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All right, it looks like, once again, the fate of postclassical music rests in my hands. So gather for the official announcement:

The 2014 John Cage Award ($50,000) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has been given to Phill Niblock.

Phill Niblock (b. 1933) started as a conceptualist filmmaker and, untrained as a composer, began making musical scores for his films based on charts of pitch frequencies in cycles per second. In so doing he pioneered the use of small pitch complexes and very slow glissandos (pitch slides) often moving gradually between extreme consonance and extreme dissonance. For example, A Trombone Piece (1977) employs only the following frequencies, appearing in all combinations: 55, 57, 59, and 61 in one octave, 110, 113, 116, 119, and 121 in the next, and 220, 224, 228, and 232 in the highest octave. Rich in acoustic phenomena and almost imperceptibly slow metamorphoses, Niblock’s music sometimes involves the use of live performers moving around the audience and playing along with loudly amplified prerecorded drones. In recent years he has written, in similarly austere terms, for multiple orchestras, with great effect. Ever since his early recording Nothing to Look At, Just a Record, his titles have tended to be drily descriptive, but he has been a major influence on Downtown composers, such as Band of Susans, David First, Lois Vierk, and Glenn Branca, since the 1960s. Pieces available on commercial recording include Five More String Quartets, Held Tones, Hurdy Hurry (especially recommended), A Y U aka “As Yet Untitled,” Yam Almost May, A Third Trombone, Four Full Flutes, Disseminate Ostrava, and many others. (Read my 1999 Village Voice article on Niblock, “Master of the Slow Surprise.” No recordings are given here only because the acoustic phenomena in Niblock’s music aren’t captured adequately in the mp3 format.)

The 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Award ($30,000) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has been given to Elodie Lauten.

Elodie Lauten (b. 1950), the daughter of jazz drummer Errol Parker, came from her native Paris to New York in 1972 where she sang female lead for a band called Flaming Youth and fell in with the circle around poet Allen Ginsburg. She studied with La Monte Young and improvised many of her early keyboard works, composing within what she called “universal correspondence systems”, in which correlations were drawn among Indian Vedic cosmologies, hexagrams of the Chinese I Ching, astrological signs, scales, keys, and rhythmic patterns. Much of her music is cloudy, meditative, and static in its textures, though she also has a more neoclassic mode marked by melodic lyricism grounded in ostinatos; either way a haunting mysticism is rarely absent. Starting with The Death of Don Juan (1987), a ground-breaking work in which she would set a pattern for Downtown opera by performing vocally and on a harp-like instrument of her own invention over electronic backgrounds, she drifted toward opera and oratorio, and many of her recent works are quite large, including Waking in New York (based on poems chosen for her to set by Ginsburg); Orfreo (an opera based on the suicided conceptual artist Ray Johnson); and Deus ex Machina, a 100-minute cycle for Baroque-instrument ensemble and singers. (Read my 2001 Village Voice article on Lauten, “East Village Buddha.”) Listen to movement 1 of Lauten’s Variations on the Orange Cycle; “Jumping the Gun on the Sun” from Waking in New York; and “The Exotic World of Speed and Beauty” from Deus ex Machina.

Pardon the lateness of this announcement, which became official two months ago and has gone almost unnoticed. Not since Meredith Monk’s 1995 MacArthur Award has any music award announcement made the world seem like such a benign place.

In the flurry of information going around on Robert Ashley, I just learned that Dalkey Archives, publisher of Ashley’s libretto for Perfect Lives, has my introduction to the new edition available online. I’ve always been proud of it, and Bob told me at one point that he had read it over and over, because, he said, “it makes me feel good.” Plus, via Carson Cooman, here’s Ashley’s Lullaby for violin and piano written in 2011, from an Australian recording I hadn’t heard before. A fitting memorial and quite a surprise.

There’s been some discussion, a little of it uncharitable, about whether Ashley was as misunderstood and insufficiently recognized as some of his admirers claim. The obvious rejoinder to that is that he wrote his operas for television, and only one of them got produced and broadcast in that medium. The expense was too overwhelming. He was a visionary dreamer at a time when our culture was quickly losing its capacity to dream, and its desire to make dreams come true. Those of us who love his operas are sadly aware that we can’t completely experience them the way he envisioned them,

as a television series, with each episode having some meaning and humor in itself, but ultimately part of a larger something that only makes sense when you come to know it. Television devotees who have watched The Honeymooners for most of their lives finally come to know something that they wouldn’t know if they had only seen one episode. Same for Star Trek. These were my models. I have had to compromise the form of the presentation of my operas, because I was not able to get into television. But they are pure television. They are meant to be heard and seen by two people sitting on a couch, having a drink, occasionally a snack, occasionally going to the toilet, finally giving up and going to bed because of a hard day of work. They are meant to be seen many times. The details pile up, and finally there is a glimmer of the larger idea. This is my idea of opera.

I imagine some more advanced civilization, hundreds of years from now, coming back to Ashley’s operas and finally realizing them in their intended form, the way we revive Baroque opera in detailed technological splendor now.

And then there’s the perennial classical-music snob’s reaction to Ashley, so anticipatable that I reflexively brace for it: “But is that really opera?” A primeval fish watches a lizard learning to scramble around on the dry land, and asks, “But is that really swimming?” “Don’t you love opera enough,” I want to reply, “to get excited about the next step in its evolution?” Bob was a giant, come too late in the sense that the civilization he lived in had quit believing in progress, and too early in the sense that few people could see the future he imagined with such detailed foresight. Even so, I’ve been gratified by all the reports yesterday of how many people are deeply, deeply attached to his music.

 

Carson Cooman, Harvard organist, musical polymath, and extraordinarily prolific composer, wrote to me a couple of weeks ago after reading my blog and asked if I’d ever reconsidered writing something for organ. It was something we had talked about long ago. In the mid-1980s my friend Gerhard Stäbler, German political composer and also an organist, had told me if I ever wrote something for organ he’d play it. I had tried, but the medium defeated me several times. As much as I love a lot of music that uses drones, I had never come up with a good strategy for employing drones myself, and the organ’s capacity for endless ones tempted me too far, so that I was in danger of trying to write a piece that was basically all one chord.

But this time I had just been playing the end of my instrumental suite Catskill Set, which closes with a chord that I found attractively poignant: from the bottom up, and voiced only this way, Eb, Ab, Gb, Db, F. The great thing about getting commissions is that the moment someone expresses an interest in my writing something, a musical image springs into my mind and I can frequently hear the piece before they’ve finished asking the question. In this case I realized that that voicing would sound lovely on organ – large intervals, no seconds, with the smallest interval on top – and that by putting the lowest (and thus hardest-to-reach) note in the pedals I could weave chromatic counterpoint around a long series of such chords. Carson also gave the perfect invitation: “For some time,” he wrote, “I’ve imagined broadly in my mind a extremely nice Gannian organ piece in your quiet, beautiful, tranquil/gentle vein. No particularly significant dynamic or timbre change, but just happening.” He also cautioned me against the first-time organ composer’s amateur mistakes of trying to get too fancy with the pedal work and using all the instrument’s bells and whistles in one piece. Given my habitual style, they were hardly miscalculations I would tend toward, but it was a good recipe for writing an effective organ piece. In the next eight days, two of them snow days in which leaving the house was hardly an option, I sketched out a fifteen-minute piece escapistly titled Summer Serenade, and then spent another week revising it. For me, that’s very fast composing; for me to write so much in mid-semester and around class-teaching is just about unheard-of.

