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I’ve put up on PostClassic Radio a rare old Wergo recording of one of my favorite works: Çogluotobusisletmesi by the irrepressible Clarence Barlow. The title is in Turkish, and has something to do with an autobus, and there are two versions: one electronic and this one, played on piano by the formidable Herbert Henck. Barlow is an important English/Indian/German composer of tremendous wit and invention, and very little of his music is available commercially. This record was, once, and to my knowledge it has never made it to CD. The most incredible thing I ever heard Barlow do was play a piece on a Disklavier that was a theme and variations based on (what chutzpah!) the theme from Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111 (on which Beethoven had written his own rather impressive variations). Barlow played for awhile, and then the piano, computer-driven, started adding its own notes. Barlow eventually got up and walked away, and the piano continued without him. Brilliant music, stunning theater. If I ever get my hands on a recording of that, you’ll be the first to hear it with me.

Other new stuff now up: music for digital piano by John Holland, Endless Bummer by Art Jarvinen, a lovely, almost motionless orchestra piece by Michael Pisaro, and a couple of amazing pieces by a young Japanese woman composer, Mica Nozawa. Sometimes it takes a full completion of the playlist loop for the new pieces to come up, and so some pieces may not be available in the first 12 or so hours I say they are. Meanwhile, there’s plenty to listen to. I’ve got more than 90 pieces in rotation, and I’ve been subtracting a couple and adding a couple every day. I don’t know how fast I should go in that process, how many listeners are beginning to hear the same things over and over. Feedback is appreciated.

UPDATE: Responding to my headline, Antonio Celaya informs me of a choral piece by Anders Hillborg entitled, Muocdaeyiywcoum. Ouch!

There’s been some inexplicable problem accessing the playlist for Postclassic Radio, but I think I’ve fixed it. (I could reach it through Mozilla, but not Internet Explorer.) Please let me know if you still have trouble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want a man who’s well-behaved,

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

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

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

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

The first chapter in my new-music education came from WRR-FM radio in Dallas. A guy named Stephen Aechternacht used to play some pretty wild stuff there in the ‘60s, and I would run home from school and record on cassettes anything by a composer I hadn’t heard of – and in that way had a fateful encounter with, among others, a piece called In C by an unknown named Terry Riley, that blew my mind and slowly but surely readjusted my course in life. I was the kind of guy who called in to all of WRR’s radio quizzes, and sometimes wasn’t eligible to win the day’s prize because I had won only last week.

From that time on I yearned to become a classical radio DJ. Of course, had I succeeded, I’d be really depressed now, given the squelched and diminishing state of classical radio. Also, I’m not nearly as polished a speaker as I am a writer – I stumble over my words, stop to edit myself, spend half a minute thinking how to say something. And I had a strong Texas accent, still slightly noticeable, which is hardly the image classical stations want to project. I would never have made it on radio, and fate wisely directed me into the print world.

BUT – I’ve just realized my dream in another way. Postclassic Radio debuts today, at Live 365.com. Besides talking, the other half of the DJ job is programming, and on my own radio station I can put together a dream program, and I have, or at least the beginning of one. I decided that my opening playlist would consist entirely of pieces that haven’t been commercially recorded, except for a few that were only on vinyl and never made it to CD, plus a couple of things that are due to come out soon – because the purpose here is not to sell CDs, but to convince you that there’s a universe of great music out there that you’ve never heard. (Actually, I remembered afterward that John McGuire’s A Capella has indeed already been released on the Sargasso label, but it’s a great piece, and I’m not taking it down just on principle.) Here is the initial line-up, five and a half hours worth:

John McGuire: A Cappella (Sargasso)

Beth Anderson: Net Work

Eve Beglarian: Machaut a Gogo

Renske Vrolijk: Voice Over

Julius Eastman: Evil Nigger (I wonder if this great piece has been heard publicly in the last 20 years)

John Oswald: 7th (Plunderphonics)

Belinda Reynolds: Sara’s Grace

Giancarlo Cardini: Lento trascolorare dal verde al rosso in un tralco di foglie autunnali (Edipan)

Mikel Rouse: “Where Are Those Girls” from Music for Minorities (Exist Music)

Renske Vrolijk: Spinning Wheels

Elizabeth Brown: Lost Waltz (Orpheus Chamber Orchestra)

