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I have gone against my most deeply-held principles. I have, for the first time, written a quarter-tone piece. As a just-intonationist, I don’t believe in quarter-tones on theoretical grounds. Quarter-tones provide good approximations for certain eleven-limit intervals: 11/9 (347¢), 11/8 (551¢), 11/6 (1049¢), but the quarter-tone scale emphasizes eleven-based intervals and skips over the seven-based ones. It’s one of my core beliefs that, if we are to accustom the collective ear to assimilate intervals smaller than the half-step, we need to proceed gradually and inclusively up the harmonic series, through seven to eleven to thirteen, and so on. At the same time, I am very fond of Ives’s occasional quarter-tones and pieces by Alois Haba, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and others in that scale, and so I listen to quarter-tone music as kind of a guilty pleasure: OK for people like me who know by ear what they’re missing, but not the best path for the general evolution of music. It’s always prickly stuff, and my ear enjoys being confused.

So I am to be the featured composer at the minimalism conference in Helsinki next month, and I was invited to write something for the Finnish accordionist Veli Kujala, who has invented a quarter-tone accordion. Well, I love the accordion, and have always wanted to write for it (even though I rather think inventing a quarter-tone one should have been prohibited by law even in Finland), and I couldn’t resist. I took Ives’s article “Some Quarter-Tone Impressions” as my theoretical basis. Ives speculated that the way to build up intelligible quarter-tone harmonies was to build up triads and seventh chords rooted on the perfect fifth, so he gives examples such as C and G with an Eb and Bb a quarter-tone flat (which makes a nice 1/1-11/9-3/2-11/6 just-intonation, neutral seventh chord, though it’s not clear that Ives understood that), and also C and G with D and A a quarter-tone sharp, and C and G with E and B a quarter-tone sharp. And so the piece, which I titled Reticent Behemoth because it growls for awhile and finally breaks into a tune at the end, moves through the quarter-tone scale in fourths and fifths, experimenting with every possible combination of fifths from each of the 12-tone scales a quarter-tone apart. It was a fun exercise, and I really had to teach myself all the quarter-tone combinations. And I guess it will be played in Helsinki at the end of September. Like the recovering drunk who buys a drink at a bar and announces, “I conquered my goddamn will-power!,” I’ve overcome my own theoretical convictions.

 

Thanks for indulging my mystery pianist contest. I was less interested in stumping the listeners than in collecting a set of comparison pianists to relate the style to. I am grateful to all who obliged.

Not surprisingly, my Downtown comrade Tom Hamilton confidently nailed the answer: it’s our late friend Elodie Lauten, playing her Variations on the Orange Cycle. Elodie was not only an early punk singer, Allen Ginsburg groupie, and composer of beautiful postminimalist operas, but a phenomenal improvising pianist. I wanted to introduce a little of the end of this version, which gets wilder and more dissonant than the style she’s usually associated with; the first long stretch of the recording is rather static (if meditatively beautiful), and I was afraid some people would listen to it, decide it’s simplistic, and turn it off before it got more athletic. Here’s the entire 40-minute recording. Made in a studio on November 21, 1991, it was “released” on a cassette (I have a slew of cassettes Elodie gave me over the years) on her private label, Cat Collectors. (I couldn’t resist including her voice at the beginning.) It has since been rereleased on two of Elodie’s CDs, Piano Works and Piano Soundtracks, and somehow on the former it is transposed up just over a half-step and correspondingly shorter; the cassette was more correct, because the piece is supposed to be in G, and the CD has it between Ab and A.

Pianist Lois Svard made another recording of the same piece on the Lovely Music label (with my Desert Sonata on the “flip side,” in fact). What Elodie did for that, in 1995, was to play the piece on an electric keyboard into a computer, recording the MIDI output, and then convert the MIDI input to notation and give it to Lois. Anyone who has experience recording live into MIDI can imagine what a morass of irrational complexity that resulted in, so when Lois despaired of reading it, Elodie took it back and revised a lot of it by hand, though the notation is still a little cumbersome; as you can see here, the left hand alternates between G and F for a long time, but the score has the F in the treble clef, and the rhythms are a little arbitrary:

Lois’s recording, only 25 minutes long, is parsed into four concise, well-shaped movements, which division greatly clarifies what Elodie’s overall plan was. It makes the piece seem stronger and more compact, but I love Elodie’s 1991 recording as well for being a little more all-over-the-place and stream-of-consciousness.

