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In a climactic moment of the wonderful movie Brazil, Robert DeNiro as Harry Tuttle, subversive free-lance electrical engineer, literally drowns, or dissolves, in the bureaucratic paperwork he has spent his career circumnavigating. I’ll die that way too, not in a mass of paper but in an ocean of CDs, as my friends grab up the fallen stacks of discs only to find that I’ve completely disappeared, absorbed into the microscopic pits in the polycarbonate plastic I spent my life obsessed with.

This combination of a blog and an internet radio station strikes me as really potent. Before, all I could do was harangue you – “Why the hell don’t you already know about all this wonderful music I listen to?!” Or, “Go buy this CD, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about!” Now, the music’s there if you want to listen to it (and, admittedly, if you have a cable modem connection; my willing friends with only dial-ups have been regrettably out of luck), and I can keep up a running commentary. In fact, it aids the fantasy I have of myself as the Harry Tuttle of music criticism – get in, get out, don’t wait for the ponderously slow commercial system to bring talent to light, but suddenly expose people to some wonderful music they would never in a million years have heard otherwise, then retreat for the next strike. You have to subvert and bypass all our social structures to make anything good happen today, because society’s arteries are clogged with the poison of money.

So let me tell you about the recordings I’ve got up so far. It seems that whenever I post music anywhere, some worthy instantly responds with, “Hell, I’ve heard that piece before, that’s not so new!” Apparently because I have a reputation as the Village Voice new-music critic, any music I champion had better be no more than 16 minutes old, and to boot made by some 20-year-old hotshot who just dropped out of college and came to New York yesterday, or I will be exposed as a pathetic fraud, and some people apparently derive a curious thrill from the thought that they’re hipper than Kyle Gann. I always have a few choice comments in response to this, and I’ll spare you the first two. Number three, I was active as a New York critic until 1997, when I cut back at the Voice and entered academia, and I have since always happily admitted that I am inevitably not right smack on the cutting edge of the era 1997-2004. I do keep up pretty well with the music of members of my own generation, who inexplicably get a year older every year. Number four – and this was particularly true of the listening page I posted for the recent Critics Conversation – I run into an awful lot of people who can’t name a non-pop piece of music more recent than Akhnaten, and I sometimes feel it is my mission to drag people through the 1980s and 1990s so they can understand what’s going on now. Also, if a truly great piece of music came out in 1988 and made no public impact whatever, and people have still never heard of it, I reserve the right to consider it absolutely now until somebody friggin’ listens to it and pays attention.

That said, many of the pieces on PostClassic Radio are 21st-century, most are post-1992, and I do include four composers in their 20s – Andrew Schulze, Erin Watson, Corey Dargel, and Max Giteck Duykers – so feign a little respect. And maybe Renske Vrolijk, I have no idea how old she is, but she’s Dutch and a major young new talent.

I’ve also performed a public service by resuscitating some music back to 1970 that some people my age may know, but is not available in the CD world. Two such recordings are Terry Riley’s lovely film score Happy Ending from about 1971, and Robert Ashley’s Music Word Fire and I Would Do It Again (Coocoo), a spin-off piece from his opera Perfect Lives that, being only 28 minutes, was never reissued on CD. One of his best discs, disappeared. I also happen to have, because I was in the right place at the right time, tapes of two multiple-piano pieces by the late Julius Eastman, an active underground New York figure of the early 1980s whose music came scarily close to disappearing without a trace when he was thrown out of his New York apartment by the sheriff and ended up living in Tomkins Square Park. There are a few people out there looking for this music, and I’ve got a little more up my sleeve. Plus a fine unsung Midwestern composer now moved to Arizona, Paul Sturm, whose vinyl record of the 1980s Long Distance deserves some 21st-century hearings.

If I were the 17-year-old Kyle Gann of today, I’d be out there with a tape recorder or audio software avidly recording everything on PostClassic Radio, waiting on pins and needles for gems such as these. But perhaps there is no such person. Young people don’t seem to check out music out of curiosity anymore. Just call me “Gramps.”

Mary Jane Leach’s Ceremony of the Bulls is within spitting distance of Arvo Pärt, and personally, I like it better.