Kyle Gann: Unquiet Night (brand new work for Disklavier, concert premiere in New York next Oct. 17)

Eve Beglarian: The Bus Driver Didn’t Change His Mind

Paul Epstein: Interleavings

Dan Becker: Fade

Belinda Reynolds: Cover

Mayumi Tsuda: Knishtet (this one is really weird, in a crazy scale based on the 13th harmonic, so brace yourself)

Corey Dargel: Antidepressants

Renske Vrolijk: Boiler Plate

John Oswald: Pretender (Plunderphonics)

Eve Beglarian: The Continuous Life

M.C. Maguire: Got that Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin’ (Haro St.) (absolutely obnoxious, but pretty brilliant)

Kyle Gann: Bud Ran Back Out

Renske Vrolijk: Blink Blink

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz: Mantra Canon

Mikel Rouse: “Those Days Long Gone” from Music for Minorities (Exit Music)

Terry Riley: Happy Ending (Warner Brothers, long out-of-print vinyl)

Erin Watson: Inhale

Dan Becker: S.T.I.C.

Andrew Schulze: Dreams and Lullabies (Spiked Punch)

Several of these composers are in their 20s or 30s, and if you’ve already heard more than ten percent of this music, stop following me around or I’ll have you arrested. All of the composers so far are still alive (as far as I know) except for poor Julius Eastman, who died in mysterious circumstances at age 49. Finally, instead of just telling you about postminimal and totalist music, I can play them for you so you can hear for yourself. And by the way, Live 365 has contracts with ASCAP and BMI, and does pay royalties to the musicians. I’ve only filled a third of my megabyte space so far, so I’ll be adding tracks and making substitutions every few days. I’ll keep a list of current and past selections on my web page. Enjoy!

The work is intended for pianist-musicians of the highest order. Indeed, its intellectual and technical difficulties place it beyond the reach of any others. It is a weighty and serious contribution to the literature of the piano, for serious musicians and serious listeners only.

The above is the proud caveat appended to the score, by the clearly not-very-modest composer, of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum, which I heard Jonathan Powell play at Merkin Hall last night. For those who’ve neglected your education in esoteric composers, and shame on you if you have, Sorabji (1892-1988) is a composer of Parsi, English, and Spanish descent, semi-famous for having written some of the longest and most mammothly difficult works in the piano repertoire, many of them ranging from two to eight hours long. Opus Clavicembalisticum is the best-known, with a couple of recordings to its credit (Geoffrey Douglas Madge on Bis, John Ogdon on Altarus). Since Sorabji wrote it in 1930, it’s reportedly been publicly performed in its entirety only 11 times; I missed Madge’s performance in Chicago in the mid-1980s and have kicked myself for years, so I determined not to make that mistake again. (I didn’t, however, hear Sorabji’s Symphony No. 5 for piano played by Donna Amato June 17 – it conflicted with Larry Polansky’s concert here at Bard.) I wasn’t completely overwhelmed, but I did become a confirmed Sorabji fan – I’ll tell you how and why.

Lots o’ multisyllable words for you today. Ready? Opus Clavicembalisticum is a four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza loosely patterned after Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, which is itself based on the final, unfinished fugue from Bach’s The Art of Fugue. (I’ve always considered Busoni’s piece hot stuff too – my own I’itoi Variations for two pianos is largely an homage to it.) Opus Clavicembalisticum is in 12 movements, four of them fugues: there’s a regular fugue, then one on two subjects, one on three, and finally, in case anyone is still standing, one on four subjects. Scattered around these are an Introit, a Chorale Prelude (following Busoni’s model, and quoting the Bach themes Busoni used), two cadenzas, two interludes – one of them a mammoth movement divided into Toccata, Adagio, and Passacaglia with 81 Variations – and a Coda. Whew.

