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I just completed an extraordinarily smooth and successful two-day recording session with pianist Sarah Cahill for my upcoming New Albion CD. Tom Lazarus is the recording engineer, with a resumé of hundreds of great discs behind him. (One of his credits was the last recording made by Vladimir Horowitz, which made me expect he’d be a bearded patriarch; actually Tom’s my age and looks younger, and we kidded him about having worked with Horowitz at age seven.) We recorded three works: Private Dances, Time Does Not Exist, and On Reading Emerson. In a couple of weeks I’ll record two more pieces for the disc with the Da Capo ensemble and my son Bernard. I had never heard On Reading Emerson before, aside from my own halting attempts to muddle through it, and I’ve been nervous about committing to disc a piece that I haven’t heard with an audience. Listening to your music with an audience is like going over it with a microscope, and sometimes at world premieres I smack my forehead and suddenly realize what I should have done instead. But Sarah plays the piece so gorgeously that she won me over to it.

To make it scarier, On Reading Emerson, stream-of-consciousness and mercurial, is not my typical style. Sarah commissioned it for an Emerson conference she attended, and while I normally settle into a steady-state postminimalism, there was nothing postminimalist about Emerson. As Emerson so often quotes other writers, the piece wanders into motivically related quotations: from Busoni, Ives, and MacDowell, plus a phrase from an incomplete song I started in college to Emerson’s poem “Rhodora.” And since I think of each Emerson essay as driven by a single idea yet ultimately all-encompassing, I derived the whole piece from a motive that keeps reappearing at the same pitch level despite changes of key – E D# C# D# (G) – and that occasionally expands into a 12-tone row, the first one I’ve ever used. (Sort of like Strauss using a 12-tone theme in Also Sprach Zarathustra to represent “science.”) I’m so happy with it and with Sarah’s performance that I’ll treat you to a rough edit, here (eight minutes).

This is not the first time I’ve written a piece outside my usual stylistic habits and found it in certain ways more attractive than my more characteristic music. Morton Feldman used to have a standard assignment that he gave his students: “Write a piece that goes against everything you believe.” He found that his students wrote their best pieces denying all their usual reflexes. (Sort of like the Seinfeld episode in which he decides, since everything he does turns out badly, that he’ll do the opposite of his reflex habits from now on – and it works.) Feldman also had a standing offer to buy dinner for the student who could come up with the worst orchestration – and no one ever won, because the more they worked to come up with bizarre instrument combinations, the more interesting the results.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m getting more and more fed up, for I can see clearly that I was not born into my proper period – [but into] a period I can’t accommodate myself to….

Erik Satie to his brother, February 4, 1901

I believe we are in a period, and have been for just over two decades, in which masculine archetypes dominate cultural consciousness. The various musics that occupy musical discourse have masculine qualities. “Kickass,” hard-grinding, “risk-taking” improvisation has its champions at Signal and Noise and Musicworks magazines, and elsewhere. The orchestra circuit is dominated, not so much by John Adams, as by his legion of imitators, both male and female, who focus violently on the percussion section and make the crescendo of repeated brass chords their trademark. Cults surround the obscurantist music of the priests of the New Complexity, music that never apologizes and never explains. Musically as well as politically, the people seem hungry for leaders, for bullies, for heroes, for those who will lift the onus of responsibility from their shoulders and tell them what to do. Of course, Morton Feldman and Steve Reich, those icons of musical femininity, are highly praised, but nostalgically so, as part of the charming past. Thank goodness no one any longer writes music like that now, right? Or if anyone still does, they should be ignored, if not downright discouraged. That music was pretty, but it’s over, and nothing left today but real MAN’s music.

Like most of the current music I’m passionately interested in, my music, I think, derives from feminine archetypes. It is communicative, and goes overboard to be clear. Idiosyncrasy is its structural principle. It is always structured, but the structure is deëmphasized, smoothed over, unarticulated by contrast and not allowed to intrude. Pretty is its default mode, pianissimo its favorite dynamic. Its physicality is neither propulsive nor regular, but grounded in a balance of conflicting tempos, making it difficult to figure sometimes what speed to tap your foot to. Neither kinetically nor intellectually compelling, it bows to”emotionally convincing” as its ultimate criterion. Above all it does not hide anything nor intentionally mystify. Back in the ’70s, as we were escaping from the brutally masculine archetypes of serialism, that seemed like a good idea. We believed, for awhile, in music not as individual self-aggrandizement but as collective communicativity, in a music that could seduce crossover listeners and bring people together. As Reich said at the time, “I don’t know any secrets of structure that can’t be heard.”

And so, with that sense of being alive at the wrong time, of being totally unfashionable, as utterly irrelevant to the early 21st century as Satie was to the 1900s and Cage to the 1940s, I bring to the public one of my seminal and most unfashionable works. One of the ways I get back into composing after a hiatus is to re-edit some of my earlier music, usually entering it into notation software, as a way of reconnecting with my musical roots: and I’ve done that now with Baptism, a 1983 work for two flutes, two drums, glockenspiel, and electric organ or harmonium. A pre-Custer attempt to fuse cultures, the piece is based on two hymns from different churches, the Protestant “Jesus Paid It All” and the Apache hymn “Daxiasee Bizra’a” (Son of Our Father.) The music reminds me that I originally felt that my most basic musical impulse, beyond even multitempo and chromatic voice-leading, was the free profusion of melody, not based in any repeitition of motives or themes, but always generated anew from the music’s harmonic center.

A PDF of the 24-page score is now available here. The piece was actually published in the ’80s by Editions V in Dortmund, Germany, but I’ve re-edited it for tempos, articulation, and dynamics. Everone comments on the strange, anticlimactic ending, but I’m attached to it, and in 23 years have failed to imagine a better one. Unfortunately, as with all my work from that period, the recording, here, is rather lacking, played on a Casio synthesizer as the only electronic keyboard then available. There were only three or four performances, one in Maine and the rest in Chicago. If you want to complain about the synthesizer, the drones, the homespun quotations (reminiscent of Virgil Thomson’s at times), the simple tonality, the lyricism, and even the most peculiar ending from an output bulging with peculiar endings, I anticipate and overrule you. Marking the end of my Eno-influenced ambient period, Baptism was the piece which marked a new phase in my music, faster and marked by a more synchronized tempo complexity. In a certain way it’s a naive piece, yet I’m unaccountably fond of it, and wish I knew how to write something like it again.

The squirrels of Columbia County, New York, are incorrigible punks. (Today’s post is, as we say, off-topic.) In most respects this is a lovely place to live, but squirrelwise, it’s like some Bronx tenement project where the young squirrels grow up without fathers, and fall prey early to gangs of juvenile delinquent squirrels. I’ve had a squirrel here face off with me two feet away, and look down his nose at me with as little concern as if I were a june bug. My bird feeder still bears a dent in its metal frame where I took a swat at it with a broom to hit the squirrel that had, milliseconds before impact, been staring at me superciliously as it munched away at the birdseed it had no right to. By the time I registered that I had missed, he was on a branch a foot away, drawing on a tiny cigar and snickering with a blasé air. To frighten these creatures is beyond human skill.

A couple of months ago, driving back from North Carolina, I chanced across a garden supply store in Virginia that advertised bird products, and, being in a mood for a break, stopped. Looking through the paraphernalia, my eye was drawn to a running video. On it spun a contraption called the “Yankee Flipper,” advertised as the world’s first squirrel-proof bird feeder: a large, clear plastic cylinder with a green metal ring at the bottom. Birds could perch on the ring and feed peacefully, but the greater weight of a squirrel, pressing the ring, set off a motor that made the ring spin around, casting the squirrel into the empyrean. I was transfixed: the sight of these squirrels being flung into the air made me laugh until tears ran down my face. You can see the video yourself here, and the manufacturer, a concern called Droll Yankees, has a condensed version here. I instantly resolved to buy one, and only flinched for a moment when informed that the cost was $150. The revenge and humiliation I contemplated would have been cheap at ten times the price.

Once home, I hung the Yankee Flipper outside my office window, where I could keep an eye on it. For a month there was no visible activity except legitimate bird feeding. Then one day I heard a momentary whirring sound, and looked out. The Yankee Flipper was swinging, and on the ground was a squirrel squinting up at it with an air of surprise. From that point on, every few hours I would observe a squirrel running up the fencepost parallel to the feeder, staring at it with a look of keen scientific curiosity. After years of getting only smirks of condescension from these scofflaws, it was gratifying to see one absorbed in concentration, truly perplexed and struggling to analyze the mechanics of the dilemma. Finally, a couple of days ago, I had the payoff I’d been waiting for. The squirrel crept down onto the Yankee Flipper from the railing above, lowered himself onto the ring, and clung with all fours as he spun round and round and round for what must have been two dozen revolutions. Losing his grip with one foot after another, he finally spun into the air and crashed on the ground. I laughed until I thought my sides were going to split. The Yankee Flipper had more than paid for itself.

Even as I was laughing, however, a vague disquiet burgeoned in the back of my mind. I was delighted, but not too delighted to notice that as the squirrel was performing his acrobatic feat, his weight made the Yankee Flipper lurch back and forth. With each lurch, a quantity of seed flew out of the seed ports in the cylinder where the birds eat from. Slowly putting two and two together, I looked down, and, sure enough, the squirrel and his fellow hoodlums were busy on the ground harvesting the sunflower seeds, millet, and thistle that had been flung out of the Yankee Flipper. Since then, a repetition of similar feats has confirmed my suspicion: the Fonz of Columbia County squirreldom will voluntarily go for as long a ride as possible, and then he and his cutthroat friends run around feasting on the birdseed. This wasn’t supposed to happen. On Droll Yankee’s videos, no squirrel ever lasts three rounds, but this little savage can cling for more than thirty.

Admittedly, it doesn’t seem like great fun for Da Fonz; upon landing on the ground, he’ll sit stunned for a moment or two, and his head makes a repetitive twitching motion. Nevertheless, his patent pride in having outwitted my expensive mechanism clearly outweighs any inconvenience, and I have been forced to concede defeat. The only way to stop him is going to be to get him for tax evasion, like Al Capone. For now, the neighborhood squirrel gang gets its cut of the birdseed, and what I get in return is an occasional entertainment whose hilarity seems to pale with each new instance. My $150 bought me a lesson: no matter how smart you are, you can’t transcend a local culture that’s been here a lot longer than you have. Or maybe Alpha Squirrel’s teaching me something more helpful: when the system’s set up to defeat you, you can eventually subvert it if you can just hang on long enough.

“Silent Night” begins with the notes G A G E. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” starts with the same pitches, G G G A G G E. Arnold Schoenberg was delighted by this coincidence, and in 1921 wrote a little work for piano, string trio, and harmonium, in which one tune morphs into the other. Called Weihnachtsmusik, it’s absolutely charming – and not one new-music fan in thirty that I talk to has ever heard of it. In fact, it’s the one Schoenberg piece about which I feel most affectionate, and I almost have to assume that Schoenberg’s fans hide it because they’re ashamed that he wrote something so damn lovely. I’m adding it to Postclassic Radio, but I also put it here on my website, as a Christmas gift to you for reading me. The recording is an old Decca vinyl record by David Atherton and the London Sinfonietta, and I’ve never seen another. It was well after this, by the way, that Schoenberg asserted, “There’s a lot of great music left to be written in C Major.”

A student complained that my microtonal music-theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull is currently (if temporarily) out of print, and that it’s not available on my MP3 web page either. It’s a reasonable complaint, so I’ve fixed that. The whole thing can now be heard here, where it will remain at least until Monroe Street brings the CD back out.

