Search Results for: nancarrow

Following the fiasco in which my audio files disappeared from Live365 a few months ago, I was pretty slow in getting Postclassic Radio back up and in running order, and it sat pretty stagnant for the month of August. (By way of apology, Live365 gave everyone affected a free month’s broadcasting.) But people kept adding on as listeners, and I finally took time out from other work to rev it back up. Having started with Eve Beglarian as July composer-of-the-month, the playlist took a female-intensive turn, and I thought about moving to an all-woman-composer playlist by September. I haven’t quite gone that far – there were some Noah Creshevsky pieces I wanted to play, and I refuse to take down John Cage’s In a Landscape, which some of you may have noticed is the station’s ever-present theme song. Nevertheless, September will be Women’s Month on the station, and I’ve got pieces up by Allison Cameron, Amy Knoles, Annea Lockwood, Annie Gosfield, Bernadette Speach, Connie Beckley, Eliane Radigue, Elizabeth Brown, Elodie Lauten, Eve Beglarian, Janice Giteck, Jewlia Eisenberg, Judith Sainte-Croix, Julia Wolfe, Maggi Payne, Maria de Alvear, Mary Jane Leach, Pauline Oliveros, Sarah Peebles, and Wendy Mae Chambers – plus I’ll soon be taking down some men’s pieces to add in Belinda Reynolds, Beth Anderson, Carolyn Yarnell, Laurie Spiegel, and Meredith Monk. Not that there’s ever any shortage of women composers on my playlist, in my writings – or in my heart (sigh).

Today happens to be the second anniversary of this blog. I notice that I wrote a little fewer entries this year than last – I suspect that decline will continue. I’m not finding a blog to be the most effective means for getting my ideas out, because I can’t accompany my arguments with sufficient evidence. I’m sitting on hundreds of scores by young composers, making statements about new music based on what I find in them, and it feels sometimes like all I do here is draw arguments from people who don’t know the music I’m talking about and won’t believe it exists. When I wrote my Nancarrow book I could include loads of score excerpts, and no one has ever accused me of not knowing what I was talking about with Nancarrow. It strikes me my time would be better spent on my proposed book about Postminimalism, with my assertions backed up by incontrovertible examples, rather than just sitting here drawing fire from skeptics.

In response to my new CD Nude Rolling Down an Escalator the questions have started pouring in about the Disklavier, some of them the same questions that Conlon Nancarrow spent his late life fielding about the player piano. Let me see if I can head some of them off at the pass.

I love the pieces, too bad the Disklavier sounds so electronic. Couldn’t you have used some really good piano samples? Actually, the Disklavier is a regular acoustic piano. Those are physical, metal piano strings being struck by felt hammers, just like any other piano. I can reach in and pluck the strings if I want. It’s exactly like an old-fashioned player piano, simply played by MIDI commands rather than by a paper roll with holes in it. If you think it sounds electronic, your false conception of what a Disklavier is may be misleading your perception.

The one odd thing about my Disklavier is its tuning: I keep it in an 18th-century well temperament, Thomas Young’s well temperament of 1799 (nearly identical to what’s called Velotti-Young on some synthesizers – you can read about the scale here). It’s a more subtly different tuning, to our ears, than something like Werckmeister III that Bach used; the greatest deviation from modern equal temperament is only 6 cents (6/100ths of a half-step). It is not a “microtonal” tuning, as some have thought, because there are only 12 pitches to the octave, all about a half-step apart. Nevertheless, while it’s difficult to notice the well temperament in any particular passage (though one reviewer’s sharp ears caught it in Folk Dance for Henry Cowell and Tango da Chiesa), it does create a slight but pervasive difference of timbre over the whole keyboard. Intervals that are purer, and lack the buzzy inharmonicity of the modern piano, are often perceived as unpianolike, and a little bell-like or electronic. I’ve had this perception myself with La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. If you think the piano sounds a little electronic, it might be that you’re not used to the temperament. I recently had my grand piano at home worked on, and it came back in equal temperament; I couldn’t stand the sound, which was buzzy and harsh and undifferentiated, and which everyone else is perfectly accustomed to. I was so relieved when my piano tuner came over and restored the 18th-century temperament.

[UPDATE: Composer Lawrence Dillon credits the electronic illusion to “an aural illusion caused by fast torrents of notes that I intuitively knew couldn’t be contained in 10 fingers — my brain… solved the riddle by hearing an artificial tint to the timbre.” I have to admit, there’s a moment at the end of Bud Ran Back Out that sounds electronic even to me. Perhaps instead of worrying about that I should cultivate it.]

The tempos sound so mechanical – shouldn’t you have randomized the attacks to make it sound more like a human is playing it? Actually, I randomized the attacks in every piece. Almost nothing on the CD is metronomically pure. Again, if you know you’re listening to a machine, you may be predisposed to hear it as mechanical. However, in writing music of different tempos, there’s a limit to how much rubato one can allow, and it is a much narrower range than is common in live performance. (This is a question that came up constantly regarding Nancarrow’s player-piano music, and my feeling about it is the same as his.)

Jonathan Kramer, in his book The Time of Music, reported that studies that analyzed performers playing conventional music showed that even the most accurate performer will frequently show variation in the durations of consecutive 8th-notes or quarter-notes of as much as 15 percent. One study showed that professional violinists played a 3/4 rhythm of alternating half- and quarter-notes at a ratio averaging 1.75:1. Now, for the kinds of tempo contrasts I use, and that Nancarrow used for the latter half of his output (up to 60:61), a 15-percent tempo deviation would be fatal to the subtle differences between lines. Take one of the simplest examples, my Texarkana. The tempo contrast throughout is 29 in the treble line against 13 in the bass line. The joke of the piece is that the melody, being indefinably just more than twice as fast as the bass, sounds out of control. 26 against 13 would be a pedestrian 2:1, something any human pianist could do. Yet a 26-tempo is only an 11-percent deviation from the 29-tempo, well within the range of typical human tempo deviation. For the 29:13 tempo contrast to mean anything, the random attack humanization needs to be kept well under 10 percent.

What Conlon always said was that, in Romantic music, performers had to add rubato and tempo deviations to enliven the music because it was inherently rhythmically uninteresting. In his own music, he felt, the rhythmic interest inhered in the subtle complexity of close-but-not-identical simultaneous tempos, and therefore no further “enlivening” was needed – and, in fact, would obviate perception of the tempo relationships he was trying to capture. I agree. To gain the new rhythmic liveliness of simultaneous tempos, we have to sacrifice some of the old rhythmic liveliness of rubato. Imagine if player pianos had always been around, but people had only recently learned to play piano by hand: someone would be complaining that we lost the old rhythmic liveliness of multitempo, for which pianists were fractically trying to compensate by applying rubato.

Performers have begun arranging Nancarrow’s player-piano studies for live ensembles. Don’t you really hope someone will do that for your pieces someday? Number one, just about the only Nancarrow studies that have been performed live are those with fairly simple tempo ratios, like 3:4:5. No one has yet arranged (or at least performed) Study No. 33 with its ratio of 2 against the square root of 2, or No. 40 with its ratio of e-against-pi. Similarly, I doubt that an ensemble could play the 29-against-13 of Texarkana, or the 5:7:9:11:13:15:17 of Unquiet Night. If someone wants to try, that’s fine with me – but it sure seems like a lot of wasted effort. Personally, I find both the player piano and the Disklavier tremendous fun to watch, whereas I don’t really see much entertainment in watching most live pianists.