First, let me say that the feat of playing Opus Clavicembalisticum is somewhat analogous, in difficulty and preparation time, to, oh, say, playing all of Chopin’s Etudes at the same time while juggling, or perhaps carving Mount Rushmore single-handedly with a butter knife. Powell is an extremely careful but energetic player, who hammered through the piece with relentless momentum, yet who also clearly differentiated all the themes, always keeping a wide range of dynamic levels going at once; he abundantly earned the instant standing ovation he received. He seemed more of a rigorous machine-like player than an expressive one, but Sorabji may not give the pianist much choice in this case. There is much more moto perpetuo than rubato here, low-energy moments are rare enough to be delightfully refreshing when they arrive, and Sorabji’s phrases are counted out not in measures, but in minutes. Powell seemed a little irked at climbing this Everest for a Merkin Hall that was only about a third full, but he was playing for fourscore fans diehard enough to have satisfied even the exacting Sorabji – not a soul walked out. Few seemed to even breathe, and several followed scores.

Sorabji’s music inhabits the harmonic soundworld of Busoni, Scriabin, Szymanowski, though a little more like any two of those composers played at once. His slow movements absolutely drip with lush exoticism. If you’re looking for an entree into Opus Clavicembalisticum, I especially recommend Movement 9, the Toccata, Adagio, and Passacaglia – the Toccata is a diabolical, dissonant blast, and the Adagio’s harmonies, constantly skirting atonality yet never quite going there, melt in the ear. It’s the fugues that are Sorabji’s problem. The four long fugue movements boast ten themes among them, all at least 30 notes long, seemed to me, and none of them hummable. Bruckner never ends a movement until you’ve heard the inversion of the theme, but Sorabji went him several better: each fugue had to state the original form, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion, exceeding textbook requirements. Through their very quantity the dense undergrowth of countersubjects mostly merged into what Schoenberg called “rebaba counterpoint” – “rebaba” being allegedly the word (“rhubarb,” in some accounts) that Hollywood film directors told actors in crowd scenes to repeat to create the effect of indistinguishable murmuring. The piece kept drawing me in, then each fugue exhaled me at a steady rate.

So soon after this centennial anniversary of Bloomsday, it would be tempting to call Sorabji, for all his circuitous layered meanings, the James Joyce of music, but not really insightful. At least in Opus Clavicembalisticum, he’s more the gargantuan endpoint of a certain brand of neoclassicism – not the ironic branch a la Stravinsky, but another stream less well established in America, one that includes Busoni, Max Reger, and Alexander Zemlinsky. All of those guys tend to write very busy fugues with not very distinctive themes: Zemlinsky’s Fourth String Quartet is marked by a typically nervous, ultrachromatic fugue, Reger’s fugues are some of his less wonderful movements, and Busoni had the sense in Fantasia Contrappuntistica to stick with Bach’s themes. Yet all of these composers could write adagios gorgeously dripping with off-kilter notes: I recommend in this regard Busoni’s Elegy for his mother, Reger’s Romantic Suite and Der Einsiedler, and Zemlinsky’s Op. 13 songs. Gorgeous stuff.

And the most gorgeous Sorabji I’ve found is not in Opus Clavicembalisticum. Advance press indicated that Powell is issuing a multi-gigabyte series of Sorabji recordings, and I went out before the concert and found his Altarus three-disc set of the two-and-a-half-hour Fourth Sonata, also circa 1930. (Sorabji gave the first performance in 1930, Powell the second in 2002.) The piece is a little lighter than Clavicembalisticum, and more consistently engaging. The first movement is Scriabinesque in a massive sort of way, and the 35-minute adagio – I pause to gasp in wonder – is absolutely heavenly. A depiction of the garden of an Italian count he visited, its sonorities drip langorously into the ear, with an incredibly prolific invention of arabesque detail. The third movement contains two fugues, but they are not ambitious by Sorabji standards, and followable. And even Sorabji’s fugues, I have to admit, have elements to admire: they are written in the pose of an inexhaustible conversationalist, someone who hardly ever ends a thought without suddenly remembering another tangent to launch into.

So I am now completely sold on Sorabji as a major figure, if clearly not one to everyone’s taste: “for serious musicians and serious listeners only.” I highly recommend the Fourth Sonata as an easier, more seductive entry point than Opus Clavicembalisticum, and possibly as an exercise to build up the stamina for the larger work. Sorabji’s scores, which were difficult to obtain until his death in 1988, became impossible for awhile afterward, but some are apparently available through the Sorabji archive, and I am in search of them. And I will avidly scarf up Jonathan Powell’s recordings as they appear and let you know about them. Postclassical? Sorabji is post-everything, a one-man musical apocalypse.

