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A Clementi Afterthought

One more word about Clementi, and as example a piece I bring into many classes. I was always a collector of canons, even before I discovered Nancarrow, and Clementi was something of a fanatic about them. (Sometimes to his detriment; the otherwise magisterial Op. 40 No. 1 Sonata is a little marred by its canonic scherzo, which doesn’t bear enough weight for the rest of the piece.) There are eight canons in his massive, almost-five-hour piano opus Gradus ad Parnassum, and two of them are inversion canons. It seems to me that an effective inversion canon, in a tonal idiom, is one of the hardest things you can write, and this one, the more effective of Clementi’s two, I find remarkably charming for the genre:

You can hear the canonÂ hereÂ in a recording by DaniÃ¨le Laval. Of course in E major he has to reflect the lower voice around F#, because the major scale (as a glance at the keyboard will show, noting D’s position among the white keys) is symmetrical around the second scale degree. Debussy tweaked fun at Gradus ad Parnassum in his Children’s Corner, and Charles Rosen blasts the collection as a marathon of mechanical soullessness. He’s almost 100 percent wrong. They’re all teaching pieces on some level, but included are dozens of lovely, memorable vignettes, variously diverging toward early Romantic harmony and warm neo-Baroque counterpoint.Â

I’ve always gotten a kick out of keeping a secondary musicological specialty besides contemporary American music, sort of as a hobby and to keep new music in perspective. My period used to be medieval, which I studied in grad school with Theodore Karp, one of the leading figures in the field. But the last time I taught medieval, the textbook (by Jeremy Yudkin, the only enjoyably readable medieval music text) contradicted half of what I said, and I realized that that field changes too fast for me to keep track of – pieces are now attributed to different composers than was true when I was in grad school, and even the technical terminology has changed. So several years ago I switched to Classical Era as a secondary specialty, though I only do the instrumental music; most 18th-century opera bores me to tears. I enjoy taking students through the Haydn symphonies because they’re so incredibly varied and numerous, though it’s a rare student who shares my enthusiasm for Haydn. And I try to show them that the period was a lot funkier than it gets credit for, by playing Albrechtsberger’s concertos for jew’s harp, Michele Corrette’s Combat Naval with its forearm clusters on the harpsichord, and music in odd meters like this fugue in 5/8 by Beethoven’s childhood friend Antonin Reicha:

But I bring up Clementi’s inversion canon even in composition lessons as an example of grace achieved under intense compositional restrictions.

Musically At Home in the Land of Fountains and BBQ

Wow – I’ve hiked Arches, I’ve been hit by an 18-wheeler in Atoka, Oklahoma, I’ve ordered a steak in Lincoln, Nebraska, I’ve been photographed in a cowboy hat in the Badlands, I’ve scoured the Little Bighorn battlefield, and the Memphis pyramid and St. Louis arch are overly familiar landmarks for me, but somehow in all my travels across this country I seem to have missed Kansas City – postminimalism capitol of the world – until this week. I was down there lecturing at the conservatory at UMKC (Mikel Rouse, alumnus) and hearing the newEar ensemble play my Chicago Spiral, and most of all scoping out the place with my co-director David McIntire for next year’s minimalism conference. What a clean, affluent looking city! Fountain city of America, boasting more big fountains than any world city beside Rome, and they were everywhere. I had no idea there was an art museum as impressive as the Kemper between Philadelphia and California south of Chicago. But what excited me most was the enthusiasm for minimalism and its offshoots at UMKC, and the expert grad-student/faculty crew David has assembled to get things rolling.

We’ve got grad student Jedd Schneider, singer and musicologist, who’s written an analytical paper on M.C. Maguire’s A Short History of Lounge, and whose contribution to the conference will be a paper on the operas of Michael Gordon. We’ve got Scott Unrein, the Harold Budd of the midwest, who keeps coming up with minimalist CDs I didn’t know existed. We’ve got pianist Andy Lee, who’s playing music by Bill Duckworth. We’ve got musicologist Andrew Granade, who’s writing a book on how Harry Partch’s hobo years, and the image of the hobo in American culture, influenced Partch’s music. Most amazing of all, the UMKC conservatory has a brand-new dean, conductor Peter Witte (only three weeks on the job), who reads my blog (hi, Peter!) and who knew about this conference even before he applied for the job, and who’s fully committed to it. What a cast. And David and I are such Virgil Thomson freaks (he’s promised to show me the great man’s grave an hour north of KC) that we joked all week about how we were going to slip a panel about Virgil onto the program.