The thing is, if you presuppose that the raison d’etre of a Disklavier is that it can do anything a pianist can do and more, I guarantee you’ll be disappointed. I’ll go further than that: if you expect ANY new music to provide all the same pleasures as the music you already love, I promise YOU WILL BE DISAPPOINTED. The question with new music is always, Does it provide sufficiently plentiful and rich new pleasures to compensate for the old pleasures that have been lost? A human pianist is an amazing phenomenon, and the Disklavier is no substitute for one; nor is a living pianist a substitute for a Disklavier. Each can do things the other one can’t. The fact that the sounds are the same may create an unfortunate expectation, one that’s never bothered me, but it may bother you. In some of my Disklavier pieces (especially Texarkana and Despotic Waltz) I take great fun in mimicking the conventions of live piano playing with the Disklavier, and, to me, it’s funny because they’re so not the same. I’ve written a lot of piano music for live performers, and I compose very differently for pianist than I do for Disklavier. To me, they’re different instruments. You may be one of those people for whom the Disklavier can only remind you of a deficient live pianist. If so, there are a couple thousand recordings of live pianists I can recommend.

Some of us composers feel that in order for music to progress, we need access to rhythms and tunings and timbres and structures that humans can’t play. Something will be gained by achieving them, but something else will be lost. I guarantee it. You’re either interested in the search for new musical pleasures or you’re not.

Why don’t you refer to it as the Yamaha Disklavier, since it’s made by Yamaha? Because I tried to get Yamaha interested in putting some money or publicity into the project and they turned me down. Why should I supply them with any more free publicity than I have to?

I needn’t have called them Disklavier Studies, after all, because they can also be played on a Pianodisc system. The Pianodisc system can be installed on a regular grand piano (a Steinway or Bösendorfer, for instance), and runs just like a Disklavier – with the additional advantage that Pianodisc, unlike Disklavier, can be run from a floppy disc containing straight MIDI files. Yamaha’s Disklavier ain’t the only game in town.

Jerry Bowles over at Sequenza 21 raises a provocative, and eternally recurrent, question, that begs to be answered at greater length than I can over there:

The comments under the announcement of David Diamond’s death on the front page [alleging that he was a bitter, petty, often malicious person] raise a question that has always intrigued me as a civilian in the world of the arts and that is: to what extent, if at all, does the character of the creator matter in the evaluation of his or her body of artistic work. Should it matter to listeners whether Diamond was a nice man or not or whether Wagner was an anti-semite?

I think that composers need to be very wary of the attempt to judge musicians partly on their politics and character, and that we need to put up a unified front against critics who write thinkpieces around the hey-this-guy-was-a-jerk-maybe-we-shouldn’t-listen-to-his-music idea.

Let’s take a hypothetical. I’m pro-choice. There are people who think that being pro-choice is as bad as being antisemitic, or worse. Say after I’m dead the prolifers have all their wildest dreams come true, and the country veers to the extreme right on this issue. I can imagine some music critic of 2105 AD writing a thinkpiece in the Times headlined, “Did Kyle Gann Have Baby-Killer Sympathies?,” and people beginning to shy away from my music in response. Given that many people truly consider abortion murder, and therefore just as bad as killing Jews, this is basically what happened to Wagner. He was one of many Germans who felt, however irrationally, that the Jews were standing in the way of German unification. It was a stupid opinion, and his shrill vociferousness on the point embarrassed many of his friends. But not until the Holocaust sank into consciousness did antisemitism come to seem, in retrospect, the evil thing that all sane people now agree that it is.

Remember that during World War I, Wagner’s antiroyalist participation in the Dresden Uprising was taken as a sign that he was politically correct, and therefore it was OK to enjoy his music even though he was German. How fair is it, in either case, to judge a person’s politics based on events that occur decades after he died?

An artist’s relationship to his art and his relationship to politics are entirely different. I have spent my life studying music. My ideas about music have been tested in the fires of professional argument and public opinion. I am a self-proclaimed leader in that field, I come up with my own ideas, and I am not afraid to defend a position of which I am the sole exponent. My reputation will and should rise or fall depending on how much resonance my musical ideas find. By contrast, I have never studied political science. I have never held or run for public office, I have never been given political responsibility, and my political beliefs have never been tested by fire. I am a follower in politics – I read the papers, books, the internet, and I respond to the arguments than make sense to me; I’ll even post political opinions on my blog, though you’ll notice I’m usually passing on something I read elsewhere – and I do not invent my own political ideas. My music is the result of intense and conscious self-scrutiny and continuous evolution; my politics are the vague, accidental, and unsupervised result of temperament (not being personally aggressive, I generally root for victims and the underdog) and environment (19 years at the Village Voice, after all, and 16 in academia). Judge me by my music – but the idea that my music might someday be judged by my amateur political thought is repellent. Might as well judge Nixon’s performance as president based on his piano playing.

When I was a teenager I supported the Vietnam War, because I believed what LBJ said about it. The day I learned that LBJ had lied, my support evaporated. I don’t consider it my fault that I supported that war at first – I was misled, with millions of others. Who knows what political beliefs I may be currently misled about? But in music, however wrong I may be, I am not misled by others.

I don’t see that Wagner was any different. Nothing about his idiot antisemitism suggests that he was on the cutting edge in that department, that he was the first to come up with ideas that others later accepted. Musically he was way out in front of everyone else, politically he carried around some boneheaded ideas that he did not originate. Being German and full of himself, and living in a time in which genius was not quite yet accustomed to being relegated to specialization, he mistakenly thought that his musical genius conferred authority on his political opinions. So because he made this mistake, I’m not supposed to enjoy Die Meistersinger? There are not many parallels to Wagner’s reputation, but remember that when antisemitism is not the crime, the reactionary tendency looks more sinister. Copland was blacklisted for awhile for supposed Communist sympathies, and if you’re as suspicious of Commies as most of us are of antisemites, then the musics of Copland, Nancarrow, Diamond, Siegmeister, and Riegger are avenues of pleasure closed off to you.

And what’s the point of that closing off? Number one, to punish the composer for having been misled; Number two, to prevent enthusiasm for music that might be somehow “infected” with bad character or bad politics. If the composer’s dead, how does neglecting his music punish him? The music exists, it’s there to do with what we want, and if we can benefit, why not benefit? I’m more open to the second argument, that music is a window into the soul, and that bad character will manage to express itself in musical weaknesses. But if this is true, then it must work both ways, and strengths in the music must also be evidence of strengths in the character. Let’s study the music, and if we find weaknesses, then we will assign it a lower position in our estimation. But to read the biography, see weaknesses, and then go searching for corresponding weaknesses in the music is to grant validity to self-fulfilling prophecies.

I’ve analyzed loads of Wagner’s music, and have never run across an antisemitic melody or chord progression. The most compelling argument I’ve seen for antisemitism being expressed in his operas (and I’ve read a lot about it) is the contention that Beckmesser and Mime represent Jewish stereotypes; but since they are not identified as Jewish in the librettos, we can only make this argument by assuming what we set out to prove, extracting what we think Wagner’s stereotype of Jews was and matching it up, more or less self-evidently, with our impressions of Beckmesser and Mime. I do think Wagner’s music has weaknesses – I think the music often rises to an emotive intensity that the libretto fails to support – and I think these weaknesses may well point to a lack of emotional maturity in the composer. But I’m disappointed with the music before I transfer that disappointment to the composer, and what this particular weakness would have to do, directly, with antisemitism, I haven’t the faintest idea. As a person, responsible to his friends and the society in which he lived, Wagner was horribly flawed by his antisemitism. But I fail to see any respect in which his music was tainted by it, and it seems like a different kind of crime – and a category mistake – to assume that we’ll find evidence of that flaw in the music.