Speaking of the piano, I’ve been cleaning out my garage, and I found (among many, many other sentimental items you’d be grateful I’m sparing you) a cassette tape of the piano recital I gave as a high school senior, on May 18, 1973, at Skyline High School in Dallas. The program was ambitious, well over an hour, and, as you can see, studded with 20th-century American music, for which I was already a staunch advocate:

Johannes Brahms: Rhapsody in E-flat, Op. 119

Robert Muczynski: Solitude

” ” : Night Rain

” ” : Jubilee

George Rochberg: “Prologue” from Sonata-Fantasia (1956)

Kent Kennan: Three Preludes (1938)

John Cage: 4’33” (1952)

Kyle Gann: Commentary on Hope and Meaninglessness (1973)

” ” : Impacts (1973)

William Swafford: “Ah, Ja! Ein Kleiderschrank” (1973)

Marcus McDaniel: Four Pieces (1973)

Alexander Scriabin: Etude in D# Minor, Op. 8, No.12

Aaron Copland: Piano Sonata (1939-41)

Frederick Chopin: Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 53

Yes, that’s right, at the age of 17 I played 4’33” for my bewildered friends and their parents, though with a lengthy explanation of Cage’s philosophy preceeding it, so the audience sat obediently quiet. Marcus McDaniel and William Swafford were friends of mine; Marcus subsequently went into computers for a living, but we’re still in touch. Kennan and Muczynski were middle-of-the-road composers better known then than they are today. I must say, I played pretty damn well, which I no longer do today, and I won’t ask you to take my word for it – out of pure vanity I’ve temporarily put the Copland Sonata performance on my web site, at kylegann.com (scroll down to the bottom if you’re really intrigued). The thing I regret most about my life is that I didn’t maintain my pianistic skills, because I get tremendous pleasure from playing: but around 1983 I started typing instead of practicing, and it took over my life. The moral here, kids, is Practice! Practice, practice, practice, and never stop!

If you find yourself in upstate New York this coming Sunday, I have a performance of my music at the Storm King Music Festival. Emily Manzo, a dynamite young pianist just a few years out of Oberlin, and with an abiding interest in the latest music, will play my solo piano piece Time Does Not Exist at 2:00 at the Ogden Gallery of the Museum of the Hudson Highlands in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. Other composers on the festival include Carman Moore, Stefania de Kenessey, Wendy Griffiths, Jonathan Hallstrom, Peter Kirn, Bruce Lazarus, Yuzuru Sadashige, and Raymond Torres-Santos (some of whom will appear on the previous day, Saturday, at 2). Storm King is a noble, aesthetically diverse little festival that specializes in not only presenting music but in getting the composers together to publicly discuss new-music issues (the discussions this year took place in August). Time Does Not Exist, which I wrote in 2000, uses various looping techniques to explore concepts of timelessness, not in a minimalist, pattern-creating way, but in an attempt to elicit psychological states; the title alludes to Freud’s statement, “In the subconscious, time does not exist.” And Emily plays it beautifully, with sustained tension and real understanding. (You can take a look at the score of the piece here.)

Call 845-534-5819 for info, or look up the Storm King Music Festival, and find directions.

The alternate tuning world is abuzz with the news that John Adams has gone microtonal. (Well, OK – that means Joe Pehrson put a notice on the tuning@yahoogroups list and a couple of people responded. But there aren’t many of us, and we’re pretty easy to get buzzed up.) Adams’ new orchestral work The Dharma at Big Sur, being premiered October 23 or 24 depending on whether you believe Adams’ web page or the Boosey and Hawkes press release (I couldn’t find the info listed on the LA Philharmonic site), is reportedly written in a system of pure tuning known as just intonation, with more pitches to the octave and more resonant chords than you’ll find on the piano. (If you’re curious, I have a crash course in just intonation on my web site.) It’s the first large piece opening the new Frank Gehry-designed Disney Center, and the piece features a solo for a six-string violin (the bottom two strings being C and F), played by Tracy Silverman.

