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Here’s a MIDI version of a microtonal rag I just wrote for pianist Aron Kallay, a fantastic West Coast player who’s specializing in microtonal MIDI piano performance. It’s the second (and shorter) movement of a piece called Every Something Is an Echo of Nothing – the title, as some of you will recall, is a quotation from Cage’s Silence. Aron will premiere it next summer – I tend to complete my commissions pretty early. And I made it virtuosic because he’s got the chops, but it is humanly playable. Think of the piece next time someone claims that new (or microtonal) music is an elitist enterprise.

I have been so deleriously busy in the last several months that I am having a harder time transitioning into summer than usual. I feel like a puppet whose strings have suddenly been cut. I am so accustomed to being driven by exigencies that the self-management of free time comes as an unfamiliar shock.

I have also been a little discouraged by changes in this blog resulting from the reformatting. Journal-meister McLennan has managed to make the “Older Posts” button at the bottom of the main page start working, but, unlike in the older format, I (and you) can no longer look up old posts by title, only by month, and by searching for unusual words. Some of my longer posts have had their line formatting entirely screwed up, making them difficult to read. Something similar happened years ago with our first platform conversion, and, in my free time, I painstakingly went through and reformatted a few hundred old posts to read smoothly again. (A particular issue is changing slanted quotation marks to vertical ones, the former apparently unreadable by some softwares.) That was 900 posts ago; I can’t possibly go through and redo all the injured ones now. I used to write my longer posts in Word and then paste them into the blog software. This, it turns out, was a mistake. I do think I’ve done some of my best writing ever in this blog, and I’m now facing the potential ephemerality of the venue. In partial amelioration, urged on by the usual Scorpionic conflict about being dependent on others, I’ve started a special page on my web site as an archive for my longer blog essays, where they can be looked up by title and where I can keep better control of them. I’m trying to retain the comments as well, and have figured out some “find and replace” tricks to make the reformatting less onerous.

In addition, my recent activities have not been very bloggable. I’ve been involved with the Charles Ives Society and the Society for Minimalist Music, and while interesting things are going on, I am not authorized to make them public. My laptop died the last weekend of the semester (no information lost, fortunately), and I am in the agonizing process of trying to reintegrate all of my music software on a new computer. Much tech support is involved. In short, my life revolves around technology, and I am in a period of resenting that changes in that technology get imposed on me, and that, for whatever reasons, such changes are not always improvements. Sibelius 6, for instance, seems more cumbersome than Sibelius 2 was. I can accept the decrees of the gods with some patience; I have less for the decrees of the super-nerds who, willy-nilly, redesign the tools of my trade.

Thanks to the good music faculty of Central Michigan University, I have a number of new recordings of my music up on my web site:

• Olana for vibraphone,
• New World Coming for bassoon and trio, and
• Minute Symphony (kind of a joke piece, a symphony in 80 seconds) for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello.

This was kindly intentional on composer Jay Batzner’s part; he programmed pieces that weren’t on my web site. Also, Contemporaneous’s recording of my string quartet

• Concord Spiral

is now available, and with Pianoteq I’ve made a nice MIDI realization of my piece for piano four hands Implausible Sketches (2006), which I think is one of my best works, and which has yet to be premiered. The four movements are here:

• 1. The Desert’s Too-Zen Song
• 2. The Goodbye Fugue
• 3. Frigid Azure
• 4. Don’t Touch My Pint

The first movement in particular, “The Desert’s Too-Zen Song,” is what I think of as quintessential Gannianism. Altogether, it’s about 55 minutes of material not available before. Andrew Spencer plays Olana, MaryBeth Minnis plays the bassoon solo in New World Coming. I always thought bassoonists would pick up on the latter, as a rare jaunty chamber work for bassoon with small ensemble, but that hasn’t happened either. Almost all of my works are now publicly available in audio, with the major exceptions of my opera The Watermelon Cargo, my string quartet Hudson Spiral, and my theater piece Scenario (coming up this summer, I hope), and a few early works.