As for ill-judging the music of composers whose personalities are considered unpleasant, this puts us on even more subjective territory. Certainly, if one decides not to perform or program music by a certain composer because he’s too big a pain in the ass to deal with, that’s a completely rational response, and an appropriate punishment. But after he’s dead, what point does further neglect serve? One of the composers who’s been trotted out as Exhibit A of unpleasantness is Ralph Shapey. Me, I had a blast with Ralph. I was never his student, I wasn’t connected to the U. of Chicago, I wasn’t the right sex for him to make passes at, and he was thoroughly sweet to me, and I found him delightful. (I seem to have a knack for dealing with composers considered “difficult.”) Likewise, I think I’m a pretty nice guy overall, but I’m aware there are people out there who would put me in the “unpleasant” category. No one is on good behavior all the time, or bad, and I think that there are certain people, like Feldman, who put all their obnoxiousness into their personality so they could keep it out of their music. A person’s artistic expression is sometimes not only reflective, but compensatory.

Not much ill has resulted, yet, from this tendency to cast doubts based on antisemitism on the musics of Wagner, Ruggles, or Varèse, or based on homophobia against the music of Ives (this last a completely bogus charge in my view, but don’t get me started), or based on unpleasantness against Shapey, Diamond, and others. But I fear that if we grant validity to holding composers morally responsible for their lives as well as artistically responsible for their works, listening to their music only if their behavior and views also meet our standards, we leave all artists vulnerable to witch-hunts arising in the ebb and flow of political fashion, based on whatever unreliable biographical evidence their enemies present. I shudder to think what sins I’ve committed, what mistakes I’ve made, what political positions I’ve taken subject to historical re-evaluation, that may be held against my music in the future. I may be responsible for my music, but my music is not responsible for me. When we love the music and are disappointed in the musician, we can only tolerantly shake our heads and wonder at what fallible vessels the Spirit of Music embraces to express itself through.

Whenever I inveigh against the unfair obstacles Downtown composers face, I sometimes receive a certain kind of question: Isn’t the value of Downtown composers that they’re rebels, and wouldn’t they be ruined if they became part of the establishment? If they won awards and became university professors, wouldn’t they lose their authenticity? Wouldn’t they become as complacent and authoritarian as Uptowners if they got performed a lot and were financially comfortable, and wouldn’t their music weaken? Can’t the social conscience that their music represents only be preserved by keeping them disenfranchised and in relative poverty?

I’ll pause a moment to let any Downtown composers finish laughing, but I do get such questions, and I intend to answer them.

This is akin to the “artists need to starve to sharpen their work” theory that some colleges use to justify denying tenured status to art practitioners. I have yet to meet an artist who doesn’t find that paternalistic, condescending, and wrong-headed. Oh, we all know the occasional talented rich boy who never developed his talent because he didn’t need to, and there are stories of composers (George Crumb being somewhat archetypal) whose creative trains were derailed by too much success too early. But those are a completely different matter from supplying an artist with a living wage, or providing a modicum of helpful recognition after years of hard work. Every composer knows how your art improves: produce a lot of it, which requires loads of time and freedom from exhausting day jobs. Everyone knows how you gain the technique needed to increase your work’s scale and ambition: by getting the practical experience of being performed. Denying these to artists does not make them spiritually pure, it stunts their artistic growth. Strip away the sappy, Song of Norway sentimentalism about artistic geniuses, and that’s the common sense that?s left.

I’d bet you that there’s not a composer in Manhattan who wouldn’t prefer being fed and performed to being romanticized. (Please, Downtowners, let me know which of you prefer being romanticized, and I’ll be glad to oblige.) I bet $30,000 would buy you the authenticity of any composer in the East Village. Easy payment plan available. Being considered authentic rebels, little miniature Harry Partches, I guess, is a kind of charming consolation prize for not getting much else, but the picture doesn’t really fit. For instance, I wrote the script for the American Mavericks radio series, but I did so under protest against the stupid word “mavericks.” It implies that Downtown composers, or the American experimentalists, are hermetic, society-scorning loners who eschew all external influences and go their own way. Hardly anything could be further from the truth.

Downtowners are (and experimentalists have always been) just as social, and just as susceptible to each other’s influence, as any other group of musicians. Even Nancarrow – the archetypal maverick, right? – spent his entire life working out rhythmic ideas that Cowell had written about in New Musical Resources, while reading about the latest Continental trends in his subscription to Die Reihe. Cage used those ideas too, and so have John Luther Adams, Mikel Rouse, and Larry Polansky. Cowell begat Cage, who begat Feldman, who begat Bernadette Speach. Partch begat Ben Johnston, who begat me. What’s maverick about that? The point is, Downtown music, American experimental, postclassical, whatever you want to call it, is not a more-street-credible-than-thou moral stance, but a coherent, traceable musical tradition. We steal ideas from each other, we influence each other, we even go, after concerts, to restaurants in large groups and drink and gossip together. But to hear the maverick myth, you’d think that after leaving Merkin Hall we each put on our cowboy hats, turn on our heels, light unfiltered cigarettes, and stalk off to our lonely studios to write music that owed nuthin’ to nobody.

The genealogy of Downtown ideas can be documented. A lot of our scores can be analyzed. A surprising number of us have doctorates. We’re closer to European music than we pretend, or than you realize. Minimalists are all Bruckner fanatics. Hell, we sit around and talk about how we’re the real inheritors of the Mozart-to-Brahms tradition, and how 12-tone music was a misguided aberration, a sick detour. Like Mozart, we go out and perform our own works in odd little spaces, composing for the moment instead of being in thrall to music of a previous century. Uptowners inherited Mozart’s forms, we inherited his attitude. The reason we’re outsiders? We placed our bets shrewdly but unpopularly, on Feldman and Reich rather than Babbitt or Druckman or Harbison. We’re feeling pretty well vindicated these days; we expect to eventually be proved right on Ashley, La Monte Young, and Trimpin as well, but we don’t think that anyone should ever be excommunicated for their opinions and preferences and the models they follow.

Sure, we’re rebels, but more like Solzhenitsyn than Jesse James, not so much striking out on our own as escaping an absurd authoritarian structure. To call Downtowners mavericks and rebels confers too much legitimacy on the Uptown establishment. That establishment does not represent The Inauthenticity of Mass Consciousness in a Corporate Society, and, sorry, it does not require a Radical Understanding of Human Freedom to escape it. It represents very little, in fact: just an outdated educational system held in place by anachronistic social institutions like the orchestra and opera house. All it takes to turn away from it is a willingness to make art out of materials and ideas that come from your daily environment rather than from your education, a refusal to write multimovement string quartets and concertos with the mandated kinds of harmonic, textural, and tempo contrasts. I can’t tell that there’s any such thing as Uptown painting, or Uptown literature. I’m sure the other arts have styles that periodically become the establishment for awhile and then give way to others. But in no other art do artists have to struggle against relentlessly surviving paradigms specifically from 19th-century Europe. Electronic music is the musical area with no real Up-/Downtown distinction because, with the exception of the endearingly quaint genre of musique concrète, there’s no oppressive European inheritance involved. Far from Downtownness being a difficult state to achieve, I’m constantly amazed that the composition world isn’t vastly dominated by Downtowners. It hardly takes nerves of steel to be skeptical of one’s education.