I also met amazing electronic composer/motorcycle enthusiast Paul Rudy, whom students had raved about to me, and who shares my penchant for native American spirituality. Paul makes incredibly beautiful music from musical tones and environmental sounds of widely varying recognizability, and I’ve uploaded his CD-length work In lake’ch* (Mayan for “I am another yourself”) to PostClassic Radio. Paul and I devoutly agreed that there’s no line between art and entertainment, and that all good art is entertaining – though he holds the theory, which impressed me, that art = entertainment + ambiguity; in other words, if it’s completely unambiguous, it’s merely entertainment, but the more ambiguity you add in, the more the listener has to mentally participate to parse what’s going on, the more it becomes art. I like it.Â

And so now I’m so charged up that it kills me that the conference is still a year away. We’re featuring Charlemagne Palestine, Tom Johnson, my old friend Robert Carl (keynote speaker, having freshly completed a book on In C), and Mikel Rouse. I spend a lot of time feeling like my view of music is a minority within a minority within a minority, but some of my gigs out there in the heartland lately have made me think that, actually, much of America and I are right in sync, and it’s only the dying Northeast that’s nostalgically gazing into the past. We talked a lot all week about how, if you’re a composer who made out like a bandit in the world of orchestral modernism, then of course you cling to modernism with all your might. But if you didn’t really make it in that world – and a lot of those composers ended up out west in KC and other less visible places – you just shrug, move on, and stay abreast of the times. As Paul Rudy said, “We’re going through a big paradigm shift, and I want to be on the front end of that shift, not the back end.” Amen to that. Still, also at UMKC are orchestral star Chen Yi and high-tech composer Jim Mobberley, whom David credits with for department’s incredibly open-minded aesthetic attitudes. There was also independent KC composer Brad Fowler (hi Brad!), whose music I haven’t heard yet, but look forward to. Suffice it to say that for a few days I was surrounded by simpatico aesthetic allies, a situation I could never get here in the Hudson Valley. I felt more at home than I have in years. This minimalism conference is going to be an incredible trip.

*By the way, I’ve also been adding other new music to PostClassic Radio lately by Joseph Pehrson, Stephen Scott’s Bowed Piano Ensemble, Rodney Sharman, Carl Stone, the Rara Avis Duo, Mark Hagerty, Guy Klucevsek, Cynthia Folio, James Tenney, andÂ Bernard Gann. If you haven’t listened lately, lots o’ new content.

A Chord Sequence You’ve Never Heard

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one of the thrills of composing microtonally is the ability toÂ write logical chord progressions and feel virtually certain that no one has ever heard them before. When I was young harmony was a nightmare for me, and for good reason: I’d been taught to use pitch sets like everyone else, which were not conducive to good voice-leading or subtle nuance. Circa 1983 I decided to break a well-trained taboo and go back to triads and sevenths chords, on the grounds that it was insane to deny myself musical materials that had worked so effectively for centuries: like a playwright trying to excise overly familiar human emotions, or common words. I just decided harmony wasn’t going to be a point of innovation for me. This is what other composers seem to hate most about my music; a comment I’ve gotten frequently, with an undercurrent of disapproval, is, “I’ve never heard such complex rhythms with such simple harmonies.” I quit caring. But then when I got into microtones, I became able to squeeze those harmonies up against each other in so many possible permutations that the unlikelihood of any other microtonalist ever having come up with one of my exact progressions before is astronomical. It’s such a relief to write a series of chords that makes sense and actually be surprised by the way they sound, not being reminded of any other music I’ve ever heard. In the chord progression linked above, I couldn’t even tell you what the chords are without looking them up; I just generated a tuning via my usual voice-leading rules, put the notes together, and they came out even better than I expected.Â

Researching 4’33”, I ran across a statement about harmony by Cage which I think bothers me more than anything else he ever said:

I now saw harmony, for which I had never had any natural feeling, as a device to make music impressive, loud and big, in order to enlarge audiences and increase box-office returns. It had been avoided by the Orient, and our earlier Christian society, since they were interested in music not as an aid in the acquisition of money and fame but rather as a handmaiden to pleasure and religion. (“A Composer’s Confessions,” 1948)

Geez, John, just because you had “no ear for harmony,” those of us who do have one aren’t supposed to use it? And if we use harmony to make our music “impressive,” that’s automatically for money and fame rather than pleasure? Isn’t giving pleasure what sometimes tends to bring money and fame? I’ve never read anything else of his that left such a bad taste in my mouth.

Spot On, but a Little Late

[UPDATE BELOW] From David Byrne, as part of his response to Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten onÂ his web site:Â

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least?Â Why would anyone do that?

Having closely observed the behavior of New York’s downtown, avant-garde music scene for a few decades, I can say that this impulse is not limited to academic classical composers. There are many musicians and composers of experimental works who seemingly compete for the title of most obscure and most difficult for the listener, and even record collectors like to play along. In this world, any trace of popularity, however slight, is distasteful and to be avoided at all costs. Should a work become unexpectedly accessible, the artist must then follow the piece with something completely perverse and disgusting, encouraging members of the new, undesired audience to walk away shaking their heads, leaving behind the core of pure and hardy aficionados. This is elitism of a different sort. If one can’t be fÃªted by the handful of patrons at the Met, then one can be just as elite by cultivating an audience equally rarified in the completely opposite direction. Extreme ugliness and unpleasantness becomes the mirror image of extreme luxury and beauty.