I have now had a string quartet performed. The premiere recording of The Light Summer Land is up here and the performers are Ethan Wood and Megumi Stohs, violins; Sarah Darling, viola; and Josh Packard, cello. I am indebted to my composer friend Carson Cooman for arranging the performance. It went very well, though it almost didn’t. Luckily my composer friend Scott Wheeler came by for the dress rehearsal. Scott is not only a very good composer of operas and chamber music (he’s one of the ones who years ago insisted I refer to his music as “Midtown” rather than “Uptown”), but he’s worked with the Dinosaur Annex ensemble for 30 years as conductor and administrator. He knows how to talk to performers, and he also knows, as I don’t much, how players in an ensemble actually hear and interpret what a composer says to them. At the rehearsal, after a complete runthrough of the piece (I have a good memory for details of my pieces, and don’t like to stop an ensemble in flight), I went through section by section and marked things that I wanted to sound differently. When I finished, Scott came up and made more incisive and general comments about vibrato and dynamics. At dinner he explained to me:

“Performers like to be engaged on the level they understand. String players spend all their time in lessons obsessing over minutiae of vibrato and phrasing in traditional repertoire. When they play Brahms and Mozart, they feel ownership of their own performances, but when they come to our music, they leave responsibility to the composer, and if it sounds bad, it’s the composer’s fault. If you can get them to experiment with different levels of vibrato and dynamics and phrasing, they’ll take their own responsibility for making the music beautiful.” 

It seemed like good advice on the face of it, involving things I’d never thought of. I have a lot of experience with percussionists and pianists, not much with string players, and none, until now, with string quartets. And the proof was that the performance was 250% better than the rehearsal runthrough had been two hours earlier. And so I pass it along. 

I also had once again an experience I’ve had before, of the performers telling me afterward, “Oh, now I understand the piece.” Why didn’t they understand it before? Because I don’t write music of crescendos and decrescendos and climaxes. I generally write flat-dynamic, impassive music of languid repetitions, nonsequiturs, brooding stillness. Very few string players ever play music by Satie, Virgil Thomson, Cage, Brian Eno, Feldman, John Luther Adams. They go their entire lives making dramatic crescendos followed by ritardandos, big up-and-down emotional curves. Several months ago I heard a group of excellent student players, who doubtless could have played the hell out of Brahms, make a perfectly lifeless hash of the Cage String Quartet. Clearly no one knew enough to coach them as to what the surface of the piece should sound like, limpid and radiant. Classical players: meet postclassical music. It’s different. Some of its paradigms are electronic or mechanical, and it doesn’t always breathe or climax. Luckily, Scott, who writes music very different from mine but who was close to Virgil Thomson (and who arranged an introduction for me to him just before the great man died), is catholic enough in his tastes that he looked at my score and intuited exactly what I was trying to do – and got that across to the players, who responded beautifully. 

I took some risks in the piece, and some of them paid off better than I expected. I think there are a few continuity problems in the first half, which I’ve got plans to revise, but it was one of those pieces I needed to try out and hear live first. I’ve wandered into a style of minimalist collage, with adjacent process-panels, so to speak, whose logic of presentation may not be apparent in the short run. I think it worked out perfectly for me in Kierkegaard, Walking, but there are a few small missteps here, easily correctible, I think. 

Of course, I’ve learned that expressing modesty is also a risk. In my Cage book I rather gallantly, I thought, attributed any originality in the book to the army of Cage researchers whose work I was bringing together into one narrative. This netted me a few reviews along the lines of “Nothing new to say, but at least he admits it.” (Actually, I know very well that the sources I wove together in that book were so farflung and so many of them from such obscure journals, that you would have to be a rabid Cage researcher yourself not to encounter several ideas in that book for the first time. One idiot at Amazon stated that if you’ve read Silence, you’ll find nothing new in my book on 4’33” – even though 4’33” is mentioned exactly once in Silence.) Modesty used to elicit compensatory compliments. Nowadays it encourages the small-minded to echo one’s low self-estimation. Nevertheless, justified modesty is a habit I prefer not to discard.