If this blows your romantic image of Downtown, tough luck – we’re more Woody Allen’s than James Dean’s, and I guarantee we would bear up bravely under some funding and recognition. Look at it this way: If poverty and disenfranchisement are such wonderful goads to an artist’s creativity, Downtowners feel guilty hoarding them. We’d be happy to spread them around more equitably.

Composer Lawrence Dillon, over at Sequenza 21, is trying to determine, for pedagogical reasons I guess, what were the pieces of music from the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that most changed the way composers think about composing. I demurred offering my own choices, feeling a little out-of-mainstream in that milieu, and also having an innate proclivity for huge, long, relentless lists instead of brief, exclusive ones. He said, “Awww, c’mon!,” which I found a sufficiently compelling argument for a lazy Sunday afternoon. It’s an odd request as worded, because those pieces from the ’60s formed my conception of music, those from the ’70s changed it, but by the ’90s, very little was really going to change the way I compose – though I’ll admit, Mikel Rouse’s Failing Kansas did. Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s my personal list for Lawrence, as short as I dare make it, and posted on my own blog so I can add important things I forgot:

1960s:

Pierre Boulez: Pli selon pli (1962)

Terry Riley: In C (1964)

Igor Stravinsky: Requiem Canticles

Harry Partch: The Delusion of the Fury (1965-66)

John Cage: Variations IV (1963)

Luciano Berio: Sinfonia (1967)

Henri Pousseur: Jeu de Miroir de Votre Faust (1968)

Bruno Maderna: Grande Aulodia (1969)

Philip Glass: Music in Fifths (1969)

1970s:

George Crumb: Black Angels (1970 – no big impact on me, ultimately, but still wows my students)

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra (1970)

Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano (1971)

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel (1972)

Frederic Rzewski: Coming Together (1972)

Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace” (1973)

Steve Reich: Music for Mallet instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973)

Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach (1976)

Morton Feldman: Why Patterns? (1978)

Robert Ashley: Perfect Lives (1978)

William Duckworth: The Time Curve Preludes (1978-79)

1980s:

Harold Budd/Brian Eno: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980)

Morton Feldman: For Philip Guston (1984)

Conlon Nancarrow: Studies Nos. 40, 41, 47, 48 (1980s)

Daniel Lentz: The Crack in the Bell (1986)

Janice Giteck: Om Shanti (1986)

Carl Stone: Shing Kee (1986)

Morton Feldman: For Samuel Beckett (1987)

La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano (begun in 1964, but perhaps not totally impressive until the 1981 and 1987 performances)

Larry Polansky: Lonesome Road: The Crawford Variations (1988-89)

Bunita Marcus: Adam and Eve (1989)

Art Jarvinen: Murphy-Nights (1989)

1990s:

Meredith Monk: Atlas (1991)

Frederic Rzewski: De Profundis (1991)

David First: Jade Screen Test Dreams of Renting Wings (1993)

Mikel Rouse: Failing Kansas (1995)

Mikel Rouse: Dennis Cleveland (1996)

John Luther Adams: In the White Silence (1998, or alternatively the piece it’s expanded from, Dream in White on White, 1992)

Elodie Lauten: Waking in New York (1999)

There should be pieces by Phill Niblock, Beth Anderson, and Peter Garland, but it’s difficult to narrow it down to one.

I ruffled some feathers with my post about 12-tone music – I wonder if I’m capable of saying anything without ruffling some feathers – I wonder if there’s anything that could be said without ruffling someone’s feathers – I wonder if ruffling feathers is as heinous a crime as a lot of people apparently think – but in at least one sense my words weren’t taken literally enough. One thoughtful respondent compared me to a fundamentalist trying to expunge all memory of 12-tone music the way the Christian right wants to expunge Darwin, Balzac, and any TV show that refers positively to gay families.

Quite the contrary. Educationally, I’m heavily invested in 12-tone music. Year after year I bullheadedly continue teaching Webern’s Piano Variations and Symphony, Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet, Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna and Sex Carmina Alcaei, Stravinsky’s Threni and Requiem Canticles, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Babbitt’s Philomel and Post-Partitions. Those pieces mean something to me (except for the Fourth Quartet, which I’ve come to loathe), and I’m proud of knowing (except for Philomel, which I don’t have a score to) how they’re constructed. I don’t advocate locking them away and never bringing them out again. What I do advocate is a revisionist view of music history – and contrary to some things that have been written in response, I’m not commenting on the validity of the music or whether it should be performed or programmed, but how it should be explained as the historical period it now clearly is. After all, we’ve been using the same rhetoric to justify the advent of 12-tone technique since it was prevalent, but our collective view of the genre is greatly altered.

One trope on 12-tone music is that it was a historical inevitability: the individual motive had supplanted an overriding tonal system as the driving force for composition, and Schoenberg needed a new method to unify music in the absence of tonal structure. But as Jonathan Kramer points out in an upcoming book, the idea that music had become totally motive-driven was a fiction invented by Schoenberg himself to justify his new method, based on a “creative misreading” of Brahms. For Schoenberg to look selectively back to Brahms’s motivic technique as precursor to his own method was a natural artistic impulse, but hardly objective; nothing in Mahler, Strauss, Reger, Scriabin, or the other late, late romantics makes the use of a 12-tone row look necessary or inevitable. Quite the contrary, the application of a pitch row as a governing device was a palpably arbitrary move, brilliantly so if you want to look at it that way, but one that patently wrenched music away from its traditional moorings. Following the historical development of harmony through various seventh and ninth chords, one eventually arrives at, not the abstract pitch sets of 12-tone music, but the 11th and 13th chords of bebop, which was the real continuation of harmonic progress from classical principles.

Another 12-tone trope is that the row provided a completely organic way of composing, in which every measure of the music was drawn from the same cell. But Lerdahl, Kramer, and others have made it clear that the textual unity of a page of notes all being forms of, say, the pitch set [0,1,4] does not at all guarantee perceptual unity. And beyond that, postmodern texts and theories have made it apparent to most college graduates by now that unity and organicism are not inherent in a work of art, nor necessary, nor a universal good. One can still cling to Schoenberg’s ideal of total organicism as a matter of taste, but it is an anachronism to claim, in the 21st century, that organicism is a necessary component, or indeed a guarantor, of quality.

Nor was 12-tone music, at least in America, a crucial step on the road to some other kind of music. The major movements since 12-tone music have either been antipodal rejections of it, like minimalism, or retreats from it, like the New Romanticism. One could argue that in Europe 12-tone music led to serialism and then postserialism, but it also seems true that the most successful postserial works were those that abandoned 12-tone technique altogether, like Berio’s Sinfonia, Boulez’s Rituel, Stockhausen’s Stimmung.

Strip away the fiction of historical inevitability, the assumed congruence of textual and perceived unity, and the aesthetic of necessary organicism, and all 12-tone music has left to defend itself with is what any other music has: its inherent attractiveness to the ear and mind and heart, which in 99 percent of the cases is pretty thin. The moral and theoretical underpinnings that buoyed 12-tone music up in mid-century have dissolved. For a piece to employ 12-tone technique can no longer be seen as a virtue in itself, and therefore one has trouble answering the inevitable student question: since 12-tone music clearly doesn’t guarantee more beautiful music, why did so many hundreds of composers feel that they were required to use it, or else risk career disaster? However you couch the answer to that question, it isn’t pretty.