UPDATE: Well, heck, in response to a subsequent request, I can put the links right here, if you want:

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)

Ninety-two years ago this week, between Nov. 20 and Dec. 2, 1914, Erik Satie penned Trois Poèmes d’Amour, a trio of brief love songs to poems of his own. At the risk of taxing my reader’s browser, I offer the first here in its entirety:

One notices right away that the voice sings the same rhythm in all eight measures: six 8th-notes and a quarter-note. This is also true of the other two songs: not only that they use the same rhythm in all eight measures, but that they all use this particular rhythm, six 8th-notes and a quarter-note. Thus not only did Satie write three songs each devoid of rhythmic variety, he wrote three songs with no rhythmic variety among them (save for some peculiar chromatic grace notes in the piano in the third, which the sketches indicate were added as an afterthought just before publication). You can listen to the whole set, which lasts barely two minutes, here, on an old Angel vinyl record with baritone Gabriel Bacquier and pianist Aldo Ciccolini. Rather than a collection of three songs, it is really one song – written three times. And yet, no one of the songs is superior to the others, no one sounds like the authentic model from which the other two were derived. Each has its own slightly distinct atmosphere. Each song is memorable on its own; each could stand on its own. Were you to insert a measure from one song into another, those of us familiar with the songs would find the intrusion jarring.

Since my teenage years I have been mesmerized by the studied blankness of mind that could produce these songs. To write a song, and then, as though you had never written it, to write another with the same rhythm and chordal characteristics, just as fresh, just as authentic, requires a mind that can wipe out the immediate past and return to center. And then, within that song, to write each measure so unmindful of its predecessor that you feel no need for contrast, yet that you can also repeat with no fear of exact repetition, seems like the kind of acute moment-to-moment awareness that Zen masters describe. In the poems, Satie was mimicking the flat rhyme-scheme of 12th-century trouveres. But, lest you conclude that only the texts made this feat possible, remember Satie’s similar achievements in formal identity in the far more ambitious contexts of instrumental works: not only the famous Gymnopedies and Sarabandes, but the even more astonishing Pièces Froides and Nocturnes, and to a lesser extent the Gnossiennes. He is capable of writing a third movement virtually identical to the first, or one that quotes the first as though it is not a quotation, but a new creative odyssey leading back into identical material. Like Borges’ hero who writes (not rewrites) Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Satie was capable of writing the same music twice: not in absent-minded forgetfulness, but in acute awareness of every moment as new.

Having discovered Satie at 15 and instantly recognized him as an old friend, I am more and more trying to achieve the blankness of mind – and also the craft, because contrary to public impression, Satie was a painstaking reviser – that makes pieces like Trois Poèmes d’Amour possible. “What should I do in this section?” is a question I try to prevent from ever arising. By the end of the first measure, everything should be decided, and the only task is to continue. By continue I mean simply to sustain the idea, to keep it alive without having to resort to anything else. Although, it’s hardly simple, it’s damned difficult: so much easier to move to a contrasting section, to bring in a second idea, to swerve and create a facile “unity” by returning to the original material later. This is what La Monte Young meant, I surmise, when I asked him circa 1991 why the five movements of his early string quartet were so similar, and he replied, after a moment’s thought, “Contrast is for people who can’t write music” – an unnecessarily dismissive formulation, perhaps, but one I found inspiring. And possibly what Kierkegaard meant when he titled one of his books, “Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.”

The classical music world – which values educatedness in a composer over discipline of will, and speciously takes variety of techniques as evidence of education – does not much respect this goal, nor Satie. But that’s the goal that continues to inspire me. (One piece that achieves it heartbreakingly well is Evensongs by Ingram Marshall, which I have just added to Postclassical Radio.)

