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I would like to write something about my new piece Kierkegaard, Walking: not to draw attention to it, but because of a technical aspect of the work that I think draws together a number of late-20th-century influences and says something about the extent to which musical ideas can be style-independent. On a personal level, this is to fill in gaps in the lengthy drinking discussion John Luther Adams had the other night about our respective premieres, and also to clarify for anyone curious that my new piece does indeed intend to do what it seems to do. Consider this a kind of extended wonkish program note of the kind I would write if I assumed audiences had infinite patience and infinite interest in the details of the composer’s creative process.

Scene 1: Almost anyone who would be reading me knows what happens in the startling ending of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel: it is one of the most famous effects in recent music. For some 15 minutes we’ve been immersed in a splintered sound world whose disconnected images at least seem homogenous in style and origin. Dissonant chords float by with the pulselessness of clouds; beatless soprano and viola melodies emerge from the distance, and occasionally a hesitant timpani pulse pushes against the grain of the meter. No one at the premiere (or listening to the recording when it was new) would have failed to understand this as a continuation of the soundworld of the 1950s avant-garde.

But suddenly – you know what happens – a vibraphone picks up with a cheerily repeating G B A C motive that sounds like it belongs to a different piece, a different composer, a different era. (In his Seattle talk, Alex Ross connected it to a motive from Stravinsky’s appropriately neoclassic Symphony of Psalms, and noted that Feldman was working on the piece the day of Stravinsky’s funeral.) One might as well have Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet skipping onstage in the fifth act of Macbeth. The dark poignancy of the first 15 minutes of the piece is unveiled as artifice, as fiction. The contingency of an ostensibly “natural” style is frankly admitted, one’s suspension of disbelief dispelled. It’s a magnificent sucker punch, one of the great postmodern gestures.

This is not the only place in which Feldman ends a piece by opening a door that leads the listener out of his soundworld and back into the real one. In Why Patterns? the three instruments play for half an hour in mutually oblivious time worlds, parallel lives. Then at the end, after each has exhausted its material, they quietly fall into regular 3/8 meter and descending chromatic scales. Following the predictable weirdness of Feldman’s universe comes a passage so obvious, so banally normal, that no other composer would have ever dared pen it.

Scene 2 of our story takes place in the same decade, but musically in a very different location. George Rochberg, in the 1960s, had started writing pieces that juxtaposed fragments of incommensurate styles: bits of Mozart, Mahler, Webern, Miles Davis butting up against each other like someone twirling the radio dial. (One might note a brushing similarity with Cage’s Variations IV.) A couple of years after Feldman wrote Rothko Chapel, Rochberg embarked on a series of string quartets for the Concord Quartet which went beyond quotation of famous works to writing in historical styles. Beethovenesque fugues lurch into Bartokian atonality, giving way to Mahleresque pathos or the Baroque French overture idiom. Though it was initially met by a flurry of some of the harshest professional outrage ever elicited by mere music, Rochberg’s gesture emboldened others to strike out in this direction as well, notably William Bolcom and John Corigliano. Bolcom’s Fifth Symphony has the time of its life counterpointing the hymn “Abide with Me” and Lohengrin in a Mahleresque funereal style, then breaking into Tristan‘s Love-Death Music reinterpreted as a fox-trot.

For musicians, this was postmodernism, as far as we understood it on our terms: the fracturing of the organic stylistic unity that one had always considered an inviolable premise of any work of art.

Scene 3: For my late and lamented colleague Jonathan Kramer, the problem with the Bolcom/Rochberg type of postmodernism was that it almost necessarily degenerated into potentially satiric collage, a kind of high-class P.D.Q. Bach. Jonathan was obsessed with this aspect of postmodernism. He didn’t live to quite complete his book Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening, but I’ve read the manuscript, and people are working on it; when it finally appears, the book will revolutionize the way musical postmodernism is understood. For Jonathan (though this is not strictly to our point), postmodernism is not so much a quality of musical works as a kind of listening potential which some pieces of music encourage more explicitly than others.

After Jonathan’s early postminimalist phase, he began pursuing the postmodernist idea creatively. In 1992-3 he wrote a superb piece called Notta Sonata which constituted a critique of Bolcom and Rochberg just as surely as Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments constitutes a critique of Hegel. Notta Sonata is for two pianos and percussion, intended as a companion piece to the Bartok Sonata and just as exciting in performance. It’s a shame the piece isn’t yet available on recording, but you have to hear it if I’m going to talk about it, so I post its two humorously titled movements here:

Notta First Movement (11:28)

Also Not a First Movement (12:09)

(The piece starts very soft and soon gets very loud. I’ve compressed the dynamics a little for fear computer listening would be totally inadequate.) For Jonathan, the more interesting musical option was not to use other composers’ styles in your music, but to make up imaginary styles that had never existed. Thus Notta Sonata contains (to quote what I once wrote about it)

passages [that] sound like Baroque counterpoint on mallet instruments, tonalized fragments of Boulezian serialism, piano horn calls from a Weber opera reworked by Stockhausen with raucously ringing glockenspiels.

Notta Sonata represents a fractured consciousness, an advanced case of stylistic schizophrenia, without sounding like a trip through some composition teacher’s record collection. Adding to the rioutous effect is that the music often breaks off abruptly, veers off in a raucous new direction, and then snaps back serenely to where it left off, as though one stretch of tape were spliced into the middle of another. So many passages in it conflate styles that don’t fit together, with qualities that no other composer ever thought to fuse in one measure. As far as I know his output, it’s Jonathan’s masterpiece: a very important (and thoroughly entertaining) work whose historic position and theoretical achievement will inevitably be recognized someday. Why not right away? What are we waiting for? It’s been around for 15 years.

Scene 4: This brings us to my own quieter and more modest effort Kierkegaard, Walking. The piece transfers the collage effect of Notta Sonata to the quieter level of Feldmanesque negation; or to put it another way, it pursues Feldmanesque discontinuity on the more pervasive level of Notta Sonata‘s collage technique. The fragments fused together in the piece are not expansive or complete enough to be distinguished as styles: each is little more than a group of out-of-synch repeating phrases with a certain rhythmic character, based around a harmony or tonality:

The tiles of the mosaic are carefully and intuitively balanced and contrasted as to direction and function: tonal against atonal against polytonal, rhythmically regular against syncopated, additively processed against repeating against through-composed. You could think of each one as a Feldmanesque mini-texture, say, the repetitions of Crippled Symmetry regularized into quarter-notes and 8th-notes. You can listen to a good rehearsal tape of the piece here (15:12), or download a PDF score here.