A couple of people seem to appreciate that I’m offering cuts from the legendary Plunderphonics CD of John Oswald, the Canadian sampling-meister whose omnivorous thefts from well-known recordings (though he never charged money for the results) landed him in legal trouble. Out of 1000 printed Plunderphonics discs he was forced to destroy the last 300, and I got one of the first 700. I’m cool. There will be more from this absolutely unobtainable disc.

The music by Florentine Romantic/Postminimalist Giancarlo Cardini is now 20 years old, but it’s wonderful, and I keep pressing him on you, so you might as well listen.

Elizabeth Brown’s Lost Waltz is wonderful, and I go around humming it. She got a doctorate in flute at Juilliard, and started composing afterward. Paul Epstein is another highly underrated postminimalist figure.

My students all go nuts for Bald Boyfriend by Pamela Z and the Qube Chix:

I want a man who’s well-behaved,

Who’s neat and clean, whose head is shaved.

It’s maybe findable, but thrown in here as a teaser.

I recently raved here about Carolyn Yarnell’s The Same Sky, and I am happy to provide it. It’s already won new fans. I got the recording of Jim Tenney’s Song ‘n’ Dance for Harry Partch from Bob Gilmore, and it’s really charming. Also, I’ve put in a hint of Diamanda Galas; I assume her Restless/Mute recordings are very hard to find if not impossible, and I’ll be recirculating more of them.

Enough commentary for now. I’m going for the most obscure, the hardest-to-find as an opening gambit, but I will eventually have to swing a little more mainstream. Remember, the playlist is here on my web page, since Live 365 has room for giganto audio files but can’t be bothered with text information, especially in the quantities classical and postclassical music require. The playlist is also linked from the “Sites I Like” on the right of this page. Give it a listen! Now we’ve got some actual sounds to talk about.

Oh yes – an alert reader caught that I glibly roped Claude Vivier into a roundup of European composers. Despite his considerable professional presence in Paris, Vivier was, of course, Canadian, and it would be churlish indeed to deprive the perennially underrated Canadian new-music scene of credit for so fine an ornament.

Well, the week before Christmas is a difficult time to blog, especially when my semester only ended six days earlier, and I had been prevented from Christmas shopping the last two weekends by a blizzard and cold, respectively. (My son’s birthday is Dec. 23, too.) So I’ve been absent. And I’m not really the type to send out the obligatory Christmas greeting – just because it’s obligatory. For the record, I am happy to express the usual lip service to peace on earth for us all, and all that.

But I do have a triumphant bit of Christmas information to report. Every year on Christmas morning I get out of bed, and my first act is to put on a CD of Christmas music. All my life, my dad would play Handel’s Messiah, interspersed with recordings of Christmas songs by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So over the years I’ve tried different recordings of the Messiah, Bach cantatas, choral music by the American William Billings, Renaissance choral music, English choirs singing Holst and Walton arrangements, and so on and so on. Some of it’s too hackneyed, some too familiar, some too intrusive. But this year it finally occurred to me to play the nativity music, in fact the entire Christmas oratorio section, from Franz Liszt’s oratorio Christus. It was the perfect accompaniment to a mellow Christmas morning. The Christmas oratorio section is mostly instrumental (in imitation of Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliet), the choral parts are mostly low-key and lovely. The nativity music is fully as charming as any Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairies and far more interesting and original – surely the only Christmas music ever written in 5/4 meter (actually, 2/4 and 3/4 in alternation). The Easter music on CD 3 is heavily dramatic and emotional, of course, but for Christ’s birth and the “March of the Three Kings” Liszt showed for an entire hour what a delicate, light touch he was capable of with chorus and orchestra. No less an authority than German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus has called Christus the greatest oratorio of the 19th century, and I totally agree – yet Liszt is vastly underrated in America, excoriated because he was far too complex and Protean a figure, and mixed in a ton of superficial showpieces along with his masterworks.

In any case, sorry the recommendation comes too late for this year, but if you received a Tower or Amazon gift certificate and have an eye to next Christmas (or even Easter), Liszt’s Christus is one of the 19th century’s mostly undiscovered gems. And there’s a superb recording by Antal Dorati on Hungaraton. So, happy holidays. Back to the postclassical world soon, but even I can’t steer you towards much postclassical Christmas music.

A second thought about Berlioz. When we think of Brahms’s life, we think of his works being championed by Joachim, Clara Schumann, Hans von Bulow. We think of Beethoven’s aristocratic patrons begging him to remain in Vienna and pooling their resources to give him a salary. We think of Chopin and Liszt playing piano to entertain at aristocratic soirees. But when we think of Berlioz’s life, it’s of him consumed with scribbling newspaper reviews, writing about musical nonentities for money, forced to put together his own early performances without institutional help. He did enjoy considerable success as a conductor on tours outside France, but he never lived to hear some of his projects performed, the complete Les Troyens in particular. Likewise, in a more profound sense than any other major 19th-century fiigure, we think of him composing in a vacuum. The extraordinary innovations of Symphonie Fantastique and Romeo et Juliet (stream of consciousness, ostinato, col legno, motivic linkage between movements, free rhythm of fermatas) often waited until the 20th century to find an echo. If his early works were too incendiary for the early Romantic movement he electroshocked into existence, later in life he retreated to an objective, Gluck-obsessed classicism that seemed even more strangely unrelated to his surrounding context. (One movement from the much-underrated L’enfance du Christ he actually passed off at first as a new 18th-century find.)

Composing without finding cultural resonance, pouring energy into a dayjob, unsupported by institutions and on his own – though incomplete, this thumbnail sketch makes Berlioz sound like a proto-American, even a Downtowner, a first draft for Charles Ives. More than any other 19th-century figure (although Mozart in Vienna was somewhat in the same boat, and the Swedish Franz Berwald worked as a glasses manufacturer, Ives-like), Berlioz faced the artistic conditions that we American composers face. We see him with a shock of self-recognition that we don’t get from Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mahler. It makes me wonder if more than just Berlioz’s wild music and wonderful sense of rhythmic surprise were involved in my early fascination for him. I devoured his Memoires and collected all his recordings years before it ever occurred to me to become, like Berlioz, a critic.

Apropos of nothing, and only because I’ve had a virtual 17-year hiatus in writing about classical music (limited as I’ve been to postclassical music at the Voice and living composers in Chamber Music and the Times), here are some more of my classical music views considered heretical in my academic milieu:

– Greatest piano work between Schubert and Ives: Liszt’s Annees de Pelerinage, three hours’ worth of remarkably sustained inspiration, with innovations that had an obvious impact on Debussy and thus helped jump-start the 20th century. In fact, given the size of the work and its consistently superb quality, one could make an argument for it as the greatest piano monument since Bach’s W.T.C., equalled in ambition only by works patently less perfect like Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum – and yet only a handful of pianists play more than a “Sonetto del Petrarca” or two from it. Similarly, Liszt’s Christus is the 19th century’s greatest oratorio, an opinion in which I am backed up by no less than the great musicologist Karl Dahlhaus, whose revisionist views of the 19th century have bracingly clarified our image of that era. And yet, a couple of years ago at a conference I told an ambitious ivy-league musicologist that I was teaching a Franz Liszt course, and from the look of disdain with which she recoiled from the news, you would have thought I had said Lawrence Welk.

– Greatest romantic piano concerto: that of Ferruccio Busoni, 1905.

– We’re supposed to find Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto far superior to his First, and I don’t. Brahms wrote some of his best large works in his youth (the Horn Trio, for instance), and the First Concerto’s opening movement, with its slow chromatic slide in the basses from D down to A, and its surprise recap of the theme a tritone away from where we’ve been led to expect, is one of the 19th century’s most vivid examples of large-scale tonal structure made audible and expressive. I hear nothing nearly so powerful in the Second Concerto.

– As a grad student, I took as my project for a rhythmic analysis class the Adagio of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony. My classmates were disdainful, but I found a convincing example of Bruckner’s large-scale rhythmic displacement masterfully supporting the overall harmonic resolution. To this day, academia remains condescending to Bruckner, not generally acknowledging him, as I do, as at least an equal symphonist to Brahms and certainly above Mendelssohn and Schumann. One of those cases in which the critics and record collectors diverge from the musicologists, and I side with the critics. Also the minimalists – a surpising love of Bruckner is found among Downtown composers like Glenn Branca.