Does anyone still listen to Postclassic Radio? I wouldn’t blame you if you’d quit, having heard everything on the long-stagnant current playlist over and over, but actually, according to my stats, listeners logged in 567 hours in September, at an average of 37 minutes per listening session, and the rate seems to be continuing for October. I’m teaching a five-course load this semester instead of my usual three, preparing for sabbatical, and in over my head, but I have lately been finding time to add some new tracks. If you’re the guy who’s listening, you’ll notice some new pieces by the Southern-born Boston microtonalist Ezra Sims (including his lovely Sextet of 1981), and piano music by the cogent and brilliant Hartford postminimalist James Sellars. Other additions will be made very soon, I promise.

UPDATE: Promise kept. Home sick with a cold today, I uploaded more than 20 percent new material. The official composers of the month – at my current rate, they’ll be around until March – are Linda Catlin Smith and Raphael Mostel, with several works each. Plus, new recordings of music by James Tenney and Jo Kondo, a rare vinyl disc of Zygmunt Krauze (Fete galante et pastorale), and Annea Lockwood’s Thousand Year Dreaming. I’ll try to keep it up, so that if you’ve been tired of Postclassic Radio, there’ll be reason to come back. Don’t make me start a pledge drive!

UPDATE AGAIN: With new pieces by Chiel Meijering, Chris Brown, Beata Moon, Reinhold Westerheide, Arvo Pärt, a couple more by Ezra Sims, and several installments of Alvin Curran’s intermittently astonishing piano cycle Inner Cities, the playlist has been a good 40 percent updated, and the complete listing on my web site is momentarily up-to-date, too. After the hundreds of hours’ worth of music I’ve programmed with virtually no repetitions, I still feel like I’m pulling things out of the top drawer.

UPDATE AGAIN AGAIN: And perhaps best of all, a deliciously strange and thrilling new work for three microtonal vibraphones, Orenda, by Kraig Grady.

Somewhere recently, and I’ve forgotten where, I read an essay by a Cage fan so avid that he had gone to some trouble to secure a recording of the piece Quantitäten (1958) by the Swedish composer Bo Nilsson, just because of a joking reference Cage had made to it. In his lecture “Composition as Process,” Cage repeats over and over at intervals, as kind of a refrain, the question, “Would you like to hear Quantitäten by Bo Nilsson whether it’s performed for the first time or not?” I chuckled, because I’ve always, thanks to Cage, had a humorous association with that piece myself, though I didn’t remember having ever heard it.

Well, I’ve been wallowing naked in all my old vinyl lately, and I ran across Quantitäten on a record of Scandinavian piano music played by Elisabeth Klein. I disremember whether Fanfare sent me the disc for review, or whether I bought it for Per Nørgard’s powerful and imaginative Second Sonata on the flip side (I used to be a big Nørgard fan, but we don’t hear much about him in the U.S. these days). The liner notes mention that Quantitäten contains 85 different time-values; I have no earthly idea why the composer would consider this important. In any case, others may have a similar curiosity, which I feel compelled to gratify. And so:

Would you like to hear Quantitäten by Bo Nilsson whether it’s uploaded for the first time or not? If so, click here.

It is with some pinch of nostalgia that I put the final touches, this morning, on the list of my complete Village Voice articles, which you can find here. There were 522 of them, from Rebecca LeBreque and Iannis Xenakis to Barbara Benary, from December 2, 1986 to December 5, 2005, 19 years to the week. I decided not to stick around for my 20-year gold watch. I was proud of having outlasted all previous Voice new-music critics, though of course my longevity was dwarfed by Leighton Kerner’s, who was kinda the Uptown critic, but he wrote surprisingly well about Downtown figures before that area was siphoned off to others. I have no regrets about putting it behind me. From 1986 to 1997 it was the greatest job in the world, and I could have done it forever. But by the time my column space had dwindled down to 650 words, and I was no longer hanging out in NYC often enough to grasp what was going on with the younger composers, I had become ashamed that I was holding on to it. Over the last eight years, from the moment the paper went free (and I didn’t see it coming), the Voice ceased to feel like the paper I used to write for, and I felt more and more alien there. Too bad. But I needed a new life as a composer, and I am dubious about the possibility of remaining an expert on music of people a generation younger than oneself. I salute what the Voice once was and, in a sense, will ever be. The new-music community owes a profound gratitude to Bob Christgau, Doug Simmons, Richard Goldstein, Chuck Eddy, and the other editors there who felt that new music was important news. They kept the music we love in the public eye for 45 years.