At the same time, the radical distancing gesture of Feldman’s closing disjunctions is normalized into a series of smooth nonsequiturs, like the mountains of Notta Sonata squeezed into a narrow corridor. No passage bears a direct link to its immediate predecessor or successor, but a center, or perhaps multiple centers, can be intuited of which the different passages are manifestations. The most recurrent idea, a series of loops going out of phase with each other, comes back almost as a series of variations on a texture. That image contains within itself a friction between time and timelessness (another Kramer obsession, which he pursued in his fantastic book The Time of Music), since the repetitiveness denies forward progression while the changing combinations imply forward movement. The connection with Kierkegaard is a parallel to the contrast of Either/Or, the time-related aesthetic life versus the sub specie aeternitatis meditations of religiosity; and also the fluid succession of fictional personas that Kierkegaard maintains throughout his written ouput. Taken as a whole, Kierkegaard’s total ouevre would be a model of postmodernism, speaking as Victor Emerita one moment, Johannes Climacus at another, and occasionally as Kierkegaard himself.

In being a series of nonsequiturs that relate to each other centrifugally rather than linearly, Kierkegaard, Walking has other, related sources. The centrifugal form – a nonlinear succession of phrases that point to a central idea – calls to mind Nancarrow’s Study No. 24, which I’ve always thought of as his most elegant and most perfectly crafted work. That piece has no motives or harmonic materials of more than local significance, yet derives a powerful unity from the derivations of its alternating A and B sections from a pair of textural ideas, manifesting differently depending on where they occur in the accelerating tempo structure. Another, more obvious model is Erik Satie’s exquisite Socrate, also a series of quiet nonsequiturs, seemingly without center.

Of course I don’t mean to imply that this is how I consciously arrived at the piece: few of my works have seemed to flow from my subconscious so smoothly, without me “knowing WTF I was doing.” But these pieces are all models deeply implanted in me, and which, in retrospect, I recognize as having prepared me for Kierkgaard, Walking. I was very much into the collage idea as a teenager, actually; an ensemble piece of mine from high school (not worth reviving) pits a marching-band version of The Rite of Spring against Liebestraum. But then minimalism came along, and narrow focus was the order of the day. It was when I started writing for Disklavier that collage techniques began to interest me again, because it was so easy to crash fragments into each other without worrying about performance logistics.

In any case, the stylistic nonsequitur has become an option of our current compositional arsenal, and it is clear that it can serve as many different purposes, perhaps, as there are composers to use it:

* the Zen confidence of Socrate

* stylized depiction of rural life (Virgil Thomson)

* bracketing of an otherwise homogenous style (Feldman)

* commentary on the history of music (Bolcom)

* schizophrenia, or perhaps more normal disjunctions in consciousness (Kramer)

* imitation of channel-surfing and other technological intercutting (John Zorn)

* mimicking a Kierkegaardian conversation with its points of stability and abrupt transitions of persona (Kierkegaard, Walking)

There will never be another Rothko Chapel, and that effect can never be achieved the same way again. But no composer today need any longer assume, as he’s working on a piece, that the next measure need remain in the same style, or inhabit the same world, as the one he’s working on at the moment. It’s a curious thing to think about.

I recently had cause to mention my tempo canon for two pianos (or piano and tape), The Convent at Tepoztlan, and it occurred to me that the poor piece hadn’t seen the light of day in 17 years. So I took a few spare hours and put it into Sibelius notation, which was a pain in the neck, because the two parts (performed with clicktrack) are out of kilter by a tempo ratio of 23:24. I had to input one part in an invisible 23:24 tuplet, and since Sibelius won’t copy partial tuplets or paste into tuplets, there was no efficiency involved in its being a canon. (Of course, I’m still using Sibelius 2; if Sibelius 5 is improved in that respect, I’d appreciate hearing about it. I’m resisting upgrading because I don’t like how long the sounds seem to take to upload in newer versions.) And since the meter is 5/4, and 5 doesn’t divide into either 23 or 24, I couldn’t justify measures and staves in either part. Does anyone know if true multitempo (or multi-meter) music is getting any easier in notation software?

In any case, a score to The Convent at Tepoztlan is now available. I think I might not post an mp3, since the sole recording used a tape part made with 1989 MIDI technology, and I would only get comments on its hokiness. It’s an odd piece for me because the structure of the canon (pianos starting together, diverging, switching tempos, and coming back, at the canonic interval of a minor third) imposed a more audible, somewhat Bartoky architecture than I’m accustomed to use. It wasn’t my first tempo canon – I wrote a slow, soft, Feldmanish one in college, at a time I’m not sure I’d even heard any Nancarrow – but I’ve never written one since. I’m curious as to whether my readers know of other tempo canons besides:

– the two dozen Nancarrow wrote,

– the couple I’ve written,

– Lou Harrison’s 1941 Fugue (though per its title this may be more tempo fugue than strict canon, I can’t remember and don’t have the score handy),

– Jim Tenney’s Spectral Canon,

– Larry Polansky’s Four-Voice Canons,

– the augmentation canons in The Musical Offering,

– and the remarkable Agnus Dei from Josquin’s Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales reprinted in HAM.

I remember years ago Ron Kuivila had an electronically generated piece based on the idea called Loose Canons, a title I much envied, and I also recall once a live performance by “Blue” Gene Tyranny in which material he played was echoed by a sped-up recording in real time. We should make another list! (I’m not going to count Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationem, because a prolation canon and tempo canon aren’t really the same thing; once Ockeghem moves into faster note values, the voices all end up at the same tempo.)

UPDATE: OK, in response to overwhelming demand from David Toub and Marc Geelhoed – come on, guys, slow down the e-mail barrage already! – I’ve put up an mp3. The tape part was sequenced in 1989 on old Voyetra Sequencer Plus software – anyone remember that? – with a Yamaha DX7, onto a four-track cassette recorder. Sounds like I was living in the 19th century (but at least I wasn’t using Italian expression markings). The pianist is the superb Judith Gordon of Essential Music, but the recording is hardly better than the MIDI realization. Let it serve as a cautionary example, a reminder of primitive times.

Just before leaving for Europe I chanced to pick up a vocal score of Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s science fiction opera Aniara, and I’ve only recently had time to spend with it. I won’t divulge the used bookstore where I found it, because they acquire a certain amount of modern scores from estate sales (lots of Henze and Berio lately), and I seem to be their prime buyer at the moment – though I must add that their prices seem outrageously high at times. (I’ve also bought scores to Brant’s Angels and Devils, Riegger’s Dichotomy, John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, and some Henze piano music, among other things.) However, Aniara was a piece I reviewed for Fanfare back in the ’80s (the 1985 Caprice recording), and when I saw the score, I knew I wouldn’t resist temptation for long, so I just grabbed it. The piece made something of a splash when it premiered in 1959, got reviewed in Time magazine, and was filmed for TV in 1960. Yet today neither recording nor score seems available. Aniara struck me as one of the most engaging, and at the same time among the least pandering, of modern operas. That it and Blomdahl (1916-68, pictured below – I scanned it because I can’t even find an image of him on the internet) have fallen so far off the radar screen seems unfair.