I was afraid the pianist’s identity might be guessed by those who read my blog closely enough to remember that I will be giving a paper, “Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser,” at the upcoming minimalism conference in Torku and Helsinki, Finland. The bulk of my paper will be on two pieces of which I have two quite disparate recordings, the Variations on the Orange Cycle above, and her Sonate Ordinaire of 1986 – which I reviewed in one of my first Village Voice columns. I have two of Elodie’s recordings of the latter, one an undated cassette copy and the other from Piano Soundtracks, in a performance dated 1986. The former is 17 minutes long, the latter 23, and they’re quite different in form, though distinctly similar in material. The piece’s main material is based on a kind of chromatic sequencing that also appears in the 1991 version of Variations, but not the 1995:

At one point I had hoped that I could prepare an entire performance score for either version of the Sonate Ordinaire, as I did for Harold Budd’s Children of the Hill and Dennis Johnson’s November, but this is looking doubtful; overlapping chromatic lines in the piano’s deep bass are hard to disentangle, and some passages have such rapid flurries that, even electronically slowed down, I don’t know whether I can decipher all the notes with any certainty. As you can see, the rhythmic aspect of most of the piece is straightforward, and I will transcribe what I can. I might also include Elodie’s Adamantine Sonata of 1983, which I don’t have alternate versions of, but I’ve already transcribed the one I have.

I am fascinated by how Elodie could have such a distinct sonic identity for each piece and still introduce so many major deviations from one performance to another – and keep such large structures in her head. Also, there are strong postminimalist traits to these pieces – the first Orange Cycle variation is entirely in G mixolydian, the second mostly in Phrygian, and the Sonate Ordinaire keeps up a steady pulse momentum for most of its length. Postminimalism is a style that has not been conducive to improvisation, and I’m hoping to get inside Elodie’s head and figure out how she conceived the music. I keep thinking I can just call her up to ask questions, and it’s too late.

As always, I will print no comments disparaging another person’s music showcased on my blog, especially for someone so recently deceased and sorely missed. If you feel a need to put it down, ask yourself why.

 

I remember Morton Feldman saying in the ’70s that if there was one musical idea that was finally dead, it was multimovement form. (Was I present when he said it? I can’t recall.) That seemed about right at the time, and, like most of the progressive composers I associated with, I pretty much wrote only one-movement works in the 20th century. But starting with Transcendental Sonnets in 2001-2, I became interested in the multiple movement problem. In recent years many of my works have divided into movements, and I’ve had to grapple with what my conception of the form is. My aesthetic is postminimalist – and by that I mean I do have my own aesthetic, and by comparison with other composers whose style it resembles, I can locate it as postminimalist, but it is simply the style I feel driven to write in, and I could just as easily call it Gannian and leave everyone else out of the picture. It is personality, not ideology; not a political strategy, but simply the route my imagination takes. The style itself produces highly unified movements of little internal contrast. (I could have adopted “No-Drama Gann” before it got applied to Obama.) My music shuns development, rarely relies on tension and release, nor am I comfortable bringing back the same main idea in one movement after another. In this sense I am not really a symphonist in the sense of most modern symphonists, as my friend Robert Carl is; my ideas do not progress from movement to movement. I have often felt that I produce suites, not sonata- or symphony-type works.

I’ve finished a draft of Proença, my song cycle on Ezra Pound. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, though one tends to think that when the ink is still wet, and especially when the piece is ambitious. Unlike my other song cycles, it is not merely a collection but a large structure, and I’ve come closer than ever to feeling what multi-movement form means for me. At 47 minutes, it’s my second longest work next to The Planets. The timings of the Sibelius files are as follows:

I was aware as I was composing that I was selecting poems and song idioms to balance each other off, and that the tendency of one song in one harmonic or textural or rhythmic direction seemed to imply the necessity of another song going in the opposite direction. Once the sixth song clicked into place I realized I was finished, because there were no more variables within my system with which I could create further contrast. And once I got nearly finished I made up a chart showing the kinds of symmetries I ended up with (click on images for better resolution):

Two of the songs are original Provençal poems; two are Pound translations of Provençal poems; and two are poems Pound wrote in response to response to Bertrans de Born’s poem “Dompna puois.” In addition, the 1st, 3rd, and 5th songs are each set in a single, unchanging tonality; the 2nd, 4th, and 6th have no central key. Songs 3 and 4 are characterized by neo-Riemannian chord progressions (closely chromatic voice-leading), one in the context of a stable tonality, the other in a kind of free-floating (though consonant) atonality. Song 2 uses more of a jazz sense of progression; Song 5 has jazz elements in the harmony as well, though it doesn’t change key. In Song 4 the root movement is typically by major 3rds, in Song 6 it is mostly by minor 3rds. Actual troubadour melodies are quoted only in Songs 1 and 6, foregrounded in the former and backgrounded in the latter. Songs 1 and 3 both follow a kind of additive process, 1 and 4 both have an articulated steady pulse, 1 and 5 share a pointillistic texture. Songs 1, 3, 4, and 5 are stanzaic, and I handled stanzaic form four different ways:

Song 1: Static accompaniment, three different melodies
Song 3: Melody becomes more developed with each repetition; final envoi switching to a slower tempo
Song 4: Through-composed, no repetition
Song 5: Repetition of both melody and accompaniment; final envoi switching to a homophonic texture

There are other, smaller ways in which the songs echo each other.

I planned out none of this structure in advance, but kept adding new poems as I instinctively felt gaps in the overall conception. There is no particular narrative arch to Proenca, but I think this is typical of how I tend to create variety in a multimovement piece, mixing and matching an array of qualities from movement to movement for a gradually shaded set of perspectives on similar material. The movements share family resemblances; given seven qualities, each pair of movements may share four or five of those qualities in diverse combinations. No linear energy runs from movement to movement, but each balances the others and helps complete the total picture. And while I kept changing the order of the songs, a certain logic finally dictated the order I came up with, so that too-similar songs weren’t placed too close together. (Complete program notes for the piece are here. And parenthetically, I hope someone can suggest how to get a C with a cedilla to happen in html.)

Looking back, I can see that I’ve instinctively operated this way in other multimovement works. I rarely reuse material from one movement to another (though little melodic ideas do sometimes get transposed, since I like to work on the movements simultaneously), but all the movements together do provide a series of different perspectives on not a single idea but a group of associated ideas. In short, I guess what I’m leading up to saying is that I think I’m a pretty damn good composer, I just don’t do what people expect. But who knows.

 

 

I had a great time working on my piece Hudson Spiral (2010) last week with the Sirius Quartet, whose career I’d followed from their beginnings – although three of the four players are new since I left the Voice in 2005. It was a rare experience to walk into rehearsal and find performers completely understanding the piece, no explanation necessary, including my totalist dotted-eighth/triplet-quarter rhythms. The performance at Symphony Space last week went great. Here’s the recording. The piece is a canon at the major sixth, one of my spiral canon series. Thanks to Victoria Bond for including me on a great program.

And to bring them together at last, here’s its companion piece Concord Spiral, a canon at the minor seventh, written at the same time and played by the West End Quartet.

Below is the paper I delivered Saturday at the University of Pittsburgh’s microtonality conference. I altered the title from the original “How the 13th Harmonic Saved my Sorry Ass.” I think my approach to microtonality is rather unusual, and the conference offered little counter-evidence. I feel like most composers use microtones to add an extra layer of complexity, or just to create an exotic out-of-tuneness, and sometimes (especially Europeans) deploy the harmonic series as little more than a background structuring device. I’m looking for a new level of musical syntax in the upper harmonics; it excites me to learn that the 11th harmonic of a tonic chord can resolve to the perfect fifth of the 15th harmonic, 11/8 at 551¢ sliding to 45/32 at 590¢. I sit around and wonder if the 13th harmonic of the 11th harmonic (or vice versa) can make a convincing resolution to the fifth scale degree of the dominant (143/128 to 144/128, or 191¢ to 204¢) – and is that movement reversible? I’m thinking all this can create a new level of tonality for a new common practice period, but only if we collectively internalize the different qualities of various interval types, which presumes a musical context in which they can be clearly heard.

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How the 13th Harmonic Ameliorated my Hitherto Not-Entirely-Satisfactory Existence
by Kyle Gann

I have always said that I’ve never found two microtonalists who have the same reason for using microtones, or who use the same method for composing with them. This diversity is a blessing. It is also, admittedly, an inconvenience: if we could all agree on some kind of system, some one notation, it would undoubtedly speed up some kind of microtonal performance practice. But since, of course, we will never come to any consensus about what kind we want, and for now I find myself committed to the boundless frontier of unfenced microtonality.