But I am as a snail compared to Carson. I sent him the score yesterday, and he, with his tireless and endlessly competent steamroller energy, recorded it last night. He noted that the copy I sent him had no dynamics, and that he presumed it was to be soft throughout. Actually, while I think mezzopiano on a little Baroque organ is probably better in general, I could also hear in my mind the charms of a very loud church organ, the latter preferably heard from several blocks away. And so, mirabile dictu, he recorded both versions for me. I strongly recommend that to listen to the soft version you plug your computer into a sound system with decent-sized speakers, because the bass drones are very low, inaudible through my computer speakers. And to listen to the loud version, I recommend that you turn it up really loud, leave your door or windows open, and stroll down to the end of the block.

(The entire music composition world will be unanimous in its mandate that I MUST DECIDE what dynamic the piece should be played at, and notate it as such – and the entire music composition world can go suck an egg, and I mean just one egg, which they can pass around, just as they all suck their received wisdom from the same teat.)

Spoilers follow, so the easily influenced might want to listen before reading further. Summer Serenade uses a form that I’ve been gravitating toward and using more explicitly lately, which I call “relenting minimalism.” That is, the bulk of the piece seems austerely static, but simmering beneath the surface is a melody which finally, after the static part climaxes in some way, emerges, mediating an apparent disjunction between modernist strangeness and tuneful “normalcy.” “Rewarding the listener,” if you will. More technically, there are nine chords in the piece, transposed to seven keys chromatically from D to Ab (the pedal notes), and they are fairly similar: either minor, dominant, or major seventh chords with various added notes. So the piece’s romantico-minimalist wall-of-sound stasis is more or less built up bebop-style through a series of modulating ii-V and ii-V-I progressions, with added notes contributing to the smooth voice-leading. I do delight in using familiar musical materials in unfamiliar contexts, another thing about my music that composers commonly object to. The PDF score is here.

And I’m very grateful to Carson for his advocacy and numerous superb talents.

 

Two new PDF scores went up on my website this week. One is not a terribly new piece: Mystic Chords (2012), which I’ve written about here before, and which consists entirely of quarter-notes with a different tempo marking on each beat. I had been waiting on putting up the score until I revised the opening, which I have now done. So there’s a new recording as well, and I’m much happier with it. As often happens with mp3s, my computer keeps going back to the old mp3 when I click on it, and no amount of reloading has yet succeeded in bringing the new recording up; but I’ve been successful when trying from other computers. Presumably you will be too.

The other, new piece is a suite of five brief movements for flute, clarinet, trumpet, vibraphone, piano, and string trio called Catskill Set. It started out as a song cycle on poems by someone who, as it turned out, had no interest in song cycles, and so I followed Ives’s example by rearranging it for instrumental ensemble and calling it a “set.” It’s been good for me, lately, I think, to learn to reuse earlier materials in new pieces; I can more easily see how Ives developed the complexity of his style by adding on new layers to simpler pieces he’d written before. My erstwhile terror of repeating myself was a little exaggerated. I enjoyed (re)writing the piece, it’s a little different for me, more linear and imagistic, and perhaps someone will be moved to play it. I’ve got no commissions or performances pending, just composing for pleasure. And geographically I’ve finally moved from all the desert-themed titles of my youth to admitting that I’m pretty well ensconced in the Hudson Valley.

Awhile back I tried to get my friend at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel interested in buying all my scores for the archive there. I promised I’d send him the original PDFs, not just copies. He looked at me a long time.

I find out too late to make the trip, but Juhani Nuorvala informs me that he’s playing my retuned keyboard piece Fugitive Objects on a program of experimental music in Helsinki tomorrow. There’s also music by Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Roger Smalley, Maija Hynninen, Timo Tuhkanen, and others, plus a celebration of Alvin Lucier that extends through the 26th. Helsinki, of course, will be the site of the 2015 minimalism conference, and I’m much looking forward to being there myself in a year and a half.

[NOTE: If you’re here from a link at New Music Box, you might want to check out my response to that article as well.]

[UPDATE BELOW] My journey into the very heart of musical Europe provides me with a renewed opportunity to reflect on how happy I am to no longer be a music critic, no matter how happy I once was to work as one. The day was when I would have attended every event of the ISCM’s New Music Days 2013, taken names and scrupulous notes, mentally organized the event into its own little symmetrical Theater of Memory, and presented its digested evidence to you as grandly and unanswerably indicative of The Times We’re Living In; but no longer. Now I am relieved to skip the events that look tiresome or simply too inconveniently late in the evening, walk out on concerts I’m not enjoying, and afterward amuse myself by sketching an old man’s vague impressions, if I decide to do so – or even possibly write them up halfway and decide not to publish at all. I often wonder if there is another composer in the history of the world of whom people can so truly say, as one would say of me, “He has spoken enough; he has explained more than we needed explained.” Only Wagner comes to mind, and he would certainly have a more benign reputation today if he had taken many more opportunities to keep his damn trap shut and his opinions to himself. Posterity may well say the same of me, and perhaps we need not even wait for posterity.

In any case, I went to Vienna with a sense that I was being invited behind enemy lines with a role to play, and as always on such occasions (especially when free trans-Atlantic airfare is involved) I played it. But my scandals are whimsical and polite these days, not so dramatic or confrontational as they used to be. I try to project an air of not knowing where I am or what I’m doing, just an innocent who doesn’t dream that his anodyne heresies, born of ignorance and inexperience, could give offense. I had never before had any contact with the International Society for Contemporary Music, which certainly has a distinguished 90-year history of presenting new music, but which seems to have acquired by my time a rather musty and narrow reputation. Friends of mine who have long experience with the organization and its traveling annual festivals explained to me that the closer the events are culturally and geographically to Darmstadt, the more prickly, academic, and monochromatic the music involved tends to be. Vienna, by those standards, was in the neighborhood. There are certainly ISCM regulars who are trying to liven the organization up and make it more representative of the totality of what’s going on in new music around the globe, and who freely admitted to me, in private, that the music I heard – and again, I emphasize that I missed more performances than I attended – sounded like it had emerged from a time capsule last open to the air in 1973, even if most of the composers implicated were not yet born by that stale date.

All the more honor, then, to Christian Utz, Nina Polaschegg, and Bruno Strobl for sensing that the annual festival is in need of some self-reflection, and for organizing a concomitant conference on musical aesthetics to provide some perspective. While the music (that I heard) did come from a pretty tiny and dark corner of the spectrum, the conference participants – besides myself, Sandeep Bhagwati from Montreal, Heekyung Lee from Seoul, Andreas Engstrom from Sweden, Alper Maral from Istanbul, Ivan Siller from Bratislava, and others – evoked a far wider and more diverse world, one which the copious and generally enthusiastic audience seemed deeply relieved to have acknowledged. Bhagwati in particular, playing with more authority a role that I once might have attempted myself, scoffed at the idea (brought up by a participant) that the music we heard represented a “critical” type of composing, or that it was a music of continual revolution. Modernist new music, he argued, is a well-defined style like any other tradition, and its practitioners are well instructed in how to satisfy the demands of admittance to its professional mainstream. It said everything about the cultural moment that some in attendance seemed offended by the remark, which others gave a smattering of delighted applause.

The music may have been a matter of taste, but there was little disagreement about its uniformity of idiom. For one thing, what used to be, and apparently still are, called “extended techniques” were ubiquitous. If a flute appeared, so did toneless key clicks. If an accordion, it was slapped and squeezed tonelessly just for the air whooshing. If a clarinet, it was usually taken apart, perhaps used to blow bubbles in a glass of water. If a piano, the pianist disappeared into its interior. It is a little late in history to object to such practices, but it has always seemed to me that what we learned, from the explosion of them in the 1970s, was that they are distracting and seem silly when used sparingly, as punctuation. In other words, a pianist knocking on the outside of the piano in between keyboard phrases can be irritating, but Cage’s song The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs achieves a refreshing poetry by having its entire accompaniment tapped on the external frame of the instrument. If you’re going to use those things, frankly base the whole piece around them. It’s the frequent back-and-forth that creates inelegant theater, and nearly every chamber piece reveled in exactly that. We tried out a lot of crazy things in the ‘70s, and a lot of them didn’t work very well; but there is a large swath of new music for which “didn’t work” is not an allowable concept, and all those embarrassing techniques have just been added to the composer’s mandatory professional vocabulary. I could say the 1970s called, and they want their silly music back – but why would they?

More generally, all of the music I heard was (needless to say) atonal, impenetrable, continuously varied, scrupulously free from minimalist or pop influence, and any impression of harmony, melody, or even memorable moment or event was assiduously avoided. I kept hearing all week about one piece I missed, which created a huge collective sense of relief in the audience by employing major triads. The orchestral music in particular was a panoply of splashes of timbre, violin glisses, celesta washes, brass splats, wind tremolos in tempestuous profusion, and afterward I wish I could have played excerpts back for the audience and challenged them to tell the pieces apart; I couldn’t have. Nominally the youngish composers hailed from all over the world, but a friend, looking through the festival program, brought to my attention that they had nearly all studied in Germany; it couldn’t have been clearer that they were writing the way they had been taught to. The way it works, my friend explained, is that each ISCM chapter makes a call for pieces, and, out of dozens, chooses six to submit to the festival committee, which then chooses from among those for the program. Thus the musical atmosphere is directly attributable to those who do the choosing, and previous festivals, I was told, have sometimes been considerably more varied and inviting than this one was.

One piece, however, stood apart from everything else. The Klangforum Wien, incredibly well commanded by Enno Poppe, played Mad Dog by Bernd Richard Deutsch (b. 1977), of which I can find no recording, but of course there’s a YouTube of a previous performance by the Die Reihe Ensemble. It struck me as kind of a madly splintered neoclassicism, an ironic neo-concerto-grosso laden with spectralist moments, at once entertaining and baffling, in the most pleasant sense. But what really baffled me were the negative comments I heard about it from Austrian musicians the next morning. When I attempted to praise it they were reflexively apologetic that it was programmed at all: “Oh, he won an award, so we had to include it.” “It seemed too much a kind of cartoon music.” “The players love that kind of music because it shows off what they can do well and fills the house, but it was too much written for the audience.” “The duet for violin and cello that came afterward [which I found strident, limited, and predictable] was much more multidimensional.” Too much written for the audience?! I’M the freakin’ audience!, I wanted to scream, but I was a guest in their country and behaved myself. Watch the YouTube, 21 minutes long in three movements: it’s hardly an easy or noticeably accessible piece, and yet it was lively and intriguing ear-candy compared to everything else I heard there. What a horribly austere, severe world to have to live in, in which the slightest pleasure given to the listener occasions such tut-tutting for its deplorable pandering. What a world turned upside down, in which music is approved only to the extent that one receives no thrill from it whatever and remembers nothing afterward.

It was into this heavy, monochrome, classically and unapologetically modernist context that I tossed what I had accurately intuited would be my stylistic time bomb. After all, I was the decadent American capitalist dog; my sadly commercial lack of taste wouldn’t be held against me personally, and might even provide some schadenfreude. I’ve already given you the core of my paper, though I both expanded it and took out a few things. But at the end, to illustrate what I said would be a kind of music that could only come from the U.S. these days, I played audio examples by three New York composers the same age, interestingly, as Deutsch: Corey Dargel (b. 1977) (click to hear the song I played), William Brittelle (b. 1976), and Judd Greenstein (though I played only a recording of his piece Change, not the brilliant video of it I’m linking you to here). I fully and correctly anticipated that some in the crowd would not consider this music at all, which is pretty funny when you think about it. Worldwide, I think a million out of any million and one people would be far more likely to identify Dargel’s charming song as a piece of music than they would the Austrian woman humorlessly blowing through the middle section of her clarinet into a glass of water, but in the topsy-turvy world of European new music, it was the busy noise pieces that are considered important music and the tonal song with rhyming lyrics that’s not so defined. After my talk one German-accented man objected with some anguish (and came up to me to repeat the observation after the panel) that he could hear no “soul-searching” in the music I played, that it just reminded him of a shopping mall. Now leaving aside whether soul-searching is something one wants to hear in every damn piece of music one listens to, what’s wrong with shopping malls? We build them, we spend time in them, don’t they deserve to be acknowledged in our art at some point? Is music only supposed to inhabit some wilderness of our imagination, and never sully itself with the actual, allegedly tawdry spaces where we spend our lives? And does, say, Vivaldi’s Seasons offer evidence of soul-searching? In any case, among the people I hung out with for the week, the comment became a running joke, and I swore that if I could find a mall that played Dargel’s delightful songs on the PA system, I would never shop anywhere else.

The sharp divide in opinion, interestingly enough, seemed to lie between English-speaking attendees (Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders – there didn’t seem to be any Brits, though since so many Continentals speak English with an impeccable British accent I can’t swear to it) and non-Enlish-speakers. One young Canadian woman came up to me later to ask where she could find more of Judd Greenstein’s music, and an American one to tell me that she had run back to her hotel and downloaded a Corey Dargel CD on iTunes, leading me to realize that I really ought to be playing my own music at these gigs, instead of providing free PR for these jokers who aren’t likely to do anything for my career.