For Adams, currently our most successful orchestra composer, to embrace just intonation is sort of like, if Madonna made a political video endorsing Dennis Kucinich – it brings a level of publicity that we long-time advocates couldn’t possibly generate on our own. But it raises a lot of questions, too. Just intonation takes some getting used to, and requires a lot of theorizing. How long has Adams been experimenting in this area? Is he simply tuning fifths pure for Pythagorean tuning, or has he ventured up the harmonic series for more exotic overtones? He’s certainly been close to the musics of Lou Harrison and Terry Riley, two of the most prominent JI composers, but generally when people are used to only the standard 12 pitches for decades, their first attempt to engage a completely different harmonic system is pretty rickety. From the other side, just intonation harmonies are notoriously difficult for orchestra. Most string players hate having to relinquish the precise left-hand finger positions that they’ve worked so hard to perfect. Brass players can easily switch to the harmonic series of their instrument as long as that’s all they’re called on to do, but the more idiosyncratic woodwinds have to deal with all kinds of different fingerings, which can even vary from one clarinet to another. It’s why there’s very little orchestral music written in JI, more often reserved for adventurous string quartets, retuned pianos and harpsichords, homemade instruments (like Harry Partch’s), and tunable synthesizers.

Does Adams know what he’s doing? Can the LA Phil pull it off? Will just intonation suddenly become a household word in orchestral circles? Will every hot-shot orchestra composer now write his token, inept JI piece while those of us who’ve been doing it our entire lives remain on the sidelines? Or – hell, I can be optimistic just for a moment – will this lead to the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for, and a new era of appreciation for, and experimentation with, all the myriad ways music can be tuned? Adams’ music has grown so conservative in recent years that the circles I’m in greet most news of his premieres with yawns, but there will be plenty of extra reason to keep a close ear on this one – not least of which is, that the sonorities of just intonation are really gorgeous, and that’s why we make so many ridiculous sacrifices to achieve them.

I was slow to start blogging this week. For one thing, I had to finish up a lengthy “hyperhistory” on music and politics for New Music Box, which will debut Nov. 1, so watch for it. More pertinently at the moment, I also moved my web site to a larger virtual space, from home.earthlink.net/~kgann/ to www.kylegann.com. Those of you who’ve checked know you’ve always been able to find me at kylegann.com; there was an automatic redirect to my free space at Earthlink. But that space wasn’t large enough to store MP3s, and I’ve now opened a new web site (though it looks the same, for now) to accomodate recordings of my music. My excitement will be attributed to the egotism of getting my music out to the public, but it has at least as much to do with my overcoming of what seemed to be incredible technical hurdles. I do business through Earthlink, but I had registered the kylegann.com domain at Yahoo, and I didn’t dream how much trouble I’d have when I decided to conflate the two. I had to get a “registry key” from Yahoo (and to be honest it was so long ago I didn’t even remember whom I had registered with), and it took three weeks and many, many phone calls, e-mails, and tech support chat lines to get everything transferred. Be careful who you register a domain with – they may make it difficult to swap. Back then (just two years ago) it seemed so self-aggrandizing to name a web site after oneself – I remember Roger Reynolds telling me apologetically about his dotcom – but now everybody and his grandmother can be found at everybodyandhisgrandmother.com.

But I will self-indulge a few words about my MP3s. I spent 1977-86 in Chicago, and then from 1986 to 1991 I endured a near-hiatus in my composing life. For one thing, I had risen from Midwestern obscurity to my job at the Village Voice, and felt under a lot of public pressure. For another, I had discovered just intonation – an alternate approach to tuning using potentially many more than 12 pitches to the octave – in 1984, and for seven years I filled entire notebooks with grids of fractions, trying to rethink music from the ground up. Having been introduced to just intonation by my teacher Ben Johnston, it took me until 1991 to finally write a piece (Superparticular Woman) that could make sense only in that tuning system. Between the unaccustomed spotlight of the Voice job and my obsessive theoretical explorations, I wrote only a handful of brief studies in the late 1980s, and didn’t really accelerate back to full speed until 1994.

