conventional classical ensembles was never a very feasible option. Even so, classical musicians need to start learning to deal with some of these rhythmic techniques that have become quite common.

Of course, none of this is officially recognized in musical discourse. Some of the most authoritative critics in the business have stated publicly that the totalist movement never existed, so by mentioning it you’re likely to subject yourself to the most withering looks of condescension. If you happen to accidentally mention it, try to cover by saying, “Ohh… it’s just something I read in Kyle Gann,” with a dismissive wave of your hand, and you might get away with it. Remember: there’s no such thing as totalist music (wink, wink).

Every professor of composition knows, and will tell you, that you can’t predict, from a 20-year-old composer’s output, his or her eventual success. People mature creatively at different rates. Some composers bloom in their 30s, others, grappling with an array of original ideas, may not achieve an integrated aesthetic until their 40s. Others may seem to follow the crowd for the first half of their career, then undergo a startling change of direction around 45 or 50. Only in retrospect do their compelling late works reveal the germs of genius inherent in their eccentric early works. Among the 20- to 25-year olds, the ones who initially produce the most professional-sounding music will often be the least original – their technical polish may be evidence more of a mimetic ability than an original vision. The more “out there” a composer’s personal vision is, the more awkward his or her early works will probably sound, and the longer it will take his or her compositional language to crystallize into something eloquent and communicative.

The early idioms of many composers testify to this. For instance, Nancarrow didn’t discover his instrument until age 36, and took another 8 or 10 years to master it. Partch, having an even wider range of unconventional elements to integrate, was nearly 50 when his style started to feel compelling. Varése wrote romantic music that he later abandoned, and struggled to bring his style into focus at just shy of 40. Feldman’s music seemed like a cute adjunct to Cage’s philosophy until his ambitions suddenly blossomed at age 44. Elliott Carter wrote an undistinguished neoclassicism into his 40s, and didn’t find what we recognize as a Carterian idiom until age 43. Rzewski wrote some charming minimalist works in his early 30s, but didn’t create his own style until he was 37, with The People United. Robert Ashley was involved in the avant-garde all along, but didn’t begin to stand out until he wrote Perfect Lives at 48. Giacinto Scelsi was 54 when he found what he had been looking for in his 4 pezzi su una nota sola. Other composers have bloomed earlier. Charles Ives wrote Thanksgiving, one of his greatest works, at 30. Cage entered into his first-period maturity in his late 20s. And La Monte Young made his life’s monolinear path clear at 25. There really is no universal pattern.

As I say, every composer knows this. Oddly enough, however, music critics, conductors, orchestra managements, and some record labels operate on a strikingly different theory of creative development. Convinced that compositional talent is similar to that for dancing or mathematics and thus inevitably manifests itself by age 25, they are on the constant lookout for the brilliant young composer. Giddy with the thrill of discovery, they pick the next Beethoven out of a crowd of grad students, shower him with commissions and recording contracts, spend a bundle promoting his name to the public. He is groomed to take an elevated position in musical society, much the way Hollywood positions young actresses to become stars. (For some reason Great Britain is especially attached to this habit.) The youngster becomes famous, is watched and listened to, taken seriously because “the authorities” have staked their reputations on him. The youngster’s music may develop, may not; it doesn’t matter, because he will continue to be lionized, performed, recorded regardless of whether his music lives up to its early promise. Only in the rarest occasions will there be a general admission that enthusiasm was premature; George Benjamin is the only such case I can name. By law of averages, these lionized composers will most often be the imitative ones whose early music seemed highly polished because it wasn’t encumbered by a need to integrate new insights.

And so, among famous composers, we have two career paradigms: the composer discovered before age 30 by the classical music establishment, and the composer discovered after 65 by younger composers. What about the composer who achieves public success at age 40 or 50, due to the dawning realization that his or her work has reached a remarkable maturity? This almost never happens. In Rzewski’s case I think it helped that he was such a persuasive pianist for his own works – the orchestra world has still not embraced him. Carter’s career I’ve never figured out, but I imagine inherited wealth didn’t hurt. But I am moved to these recurring reflections once again by writing program notes for yet another batch of competent, but not-yet-terribly-distinctive, 20-something composers that the orchestra world, with its critical entourage, has confidently declared will be the geniuses of the future.