My article “Reconstructing November,” detailing the process of coming up with a performance score for Dennis Johnson’s epic 1959 piano piece, has just appeared in the journal American Music. I prefer not to repost it on the blog; it contains hardly any more information than I’ve already posted here, here, here, here, and here. It’s available through JSTOR, or will be soon, I guess, for those who have access to that through their schools. This issue of American Music, by the way, is chock full of experimentalism: aside from myself, Maria Cizmic has an article on Cowell’s under-explored piece The Banshee, Zachary Lyman interviews Johnny Reinhard about his controversial completion of the Ives Universe Symphony, David Nicholls’s witty article on the Ultramodernists’ influence on Cage (which I heard him deliver ten years ago) finally appears, and there’s even a review of my Cage book by Branden Joseph, author of a wonderful Tony Conrad book, and a review by Brett Boutwell of John Brackett’s John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression – which quotes me! Whew. 

Listen to this eleven-minute excerpt, and don’t bother clicking unless you’ll commit to the whole thing. It’s the ending of David First’s Pipeline Witness Apologies to Dennis, and I hope the mp3 format doesn’t dumb it down too much. First’s new three-disc set Privacy Issues, on Phill Niblock’s XI label, is the greatest new recording I’ve heard in awhile, and I’ve been relistening to it every few days. It’s all drone-based works from the last 14 years. David’s work is sometimes (amazingly) solo and sometimes ensemble; I picked an ensemble piece here thinking it might have a little more profile over computer speakers, but he can make just as much noise by himself. It’s all music gradually going in and out of tune. You could say that Niblock’s music is the same, and it is, but while Niblock’s music is slow and marvelous and creeps up on you unawares if you have the patience, David’s is considerably more dramatic and high energy. You don’t have to wait for it, it’ll come get you. He’s always been really interested in the liminal area between consonance and dissonance, and the amazing places in his music are those in which you suddenly realize where the music’s going, and you can’t believe it’s about to get there – buzzy and jangling for a long time, but then it starts to slide into tune and this gloriously consonant sonority emerges that you couldn’t imagine was in there. It really feel symphonic to me, like a symphony stripped down to just its harmony, and blurred; Carl Nielsen comes to mind, because Nielsen has these great harmonic clashes in which some major key wins out in the end, and it does in First’s music too, just far more gradually. I wore out three laptops trying to make First famous via the Village Voice, and I’m thrilled that after a long silence he’s got this incredible CD set out, every piece a knockout. I wish I could write music like this, but I can’t. I tried. I just can’t make anything work without a melody to it, but some of First’s passages almost sound like you could analyze them with Roman numerals, except for the buzzy parts in-between. If I were a young composer today this would be my Stockhausen, except that First is already older than Stockhausen was when I was a teenager. In a sane world, grad schools would be hosting conferences on this music, but everything’s so conservative these days that it’s more fringe now than it was 20 years ago. 

There were so many sides to Art Jarvinen that I can’t possibly represent most of them here, but I offer several drops from his mercurial musical output, some of them commercially unavailable, others on extremely obscure labels:

Egyptian Two-Step – the first piece I heard, and which made me sit up and take notice with its aerosol spray cans as percussion, performed by the E.A.R. Unit

Breaking the Chink – performed by Icebreaker

from Sgt. Pecker, his Beatles parody:

Taller than Jesus
Man, My Guitar Playing Really Reeks
Where Can I Bury My Shark?
9 Revolutions per Minute

Endless Bummer – with Miroslav Tadik: third track, titled Part 1

25 Lines for 25 Quires – listen closely to the lyrics

The Queen of Spain – third movement, harpsichords and drums, based on Scarlatti

Serious Immobilities – an excerpt from his theme and variations on Satie’s Vexations, the whole thing lasting 24 hours

I’ve always had a fascination with canons, even long before I wrote a book about a composer (Nancarrow) whose major works were mostly canons. In the late 1980s, when I was in the habit of lecturing on the history of Chicago’s new-music scene at the School of the Art Institute and other places, I ran across, in a Chicago used bookstore, a little book called Canonical Studies, by Bernhard Ziehn (1845-1912, pictured). I recognized the name. Ziehn was one of two German composer-theorists who were living in Chicago when Ferruccio Busoni toured through. Busoni was trying to solve the puzzle of how the four fugue subjects
fit together in the unfinished fugue from Bach’s The Art of Fugue, and Ziehn solved it for him, enabling Busoni to write his Fantasia Contrappuntistica, which has long been one of my very favorite works in the world. His tour over, Busoni wrote an article about Ziehn and his colleague Wilhelm Middelschulte, titled “The Gothics of Chicago,” by which term he meant that they were masters and fanatics in the ancient art of counterpoint. Ziehn and Middelschulte taught a lot of the early Chicago composers, including John J. Becker (one of the “American Five”), whose widow I knew in Evanston. So I had multiple connections to Ziehn, and snapped the book up at once.