So what I’m looking for is a more charitable way to describe the post-war 12-tone movement phenomenon, one that doesn’t make it sound like a blatant academic mafia, so I can continue teaching my favorite 12-tone pieces without getting skeptical looks and the feeling that my students think I’m selling them a bill of goods. And I think what we need to do is quit teaching 20th-century history with a dishonest thumb on the scale in Schoenberg’s favor. For decades, academic historians have presented the Second Vienna School as central to a European modernist canon, at the expense of dozens of other composers more popular, outside academia, than Schoenberg: Copland, Milhaud, Cowell, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Messiaen, Britten, Weill, Cage, Partch. It’s time to restore these composers to the center of 20th-century music, and redraw 12-tone music as the interesting but infertile cul-de-sac that it was. What I propose is that we take 12-tone out of the “Great Monuments of Western Music” bag, and put it in the “Curious Dead-ends of Music History” bag. That way, when you get a bright senior or grad student who’s already absorbed Partch, Messiaen, Bartok, Cage, et al, you can say, “Hey, wanna see something else? Look at this crazy Webern Symphony with the double canon in the first movement. Isn’t that wild? And this obsessive Babbitt Post-Partitions, built on a ‘super-array’ with every pitch having its own dynamic? Pretty whacked out stuff, eh?” That way we can talk about 12-tone music as an interesting kind of fixation that composers got themselves into, the way we talk about the rhythmically complex music that happened at the court of Avignon from 1400 to 1418. I’d feel so much better about Schoenberg if his reputation were like that of the other 12-tone inventor, Josef Matthias Hauer, whose music I love studying because it’s truly peculiar, and no one pretends it’s terribly important.

Why change the narrative? Because education is to some extent, if not entirely, a free market, and the educator is in part a salesman for culture. My students are incredibly open-minded. I can sell them loads of weird stuff. I can play Schoenberg’s pre-12-tone Erwartung, talk about Viennese angst and hallucinations, and they’re fascinated. They fall, of course, for Le Sacre du Printemps at first hearing, no pleading necessary on my part. I’ve never played Carl Ruggles’s massively dissonant Sun-Treader without at least one student asking for a copy. They find Harry Partch a blast, personally and theoretically. Berio’s Sinfonia blows them away, guaranteed; ditto, Quartet for the End of Time. They even get a kick out of Gruppen for its aspects that are not directly 12-tone-related: the echoes between crescendoing brass from different orchestras, the quirky solos for guitar.

What I can’t sell them, what I’ve never been able to sell them in 16 years, is the idea of 12-tone technique as a method that justifies anything. Webern they almost invariably find cold and precious. The idea that someone came up with a method and everyone else followed it strikes them as ominous, and rightly so. The day Schoenberg devised his first 12-tone row, he wrote in his diary, “Today I have discovered something that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” That impulse puts a taint for them on the subsequent history of 12-tone music, as indeed it does for me.

Now of course I never lead with the 12-tone row – I start analyzing Webern or Schoenberg they way you’d analyze any music, looking for germinal ideas, repetitions, similarities. But inevitably some bright boy pipes up, “Is this 12-tone?,” and what am I suppose to say? Lie? And while I do have some affection for Webern’s music, when I start to analyze what that affection consists of, it has a lot to do with having learned it so well in my youth, and having honed my analytical skills on it. I don’t listen to Webern’s music for pleasure, and my opinion has slid downward with each passing year, partly via an accumulation of students’ disenchanted reactions. It’s become more difficult for me to make a case for its beauty, which has not happened with any other music. The 12-tone pieces that do possess immediate appeal – Stravinsky’s Threni and Requiem Canticles, for instance – are usually so atypical as to almost constitute a separate genre. One feels instinctively that they are great pieces despite their use of 12-tone technique, not because of it – and once you admit that, how do you present 12-tone technique sympathetically?

For instance: In Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna, the second row statement begins with E and the third ends with E. In between, Dallapiccola reiterates and dwells on row fragments in a languorous, non-Schoenbergian manner. The result is, about 12 slow measures go by in which the pitch E doesn’t appear, and then, when the orchestra suddenly hits a unison E after a short pause, it has a fresh, invigorating effect that is rare in 12-tone music. But if you have to torture and subvert a technique that much to make it yield an effect so modestly gratifying, what is the use of the technique? The obvious implication is, if Dallapiccola could achieve so much manacled to the 12-tone row, imagine how much he could have achieved freed from it! The composer and the piece are easy to praise, but how do you justify the absurd limitations of the method?

Let those whose feathers are hereby ruffled please humor me by considering one question: why do the Second Vienna School seem to have a privileged position when it comes to feather-ruffling? I could say, I find Copland overrated, or Hindemith, or Varèse, and I’m not going to teach him as though he’s very important, and every composer would reply, “Well, to each his own.” I know lots of musicians who consider Ives overrated, and I just shrug, even though he’s my favorite. Composers are not shy about considering Cage or Phil Glass overrated. But when someone considers Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg overrated, there’s an outcry, as though some pact with the profession has been betrayed, as though when I signed up to be a composer I signed a paper pledging to stand fast with my colleagues against the concertgoing public on those three cases. To find Schoenberg overrated isn’t allowed. It’s too threatening to the profession somehow, and this fact in itself leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why is that opinion more heinous to my fellow composers than any other I could express? Unless, maybe – and I’m just speculating here – I’ve tapped into some guilty, unconscious self-deception on their part? Just asking.

As David Mamet says concerning Stanislavsky technique in Some Freaks (and I paraphrase because I can’t put my hands on the book right now), “Whenever a method is claimed by its adherents to be the only and universal and eternal method, you can be sure that that method doesn’t work.” Or Feldman:

In art, it is the system itself that holds out the false promise, that deceives. We might almost say that art is in pain, because it is unable to believe this deception is taking place. The artist feels his work is going badly because he is not reaching technical perfection. Actually, he is looking into the eyes of a deceiver, who constantly throws him back into the dilemma – the paradox. Is it lying to me or not, he asks himself. He ends by believing the lie, in the face of all evidence against it, because he needs this lie to exist in his art.

In other words, now that 12-tone music’s promise to create a new, enduring musical language has been revealed to be a hoax to all but the most blinkered cultist, how do we honestly promote to students the few 12-tone pieces for which we’ve learned to feel some affection?

AFTERTHOUGHT: Perhaps by adding the Dallapiccola example I’ve answered my own question, and perhaps this will be my last written word on this weary subject (one can only hope). Maybe the value of 12-tone method for certain composers is its extreme limitation, which if understood that way can inspire creativity against obstacles, like writing an augmentation canon, or a novel that doesn’t use the letter “e.” The rhetoric of 12-tone music claimed to offer something: unity, organicism, consistency. Instead, it denies something, and only the composer clever enough to outwit it can make anything of it. That deposes 12-tone technique from the level of an analogue for tonality to the level of a technical device, like a canon, and while canons are fascinating (I collect them), they are not considered one of the major musical genres. They are valued not because they are often great music, but for what they achieve despite absurd limitations. (I’ll anticipate you: Nancarrow’s canons are often great music, but his aren’t particularly rule-based.) I’ve been teaching 12-tone music as a language, and perhaps it’s more aptly treated as a technical genre, like canon, fugue, passacaglia – which is just the slighter position I wanted for it, and justifies teaching only the exceptional examples, not the normative ones.

UPDATE: I found the David Mamet quote I wanted, on page 71 of Some Freaks:

We may assume that a school of thought is useless when it is universally accepted as being the only and exclusive possessor of truth.

February is the shortest month, mercifully, and I’m going to leave all of John Luther Adams’ music up on Postclassic Radio for a few more days at least as compensation. But I hereby proclaim Robert Ashley Composer-of-the-Months for not only March but April as well – on account of, I’m sick and tired of having classical musicians and even composers respond, “Who’s Robert Ashley?” “I’ve never heard his music, what’s it like?” And so if you’ve never heard his music you’re going to hear it this month, and if you have, you may revel in it to your heart’s content. I’m starting with his operas Perfect Lives and Improvement: Don Leaves Linda in their entireties, the longest complete works I’ve posted to the station. I’ll add other pieces as the months proceed. Ashley is the greatest and most innovative opera composer of the late 20th century, yet his work is so unconventional in genre and medium that the classical establishment has hardly bothered to become aware of it. In fact, for me there are four composers whose innovations could provide enough of a working foundation for a new musical language to supply my generation and another one or two afterward: Conlon Nancarrow for rhythm; La Monte Young (or alternatively, Ben Johnston) for pitch; Morton Feldman for texture and continuity; and Ashley for the relation of text to structure and music. In the work of those composers we have a new American musical revolution, for those who want to take advantage of it. It’s no exaggeration to say that my creative life has been a halting attempt to integrate what I inherited from the four of them.

Sorry, however, that I’ve been blogging about so little else besides the radio station. Paradoxically, I have too much time. Having stepped down as department chair, I now have time to pursue other projects, and so I’ve been composing, as well as writing loads of articles for print media, which leaves me little left to say. Blogging is a great spare-moment activity, and now I suddenly have too many spare hours to cut them up piecemeal.

I’ve been absent because of school duties and computer problems. (When I moved from a 4GB computer to a 40GB, I laughed at the idea of ever filling it up – now I’m realizing it’s too small to play fast and loose with aiff audio files the way I need to.) But I stumbled across a cache of my rare cassettes, and I’ve put up some recordings on Postclassic Radio that you’d have a hell of a time finding anywhere else. One is the sole work by Conlon Nancarrow that isn’t commercially recorded: his Trio No. 2 of 1990, for oboe, bassoon, and piano, close to being his last work (at least, the last he composed without ransacking previous material). Another is the Wittgenstein Cycle (1980) of the inimitable Jeffrey Lohn, who was the third leg of the art-rock trio he shared with Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca in the ’80s, but who detoured out of history for a decade or two and is now reportedly composing again. Lohn set Wittgenstein’s entire Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to music, in German, in a bouncy, Stravinskian idiom, and this is an excerpt. It’s wonderful. And on top of that I’m uploading a mystery bootleg recording that I’m not even going to advertise, not having any desire to be visited by disgruntled musicians’ union goons. The Mad New-Music Broadcaster strikes again!

The music classroom of the future, they say, will possess a computer on which the professor can scroll through a menu and select any significant piece from the history of music, click on it, and have it immediately heard over the classroom sound system. I forget who “they” are, or where I heard or read this, or who was supposed to upload the utopian CD collection, nor do I yet know of anyone living in this fantasy world. The technology is there and would be easy to install, but my department isn’t putting the money into it yet, nor is anyone else’s I know.

But, taking matters into my own hands, I’ve come as close to it as anyone I know of. For my birthday (which I share with Coleman Hawkins, composer Judith Shatin, Rene Magritte, Bjork, Goldie Hawn, Marlo Thomas, and Voltaire, you could look it up) my parents bought me (I was very specific in my request, and went through my tech-literate brother) a 250-gigabyte external hard drive. (I’ll give the commercial: the brand is Maxtor, and it’s really sturdy-looking.) The device advertises the capacity to hold 4100-plus hours of music MP3s, and I’m putting it to the test. As of this writing I’ve filled 13 GB with more than 1400 tracks, trying to think of every piece I’ve ever used in class or even mentioned to a student. This is going to be the iPod from hell, and I’m planning to carry it into class knowing that there’s no piece I could possibly want to play that isn’t on it. I’ve loaded it with all the Mahler symphonies, the last seven Bruckner symphonies, the last four Sibelius symphonies, the complete Berwald symphonies (don’t ask), most of Haydn’s symphonies, the complete Nancarrow player piano pieces, all of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, two of Sorabji’s complete works including the four-hour Opus Clavicembalisticum, the complete Beethoven sonatas, the complete Mozart Piano concerti, most of the Brahms piano music, the complete Hummel sonatas, all the available Dussek sonatas, lots of Josquin, most of Stravinsky, lots of Cage, and so on and so on. It will be my push-button repertoire machine. I’ve already tried it out – a major-minor motive in the Brahms first concerto reminded me of a similar moment in a Mahler symphony, and I played the beginnings of several movements before getting the one I wanted, the fourth movement of the Mahler Seventh. For years I’ve walked into class fumbling a tall stack of compact discs. Now I walk in with my laptop and Maxtor hard drive, and play anything from my CD collection I can think of.

The question is, of course, given 4100 hours of music storage space, what do you select? (Afterthought: I guess for people whose CD/vinyl collection doesn’t reach the five-digit range, this wouldn’t sound like a pressing concern.) Having copied more than 200 hours of music and only filled five percent of the disc, it’s not really an issue yet, but it will be. This is not a complete classical repertoire disc. There are composers I never refer to. I don’t see any reason to include Dvorak or Puccini, and I never mention Tchaikovsky in any flattering way. I play Mozart’s concerti and operas, but rarely his sonatas and never his symphonies. The name Verdi, though respected, goes unheard in my classroom. On the other hand, less new (postclassical) music has gone on the drive than you’d expect – as much as I love their musics, I don’t often get a chance to talk about John Luther Adams or Beth Anderson. It’s kind of a very generous desert island problem, preparing not the playlist that I’d want to listen to the rest of my life (though that inevitably goes into it), but what I can use to point out interesting things to students. And in case I want to play The Well-Tuned Piano or Feldman’s six-hour Second String Quartet, I have the luxury (if that is the proper word) or doing so without having to change CDs.

And so once again I spend dozens of hours changing formats for my recording collection: in youth I taped records on cassettes, in the ‘80s I bought compact discs to replace vinyl records, in recent years I transferred cassettes and vinyl to CDRs, and now I’m putting all of those onto one mega-drive. A composer friend of mine has gotten rid of her CDs altogether, after storing all of them on a similar hard drive. I worry that the entire culture is gleefully relinquishing something in terms of audio fidelity by settling for MP3s; if a new, more audiophile format emerges, I will doubtless spend yet more hours transferring once again. I’m not selling any CDs, because (as a frequent writer of liner-notes myself, after all) I need and enjoy the packaging. A colleague to whom I showed off my hard drive innocently asked whose recordings of the Mahler symphonies I selected, and I struggled to remember, with only partial success. With every transfer, it seems, something is gained, something is lost, and access to contextual information always seems to decline.

In the current climate, of course, an additional advantage forces its way to mind. In case the Bush administration succeeds in equating liberals with terrorists and outlawing them (which they certainly give every impression that they’d love to do), I may need to escape over the border to Montreal in a hurry. In that exigency, the Maxtor 250-GB offers a respectable fraction of my CD collection that I can carry in my briefcase when I’m forced to leave everything else behind. In the meantime, my teaching may be considerably enriched.

As though to demonstrate the flip-side of my argument (does the very word “flip-side” date me?), an e-mail arrives this morning announcing the appearance of Lukas Ligeti’s new web site. Ligeti is a Hungarian-American who’s performed and studied a lot in Africa, but who’s made his home in New York’s Downtown scene. His biography runs thusly:

Lukas Ligeti’s music is a unique fusion of acoustic and electronic, traditional and avantgarde, Occidental, African, and other influences. [Immediately he tells you what kind of music he writes. What a great idea!] With his uncompromising musical vision and his collaborations ranging from contemporary music groups to free-improvisors to traditional musicians, he has established himself as one of today’s foremost musical innovators.

Lukas Ligeti was born in Vienna, Austria, to Hungarian parents [one of them a famous composer named, uh… Stockhausen, I think]. He studied composition (with Erich Urbanner) and jazz drums (with Fritz Ozmec) at the Vienna Music Academy (University for Music and the Performing Arts), obtaining a Diploma in composition and a Certificate in jazz drums (1993). He also holds a Master of Arts degree from the Vienna Music Academy (thesis on “World Music and Improvised Music”, 1997), and took part in workshops led by John Zorn, George Crumb, and David Moss, and in the Darmstadt Ferienkurse.

From 1994 until 1996, he lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was a visiting composer at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. In 1998, he settled in New York City….

Ethno-musicological recordings and analyses, especially of African music, were a great influence on him from the beginning on; other areas of interest include experimental mathematics, architecture and visual art, geography and traveling, as well as sociology and politics. Musically, he is interested in creating new forms of ensemble interplay, non-tempered tunings, and the possibilities generated by electronics and by cultural exchange.

He is equally engaged in composition and in improvisation and is fond of many kinds of combination of these two extremes. An interest in jazz led him to the “downtown” New York avant-garde, and on the whole, in his attitude and development as a composer, he probably has more in common with the so-called American “mavericks” (including composers like Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, the so-called “minimalists”, John Zorn, and others) than with any European contemporary tradition.

Then, after you’ve gotten some idea what he’s about, he names the awards he’s gotten. There’s a long paragraph listing all the musicians he’s worked with. At the top of the page, this would have looked boastful, but it’s buried down at the bottom, where you’ll run into it if you’ll still interested that long. Overall the whole web site radiates enthusiasm, a sense of Ligeti’s passion for music and why he makes it the way he does. You want to hear the stuff. Compare this with any Uptown symphonist’s list of their awards and residencies, and – without any value judgment made about a single note of music – you’ll get a vivid sense of the European/Downtown eagerness for innovation and creativity versus Uptown prize-validated pretentiousness.

I don’t know whether any of you reading out there live in Cincinnati – raise your hand if you do – but by an odd chain of circumstances, I sort of “inherited” the job as program annotator for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra when my friend the previous annotator Jonathan Kramer died a few months ago. This coming weekend marks my premiere in the program guide. For Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 they’re reusing notes from a previous season, but I wrote this week’s notes for Sibelius’s Kullervo, a mammoth five-movement symphony from 1892 that was his first work based on the Kalevala, and his turn toward an indigenously Finnish musical idiom. Sibelius got nervous about the work and squelched it after a few performances – it wasn’t played in its entirety again until after his death – but I find it one of his most arresting works, more powerful than most of his other early tone poems, and in a league with his late symphonies. However that may be, the concerts are this Friday and Saturday, and you can not only get information at the Cincinnati Symphony’s web page, but even read the program notes in a PDF if you’re so inclined. (I do like the idea of people reading the program notes before the concert rather than during it.) Paavo Järvi, who conducts the orchestra, programs a hefty proportion of new music – among the composers for this season are Erkki-Sven Tüür, Arvo Pärt, Aulis Sallinen, John Adams, Kevin Puts, Jennifer Higdon, Tobias Picker, Edino Krieger, John Corigliano, and Henri Dutilleux. You’ll notice a heavy Scandinavian presence there, and I am indeed learning a lot about Scandinavian music. Admittedly, no Bob Ashley or Glenn Branca yet, but who knows?

It was the Cincinnati Orchestra’s 1930 performance of The Rite of Spring that compelled a 18-year-old Arkansan named Conlon Nancarrow, studying at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory, to decide to become a composer. An auspicious link, I thought.

When I was a student at Oberlin, my composition teacher Randolph Coleman used to say that from now on, composers would bloom a lot later than they used to, in their 50s or 60s. He felt that there were so many competing influences on a composer’s musical style that it would take a couple more decades to assimilate them and find your own voice than it used to when everyone grew up in a culture with one dominant kind of music.

At the time, this sort of went over my head, and to the extent I grasped it, it was a depressing pronouncement for a 20-year-old. (I remember defiantly thinking it wouldn’t be true of me.) But now that I’m 48 and have watched a lot careers unfold, I think old Randy might have hit the nail on the head. Partch, who made up his own musical style from bits and pieces of world musics, didn’t really hit his stride until he started adding percussion to his music in his 50s, and he sprang into something like celebrity around age 66. Nancarrow, who combined jazz and Bartok with a new technology, was discovered at 65 and started becoming famous at 70. Lou Harrison, who brought together musics from all continents, was kind of a tangential, eccentric figure for most of my life, then in the 1990s, nearing 80, surprisingly got touted as possibly America’s greatest composer. Robert Ashley, despite some early notoriety, didn’t get started on his seminal work Perfect Lives until age 48, and he’s now, at 73, in his most fertile period – best opera composer of our era and still almost unknown to classical audiences. We think these people are the oddballs, the eccentrics. They might have simply been first of a new breed. They may represent, instead, the composer career trajectory of the future.

When you grow up surrounded completely by music in one style, becoming a child prodigy isn’t so unusual – a sensitive kid can quickly master a clear, finite set of rules. The ubiquity of classical, modern, jazz, pop, and other musics offers a paralyzing panoply of choices. We don’t have much of a record of composers becoming well known in their 20s or 30s lately. For the few who have done so, it usually seems due more to marketing and PR than sterling quality of music. The British keep force-blooming their 20-something-year-old composers, to later embarrassing results.

One characteristic of the Critics Conversation we had here on Arts Journal lately was, amidst lots of drawing on various historical analogies, a pervasive assumption that composers who are really good are bound to take the classical music world by storm in their 30s or 40s. The fact that almost no one is doing so is, to them, evidence that music isn’t doing very well, that there are no good composing ideas around at the moment. Personally, I have CD cabinets and file cabinets full of evidence that we’re in a very exciting time compositionally, with plenty of good ideas and beautiful music. (Since none of the classical critics listen to me, I have to conclude that they’ve all written me off as having no musical taste whatever.) But it may be true that the composers I follow are in a phase analogous to Partch in the ‘50s, or Ashley in the ‘70s, doing interesting work that hasn’t quite gelled enough for public consumption.

Likewise, to quote Wordsworth for the 50th time: “The authentic poet must create the taste by which he is to be appreciated.” When Morton Feldman died at 61, the classical music world had barely given him the time of day. In the next ten years, he became a very big deal indeed. Maybe it not only takes decades for composers to assimilate and master the influences they draw from now, but longer for audiences to assimilate a composer’s life’s work – and with the number of composers around, no one receives any very big chunk of an audience’s time. It won’t surprise me if, as we grow older, a lot of my contemporaries begin hitting their stride, and get revealed as more important figures than anyone had thought. And maybe we should not assume that any archetypes in the history of music are invariable, but make allowances for what may be a fairly new (though not unprecedented) pattern in human creativity.

Reader and like-minded spirit Jean Lawton has written a response to my blog entry “Leave No Term Unstoned.” I e-print it here because it’s not just an answer but a beautifully written article, despite the fact that it says a couple of flattering things about me, and because she makes so many points I wish I had made, and supports them so compellingly. Thanks, Jean – for this and for the Wittgenstein line I had already quoted.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“What makes a subject difficult to understand… is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand.” [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Section 86, pg. 405 of the “Big Typescript,” von Wright catalogue number 213 ]

Kyle Gann continues to rescue music criticism from the swamp into which the pseudoscience of the set theorists had cast it for nigh on 50 years. Descriptive terms for musical genres prove not only useful but essential. The only alternatives to necessarily vague isms like “impressionism” and minimalism”? Refuse to talk about music at all… or reduce music to equations and logic.

Been there. Done that. Dead end.

Composers often take the former path — “shut up ‘n play yer guitar!” (Frank Zappa). Fun. But unproductive.

A few unaccountably influential pseudoscientists in yakademia from ca. 1950 onward chose the latter, trudging ever deeper into “that Serbonian bog,” as James Clerk Maxwell called it in his 1878 Rede Lecture at Cambridge, “where whole armies of scientific musicians and musical men of science have sunk without filling it up.”

Neither alternative works. So that leaves us with labeling musical genres. That works, because language and music interact in powerful ways. Back in the 1960s, Kenneth Gaburo passed out bowls filled with sand, water, steel bolts, rice, silk. He had composition students close their eyes, stir their fingers around in the bowls, then
compose music based on the sensations. Afterward everyone could instantly identify each composition with each sensation. Simple words like “rough” and “sharp” and “silky” and “liquid” sufficed to accurately describe each composition. More recently, a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour piece showed a class of 4th graders listening to modern
music from the 2000s. The kids instinctively used plain descriptive terms. One said “I like fluffy music.” Language is vague and imprecise, but captures important aspects of the musical experience.

These anecdotes tells us something about the power and value of non-musical ways of being to illuminate music — particularly language. So using (admittedly
nebulous) terms to describe genres remains useful, and more to the point, necessary. Spoken and written language, like music, iridesces and ignites distant meanings by creating a web of associations.

Applied to music, math murders to dissect. Language breathes life into music, or, as the Greeks put it, inspires. Only human language captures the countless microuniverses of sight and sound and touch and taste and smell which music evokes. In language, as in music, context reigns. So using terms for musical genres
works.

Musical Josef Mengeles like Milton Babbitt and Alan Forte and Robert Morris who tried to flense away the ligaments of language, the tendons of cultural connotations, the muscles of synaesthaesia, and all the skin of extra-mathematical supra-logical aspects from music left us with set of bleached bones. The attempt to reduce music to dead math and silent logic yielded unlistenable swill and unreadable jargon.

People talk about music and musical styles using inchoate descriptive terms for reasons which brain science has only recently revealed. For example, the colorful metaphor of pitch “height” actually parallels the hard-wiring of the human auditory cortex. PET scans show that the human brain’s pitch detection apparatus shares brain circuitry with Brodmann’s Area 19 (commonly known as “the mind’s eye” or “the visual theater”). (See http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Music_00.html.) Talking about pitch as “high” or “low” is thus more than vaguely descriptive. It limns the basic neurophysiology of the human brain.

Likewise, we’re now finding that describing musical timbres as “sharp” or “dull” results from similar links to other hard-wired brain structures. [For details, see the article “A Universe of Universals,” Leonard B. Meyer, The Journal of Musicology, Volume XVI, Number 1, Winter 1998, pp. 3-25] Terms describing general musical movements capture important aspects of the experience of listening to that music.

Unlike mathematical equations, which tell us nothing of significance about a musical style or a musical composition, descriptive terms like “minimalism” or “totalism” reveal important facets of these styles.

Minimalism, for instance, typically trades off a reduced pitch set for increased rhythmic complexity. Pieces like Reich’s Piano Phase dial up rhythmic intricacy (way up) while dialing down the number of pitches. “The New Romanticism” typically heads in the other direction, twirling the pitch dial farther toward 11 and punching in the LOUDNESS button for emphasis but punching the MUTE button on rhythmic complexity (compared to Piano Phase, anyway).

Totalists use both techniques, and for obvious reasons. Understandably entranced by the Dedalaean rhythmic labyrinths discovered by Arts Subtilis and rediscovered by Conlon Nancarrow, totalists quickly figured out that complex nested tuplets sound incoherent without a regular rhythmic grid for background. So totalists do both. They ramp up the number of chromatic pitches and the complexity of the rhythm, but also keep a regular rhythm (a la minimalism) with close to zero complexity so you can hear the embedded tuplets offset from a Euclidean grid – as in Michael Gordon’s Yo, Shakespeare! Most important of all, descriptive terms capture the crucial human qualities of the musical styles.

Minimalist music sounds what the name implied – chopped. Channeled. A cholo
lowrider among musical styles. Retro chic, stripped down compared to previous tonal
music, but pumped up with invisible hydraulics under the chassis. Totalist music sounds as the word implies – totalist composers want it all. It pushes forward on both fronts, as though it does want to have its minimalist cake and eat it too. By contrast, the term “set theoretic music” captures none of the crucial human qualities of such music. Instead, we should call set theoretic music like that of Milton Babbitt “sludge-ism.” The music sounds like undifferentiated glop. No perceptible melodies, no functional harmonies, no discernible rhythmic pulse, no audible organization. It sounds like oil looks when it drains out of an engine: dull. Turgid. Undifferentiated. Boring. Tom Johnson even wrote a review in 1976 in which he remarked on how interesting it was that the music sounded so supernally boring.

There’s a solid reason for that. By trying to push rhythmic complexity and pitch complexity and timbral complexity to the max simultaneously, set theoretic atonal music ran afoul of the basic neuro-cognitive constrains of the human nervous system. Faced with information overload, the human brain dumps *all* incoming information. Instead of perceiving complexity, the brain perceives chaos – boring chaos.

Well, music history offers us a kind of chaos. As J. J. Nattiez remarked, “I have said it before and I say it again – there is no progress and no regress in music, only change.” The illusion of progress held sway for a while, but now that illusion has shattered. The Hegelian historicist delusions of the pseudoscientists who envisioned music as an endless upward ramp scaling ever higher levels of harmonic and rhythmic complexity, forever and ever, amen, have collapsed. But now that musical history has fallen off that imaginary upward ramp into the fluctuating steady state prophetically described in Leonard B. Meyer’s Music, The Arts and Ideas (1967),
how to convey the savor and piquancy of the individual fluctuations we call distinct musical styles?

Math fails. The last 50 years of music “theory” prove it, as L. S. Lloyd’s article “Pseudo-Science and Music `Theory'” predicted (Proceedings Of the Royal Academy of Music, 1940). What remains? The delicate glistening web of language, whose ductile threads of meaning retain their freshness even when submerged in the alien ocean of sound. Kudos to Gann for pointing that out. As George Orwell remarked, “It requires an unusual mind to analyze the obvious” – particularly after 50 years of flat-out denial by set theorists like Babbitt.