Based on an epic poem by Harry Martinson (1904-78), who I gather was one of Sweden’s most important poets, and set in the year 2038, Aniara is the story of a space ship taking passengers from Earth (named Doris in the fanciful text) to Mars. In swerving to miss an asteroid the space ship is throw off course, and heads off into the infinite. Meanwhile, radio reports reveal that the Earth has been destroyed by nuclear explosions. Act I shows the passengers entertained by a kind of pop singer named Daisi Doody, who sings in a catchy kind of Swedish scat, and a comedian named Sandon, as they try to absorb the tragedy that’s befallen them. Act II takes place 20 years later, the passengers having fallen into decadence and cult worship as main characters die off and the journey reaches its inevitable oblivion.

OK, it’s not exactly a feel-good opera, and it’s largely 12-tone to boot. But the row is a simple expanding series – C B Db Bb D A Eb Ab E G F F# – and the simplicity of that structure unites the work in clearly audible chromatic tendencies:

Consequently, the harmony always seems to be expanding or contracting, and the choral passages are among the most singable and followable in the 12-tone repertoire. Boulez would probably have pronounced this kind of technique simplistic, but it possesses the right density for music theater, not too dissimilar in this respect from Wozzeck – and, truth be told, there’s something about science fiction, this “woo woo we’re in outer space” feeling, that makes the discomforting 12-tone idiom ring more plausibly. In addition, the chromatic aura is cut by and blended with two other idioms. One is a kind of Swedish outer-space bebop that attends the “Yurg” cult around Daisi Doody – by which I mean that it doesn’t sound like Blomdahl’s trying to write bebop, only that he’s created a hybrid music indebted to it. The other idiom is the electronic music used for various sequences, such as when the computer-like being Mima is transmitting images of the Earth destroying itself. This admirably smooth fusion of atonality, bebop, and electronics must have been unutterably hip in 1959, and given the recent long-lived wave of conservatism we’ve lived through (musically and otherwise), I have to think that if Aniara were reintroduced today as a brand-new work, within the opera world it would still seem just about as daring in its mashup of idioms as it did then: postclassical before the fact.

In fact, one of the first things I did in Europe was to visit the American expatriate composer Wayne Siegel in Aarhus, Denmark, who teaches electronic music at the Royal Conservatory. (My profile of him just appeared in Chamber Music magazine.) And Siegel played for me excerpts of his own science fiction opera, Livstegn, or “Signs of Life” (1993-94), about a scientist plunged into a personal crisis by his unexpected discovery of intelligent life on one of Jupiter’s moons. Here were the same melding of live instrumentals and electronics, only instead of 12-tone, the work’s background style is postminimalist. Livstegn hasn’t been performed since its premiere run in 1994. It deserves revival, and an American premiere, as does its remarkably parallel distant cousin Aniara.

Why do such works get marginalized from the narratives of contemporary music? Because their composers are not from the approved countries from which excellent music is supposed to spring? I’m glad to own the vocal score to Aniara, and if I ever teach a course dealing with 12-tone technique – which has crossed my mind at times, believe it or not – I think I’d use it as a particularly clear and flexible example. And since I hate describing anything to you you can’t listen to, here’s an mp3 of Scenes 1 and 2.

[Update below] I’ve been intending to write more about my European sabbatical, but I’m rather frantically composing on deadline. I have five world premieres coming up in the next several months, and two of the pieces aren’t finished. Thanks to my extended leave from teaching, I wrote seven works in 2007, totaling some 85 minutes of music – not much by some people’s standards, but a personal record for me. And I have two movements of The Planets to finish before school starts, so that the Relache ensemble can start practicing the entire 75-minute, ten-movement work – my own Turangalila, I like to think of it as – for their performance in Delaware in May. Also, my European trip was a lot to process: seven countries in eleven weeks, giving six concerts and ten lectures, meeting lots of composers, and hearing tons of new music. Unlike the American businessmen in novels, every American artist goes to Europe hoping to be changed. I’m not sure I was, but I did need time to think about it.

What I can do, though, is tell you about the most astonishing composer I learned about there: Matthijs Vermeulen. The Dutch call Vermeulen (1888-1967) “the Charles Ives of Holland,” and also their Varèse. He is the archetypal undiscovered composer. His Second Symphony – considered by many his most groundbreaking work (second page pictured below) – received its first performance in 1953, and Vermeulen himself first heard it in 1956. He had written it in 1920. The tone clusters, polyrhythms, percussion, and atonal counterpoint it opens with are easily as daring as anything Varèse would write in the next decade. To throw yet another comparison in, the Dutch refer to it as “the Dutch Sacre du Printemps.” Curiously modest about promoting their national composers, they won’t tell you anything about Vermeulen unless pressed, but if you mention how remarkable he was, they look proud as punch.

On top of the fact that he was decades ahead of his time, Vermeulen was just my kind of guy. Autodidact and too poor to buy concert tickets, he learned the repertoire by listening to orchestras play from outside the Concertgebouw, sitting in the garden. He found work as a music critic, one whose sharp and outspoken views earned him enemies and injured his chances for performance. (My apartment in Amsterdam was about six blocks from the Concertgebouw. After romanticizing the place for my entire life, I was pretty let down to find that it simply translates as “Concert Building.”)

The most famous incident of Vermeulen’s life, the one every commentator mentions, occurred while he was working as a critic in November of 1918. Following a performance at the Concertgebouw of the Seventh Symphony of the rather conservative Dutch composer Cornelius Dopper, Vermeulen, to express his contempt, yelled “Long live Sousa!” – by which he meant that even the little-respected John Philip Sousa was a better composer than Dopper. Much of the audience understood him, however, to have shouted “Long live Troelstra!”, which was the name of a socialist revolutionary who had attempted to start an uprising only days before. For awhile Vermeulen was banned from the Concertgebouw by the orchestra’s management. Unable to make a living in Amsterdam, he moved to Paris for a 25-year exile, eking out a living as a music journalist and travel writer. You can see why my heart goes out to the guy. I have a feeling Vermeulen and I would have been thick as thieves.