All but forgotten today (there’s a brief entry about him on German Wikipedia, none in the English one, and the second reference that came up on Google was a page of my own), Ziehn was ahead of his time. Books he published in the 1880s anticipated and classified chords (such as those based on the whole-tone scale) that the impressionists and Schoenberg would use considerably later. In the intro to Canonical Studies, Ziehn writes,

A canon is by definition strict. Our greatest authorities assert “strict” canons can be carried out in the Octave of Prime only. The examples given in this book demonstrate that real canons are possible in any interval…

And he gives examples of chord progressions that modulate to every possible interval away from the tonic, showing how one can continue repeating those progressions in ever-moving transposition to write canons not based on the octave or unison.

I was intrigued, and in 1987 wrote what I call a “spiral canon” as the third movement of my violin piece Cyclic Aphorisms, a canon at the major second. Then, more ambitiously, in 1990 I wrote Chicago Spiral, a nine-part triple canon also at the major 2nd, putting a postminimalist spin on Ziehn’s idea. A canon is easy to perceive as such at the unison, octave, or even fifth; it’s more
challenging at a more distantly related interval. A canon is also easier to process aurally if the beat-interval of rhythmic imitation is something symmetrical like 4 or 8 beats, more difficult if it’s 13 or 31. One thing I’ve realized is central to my music is that I love to fuse the simple with the incommensurable, making the listener think it ought to be easy to figure out what’s going on, but keeping it just out of reach. My Ziehn-inspired spiral canons ought to be simple to figure out by ear – they’re only canons, after all – but the complexity of the imitation intervals, both rhythm and pitch, keep the ear, I think, from ever quite settling into them. I also use the technique as kind of a postminimalist gradual-texture-metamorphosis generator, which is a little beyond what old Ziehn had in mind, I imagine. Paradoxically, the longer the rhythmic interval of imitation, the less gradual the changes can be made.

And now in recent months I’ve written two more such canons, Hudson Spiral and Concord Spiral, both for string quartet. Along with the middle section of my orchestra piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things from this Once So Promising World, I’ve produced five spiral canons altogether, at the following rhythmic and pitch intervals:

Cyclic Aphorism 3: 5 beats, major 2nd ascending
Chicago Spiral: 7 beats, major 2nd descending
Disappearance: 17 beats, minor 3rd descending
Hudson Spiral: 83 beats, major 6th ascending
Concord Spiral: 19 beats, minor 7th descending

The major 6th and minor 7th are the optimal intervals for a string quartet canon; using a major 6th, the cello can play down to its low E-flat (echoed by the viola’s low C string and second violin’s low A), and the first violin can play down to the F# above middle C, whereas with the 7th the cello can descend to D and the first violin only to A-flat in the treble clef. Concord Spiral generated some nice passages of what sounds like tonal Webern:

The scores are on my web site if you’re interested, and no performances are yet forthcoming. Spiral canons and Snake Dances are the two personal genres I feel I’ve invented for myself, along with my more generic tuning studies and Disklavier studies. And I hope Ziehn would have been happy to know that, 98 years after his death, his idea is still out there making the rounds.

On our recent trip to Concord, we took a side trip to Salem, where my friends Jim Dalton and Maggi Smith-Dalton, microtonal composers and early-American-music experts, took me to the grave of Jones Very (1813-1880), the temporarily-mad Emerson poet protégé whose ecstatic sonnets I set to music in my Transcendental Sonnets. (Jim’s an isolated, Johnstonian just-intonationist in the officially 72-tet Boston crowd.) Very’s tomb is in the Old South Cemetery, founded in 1689, and quite visible from a fairly busy street. Just one member in a family grave, like Thoreau and Kierkegaard, but I was thrilled to track down old Jones at last: