Kyle Gann on music after the fact
One of my now-rare Village Voice articles appeared this week, a review of Charles Amirkhanian and Paul Epstein on the Interpretations series. I’ve uploaded to my website one of the Epstein pieces I talk about so you can listen to it, the lovely Palindrome Variations.
I went to Fargo to visit Henry Gwiazda. He used to make sampling pieces in virtual audio, placing sounds in three-dimensional space. He despaired of that, because it only worked with the listener in a certain relation to the loudspeakers, which meant that he could only play his music for one person at a time. (Though the effect, captured in his piece Buzzingreynoldsdreamland, is pretty astonishing. You can experience the piece on an Innova CD, but you have to set up your stereo speakers just right.) He’s more recently gotten involved in a video-animation/sound art fusion instead. He’s got some new pieces coming out on an Innova DVD that’s going to be beautiful. (My interview with him will be an extra feature on the DVD, and that’s what we were doing.) I think of Henry as the Nancarrow of my generation, because he’s reclusive, few people know his work, he’s working with technologies no one else is using, and yet he also has a kind of low-tech element to his work, since his sound samples and video models all come from commercial sound libraries and modeling software. He picks up old technology no one had thought of using creatively and makes evocative poetry with it, the way Nancarrow did with the player piano. Of course you’ve never heard of him: he’s 53, and Nancarrow was discovered at 65.
I’ve put up one of Gwiazda’s virtual audio works, thefLuteintheworLdthefLuteistheworLd, for you to listen to, but you HAVE to use headphones, with left and right channels in the appropriate ear, to get the piece’s amazing three-dimensional spatial effects.
Henry and I have argued for years about the meaning of modernism. At present, he defines modernism as the assertion that the world is more complex than we can understand; he defines postmodernism as the assertion that the world is more complex than we can understand, and that’s fine, we don’t need to understand it. He’s recently distanced himself from both positions, and feels that we both can understand the world, and urgently need to do so. (I consider this postminimalism, but we haven’t come to agreement on that yet.) Consequently, he’s making animated videos that capture extremely mundane moments in the protagonists’ lives, and drawing attention to small, sensuous details as a way of attuning the viewer to details in his own surroundings. It’s lovely, resonant work, that does make you see the world a little differently afterward.
But Henry’s given up on the new music scene, on the grounds that most composers consider themselves musicians but not artists, and cultivate imitative, recreative thinking rather than creativity. He showed me an article in this week’s Scientific American Mind (Henry is one of the most science-conscious composers I know), which defines creativity as divergent thinking, imaginative leaps into the unknown, but notes that almost all education emphasizes only convergent thinking, which consists of learning well-trodden paths and honing in on singular correct answers. Most of the way we teach composition, Henry feels, is scientifically mistaken, because we teach by examples and models already used by others instead of encouraging off-the-wall thinking and problem solving. Hindemith, he thinks, did tremendous damage to American music by encouraging composers to think of music as a matter of craftsmanship. Henry is himself one of the most off-the-wall, imaginative artists I know, someone whose mind is well accustomed to jumping off at bizarre angles. In the other arts that’s valued; in music, it always seems a little suspect.
Also, like Feldman, Henry has a refreshing way of seeing through the blinkered assumptions of the composing world. A story he told me suggests partly where he got it, from one of his composition teachers at Cincinnati College-Conservatory (where Nancarrow was also educated): one Scott Houston, since departed. On Henry’s oral doctoral exam, Houston asked the question, “Say you’re writing a piece for woodwind quintet. What considerations do you think about when you start out?” Henry muttered something about the relative ranges of the instruments. “Wrong.” He tried eight or nine other platitudes, all greeted with, “Wrong… wrong… wrong.” Finally, in some exasperation, Henry blurted out, “Well to tell you the truth, I’d never write a woodwind quintet, because it’s an ugly combination of instruments.” “DAMN RIGHT!,” shouted Houston, slamming his first on the table. That was the answer he was looking for.
Convergent thinking, true, but what a refreshing example.