During Bard’s Janacek festival a couple of years ago, I became rather impressed with that composer’s textural and tonal originality, especially upon realizing that I had always thought of him as a 20th-century composer and he was actually born in 1854. So awhile later, browsing at Patelson’s in New York, I ran across the sheet music to Janacek’s On an Overgrown Path – the piece that the well-known eponymous blog is named for, I suppose – and picked it up. It sat on my piano for months, but since I moved to a new house, my Steinway has developed a terrible case of sticking notes, rendering it unsatisfying to play, and piano tuner time is at a dear premium up here. So at an odd moment I finally decided to listen to the new ECM recording of the piece with András Schiff while following the score. It’s a lovely recording – except that Schiff can’t handle the 5/8 meters that come up in a couple of movements. He plays this passage:

by speeding up the first three 8th-notes notes and prolonging the last two (even extending the left-hand D-flat into a quarter-note), turning the meter into a more conventional 6/8, as you can hear here, and disappointingly taking the edge off of Janacek’s rhythmic originality. (In fact, when the music reverts to 2/4 in the 5th measure, Schiff’s 8th-note suddenly slows down by 50 percent, making it clear that he was feeling the 5/8 as 2/4 with triplets all along.)

This wouldn’t merit mentioning if it weren’t so common. Classical musicians are taught early in life that a measure is a rhythmic unit, divided into two or three parts, and if divided into more, then divded according to a symmetrical heirarchy: 2 groups of 2, 2 groups of 3, 3 groups of 3, and so on – or not and so on, because that’s about it. Of course, quite early in the 20th century – On an Overgrown Path is a hundred years old – composers opened up a new conception of meter, as a quantity of equal or even unequal units. Musicians accustomed to playing composers as long-dead as Stravinsky and Copland are used to negotiating 5/8 and 7/8 meter, but it’s surprising how many professional musicians have never added the new paradigm to their repertoire. They recognize it and think they know how to do it, but when they start to play, their body-need for a regular beat, like Schiff’s, overrules their visual cognition. I have to warn my students, some of whom gravitate to 13/16 and similar meters under the influence of notation-software-induced ease, that some classical players will have to be taught how to play the rhythm, and that they might not be teachable. Recently a student wrote a passage in 10/8 meter, with the following quite elegant rhythm that required four beats per measure, quarter-notes on 1 and 3 and dotted quarters on 2 and 4:

It seemed perfectly simple to him and me, but the performance, by professional players steeped in 19th-century music, was a disaster. They ended up speeding the non-triplet 8th-notes into triplets, and making it a kind of bumpy 4/4. No amount of pleading could get them to feel successive beats as unequal.

I face the same mentality when I show people my Desert Sonata for piano, which has a long moto perpetuo passage in 41/16 meter. Certain people look at it and exclaim, incredulously, “How do you COUNT that?!” Well, of course, you don’t count it, but if you will play the 16th-notes evenly and in the order indicated, I promise it will come out all right. What they want, of course, is some heirarchical division of 41 that they can funnel all those 16th-notes into, and there just isn’t one. (Please don’t be tiresome and advise me to renotate it in 4/4 – the 41/16 clarifies the underlying isorhythm, and mangling it into 4/4 would turn it into an unmemorizable mishmash.) By now this new metric paradigm is very common among young composers – Sibelius notation software will handle meters up to 99/32 just as easily as 4/4 – and so it’s astonishing to still find it so missing in classical music pedagogy. In 1947 Nancarrow turned to the player piano because the musicians he met couldn’t play the comparatively simple cross-rhythms he was writing. Were he to come back today, there are circles in which he would find that things haven’t improved much.

A week from tomorrow, Saturday, December 3, the Other Minds festival is holding a “musical séance” at San Francisco’s Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street, at 2pm, 5:30pm and 8pm. The idea is to raise up the spirits of composers from the experimental (or rather, Postclassical) tradition such as Cage, Nancarrow, Cowell, Crawford, Satie, and Rudhyar. I’m not projected to be dead yet myself by that time (unless they know something I don’t), but nevertheless their star pianist Sarah Cahill (pictured) will play a piece of mine, “Saintly” from my Private Dances, along with works by others from the still-kicking set like John Adams, Terry Riley, and Mamoru Fujieda. There will also be some works for Disklavier presented, including a new work by Daniel David Feinsmith, my own Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, and a couple of Nancarrow’s Player Piano Studies. Sounds like one of those great San Francisco new-music marathons, with Cahill featured throughout (both my pieces are on the 5:30 concert). Wish I could say I’ll see you there, but I’ll be in upstate New York, kicking myself for not having moved to California right out of college like I was tempted to.

The American Composers’ Orchestra is performing a transcription of Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No. 7 (perhaps the best of his early works) at Zankel Hall on November 11. They asked me to write a little article for their web site about Nancarrow as a person, and it’s now posted here.

Alaskan composer John Luther Adams and I were out grouse-hunting the other day, and got into a conversation about our generation of composers. We had flushed out a couple of coveys we weren’t expecting, peppered the air with some 7 1/2 shot, and my spaniel Nellie had done a noble job of scouring the bracken for anything we might have hit – but came up empty. Finally, dropping my gun, I suggested that maybe the reason composers our age hadn’t gotten enough attention was that we showed too much respect for our elders, and hadn’t presented ourselves as individuals worthy of attention ourselves. John removed his orange cap, wiped his forehead with a weary arm, uncocked his 20-gauge, and asked what I meant.

OK, we weren’t actually grouse-hunting, we were drinking at the Broome Street Bar after a La Monte Young concert, but it was just as picturesque, believe me.

After all, John was just about to premiere a piece titled For Lou Harrison, dedicated to one of his mentors. I had just released a CD of basically player-piano music, after having written a book about Conlon Nancarrow. I describe John’s music as a kind of cross between Henry Cowell and Morton Feldman, and he’s always been OK with that. My microtonal music doesn’t sound like that of my teacher Ben Johnston, but I use his notation, and I inherited his approach to harmony. Our mutual friend Peter Garland has evolved an entirely original musical idiom, but he’s always staking his claim to the Partch/Cowell/Rudhyar aesthetic. Our friend Larry Polansky is the continuation of James Tenney experimentalism, and his greatest piece yet is a set of variations on a Ruth Crawford-harmonized folksong. Mikel Rouse dedicated his most groundbreaking opera to his pioneer-predecessor Robert Ashley. The great composers of my generation, at least the ones I think are great, have not exactly revolted against their elders. We have not reinvented the wheel nor the world, nor announced that all music before we arrived was worthless and should be forgotten.

That’s part one of the argument. Part two is that we have also not excommunicated anyone. We have not indulged in the age-old gambit of announcing that our way of writing music was the only way. We have not penned manifestos declaring that “Anyone who has not felt – I do not say understand – but felt the necessity of the postminimalist/totalist/microtonal language is USELESS.” We haven’t done the Stockhausen/Boulez thing, the Picasso/Braque thing. We haven’t even claimed, as John Zorn did, that Carl Stalling, not John Cage, was the REAL father of the avant-garde. I remember in the mid-80s Zorn starting off a liner note, with a startling lack of prescience: “Like it or not, the era of the one-composer piece is just about over….” He seemed to abandon that tack soon after.

There are several things I feel in response to all this. First, I am proud of my generation for not excommunicating anyone. We were scarred by the battles our teachers fought, which appear stupid in retrospect. We absorbed pluralism with our mother’s milk. We learned 12-tone music and sometimes loved it, while nodding our head to the Beatles, while zoning out to Terry Riley, while feeling a warm kinship with Virgil Thomson, while absorbing amazing rhythmic complexities from Henry Cowell, while buying up one Coltrane record after another. I had always felt that working as a critic robbed me of the luxury of believing that my own aesthetic was uniquely privileged, but more and more I find all my peers in the same boat. Many of us may feel (John certainly more than I) that THIS is the way I must write my music, but I’ve never met a composer my own age or younger who feels like only one kind of music is valid today for everyone. Minimalism nurtures no mandates. There were a couple of years back there that the Bang on a Can composers went around saying that new music, to be relevant today, must be based on the vernacular – but what vernacular they meant was a question no one could answer, and the argument petered out quickly in the face of non-vernacular-based great music by Feldman, Varese, Tenney, Niblock, and others. Thank the gods for my generation of composers: we are, by and large, a goddamned tolerant bunch.

The other part is harder to answer. Beethoven claimed that he had learned nothing from Haydn – I will not say that about Nancarrow, nor John about Harrison – quite the contrary. This does not mean that John’s music isn’t a whole different kettle of fish from Harrison’s. Peter Garland can go on about the mantle of Varèse all he wants, but his own gentle, subtly non-repetitive style couldn’t be further from the acerbities of Octandre and Hyperprism. And there’s been little notice that, while Nancarrow’s player piano music is laced together with brilliant large-scale canonic and isorhythmic structures, my own Disklavier music is almost the opposite: whimsical, intuitive, stream-of-consciousness. We’re proud to be card-carrying members of a Maverick tradition (if that is not an oxymoron), but that doesn’t mean we haven’t each staked out his own territory.

My own take on the 20th century was that it was a tremendous unearthing of new ideas – and that now those new ideas are ready to be knit into a more elaborate language. In particular, for me there are four (or five) composers whose music created a space that younger composers could inhabit for several generations:

Nancarrow, for rhythmic structure;

Ben Johnston (or, alternatively, La Monte Young) for pitch structure;

Robert Ashley for text setting and theater; and

Morton Feldman for texture and continuity.

Personally, I feel like a composer could run wild for decades through the rainbow canyons opened up by these composers, without repeating anything they did. In my Nancarrow book I list 26 devices that he used only once each in his output, any one of which is susceptible to further development in other, quite different contexts; plus several ideas implied by his music that he never used at all. It seems silly to walk away from all those untouched riches in search of more pristine ideas. The modernists opened up new continents to musical habitation, and there’s little point in that if someone doesn’t come live in them.

To the extent that the arbiters of musical discourse have not recognized the musical leaders of my generation because we don’t kick ass in the musico-political discourse, that’s their loss. Our commitment to pluralism is a commendable ethical position; our refusal to chase after empty novelty while so many barely-unwrapped new ideas lay waiting to be developed means we are living in a reality that the taste-makers just haven’t caught up with. There are times for innovation, and times for assimilation, and critics and entrepreneurs need to be on their toes when the paradigm shifts.

But I’d be willing to admit that our rhetoric is perhaps not sufficiently self-serving. Every time we justify our willingness to stand alone in some weird sonic territory by pointing to Tenney or Feldman or Young, perhaps the world understandably dismisses us as epigones. We fought the academy, but maybe we forgot to psychically kill off our father figures – at least the ones inside us. Perhaps Peter needs to make a more belligerent case for Garlandism without reference to Cowell, perhaps a manifesto telling what Polansky renounced in his teachers’ music is in order. It’s time for a “Cage Is Dead” article. John, in between puffs on his meerschaum (oops, not true, sorry), admitted that he once told Tenney how much he owed to his music, and Tenney practically got mad: “But John, you’ve gone way beyond what I’m doing, the music’s all yours now!” He was right. We’re too proud to make like Stockhausen, none of us yearns to play the Grand Inquisitor. But we all have strong reasons for making our music precisely the way we make it, for reasons that apply to this exact historical moment that wouldn’t have been relevant 40 years ago. And maybe we need to state our own cases with a little more ego, and less reverence for the composers who meant so much to us – but whose music we’ve indisputably grown beyond.