I do, however, have strong and, to me, philosophically and musically compelling reasons for choosing the microtonal path I’ve taken, and, not being the kind of liberal that Robert Frost described as being “too open-minded to take his own side in a quarrel,” I thought, today, that I would propose my own approach to just intonation as a kind of model. It is not unique to me, and to some extent I inherited it from my teacher Ben Johnston, but I think I have pursued it more single-mindedly than he did. I have achieved less than Ben partly because he was such a brilliant conceptualizer, and partly because he did many things, whereas in my work as a microtonalist I have kept trying to do one thing, and to see where it leads. What I did inherit from Ben, and I think it is implicit in his microtonal notation (in which I’ve been writing for more than three decades now), is a sense that the future of music lies in going back to the early 17th century at the point at which Europe closed off the possibilities of the harmonic series, and in certain respects beginning again from that point. Our common practice harmony is based on what were originally five-limit intervals, particularly the 3/2 perfect fifth, the 5/4 major third, and the 6/5 minor third. By building new triads on members of previous triads we can evolve a large gamut of tones and elicit a wide range of harmonies within a limited pitch space:

 

I will now put up a progression that expands from triads to seventh chords, linking them via pivot tones in a manner typical of Brahms, though here carried to perhaps an unusual length:

 

If we tune the sevenths of these chords to the seventh harmonic, we get a vast expansion in the range of intervals available and the subtlety of chromatic nuance. This next chart is the exact same chord progression renotated in Ben Johnston’s notation, with seventh harmonics marked by sevens and seventh subharmonics by upside-down sevens:

 

The numbers tell the distance from C in cents. You can see that the top line offers seven different pitches in the narrow minor third from 814 cents to 1088 cents, with six of those in less than a whole-step: 814, 884, 899, 933, 969, 1003, and 1088. Likewise, the tenor line uses seven pitches in less than a minor third, and aside from the C, the bass line has five pitches within a space smaller than a whole step. And yet this chord progression is built up in a perfectly conventional way found frequently in late Romantic music, only with the tuning limit raised from five to seven. It requires 25 pitches to correctly tune this sequence of ten seven-limit chords.

From the beginning it seemed to me that if we could learn to apprehend relations between these complexly related chords based on the 3rd, 5th, and 7th harmonics, then we must be able to further hear such relations based on higher harmonics. This became my approach to microtonality: that one could climb further up the overtone ladder to the seventh and eleventh harmonics while pivoting between chords in the same way European composers have always done in the triadic system. I have often joked that I became a microtonalist because I liked Max Reger’s music but didn’t find it chromatic enough. What was crucial for me was to become able to hear these new intervals in my inner ear and compose with them intuitively – I was never content to impose a structural or mathematical system on music that I couldn’t feel. And it seemed to me that the way to internalize them was to use them in the same kind of context that I had learned the traditional intervals as a child. I knew how to hear a movement from a tonic to a major submediant (the fifth harmonic), and I thought that with training I could come to hear one triad moving to another based on the eleventh harmonic.

At the same time, microtonality offered me a bridge over which I could glide back and forth between Romanticism and minimalism and bypass modernism altogether. Why bypass modernism? Because I had begun to feel trapped in an aesthetic based equally on endless novelty and ascetic prohibition. I’ve always thought the composer George Rochberg characterized this accurately: the progressing history of music was always inclusive and cumulative, each era receiving what was valuable from the previous one and building on it – until the mid-20th century, in which composers decided to exclude and prohibit aspects of the musical practice associated with the past. It became forbidden to do all the wonderful things in music that we already knew how to do, and a composer constantly walked on eggshells trying to avoid reminding a listener of any previous music. Rochberg felt that this negative new attitude was a collective neurosis, and a sure road map to oblivion, that a prohibitionary approach to composing would inevitably become a dessicated practice that would blow away with the first wind. By contrast, to add new harmonics to the musical practice we already had allowed me to bring the past along with me, and I felt that the more my compositional technique was rooted in the past, the more securely it would stand in the future. I always liked Partch’s statement, “Let no year pass that I do not step one significant century backward.”

And so I moved up to the eleventh harmonic. I’ve always had more affinity for Renaissance counterpoint than Baroque counterpoint, in addition to which I felt that until we learn how this new harmonic world operates a Renaissance approach was the safer route. And so my criteria were relentlessly contrapuntal, based in voice-leading criteria rather than root movement. I’m going to play an excerpt from my 2005 chamber piece The Day Revisited, in which I spiraled through a collection of eight harmonic series’. The criterion for ordering them were to base them on some line of counterpoint within the chords ascending through the smallest possible intervals, and within that chord progression I would write melodies fixating within a small, static region. In other words, he chords would gradually ascend, but the melodies would stay as fixed in register as possible, so that the melody note’s place in the current harmonic series would keep changing, as happens in good conventional counterpoint. Here the piano plays among eight notes bounded by a small minor third, occasionally leaping upward by a third in the harmony:

 

One will note that in this case the triadic and seventh-chord harmonies are fairly conventional in themselves, the exotic element being the contrapuntal voice-leading between chords. I wanted the audience to learn to feel these tiny intervals, to literally go out humming them (in the way that Ives predicted a coming century in which schoolchildren would whistle tunes in quarter-tones), but to be understood, it was crucial that they be harmonically supported – and, at the beginning, by chords that in themselves were already familiar.