This passage suggests that Byrne has not closely observed the behavior of the Downtown scene for a few decades, for had he closely observed it, he would have noticed that a broad swath of Downtown music – not all of it, admittedly – has been devoted to music of great beauty, clarity, and accessibility. (Not that those are the only musical virtues: some of the music included in the above critique I’m probably a fan of.) From a certain angle, clearly the only angle from which Mr. Byrne sees it,Â that multifaceted creature Downtown musicÂ has been encapsulated as the world of John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, and their cohorts, who during the 1980sÂ unfortunately succeeded in obscuring the fact that Downtown was first the world of Steve Reich, Charlemagne Palestine, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Elodie Lauten, William Duckworth, and a few hundred others. Byrne’s eloquent attack is pitch-perfect as far as its appropriate target goes, and still relevant; still, he’s about 25 years late in failing to recognize that hundreds, perhaps thousands of composers had already agreed with him by 1980, and set about doing something about it.Â Quite a bit about it, actually.

UPDATE: I guess I broke one of the main commandments of musical culture: Thou shalt not disagree with a Revered Pop Musician, even when he ventures an amateur opinion on a subject that Thou knowest more about than he does. But it’s so, so easy to write this kind of blanket condemnation of 20th-century music: “Oh, those awful composers, they were elitists, they wrote ugly music on purpose, yada yada yada.” It’s so easy.Â It’sÂ soÂ easy.Â Anyone can join in. Everyone knows the words by heart. And what does it do for composers? Makes us feel bad. What does it do for music lovers? Confirms the bad opinion they already have of new music. Meanwhile, thousands of composers have rebelled against that awful stereotype, and have labored mightily to write music that cares about its audience, that wants to seduce people, that gives generously of the kinds of beauties music can offer. Many of them can’t get their music distributed because the powers in charge still think that the old ugliness is some guaranteed sign of quality. I’ve spent my life trying to convince people that music is out there. What good does it do for someone of David Byrne’s stature to come along and tell people that all the old stereotypes are still in place, and we should avoid modern music because it’s all elitist and ugly? Of course he didn’t say that it all is, but he alluded to no counterexample, painted everyone he touched with the same brush, and segued smoothly from 1957 Zimmermann to the present as though it were all the same crap. He has nothing hopeful here to say about anyone. What good does it do us? Surely someone as insightful and talented as Byrne has something better to do with a blog than shovel more dirt onto those of us composers who’ve spent decades valiantly trying to dig music out of the hole it fell into.

Academy d’Underrated: Ljubica Maric

Musicologist Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic was here from Serbia, researching Cage at the John Cage Trust at Bard. Chair of musicology at Belgrade’s University of the Arts, she’s just published a book of essays on contemporary music in Serbian, and she’s working on two more, in English: a series of interviews with Vinko Globokar, Yugoslavia’s leading emissary to the Darmstadt crowd, and a book on Conlon Nancarrow’s correspondence. Reading her preliminary chapter for the latter taught me a lot I didn’t know about Nancarrow (did anyone know he urged Cage to read Godel, Escher, Bach?). She also taught me a lot about Serbian music, some of which I’ll pass on here.Â

For instance, did you know that a Serbian composer, Vladan Radovanovic, claims to be the first minimalist composer, having started in 1957? (I’m really sorry that I can’t provide Serbian diacritical markings, but my word-processing software isn’t up-to-date enough to handle them, nor am I confident that Arts Journal could represent them.) Dragana runs into him occasionally, and he’s miffed that she hasn’t credited him yet. And here’s national composer Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac, pictured on the country’s 50-dinar note (about a dollar):

(The 100-dinar note boasts national hero Nicola Tesla, who figured out a lot about electricity before Edison did.)

But easily the most fascinating story in Serbian music history is that of Ljubica Maric (1909-2003, pronounced Lyubitsa Marich, with a “ch” like church and accents on both first syllables). She was Serbia’s most important and innovative modernist composer before World War II. Now, how many other countries can claim that their pioneering modernist composer was a woman? Like, zero? Gotta hand it to Serbia. And, to be a chauvinist pig about it for a moment, early photos like the CD cover here show that Maric was just about the most beautiful composer in the history of music, strikingly modern-looking in the 1930s. She lived to be 94, and Dragana used to see her at concerts, but was too shy to speak to her.

Maric studied with Josip Slavenski (1896-1955), who had absorbed Bartok’s ideas about incorporating folk music into symphonic music, and there is a strong Bartokian streak to Maric’s music, though the folk music influence is rarely obvious. She later studied in Prague with Alois Haba of quarter-tone fame, and wrote some quarter-tone music which is unfortunately lost. She got rave reviews for a wind quintet played in Amsterdam in 1933, and spent some time conducting the Prague Radio Symphony. But World War II interrupted her career, and afterward she was inhibited by Yugoslavian communism’s antipathy toward modernism, so that her total output is rather small. She revved up her muse again in the late 1950s, however, and the only works I’ve heard of hers, on the pictured Chandos disc, are from the period 1956-63. The most immediately engaging of them is her Ostinato Super Thema Octoicha (1963), which is based on a repertoire of Byzantine medieval religious songs called the Octoechos; I’ve uploaded an mp3 of it for youÂ here. The Byzantine Piano Concerto and Sounds of Space contain remarkably beautiful and original passages as well; she very much had her own voice.

Teaching at the Stankovic School of Music and then at Belgrade Conservatory, Maric was into Zen and Taoism, and lived a reclusive life despite interest shown in her music by Shostakovich, among others. From 1964 to ’83 her pen fell silent, then she started composing again. She made some tape music performing on not only violin but cutlery, jewelry, and dentist’s equipment, but refrained from ever releasing it. She was a fascinating figure, Serbia’s Ives, Crawford, Bartok, and Cage all rolled into one. There’s a scholarly essay by musicologist Melita Milin about her career in the 1930sÂ here. It all makes me think that the Balkan countries need to be more regularly incorporated into the historical narrative of 20th-century music.Â

When Playing the Notes Is Enough

One (or two) of my favorite Cage pieces is (are) the little-known Experiences Nos. 1 and 2. The first one, supposedly written in 1946, is for two pianos, the second from 1948 for solo voice. I say “supposedly” because the solo voice version, written on an E.E. Cummings poem, uses the same melody as the piano duo version from two years earlier, and it seems odd that Cummings’ phrases would have fit so snugly the melody that Cage had earlier written for pianos. I discovered both pieces on the old Voices and Instruments vinyl disc of 1976 on Brian Eno’s Obscure label, and subsequently, as a student at Oberlin, played the duo version along with Doug Skinner, who’s since gone on to a musical career of his own. On the Obscure recording, the piano duo is played by Richard Bernas, apparently by overdubbing, and the solo is sung by Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine British psychedelic rock fame. To this day, those are the best, most touching recordings of those pieces out there. I’ve uploaded them for you here:

Experiences No. 1
Experiences No. 2

I’ve been looking for newer recordings, on CD. But every other recording I find is too fast, too textural, too “expressive,” too classical – too Uptown. They’re ultrasimple pieces, all white keys, nothing but pentatonic scale in No. 2. As with much of my own music, I sense that classical musicians find the bare notes too uninteresting, and think they have to “interpret” them to breathe life into them. There seems to be no sense anymore that a pure, stately, slow melody (such as one finds in Renaissance polyphony or Japanese Gagaku) can be beautiful. Post-Ligeti, post-Carter, post-Debussy, everything has to be turned into texture, into an illusionistic surface that transcends the notes. No! No!, a thousand times no! Sometimes the notes, played slowly and with dignity and clarity, are all one needs, as in Socrate, as in Musica Callada, as in In a Landscape, as in Snowdrop, as in Symphony on a Hymn Tune, as in The Art of Fugue.Â

It strikes me, though this would be difficult to document, that the ’70s were a high point for performers understanding that principle, and we’re now in a deep trough, because lately I’ve had a difficult time getting performers to play my simple music slowly enough; they encounter so little technical challenge that they start to rush, trying to buoy what they fear is dull music through some hint of the virtuosity they’re so proud of. But such music turns trivial when played as quickly as it’s easy to play it, as does much of Cage’s music of the 1940s. Bernas and Wyatt and Eno, coming from the pop world, exhibit far and away a more instinctive understanding of the Zen simplicity Cage was aiming at than any of the more recent renditions. I fear I’ll never find another really beautiful recording of Experiences 1 & 2 again.

An odd thing about Experiences No. 2 is that Cage omitted the final two lines of Cummings’s Sonnet, which I think are the best lines:

turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

But it’s still a gorgeous song, and most gorgeous of all when sung the clean, blank way Wyatt sings it.

The End of Not Inhaling

Friends are beginning to inquire whether I’m OK, so I guess it’s time to blog something. The end of the semester is always a whirlwind, complicated this year by a performance of my son’s beautiful orchestra piece and the arrival of relatives to hear it. Afterward, only one day’s rest intervened before I was whisked off to Wilmington, Delaware to make the first half of a recording of my 70-minute suite The Planets, with the intrepid Relache ensemble and a brilliant young sound engineer with a great ear, Andreas Meyer. (Andreas runs a new CD label called Meyer Media, some of whose offerings are now up on Postclassic Radio.)Â

Once back, I plunged into my summer project, a book on Cage’s 4’33” for Yale University Press. I’m hip deep in Cage, Rauschenberg, Daisetz Suzuki, Coomaraswamy, and the 1950s, and for perhaps the first time since I’ve started this blog, I’m inhaling a lot more knowledge than I’m exhaling. The bulk of my Cage obsession took place between ages 15 and 20 (I performed 4’33” in Dallas in May 1973), and there’s been a tremendous amount of startlingly good Cage scholarship in the last 15 years that I hadn’t seen at all – he seems to bring out the best in musicologists of all stripes. So I’m going back deeply into Cage and getting a tremendously cleaned-up perspective on him which I anticipate being creatively affected by. In my teens I became too overwhelmed by Cage’s influence and had to finally get away from him. Now I’ve got a much stronger artistic backbone, and can pick and choose, criticize and admire, whatever I fancy. He wasn’t a philosopher, and any musician who calls him that just doesn’t know what philosophers are or what they do. But he was an innovative composer with an original personality and an incredibly elegant and memorable flair for words, which latter did a tremendous amount to promote his career.

One note, though – in case it occurs to you to write in with a wisecrack that a book on 4’33” will be full of blank pages: you’re not the first to come up with that joke. Nor the 2nd, nor the 12th, nor the 50th. The fact is, I brace myself for it now, and am growing weary of it.

I had quite a few performances this spring, and the last two were by student ensembles: Bard’s chorus performing Transcendental Sonnets and the Williams College Symphonic Winds playingÂ Sunken City. What struck me is that student ensembles really, really rehearse – and that there is NO substitute for rehearsal. The Williams College musicians, many of them non-music-majors (the flutist is going on to grad school in microbiology) worked hard from February to May, and the Bard chorus had begun rehearsing last fall. The wonderful effect was that those kids had the total sound of those pieces in their heads, knew and could anticipate every chord, every rhythmic quirk, every melody. They weren’t playing “new music,” but repertoire they knew virtually by heart. Several superb professional groups have played my music lately with considerable Ã©lan after only a few hours’ rehearsal, and I’m grateful to them. But the performances that truly gelled, that sounded the way they sounded in my head, were the ones rehearsed for months and months, and apparently that kind of luxury is only available in academia these days, with student ensembles. It gives new meaning to Milton Babbitt’s characterization of the university as “our last hope, our only hope.”

The version of Sunken City now uploaded to my web site is the Williams College one:

1. Before (Brian Simalchik, piano)
2. After (Noah Lindquist, piano)

There are many fewer mishaps here than in the otherwise heroic premiere performance by the Orkest de Volharding, which was the only recording I had previously. I was flummoxed by the ease with which the Williams College kids negotiated the constantly changing meters of 17/16, 7/8, and so on, but conductor Steven Bodner told me his secret: “Never admit to them that what they’re doing is difficult.”

Sounding the Solar System

I finished my magnum opus today: The Planets, for flute, oboe, alto sax, bassoon, percussion, synthesizer, viola, and contrabass, commissioned in stages by the wonderful Relache ensemble in Philadelphia. It’s just over 70 minutes long, a 346-page score, in ten movements, my own personal Turangalila. I started writing it in January of 1994, sitting on a plane en route to Seattle next to Laurel Wyckoff, the ensemble’s former flutist. They commissioned the first four movements as part of the Music in Motion project, by which ensembles and composers flew to distant cities to collaborate. The concept was that I would compose every morning and in the afternoons the ensemble would run through what I’d written. I used to be a fairly slow composer, and the plan terrified me. But, under pressure, I wrote the first movement, “Venus,” in a week, and, realizing I could write as fast as someone told me to, I’ve been a fast composer ever since. In fact, I date the coalescence of my mature style from that trip. I was 38.Â

I had always planned to write more movements than the initial four I wrote then, and in 2001 Relache came up with another commission. Their instrumentation was so odd (so difficult to keep that viola audible) that I was reluctant to write a major work for them without assurance that they would play the whole thing, and for years they were in such financial straits that I was afraid to proceed. Also, their instrumentation had changed before, and I feared it might change again before I could finish. But last fall they called and said they were ready to record the work for CD, and told me to get my ass in gear and get those other movements in. So I have, and we start recording next month. Of course, the obvious question is, had my compositional habits so changed over 14 years that the end of the piece would come out very different from the beginning? But I had formed a firm idea back in the ’90s of what each movement would do, and I stuck to my original conception. It’s pretty consistent. “Venus” remains, I think, one of the best movements.

This is my big astrological piece, and of course, there are always people disappointed or horrifed by an admission of any interest in astrology, because most people know next to nothing about it, and have a caricatural view of it associated with newspaper sun-sign columns. I came to the subject via a respectable route. Reading Cage as a teenager interested me in the I Ching and the idea of synchronicity. That led to an interest in several other forms of mysticism, and, eventually, a close devotion to the music of Dane Rudhyar (a far more important and fascinating composer than all but a few of us cult fans will ever admit) led me to embark on reading some of Rudhyar’s 30-odd books on astrology, beginning – as one must – with The Astrology of Personality. Add to that an addiction to the writings of Jung in grad school, and I got caught up in a Jungian conception of the field, based on synchronicity rather than causation. The most important recent writer on the subject is Liz Greene, a brilliant Jungian psychoanalyst.Â

There were other, more personal influences as well. I once worked for an arts organization whose entire staff were clients of the excellent astrologer Doris Hebel. Arts-world interest in the subject is vaster than people talk about. Almost any composer on the New York scene can tell you, if asked, their sun, moon, and rising signs. It’s a social thing. Cage himself was a long-time client of the New York astrologer Julie Winter. I’ve collected music based on astrology, including Holst’s eponymous work (one of my favorite orchestral warhorses), Constant Lambert’s Horoscope, George Crumb’s pieces, and the Interstellar Space recording of John Coltrane, with pieces entitled Mars, Leo, Venus, Jupiter Variation, and Saturn. I took courses in astrology at (apparently defunct) Isis Rising bookstore in Chicago, and, like Holst, I’ve done readings for many a fellow composer. In fact, in 1986 my income as a freelance critic was dwindling, and, having failed (I thought) in that field, I was looking into how to get started as an astrologer when from out of the blue Doug Simmons called me from the Village Voice and offered me a job. (If you know something about astrology, it may interest you to hear that on that very day, Saturn crossed my ascendant and Uranus transited the ruler of my house of employment. Very significant.)Â

I used to fantasize about reviewing concerts astrologically, in advance, like: “Don’t bother attending Nic Collins’s Roulette concert this Friday, Mercury is retrograding over his midheaven, and it’s a sure bet his equipment will malfunction.”

I have to add, too, that with 12 zodiac signs divided into 30 degrees each, with a wealth of experimental aspects like quintiles and septiles calculated within certain degrees of orb, astrology offers a number of delicious parallels with the 12 fluidly-defined pitch areas and continuum of consonances in microtonality. I’ve long savored the feeling of moving smoothly from one to the other without seeming to change the kinds of geometry I’m dealing with. And then, my fascination withÂ rhythmic cycles going out of phase with each other, much manifested in The Planets, was always partly driven by a “music of the spheres” paradigm. Whatever mathematical way my brain is hardwired that drew me to Henry Cowell’s rhythms and Ben Johnston’s scales made me a sucker for astrology as well. Jupiter circles the sun every 12 years and Saturn every 29 years, with a conjunction approximately every 20 years? Now that’s a rhythm, cut me off a piece of that! It’s not all just, “Oh, you’re a Libra, so you have trouble making up your mind.” There’s as much math as you want.

So comments challenging me to defend astrology will be ignored. I never defend astrology, nor proselytize for it, nor say I “believe” in it. I have no idea why astrological transits sometimes seem startlingly relevant, but, like the I Ching, it is an ancient worldview containing a wealth of psychological insight that greatly widened my understanding of human behavior. There are even astrologers who consider it no more than a kind of elaborate Rorschach test, which is certainly one way to understand it. Like anyone who knows anything about the field, I never read newspaper sun-sign columns except for amusement. If you want to bash me for taking an interest in it, go ahead and blast Cage and Coltrane, and feel free to throw me into their camp. I’ll be honored.Â

My mother likes to say, “I don’t believe in astrology; Aquarians never do.”

In any case, as I say in the program notes to the piece, music may not have progressed since Holst wrote his Planets, but astrology has. Rudhyar ushered in an era of “free will” astrology, according to which transits are psychological forces which, if understood, can become channels to new understanding, by which otherwise fated-seeming actions can be avoided. As astrology is now understood as process rather than fate, and minimalism created a new musical paradigm of process-oriented composition, it was time for a new set of Planets to fuse musical processes with planetary ones, rather than the more conventional melodies and atmospheres of Holst’s grand work. I have three more movements than Holst: I include the Sun and Moon, which astrology refers to as “planets,” and also Pluto, which wasn’t discovered until 13 years after Holst finished. (The demotion of Pluto by astronomers has had no effect on astrology.) Each movement follows a process that expresses the idea of its planet. “Sun” is an additive process in the shape of a sunrise. “Moon” is full of melodies and rhythms going out of phase. “Saturn” is a chaconne in which harsh, immobile dissonances are gradually replaced with gorgeous lines of counterpoint. “Uranus” is a jolting collage of constant surprises. The fog of “Neptune” (pictured) has the performers in eight unsynchronized tempos. And so on. John Luther Adams and I agreed that he’ll write music about the earth, and I’ll handle the rest of the solar system.

So after 14 years (half a Saturn cycle), I’ve finally completed the longest instrumental work I have any thought of writing. You can hear the movements that Relache has already performedÂ here. They premiere the entire work in Philadelphia and possibly New York September 26 and 27, by which time we’re hoping to have the CD available as well. It’s a weight off my shoulders. I have dreams of orchestrating the work, but what would I do with a 70-minute orchestral score? Make a nice MIDI realization?

Those Uptempo Canadians

For monthsÂ Postclassic RadioÂ has chugged along with no help or intervention from me, playing its little heart out with Dutch, British, and Irish new music. Last night I found myself with some unexpected free time after bringing several long projects to completion, and ripped about ten hours’ worth out of the rapidly aging 17-hour playlist. I’ve been building it back up with the following:

– Renske Vrolijk’s complete theater workÂ Charlie Charlie, her well-researched and mesmerizingly beautiful postminimalist story of the wreck of the Hindenburg. That was the major Dutch premiere I flew back from London to hear last November. It’s on as I write this, and I can’t stop listening. (Note – if it sounds like the recording is playing on well-worn vinyl, it’s because Renske sampled vinyl noise and plays it in the piece’s background to evoke the milieu. Charming idea.)

– Canadian music, since I’m trying to convince even the Canadians themselves that there’s a lot of good stuff. To that end I’ve put up some pieces by Paul Dolden, whose music is parallel to M.C. Maguire’s in that it hits you with an overload of hundreds of tracks running at once. Just between the two of them, Maguire and Dolden pull the geographic center of North American hair-raising crazy-mad fanatical sonic complexity up to somewhere around Fargo. I also add some major works by that “totalist of Canada” Tim Brady, including his half-hour piece for 20 electric guitars and his Symphony No. 1, which sounds a little like Olivier Messiaen started messiaen’ around with some of Glenn Branca’s MIDI files. That’s pretty high-energy stuff too, so the station’s going through a definite uptempo phase. It must be too cold up in Canada to write the kind of slow, soft, mellow, depressing music a lot of us favor down here. You got to keep even those inner-ear follicles moving.

– Pieces by Jeff Harrington, Ben Harper, Eve Beglarian, some brand new John Luther Adams, Steve Layton, and David Borden, including several installments of his Earth Journeys for Composers (including, so far, For Alvin Curran, For Paul Chihara, and For Kyle Gann). (Hey, it’s another way to get my name on the station.) If you hear some unexpectedly conventional-sounding songs, those are Corey Dargel’s “Condoleezza Rice Songs,” so focus on the lyrics. My concept for Postclassic Radio was always as a way to get my CD collection out on the internet, and I was reluctant to use content that could already be found online, but considering so many good composers don’t have CDs out these days, I’m starting to rethink that a little.

– Some of my recent pieces that premiered lately. Since I never repeat pieces (well, almost never), my own music hadn’t had much of a presence on the station in several months.Â

More to come. Part of the hurdle is always the thought of updating theÂ playlist, so I’ve finally decided to quit trying to make it a guide to the current station, and instead simply list all the pieces I’ve played – which I like to do as a public reminder of the incredible volume and diversity of postclassical music. I finally realized why I’ve suddenly gotten tremendously busy the last few weeks, because next month my three largest non-operatic works are being either performed or recorded. My piano concerto Sunken City needed a few minor revisions prior to its American premiere at Williams College May 9, and I’ve been making a new version of Transcendental Sonnets with a two-piano accompaniment for a May 6 performance at Bard. And I’ve been finishing The Planets, a 70-minute work I started in 1994 and which had laid dormant since 2001. The Relache ensemble is putting it on CD this summer. More of that later, soon, when everything’s finished. Meanwhile, it’ll be safe, and maybe even enlightening, to return to Postclassic Radio.

Zuni Totalism

Below is the complete transcription of part of a Zuni Buffalo Dance from Robert Cogan’s and Pozzi Escot’s 1976 book Sonic Design, one of the best books of musical analysis ever written. (Though long out of print, you can still get print-to-order copies on the web.) This is the book which introduced me to the practice of switching back and forth among different tempos in Southwest American Indian music. Combined with the rhythmic theory I already knew from Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, it elicited in me an interest in meters with denominators other than powers of 2, and, more significantly, led me to embark on a musical style which shifted among different tempos. Here’s the score, and you can hear the original recording from which Cogan and Escot workedÂ here:

The meters, of course, aren’t given as 2/3 or 5/6, as they could be, but as 2 and 2/3 over 4 and 3 and 1/3 over 4 – a format Charles Ives also used. A somewhat similar Hopi Elk Dance song, in my own transcription, using dotted quarters and quarters instead of quarters and triplets, is given in myÂ program notes to Desert Sonata, the 1994 piece that quotes the song.

Of course, the Zuni were not reading from sheet music, and one could quibble about whethere these incomplete triplets are the best way of rendering their music in notation – but as I saw it in 1977, this was a way of transferring that feeling of performance practice into music based in European notation. I wanted a musical basis that didn’t sound European, didn’t sound familiar, nor was rhythmic precision my aim. It has always seemed to me that dotted 8th-notes have an inherently syncopated feel, while triplet quarter-notes are much smoother, suspended over the felt beat, and I was interested in using the notation to induce different qualities, not only quantities, of rhythm. Performers who internalize that principle find my music easier to play than it looks at first. Steve Reich had arrived at his style by studying the Ewe drumming of Ghana, Riley and Glass by involvement with classical Indian music, Lou Harrison via Indonesian gamelan, and so on, and as someone who had grown up in the Southwest, I mined Zuni, Hopi, and Pueblo music for qualities that would help revitalize my tradition. During the 1990s there was a lot of criticism of white artists who “appropriated” music by people of color, and so I gradually backed off from the more programmatic aspects. Plus, increasing commissions from ensembles limited my style in rhythmic respects, while working with the Disklavier and electronics liberated it in other directions. This Zuni-Hopi influence survives in my music, but rather abstractly at this point.Â

In any case, to anyone who claims that incomplete triplets can’t be performed, I can always counter, “The Zuni can do it – why can’t you?”