Nina Polaschegg had begun the conference by saying that she organized it because we don’t do nearly enough talking about musical aesthetics, about why we like some pieces and don’t like others. As you can imagine, I completely agree. I mentioned in my paper that young composers these days don’t like arguing aesthetic viewpoints. A couple of young composers in the audience felt put upon by that and objected, but as a friend mentioned to me afterward, both of them basically said, “We do have aesthetic discussions, we just don’t like to argue,” which merely restated my point. I think that if we studiously ignore what makes some pieces better than others and some styles more fertile than others, we will be pretty much condemned to blunder along making music that isn’t meaningful or enjoyable, like so much of the crap I heard last week. After all, start enunciating these aesthetic positions out loud, and some of the most absurd ones just fall apart as you pronounce the words. And it was good for me to get a strong sense of why Germans and Austrians really object to the vein of American music I champion; we get the same objections at home, but no one dares articulate them. To deafly continue in traditions that no one is enjoying, just because everyone is too polite to say anything, is a sad option.

UPDATE: I’m not going to rewrite this entry, because I like it, and most people got it. But I have to say I’m astonished at how many people, some of them friends I respect, completely misread it. It has been taken as a blanket condemnation of European music, a rant against modernism, some grandiose claim for the superiority of American music. It is none of those things. It is a description of a specific festival that was criticized by many people, even those within the organization, for being too one-sidedly homogenous for an event that purported to represent music from around the world. When a festival is curated as a kind of competition, and seven pieces in a row sound so similar that one can hardly tell them apart, it is evident that the jurying committee had a very strong aesthetic bias. Maybe some people think that’s fine and the way it should be, but the perception that it was a problem did not originate with me. I believe, though no one said so, that I was invited, as were some of the other speakers, as a corrective, an outside perspective. If so, I applaud the impulse. That the American pieces I played would not “fit in” I could guess in advance, but I was surprised that the most interesting German composition was also considered controversial – which shows what a narrow framework the festival followed. I reported here on criticisms that were made by a wide range of participants. Yet some readers, who didn’t attend the festival or conference, took these criticisms as being entirely my own invention, and also leaped to a conclusion that I must have misrepresented the festival according to my own biases. I wish they would click on Deutsch’s video and hear the exciting European modernism I’m defending, but they seem to prefer to keep their own caricature of me intact. I don’t know how to respond to such gross misreading, let alone evidence-free charges of falsification. As the saying goes, I can write it for you, but I can’t understand it for you. If someone is determined to misread and misrepresent me, he will do so.

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I don’t know if this constituted a great moment for my students, but it did for me. My favorite piece by the British postminimalist Gavin Bryars, although I doubt that I’ve heard everything he’s recorded, has always been his 1990 piece for ballet Four Elements. I once started analyzing it on my own and didn’t get far, but we spent our entire minimalism class (two and a half hours) on it the other day, and I was quite impressed with what we found. The entire piece is drawn from a three-note motive heard in the chimes in the first two measures, a fifth and a minor second:

 

 

(echoed by the vibraphone in the next phrase, G-C-B). All of the harmonies of this half-hour piece are drawn from this motive, in the form of two fifths separated by a half-step between the bottom note of one and the top note of the other. However, while most of the fifths are perfect, sometimes either the lower or higher one is augmented (Bb-F# and C-G# here):

 

 

 

 

The perfect fifths make either a major seventh chord or a minor triad with a flat 13th, depending on what is emphasized in the bass; the others can be an augmented seventh or a minor triad with a major seventh. The piece capitalizes well on the major/minor ambiguity inherent in these voicings. Of course, any seventh chord can be spelled as two fifths, but this is the way Bryars voices them in the piano and electric keyboard parts, and the melodies in the winds frequently bring out the fifth- (or fourth) plus-half-step motive. In addition, the harmonic feel of these chords can be altered by whatever note is additionally heard in the bass. The elements are in the order water/earth/air/fire, and the opening water movement is built on the following chord progression:

Note, for instance, that the fifth keyboard chord is the same as the second and fourth, but has a quite different feel with the A in the bass rather than the E. The intuitive, meandering quality of this progression, with some chords being sustained over more than one bass note, is the reason I never got very far with the piece in the beginning. But in class we looked at the second section (earth) and found the identical progression, more systematically articulated in repeated 16th-note patterns. The third section (air) begins with a different but related chord progression (shown below), but brings back this above progression toward the end.

Here is the recording (ECM, conducted by Roger Heaton) of the first section and the beginning of the second. We had a good discussion in class about why the piece doesn’t sound particularly minimalist or postminimalist. Part of it is the foregrounded and highly expressive melody in the bass clarinet. Another part is that, unlike in most minimalist-related music, the harmonies don’t sound functionally equivalent. Because of the augmented fifths and the variable and sometimes dissonant bass notes, there are purposeful-sounding gradations in the calmness or intensity of the chords, which give the piece a more uneven emotional shape than is common in minimalism. And yet, the harmonic rhythm is pretty regular, either two measures per chord or in some sections three; and the way I’m aurally programmed I still hear the piece as postminimalist because of the way the melodies sound derived from the harmony rather than vice versa, drawing the chromatic connections between distantly related chords in exactly the way Glass does in the “Bed” scene of Einstein on the Beach. Most obviously, here’s the opening alto sax melody with chords from the Air section, and you can hear the audio here:

Perhaps it’s only because I am so attuned to noticing how minimalist music operates beneath the surface that I hear this piece as minimalist. The analysis confirms my impression that the harmonies may have been composed first and the melody laid over it; at least it sounds like it’s the harmony that drives the music. I do something similar in the final movement of my Transcendental Sonnets, a nine-minute chain of seventh chords, although determined via parsimonious voice-leading rather than intervals or root movement. And I didn’t have to go to Gavin Bryars for the idea, it was all implicit in Einstein. Still, that’s a quintessentially Gannian kind of melody in that example. No wonder I love the piece.

One of the things that I love about teaching minimalist music analytically is that it’s such a good pedagogical model for young composers. When I was an undergrad I was trying to mimic Boulez and Berio, and I didn’t have nearly enough technique under my belt to achieve anything close to their complexity and subtlety; I hadn’t “come up through the ranks” on that complicated history. But minimalist pieces tend to be clear in their structure and often deceptively obvious in their procedure once you look just beneath the surface. They embody a level of technique that students truly could imitate and pull off, and while some will take that as a criticism of the music, it’s not. The pieces are attractive and remain so after years of listenings, and the students are thrilled with them. But such minimalist pieces often draw tremendous length from very little material, which, if I remember my history of musical aesthetics correctly, used to be considered quite a virtue (see Bach, J.S., and Webern, Anton, for instance). I would love to command a composition student, “Pick three notes and write an entire 30-minute ensemble piece using only patterns derived from them,” and then show him or her that Bryars did exactly that, with stunning results. It’s such a great repertoire for a student to start out with, and if they want to do something more complicated later, they can always move on. Personally, I would find this rich kind of simplicity enough to aim for.