After World War II, and the war-related deaths of his wife and son, Vermeulen moved back to Amsterdam, and his works started to be heard. There is a “Complete Matthijs Vermeulen Edition” of his recordings on two three-CD sets on Donemus, sold in every record store in Amsterdam but rather difficult to locate on internet retail outlets. His twenty-odd works are easily listed:

Symphonies:

No. 1, “Symphonia carminum” (1912-14)

No. 2, “Prelude à la nouvelle journée” (1919-20)

No. 3, “Thrène et Péan” (1921-22)

No. 4, “Les victoires” (1940-41)

No. 5, “Les lendemains chantants” (1941-5)

No. 6, “Les minutes heureuses” (1956-8)

No. 7, “Dithyrambes pour les temps à venir” (1963-5)

Chamber music:

Cello Sonata No. 1 (1918)

String Trio (1923)

Violin Sonata (1924)

Cello Sonata No. 2 (1938)

String Quartet (1960-61)

Songs with piano:

On ne passe pas (1917)

The Soldier (1917)

Les filles du roi d’Espagne (1917)

Le veille (1917; also in orchestral version of 1932)

Trois salutations à Notre Dame (1941)

Le balcon (1944)

Preludes des origines (1959)

Trois chants d’amour (1962)

Other:

Symphonic Prologue, Passacaglia, Cortège, and Interlude to The Flying Dutchman (1930)

That’s it: Vermeulen’s life’s work. The symphonies – only the Fifth of which is divided into movements – are amazing. All of his music is tremendously contrapuntal, with many lines competing in a vast rhythmic heterophony. Throughout his life he complained that musicians who looked at his scores warned that the music would never sound, but that no one would play it to prove the point – and when he finally heard his works, they sounded just the way he wanted. He flows back and forth across the threshhold of tonality and atonality, occasionally sounding like Ives or Ruggles depending, though really sounding very much like himself. One of his most lovely and characteristic effects is the atonal (or dissonant) background ostinato, over which lengthy melodies unfold. It’s complex music, difficult to become familiar with, but not at all without personality. In weight and density one might compare the symphonies to those of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, although they are not nearly so complicated in form as Hartmann’s, and easier to take in as a whole.

I was directed to Vermeulen by a casual comment from Anthony Fiumara, director of the Orkest de Volharding. The name was totally unknown to me. I would have never believed that I, lifelong connoisseur of obscure composers, someone who teaches Berwald and Dussek in the classroom, would discover, at 51, a major composer I had never heard of, let alone one who would quickly become one of my favorites. At Donemus I bought the scores to the Second, Third, and Sixth Symphonies. It turns out that my erstwhile Fanfare magazine colleague Paul Rapoport wrote a book titled Six Composers from Northern Europe, about Vermeulen, Vagn Holmboe, Havergal Brian, Allan Pettersson, Fartein Valen, and Kaikhosru Sorabji, which remains one of the fuller treatments of Vermeulen in English; the one existing biography is only in Dutch. And since I hate to tell you about any music you can’t hear, I upload Vermeulen’s Third Symphony for your listening pleasure. Keep in mind it was completed in 1922. It’s amazing what you can reach your fifties without knowing, but delightful to realize how much left there is to learn.

UPDATE: I found an insightful and thorough article on Vermeulen here.

David Mamet in his wonderful new book Bambi vs. Godzilla:

Every [film] studio pays myriads of number crunchers, market analysts, and various other experts to predict and strategize. The breakaway hits, however, have usually been films that were originally discarded as “too.”

“Too” what? What matter? Too original, too predictable, too mature, too infantile, too genre, not sufficiently genre, etcetera.

I am reminded of what I wrote in a free-lance definition of Downtown music:

The only thing that all Downtown music might be said to have in common is that, at least at the time of its original appearance, it was too outré – by dint of excessive length, stasis, simplicity, extemporaneity, consonance, noisiness, pop influence, vernacular reference, or other purported infraction – to have been considered “serious” modern music….

Mamet’s right: “Downtown” is unnecessary. The correct and adequate term is too.

I finally got a recording of my piano concerto Sunken City – by recording it off of Dutch radio via the internet:

First movement: Before (7:43)

Second movement: After (22:19)

The recording is of the premiere in Rotterdam, which had a few more mistakes than the next evening’s concert in Amsterdam, but the spirit of it is quite nice. The ensemble is the Orkest de Volharding, the crackerjack wind and brass ensemble founded by Louis Andriessen in 1972, conducted by the young but impressively expert Finnish conductor Jussi Jaatinen. The soloist is Geoffrey Douglas Madge, an Australian pianist living in Amsterdam since the ’70s. Few I talk to in the U.S. have heard of him, but he long ago recorded the complete Busoni piano music for Philips, and gave the Chicago premiere of Sorabji’s massive Opus Clavicembalisticum in the mid-’80s, so he’s been a big figure on my radar screen for a couple of decades. It was a great honor to have worked with him, and I found him a kindred spirit and a convivial conversationalist. Here’s a photo of him rehearsing just before the premiere (the other half of the ensemble is outside the picture frame):

Of course, I got blasted in the local Amsterdam Picayune by the same critic whom all the Dutch composers hate because he’s blasted them as well. The only stated complaint was that the piece was too long, which is the most superficial kind of comment; I have tried, throughout my critical career, to avoid ever simply calling a piece too long, because that doesn’t mean anything. If Tristan isn’t “too long” at four hours, how can anything shorter be “too long”? What a decent critic would say instead is something about the structure of the piece that makes the overall form unwieldy. Typically such a work will be unclearly articulated, with too much sectional variety to grasp as a large structure. But in this case, the long second movement is a simple alternation of tutti sections and piano solos, ABABA in that respect after a short introduction of piano chords. It is also a chaconne, one of the simplest of forms, interrupted by a jazz section quoting Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man’s Blues,” and returning at the end to the opening chords in a freer order. The chaconne does contain 17 chords, because I needed at the beginning to suggest the seeming eternity of New Orleans victims waiting for help. I have my qualms about the work’s orchestration, transitions, and other details, but there is nothing about it I am more certain about than that it is not too long. (While composing I even found the piece getting too large and compressed some sections.) And no composer in the world knows better than I do exactly what such reviews are worth.

Much more to the point, probably, is that the second movement is rather sad and Romantic, and as one experienced Amsterdammer warned me, “The Dutch critics don’t like sentimentality.” The piece is, I’ll remind you, an homage to and memorial for New Orleans. I’ve already blogged the program notes, so won’t repeat them here. You can download a PDF score here if you want.

I have a didactic point to make about the performance. You will notice that some of the solos are rather jazzed up, with tasteful pitch bends. I did not notate these. They are, generally speaking, exactly what I wanted. The Volharding players, being smart and sensitive musicians, inferred from the nature of the music precisely what would sound appropriate and played it creatively and in the right spirit. I didn’t coach them on that at all – they were already playing it that way when I arrived. So much for the Midtown fallacy that every nuance has to be exactly notated or no one will know how to play your music. Many Pulitzer- and Grauwemeyer-winning composers would say that my score to Sunken City is “undermarked,” and thus “unprofessional” – and yet a European ensemble, who had never heard my music before, divined exactly the degree of looseness that would make me happy, and achieved it with no input from me. How is that possible? Surely I can’t be right in what I’ve been saying for twenty years, that if you write music clearly enough you can trust smart, sensitive performers to play beyond the notation to find the right feel for the music? Or does this performance, perhaps, prove the orchestral hotshots’ mandate about notational exactitude to be the ideological horseshit it’s always been?

With that in mind, enjoy.

UPDATE: Friend John Luther Adams provides a comforting thought: “Your piece isn’t too long. That critic is too short.”