– Mozart is overrated. Actually, despite the scorn Woody Allen heaps on the idea in Manhattan, this is a less rare opinion than is often admitted. Quite a few composers I know think that Mozart’s perfection is greatly overstated. That’s not to deny that there are quite a number of perfect pieces, like the late piano concerti. But so many passages in his music (as Charles Rosen mentions) can be transferred from one piece to another with no change in meaning, like interchangeable musical bricks, a shortcoming that modern composers don’t easily forgive. In my sonata class I analyze Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven alongside tremendously underrated composers like Clementi, Dussek, and Hummel, and side by side, Mozart’s hastily-composed piano sonatas don’t always fare well next to the lyric perfection of late Clementi or the daring innovations of Dussek.

I know, I know, this is classical music, not postclassical – but I’m getting it out of my system. And if the postclassical era is going to draw on the classical, it will need to reinterpret it to suit its own needs, as well.

Astute reader and fellow critic Marc Geelhoed took exception to my dismissive remarks about Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter, and did so intelligently. My attitude, he says,

comes across as a simplistic rejection of their respective styles. You wrote that their music is “difficult to remember,” but this “It’s not easy to hum” is lousy grounds for critical acceptance, like saying that the Aladdin soundtrack is superior to Brahms, just ‘cuz you can remember all the melodies… You criticize composers for not meeting criteria they don’t pretend to aspire to,… namely, instant memorability…. It’s not a matter of pretentious vs. approachable, it’s a matter of compositional technique as well as the aim of each composer….

He’s right. Of course I don’t equate easy memorability with quality, though my comments did seem to point in that direction. My relationship with the musics of Carter and Boulez has been complex and changing, but as a critic of Downtown music, I rarely have an opportunity to write about them with much nuance. But what’s a blog for?

In my early teens, I discovered Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Both were incomprehensible but fascinating, and I kept listening over and over and over until I totally fell in love. Next came Carter’s Double Concerto and Second String Quartet, and I assumed the same thing would happen. All through college and grad school I avidly followed every new Carter premiere, bought his scores and recordings, listened dozens of times, analyzed what I could. Then, one day in the early 1980s, I was listening to the Double Concerto with the score again for what was at least my 50th time. And the thought popped into my head: “I’ve studied this piece and studied it for over ten years, and I don’t give a damn if I ever hear it again.” I closed the score, and never listened to the piece closely again until I wrote my American music book in 1995. In a way, what drove me away from the music was its unmemorability. There’s a tremendous pleasure in becoming familiar with something as mammoth, dense, and complex as the “Concord” Sonata, and learning to love every skewed little harmonic implication. But while I had the general overall plan of the Double Concerto in my head, and could anticipate the climaxes and piano and harpsichord cadenzas, the vast majority of the pitch complexes just never imprinted themselves on my memory. (You can assume I have lousy ears if you want, but when I entered grad school the professor who administered the ear-training entrance exam told me I did better on it than he could have. It included some Stravinsky 12-tone vocal music that I transcribed correctly, including the solo vocalist’s quarter-tone mistakes.) Though by then fond of Ives, Stravinsky, Cage, Stockhausen, and even Babbitt’s wonderful Philomel, I had failed to develop the slightest affection for the Carter Double Concerto after dozens, maybe hundreds of listenings.

And it wasn’t just listening. In the ’70s every young composer analyzed Carter’s Second String Quartet, and I was no exception. I started with loads of enthusiasm, but increasingly found the ideas unmusical: especially that the tritones were all in the viola, the perfect fifths all in the second violin (or whatever – I disremember the details), which isn’t something one can hear in a polyphonic texture. It’s a stupid idea, really. And as fanatical as I am about tempo contrasts, Carter’s seemed mechanical and musically unmotivated. I came to think that Carter had invested a lot of time in overly literal aspects of music that didn’t appeal to the ear. As I’m always reminding my students, art isn’t about reality, it’s about appearances.

And yet, I never turned against all of Carter’s music. I’ve always been fond of his Quartet for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (which I plan to analyze for class in my next Advanced Analysis Seminar at Bard), and also like his First String Quartet, Piano Sonata, and Cello Sonata. These transitional works he wrote between 1948 and 1952 seem poised exquisitely between his neoclassic period and complex atonalism, and for a few years there I thought he perfectly cross-hatched the near-tonality of his Boulanger years with the intervallic precision of serialist technique. But then he visited Darmstadt and started one-upping the Europeans, apparently, and from the orchestral Variations of 1955 on I find his music lacking in personality. So it’s true I don’t like most of Carter’s music because it isn’t memorable, but simplicity is not the only key to memorability. The F,O,C,&H Quartet is not necessarily simpler than the Carter Piano Concerto, but its pitch choices seem much more meaningful, not nearly so bland and randomly scattered.

Except for Le marteau, Boulez is a different story. In youth I attacked that piece with all the fanatacism of a new convert: read Musique aujourd-hui (of which Boulez eventually autographed my copy for me), did what analysis I could, and even did an independent tutorial learning to conduct the piece. But here again, I eventually came back to the piece in the late 1980s and realized that, after so many years of devotion, I couldn’t meaningfully tell one movement from another, aside from the instrumentation. If someone had come out with a recording of Le marteau with half the pitches transposed by half-steps one way or the other, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. (I also analyzed every note of the Boulez Second Sonata before hearing it, and was so brainwashed that, when I finally heard it, I cried over its beauty. Today I wouldn’t recognize that piece in a blindfold test.) Ultimately, I think Boulez was trying to be very avant-garde in Le marteau, but didn’t really know what he was doing yet, and made lousy pitch choices. I’ve run into a surprising number of composers who have exactly the same opinion, and who were afraid to mention it for years.

But that’s not my opinion of Boulez in general. His next work to grab public attention was dynamite: Pli selon pli, a lovely atmospheric piece with a highly original rhythmic sense and sensuous textures, and one he conducts gorgeously on disc. It seems to me that what happened next was that Boulez’s confidence failed him. He left so many pieces unfinished, and after a long dry spell, came out in the 1980s with Notations – a thick orchestration of a not-very-interesting piano piece from his student years. My favorite Boulez piece besides Pli, the 1973 memorial for Maderna called Rituel (I heard the exhilarating American premiere in Cleveland), seems like an anomaly in his output, an abandonment of serialism for an almost minimalist concentration on evolving melodic contours. (His much-heralded Repons picked up this thread to some extent.) So I don’t see Boulez as a bad composer, but as a failed composer who got sidetracked into conducting and administration and never lived up to the exquisite promise evident in Pli selon pli. But I do hear Le marteau as a terribly overrated, lackluster youthful indiscretion, and even some of his later pieces like Doubles and Explosante Fixe as perfunctory.

Certainly I love the music of a whole host of atonalists who, in most people’s minds, would hardly differ from Boulez and Carter. Among the Darmstadt serialists, I always felt Stockhausen and Boulez grabbed the attention via political means, when the more talented, less dogmatic composers were Bruno Maderna (who died young, and whose music is seductively sensuous), Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur. All three of these were able to make pitch a secondary concern in their music, and put timbre and atmosphere at center stage; or in Pousseur’s case, theatricality. Nono’s Contrappunto dialettico alla mente wowed me again when I heard it recently, and I’ve been waiting for decades for the world to make a big deal out of Maderna’s gorgeous Grande Aulodia and Pousseur’s dashingly collage-based opera Votre Faust. One has to wonder why the most doctrinaire, least interesting composers in a scene are allowed to rise to the top.

As for Carter, I always felt it was Stefan Wolpe who better achieved what Carter was aiming at. I would have a difficult time explaining to a nonmusician what it is I greatly prefer in Wolpe to Carter, Davidovsky, Wuorinen, or most of the American atonalists. But despite Wolpe’s density his music is endlessly playful, and though it can be as opaque as anyone’s for stretches, every single piece has moments that stand out vividly, and spring up in hearing after hearing like old friends.

To repeat, simplicity is not the only, or even primary, key to memorability. A subtle sense of harmony and voice-leading, even in an atonal context, is very important, and not many 12-tone composers managed that; the Italians, Dallapiccola, Maderna, and Nono, were superb in that regard, and underrated. I feel that Boulez’s sense of harmony in Le marteau, and Carter’s in the music from Variations on, were extremely weak. And though I may have strayed far from my original point, I do think this is at least partly related to a refusal to anchor the music in simple pitch cells. Thus my too-dismissive attitude toward Boulez and Carter: not simply that their music leaves me cold, nor that they’ve wielded more power in the music world than they deserve, nor yet that they became emblematic of a gray, bureaucratic music (though that’s all true), but that I invested many years of enthusiasm in both of them – and they disappointed me.