 

I’m teaching my Analysis of Minimalism seminar this semester, and I have never had a group of students (eight of them) who came in already knowing so much about the repertoire we were dealing with. They bring up pieces I hadn’t planned to mention and occasionally even one I hadn’t heard of, and I have to think quick to stay one step ahead of them.

What I enjoy doing most in my analysis seminars is figuring out music I’d never analyzed before. I let them do the work for me (or if I end up doing it myself, I assume they’ll learn from watching me), and this class is certainly obliging. For the first time I’m analyzing scores by Phill Niblock, some of which are included with his CD liner notes. For instance, the following stack of random-looking numbers is the beginning, about half the score, of his 1980 piece for eight overdubbed flutes, titled SLS after the initials of his soloist Susan Stenger, on the XI disc Four Full Flutes:

(Click on the image for better focus.) With just this to go on, the students figured out that the top numbers in each line above the little T marks (110, 418, 606 in the first flute) are the timings of the piece: 1:10, 4:18, 6:06. The upper number above the horizontal line following each one is the duration of the note in minutes and seconds. The bottom number, below the bottom line, is the frequency of the pitch, since Niblock never uses musical notation, but writes directly in cycles per second instead. We worked out that there are only ten pitches used in the 20-minute piece; three of them, C, D, and F, are based on frequencies from the conventional equal-tempered scale, and others are tuned upward or downward a few cents:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition, as someone in class figured out, each pitch at a certain frequency lasts the same duration every time it comes back: the pitch 260.7 cps always lasts 3:09, 345.7 cps always lasts 2:32, and so on. We figured out how we could make something of a readable score from this sloppy accounting sheet, and that, with the timings across the top, it would look something like this:

(Here’s this much of the piece to listen to, although you really need to hear the whole twenty minutes to appreciate the overall shape.) At least this translates the number score into something that we can follow with the timer and hear somewhat, although this hardcore minimalist essay can really only be experienced, not analyzed by ear. But we’ve figured out that Phill does seem to start pretty much with equal temperament as a basis, and that while some of his pieces have a gradual process going (as does Five More String Quartets, which we looked at the number score of as well), SLS has a more whimsical, less logical form.

The other day we used Neo-Reimannian analysis to compare the chord progressions in movement 2 of Phil Glass’s Low Symphony to those in Einstein on the Beach, and then we traced the course of the ubiquitous four-note rhythmic motive on which John Adams’s Phrygian Gates is based. This week we’re finally analyzing Gavin Bryars’s The Four Elements, which I’ve always wanted to do, a fabulous piece. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a graduate-level seminar at Bard, because the students walked in the door already loving the repertoire. And it’s such a cool new world of music to analyze, I can’t believe most music departments want to opt out of it.

 

 

I didn’t anticipate that I would arrive at anything new to say about Robert Ashley in my paper about him at last week’s minimalism conference at Cal State Long Beach. But as it happened, the attempt to talk about him in a minimalist context elicited some insights I hadn’t had before, and as some previously Ashley-dubious audience members claimed to find them persuasive, I decided to post the paper here. Also probably at the Society for Minimalist Music website as a PDF, but here I can link to the audio examples.

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“Eventfulness is really boring”: Robert Ashley as Minimalist
by Kyle Gann

I hope it does not seem merely opportunistic to appear with a paper on Robert Ashley as minimalist just after I have published a book on Ashley. One of the things I find historically fascinating about minimalism is the magnetic field it cast on all sides, attracting some composers and repelling others, to the point that some composers whom we do not consider part of the movement led careers that we cannot adequately describe without alluding to it as explanation. Morton Feldman is certainly one of these, perhaps James Tenney, and also Robert Ashley. (For instance, my composition teacher Peter Gena recalled, in the early 1970s, being anxiously called into Feldman’s office to look at sketches for his newest piece. Feldman asked fearfully, “Do you think it sounds too much like Steve Reich?”)

In 2009 I interviewed Robert Ashley for a book I was writing about him. He made a statement that rather surprised me, and I want to play you the audio because his delivery is so evocative:

The only thing that’s interesting to me right now is that, up to me and a couple of other guys, music had always been about eventfulness: like, when things happened, and if they happened, whether they would be a surprise, or an enjoyment, or something like that… And I was never interested in eventfulness. I was only interested in sound. I mean, just literally, sound in the Morton Feldman sense…. There’s a quality in music that is outside of time, that is not related to time. And that has always fascinated me… A lot of people are back into eventfulness. But it’s very boring. Eventfulness is really boring. – (Interview with the author, June 11, 2009)

As composers of his generation go, Robert Ashley is not someone often thought of as a minimalist. In fact, a case for the polar opposite would be easy to make. At a certain period in his career he earned a reputation as being the prime exemplar of what we then liked to call information overload. For instance, the initial 1979 version of his opera Perfect Lives, as recorded on the famous “Yellow Album,” was pretty spare, but by 1982 he had overlaid the piece with so many layers of musical activity that the original became difficult to locate beneath the multi-channeled audio surface. His next opera, Atalanta, was a chaos of improvisation. In Foreign Experiences Ashley underlaid his text and music, in the first act, with a 12-tone piano sonata he had written decades earlier. Ashley’s opera Improvement: Don Leaves Linda is entirely based on a fanatical precompositional scheme involving a 24-note row. When I interviewed him about the piece in 1991, he added, “Of course! I’m a serialist! What else would I do?” In the introduction to his book Outside of Time: Ideas about Music, titled “Speech as Music,” he wrote:

For some reason that I have never understood (and don’t fully understand today) I have always been attracted to music that is irrationally difficult. I don’t mean difficult in terms of endurance or effects. I mean difficult in the sense that there are many things going on at the same time… What I think today my problem came from is that even in piano music, when there are a lot of things happening very fast… the complexity resembles the complexity of speech. I came to discover very gradually that I was fatally attracted to the complexity of speech…. (Ashley, Outside of Time, p. 38)

He goes on to make a veiled complaint about minimalism, that around 1970, there was an “official announcement from New York and Washington”: “The announcement said simply, there is a new kind of music; it is very simple; everybody will come to understand, and we will forget about all of that foolishness that has been going on.” (Outside of Time, p. 54) The references to New York and Washington seem to refer to the performing space The Kitchen, the New Music America festivals, and, more explicitly, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts. (He and I were on opposite sides of a generational divide in that issue.)

At the same time, though, Ashley included in Outside of Time another new (2004) article titled “to begin again with ‘music,’” in which he talked about the central ideas that had always been crucial to his music, beginning with the “drone concept”:

I use the term “drone” to mean any music that seems not to change over time. Or music that changes so slowly that the changes seem almost imperceptible. Or music that has so many repetitions of the same melodic-harmonic pattern that the pattern is clearly secondary to another aspect of the form. (And I use the term “drone” though from the beginning it has often been used by critics in its pejorative sense, meaning “nothing is happening.”) (Outside of Time, p. 96)

It is clear that Ashley thinks all of his music has been drone music (as opposed to what he calls “timeline music,” meaning everything else), even when it doesn’t contain anything that we minimalism scholars would think of as a drone.

Bob doesn’t know I’m giving this paper, and it may be that he would disagree with my premises here. But he and I have disagreed before, and in fact he raises quite a public disagreement with me in the introduction I quoted from. To take issue with him a little bit, then, it did seem to me, at the time of the 2009 interview, that Ashley’s claim that he had only been interested in “sound, in the Morton Feldman sense” was something of an illusion of hindsight. In a 1961 interview in Source magazine, Ashley once claimed that subsequent to John Cage’s use of empty time structures, the guiding metaphor of music was now no longer sound but time, and the ultimate result might be “a music that wouldn’t necessarily involve anything but the presence of people… It seems to me [he famously continued] that the most radical redefinition of music that I could think of would be one that defines ‘music’ without reference to sound.” Like many other composers in the 1950s, Ashley had been highly impressed by Cage’s use of empty time structures, the lengths of which were determined in advance before the sounds within them were composed. I have sometimes referred to Cage’s works of this period as being proto-postminimalist, in that they seemed to anticipate postminimalist music rather than minimalism per se. If that is admissible, then we could say that Ashley’s works inspired by Cage’s time structures might be neo-proto-postminimalist, and by a musicohistorical arithmetic that should put them somewhere in the minimalist ballpark. [This was a joke, and appreciated as such. In fact it became a running gag of the conference.]

Born in 1930, Ashley is a little older than the oldest composers we consider card-carrying minimalists, but he knew about the style almost from its origins. He directed the ONCE festival from its beginnings in 1961, and two of the original minimalists, La Monte Young and Terry Jennings, were featured at the second ONCE festival in 1962; Jennings, already a heroin addict at the time, ended up staying at Ashley’s apartment for awhile. While there is no discernible direct influence of their music on his, a couple of Ashley’s better-known ONCE festival pieces were, in fact, explicitly repetitive and extremely restricted in their materials. One was She Was a Visitor, the finale of his opera That Morning Thing (1967), in which the narrator repeats the title phrase over and over as the other performers extend the phonemes of the phrase into a sibilant continuum, sustaining each sound for one full breath. This piece seems to me incontrovertibly minimalist.

A conceptually similar piece called Fancy Free (1969) was written for the stuttering voice of Alvin Lucier, who was supposed to read the text over and over as four cassette recorder operators recorded his speech and played back fragments of it. There is an obvious conceptual similarity here to Lucier’s own piece I Am Sitting in a Room, also based on a repeating text. And it is worth re-emphasizing that Tom Johnson’s first use of the word minimal to describe music (in the Village Voice of March 30, 1972) was applied to music not by the composers we now think of as minimalist, but to works of Alvin Lucier and Mary Lucier.

Almost from the beginning, Ashley’s music involved the setting up of certain chunks of time, the sounds to fill them being decided upon later, but this determination was often made via group collaboration. Within the conceptualist milieu of the ONCE festivals, what was most distinctive about Ashley was that he seemed less interested in sonic patterns than in the social situation of the performance. Far from being interested in “sound in the Morton Feldman sense,” many of his early pieces allow the performers to choose the sounds, and show an almost total lack of interest on Ashley’s part as to what the sounds are. The combination of this attitude, along with his use of uniform time units and repetition, sometimes results in what one might call a “randomized minimalism,” in which the gambit of sounds within a piece is closely circumscribed, the process might be subtle and gradual, but the sounds might be anything at all.

Ashley’s most famous ONCE composition, The Wolfman (1964), involves singing single notes of 13 seconds each, changing within each breath one aspect of the sound (either pitch, loudness, vowel, or closure). Amplified up to maximum feedback, the piece may have a maximalist noise component, but as experienced by the performer it is as tightly disciplined and as limited in its possibilities as many early minimalist classics. in memoriam…CRAZY HORSE (symphony) (1961-2) is structured as a series of regular pulses in which the players are supposed to sustain a so-called “reference sonority,” changing some aspect of it as certain symbols come up in the circular performance chart.

A 1966 recording of the work on the Advance label [click for audio] was chaotically noisy, yet gradual in its transformations. However, in 2007 the Ensemble MAE in Holland produced a recording of a very similar piece in the same series, in memoriam… ESTEBAN GOMEZ (quartet), using a drone with a consonant major third as their reference sonority. This recording sounds classically minimalist, and in fact rather similar to James Tenney’s Critical Band, which I think of as really hard-core minimalism. In short, there is nothing in the description of these pieces that precludes a minimalist-sounding realization. This comparison is our first hint today that, as dissonant and modernist as they seemed in the original performances, some of Ashley’s early ONCE festival works were minimalist in concept, and could be made to sound classically minimalist merely by a change in the materials chosen by the performers.

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The second phase of Ashley’s music begins in 1979 with the first of his mature operas, Perfect Lives. Almost all of Ashley’s operas have certain minimalist aspects, usually limitations of tempo, rhythmic structure, or harmony, and it would be easy to cherry-pick passages that sound minimalist or at least repetitive. For instance, in the five operas Perfect Lives, Improvement, Atalanta, eL/Aficionado, and Now Eleanor’s Idea, the tempo is always 72 beats per minute throughout. The tempo in the remaining opera of this group, Foreign Experiences, is 90 beats per minute. The duration of each opera is set in advance. Each of the seven scenes of Perfect Lives was intended to be 24 minutes and 40 seconds, which in 1979 was the legal minimum length of a half-hour television show, allowing for commercials. Originally, each of the four operas of the tetralogy Now Eleanor’s Idea was supposed to be 6,336 beats long, which is 88 minutes (4 acts at 22 minutes each) at a tempo of 72 beats per minute. (eL/Aficionado was exempted from that requirement because it was not originally composed as part of the tetralogy, and its tempo is not continuously articulated.) I’m sure there’s probably someone who knows how many beats there are in the score of Wozzeck or Der Rosenkavalier, but the fact that the number of beats in some of Ashley’s operas is easily calculated speaks volumes about his working methods.

Each scene of Perfect Lives follows a single rhythmic template throughout. The first episode, “The Park,” has a 13-beat meter, “The Supermarket” five beats, “The Bank” nine, and so on. In quite a few passages this results in a repetitive ostinato running through a scene for several minutes at a time. In addition to the rhythmic units, harmonies are also often structured repetitively. Atalanta, a monumental work, is performed entirely over a progression of six chords: Bb, Ab, G, C7, Eb, Bb. This is not always apparent because of the improvisatory latitude granted the performers, but the chord changes theoretically come at regular intervals. Harmonically, eL/Aficionado is based entirely on a repeating series of 16 chords, in four groups of four, each group unified by a single scale:

In the scenes of the opera that are titled “My Brother Called” (scenes 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, and 10), the chord changes every 18 beats, or every 15 seconds, and one line of text is sung over that chord. In addition, while the singer Thomas Buckner improvises his lines within the scale, the initial note of each phrase is determined by a repeating sequence, given in half-notes above. The first scene of Dust (1998) has simple chords repeating in an isorhythm of 1, 2, 3, 5, 3, 2, 1 lines, the rhythm repeated over and over again.

One of Ashley’s most conceptually minimalist works is the opera Celestial Excursions. Although it’s also one of his most musically elaborate works, the entire piece uses only the C-major scale. Each scene is based a certain chord, with different reciting tones for the singers, and the scenes differ harmonically by having a different note in the bass – and that note is never C, so there’s never a feeling of resting on the tonic. This is an overall structure very similar to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

Of course, what keeps people from thinking of these pieces as minimalist is most obviously the text. Were we to listen to them without the text, long passages might take on a minimalist aura, but the speaking of a text over a static background tends to preclude any impression of minimalism. Text tends to be linear and unidirectional. We listen to hear what will be said next. There are clearly minimalist text pieces, by Jackson Mac Low and others, but they tend to be restricted to few words, with much repetition and a Gertrude Stein-ish disregard for syntax. Ashley’s opera texts are not of this nature; indeed they tend to be incredibly verbose and extended, with long stories.

However, Ashley’s idea of opera, to the extent we’re inclined to acquiesce to it, is that speech is music, and that we do not listen to it for meaning alone. Several operas deal with the tendency of profanity – that is, intentionally meaningless words – to slow down thought, and as he asks rhetorically in Atalanta, “Who could speak if every word had meaning?” The texts are filled with gentle nonsequiturs and incomplete word-pictures. Each phrase means something, but the totality of what the text means is more than usually in doubt. In other words, Ashley’s texts are narrative in appearance, but he uses a variety of devices to render their narrativity ambiguous. While he denies that his writing is stream-of-consciousness, he also denies that an opera can have a plot. Ashley’s operas do possess background plots, but those plots are rarely inferable from the text of the opera; they are best read in the liner notes. As he has written,

At the opera I am transported to a place and time where there is no disorder. There is disorder on stage, and it is called melodrama. We don’t believe it. This is important: that we don’t believe it. We do believe… what happens in the movies…. Therefore, opera can have no plot. It is foolish to argue that opera – any opera – can have a plot; that is, that the “characters” and their apparent “actions” and the apparent “consequences” are related in any way. Opera can be story-telling only. (“The Future of Music,” unpublished typescript delivered April 15,2000, p. 9)

This may not convince the dubious that Ashley’s words are simply melody, though he often speaks as though he believes that’s the case. At least one can say that the time element in Ashley’s texts is frequently unimportant, that one statement does not lead to another, nor one episode need to be previous to another episode for the sake of understanding. Ashley’s words, frequently nonlinear and read in his own calmly inflected voice, or chanted on or around one note, can be heard in themselves as a kind of randomized minimalism. We will come to a perhaps more convincing example shortly.

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However, when we move to the most recent phase of Ashley’s music, the parallels to minimalism become more and more striking. As modernism moved, from its heyday in the 1950s or ‘60s, to minimalism and the New Tonality, so did Ashley’s music move from often maximum confusion and chaos to more meditative continua. This has been especially true of his non-operatic works, starting from 1988 on with his flute concerto Superior Seven. Ashley’s late instrumental works are in a style that I would called randomized postminimalism. That is, the choice of pitches is limited, the tonality usually clear, the rhythm based in a steady pulse, but within the available gamut the note-to-note choices are determined by random or quasi-random procedures. In his piano piece Van Cao’s Meditation and the ensemble piece for Relache Outcome Inevitable, the order of notes was determined by a systematic document Ashley had been using in the early 1960s for the ONCE festival pieces, what he calls an “encyclopedia of proportions and combinations” of the numbers 1 through 5. Although he’s used it for many pieces, the document mysteriously disappeared about the time I came to write the book on him, and I’ve never been able to take a look at it – kind of a strange thing given how neat and well organized most of Ashley’s files are.

Van Cao’s Meditation (1992) was inspired by a photo of Van Cao, the composer of the Vietnamese national anthem, sitting at what was supposedly one of only two pianos in the country at the time. The music is made up entirely of 8th-notes on the pitches Bb, C, Db, Eb, and Fb, with an occasional fermata-laden cadence on some octave A-flats:

Texturally and tonally the piece is minimalist in the extreme, but the ordering of pitches is completely inscrutable.

Outcome Inevitable (1991), for the Relache ensemble, is grounded in an insistent repeating middle C in the bass. The rhythmic structure is determined by repeating rhythms tapped out softly on a bass drum in odd groupings. The series of changing rhythms outlines a seven-part structure, each part of which features a solo by a different instrument. The melodies all consist merely of rising scales interrupted by occasional leaps (or steps) downward to keep the line within a fairly narrow range:

(Audio example here.) Each phrase consists of a small random number of 16th-notes (up to 6) leading to a sustained note. Lasting 16 minutes, the piece is a lovely evocation of timelessness, drawn from a clear and endlessly elaborated idea, but quite unpredictable in its details.

In When Famous Last Words Fail You (1997), written for singer Thomas Buckner to sing with the American Composers Orchestra, the entire orchestra plays only the pitch A in various octaves; the conductor does not beat time, but merely controls volume, as the instruments are cued by key words in the singer’s text. Unwilling to do this at the premiere, Dennis Russell Davies did not rehearse the piece well, and gave what Ashley considered a miserable and misleading performance. The piece has never been heard as it was intended, but surely an orchestra piece using only one pitch merits some mention in a history of minimalism.

As for the operatic works, in 1998 Ashley began devising strategies to sabotage the narrativity of his own texts. One of these is the application of more than one text at a time. The stories in Dust (1998) are chanted by each soloist above four other lines chanted by the other singers. Celestial Excursions uses similar techniques, and also includes a scene in which two songs are heard at once, one a country-and-western love song and the other a Renaissance sonnet. In his current opera Quicksand, Ashley is experimenting with a technique of reading the line while passing quickly past the microphone, so that each phrase takes on the envelope of a quick motion, a kind of Doppler effect; in the excerpt I heard performed live, the meaning sometimes became indistinguishable. One of the most striking examples of textual sabotage is the short opera Your Money My Life Goodbye (1998), one of Ashley’s most minimalist works. (Please listen to the first excerpt before reading the following description.)

The musical accompaniment is a series of pulsing A-flat major triads at a pulse of 216 per minute. The text comprises 892 lines of seven syllables each, each line divided 3+2+2, with no line hyphenated over to the next:

Each vocal line is meant to be read in a rhythm that parallels that of the title, “Your money, my life, good-bye.” (The opera Concrete will use a similar verbal isorhythm.) There are 15 pulsing chords per vocal line; I think no one would ever notice this simply listening to the piece, but if, starting from the first note, you conduct the pulsing chords in 15/8 (that is, five groups of three), you can predict the onset of each phrase. Since I have realized this, I have found the text much more difficult to understand – I fall into the habit of listening to it as merely phoneme-inflected rhythm. (Now listen to the first excerpt again.)

Your Money My Life Goodbye does have a plot about a spy married to a nefarious woman financier who brings down large corporations a la Bernie Madoff – and this a full decade before Madoff became a synonym for fraud. But if you listen to the text in seven-syllable increments, it can virtually cease to be heard as text and sound like a repeating rhythm, like those optical illusions that can be seen either as a vase or as two faces. The effect illustrates perhaps better than anything in Ashley’s output his idea of speech being musical in and of itself. Towards the end of the work, in another complication, a bass ostinato starts grouping the chords into a syncopated 6/4 meter. Thus the text marks off chords in groupings of 15, and the ostinato creates a harmonic rhythm of 24 chords, for a quite complex but minimalistically steady five-against-eight cross-rhythm. I think we may have to call Your Money My Life Goodbye the most hard-core minimalist opera since Einstein on the Beach.

In addition, Ashley’s second recording of Atalanta, made in 2010, twenty-five years after the first recording, shows how far Ashley’s style moved towards minimalism in that quarter-century. The 1985 version is particularly chaotic by Ashley’s standards, though there are passages, such as this one, in which the six repeating chords and the recurring melody are clearly audible. By the 2010 recording, though, improvisation is absent, and the electronic backgrounds engineered by Tom Hamilton are consistent and predictable. In the first scene, “The Etchings,” each chord lasts five minutes. In “Empire,” of which we’ll hear an excerpt here of the first chord going into the second, the music takes more than half an hour to move through the six chords only twice. The second compact disc that contains the series of stories called “Au Pair” (text by Jacqueline Humbert) is entirely on an E-flat chord. Ashley unifies the stories by a motive of two rising half-steps, and each story continues the upward chromatic scale where the previous one leaves off, a very subtle kind of additive process.

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Ashley’s lifelong commitment to both complexity and the drone concept make him an interesting, not-very-minimal-sounding minimalist. Over the decades, the drone concept has remained a constant in his music, while the complexity, if never absent, has gradually become more transparent, a randomization of details rather than an overloading of layers. Ashley’s born-again Feldmanism in later life may have colored his early intentions through 20-20 hindsight, but his relentless pursuit of uneventfulness has eventually turned him into a wary, reluctant, perhaps even unintentional minimalist, but a minimalist nonetheless.

 

I am in receipt, today, of a few copies of pianist Sarah Cahill’s new compact disc on the Other Minds label, A Sweeter Music. It’s a compilation of eight pieces from her project commissioning composers to write music that protests war and urges peace – out just in time for our Nobel-winning president to bomb the hell out of Syria. On it Sarah plays (and speaks) my War Is Just a Racket, on a 1933 speech by General Smedley Butler, along with other pieces by Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, Carl Stone, Phil Kline, Yoko Ono, and the Residents. There’s a lot of sensuously beautiful stuff on this disc; my piece and the Residents’ are the only ones to use text. Sarah does a magnificent job, as always, and will be recording the other ten pieces from the collection at a future date.

 

I’m rather obsessed with bitonality at the moment, and the three composers who are much on my mind and stereo lately – Charles Ives, Kaikhosru Sorabji, and Darius Milhaud – all have a strong bitonal streak in their music, though that’s not as well known about the first two as it is about Milhaud, who wrote a book on bitonality. My wife Nancy gave me a three-octave toy piano for my recent birthday, and as a kind of sketchbook I wrote a suite for it called Surrealities; of the seven movements, two are atonal, one tonal, three bitonal, and one bi-modal (C harmonic minor in one hand, C Lydian in the other). I’m particularly pleased with the sixth movement, “Incommensurate Quantities,” which is a bitonal canon in A and D-flat, the only canon I know of at the interval of a diminished fourth. More to the point, it follows all the traditional contrapuntal rules, resolving every dissonance correctly, and of course contains an episode in the equidistant key of F (Gbb):

You can hear me play it here. Also another bitonal movement “Deep Denial” (A in one hand, C alternating with F# in the other), and the last (tonal) movement “Mistimed Adieu,” which I’m quite happy with.

In my youth Milhaud was one of my favorite composers, and he’s never quit being, though one doesn’t encounter his name much these days, or get opportunities to write about him. When I last visited San Francisco, Richard Friedman reminded me of a wonderful Milhaud piece I remember well from the 1960s, recorded only on vinyl, called A Frenchman in New York, written to go on the flip side of Gershwin’s American in Paris – and the Milhaud is by far the better work. To allow you to assess that judgment, I temporarily upload the recording he gave me here. I hadn’t heard it in thirty-five years, and with the first notes it all came flooding back from the recesses of my memory. Philip Glass has told me that Milhaud is one of his ongoing influences as well.

 

I’m back from the Einstein on the Beach festivities in Amsterdam, and Friday at 3 I’ll be giving a reading from my 4’33” book at the National Academy Museum in New York City. [No, I won’t stand there without saying anything. Ha-ha.]

UPDATE: You can ignore the following. Frank Oteri wants to put my Einstein analysis on New Music Box, where it will reach a wider audience. Going commercial, at whatever modest level, is always better than going academic when you have the chance, if you can do so without compromises. So I’ve pulled the article off my website, and will announce when it’s on NMBx.

As for my paper on Einstein, I decided for now not to blog it, but to put it up on my web site, so you’ll find “Intuition and Algorithm in Einstein on the Beach” there. I’ve seen a lot of scholars post scholarly articles on their web sites, and it strikes me that it carries just a touch more gravitas than doing it on one’s blog. It would be nice to have it in a journal somewhere and be an official Phil Glass scholar, but it’s kind of an empty credential to play off against the advantage of people finding it easily on Google. As I’ve said before, I’m all for peer-review in principle, but it’s kind of a double-edged sword. The purpose of peer review is to make everyone conform, meaning 1. making everyone conform to the facts, which is great, and I’m happy to be fact-checked and have typos caught; and 2. making everyone conform to the conventions of academic writing, which can be deadly awful. Depending what “peers” review me (and while thousands of people write as well as or better than I do, only a handful of them are musicologists), I am likely to be told not to be so breezy, casual, and journalistic, and that I ought to be more interpretive, and properly mention Deleuze, and throw in some critical theory, and all that crap. I really think that after one’s published a certain number of books from academic presses (let’s just say five, for the sake of argument) one should get a permanent free pass from peer-review, and have one’s writings accepted verbatim thereafter. But, that’s what the internet’s for, right? The masses will, in time, catch my miscalculations and typos. I can’t quite believe that no one else has yet compared the two Dances in Einstein, but I couldn’t find it elsewhere, and perhaps someone will bring such a case to my attention. If not, now it’s been done.

UPDATE: And I’ve been remiss in not thanking Juhani Nuorvala for the nice Tom Johnson quote, which I used prominently.