I know a lot of Uptown composers, probably a lot more than most Downtown composers know. (Hell, I had a Grawemeyer Award winner over for dinner last night, have another one coming over soon, and down the road is the house of another friend, one of the country’s best-known opera composers. I’m better connected than you think. And by Uptown, for purposes of this entry, I mean Uptown, Midtown, and non-Downtown. It’s not a distinction we Downtowners make conversationally, sorry.) As I say, I know a lot of Uptown composers. All of them are lovely people. They’re all politically liberal. They all despise George W. Bush, and all fear for the direction our country is taking. They’re deeply devoted to their students and colleagues. They all believe in diversity and equality, and in giving minority and women composers every possible chance.
And every single one of them, without exception, says and believes that it is wrong to discriminate against composers on the basis of style.
Some of these composers, not all of them, sit on panels for awards and artists’ colonies, serve on search committees for academic positions, make recommendations for commissions. What happens is, say an orchestra piece by John Luther Adams comes up: “Well, thats all on the C major scale, it’s not very sophisticated.” A piece by Beth Anderson: “That piece wanders all over the place, there’s no throughline.” A score by Elodie Lauten: “There aren’t very many dynamic markings here, that piece isn’t really ready for orchestral performance.” A piece by Phill Niblock: “This is just drones, nothing really happens in it.” A piece by Bernadette Speach or Peter Garland: “Too repetitive.” A piece by Joshua Fried: “There’s no score, I don’t really understand what’s happening here.” And so all those composers get passed over for awards, for funding, for jobs, for commissions, on what my Uptown friends are convinced is the basis of quality. They are certain that they are only applying standards that they have developed through their long experience as practical composers. What is really happening is that they dismiss all this music because they have no way to evaluate music written in Downtown idioms. And despite all their best, most honest, most laudable intentions, they discriminate against Downtown music on the basis of its style.
I’m not saying anything controversial or even subjective. I talk to these Uptown friends, and they agree that the reasons I’ve given for their decisions are the correct ones. When I talk to them, they concede that perhaps there’s a style there that they don’t understand. They will admit, under duress, that I may have a point about Downtown music having different notational conventions that, to them, look amateurish – “undermarked” is their term – but may not be. They recognize that some important composers have come from the Downtown scene: Reich, Feldman, Zorn. When a Downtowner reaches that level of adulation by younger composers, they resist acknowledging it for awhile, and then finally decide that it’s OK to consider those people important. But they don’t extrapolate from those exceptional cases to the younger Downtown composers who haven’t “made it” yet. Aside from myself, they are surrounded by dozens of like-minded colleagues, and they feel no pressure to consider Downtown music under a different set of standards. They’re not familiar with the music of composers whom Downtowners consider their important forebears: Niblock, Ashley, Lucier, Oliveros, Branca. They don’t quite understand why Lou Harrison is supposed to be such a big deal, because they find his music aimless and lacking a tension that they don’t know how to do without. They’re resigned to Cage, but don’t teach him. They don’t know how to distinguish between drone pieces, or postminimalist pieces, that are really interesting and others that are merely pedestrian (the way I realize I’m not good at distinguishing a good DJ artist from a mediocre one). They don’t know the reference points of Downtown music. They do their best, but ultimately they’re comparing the music they hear with that of Ligeti, Boulez, Daugherty, Druckman, Harbison, Davies, Carter, Rochberg, and it all sounds lacking, amateurish, unsophisticated. While talking to me, they’ll come around to realizing that they may not know enough about that music to judge it, and they really want to be fair and nondiscriminatory. But when they get back on that panel or committee with their peers, and they hear a CD by Mikel Rouse, they don’t know what to do with it, and they slap it in the reject pile. Some of them, under my influence, even graciously try to represent the Downtown viewpoint on panels, but they don’t really know how to argue for it, and there’s no effect. The ones who are really in the circles of power in American music, being human, don’t have a strong incentive to dilute their own influence by widening those circles – though one of the Grawemeyer winners, truly conscientious and newly aware that Downtown composers don’t have a voice, has gotten me involved in some panels. As I said, lovely people.
Well, so what, right? Downtowners have the same reaction to Uptown music, right? And they’re just as biased.
But the relationship is not symmetrical.
Have you ever heard of a college or university where the faculty was so Downtown that no Uptowner could get a job there? No. Mills College, maybe. The number of Downtown composers who have achieved academic positions in America can be counted on your fingers with some left over, and one of those (myself) only did so, after unsuccessfully applying for more than 100 jobs over 16 years, by pretending to be a musicologist. Contrary to a self-consoling Uptown myth, plenty of Downtowners would love to teach, are qualified, and do apply for the jobs.