I write for nonexistent orchestras, peopled by superhumans. I need pitches and harmonies beyond the scope of current acoustic instruments, fingered in rhythms no musician can count. And so, despite a dearth of training in the field, despite a lack of talent for the technology, I am driven to make electronic music that will not be considered electronic music by electronic composers. My music argues its way into a no-man’s land in which even the simple category of medium is denied it: it exists entirely as a digital soundfile, but it is, by universal consensus, not electronic music. There is no side-stepping this dilemma – but I have finally found a solution for it. I can’t produce my music alone, but I can collaborate with people who have finer control over the technology than I do. I can supply the pitches and rhythms – the meaning, the content – and leave the coloring, the timbre, to someone else.

And so Mike Maguire and I have completely remade my one-man music theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull. Mike (whose composing name is M.C. Maguire) is not only one of the most surprising and innovative composers around, but an expert commercial sound engineer with broad experience in commercials and film. So I gave him the MIDI files and some general pointers, and he’s completely refitted the piece with new sounds, from the ground up – we got together in Toronto to go over the results with a fine-tooth comb. Mike’s sounds are indeed grittier, livelier, more energetic than the ones Dale Hourlland and I had once coaxed out of 1999 technology, but – what’s most important to me – they feel as supple and definite to perform with. I hope this stills some of the complaints I get about my electronic timbres, and if not, that’s the end of the line – my music is not for everyone. It’s my observation that some people are so attuned by pop music that they can listen only to production, to the extent that distinctions of syntax escape them if unorthodox production values get in the way. And then, to people reluctant to bend their ears to it, microtonal music will always sound simply out-of-tune, and the strangeness gets projected onto other elements as well.

This is no apology, for none is needed. Mike did a fantastic and creative job, amplifying effects beyond my ability to conceive of electronically, and even making suggestions that tightened up the syntax. I wish I could hire him for many more such projects, but he’s got his own unutterably complex music to write. Here are the new versions for you to give a listen to:

Custer: “If I Were an Indian…” (8:42)

Sitting Bull: “Do You Know Who I Am?” (8:17)

Sun Dance / Battle of the Greasy-Grass River (7:59)

Custer’s Ghost to Sitting Bull (10:04)

And if you want, you can compare them to the old ones (originally issued on Monroe Street), below. I’d be curious how much change people think there is:

Custer: “If I Were an Indian…” (8:42)

Sitting Bull: “Do You Know Who I Am?” (8:17)

Sun Dance / Battle of the Greasy-Grass River (7:59)

Custer’s Ghost to Sitting Bull (10:04)

Also, the Monroe Street version was recorded before I had performed the piece live. After some three dozen or so performances, I think I intone the text much better in the new version. Program notes and texts are here, and recently, without mentioning it, I uploaded as a PDF the entire 322-page MIDI score, which you can find here – though it’s 146 MB in size, and a hell of a long download. (You can still get a bound hard-copy score from Frog Peak for only $20, and it’ll be a lot more convenient.) Though I wrote it between 1995 and ’99, I still consider it my most ambitious and successful piece, at least in terms of integrating the harmonic and rhythmic sides of my musical language. I’ll be giving the world premiere of this new version October 9 in Amsterdam, at the Karnatic Lab.

I tend to buy more scores in the UK than CDs. The kinds of British composers who get their recordings into the stores are, as here only more so, not really the postclassical variety. I don’t listen to the recordings I already have by Harrison Birtwhistle, Thomas Adès, James Dillon, Peter Maxwell Davies, and so on, avidly enough to justify busting my frail bank account of puny little Americo-dollars trying to get every recording I’d never seen before by them all. I do, however – and it is always my first act in London – run through the entire piano music collection at Foyles, followed in short order by the orchestral and chamber scores. Then I head for Travis & Emery at Circle Court and see what they’ve got in. This trip, in addition to purchases already mentioned, I landed Feldman’s Coptic Light, Messiaen’s Vingt Regards, Pärt’s Fratres, and quite a bit of piano music by Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons, and Christopher Hobbs. (Did I ever tell you about the critic down south who decided to translate the title of Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus and came up with, “Give My Regards to the Infant Jesus”? True story. “And remember me to the Holy Ghost,” I guess.)

But you knew I’d come back from a minimalism conference with some new obscuuuuuuuure recordings for Postclassic Radio, and I haven’t disappointed you. You’ll hear plenty of CDs that give me that “Titles not found in CDDB database” message when I load them into iTunes. Christopher Hobbs, as I mentioned, was at Wales. I called him one of the original British minimalists, but I note now that he was born only in 1950. From the fact that Michael Nyman was writing about his music in 1974, I had him pegged for much older – that would have been like someone writing about my music in 1979, which no one was. But Hobbs’s Sudoku pieces, based on the newspaper puzzle (never worked one myself), are exotically listenable and remarkably varied, and after hearing them here you can get them at Experimental Music Catalogue.

Also going up (and locatable at the same web address) are piano pieces by Hobbs’s colleague Michael Parsons, whose Satie-ish piano works are surprising, quirky, and charming. Hobbs, Parsons, Skempton, and John White are among that generation of truly postclassical British composers of the 1970s whom Nyman’s Experimental Music book teased us with, and then we almost forgot they existed. Turns out they’ve continued to make increasingly beautiful and subtle music without every losing their experimental spirit. Whether there is a younger British generation following in their footsteps, aside from Chris Newman whose work I already knew, I didn’t find out.

And on the subject of Serbian postminimalism, which I’m sure you’ve brought up at a cocktail party by now, I’m happy to present several pieces by my new friend Vladimir Tosic (b. 1949 – his last name needs a couple of diacritical marks that I can’t achieve with this keyboard). Tosic adheres to what he calls “reductionist techniques,” which I guess is how they talk about minimalism in Belgrade, but his music does sound somwhere in-between the studied flatness of American minimalism and the affectless irony of Russian postminimalism. It is often, withal, hauntingly beautiful, and to prove that I’m putting one piece, Voxal for piano and string orchestra, on my web site where you won’t have to search for it. In Serbia, someone whose music melts on the ears as languidly as Harold Budd’s can get access to orchestras, and if you’ve wondered what that would sound like, – click!

Keith Potter informed me that, since my last visit to London, John Buller had died (in 2004, aged 77). Buller had to be one of the most wildly original figures in British music. His Proença of 1977 set a number of troubadour songs with an electric guitar in the orchestra. The Theatre of Memory (1981), based on Renaissance memory techniques, began with the orchestra members all playing chaotically at their own rate, after which the conductor finally walks onstage and brings them together with a resounding downbeat. Startling stuff, with a notational looseness sort of in the Crumb/Kagel/Schwantner realm, but more substantial and engaging, in my opinion, than any of those names. You’ve never heard of him. Like the US, the UK puts its staid, “respectable” composers in the limelight, and hides its crazy endearing geniuses under a bushel. That must be where we inherited it from.

UPDATE below.

Listen to this excerpt of minimalist music, and then tell me what kind of music this is.