From 1984 to 2004, I contented myself with the eleventh harmonic. Part of this was out of allegiance to papa Harry Partch, who had not only gotten along fine but done wonders within eleven-limit tuning. As he wrote in Genesis of a Music, though,

…[T]he reason for resting at the limit of 11 is a purely personal and arbitrary one. When a hungry man has a large table of aromatic and unusual viands spread before him he is unlikely to go tramping along the seashore and in the woods for still other exotic fare. And however skeptical he is of the many warnings regarding the unwholesomeness of his fare… he has no desire to provoke further alarums. [Genesis of a Music, p. 123]

The other reason for stopping where Harry and I had stopped was that I had far more trouble learning to hear and anticipate the 13th harmonic than I had the 7th and 11th. But the problem I kept coming across, measure by measure, in The Day Revisited and other pieces was that within any one tonality I could use whole steps from which I could almost always find a pitch in the next chord less than a half-step away – except where I encountered a gap of 267¢ in my scale between the 12th and 14th harmonics:

In addition to Ben Johnston’s pitch notation for the 7th and 11th harmonic I have also added some of my own verbal notation to document the kinds of comments I typically made upon encountering this interval in counterpoint.

So I had considerable incentive to fill in that gap with the 13th harmonic, and I started to train my ear by writing a simple piece hammering away at the 13th harmonic over a drone, Triskaidekaphonia of 2005. For this piece I employed a simple scale concept of using all 29 intervals formed by the ratios of the numbers one through 13. This also gave me a range of scales moving from the satisfyingly exotic (a tridecimal tuning of 13/12, 13/11, 13/10 and so on in the top line) to a normal-sounding major scale of 1/1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 5/3, as you can hear at the end of this one-minute excerpt (Aron Kallay, pianist):

 

With these intervals better established in my ears I added in 13-related intervals to the kind of harmonic scheme I’d been using.

With my harmonic scale spread more evenly across the octave I began writing pieces pivoting between the harmonics up to the 13th, the 15th, and occasionally a fake 17th harmonic on 15/14, being slightly more exotic than the real 17th harmonic. (The 15/14 root also provided a link to Henry Cowell, the only writer to use this ratio for the just half-step.) One such piece, particularly paradigmatic in my output, is The Unnameable of 2012. In this piece the keyboard solo disappears into the wall of overtones, somewhat like a person walking into a lake, exploring the bottom of it, and then emerging again. Through the bulk of the work the voice-leading approaches immobility. The subjective element is embodied by a motive of a major second – although the major second can variably be 231, 204, 183, 165, or 151 cents in size. It comes to seem like a leap compared to the tiny increments of the contrapuntal background, and yet at every point the motive clarifies the melody’s position in the harmonic series of the moment.

I’ll play the beginning of the work:

 

and then I’m going to skip to the densest moment, in which the sense of melodic phrase disappears for a kind of very low-key climax, a climax not of dynamics or texture or register, but merely of harmonic rhythm and disorientation. In this excerpt you can see that the bass notes start on the tonic Bb, then move to the 9th harmonic on C+, the 11th harmonic on E^b, the 13th harmonic on C13b, the 7th harmonic on A7b+, and so on. Melodic movement in the upper parts is as minimal as possible, a kind of virtuoso exhibition of parsimonious voice-leading.

 

We look next at the different lines in terms of cents above the tonic Bb. The underlined numbers indicate the root of each harmonic series. In the bottom part of the chart, the numbers between lines indicate the pitch movement in cents, showing intervals of 3, 12, 17, 27, 32, with rarely more than 85 cents in the upper voices.

Conceptually, this is no different from the conventional triadic chord progression I played as my first example, except that in addition to the 1st, 3rd, and 5th harmonics I’ve also added in the 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, and occasionally 15th, using them similarly as pivot notes to swing to related harmonic areas step by step.