Have you ever heard of an award panel that was so dominated by Downtowners that no matter how hard the token Uptowner panelist tried, she couldn’t get an award for any Uptown piece? No. Out of all the composer awards in the country that go to composers, two routinely go to Downtowners: the Herb Alpert Award and the Society for Contemporary Performance Arts (the latter funded, I believe, by the estates of John Cage and Jasper Johns). Thanks goodness for them. It’s great when they go to good composers like David First or Pamela Z or David Dunn, but both these awards are decided by secret nomination, and it’s a little frustrating for Downtowners to sit around and hope for an unexpected bolt from the blue. We need things we can apply for, with some hope of getting them.
Have you ever heard of an orchestra whose Downtown composer-in-residence made sure that all the pieces that got commissioned were by Downtowners? No.
Besides, the Downtown point of reference includes the Uptown view, and the reverse is not true. Most Downtowners learn about the music of Ligeti, Boulez, Harbison, Druckman, Daugherty, Davies, Carter, Rochberg – we can hardly avoid it. We’re educated on the same 12-tone music, the same modern European masters, we hear pieces by the Pulitzer composers. But we’ve also discovered alternative composing aims and strategies of which the Uptowners are unaware. Many of my Uptown friends go their entire lives without hearing music by Niblock, Eliane Radigue, Charlemagne Palestine, Duckworth, Lauten, Lentz. They never get immersed enough in that music to realize that it has its own, different, often quite demanding set of standards.
Some of the hardcore Uptown (non-New Romantic) composers of the past, like Wuorinen and Davidovsky, went on deliberate crusades against music of diverse aesthetics, but that’s not true of my friends. They think they’re simply applying their hard-won knowledge and being fair. So I’m not accusing them of a conspiracy or vendetta or anything dishonorable. They’re just ignorant. Their ignorance, and perhaps a little laziness, puts them in the contradictory stance of being politically liberal but culturally conservative, giving lip service to diversity but perennially reforming musical society in their own narrow image. And, with all the best intentions in the world, they collectively prevent composers from the Downtown scene from participating in the few opportunities that this country affords for composers to make a little money from their work, to make their living from music-related jobs, to buy the time it would take to undertake serious creative work without interruption.
Some people on the internet think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do. I watch it happen. The composers in positions of power don’t disagree with my assessment. I am well aware that many, many Up- and Midtown composers similarly have a difficult time getting awards, commissions, jobs – but whatever their problems, they are not being discriminated against based on a total misunderstanding of their style and intentions. Education is needed. Consequently, I’m going to continue writing about the problem and talking about it until the situation changes. Any composer who thinks the current status quo is just fine is less liberal than he flatters himself.
For the first time I’ve repeated a work on Postclassic Radio. It’s Daniel Lentz’s The Crack in the Bell, and I aired it last September, but I listened to it again last night, and it’s just too beautiful, and not nearly enough well known. It’s a setting of e. e. cummings’s classic antiwar poem “next to of course god america i”:
“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead….
Lentz matches cummings’s irony with a deadpan but glitzy setting, with a driving pop energy breaking into passages of glorious Renaissance counterpoint on the word “beauty.” The piece is hilariously tongue-in-cheek yet sumptuously written, and its use of synthesizers and delay units in a large-ensemble context is elegant and innovative. Some people don’t like the voice and intonation of vocalist Jessica Lowe on this (the only) recording (originally on EMI, now rereleased on Lentz’s Aeode label), but those people’s expectations are too classical. I think she’s perfect for the piece, with just the cheesy insouciance to undermine cummings’s surface meaning. As far as I’m concerned, a society in which Le Marteau sans Maitre is famous and The Crack in the Bell isn’t has its values upside down, and so you can check out that opinion, I’ll also post the mp3 to my web page, here.