And so the music I wrote before 1986 lies on the other side of a divide – performed in Chicago and then forgotten. Some of the pieces now up as MP3s haven’t been heard publicly since 1983, and I’m pleased to have the means to expose them again. Heavily under Brian Eno’s influence from his Music for Airports on, I made my experiments with improvisation and ambient music in those years, and while I abandoned improvisation due to the difficulty of getting my intentions across to improvising musicians, I always meant to return to the ambient thread. (I’ll be really impressed if anyone can find the quote from a relatively obscure Eno album in my MP3s.) I remember in 1982 meeting Steve Reich and describing my music to him as a cross between Morton Feldman and Harold Budd – that ceased to be true, and my music became rhythmically energetic under additional Native American influences. As any artist will tell you, work produced that long ago feels as though made by another person, and I have a distanced affection for some of these pieces similar to what I might have for a Roy Harris symphony or Morton Feldman chamber piece that hasn’t yet been given its due. One’s own opinion of early works goes up and down with time as well, and right now I think much more highly of my early ’80s pieces than I did a few years ago. I wish now I could recreate the outpouring of continuous contrapuntal melody that I did in Baptism (1983), and I’ve always meant to return to the ambient, unsynchronized feel of Long Night (1980-81), and have just never gotten around to it.

As Emerson so beautifully says, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” Not that they’re works of genius, but that’s how I sometimes react to my early music, reproached by anticipations of directions I had intended to go in.

Of course, I also have MP3s of recent music up, and if I can get performers’ permissions, I’ll put more. I’m augmenting my CD collection by downloading and burning to disc the music of composers I can follow only on the internet, and I’m happy for others to do the same with me. I trust that the RIAA won’t come snooping around a bunch of aging new-music composers trying to trade soundfiles so someone can hear their music – not when there are so many 12-year-old Brittany Spears fans with parents ready to make cash settlements.

Lately I’m fawning over the internet to an extent that worries me. Yesterday I was talking to Matt Wellins (Mr. New Music at Bard), and, ransacking my brain for references he might not already know, I suddenly asked him if he was familiar with the music of San Francisco composer Erling Wold. The name rang a bell, and I mentioned that I hadn’t heard any new music from Wold in years, and wondered what he was up to. No sooner did the thought occur to me, of course, than I whirled around to the computer, pulled up Google, and there I was at erlingwold.com. Wold’s got a superbly simple but well-designed web site (like his music), and to my delight had not only mp3s of most of his music, but PDFs of the scores. I went to a piano piece titled Veracity, clicked a couple of times and hit Apple-P, and less than five minutes after his name had popped into my head, I was holding the sheet music to a new Erling Wold piano piece.

Now I realize that to anyone under 30 the delight I take in this makes me sound like an addlepated old man. But sonny, (HACK HACK, SPIT) let me tell ya about the old days. I remember my friends and I in college, when we were avidly searching out the latest musical news, which in those days had to do with Xenakis, Feldman, Berio, combing through music stores for the occasional C.F. Peters piano piece or Universal orchestral score that would set us back 50 bucks or more, hanging out at big-city record stores with import sections, spending all available time and cash to keep up some feeling of being conversant with the latest thing going on. Decades pass: “import sections” at record stores become a dim memory (HACK), European labels quit marketing new music to dull-witted America, music stores where scores are sold go out of business a half-dozen at a time, record distributors throw out new-music labels like moldy vegetables. If I managed to stay current in the 1990s, it was largely because I knew personally the composers whose work I was trying to follow, and could hound them for CDRs and Xeroxed scores myself. The feeling that there was a musical cutting edge to follow was getting difficult to sustain, and it felt like the culture was closing up shop.

This is a key to many of my attitudes toward new music, toward my own music, music distribution, and so on – the sense of frustration I felt in college over how difficult it was to get information. I declared silent, internal war on Pierre Boulez, for instance, because in On Music Today he revealed almost enough hints to tell us how to analyze his music, but intentionally withheld crucial details. And I swore to commit myself to the free, unimpeded flow of new-music information, to the point that I now put more tuning information about my scores on my own web page than anyone’s likely to ever be interested in.

So now, as I held in my hand that Erling Wold piano score whose existence I hadn’t even suspected moments before, I imagined how I would have felt in 1975 if I could have pushed a button and gotten a free score to, say, Xenakis’s Mists, or Berio’s Circles, or Feldman’s Out of Last Pieces. Not only is there a future to new music, we just might be able to make it infinitely more open, information-wise – and maybe even infinitely less expensive – than the hallowed past.

It added to the sense of heaven that Wold’s site is so clearly designed. His mp3s and PDFs pop up instantly. And I appreciate, for him being the hip kind of composer he is, that he is so score-oriented. These days the world sometimes seems divided between two stereotypes: the old-fashioned, modernist composers who write complex, gorgeously notated scores of tedious, unintelligible music that they can’t get recorded, and the postmodernists who put out CDs by the bushel but don’t bother putting anything readable on paper. Wold writes simple but tonal and rhythmically unusual music, sometimes microtonal, atmospheric yet lyric. I seem to have once called him “the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-artrock” – I think that’s my Village Voice quote he’s got on his bio. Not all of his music has scores (the score line in the grid sometimes marked “N/A”), but most of it does. The PDF scores look a little blotchy on my screen, but they print out beautifully, and I’ve always got people asking me for the latest new piano music – here it is. I’m grateful for Wold’s sense that audio files and notes on paper are equally meaningful, and complement each other. And after a couple of centuries of music publishers taking composers to the cleaners, I’m thrilled that the technology exists for Wold to put his paper scores directly into my hands without any intermediary. He didn’t make any money on the transaction, but it might lead to a performance or two, and it’s better than having his scores sit in boxes in warehouses as a tax write-off for some snobby classical publisher that doesn’t give a damn.

I went back today and heard some excerpts from Wold’s new opera Sub Pontio Pilato, mystic and thoroughly enjoyable, and printed out another intriguing-looking piano piece called Albrechts Flugel. That solves the mystery of what Erling Wold’s been up to these last few years. Only thing left: why don’t I yet have any of his last five CDs? I guess I’m still caught in the old critic paradigm, by which I wait for people to send me things. I’ll catch up.

Yes, that’s right – hard to believe, but my blog is a month old today, and it’s time to assess how I’m doing. I’ve been a music critic since February of 1983 (my first appearance in the Chicago Reader), and not once have I ever marked one of my own anniversaries – nor, except for a couple of modest conflict-of-interest disclosures and a couple of articles on my own web page, have I ever drawn attention to my own music in print. So no one, I think, can charge that I am habitually self-promoting. But in one month on this blog I’ve e-printed more words than I do in a year at the Village Voice and Chamber Music magazine combined, and it’s time to examine the self-searching question: Can an introvert blog?

For an introvert I undoubtedly am. I use the word in its strict Jungian sense (though he spelled it “intravert”): someone who makes judgments more on the basis of internal feelings than on external events. (Not many who know me would call me shy, I guess, though I am more shy in person than in public, if you know what I mean.) I now read the blogs of others frequently, and it strikes me that bloggers are typically attuned to the outer world. They react to items in newspapers, call attention to current events, link the reader to other articles that appeared yesterday. It’s unlike me to do this, though I make the occasional effort to fit in. (Intraverts, says Jung, tend to overcompensate by overestimating the significance of public opinion.) I’m far more interested in reporting on recent insights I’ve had and my current state of mind, frequently having to do with realizations that have come to me slowly. A new interpretation of Boulez’s Pli selon pli may suddenly occur to me, or it might dawn on me that I no longer hold the opinion of Dallapiccola that I did in the mid-1980s when I last thought about him much, and I end up reporting things months or even decades after the fact. And that fits with the kind of music I write about. My friend and fellow blogger Sandow may keep track of the classical music world on a week-to-week basis, but given the low simmer of the postclassical music performance scene today, there are not daily earthquakes in the postclassical world to elicit my attention. I am most interested in new wrinkles in compositional technique – my current Voice article on Andrew Violette’s Piano Sonata No. 7 is a case in point. In the 1970s new musical techniques seemed to come thick and fast, but today gradual synthesis seems to be more common than striking innovations – or is it just that the innovations no longer strike me? In any case, catching on to “news pegs” as they fly by has never been my strength as a critic, and I am by nature slow to react, mulling things over for a long time before speaking. It’s why I stank at football as a kid: I was 6’2″ and could catch the ball, but I’d spend too many seconds studiously considering which way to run.

Overall, this appears to be more of a liability to editors than it is to readers. I’m honored by the people who have written in to thank me for expressing thoughts they’d had themselves, and equally by the people who’ve taken intelligent exception to something I’ve said. I rarely change my mind based on reader input, but I will readily change the way I express myself. For someone obsessed with the avant-garde, I am in many respects old-fashioned. As you can see, I’m not really attuned to the fragmentary nature of the “blog entry”: I still write articles, each with a beginning, middle, and end, and I edit myself for completeness and overall form. I still write as though for the printed page, and don’t know whether I want to change that. My articles are pretty long by blog standards, and I treasure the internet precisely for its lack of space limitations.

It’s not true, as some think, that I took on this blog primarily to publicize the fact that the transmission on my Toyota Prius died mysteriously after only ten months, and that Toyota refused to honor the warranty, dishonestly claiming that I must have done something to injure the car. There were other reasons as well. After all, that issue will cease to exist someday, when I trade in that piece-o-crap lemon that Prestige Toyota of Kingston sold me for a nice new Honda or Subaru. Discouraging readers from ever buying a Prius, or from patronizing those crooks at Toyota, is only one of my aims, and hardly the most important one.

For one thing, for 17 years at the Voice I’ve been charged with writing only about Downtown Manhattan music, and it’s not the only music I know well or am interested in. I love writing about classical music as well, and it’s been a relief to de-pigeonhole myself, to return to the wider range of music I wrote about in the 1980s. Unlike Sandow I am not terribly concerned about the continuance of the classical music world, but the word postclassical itself implies music written by musicians trained in the classical tradition, of whom I am one. As critic and as composer, I don’t believe in jettisoning musical devices that have worked in the past, and I believe in taking with us anything we can glean from classical music that still seems useful, as well as throwing away anything that no longer fits the contemporary worldview. Yet despite my affection for classical music as a repository of ideas, very little that goes on in the commercially-defined world of classical music concert life interests me, and that’s been true all my life. So I haven’t been to Zankel Hall at Carnegie, nor do I give a damn whether the NY Philharmonic merges with Carnegie Hall or with Barnum & Bailey Circus – neither is likely to lead to performances of music that interests me. To some I may seem overly concerned with musical academia, but it’s where I’ve spent half my professional life, and in many ways that’s where our potential musical culture gets cut off at the source, so to speak: the convictions of professors, just as trendy and biased as those of any other special-interest group, get transferred to students, who then go out and form each new generation of composers and performers. There is a tendency among the more high-powered critics, too, to be inordinately cowed by the academic musicologists, so when some neurosis takes over academic music departments, it eventually shows up in concert practice, and I find the situation worth policing.

Whether I will be able to continue blogging at this pace I have no idea. Over the last few years, as my space at the Voice and elsewhere has shrunk, it’s been more and more difficult to say what I want to, and right now I have a lot on my mind that’s gone unexpressed for a long time: the literary equivalent of “blueballs.” I do write compulsively, though I edit myself just as compulsively, and I will have to discipline myself to keep from letting blogging interfere with my composing. You’ll know when I’m composing, because I get into a relatively nonverbal universe in which words begin to blur.

So how I’m doing depends on who’s reading, and whether anyone out there agrees with the delayed views of a cud-chewing introvert who shrinks further and further from the mainstream the more conservative and commercially oriented the culture becomes. At the age of 13 I wrote, for an English class assignment, a paper decrying and attempting to analyze the neglect of contemporary music, and if you could see how little my basic views have changed over 34 years, you’d realize how glacially stubborn I am and how permanent my mission in life has been. I’m a mourner at the funeral of classical music, sentimental but hardly wracked with grief, and seeking similarly forward-looking mourners who want to get on with life. Classical music had two debilitating diseases that I’m glad to see it put out of its misery from. One was a star system that put goofballs like Pavarotti and self-indulgent anti-new-music snobs like Georg Solti at the top of the pyramid, inevitably tossing composers into the ninth circle of hell. The other, deeper rooted and more insidiously tubercular, was a connection with European aristocracy and the concomitant genius myth which, transplanted to America and talked up by pious elitists like 19th-century Boston music critic John Sullivan Dwight, had always given classical music in America a foul odor of combined class distinction and moral superiority. Good riddance. Now that 4’33” has wiped the slate clean, let’s build up a postclassical music scene integrated in American life, conducive of democracy, perception-stretching, enlivening, and expressing our innermost desires devoid of contamination by the pretentions of a mythic past.