(In the past ten years I’ve found myself more and more fascinated by barbershop quartet music. Because when you consider it compositionally, barbershop quartet consists of an attempt to keep the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th harmonics continually in play within a two-octave range, shifting fundamentals according to pivot tones, and triggering the sequence of chords by running a melody through it. It hardly matters what the melody is, because the chord sequences come out pretty much the same regardless. What I’ve demonstrated above is a kind of 13-limit barbershop sextet, complete with melody in the alto. All it needs is for me to write some snappy lyrics for it, buy some boaters and canes, and hit the Appalachian circuit.)

I’m going to play one last example, which is a little tongue-in-cheek piece I wrote in preparation for a much larger piece that I was unable to complete for this conference. The piece is one of a series of little tuning studies I titled Nursery Tunes for Demented Children. This uses an eight by eight grid of harmonics numbers 1 through 15 built on the odd numbered harmonics 1 through 15, a tuning system that I am not the first to use. The most ambitious piece I’ve completed in this tuning is Romance Postmoderne, which you will hear on the concert, and much of what I say here will apply to that piece as well. The purpose of the little piece is to demonstrate levels of dissonance and consonance arrived at by simply moving among different triads in the harmonic series. It starts off with triads of 7:9:11 and 10:13:15, replacing them little by little with minor triads of 10:12:15 and major triads of 4:5:6. Once the triads are all major, they begin accruing upper harmonics until each eight-note harmonic series is being played at once. Then notes begin being shed from the top again until we end up with a conventional I6/4-V7 cadence which closes deceptively on a chord on the 13th harmonic. I think of this little piece as partial proof of what I call Henry Cowell’s Theory of Relativity, his principle as stated in New Musical Resources that

the points in the [harmonic] series… where consonance leaves off and dissonance begins, are not rigidly fixed… but depend on the ear of the individual listener, who is in turn influenced by the musical age in which he lives… acoustically speaking, there is no point at which any other than an arbitrary difference between them can be shown, which establishes the relativity of consonance, dissonance, and discord. [pp. 10-11]

 

Optimism is not characteristic of the times we find ourselves living in, but if it were not for our political situation, I would find boundless optimism for music in the steps of the harmonic series we have not yet assimilated into our music. I have begun learning to hear how chord progressions pivoting on the 11th and 13th harmonics work, but I am a long way from arriving at any kind of idiom or composing habits ready to replace our common practice tonality. Nor have I yet figured out how to work effectively with 7:9:11 and 10:13:15 triads, and so I feel like I might as well be composing in 1605, overwhelmed with possibilities of a vast new language. I also think that in a sense we are closer to the beginning of music’s history than its potential end, and that the materials we know about but haven’t yet learned how to use effectively could provide enough material for several more centuries of exciting development. And until some totally new direction suggests itself to us, I think that the long past of music, in which we’re all so well trained, provides the best available guide to our future.

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The day following my paper, Vicky Ray and Aron Kallay (pictured below) gave the world premiere of my Romance Postmoderne (the linked recording is my realization, not their performance). It’s about the piece that most clearly illustrates the principles stated above.

 

I wrote some more of my Nursery Tunes for Demented Children that I recently mentioned here. They’re silly little pieces, but they serve a serious purpose for me. I’ve been doing a lot of sketches for large works in what I call my 8×8 tuning, which contains potentialities that I need to explore and learn to hear before I can commit myself to basing entire pieces on them. In particular I’ve been trying out, in the second and fourth pieces here, more exotic triads a little higher in the harmonic series, such as 7:9:11, 10:13:15, and 8:11:13, which resolve in both pieces to conventional major (4:5:6) and minor (10:12:15) triads. “Tiger, Tiger” climbs through the 33-pitch scale step by step to control the harmony, just as so much late Romantic music harmonized the charomatic scale. And the final piece moves between major triads on the 5th and 13th harmonics in kind of a super-Neo-Riemannian voice-leading. Anyone capable of the requisite math can quickly see what I mean.

Down to the End of the Town
Up the Hill and Up Again
Tiger, Tiger Turning Right
The Cracked Bells of St. Swithun’s
Jack Ate a Blackbird

I just love that microtonality enables me to write music with which I can confuse my own ear. And I think it’s fun to occasionally hear conventional musical textures reworked microtonally, as a way of imagining what we might have been doing all these decades had Europe decided not to cut us off above the 5th harmonic. I also realize occasionally that I could have been a passable neoclassicist had I decided to go that route, though that would have seemed like career suicide when I was first starting out. But as it turns out, almost everything interesting is career suicide, microtonality most of all.

I can use these pieces to illustrate a didactic point, though. My 1/1, the reference point of my tuning, is Eb, but that doesn’t mean the pieces are all in that key. The first piece is in G, the last in C13-flat, and the penultimate begins every phrase on D7-flat; the others move around. I tend to avoid Eb, in fact, because that’s where the least exotic intervals are. I say this to confute all those music professors who find it droll to smugly remind us that Harry Partch’s music is all in the key of G. (Partch’s 1/1 is G 392 Hz.) Actually, Partch’s music employs many tonalities, and sometimes none. It would be exactly as accurate to claim that all orchestra music is in the key of A, since that’s the pitch the orchestra tunes to before the performance. I could rename any of my 33 pitches 1/1, but Eb is the reference point that provides the simplest fractions. There’s a precise analogy with a meantone keyboard: in the 17th century, writing in the key of Bb made more of the sharp side of the circle of fifths available, while the key of A major made more of the subdominant side possible, so you chose your key according to the mood you were aiming for. So you could as easily claim that all pre-1800 keyboard music is in the key of C. The attractiveness of having an implicit center is the subtle tension of leaning away from it. Resisting gravity is how artists create a feeling of lightness.

I wrote a symphony. It came to pass in this wise. I visited my friend Robert Carl at Yaddo. He was telling me his plans for his next two symphonies, one of which would be an orchestration of a two-piano piece he had written. I replied that I had a two-piano piece myself, in five movements (Implausible Sketches) that I think of as an unorchestrated symphony. He said I should arrange it for orchestra. I replied, Nah, I wouldn’t do that. The next morning I woke up obsessed with the certainty that I needed to make an orchestral version of Implausible Sketches. Of course, all the movements needed to be expanded as well as orchestrated, so the Symphony is forty minutes long, as compared to the two-piano piece’s thirty-one. Because of the source and because no performance is remotely anticipated (I haven’t been able to get Implausible Sketches played either, despite several piano duos looking at it), I call it the “Implausible” Symphony. I’m thinking of following it up with Symphony No. 2, the “Irredeemable,” and Symphony No. 3, the “Unforgivable.”

And that’s not all, for I’ve unaccountably been spending every spare minute composing. Alex Ross has called blogging “public procrastination,” and I haven’t been blogging because I haven’t been procrastinating. In the past two months I’ve written a 23-minute song cycle – unusual for me to complete so much music during the semester, especially when as division chair I am overwhelmed with administrative meetings lately. But I had always, for thirty years, wanted to set a group of Transcendentalist poems to music. I had written a few small ones, only two of which I’ve kept, but singers are so hyper-cautious about taking on new repertoire that I never felt encouraged to expand my song output. Some of them I had written enough of in my head to go around humming vocal lines from them all these years. After I finished my Ives book (which is now stewing over at Yale UP, no news yet), I felt an urge to linger in a Transcendentalist mode, so I got out Perry Miller’s anthology and plunged into a project I’d carried around in my head for decades. I came up with seven new songs, on poems by Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Henry Hedge, Christopher Pearse Cranch (two songs), and Jones Very; Emerson and Thoreau are not the most settable poets, and the poems that had always been most urgent to me were philosophical ones emblematic of Transcendentalist thought, Cranch’s “Enosis” and Hedge’s “Questionings.” Hedge was central to the Transcendentalist Club formed in 1836, and his poem is a statement of the epistemological problem of solipsism:

Hath this world, without me wrought,
Other substance than my thought?
Lives it by my sense alone,
Or by essence of its own?
Will its life, with mine begun,
Cease to be when that is done,
Or another consciousness
With the self-same forms impress?

Doth yon fireball, poised in air,
Hang by my permission there?
Are the clouds that wander by
But the offspring of mine eye,
Born with every glance I cast,
Perishing when that is past?
And those thousand, thousand eyes,
Scattered through the twinkling skies,
Do they draw their life from mine,
Or of their own beauty shine?….

So it’s rather the philosophical song cycle I’ve always wanted, to complement the raft of philosophy courses I took at Oberlin and Northwestern. The other poems can be read here, and the score of Transcendentalist Songs is available on my web site. My songs may seem puzzling to new-music fans, because I write them imagining how the poem itself would want to be sung, and if it’s a 19th-century poem, it’s likely to come out in a 19th-century harmonic syntax; the whole song cycle may seem an effort more scholarly than creative. I don’t care. What interested me in this case was to translate the intellectual atmosphere of Transcendentalism into a musical atmosphere congruent with it, and since the American musical idiom of that era lagged behind the poetry and philosophy, I had to retrofit a kind of appropriately mystical, American-sounding impressionism. As with the symphony, I have no performances in sight, but Bard has so expanded its vocal program in recent years that I’m hoping someone there can be persuaded to take an interest.

Thursday, invited by composer Michael Hersch, to whom I am grateful for it, I gave a lecture on my music at Peabody Conservatory, and I give another this Wednesday at Hartt School of Music. I hadn’t done such a thing in two or three years, and my composing has become such a private, impulsive, unmotivated activity that I hardly know how to talk about it anymore. Plus, I’m creating a backlog of unperformed and unrecorded pieces, so to play examples I have to go back a ways and try to remember what I was thinking seven, eight years ago. But I feel like what I have to explain lately is how I got to where I am, because the composers who were my major reference points are ones students no longer hear about. The young composers seem totally attuned to Europeans these days – Haas, Dillon, Ades, Lindburg – and the ones at Peabody were accustomed, as guest lecturers, to orchestral regulars like John Adams, John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, and Christopher Rouse. So here I come out of left field, with my microtones and Disklaviers, and while the students were welcoming and curious, their questions expressed a skepticism understandable in context. I have to explain myself as an alien visitor from that mythical Brigadoon called the American Experimental Tradition. On the other hand: now I’m a symphonist. That ought to count for something.

My good friend Anne Garland, wife of songwriter David, gave me some html code with which to make my Just Intonation Explained page far more convenient and practical by embedding the mp3s so that they don’t jump to a new page to play, and you can keep reading the text while listening. She warned that it doesn’t work on all browsers, and so if any of you find you can’t access the recorded examples, please let me know and I’ll put the original version back up as an alternative. This is going to open up a lot of possibilities: I’ve been considering putting up a Listener’s Guide to the Concord based on my analysis.

Just prepared my “Late Beethoven” syllabus, about to walk into my first class of the semester in three hours.

I like this interview with Branford Marsalis in the Seattle Weekly, and completely agree with him:

You put on old records and they always sound better. Why are they better? I started listening to a lot of classical music, and that really solidified the idea that the most important and the strongest element of music is the melodic content.

In jazz we spend a lot of time talking about harmony. Harmonic music tends to be very insular. It tends to be [like] you’re in the private club with a secret handshake.

I have a lot of normal friends. ‘Cause it’s important. [When] you have a bunch of musicians talking about music and they talk about what’s good and what’s not good, they don’t consider the larger context of it…

When laypeople listen to records, there’re certain things they’re going to get to. First of all, how it sounds to them. If the value of the song is based on intense analysis of music, you’re doomed. Because people that buy records don’t know shit about music. When they put on Kind of Blue and say they like it, I always ask people: What did you like about it? They describe it in physical terms, in visceral terms, but never in musical terms.

But then he says what so many musicians say:

Everything you read about jazz is: “Is it new? Is it innovative?” I mean, man, there’s 12 fucking notes. What’s going to be new? You honestly think you’re going to play something that hasn’t been played already?

And I always think, Well, actually there are a lot more than 12 fucking notes if you want to use them, and with the other ones I think I have played some things that – worthwhile or not – at least hadn’t been played before.

 

A couple of summers ago I had the odd idea of writing some simple microtonal pieces for kids, and maybe calling them “Nursery Tunes for Demented Children.” I had forgotten about them (odd how often I forget pieces I’ve written) and ran across them today, found I had completed two. I had been wanting to use some complex scales in a simple context, and maybe also thought that if kids were exposed at a tender age to something other than the 12-pitch scale they might grow up as weird as I am. Here they are:

Down to the End of the Town
Tiger, Tiger, Turning Right

Should I keep going? I have no idea how you’d perform them.

Today is not only the 197th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, but the milestone 60th birthday of the composer (and my good friend) Robert Carl. His Fourth Symphony is on my web site if you’d like to celebrate. (Be warned, the beginning is very soft.)

New recording, from the other night, of Sang Plato’s Ghost, played by the Ghost Ensemble under the baton of David Bloom. Expert young musicians, they did a fine job. The drums are a little too evident on the recording, imagine them softer. On June 7 I have a performance of The Stream (Admonitions) by the New Music Ensemble of the Australian National University in Canberra. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, that anyone has simply plucked a score off my web site and decided to play it – after seventeen years of posting PDF scores then.

I’ve been engulfed in graduating-senior crises, and my last responsibility as arts division chair is to oversee the division end-of-year party tonight. Tomorrow morning my life will be my own again.