Greatly underappreciated though they are, negative comments in reviews are the sparks that illuminate your position with respect to the rest of the world. My Cold Blue recording of Long Night was described over by David Salvage at Sequenza 21 as “a bit Zen for my taste,” and it’s the best comment I’ve had since John Rockwell in the Times called my music “naively pictorial” in 1989, which led me to develop an entire aesthetic I call Naive Pictorialism, of which I am to date the sole exponent. Both are the kind of insights that indicate your message has gotten across. As a matter of fact, the last organized religion I participated in, years ago, was at Zen Buddhist temples in Chicago and New York. (The Chicago temple was great, but the New York one so smarmy, so more-meditative-than-thou, that I quit in disgust.) One of the earliest vocal works I wrote (Song of Acceptance of 1980, same year as Long Night) was a harmonically immobile setting of paragraphs from the Tao-te Ching:
The multitude are merry, as though feasting on a day of sacrifice…
I alone am inert, showing no sign of desires,
Like an infant that has not yet smiled…
Mine is indeed the mind of an ignorant man,
Indiscriminate and dull!
Common folks are indeed brilliant;
I alone seem to be in the dark.
Common folks see differences and are clear-cut;
I alone make no distinctions.
I seem drifting as the sea;
Like the wind blowing about, seemingly without destination.
The multitude all have a purpose;
I alone seem to be stubborn and rustic.
I can’t honestly say at this point whether it was John Cage’s writings that led me into Taoism and Zen and occultism, or whether it was my instinctive affinity for Asian religions that made me open to Cage’s writings. But I do know that, while Zen shouldn’t be made to take the blame for my music, the meditative state encouraged by Zen is a listening paradigm with which I am not uncomfortable. “A little too Zen” is praise that I would not have been so immodest as to confer on myself, but if someone wants to elect me to that august fraternity, I’ll emblazon it on my next poster.
The late Columbia professor Jonathan Kramer, in his great book from the 1980s The Time of Music, wrote at length about what he called “vertical music,” non-narrative, static music in which time ceases to exist, or rather that refuses to create a sense of virtual time, thus throwing the listener back on his own subjective time sense. This can range from music that doesn’t change at all – like Satie’s Vexations, Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis and Hymnkus, La Monte Young’s sound installations, Stockhausen’s Stimmung – to music that changes only very slowly, like Phill Niblock’s slowly unfocussing drone pieces, Charlemagne Palestine’s Strumming Music, Steve Reich’s Drumming, Bill Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes, Elodie Lauten’s The Death of Don Juan, John Luther Adams’s Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, David First’s The Good Book’s (Accurate) Jail of Escape Dust Coordinates, Eliane Radigue’s incredible Adnos and Trilogie de la Mort (pieces I use as the acid test for judging a great stereo system), even some of Olivier Messiaen’s slow movements. For that matter, Morton Feldman’s entire output has a strong vertical component, “vertical” referring to the music’s refusal to significantly order contrasting events in the “horizontal” dimension of time.
Tell me that nothing happens in such-and-such a piece, and I am immediately intrigued. To say that all or even most Downtowners subscribe to an aesthetic of vertical time would be a gross exaggeration, but many of us do. Large swaths of Downtown music are devoted to gradual process, without events, or sometimes just directionless stasis without process, “like the wind blowing about, seemingly without destination.” (Actually, my music was more like this in the ’80s, and I’m recently getting back to it.) To outsiders, this music seems to be missing something: the emotional sine curve typical of Western music, the up-and-down European conceit of psychological cause and effect.
Since Beethoven, music has been paradigmatically based on our psychological life, and since Wagner, particularly on its sexual side. Obstacles appear, dissonances thwart us, events move toward a cathartic climax, and the hero strives and overcomes – or, beginning with Mahler, is sometimes defeated. Tension crescendoes, release comes in decrescendos, and all value consists in the intensity of the struggle. But starting with Cage, or even going back to Satie, came a different paradigm more akin to Eastern musics, based on a more meditative, Asian sense of all-at-oneness, of music experienced in the moment, not as going anywhere, but as Eternal Being. La Monte once tossed off to me the comment, “Contrast is for people who can’t write music.” When I quote this, it tends to make Uptowners, Midtowners, Out-of-Towners, and even some Downtowners very uncomfortable.
The discomfort is understandable. As Kramer would say, most classically trained musicians (it’s not necessarily true of your average audience member) are locked into a meta-narrative in which one never challenges the assumption that a piece of music should contain contrasting sections and high points and low points. What’s surprising is that, after so many great, successful, historically important individual examples of vertical music that doesn’t contain those things, vertical music still remains unacknowledged as a genre, as an ever-present possibility, and has to be refought for with every new piece. Reich and Glass wrote vertical music, but they got away with it. Young and Palestine, well, OK, but that was back in the ’60s when everyone was doing drugs. That aesthetic is supposed to be over now, everything back to “normal.” The great achievement of Morton Feldman was that he wrote so much strongly vertical music that appealed to young composers, who in turn forced many of their reluctant professors to concede that one Downtowner had indeed entered the canon of the Greats.