I think I’ve made a mistake. I’ve often written that the most essential characteristic of minimalism was obvious surface structure, but I’ve realized that that’s not necessarily what makes me most feel that a piece is minimalist. Taking the plethora of recent advice that Democrats need to argue from the heart rather rely on rational discourse, I’m going to say, then, that what convinces me that a piece is minimalist is its low information content, the fact that what’s first noticeable about it is that less is going on than in conventional classical (or pop) music. A piece starts, and you pause expectantly for a certain number and frequency of syntactical units to tell you what’s going on, – and they don’t arrive. You can decide a priori that that’s unacceptable, declare yourself bored and the piece boring, and turn it off or leave. Or you can quiet yourself, lower your expectations, and hone your attention to the subtle, slow, long-term changes that some of us find fascinating to listen to once you let that music into your psyche. Minimalism, for me, was always a different kind of music, requiring (to misquote John Rockwell) a different kind of listening. It wasn’t for everybody. It acquired a cult following of unusually patient listeners. It was, and is, a different type of listening experience than the attention-holding narrative of conventional classical music.

I was on John Schaefer’s WNYC Soundcheck show yesterday with Times critic Steve Smith, and we discussed a little of this, but radio time flies by so quickly that you’re lucky if you can get 500 words, cut into five or six soundbites, into a half-hour show. The point is, as keeps coming up over and over again, most people no longer define minimalism the way I always have. They think of minimalism as connoting the orchestra music of Glass, Reich, and John Adams. The Death of Klinghoffer is, as everyone but me now knows, a minimalist opera, and what’s Strumming Music? Who’s heard of that? No one. So every time I make one of my quixotic attempts to limit the word to what it meant in the ’70s, I get a rash of “Let usage prevail!” comments.

Well, just so. Let usage prevail. The large, record-company-owning corporations have won, as they always do: they have redefined minimalism for the mass public. Let us prostrate ourselves before their infinite PR resources. Our musicology is no match for their press releases. I am nothing if not pragmatic. I would even volunteer to write the new Wikipedia article on the genre:

Minimalism: a rhythmic, wildly syncopated, rambunctious form of orchestral music with lots of repeated brass chords and propulsive percussion, usually tonal but sometimes atonal, and often breaking into 19th-century style Romantic melody; almost always found on a Nonesuch CD, but the only essential quality is that the composer’s last name must be Reich, Glass, Adams, or Andriessen….

Everybody OK with that? Fine, we can polish up the details later, but we’re all on the same page, and everyone should be happy.

However, one problem remains. Those of us who love that near-eventless, attention-compressing music I described in the first paragraph, need a name for it. We need to be able to refer to it, and by “it,” I mean the following specific repertoire:

Music of the 1960s and ’70s by

Terry Jennings

Dennis Johnson

Richard Maxfield

Pauline Oliveros

Steve Reich

Philip Glass

Barbara Benary

Julis Eastman

Jon Gibson; and

Music of that era and continuing up to the present time by

La Monte Young

Charlemagne Palestine

Harold Budd

Phill Niblock

Tom Johnson

Eliane Radigue

Tony Conrad

The co-optation of minimalism was, after all, to a considerable extent, a deliberate move to marginalize all that boring old drone music that the classical people never liked anyway and the musical academics were embarrassed by. You could sense their relief when John Adams and Louis Andriessen started funnelling those repeated notes into big orchestral gestures, and breaking into actual melody. “Oh, thank god,” all the classical mavens and music professors sighed in chorus, “we couldn’t take another minute of those endless repetitions, those drones moving by infinitessimal degrees. Let’s call this stuff minimalism, and hopefully everyone will forget about that old boring minimalism.” Even the title of Jon’s show yesterday – “The Maturing of Minimalism” – seemed to imply that the ’60s minimalism wasn’t the real stuff yet, that the real flowering of minimalism came in the Nonesuch orchestral music that is now so popular. But – the old boring minimalism was exactly what many of us loved and still love, thank you very much and keep yer damn mitts off our musical proclivities, and what some very important composers still produce.

What would chemists do, if the public, motivated by whatever bizarre fad, decided that any blue, flaky substance should now be called aluminum? Well, first the chemists would protest, then they’d stick to their guns for awhile and maintain a secondary, professional usage, and if public opinion refused to budge, they’d probably eventually let the public have their blessed flaky blue aluminum and come up with some new name for the actual 13th element in the periodic table. It sounds ludicrous, but it’s not too dissimilar to what happened to the word gay. We still need synonyms for cheerful and carefree, and no longer have a word that means exactly what gay used to mean. Nor do we any longer have a word to specify what the Theater of Eternal Music, Phill Niblock, and early Philip Glass had in common, without falsely implying syncopated brass chords and big Romantic melodies.

So help me figure out what to call the-style-formerly-known-as-minimalism. I’m tempted to suggest something arbitrary like Cogluotobusisletmesism, or Btfsplkism, some ungainly, difficult-to-parse term that the critics can’t pronounce nor the public remember, so they won’t appropriate it again and make it mean something else. After all, fans of that music, and musicologists who study it, have a right to refer to it. The concertgoing public does not have the privilege of deciding what music counts as Baroque, nor what a fugue or a cantus firmus is. Musical experts do that. But when it comes to minimalism – let usage prevail! So now we need a musicological term, a specialist term, for the repertoire I describe above with which the public is not allowed to tamper at will. The list I give is, arguably, not closed; other composers and works could fit the definition (Zoltan Jeney and early Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars come to mind). But no one who can’t name a single Phill Niblock piece gets to argue which ones. We need a scholarly term such that, if you’re not an expert on the specific music denoted, you no more get to futz around with the definition than you get to redefine “quark” if you’re not a physicist.

For now, I’ll make do with an obvious back-formation, “hardcore minimalism.” But I’m not satisfed: I’d rather come up with a word as far dissociated from minimalism as Charlemagne Palestine’s drones are from Louis Andriessen’s bumptious brass climaxes. Steve Smith, on John Schaefer’s show, pointed out that Tom Johnson, in 1971, originally used “minimalism” to describe the conceptualist music of Alvin Lucier, and referred to Glass and Reich as “hypnotic music.” I don’t much care for that, since I don’t find the music hypnotizing. Maybe “compressed attention” music, or “slow change music.”

Once we effect this change of terminology, it will be evident that minimalism is a music I have no more particular interest in than I do in Ravel or Debussy or Shostakovich, which it greatly resembles. Hardcore minimalism, or compressed-attention music, or Cogluotobusisletmesism (if you like that), is music I care deeply about, listen to often, and continue to analyze, study, and write about. But minimalism is just another orchestral fad, a new wrinkle in neoromanticism. In fact, “minimalism” can go mean anything anyone wants it to mean: the Spanish Civil War can be minimalist, lovers can roll over after a hot session in bed and exclaim, “Wow!, that was really minimalist!”, the sentence “I have to minimalism a root canal next Tuesday” can be adjudged grammatically correct, since minimalism is apparently one of those contentless words that function as a Rorschach test, able to mean anything to anyone. Let usage prevail! But let’s come up with some ironclad musicology word, some word that will specifically and centrally denote the static, slowly-changing music of Young, Palestine, Niblock, Budd, Johnson, Radigue, Jennings, Conrad, and the ’60s and ’70s music of Reich, Glass, Benary, Eastman, and Gibson. Something besides “minimalism,” because who, in our wonderful world of strange and alternative and postclassical music, gives a shit about minimalism?

(I leave today to go attend the First International Minimalism Conference at the University of Wales at Bangor. Maybe some of the smart guys there can help me think of a new word.)

UPDATE: I just looked at the comments left to yesterday’s Soundcheck show, and liked this one from Downtown musician David Linton:

my particular generation of downtown musicians felt as early as 1980 that we were entering into a post minimal period…

in our current cultural phase it’s interesting to note that minimalism prevails as though this “post”phase had never happened…

i attribute this to a kind of perpetual cultural amnesia that occurs with every new generation (5 years) of young artists coming to ny in addition to the more obvious institutional cultural hegemony that has always been afforded the anointed biggies from the seventies

Also, Galen Brown repeats his distinction (which I had forgotten about) between “big-M Minimalism,” by which he means the original compressed attention kind, and “small-M minimalism,” by which he means the popular application of the term to Adams, Andriessen, and so on.

1. A few years ago, Gloria Coates completed her 13th symphony, and in so doing became the most prolific female symphonist in history, one up on the obscure African-American Julia Perry (1924-79) of Kentucky. Yesterday, Gloria told me she has completed her Symphony No. 15, which ties her with Shostakovich. It will be available on Naxos in a few months. Gloria characteristically does a lot with long, slow string glissandos, often overlaid with tonal passages for a bizarre but gripping effect. I particularly recommend her Symphony No. 4, “Chiaroscuro.”

2. Really odd offerings continue to appear on the International Music Score Library Project. A pianist in Kansas has posted Sonatas Nos. 7 and 8 by Johann Nepomuk Hummel. It is enshrined in the literature that Hummel wrote only six piano sonatas, very important and impressive works: the fifth, in F-sharp minor, was considered the most difficult piano work ever written, and Beethoven is supposed to have written his Hammerklavier Sonata in competition with it. Grove Dictionary still lists only six Hummel sonatas, but apparently there are three earlier ones, werke ohne opus, which have been numbered 7, 8, and 9 as coming after his recognized ones – much as the three Bonn sonatas that Beethoven published when he was 12 are enigmatically listed as Nos. 33, 34, and 35 in certain complete editions of the Beethoven sonatas. Very curious. One of my favorite assigments in my “Evolution of the Sonata” class is to give students the first eight measures of Beethoven’s first Bonn sonata (without divulging the author) and have them write the remainder of an exposition, to see whether they can do as well as the prepubescent Beethoven did. Perhaps Hummel’s early sonatas will work as well.

IMSLP also offers some chamber music scores of the short-lived Hermann Goetz (1840-76), whom Bernard Shaw raved about as one of the greatest of 19th-century composers. I don’t quite agree, but I have found Goetz’s music as compelling, overall, as, say, Mendelssohn’s. And I’ve also enjoyed the opportunity to look through the two piano concerti (in four movements, like the Brahms No. 2) of the Swedish patriarch Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927). They’re not very good. Stenhammar went through a tremendous style change later in life, and, studying Beethoven and Haydn in detail, became a neoclassicist. I am fond of his admittedly extremely conservative String Quartets Nos. 4 through 6, and I hope those will appear in due course. In any case, IMSLP offers an opportunity to study a much richer and more varied 19th century than one learns about in school.

3. I bought a scanner today, and can now upload as PDFs my scores that only exist in the old obsolete Encore notation program. Accordingly, my Desert Sonata is now available on my web site, where it will soon be joined by my early Disklavier studies, as well as Custer and Sitting Bull. I’m inspired to do this partly by IMSLP. My early scores are available from Frog Peak Music, but I love having 13,000 mp3s on my external hard drive, and I’m enjoying having PDF scores there as well. There’s something about being able to check out a PDF score online before going to the trouble of obtaining it, and I like giving people a chance to do that with my own music.

4. On a completely unrelated political note: There was a wonderfully telling moment in Sara Taylor’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention. She started out saying that, as a deputy assistant to the president, she “took an oath. And I take that oath to the president very seriously.” Senator Leahy was forced to point out to her that the oath she took was not to the president, but to the Constitution. She conceded her error. Doesn’t that just about sum up everything that’s been wrong with the Justice Department?

Forgive me for not blogging. I have little to say to the world at the moment, and, aside from the heinous political stuff in which you are as expert as I, the world doesn’t offer much to attract my attention. I am involved in the little ditzy administrative tasks of getting my music in order, and since I gather that 96 percent of you reading this are composers, you are, or have been, or will soon be, involved in the same species of tasks, and so there is little point in describing them. I acquired a PDF merger (a free one – PDFmergeX), and so am getting all of my multimovement works into single files, which will make them more convenient to download. Mike Maguire and I are redoing the electronic backgrounds to Custer and Sitting Bull, which ought to improve the sound quality immensely. I’m getting new or improved copies of scores printed up, and mailing them off. And I have program notes to write.

This last task is one that almost all composers seem to hate, but that I rather look forward to as a final bit of dessert after the feverish and anxious effort of writing the piece. I love writing about music, and I especially love writing about my own music. I am not, as I suppose I hardly need repeat, one of the predominant “The music should speak for itself!” confraternity to which most composers belong. The music should speak for itself, and I hope it will, eventually. Until then, even the most experienced listeners benefit from a little noodge as to what there is to listen for in a new work, until its style becomes so familiar that many people can hear it for themselves. Relationships that will become obvious on a third hearing may at least be sensed on a first if attention is drawn to them, creating better odds that there will be a third hearing. Nonverbal musicians greatly romanticize “pure” experience, but, except for perhaps the first five years of my life, I don’t believe I’ve ever had a “pure” experience. An artistic culture results not only from perceiving but from discussing what we perceive, putting it into context, comparing it with other experiences. A thousand “pure” experiences, never interpreted, never analyzed, never compared, would lead, it seems to me, to very little. I would not rather be a novelist than a composer, but I have always envied novelists and their world: since words are their medium, no one ever questions the appropriateness of writing about novels, and at great length. I consider music more like the novel in that respect than most people admit. No need to write in and disagree; I take it for granted that I am nearly alone, among composers, in my belief that words have much to contribute in making music digestible and memorable. In fact, perhaps it’s not so much that I have little to say to the world at the moment as that I am simply tired of being disagreed with.

In any case, I have written program notes for Sunken City, my piano concerto. I also, since there is scant chance that anyone else would try to perform the piece before its premiere in Amsterdam next October, release a PDF score. (Warning: don’t click unless you really want to deal with a 135-page PDF.) These aren’t the most literary notes I’ve ever written, but they explain some important things that happen in the piece, and since I have nothing else to offer at the moment, I offer these:

Sunken City (Concerto for Piano and Winds in Memoriam New Orleans) was a departure for me, whose direction was determined by the medium. Anthony Fiumara asked me for a work for piano and the Orkest de Volharding of Amsterdam. Being an American of postminimalist tendencies, I could have responded with a one-idea piece of continuous textural transformation, which would hardly have been outside my stylistic proclivities. But to write a slowly changing sound continuum for brass, reeds, and piano seems impossible; the piano will barely have space to be heard. The first requirement that imposed itself was that orchestra and piano would have to alternate, which led me to the dramatic shape of a true concerto. I’ve always wanted to write a piano concerto, but had always thought of strings, woodwinds, drums. I considered the few classical models for piano with brass, and was not impressed. (I am familiar with two wonderful concerti for piano and winds, Stravinsky’s and Kevin Volans’s; but both employ woodwinds, which I didn’t have available.)

The successful model for brass, reeds, and piano that came to mind was 1920s New Orleans jazz. At the same time, I had just been deeply touched by Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, detailing the tragedy of the government-allowed destruction, and subsequent forced evacuation, of much of New Orleans. (My childhood was dotted with visits to southern Louisiana, where my mother grew up, and some of our oldest friends became Katrina evacuees.) In the documentary, officials from New Orleans visit Amsterdam to see how levees are supposed to be built. So there was my Amsterdam connection, dovetailing with the New Orleans jazz, and I acquiesced to my subject matter as irresistible. The title Sunken City, I thought, might draw a link between Amsterdam and New Orleans – though, hopefully, never with similarly catastrophic connotations.

The first movement is pure fun, the Mardi Gras New Orleans of my imagination, a stylized portrait of the energy level and harmonic language of the 1920s music of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbeck. There are two simple main themes, or perhaps only motives, used in the piece: an alternation of two notes a step apart (sometimes expanded to a third, as in the opening), and a rhythmically irregular repetition of a single note. Only one actual quotation appears in the first movement, a re-voiced chord progression from Frankie Trumbauer’s song “Jubilee.” Premonitions of the tragedy cloud the coda, which ends in a hasty retreat. The much longer second movement is a kind of interrupted chaconne, based on its opening 17 chords (spelling out the repeated-note theme). Successive variations suggest stages of grief, outrage, nostalgia, and acceptance, but finally the piano drifts into Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues” (or rather, its chord changes, with some abstracted bits of the tune), which spreads into the orchestra. The last few minutes return to the chaconne chords, no longer in strict order. The single pitch that runs through all 17 chords is A; the “Dead Man Blues” passages are in B-flat, and the major seventh A above B-flat major provides the movement’s rare moments of solace.

The obvious model for a two-movement work with a vastly larger second movement, of course, is Beethoven’s Op. 111 (also Mahler’s Eighth Symphony). With Beethoven in mind, I had planned to suggest some sort of transcendental acceptance, but as a friend [John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop] reminded me, there can be no acceptance of what happened in New Orleans; not the natural tragedy, which was so foreseeable (and actually didn’t happen, since Hurricane Katrina downgraded into merely a level 3 storm before reaching the shore), but the unforgivable political tragedy: the levees never built to last in the first place, the uncaring abandonment of the population to heat, thirst, and death by drowning, the politicized gutting of government agencies meant to respond to disasters, the turning back at gunpoint of honest citizens trying to escape the city by walking over bridges. My friend was right, and the piece ends as it must, in bitter inconclusiveness.

Awhile back my Australian composer friend Andrian Pertout – I should say, one of my multitudinous Australian composer friends – e-mailed me a font for Ben Johnston’s microtonal pitch notation. I’m not very good at this kind of technological challenge, and we had been down this road before, so I filed it away to deal with later. But being in between compositions this week and without any particular idea in my head, I tried it out and got it to work! What this means is that now, for the first time, I can notate my microtonal music on the computer with the correct notation. Until now, all my microtonal pieces have had to be hand-written scores, or else with some jerry-rigged notation showing cents sharp or flat, and so on. But I got inspired – or rather, remained uninspired, and thus in need of some mind-numbing busywork project – and renotated my piece The Day Revisited in Ben’s beautiful notation. I’m very excited about it.

It took me something like 14 hours to place all the accidentals in a 13-minute quintet. You can see a sample here:

And if you want, you can download the entire score here. The little sevens in Ben’s notation lower notes to make them 7th harmonics, and the upside-down sevens raise them the same amount. The upward arrows (which I hope you can see at least on the PDF; they’re undeniably faint here) raise a pitch a quarter-tone to make it an 11th harmonic, and down-arrows lower the same amount. The pluses correct for the syntonic comma, and if that’s Greek to you, well, sonny, you’ll understand when you get older. But enough about that. The important thing is that now I have a downloadable copy of The Day Revisited which, even if you don’t understand the notation, reveals much more about how the piece works than the old cents-sharp-or-flat score does. And if it took 14 hours, that’s a shorter job, and a less exhausting one, than it would have been to copy the score by hand, which I once assayed to do and gave up.

Andrian uses Finale; I use Sibelius. (O when, o when, will these Finale users see the light and bend to the inevitable?) He says the font is more convenient in Finale, where it can be programmed to punch in next to a note like a regular accidental. In Sibelius, I had to treat it like text (apple-T) and painstakingly drag each accidental next to the note. But I’m impressed with the way it looks, at least on my print-out; I’d be curious to hear others’ results. He’s not quite ready to go public with the font yet. Meanwhile, a recording of The Day Revisited, which will be released in September on my CD Private Dances from New Albion, is still on my web site for now, where you can listen to it here and compare it with the score, if that kind of thing appeals to you. I think, and have been told, that it’s my most ear-opening microtonal work yet.

I fantasize that, on my deathbed, someone is going to run in with the news that a new software has been developed that will not only notate Ben’s pitch notation with seamless ease, but play it back in incredible acoustic fidelity. Someone like Alex Ross, or Michael Gordon, or one of those guys (they’ll all be there) will turn to me and jeer, “Seems you were born at precisely the wrong time, Gann: late enough to find just intonation irresistible, but too early to find it feasible!” The pained expression with which I depart this vale of tears will have nothing to do with my final illness, I assure you.

Art Jarvinen, whose rhythmic intricacies are second to those of no one I write about, offers a different genealogy for how he came to metametric complexities. In ninth grade (circa 1971) he discovered Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band’s then-brand-new album Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which he found, as he puts it, thoroughly “post-minimal/totalist, with the crunch that was supposedly added to the prettier pattern/phase things of Reich et al by my generation of composers.” As evidence he sends an mp3 of the song “I Wanna Find A Woman That’ll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go,” which you can listen to by clicking the link. Art didn’t hear of Steve Reich till he got into college, and never heard the word phasing until his senior year, 1978, when percussionist Jan Williams lectured on the topic. By then, the metametric idea had already long been sown in him, via Captain Beefheart.