No Kelp, Sorry, but Toy Pianos

Having some free time this week (translation: none of the people I owe work to were hounding me), I started revamping my web site once again. The aim is to both streamline and expand it, in imitation of composer web sites I envy like Erling Wold’s, Alex Shapiro’s, and Eve Beglarian’s. I’m obviously not much concerned with graphic sophistication. The Hudson Valley doesn’t provide me with kelp to drape over myself, like Alex has out there on the Pacific Coast (though if I took a walk through the Hudson I’d probably emerge with some pretty picturesque, if carcinogenic, muck). But it bothered me that my mp3s were on one page, PDF scores on another, program notes accessible somewhere else, and I’m remodeling it on Erling’s everything-in-one-table format. My brother Darryl set up my web site in 1996, and for 12 years I’ve been getting by on what HTML tricks were available in the primitive 1990s. I know now I could probably do something cool like make the eyes in my photo blink, but I’m putting utility above aesthetics.

As for the expansion, I took off most of the recordings that you now have to go buy my new CD Private Dances to hear, but I’ve added lots of obscure recordings that no human has heard in years. Like my Homage to Cowell (1994), the piece that got cut for space from my Custer’s Ghost CD, and which uses a single looping, carefully-tuned drum sample to imitate Cowell’s Rhythmicon; Imaginary Isle (2003), the little piece I wrote for Trimpin’s installation of nine MIDI-operated toy pianos; and Snake Dance No. 1 (1991), which I had quit listening to because I like No. 2 better, but No. 1 has some advantages I’d forgotten about. Plus I’ve put up everything from the out-of-print Custer’s Ghost until I can bring it back out in some new format. Clicking on the pieces that are commercially recorded will take you straight to Amazon.com, so have your credit card ready.

I reiterate that I do all this not because I perceive a hue and cry begging for my minor works, but because I’m so physically disorganized that it’s reassuring for me to have everything on my web site, where I’ll know where to look for it and how to find it. I’ve even started keeping documents there to which there is no public access, because I’m weary of losing things in the Bermuda Triangle I call my office.

While I’m at it, anent our discussion of online PDF scores, I had forgotten that Eve Beglarian offers her scores online. And I’ve been meaning to note that Art Jarvinen’s Leisure Planet site has a very interesting collection of scores for modest prices. Music-score culture’s transition to the internet continues slowly but surely.

Name from the Past

No obituary I’ve seen for the record producer Teo Macero (1925-2008) has mentioned that he was also a composer, though the Times notes that he studied with Henry Brant. I offer the only piece I’ve heard of Macero’s, One-Three Quarters (sic): a six-minute quarter-tone piece for two pianos and ensemble from 1968. It’s pretty cool. It was on an Odyssey vinyl disc, with Ives’s Quarter-Tone Pieces and other 24tet works.

As a just-intonationist, I officially disapprove of quarter-tone music and would never write any, but I harbor a secret affection for it anyway. My music starts to sound all too normal after awhile, but quarter-tone music just never stops sounding weird.

UPDATE: Tom Hamilton sends a link to recordings of Macero’s music. I always feel bad making a big deal out of a composer just after he dies. That’s why I’ve devoted the bulk of my musicology work to living composers while they’re around to appreciate it.

Knowing the Score

A non-composing new-music enthusiast writes in with an urgent question:

It is often nearly impossible for an ordinary person to obtain contemporary scores. I’ve written to composers that you mention without success (or often, without even a response). Why do we need to be Kyle Gann or eighth blackbird to get contemporary scores, even (or especially) when recordings are available?

Amen, amen. How can we keep up a civilized discourse about new music today, even when we can get the recordings, when we can’t find the scores on which the recordings are based, and of which they are, after all, only one possible interpretation? I constantly bug composers for scores, and, ironically, it’s the ones whose music is published that are the hardest to come by – I can only get perusal scores for a short time, and they take forever to arrive, and so on. I will point out that a very good collection of recent scores, including mine, is available for low prices at Frog Peak, a wonderful company that supports artists and is not trying to enrich itself. But we need some kind of central score warehouse that people can put their work into. The now-defunct and much-lamented IMSLP looked like it might partly serve that function. I scan a lot of the scores I get into PDFs so I can take them on lecture tours and work on them away from home, but I can’t go handing those out without some arrangement with the composers. Fifty of my own scores are downloadable on my web site, and very good San Francisco composer Erling Wold does the same. Send me notice of others who do this, and we’ll make a list. It’s great that making recordings and mp3s at home has become so easy, but the decline of score culture, in sharp contrast to my youth, has been a bee in my bonnet for a couple decades now. Suggestions welcome.

And further to the point, I’ve now put up a score to my vibraphone solo Olana (PDF download). Several people had asked about it, and I am given to understand that the mallet world is desperate for new repertoire. I often feel I can’t get my music played as mellowly as I want it, so I have even introduced into the score the word mellissimo – for those who would feel so much better if I would only use Italian terms.

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