To this day, I play static, vertical music by Downtowners of my generation for my more dyed-in-the-wool classical colleagues and their faces fall into a look of patient indulgence of my naivete. I have to understand, after all, that the music doesn’t really “do anything.” It’s never presented as an issue of style or intent or idiom, but as one of quality. These composers are OK at creating atmosphere, but they haven’t learned yet to build up climaxes, have they? Where are the pitch motives, where the colorful contrasts of orchestration? They’re still amateurs, and perhaps they’ll someday learn to write “real music.” I wish, instead of acting so goddamned self-assured in their convictions of what music is supposed to do, these people could step out of their own meta-narrative enough to have the graciousness to admit, “Well, it’s a little Zen for my taste.” I wonder if it’s partly because I live in the still-Europe-tinged Northeast; I fantasize that out in California people sit around grooving to slowly-moving drones, but I don’t know whether I’d find it different out there or not. Probably academia is the same on the West Coast as it is here, and I’ve come to believe that musical academia is never, ever going to step out of the classical meta-narrative, Jonathan Kramer’s most brilliant arguments notwithstanding. Like the music it roundly rejects, musical academia is permanent and unchanging.
I think Young’s right, that contrast makes composing easier, and that to get by without it (think of the great Renaissance composers, like Ockeghem and Palestrina, whose music is so seamless) requires more skill. I’ve written plenty of “real music,” sometimes on commission from classical performers whom I fear couldn’t appreciate anything more hardcore, and I find it less of a challenge than a piece that manages to stay focused on one idea. “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” wrote Kierkegaard. “All of man’s troubles stem from his inability to sit still,” wrote Pascal. With every new piece I try even harder to keep my music from changing. (Of my mature pieces that have climaxes, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator for Disklavier is a joke about climaxes, and literally laughs at them; Hovenweep was written for the elegantly Midtown St. Luke’s Chamber Players, and I was being a good boy.) After all, to listen to music is to temporarily identify with the emotional/psychological persona it presents. Music that goes up and down a lot, that creates arbitrary anxiety only to resolve it, that drives itself into frenzied crescendos, feels, to me, sort of immature, unenlightened, not a persona I would be eager to internalize – and I think that lay audiences generally find it a chore to get through anxious modern music that seems to be about emotional instability. I do love the slowly graduated emotional catharses of Mahler’s music, but experience them as a kind of throwback to music’s (and my own) turbulent adolescence. Today I prefer music that can keep its calm, that aims at something deeper, more spiritual, perhaps, than a fluctuation of violent emotions.
It’s a personal preference, not an ideological position, but it keeps me and my friends from ever feeling at home in the world of contemporary classical music. Fifty-three years after 4’33”, 47 years after La Monte Young started working with drones, 20 years after Jonathan Kramer introduced the concept of vertical music into theoretical discourse, several centuries into the histories of Indian classical music and Tibetan chanting, you’d think there would be more frequent recognition that music can be something other than a calculated sequence of contrasted events. But I alone seem to be stubborn and rustic, for every contact with classical musicians reminds me that a lot of the music I relish most is still considered “a little too Zen.”
UPDATE: Reader Joseph L. confirms that they do still listen to drones out in California, and points me to this recent Oakland concert as evidence. Always knew I landed on the wrong coast.
I just received an excellent CDR recording of a new piece of mine, Private Dances for piano, played exquisitely by Sarah Cahill – in her hands, in fact, a couple of the movements are more beautiful than I imagined they could be. I wrote the piece because for years I’ve been such a big fan of William Duckworth’s multi-movement pieces like The Time Curve Preludes and Imaginary Dances, and they made me want to write a piece as a series of brief movements, something I’d never done. What Duckworth achieves that I didn’t was a way to link the pieces convincingly as a series, like Schumann; my dances are more self-contained, but I’m happy with them. I’ve posted the piece to my web page and on Postclassic Radio, and I post it here as well. You can listen to the whole piece:
Private Dances (timing – 23:44)
or to individual movements:
1. Sexy
2. Sad
3. Sultry
4. Sentimental
5. Saintly
6. Swingin’
and you can find the scores here as PDFs if you want. Hell, you can take ’em and play ’em on your own piano. [UPDATE: My PDFs, made via Sibelius on a Mac, download and print just fine on some computers, but on others either won’t print correctly or possibly won’t download at all. I don’t know what the problem is, or what to do about it, except that friends have had luck trying it on different computers until they find one that works. Advice appreciated.]
Renovations on Postclassic Radio are complete, and the playlist is back up to around 17 hours. Also, I’ve finally updated the playlist on my web site, so if you look quick you can actually find out what’s playing tonight. (Offer limited.)
Conlon Nancarrow, like all artists interesting to read about, was a fount of idiosyncracies. One was the tendency to bring out earlier music, often abandoned works from his early years, as brand new music. His most spectacular instance of this was renumbering his Player Piano Studies Nos. 38 and 39 as Nos. 41 and 48 because he was using them to fulfill commissions, and didn’t want his patrons to know that they were paying for works that had already been completed prior to the commission. (No shame in this, by the way; Stravinsky did it as a matter of course, and recommended the practice.) As a result, in the complicated numbering of Nancarrow’s 50-odd studies, Nos. 38 and 39 do not exist.
Now this personal quirk is occasioning some interesting wrinkles in Nancarrow scholarship, and I’ve spent the week unraveling some of the mysteries I wrote about last week. First of all, the Three Movements for Chamber Orchestra, his last work, since it’s receiving it’s US premiere with Alan Pierson and the Alarm Will Sound ensemble this Saturday, Feburary 19, at Columbia University’s Miller Theater. Around 1993 Conlon received a commission from New York’s Parnassus ensemble. Having already suffered a stroke, and not feeling up to conceiving a major work from scratch, he was rumored to have gone through some of his abandoned player piano works (of which there are dozens) and orchestrated them. Now, thanks to files Alarm Will Sound has sent me, I’ve been able to confirm this.
Trimpin labeled all the unknown piano rolls alphabetically, A through Z, then AA through ZZ, up through BBB. Some of these are mere sketches or jokes, some apparently early versions of studies you’re familiar with, others entirely completed works he abandoned for some reason, and one of them remarkably Romantic in tonality, kind of Lisztian. The Three Movements for Chamber Orchestra is based on three separate rolls, marked R, AA 39 A (because either Trimpin or I once thought this had something to do with #39/48), and “UK Finished A,” so labeled by Trimpin – “UK” meaning unknown, and “Finished” to indicate that it was clearly a completed work. (If memory serves, this last roll is one of the ones Trimpin presented at the Kitchen in 1993.)
R is only a rhythmic canon using five pitches, and might have been presumed to have been written for Conlon’s abortive experiments with a percussion machine in the 1950s; however, I’m not so sure of that, because the five pitches are spaced out at octaves, and the percussion rolls seem to used a chromatic scale over a much smaller range. Alan Pierson confirms that the first movement is only for percussion, and that the tempo relationships (which I couldn’t quite figure out from the piano roll) are 75:96:105:120:126. This doesn’t quite correspond to the roll, which seems to be 75:84:96:105:120; some change must have been made while arranging. Also, this is a remarkably complex ratio for Conlon, the kind of number series he used in his last few works, but never in his early music. I wonder if that suggests a more recent time period.
The second movement seems pretty literally based on AA 39A. The third starts off based on UK Finished A, but some notes are missing and altered, and I’m still curious as to how this differs from the original. UK Finished A contains a large canon, but one somewhat obscured by an additive process in which chromatic pitch gestures repeated over and over with one more pitch added each time. I’ve put up a MIDI version of UK Finished A here, if you’d like to listen and compare it with the third of the Three Movements being premiered this weekend.
As for the named earlier works for player piano cited by Helena Bugallo in her dissertation, she’s kindly clarified their provenance for me. The Didactic Studies are all different versions of Study #2a, simply the same tune and ostinatos but with a variety of different tempo relationships. I had found these scores and piano rolls in Nancarrow’s studio, and wrote about them, and they are almost certainly a product of the 1950s when he was first starting out. But apparently in a 1980 interview he referred to them by the title Didactic Studies and avowed an intention of publishing them as a set. Perhaps he really did return to this piece as late as 1980, but it seems odd. I think he had abandoned any such intention by 1988, because I looked at those scores then with his supervision, and he said no such thing. The other work, For Ligeti, was apparently presented publicly in 1988 (though he also never mentioned this to me either). This, according to Sacher Foundation archivist Felix Meyer, has been found to be an early study originally intended as Study #3, but withdrawn. I’m eager to get more information.
In addition, two readers wrote to inform me that, while several of the recordings of the Canons for Ursula contain only two canons, there are two recordings that include the third, or rather middle, canon. One was a 1996 recording by Joanna MacGregor which may soon be rereleased on her own label. The other is the brand-new Wergo recording by Helena Bugallo herself, on which, in addition to some player piano study transcriptions that she plays with her duo partner Amy Williams, she also plays all three canons. Sorry I missed this fact.
There are doubtless new Nancarrow works yet to come to light; a few years ago at a Nancarrow conference in Mexico City someone showed me a couple of brief 1940s piano pieces found among his papers, and I myself had discovered a movement for large orchestra apparently intended for an expanded version of his Piece No. 1 for Small Orchestra from about 1942. But I suspect most of what we have to look forward to comes from the piano rolls, and perhaps I’ll have time to get some of my MIDI files of them into performance shape. If so, I’ll post them to Postclassic Radio.
In my Village Voice column this week, I review the Sequitur ensemble playing four works, two of which I possess recordings of. And so, in an experiment aimed at making music criticism more accessible and relevant, which I have long wanted to try out, I temporarily post those two works so, having read the article, you may then listen to them if you like:
Both pieces are also posted on Postclassic Radio as noted in the article, but rather than tune in and wait several hours for them, you may want to derive more immediate gratification.
In addition, new-music maven and entrepreneur Herb Levy sent some comments in response to my minor dissatisfaction with Sequitur’s sound production. I suspected something like what he says, but he knows more than I do about the technical end:
Reading your article about the Sequitur Ensemble made me think about
what makes bands like those led by Glass & Dresher work & it’s more
than (or really I think, other than) the instrumental doubling you
cite.Dresher tour
with a sound technician who knows exactly what the composer wants the
ensemble to sound like. Without knowing any of the people involved,
it’s likely that the sound technician for the Sequitur concert was
less experienced with sound reinforcement and/or recording of
instruments that are more often amplified or just didn’t hear the
disparity of the sound sources as presenting a problem.With bands like Glass’s & Dresher’s, nearly everything you hear,
whether the original source is acoustic or electronic, comes from the
same set of speakers, just as it does in the recording of the
Beglarian piece (or any recording) you’d heard before the concert.
Because the sound all comes from one source, whatever signal
processing and other coloration the sound system may have is applied
to all the instruments, and the ensemble sound is more unified.In the picture running with the Voice article, it looks like the
acoustic instruments are amplified with overheard boom
microphones. Letting all that air & room sound into the mix instead
of using close miking is going to give the acoustic
instruments a more distant sound than the direct input of the
electric instruments. By enabling the audience to hear the strictly
acoustic sound of the acoustic instrument, as well as the mix of
amplified sounds, the acoustic instruments retain more of their
separate character. The psycho-acoustics of this also include the
fact that the acoustic sounds are perceived as coming from the
specific locations of the actual instruments, rather than through the
sound system.In the Glass & Dresher ensembles, the acoustic instruments are
more closely miked (sometimes using contact mics or, in Paul’s band
at least, electric versions of some of the instruments) and little if
any of the sound of the acoustic instruments is heard outside of the
speakers, so the sounds blend more easily with those of the wholly
electric instruments.
Merry Christmas: I updated my Postclassic Radio playlist on Christmas Eve – strikes me as kind of a festive activity – for the first time in awhile. Putting new pieces on the station is a cinch, but keeping the playlist current turns out to be the tedious part. I’m streamlining the process to make it easier.
Anyway, I recently got access to an old box of cassette tapes that’s been in storage for ten months, and it’s a cornucopia of new music mostly from the 1980s that never got commercially released: works by Todd Levin, Bunita Marcus, Maria De Alvear, Carman Moore, Elodie Lauten, Diana Meckley, and especially a large cache of recordings by Peter Garland. So Postclassic Radio will start the new year with another influx of commercially unavailable recordings. The sole complaint I’ve received about my timing indicated that I’m taking pieces off too quickly, so I’m actually sitting on a gold mine of material and trying to hold back. But to whet your appetite, I’ve just posted two lovely pieces by Bunita Marcus, her 1987 chamber piece Adam and Eve and her charming arrangement of the Beatles’ song Julia, written for Aki Takahashi’s Beatles project and played by her. Enjoy.
And for those who read me on a phone-line modem, unable to access internet radio, my apologies for writing about so little else lately. Happy holidays.
Having just had performances in San Francisco and Berkeley, I then had one in Seattle, and have one coming up in Pasadena on November 19. I meant to tell you about the one in Seattle, but I thought it was on Nov. 17 and I just noticed that it was Nov. 12. Anyway, the Seattle Chamber Players played a one-minute quartet that they asked me to write, in a series of such brief works to celebrate their 15th anniversary. So I decided the piece should be in four movements, and called it Minute Symphony. I haven’t heard how it went. Anyone hear it?
The Pasadena performance is this Friday. The ensembleGREEN kindly asked me for an instrumental arrangement of my sampler piece So Many Little Dyings, based on a Kenneth Patchen poem. The result will be performed Friday night at 8 PM, at the Neighborhood Church Chapel, 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena, CA. Here’s the program:
Arthur Jarvinen: DLL Canon (1993)
Mary Lou Newmark: Identity Matrix (2003)
Arthur Jarvinen: Brahms (1979)
Bruno Louchouarn: Flux (1999)
Henry Rasof: Witchita Falls 1
Frederick Rzewski: The Waves (1988)
Tom Johnson: Swena Lena (1976)
Philip Glass: “KneePlay2†from Einstein on the Beach (1975)
Tom Johnson: WoloYolo (1976)
Kyle Gann: So Many Little Dyings (1994)
I won’t be there, but let me know if you are. It all reinforces my feeling that I’m a West Coast composer trapped in the body of an East Coast composer.
The November Composer-of-the-Month at Postclassic Radio is, logically enough, William Duckworth, whose elegant musical logic has been a tremendous influence on my own music. I’ve uploaded two major Duckworth works, The Time Curve Preludes (1978-79) for piano, played on Lovely Music by neely Bruce, and Southern Harmony (1980-81), a choral piece sung by the Gregg Smith Singers and the Rooke Chapel Choir of Bucknell University. The latter work is in 20 movements divided into four books, and I’ve separated the four books out among other works in the playlist. Duckworth’s Imaginary Dances (1986) is also being aired, performed by pianist Lois Svard. These are all classic works of the postminimalist movement. There’s no reason to upload performances from Duckworth’s vast internet work Cathedral, because it’s already on the web here, and you can hear it (and play it) yourself.
To upload a couple of pieces to Postclassic Radio every night is easy. What’s proved more daunting, in my mid-semester work overload, is keeping the playlist current. My apologies for lagging behind in that area. Corrections coming shortly.
Composer Kyle here. We just finished a very successful two days of recording sessions for my piece Long Night, which will be an upcoming release on Cold Blue records, an underground West Coast label that I’ve admired since its vinyl days. The piece is for three pianos, but since the piano parts aren’t synchronized, we recorded it with one pianist, the amazing Sarah Cahill – though on three different pianos. And we did it in the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard, which European newspapers have called acoustically the best concert hall in North America, and which is across the street from where I sit. I wrote Long Night in 1980, revised it in 1981, and it hasn’t been heard publicly since New Music America 1982. You can listen to the 1981 performance here if you want, though it sounds so inferior to the recording we just made that I’m ashamed of it now.
Anyway, we recorded all day yesterday, and gathered this morning to hear the results. The first piano tones that came over the loudspeakers were just gorgeous. Tech Director Paul LaBarbera had turned off all the air conditioners in the building for us, and we had achieved absolute silence, like an anechoic chamber; I could hear my tinnitus, which is so faint as to be drowned out by almost anything. In the playback, those pristinely recorded piano tones emerging from total silence were just delicious, like perfect blueberries in first-run maple syrup, even where Sarah was just practicing a fingering. Suddenly it didn’t matter what I had written, and I said so, and Sarah replied, “It doesn’t matter how well I played.” The piano would have sounded beautiful even if a cat had been walking on the keys. Thank goodness perfect sound conditions are so rare, or composers, arrangers of sounds, would become unnecessary – as, indeed, John Cage thought they were.