Fellow critic/blogger Alex Ross (currently on book leave) offers a thoughtful reply to my post on American Romantic painting vs. music:

I think it’s a terribly important topic, actually, why there is no great 19th-century American music. Composers feel that absence to this day. At the same time, it’s a great thing. You couldn’t have had a Cage if there had been a musical Melville.

I’ll see that, and I’ll raise him: I think that absence helps account for the fact that America has produced such a stream of neoromantic composers – Barber, Hanson, Diamond, Corigliano, right up through Rochberg and Bolcom – a type virtually unknown in Europe. Because we never had Great American Romantic Music, someone’s always finding it irresistible to fill in that gap. Even the middle movement of my own Transcendental Sonnets is an attempt to figure out what an American Brahms’ Requiem might have sounded like.

My early music continues going through an odd renaissance lately. A week ago Sunday, the Bard flute ensemble – with no prodding from me – played my 1979 work Siren for five flutes, which hadn’t been heard publicly since the year it was written. And tonight, at Bard, student vocalist Liz Przybylski and accompanist Sharon Bjorndal are giving the world premiere of a song I wrote in 1985, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” on a poem by T.S. Eliot. I once wanted to write a whole T.S. Eliot song cycle, but I read that his estate disallows musical settings of his poems, so I assume that the song can’t be performed in any for-profit occasion, and I discontinued the cycle. Still, it’s the best, most ambitious song I ever wrote, and it’s been a blast to hear it coming from outside my head for the first time in 21 years. I guess the damn poem will go into public domain someday.

UPDATE: At the risk of representing the song badly, here’s the recording. Liz was having vocal problems that day and had been warned by her teacher not to sing, but she did anyway to avoid disappointing me. Given that, I thought it was a charming world premiere performance. And, since the poem’s in public domain after all (see comments), here it is, made-up words and all:

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-panes.

In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.

Superfetation of to en,

And at the mensual turn of time

Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school

Designed upon a gesso ground

The nimbus of the Baptized God.

The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through the water pale and thin

Still shine the unoffending feet

And there above the painter set

The Father and the Paraclete.

The sable presbyters approach

The avenue of penitence;

The young are red and pustular

Clutching piaculative pence.

Under the penitential gates

Sustained by staring Seraphim

Where the souls of the devout

Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between

The staminate and pistilate,

Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham

Stirring the water in his bath.

The masters of the subtle schools

Are controversial, polymath.

For those interested in what tuning software will make microtonality most convenient for them (assuming you can be seduced down the primrose path, my pretty), microtonal programming expert Bill Sethares has offered an authoritative comparison, over at the tuning list, between Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven (LMSO) and Scala:

[W]hile they do overlap in some functions, they
do differ. The similarities: both will generate scales, both will save
to a variety of formats, both are written by dedicated people who have
done a lot to make it easier to explore microtonality. Strengths of
Scala: many analysis features, huge library, available on all
platforms. Strengths of LMSO: easy to use with a large variety of
synths and softsynths, great manual (clearly written and easy to
follow). For my personal taste, I think of Scala as better for
analysis and LMSO as better for performance. With specific reference
to Kontakt support, both work by writing a Kontakt script file that
can be added into any instrument. Scala’s implementation is limited to
a single scale at a time (I know — I helped Manuel debug the Kontakt
scripts). LMSO can have many tunings available instantly in a single
script, and you can switch between them slickly and easily. It’s
biggest liability is that it is Mac-only.