Periodically on Paper

A list of journals (a) focused on new/contemporary/experimental music, (b) currently in operation, (c) published periodically and (d) available on paper.   I have not included journals by national music information centers, publishers, or membership organizations.  This list is definitely not complete; if you know of any further journals, please let me know and I'll update this item.

English:

Computer Music Journal.

Contemporary Music Review.

ex tempore.

Journal of New Music Research.

Leonardo Music Journal.

Musikworks.

The Open Space Magazine.

Perspectives of New Music.

Search: Journal for New Music and Culture

Sonus.

21st Century Music.

Tempo.

French:

Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines

German:

MusikTexte.

Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.

Positionen.

The Radical Music: Fragments of a Manifesto

Sounds articulate precise dimensions in physical space; musical sounds also articulate precise dimensions in social and private spaces.

*****

Use the minimum of resources or means required. Less is often more.

Find the core question or idea in a work. Choose and use your materials to best frame that question or idea.

All musical ideas and all musical instruments (save the vibra-slap) are potentially useful. None is universally useful. (Save the vibra-slap, which is never useful.)

But having practiced the virtues of economy, allow yourself, from time to time, a bit of extravangance, some conspicuous production and consumption.   In the end, the economy of musical production is like the bellows of a concertina, expansion necessarily paired with contraction.

*****

Go to extremes, in whichever parameter you use, including extremes of moderation.

Question parameters. A parameter is someone else's way of dividing up the aural experience. Explore the edges and boundaries of and between pitch and timbre and rhythm and dynamic and form. Explore and break boundaries between music and not-music.

Music, the physics of musical sound, the psychophysics of music, and the neuroscience of music are different concerns, each with its own territory and terminology. How might they relate? How might they not relate? What unique elements of cohesion does music bring to these disciplines and how can they extend the potential for new forms of musical activity?

*****

Follow an idea in all its consequences. Find the end of a process or pattern. Push a system to its design capacity and then push beyond it.

However, if the consequences of a process are obvious, is it necessary to carry out the process in full?

Consider the possibility of multiple versions, or realizations, of a work. Or accept the first version and move on to the next work without looking (listening) back.

Break, subvert, or invert cause and effect.

*****

There is an indeterminant number of ways of arriving at the same musical surface and it's not possible to determine the best or most efficient or most elegant way.  Worrying about this is an ethical issue, not an aesthetic one.

Start from nothing, from first principles, without assumptions and build a better (sound) world from the ground up.  Or start with everything and scrape, sculpt, and erase away, making the real, existing (wise, tired) world better. 

Limits and rules: anything we compose could, potentially, be through-composed,  by taste and experience, but sometimes the alternative, carrying out rules applied to a limited set of materials, in the manner of a game (a music game, like a language game) carries much less anxiety and leads to surprises rather than the habitual.

*****

The radical music is about complexity.  But not necessarily that complexity.

Complexity is an elusive quality: It can be algorithmic complexity (for all that's worth) or the complexity of acoustical phenomena when heard in greater detail or the complexity of historical or social context.  Sometimes a highly dense phenomena can only be heard coarsely and sometimes the simplest of conditions can overwhelm the senses.  A universally applicable and acceptable definition of either "sufficient" or "over-" complexity is impossible. (To paraphrase Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it). When people make and listen to sounds, to music, one form or another of complexity is inevitable. Don't give it a second thought. No, strike that, don't give it the first thought, but keep it well in mind as a second.

Every piece of music has an element of the improvisational, extemporaneous, accidental, capricious, prejudiced or arbitrary. Is a piece of music interesting because of this? Is a piece musical because of this?  

*****

Experiment with scale, both the smallest, most local, and the grandest, most global, as well as the most anonymous quantities in-between.

Boredom is only a function of time, and a function with several variables.

*****

Modest work done in a serious way, leavened with levity, can carry large ambitions.

History is both a playground and a minefield, and a composer can and will write and rewrite music history with reckless disregard for the difference between a playground and a minefield.

(2007, revised 2009)

Just an Old-Fashioned Melody

We went to Wiesbaden this evening to hear (and see) Lulu.   It's astonishing how much of a period piece it has become, with the touches of alto sax and bar-room piano in the orchestra, the redundancy and charateristic curves of the various Lulu tunes and — still, best of all, as far as I'm concerned — the silent movie in the middle.  I imagine that in the 1930's, anything remotely like Lulu would have been shocking, even dissonant, in the Neo-Baroque digs of the Hessisches Staatstheater, but now, and even with a highly stylized production (read: lots of wet paint), it's just another night at the opera, and a night without Otis B. Driftwood at that.

Stand and Deliver!

Like Health Care systems everywhere, New Music suffers from a poor delivery system. The route from composer to performer to listener is often capricious, improvised, and instable, and more often a product of repertorial lethargy and personal relationships than an open market in matching musical interests.  

The web ought to be a perfect route for moving our scores to performers and attracting listeners to performances, but the low-level of web activity for new music — I keep track of 35 or 40 new music oriented blogs via bloglines and sometimes several days will pass without new messages — suggests that the new music community has a far-from-optimal approach to the web as a resource.   (It is surprising to me that  the largest traditional music publishers  and the license-collecting agencies — who have an immediate financial interest in making their wares public — do such a very bad job of it;  title searches at these sites are slow and miserable, and I'm someone who actually enjoys doing library research.) 

Here is one small proposal to help remedy this situation:  How about a blog or site dedicated to publicly registring new scores?  With probably several thousand active "serious" composers in the US alone, if only a couple hundred were to join such a registry, announcing each of their new title immediately upon composition, detailing and cross-indexing the resources required and how to obtain performance materials, one would presumably have a web page with many daily updates, thus both offering a useful way of matching performers with new scores and better mirroring the liveliness of our community.

 

The Fermata

A discussion at BloggingHeads.tv between two philosophers with interests in environmental issues, Jay Odenbaugh and Craig Callender, raises some serious questions about conservation and even the re-introduction of extinct species.  A proposal to conserve or revive any particular species is a non-chronological privileging of one particular historical moment or era over others, establishing the particular constellation of climate, fauna and flora of one moment as a benchmark against which any other state is less valued. This is an enterprise which strikes me as ultimately rather arbitrary, however immediately attractive any particular configuration may appear.  (I find their example of a restored Cave Lion population roaming Los Angeles is an especially nice addition to the long tradition of destruction-of-L.A.-narratives (see Mike Davis's City of Quartz for several more)).

It occurs to me that, in the modern invention of the "classical" music repertoire, with the predominance of late 18th through early 2oth century western European music in that repertoire, that a similar experiment in privileging one era over others — including our present era — has, in fact, already been carried out.  While it is true, on the one hand, that there has been a steady admixture of new composition and historically-informed recreations of early repertoire nipping at the edge of the trunk repertoire as well as occasional tributaries to more distant traditions, and, on the other hand, one can recognize certain qualitative benchmarks in the classical style — among them in the variability and complexity of the tonal language, the flexibility of ensemble textures, and the relationship between notation, oral transmission, and individual interpretation — one can also readily imagine a musical world in which some other, perhaps very different, repertoire or slice through repertoires had gained a similar level of prestige, and that other slice would as certainly have its own set of qualities to recommend it (moreover, the qualitative benchmarks to one musician's or listener's tastes may well be heard as deficits by another musician or listener).  

AFAIC, the problem here is not in the choice of musics to be privileged but rather in the phenomena that one music can aquire such privilege — often institutional in nature, and sharing the material power of that association — to the disadvantage of other musics.  I certainly have my own preferences and distastes and I have no problem that you do, too.  (In fact, that's what I value most about you.)  But I do have real problems when the choice has essentially been made for both of us by prohibiting the successful cohabitation of a diversity of musical materials, methods, styles, and traditions through some artificial institutional constraints on musical practice.  Unlike the streets of L.A., in which a decision to allow coyotes and mountain lions — or even genetically re-engineered mamoths, sabre tooths or cave lions — will have inescapable and immediate consequences to life, limb, environment and economy, it is the inherent advantage of music that there are no neccessary disadvanges to the cohabitation of a diversity of musical forms.  

More free scores

TauKay Edizioni Musicali has a large number of free-to-download scores online, yet another example of the way the winds are blowing for sheet music.   While there will likely remain a role for sheet music printed on paper and physically delivered to musicians and libraries — and a particular niche for elegant editions — the time and cost efficiencies of direct downloads are increasingly hard to ignore.  Sheet music, on its own, for new and experimental music, is not an especially profitable business, the larger profit is in commissions and licensing for performances, broadcasts, and recordings; sheet music is an instrument in realizing performances, broadcasts, and recordings.  If traditional sheet music publishing is either slow or expensive, it runs the risk of leading to fewer rather than more performances, which makes publishing more of an obstacle than an assist to the music.

Sheet music in the form of scores and parts for choral groups, bands, and orchestras which becomes widely used (especially by educational institutions) can be profitable as a sale or rental operation.  The individual composer must decide whether he or she can handle such operations on their own, the profit expected covering his or her costs in time and materials, or be willing to share  license fees in return for allowing a traditional publisher to carry and promote their work, or to go the download route instead.  At present, I can well imagine many composers using a tactical mix of publication methods, with solo and chamber works largely issued online and ensemble works intended for institutional use promoted via online perusal/study scores but available as rental or purchase sets of scores and parts.

One reminder to performers:  if you download a work and perform it, identify the piece accurately on your program and also let the composer know about the performance directly.  In many cases, institutions pay blanket fees for to licensing organizations, so the particular performance will not cost you anything more and the main obstacle to the composer from eventually getting her or his fee is a lack of reporting.   Reporting is the least that you can do when the composer has provided the performance materials for free.

 

   

Henry Brant as composer and orchestrator for films

It's well-known that the late composer Henry Brant had an active parallel career as on orchestrator and composer for film, but a lot of his work took place under- or uncredited, which is standard practice in film music.  During his life, Brant was always modest about his work as an orchestrator for the scores of colleagues, characterizing it as always implementing the style and preferences of the composer rather than in his own.  Mr Brant's musical executor, Kathy Wilkowski, has been kind enough to share the following list of films on which he worked.  

First, his collaborations as orchestrator:

for Virgil Thomson:  The River (1937), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Louisiana Story (1948; the score won Thomson the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Brant was credited as "music technical assistant".)

for Aaron Copland:  The City (1939)

for George Antheil:  The Scoundrel (1935)

for Marc Blitzstein: at least two films.

for Douglas Moore: Power on the Land (1940) , Youth Gets a Break (a WPA-related film; Brant stated: "it was for full orchestra; he left it to me."

for Alex North: The Misfits (1961), Cleopatra (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1964),  Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff (1966), Africa (ABC-TV documentary, 1967),  2001: A Space Odyssey (the score was not used in the released film), The Devil's Brigade (1968),  Carny (1980; includes two compositions by Brant which were organ solos extracted from Brant's 1956 opera The Grand Universal Circus), Dragonslayer (1981), Good Morning Vietnam (1987)

for Gordon Parks: The Learning Tree (1970)

Brant's own work as a film composer was also extensive, particularly for documentary and independent films.  It includes:  Playing Fields of America (aka Sport Film) (1943), Capitol Story (aka Public Health, for the OWI)(1944), the Pale Horseman (OWI)(1944), Journey into Medicine (1946), Osmosis (1946), Outbreak (1947), The Big Break (1951), Ode to a Grecian Urn (1953; an avant-garde film to which Brant improvised on dulcimer, double-flageolet, ox-bells, double-ocarina, celesta, bass recorder, and Persian oboe), The Secret Thief (1956),  Your Community (1956), Dr. "B" (1957), Endowing our Future (1958), Fibres in Civilization (1958), Peace Music for U.N. Day (1959), a “Wind quintet film” (1960), Early Birds (1961),  Fertility & the Physician (1965), Jack Levine (1966), Chartres Cathedral (1970), Marcel Duchamp (1978; improvised by Brant), The Trappers (1981), and Noch Ist Polen Nicht Verloren (1991)

See also these posts about Brant: On the Nature of Things, and Brant on Orchestration

Billiard balls made of cellulose nitrate would occasionally explode on contact

Archiving your music is not easy:  try to keep it in several media at once (as paper originals and copies, as data on permanent and non-permanent formats), make multiple copies of each, and distribute the storage (i.e. one copy at home, one copy for the safe deposit box, one sent home to Mom).   Think plastics will last forever?  Think again:  here's a new aticle  on the degrading of plastics.  

Reboot

It's time for the annual notation reboot.  In addition to setting up new template files for the new edition of Finale, my primary engraving software, I've been doing practice runs to keep up some facility with the other notation software on my computer.  In addition to Finale, I have Lilypond, Sibelius, Turandot, Graphire Music Studio, and have recently downloaded Berlioz  (a commerical program now turned into freeware) and MuseScore (free and open sourced) to try.  Each product has useful features and a distinct workflow and I find that it's useful to have several approaches available to solving the same problem.  The new Finale (2010) doesn't have any dramatic changes, but does have two features that were worth the upgrade: an easier way of working with percussion and more possibilities for the import and export of graphics.

But don't get the impression that I'm spending all my composing time with my computer: a fresh box of black uni-ball micros has arrived,  I've ultra-sounded my Rapidographs and calligraphy pens completely clean, and have even purchased a fresh Noligraph, my favorite five-lined staff writer.   I'm now ready to compose with or without electricity and on the backs of envelopes or cocktail napkins should inspiration hit.  There are no more excuses: time to write. 

 

    

Along the river

I've long imagined that music had two origins.  The first as a extension or heightened form of speech, essentially and immediately communicative in function, and the second, more absolute and aesthetic in nature, an articulation of time passing, as relief from boredom, accompaniment to work, travel, falling into sleep (and dreams).   These two causes have long been comingled in music, but I'm not altogether sure that that is a good thing.

I was reminded yesterday that not only does music articulate passing time, but it can also articulate space. It has a physical presence with a center which it fills and thresholds into which it dis- and reappears.  I went cycling with the family alongside the Nidda, a small river near our house which empties south of us into the Main.  A lightly clouded Saturday in June was a perfect day for festivals, and as we passed over the bridge in Praunheim, a cover band on could be heard from a stage some hundred metres away in the center of the village.  As we drove on, that sound steadily evaporated with distance and barriers both natural and human-made.   Further on up the river, as we approached Heddernheim, small fragments of low brass intercut with bits of snare drum begun to cross our path, eventually revealing themselves as whole swathes of tunes and countermelodies and bass lines played by the local Fanfarenzug.    With a weakness for brass bands, I swerved off the path into a churchyard to hear the wind band more closely, especially enjoying the way in which the percussion was used to provide a continuous bed of sound for the winds,  and the gradual addition of the more higher pitched (and consequently more highly attentuated by physical distance) instruments to the total mix.  Cycling onward, the process was reversed and Heddernheim receded both as a civic and acoustical location.  The next villlage up the river soon spoke for itself in quite a different way, through a peal of church bells, announcing the hour, or — for it seemed to go on longer than usual — perhaps a special event, maybe a Saturday wedding in June.   As we went further upriver,  the gently creaking sounds of the river and the whirr of other bicycles, sometimes the steps of joggers (some of whom put their iPods or mp3 players up loud enough to "share")  were only interrupted by a pair of bridges underpasses with their ignorable traffic,  a family of insistant swans at the edge of the water, and a pair of soccer matches.  Each physical space we approached, passed by or through, or departed, was as recognizeable from its acoustic signature as from its physical shapes and forms.  Having ears means time — and space — passing need never be dull.       

Copy that

At least half my training as a composer has come from copying music. Not imitating the music of others but the note-for-note copying of scores by others both as work for hire and for my own use, to play and study. (See also this post). Whether with pen and ink on paper or by pointing and clicking with an engraving program, copying invites, indeed forces, one to attend to the music in an analytic and intimate way that, in my experience, casual listening to a recording cannot replace, and to hear imaginatively, interpreting both details and larger passages in the in-and-out-of-time unique to the written score. A major part of the copyist's work is planning the project, finding the most efficient way to move notes from the original to the copying, figuring out the most elegant layout of notes, measures, systems, pages, all of which is analytical work, tracing phrases, sections, processes, resemblances and differences, identifying local tactics and global strategies of both original and transcription, as well as the inevitable and incalaculable surprises. Even deciding where to place page turns is a matter that invites analytical and interpretive engagement!

Composers have probably trained by copying music for as long as music has been written down. The tales of the youthful Bach and Mozart copying music by others are familar to many young musicians (as I remember them, these tales often include mention of candlelight and ruining ones' eyes). While it is entirely possible that copying, indeed written notation altogether, will fade even further away from widespread use, in favor of more purely aural/oral transmission, recordings, and possibly even new technologies as yet unimagined, it is hard to escape from the recognition that copying has been a useful skill, and written notation an effective and long-lived technology for moving music from here to these as well as preserving and learning about music.

An effective technology, but not a perfect reproductive technology, in the sense of a perfect digital copy of a sound file: the risk and the charm — and, to my ears, ultimately the advantage — of the handmade copy is the interjection of interpretation into the path of transmission. On the one hand, this is just another example of (Richard K.) Winslow's law at work — "if you want a perfect copy, learn it by ear, if you want to garantee that it changes over time, write it down" — but on the other, this interpretative act can be a first step in a process moving inevitably towards new composition. Each work I have copied (as a teenager, I copied lots of Webern and Machaut and Cage and Harrison and Purcell and Lully and transcribed almost every note of Harry Partch, I later earned part of my living copying for colleagues and doing ghost-scoring for films; now I do some interesting work for Material Press) has been an invitation to compose something new, as if tracing the paths of each of these pieces has made more urgent the paths not taken.

Morton Feldman, "Piece" (1950)

Landmarks (41)

Richard Ayres: No. 37b (2003/2006).  Never mind the neutral title — this is a work of symphonic dimensions and classical formal proportions. The composer — as far as I'm concerned the most technically gifted composer of our generation — is an exuberant orchestrator, inviting the orchestra here to do everything that an orchestra can do well, and the performances I've heard have uniformly showed the orchestras honoring the challenge with equal exuberance.  He has made that rare thing: new music that orchestral musicians love to play.  The writing for the brass and string harmonics is spectacular, with some passages for the trumpets in particular touching my heart with a characteristic drag that resembled something in-between New Orleans funeral marches and mariachi playing.  (In this score, Ayres has also raised the process of muting a tuba to a cooperative musical skill of the first art. )  No. 37b  is a more than a bit of a madcap adventure, comic in genre, but with the entire range of comic expression in use, from droll to intense and from gentle to slapstick.  A comic symphony is naturally more classical than romantic, and the rapid cuts and transitions never look backward, but are sometimes detoured by cul de sacs and hairpin curves, seizing that same cinematic impulse that was captured in the some of the best works of early 20th century neo-classicism.  Why isn't real movie music ever this good?

Listening for the day

Henry Cowell: Homage to Iran; Terry Riley: Persian Surgery Dervishes

Cowell's music is an homage, with a casual relationship to Persian classical music; Riley's piece has even less to do with that tradition.  But who cares?  Each piece makes an honest gesture of tribute to a valued culture.

Losing the game

Are downloading killing recorded music sales, or is it the competition from games? 

Brant on Orchestration

Very good news: the late Henry Brant's handbook for orchestrators, begun in the 1940's and completed in 2005, Textures and Timbres, has finally been released. Music Books Plus lists the book already, Amazon, SheetMusicPlus, and CarlFischer.com should have it soon.

Brant had a unique career, not only orchestrating his own extraordinary works — most famous for their use of physical space as a compositional element —, but also working in commercial music for Broadway, radio, and in Hollywood films (his longstanding collaboration with Alex North is best known, but his credited and uncredited work for film was much more extensive.)  Several of his students have described Brant's approach to scoring as uniquly empirical, practical, and rule-of-thumb systematic, but always imaginative.

[I frequently get asked to recommend orchestration textbooks. My first recommendation is to get some hands-on experience with each of the orchestral instruments, for example through an instrumental music education course. Then, go to the books: Andrew Stiller's Handbook of Instrumentation is essential (it's now available in cd format; I think of it as the successor to Forsythe's Orchestration, an underrated book with a lot of good practical information), as well as a good introduction to the physics and psychophysics of music (there are several good choices) and William Sethares Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale places timbre within a larger context. (Likewise for Robert Erickson's Sound Structure in Music). Then a good history of orchestration (Adam Carse will do) and Berlioz's classic treatise. If you have any conducting ambitions, Hermann Scherchen's Handbuch des Dirigierens is an elegant and cultivated book but it is also very useful for orchestrators. Have a look — but not too long — at Rimsky-Korsakov, Widor, Koechlin, and Piston for some distinct aesthetic approaches (Riemann's Katechismus der Orchestrierung, too, if you can read the German in Fraktur type). The most-used contemporary university-level textbooks (Blatter, Adler, Kennan), are certainly useful as one-stop-shop references, but I find none of them as good as Stiller for basic questions of instrumentation, nor do any of them offer particulary distinctive aesthetic approaches.

There is nothing in English quite like Hans Kunitz's 13 volume series, Die Instrumentation, which treats individual instruments in detail, but the last 30 years have given us many books which advise on contemporary techniques for individual instruments, including Turetsky for contrabass, Dempster for trombone, Rehfeld for clarinet, Strange for violin, Artaud or Dick or for flute, Van Cleve or Veale/Mahnkopf for oboe, and Solomon or Schick for percussion. Several books have treated contemporary techniques more comprehensively; the book I grew up with was Gardner Read's Contemporary Instrumental Techniques, but it surely ought to be updated or succeeded.]

Have Windmill, Will Tilt

... if I were to have a logo promoting my work as a composer, that'd pretty much be it.   Composing is fundamentally an act of independence (Blake's fool pursuing his folly), not doing what everyone else is doing.  When everyone else sigs, you zag.  Composing is not so much putting things together as making an act of imagination concrete (the Hungarian word for composer zeneszerző, literally a "music catcher", is so much more to the point): hearing a dragon where others hear only creaking windmills and figuring out how to make that explicit for others. Photographer Ansel Adams once said something to the effect that he never pushed the shutter until he saw an image that wasn't literally there.  Gregory Bateson advised prospective field workers to be prepared to simply sit a good long while, not to try to document everything, not to  try to take everything comprehensively in, but to wait for something interesting and important to happen. It always does.  Every new work of music, if it rises to the extraordinary, must be an error, a mistake, even wrong-doing or a violation, by the standards of the work which proceeds it and, often,  the community of listeners.  (Blake again: Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear.)   Composition is resistance against the existing social construction of the musical. 

Groupwork

Composing is mostly on the solitary end of a private-public partnership.  Performing, recording, broadcasting is the public side.  Many composers carry out their end as covertly as possible, often in near- sacred spaces, our hermitages, garretts, and ateliers.  (Mostly a good thing, too: I'm not alone among my colleagues in never having gotten good marks for "gets along well with others" in grade school.) Some work privately and keep it so, other hold on to every scrap and sketch, allowing the possibility that their steps to be retraced by others (for examples, see the Elliot Carter and Roger Reynolds archives online at the LOC site)*.   

However composition is often taught in institutional settings and taught to groups of people, whether in formal courses (with exercises and assignments) or in more open seminar environments (Paul Bailey usefully points to a New Yorker article about creative writing workshops, an enterprise parallel in many ways to composition instruction, which asks good questions about the value of the enterprise pedagogically and the nature of its impact on writing itself.)  Typically, though, most composers who are taught in institutions get a mixture of group and one-on-one instruction.  My impression is that most directed composition ends with the model compositions associated with theory sequences, but directed composition assignments in groups can be very exciting (Cage's assignments to his New School classes and Stockhausen's group projects at Darmstadt are cases-in-point).  

Some composition teachers like to examine every detail in a student's work, others are most focused on the bigger picture.  Personally, I don't find much value myself in having my work edited note-by-note by a teacher.  Iin the end, I take responsibility for every note; another set of eyes canusefully help me with the editing, but they don't have to belong to my teacher and I refuse to be cross-examined on every detail.  That said, I do value highly the exchanges with teachers that focus on getting the ideas right, and the execution both clear and polished.   I was lucky to have composition teachers and fellow/sister composition students who shared that preference, but there are certainly ideal student/teacher pairs and groups who have worked and do work on a more nut-and-bolts level.   (This too: Seminar groups and private lessons can run a certain risk of turning into encounter groups and therapy sessions.  Having lived through California in the 1970's, I don't have much need for that myself, but if it's good for you, fine and dandy.) 

Composers also, sometimes voluntarily group together as professionals and sometimes get grouped together by others.**  There are a lot of good reasons for clustering or grouping — exchange and promotion of music and ideas,  playing each others' work, pooling of material resources, sharing concerts and publicity — and there are also some problems (who's in and who's out of the group?  what if the group falls apart, like a marriage? what if one member is more successful career-wise than others?  what if you now disavow a group?). (Ron Silliman has some thoughts on poets clustering).   Maybe it's wise for groups to have some form of pre-nuptial agreement, for the worst case scenarios.  My own engagement with other composers around Material Press has been both personally and musically rewarding;  the association is voluntary and  fair— like Frog Peak in the US the publisher only earns from scores sold, not demanding the usual 50% publishers' share of license fees, and the times we get together, socially or musically have always been good.  We could, perhaps, have done more in the way of promotion, but our lack of pushiness is also a matter of style.

See also this post from 2007 on Co-Composing, this on The Convivial Cage (2006) and this on Loneliness or Conviviality (2007).

_____

* There are three very practical and potentially profitable reasons for saving sketches: for revising or extending your own work, as material for teaching, and as salable archival materials.  I don't save my sketches, having (a) a small horror of someday being overwhelmed by them, such that I cannot do anything new and (b) some committment to the notion that there are always more than one way to create a given musical surface, with no certainty about which one is the best or most efficient way, but those are my personal quirks.  I recommend that my younger colleagues carefully save every scrap of paper and analog or digital media they make: this is your work, too.  

**The best/worst example of this being the minimalists, with the most curious moment happening when the dubious, but original, quartet of Young, Riley, Reich, and Glass got re-booted (the culprit seems to have been Nonesuch records which, no surprise, was making a heavy investment in Reich and Adams) with Young out and Adams in, albeit with Glass, Reich and Adams running as fast away from the label as they could...

The Unbearable Languidness of Institutions

If we had been limited to mainstream media this weekend, with the exception of BBC's Persian service, we'd have almost completely missed news of the events in Iran.  Traditional media institutions — aside from the fact that they never perform well on weekends — simply don't have the agility and networks of witnesses to cover stories that are not lead by releases from official sources and move faster than hourly deadlines. Internet reporting, on the other hand, while often — and wisely — having to carry caveats about verifiability, have proven themselves to have both considerable agility and a astonishing breadth of networked resources, many of them appearing nearly spontaneously.   (I'm personally amazed that two of the best sources have been diaries at the (left) Daily Kos and (conservative) Andrew Sullivan's page; new pages of photodocumentation from inside Iran and translations of twitter messages have also been very informative.)  I have no doubt that, with the weekend closing, mainstream reporting on Iran will improve, but the internet provided essential information bridging the mainstream's absence and has set a high level of quality for further reporting, changing the initial mainstream spin on the election, which essentially accepted official statements. 

*****

I didn't notice that Perspectives of New Music has — or had? — a blog.  Seems like no one else did either.  It's here but seems to have moved to a Google group here, which is just as quiet.   I'm not exactly a fan of PNM, but it has been moving in more interesting directions in the last decade or so (with features on composers including James Tenney and Pauline Oliveros; good stuff even if two decades too late), but this good news appears not to have reached a wide audience.  This is a shame, because for New Music to stay news, it has got to communicate its breadth, depth, and liveliness.   For breadth and depth, PNM could be an important component, a marker of our diversity and controversy and as a forum for the more intellectual aspects of our art form (yes, Virginia, musicians can be intellectuals), but to succeed, it has to appear lively, with a greater online present and a more rapid delivery of new information, idea, opinions, and, yes, music. I honestly hope that the inherently slow pace of PNM's paper-based journal culture does not keep it from finding a lively presence online.

*****

It was both a revelation and a confirmation for me, when as a young composer, I discovered that Europe had recognized the music I loved most — that of the American experimental tradition — as our most vital and important.   Cage and Feldman and Reich were important names here, while the American compositional establishment — the best upper set, so to speak —, the ones who got commissions and teaching jobs and other plums, were largely (and, to my ears, correctly) obscure.   In my recent listening journeys through the archives of RadiOM, I've been delighted by the realization that, in the end, we valued the experimental tradition more as well, for it has been the experimental repertoire that has survived in the archives.*  In part, I suspect that this is because the outsiders running music programming at Pacifica stations, for example, recognized both the historical importance of the radical music and its material fragility, and understood that if one was to be responsible, as journalists and citizens, that documentation was essential, not a luxury.  (Being able to rehear KPFK broadcasts by Carl Stone or William Malloch lately has been a bit like going through a second musical adolescence.)  On the other hand, where are the archived broadcasts of mainstream new music performances or interviews and the like? The programming lists of a traditional, commercial, "classical" station, like LA's KFAC, actually included a modest number of mainstreamish new music performances, but there's been no foundation created to store those archives.   I suspect that there was a form of institutional hubris at work here, not unlike that found in the large financial institutions that have fallen so greatly of late, a sense of entitlement that comes with establishment status: "we don't have to worry about archives because we're too big to be forgotten..."

*****

Don't get me wrong: we need institutions in our lives.  (Yes, Virginia, we need both the post office and the opera house).  There are just too many of us living on a small planet that somethings need to be organized on a large scale.  Efficience, reliability and redundancy all have their place. (I'm thinking now of Cage's Buckminster Fuller-inspired recognition of the essential role of "utilities" in our lives and the modest way in which it should interact with our lives.) The problem is created, however, when such institutions become bottlenecks, gatekeepers, or roadblocks, when the institution is no longer flexible enough to meet changes in supply, delivery, or demand, and particularly when the institutional will to survive is greater than its ability to recognize that it is no longer providing an adequate service.

*****

[Added, an hour or so later.]  I'd thought I was done with my institution-bashing for the day, but here's something more:  perhaps the first decent English language newspaper obituary for Henry Pousseur, who died on March 6th, appeared in the Guardian on June 11th.  

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* The survival of radical work in online archives is not a phenomena restricted to music:  check out the PennSound pages for poety, or UbuWeb for film, music, poetry, and much else.

Admission, granted

I like concerts.  I like going to concerts.  I like them to the near-exclusion of recordings from my life. But I must admit that I'm not always a perfect concert-goer.  I have, for example,  yawned during a concert. Yawning is rude and distracting to both the performers and the audience.  I shouldn't yawn during a concert.  I have also fallen asleep during a concert*.  That should probably be avoided as well. During intermissions, I sometimes move to more expensive seats that have been vacated. And, of course, as a penurious student, I did steal my way into more than one concert. Sometimes whole concert series or festivals. On occasion, I have left concerts at intermission and — albeit with somewhat less frequency — I have departed the hall in the middle of a piece.  I have coughed, to be sure.  Also sneezed.  I have made crispy plastic noises while opening packages of mints or cough drops, trying to avoid coughing or sneezing. I have sat in squeaky chairs and been unable to stifle all sqeaks.  I have worn shoes that squeak. When suffering stress, my jar has been known to crack.  Not quietly. I have dropped programs, books, sun- and/or reading glasses, articles of clothing, backpacks, briefcases, picnic baskets,  canned beverages, and — but only once — a bentō box during concerts.  I have expressed displeasure by not clapping.  But for all that, I do not talk while music is being played during concerts and I do not have a mobile phone, pager, portable music player, or wristwatch with an alarm that might go off.  Nor have I ever worn clothing so distractive as to compete with the music for the audience's attention.  To be absolutely fair, most of the things I have dropped have fallen on cushioned chairs or carpeted floors.  And while yes, a fallen bentō box is indeed annoying, but a tiffin or a schoolchild's tin lunchbox or carkeys or a handful of cutlery would be that and more so! My cracking jaw is a legitimate medical condition.   And supressing a cough or sneeze is often a hell of a lot more distracting than actually having the damn cough or sneeze and getting on with it.  And, pardon me, but I have never booed, hissed, or demonstratively exited any performance that didn't really have it coming.

In fact, I'd say that altogether, I'm just about your perfect concert-goer.   

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* I have never fallen asleep in a work of Morton Feldman's, by the way.  But I have watched three men — my father, the late musicologist and philosopher Daniel Charles, and Feldman himself — all doze off during Feldman concerts.  Charles, a large man, snored loudly — if ironically — throughout a performance of Feldman's Piano, but somehow managed to wake, as if by some form of electric shock controlled by clockwork, promptly and impressively, given his gallic tonnage, at the piece's end, rising to his feet and shouting "bravo!"

 

Genre Trouble

Once again, I'm thoroughly enjoying myself with a new China Miéville novel, The City & the City, which is a kind of late 19th century mystery story set in a wierd fictional/sci fi/fantasy universe in which the two cities in the title share the same geographical space but are otherwise essentially distinct from one another.  Miéville is a writer who clearly loves his genres, and generally respects their conventions, but not their borders (I hear echos of Kafka and Dickens here as well)  and his respect is never at the expense of getting the language right, and his language is beautifully right.  Similar in my experience to only Pynchon (and, with respect to non-"literary" genres, like legal briefs, Gaddis, or technical and commercial writing, Wallace), Miéville understands how to love a genre just enough to make it better.  If I were a 19h century romantic, I might even use the word "transcend." 

I have to wade carefully now when it comes to the subject of genre.  A post in the past which mentioned comic books casually was rightly torn in shreds by readers with a much less casual relationship to that jenre.  To be honest, with the exception of juvenile flights in sci fi and the hard boiled detective novel and the occasional but neccesary escapes into airplane novels, my reading has been mostly "literary", writing that has the conceit of being outside or even above established commercial genres.  My musical tastes, of course, are probably even more conceited.  I probably know less of or about more popular music genres — whether rock or jazz or polka or jaipongan or whatever — than most of you, and yet I am more or less convinced that the new music has a capacity — if often imperial in ambition — to both contain, critique and go beyond any other genres.  At the same time, I will note the complementary capacity of popular genres to swallow innovations whole if only to spit them out when they are done (anyone else here remember Joseph Byrd's brilliant The United of America or Stanley Silverman's Elephant Steps?  I wonder to what degree such efforts, from the late 1960's, might be considered as tales of caution for my colleagues, now, in the late years of the first decade of the 2000's, who are entering into similar cross-over projects?) (More interesting to me are the cases of composers who have parallel careers in genre musics, like Wallingford Riegger, who wrote band and choir music under a number of pseudonyms, or Jerry Hunt, who made his living largely by scoring industrial films and videos).

In his introduction to McSweeney's Mamoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, editor Michael Chabon (a writer who also knows his genres)  offers a though experiment: "Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe everyother kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. ... I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic materpieces would have emerged.  Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. ..."   May I suggest that any composers interested in joining our little melodica anthology project think of it in similar terms: Imagine that, sometime in the 1950s, it had been decided that the optimal vehicle for avant-garde music were the virtuoso solo melodica piece, that the melodica had had its David Tudor and Severino Gazzelloni and the Arditti and Kronos had been melodica quartets and that its repertoire had included its own Berio Sequenza, and a Cage star-chart-based etude, and an hour of Stockhausen's Klang, as well as the Steve Reich phasing piece or a Christian Wolff exercise.  (Oh wait, we have those last two. Oh well.) 

Enduring Optimism

Composer Gordon Mumma (my teacher, so I'm partisan here) has a new blog, here, and an updated webpage, here.   The greybox images on his site are particularly elegant; definitely a new trick this old dog will have to learn.

I'm delighted, also, to learn about the music of composer Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, who has a website full of scores and sound files, here.  

 

Vérités et Mensonges

For the Melodica project, I've been toying with some forgery.  The idea has been to compose the melodica pieces a few famous composers neglected to write before shuffling off.  The notion is that the world really needs a virtuoso Cage Etude and a Berio Sequenza and maybe even an hour of Stockhausen's Klang for solo melodica.  

I have discovered, however, that if you want the result to be both convincing and musical, you can't play fast and loose with your imitations or parodies, no matter how cheap or, well, funny, they might want to be.  If you want to fake a Cage Etude, for example, there's really no alternative to the discipline Cage followed, in which clear rules were established — whether for chance or choice operations — through which the notations on a star map are to be transformed into notes, intervals and chords arrayed in musical time, and then executing those rules precisely.   Forging a work that is supposed to pass as an unknown piece by a known composer requires replicating the same level of detail and depth that the composer brought to his or her work as well as using material that that is similar but not identical to material the model composer used in "real" pieces.  Anything less that that is likely to lead to an unconvincing result. The same goes, one presumes, for Ersatzstockhausen or faux-Boulez or fraudulent Ferneyhough or bogus Babbitt or counterfeit Carter or gold brick Glass or reproduction Reich... okay, you get the idea.  

One other thing:  a successful sham requires that one concocts a convincing backstory.  Like that sweet little melodica piece Morton Feldman jotted down on a cocktail napkin and promptly forgot in a booth in the back of the Cedar Tavern in '58, or that tragic work Xenakis abandoned in a foxhole while running courier services for the resistance, or that very long solo La Monte Young forgot about during one of those years in the 1960's that has long been forgotten by anyone who was really there... 

Setting the Price

A bleg:  In my sideline as music publisher, we're having some serious discussions about the price of sheet music.  We're not exactly operating in a perfectly balanced supply and demand environment, and there are real costs in materials and time in handling individually printed and shipped orders of sheet music (often with some unusual formating issues), so the calculation is far from easy.  For my own music, and the music of some others at Material Press, I'm usually happy to give away electronic copies of scores (knowing that, if all is reported correctly, I'll earn money from performance licenses), but sell paper scores to libraries or others who don't like to roll their own.  But setting the price for those paper copies is tricky, particularly (a) when a single piece has a relatively modest — by page count — size, or (b) when text or graphic scores are involved, or (c) the score is published on demand.   Peters gets 5.95US$ for a copy of 4'33", perhaps two photocopied pages in a folder.  Peer Southern sells Thomson's Piano Sonata No. 3 — 6 pages of engraved music in a folder — for five bucks.     Anthologies of smaller works by either of these composers, in an engraved and staple-bound format, range from 5 to 25 dollars.  What would you be willing to pay for a single page of instructions for a piece of music?  For a piece 5, 10, or 30 pages long?  How about a cd of recorded sound required for performance of a work?

Think Again

Repetition is opportunity.

A nice line from Xenakis:

When you say repetition, it is "thinking again about the same thing." This is what I think of as the meaning of "repetition."

(from here), reminds me  (once again) of my favorite Lewis Carroll verse, The Mad Gardener's Song:

He thought he saw an Elephant,
  That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
  A letter from his wife.
"At length I realise," he said,
  "The bitterness of Life!"

(...)

and, of course, John Cage's advice:

If we are suffering, and we are able to recognize it, we have the opportunity to change our minds. 

 

Irreverent

Without thinking too much about it in advance, I recently set some small poems by the late Charles Chase, a hometown poet, radical, sculptor, teacher, instrument repairman, small businessperson, and a great friend.  One of them has gotten me into some trouble:

we're not so crowded / where we're going / but we got room for God / being he don't mind / sharing the work / except Sundays

My settings are for ATB voices, not too difficult technically, and are rather mild in musical character, even pretty.  But the reception from prospective singers has been cool.  I just hadn't reckoned with the fact that most choral groups are either attached to religious institutions, or peopled with church-goers so this modest bit of irreverence was just enough to place it in the not usable column.  

These little songs are not central to my work, so that this is is not a major issue for me or anyone else, but maybe it is a useful illustration of current religious sensitivities.      

 

Language Extinction

It's a good thing that there's so much concern these days about language extinction.  As someone working in a musical niche, I recognize something kindred in endangered, dead, and extinct languages.  These languages, like our musics, are repositories of alternative modes of expression (at their acoustical surfaces, at the very least)  and, sometimes, perception, and the preservation of such creative diversity is a critical task.

This conservative task is entirely complementary to the goal of encouraging new linguistic invention.  Nothing is more deadening to the imagination than prescriptive linguistics when it has acquired political power (in a country like Germany or France, for example, the rules about correct spelling are a highly political affair and inability or disinclination to follow those rules can be highly disadvantageous; I have recently watched the newfound American enthusiasm for the spelling bee with some horror).  The same certainly goes for musical composition:  innovation, like the recovery of neglected historical musical paths, inevitably means a confrontation with or negation of some conventions or rules.  

   

Arts and Crafts

I just read that Sam Maloof has died, at the age of 93.  A woodworker, Maloof famously refused to identify himsef as an artist and insisted that his rocking chairs were to be rocked and his cribs were for babies to sleep in, not just striking objects to look at but exquisite surfaces to touch and be put to use.  He was part of a Southern Californian crafts scene that, to my mind, included people like the ceramicist Paul Soldner (Soldner was a neighbor when I was a kid, with a stone house like ours in Russian Village on the Claremont/Montclair border; Maloof lived in Alta Loma, not so far away) as well as countless others working in niches between the ornamental and the practical that California seemed to have always attracted like a magnet.  

I don't think it's much of a stretch to also associate a number of west coast musicians with these craftsmen — Lou Harrison and Harry Partch and Erv Wilson, certainly, but also John Cage, for all of whom craftmanship (in notation or instrument building, for example) was important, as well as the inventive use of found materials, and were never narrowly constrained by the conventional and narrow definitions of their professional disciplines, but rather an attitude that any interesting line of work could be pursued, DIY.  Moreover these musicians seemlessly incorporated craft elements into their work in contrast to the way in which a Schoenberg kept his hobbies (designing playing cards or a cardboard violin) at home or Hindemith identified the craft of composition with a guild-like professional compentency.  

There is a well-known and rather formal art historical term, Arts and Crafts, that identifies a movement in architecture and the decorative arts that, with probable roots in the English movement of the same name, flowered in California and further up the west coast.  Facing the Pacific, Asian models were as important as those from Europe, and the European models as often as not were filtered through the Spanish and Mexican colonial/mission era.   I can remember, in the 60's, visiting the homes of various elderly relatives, all of which exhibited mixtures of architecture, furniture, decor, and objects which comfortably incorporated all of these influences.  My great grandmother's place in Paso Robles was a white-plastered, red tile-roofed adobe bungalow, where persian rugs inside looked up at wrought iron Mexican lamps, and dinner was served on real blue china from China, the model for her garden was, despite the hot climate, an English one with Japanese-inspired touches. The movement was never exclusive to professional artists.  That house and garden in Paso Robles was sketched on by the owner-builder on butcher paper and later on had hand-made lace, stained glass windows, and wallpapers to accompany the purchased items.  Russian Village was only one of several complexes in Southern California with houses made from rocks, salvaged slabs of flood-wrecked concrete pavement and any other bits of thrown-away but still usable material. (The famous Watts Towers are a close sculptural relation of these houses).   The movement reached outward and downward: a standard field of instruction in public schools was "arts and crafts" rather than the traditional fine arts trio of drawing, painting and sculpture. John Cage's mother, for a time, owed an Arts and Crafts store in LA, selling materials to home hobbyists; his engagement with graphic design and, later in life, with printmaking mixed the seriousness of someone who know the mainstream world of modern art well with the play of someone who was willing to try it himself.  I also think that there's an obvious straight line to be drawn from Cage's can-do music education experiments with his Aunt Pheobe and in WPA projects to his music for percussion and the prepared piano.   

Lou Harrison will always be a professional role model for me: if he needed a particular instrument, he had it built or built it himself.  (A friend once quipped that "with every step forward in technology, Lou was apt to take two steps backward".*) Two of Lou's own role models were William Morris and Arnold Dolmetsch, direct connections to that other Arts and Crafts movement.  His calligraphy was of a different aesthetic than Cage's, connected to older historical models (Morris especially) than Cage's more strictly modernist influences (i.e. Maholy-Nagy), but both had manuscript hands that were attractive, legible, and immediately identifiable as their own, impulses that go at some odds with the emphasis elsewhere on a more uniform professional copying style.    

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* That same friend predicted that Lou would soon be making his own paper, but Lou actually became a serious advocate of non-tree papers and it was Cage who would incorporate his own paper (with ingredients including kitchen scraps) in his visual art works.  Lou was also not-entirely-so-backward with regard to technology.  With Carter Scholz, he devised several sets of computer fonts based on his calligraphy, which are now available from Frog Peak Music.

Shawn on Schoenberg

I've just read composer Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey (Harvard 2002) and can recommend it highly.  It's a modest length (ca. 300 pages) work of advocacy for the music and for Schoenberg himself, written in a personal and concrete style making it a nice companion to both Charles Rosen's small Schoenberg book and Andriessen and Schönberger's wonderful Stravinsky book, The Apollonian Clockwork.  Shawn discounts his analyses in advance, but his treatment of the Six Small Pieces, Die Glückliche Hand and the String Trio are quite fine, clearly the work of a musician listening closely to music he loves and comfortable with the words needed to share what he has heard.  In his discussion of Schoenberg's life and personality, he is always interesting and musically relevant, whether writing of Schoenberg's complext relationship to religion, his passion for games and crafts, or even giving an entire chapter over to the topic of "On Being Short"*.   

It is a striking fact that Schoenberg remains a composer whose music — and person** —  is so often held only in the most reserved form of respect, only thinly concealing a serious disapproval, that advocacy is still required.  I contend that the difficulty with Schoenberg's music is its style rather than its substance or technique, and perhaps what his works need best is some defense against its devotees, whether from an Adornovian historical dialectic or dry Babbittonian technical description.  In truth, however, the style, one in which expression is so heighted and treats the darkest themes and topics which haunt our souls, has long become a permanent part of our musical language, if only most often encountered in its weak imitations found in film music.  Fortunately, in Europe at least, his work receives regular concert and stage performances and is increasingly well-played.  The 1998 Gielen/HR-Symphony recording of the one act comic opera Von Heute Auf Morgen, for example, was so brilliantly rehearsed that it revealed that the work, long considered only questionably comic and impossible to really pull off, was, in fact, a lost masterpiece, and the players under Gielen learned to play in the style with both the precision and spontaneity required of a comic work.  

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* As someone who is often the tallest composer in the room,  it was very interesting to read that people who are not tall often adopt social strategies that are the opposite of my own.

** A vivid example of this was recently provided by the German musicologist Martin Vogel, who devoted an entire volume to disparaging Schoenberg's music and personality and an entire companion volume to disparaging Schoenberg's influence (Cage in particular) as the "Mistaken Path of Modern Music".   What a waste of paper.

Melodica!

While free-reed instruments have enormous prestige in East Asian and Southeast Asian musics, they have often been a bit undervalued in the west, more associated with popular and pedagogical repertoire.  Occasionally, however, individual free-reed instruments have proven themselves to be valuable in art music as well -- just think of the harmonium in Rossini's Petite Messe Solemnelle, the accordion in Ives' Second Orchestral Set, Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, and many pieces by Oliveros and Skempton, or the bandoneon in Mumma's Pontpoint, Tudor's Bandoneon! or Kagel's Tango Alemán.  (Not to mention the original orchestration of Die Dreigroschenoper or Oliveros' See-Saw (a duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato).   The number of composers who have written for the harmonic is long (here's one list), so I'll only note concertos by Cowell and Hovhaness.  

There has, however, been too little written for the friendliest of the free-reeds, the melodica.  Composer Christian Wolff has often used it as his axe of choice whether playing his music with others and an early tape phasing piece of Steve Reich carries the name Melodica and uses a toy example as its sole sound source.  Now is the time to remedy this lack of repertoire.    

SO HERE'S A CALL FOR SCORES  for the first online anthology of new music for melodica.  Pieces may be for any solo or combination of melodicas (although solos and four-part ensembles seem to be the most popular).  If you use specific pitches, I suggest using the range f to e''', which will cover both the most popular Hohner and generic models  (the Thomann model, for example, widely used around these parts, has the range f to f''').  Please send scores in PDF format to me by the first of September, 2009.

For some sound examples of the Amsterdam-Based Melodica Quartet ((Jeremiah Runnels, Sander Breure, Graham Flett and Taylan Susam - founder), composer and melodicaist Taylan Susam has usefully posted these:

Christian Wolff: Exercise 1
Mark So - Collateral (4)

Also, see this previous item about new music melodica, here.

 

Some Movement

I should be a short-term futurologist*: Steve Hicken is getting serious about twittered scores, here.

I've added some prose scores of my own manufacture to join the good works of the hard-working folk at Upload .. Download .. Perform, here.

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*I've always been amused by that term.  You would think, wouldn't you, that if a "futurologist" was any good, he or she'd be rich from their predictions about the future, and not reduced to peddling books and lectures?

Short Scores

I keep getting asked if I twitter.  I don't and I probably won't, but I do have one prediction: we're sure to soon see a number of twittered prose scores.   It strikes me that the constraints of the form lend themselves to prose scores based around images or tasks.  For example: THREE TRIANGLES THRICE or SO FAST THAT IT SOUNDS SLOW or ALL TUNES ALL THE TIME or CLOUDS BECOME RAIN or SOUNDS WITHOUT EDGES or EACH TONE CONNECTS TO THE LAST TONE or PLAY WITH EACH AND EVERYONE IN THE ROOM ONCE or REPEAT EVERYTHING AT LEAST THREE TIMES. 

Playable

A recent post here about all-white note pieces sent me looking for a copy of Virgil Thomson's Sonata No. 3 for piano (1930), written for Gertrude Stein who like to improvise only on the white keys.  As might be expected from Thomson, it's brief, witty, and wise, alternating between playing the naif and the wiseguy.  The disfunctional harmonies and athematicism keep the (third, of four short movements) waltz, in particular, safe from any out-of-place sentimentality.  That athematicism and all the right wrong notes make this very easy-to-play piece suitable for children and others with very short or very long attention spans.  

Neglected Topiary

I had a nice first performance this weekend in Saarbrücken of a quartet for flute, clarinet, guitar & percussion, Neglected Topiary, a commission by Saarländischer Rundfunk for the Ensemble L'Art Pour L'Art.   

How does a listener make sense of a new piece of music? In traditional repertoires of music, "making sense" of a piece in specific or general terms is highly dependent upon a broader familiarity with the repertoire. But The New Music doesn't necessarily come to us embedded in a repertoire of conventional forms, styles, or figures, and if it does, the relationship to existing repertoire is often more of negation than affirmation.
 
Neglected Topiary is a book of music including 17 pieces played without pause for flute, clarinet, guitar and percussion, each about a minute long and each sharing the same rhythmic structure, which is often articulated by the percussion in the manner of Asian ensemble musics, but here using a battery mostly North American in character. The pieces includes one quartet, four trios, six duets, four solos and two "other" arrangements, the sequence of which was determined by chance operations.  Each of the individual pieces connects immediately to two other pieces, each solo, for example, is derived from the individual voices of the quartet, and each trio is derived, in turn, from a solo, and duos, in their turn, from the trios.  Thus, every piece is connected, if at some distance, to every other and, to a significant degree, the pieces can be described as pseudo-repetitions of one another.

Through this near-repetition, the pieces may allow listeners to gradually form the impressions of a repertoire of music, in turns ceremonious, mannered, sentimental, and whimsical, with all of the internal consistancies and differences encountered in "real" repertoires, not like Pinnochio trying to be a "real boy" by learning to behave well, but like a topiary animal in a forgotten garden, which is ultimately no more real than the observer wants it to be.
 
Something like a serenade, Neglected Topiary may be played inside or out-of-doors in a garden of appropriate size. The title was suggested by a line from Edward Gorey and refers either to the fact that the piece gathers together a group of materials (snare drum rim shots),  images (burst bubbles and torn pages) or lines of work (non-parsimonious voice leading) that I had been neglecting or to the fact that our tired world has, literally, all-but-abandoned too many pieces of once well-sculpted plant matter.  Either way, the piece sometimes verges on the sentimental and nostalgic, the neo-classical revision of a unknown — and fictional — repertoire.  

Cry Dr Chicago

From George Manupelli's Doctor Chicago trilogy, starring Alvin Lucier as the evil (and politically incorrect) surgeon on the lam, Dr. Alvin Chicago, with his sidekicks Sheila Marie (Mary Ashley) and Steve (Steve Paxton, who dies, dancingly, in each episode).

Ride Dr Chicago Ride

From George Manupelli's Doctor Chicago trilogy, starring Alvin Lucier as the evil (and politically incorrect) surgeon on the lam, Dr. Alvin Chicago with his sidekicks Sheila Marie (Mary Ashley) and Steve (Steve Paxton, who dies, dancingly, in each episode). This episode was filmed in Joshua Tree National Monument.

Just What Is It that Makes Today's Music So Different, So Appealing?

Just asking.

(With apologies to Richard Hamilton).

Symphonia Domestica

If I recall correctly, there is a Jules Feiffer sketch about a average middle-aged family guy, who just happened to be a werewolf, growing fangs and claws and getting hairy each full moon.  When his children complained that other fathers didn't do that, he ate them up.  And when his wife complained about that and other, mostly mundane, things, he ate her up as well.  The moral of the story was "werewolves shouldn't marry."

Should composers marry?  Have kids running about?  The material and moral support can be wonderful (not to mention the "restorative affection", as Lou Harrison put it) and even the brutal instant critiques of a captive audience.   But a composer's life can try that of his or her family.  We don't get rich, we sleep odd hours, run around with odder friends, and make all manners of the oddest noises, only some of which are immediately related to music.  Our expectations for quiet or even servitude (i.e. when a deadline is approaching my grammatical moods are reduced to the imperative) from the family can be extreme, our companionship often vague when in the middle of concentrated work,  and at those times our reliability for household tasks is near nil.  When the music or career is not going well, we can get irritable or rude.  But very few of us, as far as I know, ever actually resort to eating our children or spouses.

The one concrete affect I've felt of family life is that my attention span has been reduced due to the complicated schedules of shuttling kids about to school and lessons and the other hunting/gathering activities a household requires.  This has meant either making shorter pieces, or longer pieces composed of many short stretches of material.   Development, in the classical sense, can get shortchanged in favor of multiple and serial expositions leading nowhere in particular, and not always clearly from one exposition to the next.  Things are apt to follow one another with the same unpredictable mixture of care and inattention that children bring to tasks.  As the kids are getting older and more self-sufficient, this has waned somewhat and, perhaps, I'll start back into development and all that.  For the time being, however, this state of affairs (domestic bliss plus restless composer syndrome) is perfectly pleasant.  And no one is getting eaten up.  Composers can marry, after all. 

La Disparition

Some minor blogkeeping:  There have been about 1200 posts here.  Some of them have been deleted, but most of them are still available in the standard blogspot archive format, indexed in the sidebar.  About half of the entries have been tagged by subject.   I have not downloaded archival copies of any of this for myself, and am not even sure if there's a good way to do it.  

But I'm not even sure that I would actually want to keep such an archive.  These items are essentially journal entries by a working composer.   In the interest of helping New Music to have a more lively presence online,  I have made these writings public.  I would have written many if not most of them anyway (in particular, I'd like to have some record for my children to have, if they should later have any curiosity about why Dad made such odd music),  but the blog format has provided a format which encourages some useful discipline, encouraging one to write at a more regular rhythm and keeping it dressed up enough for others to read, while at the same time having neither the formal constraints and length of a journal article nor the forced brevity of a twitter.  The items here have also been written to some compositional constraints that are related to my music: I use chance procedures to determine the timing, length, and, sometimes, topic of each post.  In many cases, formal or vocabulary controls have been applied, sometimes fairly elaborate games or experiments have been attempted, but not as often as I would have liked.

While I cannot say that I have personally received any commissions or performances as a result of this blog,  I believe that the blog has been useful to the New Music community in a few ways. The first has been in contributing to some discussions of musical politics and the composition competition system in particular.  The other is the online anthology of 15 brief piano pieces, A WINTER ALBUM, here.  (A SPRING ALBUM, of percussion pieces, is still taking entries, and I will soon announce a similar project for melodica and melodica ensemble).

1200 posts over four and a half years is probably enough, if not too much, verbosity for a mid-career composer of modest reputation and ambitions.    Eventually, I will just stop and delete these pages without much ado, retiring to my orchids, bon-bons, and philately*, but for the moment, I'll keep at it, because, on the one hand, it does seem to complement my composing well,  pushing it further along into interesting areas of inquiry and, on the other hand, New Musicland online remains far too quiet.   In the end, I'm blogging because not enough other — and especialy those more verbally gifted — composers are doing it.  If we want our music to be a lively presence in the world, we have to let the world know that our work is deep, lively and available and is full of sounds and ideas to which attention is well worth paying.  Anything less conveys the impression that we do not believe this ourselves to be true.

That said,  June 2009 will be requests month.  What would you like to read about here?

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*No, I don't really have interests in either orchids or philately.  As Sen. Claghorn said, it's a joke, son.

Rep

The word "repertoire" gets used here often.  This is in part due to training in ethnomusicology (see this post), a field in which defining and characterizing a repertoire and its extents and limits is a central concern.  But my concern here is more that of a working composer, trying to figure out how my own work fits into "the rep", if at all.  From an entirely pragmatic viewpoint (especially with regard to the livelihoods of composers), art music took a seriously wrong turn in the 19th century with the development of the masterpiece ethic, which was perpetuated and extended to to a ridiculous — and sometimes pathological — extent in the 20th century.   When the goal became that of making, of each new work, pieces of such import and significance and so conspicuously consumptive of resources for their realization that it becomes all but impossible to perform these works with any real frequency, then one has elevated the work into a Valhalla of special esteem, which certain shows respect for the work, but in doing so has also removed it from everyday music-making with its intimate connections to the normal rhythms of life, the only repertoire that is meaningful to me. It may well be argued that broadcasts and recordings offset this, but I will argue even more strongly that these forms, as marvelous as they can be, are essentially a different experience from live music making, whether private or communal, in realtime and in real physical spaces, and are by no means a substitute.  A record shelf (or an iPod playlist) is a collection but not a repertoire.

Waiting for the repetition

In ninth grade, Mr. Tackett, an English and Drama teacher and my school's resident hipster, handed me a copy of Waiting for Godot with the instructions: "Read.  Now." I started immediately and read during, and with complete disregard for, whatever classes I had that day, and by the time I'd finished the second act, realized something fairly profound about form that is as true for music as for theatre:  You have to be careful to get the repeats right.  If you get them right, you necessarily go beyond simple reproduction, as the experience of the repeat changes the memory of the original.  

The grand audacity of Godot is not that it's a play in which little is said and less happens, but it is a play in two acts in which little is said and less happens, twice.*  The repetition here is not exact, but pseudo-repetition, combining the feeling of worn routine with the sense that the repetition occurs in a world in which time has really passed and the world and the actors and audience in it are all a little more worse (but not necessarily wise) for wear, thus nothing can ever be exactly the same.   The edgy discomfort and awkward laughter of the audience during the first act takes on an entirely different edge when the formal repetition of the second act invites expectations which are inevitably disappointed.  But disappointment is erased, no, transcended, by the joys of variation, whether in major changes (can the blinded Pozzi of Act Two see any less than the sighted Pozzi of Act One?)  or in the smallest details.  

The game here has everything to do with memory, particularly the tension between the memories of the audience and the fragile, fractured memories  of the characters (has the boy come before?)  Moreover, the second act is perfectly scaled down in duration from the first, picking up that trick from slapstick or story- and joke-telling, in which a sequence of quasi-repeated actions gets acted out or told in progressively shorter durations (I wouldn't be surprised if Beckett — intuitively — hit on a golden proportion here), scaled to maximize our attentions.   The effect is uncanny:  even less happens after intermission than before, yet the laughs lose their awkwardness and become relaxed, honest, tender, and sympathetic and the scant bit of hope  that closes the act is just enough to leave one half-hoping for a third act, another day, of similar uneventfulness.

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* None of my observations here are particularly novel.  Wikipedia quotes the critic Vivian Mercier: "a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice." (Irish Times, 18 February 1956, p. 6.)       

Presence

I just got a worried email from some performers concerned about some dynamics in a piece.  In the score, I have a flute playing at a moderate dynamic and suddenly a snare drum rolls over the flute for a measure of forte, after which the flute continues on, more or less as before.  This interruption occurs a few times.  The players were concerned that, during the drum roll, the flute would be inaudible, so they suggested upping the flute's amplitude to match the drum.  I wrote them back not to worry, as the flute, through the continuity of its line and its distinctive character, would be perfectly present, if not literally "heard" and so attempting to balance the two instruments was unnecessary. 

Resourceful

New Musical Resources is a blog with a swell Cowellian name which shows that yes, Virginia, musicologists can do interesting work, too.  Among other things, blogger Peter Gillette is doing research into some American composers who have slipped through the cracks.  In addition to a lot of valuable work about Albert Fine, a composer with connections to East Coast early '60s experimentalism, he has an interest in the ultra-modern music of the early 20th century.* Good stuff, and I hope more musicologists can soon follow suit, allowing people like myself to rest on our imaginary laurels.

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*I was particularly pleased to learn from this blog that the book The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music by the Skryabiniste Katharine Ruth Heyman is now online,  which Dane Rudhyar (perhaps America's best-known Skryabiniste) once recommended to me while a precocious high-schooler (a recommendation which I have filed, for some reason, in a corner for unexplored esoteric advice, alongside that time when Ornette Coleman recommended Cyril Scott's Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages and the Dick Gregory Diet.)   I have mentioned the Skryabinistes here before, as an example of a path mostly untaken by modern music, except for isolated figures like Rudhyar, a handful of Russians and for that all-but hidden thread which runs via Wyschnegradsky and Obouchov to Messiaen and Boulez.  It's strange and heavy stuff to which I've never been able to get particular close, but perhaps that is an inescapable aspect of such a free and intuitive style.

The Joy of Orchestration vs. The Orchestrator's Companion

Over lunch (a plate of left-over chicken momos), skimming through Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration (skimming because you can't really read it, unless, perhaps, you have a thing for excerpts from Kashtschei the Immortal or The Legend of the invisible city of Kitesh or Snegourotchka) , noticed that almost all of the scoring suggestions for string and woodwind ensembles are based upon the reinforcement of score order (flutes over oboes over clarinets over bassoons and strings from high to low) and more eccentric skips and mixtures within the score-ordered lists depricated with, ultimately, the goal of smooth part-writing (especially avoiding voice crossings and cross-relations) and an ideal spacing (approximately that of a harmonic series (intervals getting smaller as the register ascends)).  

Well, okay, Nikolay, but how come almost all of my favorite moments in orchestrated music (violins and contrabasses doubling aeveral octaves apart, bassoon over clarinet over oboe over flute...)  happen to make just exactly the moves you advise against?  Perhaps the Principles could be thought of as the collection of bland, everyday orchestration recipes (bland, but trusted and familar, like The Joy of Cooking) , the default setting you want to avoid whenever you want your music to be something other than bland and everyday (attractive in an exotic and maybe dangerous way, like The Gentleman's Companion).  

Future Imperfect

The New Music Box (of the American Music Cartel Center) autocelebrates its tenth anniversary with one of those rounds of articles prognosticating the future of music.  Among the inevitable appeals to technological progress and even Fukiyama's now-discredited neo-Hegelian (and neo-con) "end of history", there are no real surprises, but it is good to see that at least one contributor, George Lewis, decided to experiment with the prose format.   The money line is the closer:  musicians will take a chance,  which is more to the point then the ever-recyclable Kinder! Schaff' Neues! There ought to be more of this online — composers are supposed to be inventive, after all —  and it was disappointing to read a younger blogger barking at Lewis for doing exactly this.  I mean, if all we expect from words about music is prose, then we can just settle for the sixth ring of hell, you know, the special one reserved for musicologists. 

In any case, congratulations to Frank J. Oteri & his colleagues on ten years of making musical lives more, rather than less, interesting.   And if I tease the Boxers from time to time, it's only out of affection, a loyal fan encouraging the team to do ever better and more challenging work.

A Monday Miscellany

In no order in particular:

Kenneth Woods has a fine essay on Ives & Mahler here, imagining what the conductor Mahler might have found in the score to Ives' Third (my much less elegant attempt the the I & M topic is here;  N.O. Brown once mentioned that Carl Schorske wanted to write a book on the two composers... wouldn't that be something?).

Want to learn Latin?  Here's an online course based on the method of Reginald Foster, whose "experiences" are based on immediate engagement with real Latin texts (and spoken Latin) with grammar introduced as needed (rather than the other way around).

And some music:  Here's Anthony Braxton's Composition Nr. 58 as played by the Taylor Ho Bynum Chicago Big Band.  The video and the performance are both in a rough'n'ready style, which is altogether appropriate to the musical topics in the piece, but I do wonder how the piece would sound in a very tight, precise performance style.  It's not that I think such a style would be better, but it might bring out other aspects of the piece.  (Here are Braxton's own notes on the score).

Another illustration of the elasticity of the term minimalism in an article about the poet Robert Creeley: "an interesting instance of a post-Modernist writer whose career was to a considerable extent the 'story' of the development of Miminalism in America"

Trademark

Recently overheard, from a pair of student composers chatting: "Arpeggio?  Philip Glass so OWNS the arpeggio!"

I recognize the sentiment — it's widespread enough that the arpeggio-heavy theme music to the TV series Fringe was instantly pegged online as faux-Glass — but still, if that's the case, that's a major piece of musical territory to own, at least on par with Ted Turner's two million acres and share of the North American bison herd, and also something of a limiting factor for others writing tonal music.

Which made me wonder... if all existing music were wiped from the planetary memory, and you could stake a trademark claim to any one musical element or figure, strictly on the basis of its income-generating potential, which would be the most potentially lucrative by locking others out of your territory?  A major triad?  An authentic cadence?  Common time?     

 

About Time

Musicians can usefully pay attention when others are talking about time.   Here, via a Blogging Heads conversation*, is an elegant essay by physicist Julian Barbour on nothing less than The Nature of Time.   The two basic problems of time for physicists — the definition of duration and simultaneity of events at spatial separation — are also very much problems for musicians, complicated (of course) by questions of perception, cognition, memory, and cultural or personal habits. Barbour views about time (especially in his book The End of Time) are controversial among physicists, but his notion that time is an illusion is perhaps a useful metaphor for the sleight-of-ear aspect of the work musicians do: extraordinary musical moments as unique configurations of space.  

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* Still waiting for a new music Blogging Heads episode... I'd give an eyetooth to watch Lisa Hirsch go up against A.C. Douglas...

Concentration of Cultural Capital

This brief article, Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital, is well worth a read.  It is precisely the same sort of social concentration in the mainstream new music world which concerns me; the fact that the kinds of composers who are invited to the Cabrillo Festival these days, for example, overlaps so much with those who study at, say, Juilliard or already get play in the major orchestra circuit probably also means that the range of ideas exchanged is necessarily going to be limited, and that kind of limitation does not readily lend itself to the outside-the-box thinking that can often lead to the musically exciting.  

Music for an Epidemic

Here, reposted from February 2007, is a prose score by Bhishma Xenotechnites  (Douglas Leedy) related to a current news topic:

H5N1 (Environmental Music )

This music is for whistlers, or very high treble instruments from any musical tradition (either/or, I think, but maybe one or two whistlers could be in a qroup of instrumentalists, but not vice-versa) . Winds or whistlers need to produce a steady tone of at least 20 seconds' duration. Time is to be indicated by the sound of antique cymbals at intervals as will be specified below. No sounds may be produced or amplified by means of electronics.

Sound any pitch at all (not just "scale pitches") above f''' (which is ca. 1400 Hz.) . There is no upper limit. Choose a pitch and let it sound out steadily (no vibrato) for as long as it can be held; violins, 30 seconds or so up to around a minute (not more). Coming to the end of a tone, take a silent rest of one to two thirds the length of the tone that you just completed. Then repeat the same cycle using next a different pitch. The level of the loudness: not particularly high, but make a full sound. (Crescendo at the start and at the end a fade are good, so long as the pitch is steady.)

The performance will last at least six minutes, or longer, if the performers agree on a duration; the composer thinks the best result will probably ensue if the tone-rest sequence is performed at least a dozen times, and perhaps not more than about twenty, though a still longer performance could be done.

At the first sounded note, the piece will begin. The antique cymbals, as a sort of marker, will be struck three times, at well spaced intervals, and then twice in close succession at the end — five seconds or so apart. On hearing this signal, the performers will finish the tones, one by one, that they may be sounding, and when the last tone falls silent, the performance ends.

Listeners: what you will hear is what you get.

Bhishma Xenotechnites
2006

(some minor revisions, 2007)

(cc) Part of the Public Domain, 2006.

Complexity Wars, revisited

Very often, the comments to blog posts are where the really interesting activity happens but, hidden away behind an additional click in the archives, they often turn into lost bloggage.  

I think  this thread on the complexity wars at Tim Rutherford-Johnson's The Rambler is well worth revisiting.   There is a lot of red meat here from every side of the issues, and I think the dialogue between experimentalists and complexists has more common ground and is much more fruitful than that with the quietists who control much of the musical status quo.  Both of our parties are uncomfortable with music, as it is, and are willing to rock the boat so that it, and life around music, might be something different.

I probably should have pushed one of my points in this thread more: not only is Drumming damn hard to play and an authentically complex musical experience for the listener, part of the difficulty and, yeah, complexity of Drumming lies in the fact that the accuracy of the players is verifiable — by player and listener alike — to a degree both unimaginable and irrelevant to, say, Bone Alphabet.   Consequently, this leaves the player in an exposed position with precious little room to fake her way through it.   The one disappointing aspect of the thread is that it ends with the almost inevitable one-upmanship that characterizes a lot of the macho talk which prevails in the complexity scene: "name the time and place, Buster, and I'll play you a 13-against-7"; I personally prefer the attitude, found more often in the radical music community, in which greater performative or perceptual accuity is most immediately and optimistically adressed as a compositional problem, that is to say, making a music that more clearly makes the nature of its material articulate for the listener seems to be about inviting the listener to hear more rather than less and not simply witness virtuosity for its own sake.   

Rational

Edward Lawes points to this rather nice video of composer Brian Ferneyhough rehearsing his Bone Alphabet for solo percussion.  It's a great little piece and the film is a good document of Ferneyhough's amiably non-dogmatic approach to working with good players.  Just one little complaint:  Ferneyhough insists on describing non-power of two rhythmic relationships as "irrational", a habit that's frequent among the complexity set.   3:2, 4:3, 11:7, 17:13.... as complex as they might be when used to articulate a rhythmic relationship, these ratios of whole numbers are all, by definition, rational, nor irrational.  

Bárdarbunga!

Boy, was I disappointed to learn that the Imagem Music Group had acquired the Rodgers & Hammerstein catalog!  If I had known that they were in the market for a corpus of music like that in the R & H musicals, then my partners in the Music Division of Wolf Industries of Gulfport, Miss. would have been more than happy to make an offer.

Thanks to a series of proprietary algorithms developed by our staff of highly-paid, well-trained, fine-mannered, and not t00-tough-on-the-eyes music industry scientists and technicians, we have the capacity to rapidly deliver single works of music or works for the musical stage and screen on demand equivalent to any known work, but different enough from said works to guarantee adequate distinction in the case of any copyright infringement action via sophisticated music-theoretical procedures including parody, transposition, inversion, retrograde, and a complex operation involving moving a lot of notes around on the page that we like to describe as variation.  

For example, our staff has already produced the musical about the 1950's Southern California land grab, Oh, Pacoima!, which, in addition to the cheerful title song (Oh - P - A -C - O - I -M - A!)  includes the abstinence-only theme song commisioned by the Bush adminstration I'm A Girl Who Just Says No!.   For those with more exotic tastes, our cold war musical North Atlantic was a great success in previews during the 2002 Norwegian cruise season. The lyrical paean to the great Icelandic volcano, Bárdarbunga,  sung by the comical flight mechanic Muddy Barry, was a particular hit with the over-eighty set.  (Unfortunately, our catalog novelty for 2006, the Hitchcock-like musical, about a family of eight adorable singing Austrians in Lederhosen trapped in a unstoppable falling elevator, The Sound of Muzac, cannot be supplied at the moment due to a cease and desist order from the Muzac Corporation.) 

Young's Paradox

I was recently asked to write something about La Monte Young, as a teacher and friend, but those relationships are works in progress and I'm loathe to sum them up as there is too much left to be done.  Here, though, is one observation about his music: 

There is a central paradox in Young's composition and performance practice that gives the music a large part of its highly individual character and charge.  Although his earliest mature compositions were frequently without a global tonal center (a number of the early pieces are twelve-tone, but the slow tempo often strongly invites a localized sense of tonality), his subsequent concern for precision in the domain of pitch has continuously increased, and with it, he has progressed up into unexplored regions of the harmonic series,  reinforcing a form, if highly expanded, of tonal centeredness.  However, in his rhythmic practice, the actual articulation of those pitches in musical time, remains free, from regular metre and, often, from even a steady pulse.

The Well-Tuned Piano, for example, alternates in texture between a free articulation of the simplest pitch configurations, both melodically and in simple harmonies, dyads or triads, in a manner suggestive in speed and mood of an alap, an unmeasured prelude, or a very deliberate recitative, and "clouds",  which are larger pitch collections, frequently at or past the boundary between a chord and a fused sonority of timbral rather than chordal complexity,  articulated by a continuously developing motion of the hands and individual fingers, keys, hammers, and wires, intuitively adjusting the speed and patterns in order to lock into textures in which the entire acoustical complex is self-reinforcing, bringing out internal melodic and harmonic patterns as well as phenomena — beating and combination tones especially — which create a whole larger than the sum of the component parts.  

The special charge here, for me at least, is that the potential tension between the clarity of the immediate pitch relationships — however expansive the particular relationships may in fact be — and the complexity of the actual sounding surface is always resolved by an optimistic assertion of a greater potential for our capacity to perceive music  (this assertion is related to, but not identical with, John Cage's assertion of a universal music-interpretive competence;  "I can eventually figure out if I'm in the best seat" (Young) is a different proposition from "everyone is in the best seat" (Cage).)  

The sources of Young's style are a heterodox assembly of consequences and influences that happen to have reinforced themselves particularly well.  Young's own study and practice of forms of Bebop and free jazz as well as an alap-heavy style of North Indian Classical vocal music both landed the composer-performer in ametrical territory (not to mention the important experience of musical traditions with their own solutions to the real time articulation and ornamentation of static pitch configurations), and while Young has always been a man with the tempo of a tortoise in the exercise of everyday life and he grew up in a household and church in which talk of both "all time" and "eternity" was everyday chatter, the pursuit of ever-greater accuracy in intonation, requiring an ever-longer sampling period and Young's attachment to electronic tone generation, with its potential for both more accuracy and more continuous playing durations, have only increased the openness of his rhythmic and, indeed, formal sensibility, while altering none of the rigor of his pitch selection.    

    

The Routine

"Pulitzer Prize in Music?  Passport to oblivion."  — Richard K. Winslow

Let's get over the Steve-Reich's-Pulitzer-Is-Well-Deserved-But-30-Years-Too-Late trope, okay?  If you go through a list of the music composition awards* (or the poetry or editorial cartooning awards, for that matter), it's pretty clear that they stick to a pattern of handing it out for several years in a row to mid-career musical quietists (mainstream conservatives, and yes, I mean quietist, even when the music is loud)  and then tossing in a neglected senior figure from time to time, either someone really unavoidably significant, but never within the acceptable middleroad (Ives, Brant, Coleman) or someone very much a part of the establishment but not actually having produced a great piece (Sessions, Powell, Gould).    

Ron Silliman, from whom I cheerfully steal the E.A. Poe term "quietist", has a great post this week (here), in which he notes that in US poetry, it has only been new formalists who have made an attempt at stealing the brass ring from the quietists.  East coast 12-toners seem to have once made a serious attempt along these lines in the Music Pulitzer's, with Wuorinen and Martino each getting through, as place holders, perhaps, for Babbitt, who was eventually settled with an honorary "lifetime" award,  but the awards themselves quickly returned to the routine of less obstreperous selections.  While it may well be possible that Ben Johnston, for example, a figure who has does some bridging between the experimental and academic worlds might yet see an award, and an award for Glass  is probably only a matter of time, major American composers — all composers, in fact, whose work is understood now, in terms of concert performances and recordings, to be essential American repertoire — for whom the ring was simply never available have included Harrison, Cage, Feldman, Brown, Nancarrow, and Erickson and probably will continue to include Riley, Young, Lucier, Ashley, Oliveros.  

The bigger story about the Pulitzers is, of course, the continued slighting of online journalism.  I suspect, for better or worse, that the first such award will come in criticism, given the continuing reductions in critic positions by print journals. Fortunately, there are some blogging critics out there who have already demonstrated the perceptiveness and writing chops required as well as a command of the medium's unique possibilities to do the job imaginatively.  

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*Here's my list with estimated ages of the recipients at the time of the award:

1943: William Schuman (32), Secular Cantata No. 2: A Free Song
1944: Howard Hanson (47), Symphony No. 4
1945: Aaron Copland (44), Appalachian Spring, ballet
1946: Leo Sowerby (50), The Canticle of the Sun
1947: Charles Ives (72), Symphony No. 3
1948: Walter Piston (56), Symphony No. 3
1949: Virgil Thomson (53), Louisiana Story, film score
1950: Gian Carlo Menotti (38), The Consul, opera
1951: Douglas Stuart Moore (57), Giants in the Earth, opera
1952: Gail Kubik (37), Symphony Concertante
1953: no prize awarded
1954: Quincy Porter (57), Concerto Concertante for two pianos and orchestra
1955: Gian Carlo Menotti (43), The Saint of Bleecker Street, opera
1956: Ernst Toch (68), Symphony No. 3
1957: Norman Dello Joio (44), Meditations on Ecclesiastes
1958: Samuel Barber (48), Vanessa, opera
1959: John La Montaine (41), Piano Concerto
1960: Elliott Carter (51), String Quartet No. 2
1961: Walter Piston (67), Symphony No. 7
1962: Robert Ward (44), The Crucible, opera
1963: Samuel Barber (53), Piano Concerto
1964: no prize awarded
1965: no prize awarded (See Duke Ellington)
1966: Leslie Bassett (43), Variations for Orchestra
1967: Leon Kirchner (48), Quartet No. 3 for strings and electronic tape
1968: George Crumb (38), Echoes of Time and the River
1969: Karel Husa (47), String Quartet No. 3
1970: Charles Wuorinen (31), Time's Encomium
1971: Mario Davidovsky (37), Synchronisms No. 6
1972: Jacob Druckman (43), Windows
1973: Elliott Carter (64), String Quartet No. 3
1974: Donald Martino (42), Notturno
1975: Dominick Argento (47), From the Diary of Virginia Woolf
1976: Ned Rorem (52), Air Music
1977: Richard Wernick (43), Visions of Terror and Wonder
1978: Michael Colgrass (46), Deja Vu for percussion and orchestra
1979: Joseph Schwantner (36), Aftertones of Infinity
1980: David Del Tredici (43), In Memory of a Summer Day
1981: no prize awarded
1982: Roger Sessions (85), Concerto for Orchestra
1983: Ellen Zwilich (44), Three Movements for Orchestra (Symphony No. 1)
1984: Bernard Rands (50), Canti del Sole
1985: Stephen Albert (44), Symphony RiverRun
1986: George Perle (70), Wind Quintet No. 4, for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon
1987: John Harbison (48), The Flight into Egypt
1988: William Bolcom (49), 12 New Etudes for Piano
1989: Roger Reynolds (54), Whispers Out of Time
1990: Mel D. Powell (77), Duplicates: A Concerto
1991: Shulamit Ran (41), Symphony
1992: Wayne Peterson (65), The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark
1993: Christopher Rouse (44), Trombone Concerto
1994: Gunther Schuller (69), Of Reminiscences and Reflections
1995: Morton Gould (81), Stringmusic
1996: George Walker (73), Lilacs, for soprano and orchestra
1997: Wynton Marsalis (35), Blood on the Fields, oratorio
1998: Aaron Jay Kernis (38), String Quartet No. 2, Musica Instrumentalis
1999: Melinda Wagner (42), Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion
2000: Lewis Spratlan (60), Life is a Dream, opera (awarded for concert version of Act II)
2001: John Corigliano (63), Symphony No. 2 for string orchestra
2002: Henry Brant (88), Ice Field
2003: John Adams (56), On the Transmigration of Souls
2004: Paul Moravec (46), Tempest Fantasy
2005: Steven Stucky (55), Second Concerto for Orchestra
2006: Yehudi Wyner (76), Chiavi in Mano, (piano concerto)
2007: Ornette Coleman (77), Sound Grammar
2008: David Lang (51), The Little Match Girl Passion
2009: Steve Reich (72), Double Sextet

More on competitions etc.

Jessica Duchen is on the trail of the (corrupt) music competition system.   The career stakes for performers in these affairs are generally higher than those for composers, for whom the main problem is that entrants are too often being asked to fund the competition prize through entry fees without clear-cut aesthetic criteria for the judging offered up-front, but the nepotism and abuses of the jury system indicated here are alarming.  

Music is not a sport and simply doesn't operate by the kinds of rules that lend themselves to fair judging, so maybe the best solution is to simply recognize that competitions — unless very carefully, ethically, and openly organized, like the "Iron Composer" competition, for one — are by nature  prone to abuse.  Given that recognition, we can then either ignore them altogether or take them in a much lighter spirit, as a none-too-serious form of entertainment. 

The best way for a young musician to establish a reputation for playing is through playing, especially with other musicians, not competing against them.  Play lots of different music in informal settings, as a soloist or chamber musician, and cultivate your "works well with other skills" as well as the purely musical chops.  Playing for free in such events is far more useful than trying to finance your way into the competition circuit.  Organize your own soirees and concerts.  The finest musicians I know have established careers in just this way and their independence from the conservatory/competition/agent system has meant that they can play a greater number of concerts with a greater variety of music and have more interpretive freedom than their colleagues who are locked into narrower repertoires with lower levels of interpretive tolerance.  The per-concert fee of a good new music pianist, for example, may be lower than that of a good Chopin player, but the new music pianist is going to play more music more often and can more readily establish a niche that looks like a real career than the mainstream player who is always subject to the whims of the current market.  

Fashion

Like most American males, I learned to dress at the age of 12 and have learned nothing more about it since.  My own sartorial preferences have remained in that age, when the two principal models were that pair of boys' lit Toms, Sawyer and Brown.   In Grad school, the choreographer and scholar Susan Foster encouraged me to read Roland Barthes; while I really liked Empire of Signs (the book about a country very much like Japan) , The Fashion System was totally lost on me, and I've never been quite sure whether my deficit was due to intellectual weakness on my part, or just an ordinary heterosexual allergy to fashion.  Nevertheless, I have recently made some modest efforts to up my wardrobe, but the direction is more retrograde than original.  I'm back to wearing hats, but now going with wide brims rather than the caps of my schooldays and in Kathmandu, perhaps risking the dismay of some vegetarian friends, I had a couple of extra-long leather ties and a suede vest made for me, figuring that both were about a generation out of style, so there was a chance to beat the curve for once.   Moreover, having not worn a tie for about five years (and that last one was a bolo at that), maybe it was time to at least imitate the appaearance of a grownup.

Which brings me to my (small) musical point.  Many of my recent pieces have been coming out with surfaces that recall familiar musics enough to be heard as, well, neo-classical.   Inasmuch as my current working mode has emphasized, instead of first principles, digging into historical repertoire and locating alternative paths not taken, the label certainly fits. But only if the "classical" part is loosened up a bit more (neo-subitor, neo-serial, neo-experimental...).  In any case, there is certainly nothing less fashionable at the moment than to assert a relationship to the classical, even when neo- or pseudo- or quasi- or just plain faux-.   And the musical point of this is that one only moves forward, does or makes or discovers something really new, when one is out of step with fashion.  When the world zigs, kiddos, it's time to zag.

Global Modernity

Noted: the average DVD shop in Kathmandu has a better selection of classic art films than the average shop in LA.  You can walk out of one of those places with the complete works of Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, Griffiths, Renoir, Buñuel...  I know that these are all copies of dubious legality made locally, but they are beautifully packaged, required some capital investment, so you have to wonder what the intended market is?  Are there that many cineaste expats in town? Or are the Nepalis serious film buffs?

For Walter Zimmermann

The composer Walter Zimmermann has just turned 60.  For many younger composers — wayward North Americans (like myself) in particular — Walter has been an essential and nuturing presence.  I know of no other composer in this country who has, on the one hand, been so generous with their time and resources and, on the other, so uncompromising and impatient with any effort — whether his own, or that of a colleague — that was less than complete or lacked commitment to the essence or core of a musical idea.  In his own music, Walter has no fear of handling hard topics and his Lokale Musik project, in particular, showed a path out, if not a solution, to making a traditional music (and perhaps even the historically troubled landscape around that music) into something new and transcendent.  Walter is a fine composition teacher and has a special gift for stepping into a moribund scene and making it more lively with his enthusiasms and challenges.  In a country where most artists are content to roll along with the restrictions of institutions and habit, Walter has been a champion of self-reliance and has never been content to do things in the default fashion.  (One of my favorite examples was when he adjourned a scheduled "chalk talk" in Darmstadt for an outing to an rustic Inn on an Odenwald hilltop; he and the late Stefan Schaedler, as independent producers, were responsible for the last major Cage festival assembled with the composer's cooperation in Frankfurt, Anarchic Harmony, and, of course, Zimmermann's self-published anthology of interviews with experimental American composers, Desert Plants, was a decisive influence on many of us).   I am very lucky to call Walter a friend and mentor and my debts to him, both material and ideal, are immense.

(I recently made a small set of pieces facile, called Some Handywork, for piano with limited ambitus for Walter Zimmermann's 60th;  the Bransle above recalls our mutual delight in AGON and the music of social dances). 

From Chitwan, Nepal

With electricity eight hours a day at most and internet connections slow and unpredictable, turning on a computer and blogging about a family holiday seems somewhat besides the point. (As the Doctor put it: ""You Two! We're at the end of the universe, eh. Right at the edge of knowledge itself. And you're busy... blogging!", Doctor Who, "Utopia") Nepal is a country which overwhelms, perhaps mostly in the contrast of tragic conditions of most human life here against the spectacle of the land itself, especially the mountains. Outsiders here, whether tourists like myself, mountain trekkers, seekers of one denomination of enlightenment or another, or aid workers in brand-new ATVs too wide for the roads, seem like distractions in a country which has a lot to settle on its own terms, from ecological catastrophes, the numbing divisions of caste, ethnic group, region, class, and gender, the unsettled heritage of regicide, revolution and civil war, to the all-too-common difficuties of the transition from agrarian to urban society. Some of these problems do have an international dimension, for example the effect of climate change on glaciers and the resultant water supply problems. Religion seems an area of relatively calm, with an astonishing fluidity between the various sects in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, but their are signals that this may no longer be the case, with (ironically, perhaps) the new "non-sectarian" state attempting to control some religious practices - for example, the appointment of priests to temples - in something, for better or worse, like the Turkish model. That said,my overwhelming impression is that the land functions and people survive, if only at a subsistence level, in a complex of informal networks and markets, independently from when not despite the institutions of state. (I think Hardt and Negri's Multitude gets some of this right, but their attachments to some pretty ugly ideological and theoretical baggage ultimately sinks their project.)

All that said, I appreciate the quiet and kindness of all the people I've encountered here. (Even theauto horns, though used frequently, are at least 30 db quieter than those in Germany). The residents of Kathmandu all seem to have a highly advanced sense of proprioception as they manage to negotiate their bodies through streets filled with every kind of transport medium. My children are having a grand time, even sharing a river bath with elephants. And I've learned to cook momos, the local version of the stuffed dumpling. When I'm back next week, I may even have something to write about music.

Bake Sale

This story makes me very happy:  Newspeak and Ensemble de Sade are holding their "1st Annual New Music Bake Sale".  It's not quite the pancake breakfast suggested here, but it'll certainly do.  In order to thrive, New Music has to go wide and deep, not only concentrating on the elite institutional life of opera houses, major orchestras, university music departments and a handful of venues in Manhattan, but reaching and integrating our music-making into homes, schools, and communities, a task not made any easier by the increasingly disconnected patterns of contemporary life.   I can't make it on the 17th — I'll be with the family in Nepal — but if you do, have a slice of banana bread and think of me.

Simmer and reduce

Reduction in cooking eliminates bulk and intensifies taste. The equivalent move in the radical music*, the reduction of materials to a minimum serves a similar function.  I'll repeat, again, the most useful definition of minimalism: "the elimination of distraction" but add this: the intensification of the experience of sound.

Here, from a famous set of small piano pieces for small hands:

In these very famous pieces, the right hand is busy with only five notes at a time in a piece or section of a piece, one for each finger.  The left hand sometimes gets to play with a few more than five.  With so few tones available, and each tone consequently subject to frequent iteration, we should be able to settle quickly into a comfortably familar neighborhood of the tones used singly, in sucession or in combination .  But the composer always manages to surprise, bringing out unexpected depth in what would initially appear to be a rather shallow field of possibilities.  The chord above to which the forefinger is pointing is a case in point.  Yes, this is music about exquisite — and, sometimes, exquisitely familiar if not banal — voice leading, and habits of voice leading should excuse the b in the left hand as a neighboring tone, just passing by, but we do also hear this coincidence of lines as a chord, in its context, and as a very special chord indeed, perhaps the most sonically dissonant possible assembly of three tones extractable from this collection.  Such clear means, such reduced materials, and yet such a complex sensation, at the limits of our tonal sensibilities, conditioned as they are by musical experience and probably some neurological hard-wiring.  Okay, this is not The Famous Minimalism,  and there are other things going on, especially in the realm of metre and accent, but the impulse is the same: simmer, reduce, and the materials are given a new context or frame, one in which we can pay attention to details that would otherwise get (dis)missed.

Or this:  I've recently been playing through Charles Shere's sonata ii: compositio ut explicatio  (related to a lecture by Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation and, in one version, playable as accompaniment to a rhythmicized performance of that lecture). This is a large-scale work for solo piano, about an hour in duration, with a particular wealth of variety in registration and texture.  The generous scale of the work and the way in which similar figures and textures are almost rhetorically deployed over its course are so engaging that it scarcely registers that the piece only uses the white keys.*  There is almost too much material in those seven pitch classes.  Additional chromaticism, given the variety of gestures and textures, would probably be a distraction.  Again, simmer, reduce until the flavor is more intense than the sum of the ingredients.

_____

*For more about the Radical Music, see this collection of posts, or these fragments of a manifesto.

** This is also a Stein reference, in that the writer liked to improvise on the white keys only. Virgil Thomson's Piano Sonata No. 3, written for Stein, is also a white key piece.  Another large-scale work for the white keys only is John Cage's Four Walls.  These pieces would make a swell program (hint hint).

     

The Ancient Habits of Musicians

Afarensis reports on the excavation of a 2700-year old tomb in Yanghai, China:

The burial is that of a 45 year old male. The grave goods included bridles, archery equipment, a harp, a leather basket, and a wooden bowl. Both the basket and the bowl were filled with vegetative matter - about 789 grams (~ 1 pound 11 ounces). Radiocarbon dating was performed and a calibrated date of 2,700 years BP was returned. Analysis of the vegetative material indicated it was Cannabis sativa. Furthing testing indicated it was psychoactive.

Yep, a harp and psychoactive vegetative matter. No doubt we will soon see some cultural conservatives rallying around this ancient evidence of the connection between music, dope, and death.  

K.V. Narayanaswamy

During a recent viewing of A Composer's Notes, Michael Blackwood's Philip Glass documentary, I noticed that Glass's comments about the importance of Indian music were made during a concert in Chennai (Madras) featuring the South Indian vocalist K.V. Narayanaswamy (1923-2002). I had the fortune to hear KVN (as he was called) live only once, and it was one of the most astonishing concerts of my life. Considered one of the finest Karnatic vocalists of the 20th century, he was, in universal terms, a real classicist, with no gesture or ornament wasted. While capable of the most virtusosic runs and most complicated rhythmic patterns, the music was clearly more important to him than his own ego and he always focused on getting to the core of the raga and composition at hand. In this video (one of several of KVN on YouTube, all of them rather rough, but still valuable), in Raga Ranjani, pay close attention to the exquisite intonation of the third degree of the scale, sung to the solfege syllable "ga", especially towards the end of this clip.

Evening

Sommerzeit, the local version of "Daylight Savings Time" has just begun in this part of Europe, extending daytime by one hour. Try as I may, I cannot imagine making music to be played in daylight -- even my out-of-doors music prefers the night --, so this supposed energy-saving measure registers as more of a music-saving measure, with the lengthened afternoon shoving the prime concert time into ever-later and, for working people, marginal hours. There are, perhaps, composers and musicians with sunnier dispositions, who know how to make the magic of a musical performance function under natural light and before an audience which is fully alert and awake (unlike the evening audience, advantageously prone to reverie and other semi-conscious states), but I am not one of them. Even in musical traditions -- those of India in particular -- in which modes and compositions are designed for and understood as belonging to particular hours of the day, the bulk of the repertoire is evening music, suggesting that the musical advantages of the early darkened hours are widely recognized.

See also this item from 2007: Nocturnal.

Our Other Orchestra

Here's a Google map of gamelan orchestras in the US.   Compiled by Chad Bailey Nielson, it's color coded: blue for central Javanese, red for Balinese, green for Sundanese, teal for Cirebonese, and purple for mixed.  The gamelan, in one variety or another, has rapidly became an alternative orchestral form in the US, and not a few composers have had more large ensemble experience with gamelan than with traditional western orchestras.

The Vanishing Niche

Here's more evidence that the big online distributers are increasingly turning away from niche business, in this case via recommender systems. This is not a good development for new music.

Revolution?

The half-joke in the Clinton years was that if the amount of wealth which had been transferred upwards had gone in the other direction, we'd have called it a revolution.  It was only a half-joke because most people remained comfortable enough and the word "revolution" had lost much of its currency in the dull years that followed the '60s and 70's.

Now, here's a small article by Felix Salmon that seems to have the general measure of temperaments these days right, and, to be honest, I'm more than surprised by the ease with which terms like revolution, class, and even class warfare are now being thrown about:

"That dream is shattered -- and, what's worse, it turns out that very overclass is responsible for the working classes' own present straits."

Musicians, and especially new musicians are very much on the the margin of any debate structured in terms of class, let alone warfare and revolt.  (Cage or Cardew's writings about revolution now seem odd, even quaint)  We have the pocketbooks of the working class, yet make our livings by packaging our selves and our wares for the pleasure of an intellectual and capitalist class and the state that they have made.   But the condition and survival of new music in rough times is a serious topic, serious in the practical terms of assuring our livelihoods, but also in the aesthetic terms of the nature of our work.   Sometimes, historical examples provide some guidance.  However, for better or worse, it is next to impossible to generalize about new musical pratice in previous times of stress, as there is no general pattern.  Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner were each influenced, profoundly, by revolutionary times, but they are too far in the past to provide transposable examples.   After the First World War and during the Vietnam era, there were moments of true musical radicalism, some of which may now echo well with the popular anger of the moment, I suppose.  But after the Second World War, there was a turn to cooler forms of modernism, and during the Great Depression, the coincident styles of neo-classicism, folkloric nationalism, and socialist realism were all aesthetically conservative, if populist, moves.  Of course, technology is always the wild card here:  it may just be that the means of musicial pro- and repro-duction are efficient and cheap enough to sustain a greater diversity of both substance and style.   The half-joke of the '60s, that the revolution would not be televised, may have to be revised to the affirmative that the revolution will be online.

 

 

Embedded, from the Opera Ball to the Pancake Breakfast

There is no musical genre as resource- and personnel-intensive as opera, and yet, despite the extravagant costs and the fairly limited potential size of its audience, opera and the institutions which produce it continue to maintain prestige and position even through the deepest of downturns, when other musical institutions, even those requiring much more modest resources, are seriously affected.  There are several reasons for this special status, both artistic — opera is a unique amalgam of activities and can present spectacle, virtuosity, and complexity for both eyes and ears — and social, but I suspect that the social considerations are the more critical.  Opera is embedded in local social networks, and often wealthy and powerful networks, with the prestige of these networks lending opera the aura of importance, class, value, and indispensibility.  

Which isn't to say much of anything new, except perhaps this: New music doesn't need the scale or the prestige of opera, much less the institutional status.  Indeed, it would probably lose much of its essential character — its novelty and urgency — if placed under such institutional care.  However, to thrive, even at the margins, new music needs a similar social embedding, a connection to civic life.  No, nothing as large in scale and extravagance as the annual Opera ball, rather something more like the annual pancake breakfast the local Little League holds, an event that brings a community together in regular intervals, does some useful outreach and fundraising, and does so in an informal and comfortable way.  That said, we can skip the paper plates and plastic forks (can we stipulate that there is nothing worse than eating syrup-drenched pancakes off a paper plate with plastic forks?).

Too Big To Fail

The current crisis in banking is, in large part, due to the massive deregulation of the financial sector, which included a removal of restrictions on the types of business that single institutions can carry out as well as the end of restrictions on interstate banking, creating the banks (and other private financial institutions) which are now identified as "too big to fail."

I contend that new music appears much less lively, diverse, and interesting than it actually is because there is a similar concentration of public attention on a limited number of markets, venues, and providers.  A recording on Nonesuch, for example, is more likely to get reviewed and will receive optimal distribution, while recordings on more local and upstart labels and without the backing of a major media firm like Warner, will largely be ignored.  A one-off performance in New York before an audience of 12 in a Soho loft gets reviews, but a run of 12 sold-out performances on Cape Cod is ignored entirely.

The more egregious effect, however, is on the music itself.  A commission for orchestra is rare and an orchestra is a large and expensive institution, and composed as it is of a mass of people with well-practiced working habits, even quite talented people, tends to learn new things slowly, so rehearsal time is precious.   Consequently, presenters tend to play safe with the orchestra, the musical institution "too big to fail," and play it safe by choosing composers with track records for playing it safe and working successfully with other orchestras (remember second grade: "plays well with others"?  diplomacy is ofen a real substitute for real musical interest).  The chosen few composers, in turn, protect their track records by providing just enough novelty ear candy to maintain the aura of the new while fundamentally remaining in the safety zone in terms of both performance difficulty and audience receptivity. 

This situtation is most unfortunate because it seriously misunderstands the central function which risk plays in musical change and underestimates the capacity for serious musicians to successfully negotiate risks.  Each landmark in music history can be reasonably heard as an example of a composer and performers successfully resolving risks.  (There are even a small number of extraordinary works in which the risks have never been successfully mastered, yet it still seems worth our while to keep working at them).   The relationship between success, failure, and risk in music-making is something altogether different from that in commerce and finance, but I daresay that music managers have been doing as damn bad a job as their colleagues in finance in risk management.    

Feyerabend

If the anarchic qualities of musical change and discovery are to be taken seriously, then the writings of Paul Feyerabend seem increasingly useful.  Take this small text, for example, on epistemological anarchism, and substitute "compositional" or "aesthetic" for "epistemological". Or take this, from Against Method, and substitute "music" for "science":

“The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too simple a view of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause, their development. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to increase our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity. In addition, the idea is detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical and historical conditions which influence scientific change. It makes our science less adaptable and more dogmatic: every methodological rule is associated with cosmological assumptions, so that using the rule we take it for granted that the assumptions are correct. Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest and not hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. Empiricism takes it for granted that sense experience is a better mirror of the world than pure thought.”

SP'sD

Another St. Patrick's day has past, which in the US has become a curious spectacle of elective affinity for an imagined identity.  Bars and parades are full of one-day-a-year patriots drinking green beer, singing A Nation Once Again, without ever wondering if the supposed nation was ever there in the first place, let ago ready for reappearance. And don't get me started on corned beef and cabbage... 

I'm as much of a mutt as most Americans, with some fractional advantage to those ancestors whose last European home was in Ireland (with the rest from Holland or Britain),  We've kept in touch with relations on that island and my mother even has an Irish passport, but identifying myself as Irish-American seems odd.  In fact, the whole business of program note biographies and encyclopedia entries which inevitably begin with some national identity (American composer Philo T. Boxtop... ) seems even more odd.   How obligatory or meaningful is such an identification? Does a composer identify musically with a nation state?  With a piece of real estate?  With a language or the traditional customs of some tribe or folk?  

(For the record, my earliest haplogroup (M168) hasn't made me any more attached to the Rift Valley, although I am certainly fond of Doro Wat and Injera).

My personal attachment to the mountains, desert and coast of California is real, but it seems presumptive to claim that they are embedded in my music.  On the other hand, my few years on the East Coast were mostly unhappy and more foreign, in their way, then time spent in places where I had to get my passport stamped.  (A few weeks in the Deep South of the US were certainly the most exotic experience of my life.)  So identification as an American composer seems rather coarse to me, no matter how honored I'd be to share the designation with Ives, Cowell, or Cage.  

On the other hand, though I've been in Europe for a long enough time, coming here was unplanned and unexpected, personal rather than professional, and staying here is as much due to relatively good schools and health care for the family as any geographical or cultural attachments, of which I have few and increasingly fewer.  That said, whenever a work of mine is played here, the advertisement is inevitably of a work by an American composer, which I can sometimes get the organizer to temper to Californian, but when a piece is programmed in the States, I just as inevitably get the qualifier "Frankfurt-based." (Does that mean I'm following in the steps of Telemann, Humperdinck and Hindemith, or that I ought to be expert in the writings of Goethe or Adorno?  Or maybe I should have a special relationship to Rindswurst or Grie Soß?)

This lack of attachment comes with advantages and disadvantages.  Musically, especially for work with experimental ambitious, this detachment can lead to a useful distance from habit or tradition.  But there are real practical disadvantages in not being a fully enfranchised member of the local polity:  my status is perpetually that of a tolerated guest (and during the Bush wars, even this was not always clear) and I can't vote here, but must pay the same taxes as those who can.  At the level of the nation-state, this pains little, but I do like to participate in local affairs. More critical, however, is that I often fall between the cracks for music presenters and musical funding sources.  Not being German, my work can't be supported by a number of sources and not being resident in the US, a number of sources there are — whether by rule or by practice — cut off from me.  But most critically, the attachment of one label, whether American or experimental or minimal or serial or complex or neo-/archao-/post-/prae-/ad hoc-whatever, can lead to the uniform identification of all of ones work with that label.  If your particular label does not fit the fads and fancies of the current programming season, tough luck.  (And if you hairstyle doesn't fit, even worse luck...)

Years ago, in grad school, I noticed that most of the composers in New York, the most saturated marketplace for composition in the US, tended to discipline themselves so that their work was ever-more focused on a particular specialization.  This is probably an inevitable behavior in such a market, and to its credit, New York manages to support competing streams of music-making to some degree or another, but it also leads to precisely the labelling described above.  I'm less interested in catalogues of composers than in individual works of composers, and sometimes only even in moments, marvelous moments, in those individual works, so this labelling is essentially a filtering device for programmers and marketers and a distraction, away from the music, for me.  Moreover, the capacity for talented composers, and American composers perhaps particularly so, to, chameleon-like, elect one identity or another, just like American politicians all becoming Irish for one day in 365,  is something that surely should raise suspicion. 

You would think that, with all of the ease of communication and travel, such labels should be increasingly discounted.  (Not disregarded, just discounted).   I suppose, however, that an economically marginal activity like new music is going to hang onto these for sometime longer in that the filtering, segregating, and isolating effects still have an economic function, a crude but practical filter on a supply of music far in excess of demans.  Restraint of trade, one might say.  But if we practice a bit more suspicion of the labels, perhaps we can restore some more valid utility to them.  There are, indeed, qualities that are inescapably French to the music of Berlioz, Debussy or Boulez or American about the music of Ives or Piston or Harold Budd, and it can be useful to talk about these qualities, if the talk is more than an arbitrary, casual and prejudiced application of labels, but rather as nothing more than an opening to a discussion of real differences in music.   

Just when we thought we were done with Bushian slips

On his plans to write a book:

"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened," Bush said. (from here)

Marathon

I spend as little time with recordings as I can, but a recent gift of the Sony boxed set of 22 cds worth of Stravinsky-led Stravinsky has provided an excuse for an all-Stravinsky marathon.  Boy, with very few exceptions (and maybe only The Flood, at that), this is all renewable music.  Both the music itself and the fields of association around the music are incredibly rich,  with each new listening suggesting new paths in and out of the music.   I'm particularly struck this time by how useful irony is to Stravinsky in creating this manifold if not open-ended quality.  Neither Viennese expressionism nor Russian mid-20th century musical sarcasm have this particular power.  

It's probably not good to play favorites with so much good stuff, but I am very taken with the disk which included the ballets  Apollo, Agon, and Jeux des Cartes.  Agon has always been a favorite — with its crispy and splittered orchestration, so well-made for nimble feet (those galliards, those bransles!) — and Jeux des Cartes is a romp with amazing, almost non-sequitorial, roll-offs and flourishes for the various shuffles and gambits (I've never been sure whether the game described should be more in the style of Lewis Carroll or of Ian Fleming).  But this time, it is Apollo that captured me.   There is something naive, almost artless about surface here, but Stravinsky always manages to pull in something unexpected, if only the smallest bit of uncanny voice leading.  And likewise, although the string ensemble initially appears a neutral, plain, a monochromatic white even — the score, a ballet blanc, after all, is full of white space — by the middle of the variations (in which Apollo partners with each of three muses in turn), the ensemble comes to seem almost too bright, too colorful.  The whole is refined yet radiant, completely in keeping with the title character.    

 

Continuing Ed

I've been brushing up on Fourier transforms, which can be useful in musical applications.  This video lecture series by Brad Osgood of Stanford  at Academic Earth has been helpful.  Too bad there aren't any courses in music at AE yet.  

Standards of (Performance) Practice

Composers depend upon performers to turn marks on paper into real sounds and — when everything works out — music. When the music works, it's often far from clear which party is most responsible. On the one hand, some scores are so robust, they can survive the worst approximation and most dispirited rendition. And on the other hand, I know some musicians who can take my breath away just playing scales, so the actual notes played, or supposed to be played, are beside the point. But when the music doesn't happen, it's just as difficult to assign blame. Performers can sabotage a piece, but maybe the notes were never going to be music in the first place.

I just toured a brand new shopping center in the middle of Frankfurt. Designed by a star architect, it has a great deal of flash and some virtuoso features, and has received a lot of press attention. But almost everywhere there are small details in the construction that have gone wrong: surfaces not smoothly joined together, walls too roughly plastered, light fixtures that are not sealed properly, windows slightly out-of-line, a hinge to fire extinguisher box on crooked so the thing doesn't quite close... all of these small things gone amiss are the architectural equivalent of wrong notes. There is a clear failure in performance practice here, but I understand that the construction industry deals with such failures in terms of tolerance, legally codified as standards of practice. The assumption in the building trade is simply that some percentage of the work will not be done to spec, and the on-going negotiations between client, architect, and contractors during construction largely concern whether or not that percentage is acceptable. The ideal execution — note perfect, in musicians' terms — is just not a possibility and everyone goes into the project understanding this.

I think composers and musicians have some advantages here over architects and builders. Musicians really do come closer, and more often, to the note- and style-perfect reading of a score, than builders come to perfect realizations of ideal architectural plans. Also, the working relationship between composers and musicians is rarely loaded with the monetary considerations that a major work of architecture must have, and, in general, composers and musicians work together with considerable respect and even a mutual cultivation of talents (and even careers). At the very least, a musical error (whether of composition of performance) is ultimately a transient event. We can survive a bad piece or a bad performance and move on to something better. An error in execution of an architectural plan, on the other hand, can carry a risk to life and limb that render any smaller aesthetic considerations trivial. But the greatest advantage of all that music brings is the fact that it is entirely possible for a performance to err from the letter of a score and nevertheless capture the piece in spirit, or even go beyond it. In musical performance, the ideal is not the enemy of the real, but a means to it.

Free and Open Notation

MuseScore is a promising free WYSIWYG music notation program, licenced under GNU GPL. It already has a set of features superior to Finale Notepad or other entry-level notation packages (offering, for example, unlimited staves and a set of microtonal accidentals), making it ideal for most classroom applications and probably good enough for serious projects requiring only conventional notation.  It appears that the programmers are actively working on some additions required for more complex scores like nested tuplets.  It's cross platform, but currently only for Linux and Windows, with Mac available only in a prototype version.  The output I've seen from MuseScore is comparable in style to that of Lilypond.

Perspective

"From the modernism that you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve." -- David Antin

From Materials to Music

I've been working in just intonation since my freshman year in high school, in 1975 or 76, when the music of Lou Harrison and Harry Partch first registered.  The beauty of the pure intervals was the first attraction, but soon, the whole business of organizing tones into scales and systems became an attraction of its own.  But a scale or a system is not yet music, but rather material with potential to be used musically.  The diagram (or lattice — German Tonnetz — or manifold) describing a tuning system is a static entity, rather like a map from which a useful route has not yet been discovered.  

My first lattices were all at right angles, following the models of Martin Vogel and Ben Johnston, with chains of fifths (ratios of 3:2)  running horizontally and major thirds (ratios of 5:4)  vertically.  Adding ratios of higher primes, especially 7, 11, and 13, was an on-going problem, solved with transparencies or other kludges.  I literally stumbled into a way of animating my lattices, turning the static information on the lattice into information about successive events in a score, when I came across an article by Shohei Tanaka (1862-1945), a Japanese scientist who wrote a dissertation in Berlin in the late 19th century on Just Intonation, in which he advocated a 53-tone equal temperament for the approximation of a just intonation based on pure thirds and fifths.  Tanaka used a lattice in which the lines of fifths and thirds were at a 60-degree angle to one another, and added lines indicating the minor third relationships as well, thus presenting major triads as upward pointing triangles and minor triads as downward.  This started to look more like music to me, and quickly, all of the moves that characterize smooth voice leading in tonal music started to appear as simple moves on this hexagonal lattice.  The tones connected directly to a single tone were the fifth above and below, the major thirds above and below and the minor thirds above and below.  The vertical mirror of a major triad was the minor on the same root, horizontal neighbors sharing the central tone were in a dominant-tonic relationship, and triad described by triangles sharing one face had mediant relationships.  At the same time, I started to recognized that the most compact voice leadings I was learning simultaneously in my study of figured bass realization were compact moves on the lattice, while progressions that were more exotic tended to be represented by greater distances on the lattice.

In the spring of '78, I went to San Diego to visit the Partch instrument collection then housed at SDSU under the watch of Danlee Mitchell.  I showed Mitchell my attempts at latticing Partch's scales and Mitchell said immediately that I had to visit Erv Wilson, a name I had recognized from the second edition of Partch's Genesis of a Music (Wilson, a professional draughtsman, had done the diagrams for Partch and had also suggested the layout for one of Partch's instruments, the Quadrangularis Reversum).  Wilson lived in East LA, and I soon arranged to visit his house, one of the oldest in the city, located at the edge of the arroyo into which the oldest — and now, almostly quaintly small — freeway in the city, the Pasadena, had been dug.  Wilson was in his front garden when I arrived, sorting bags of corn hybrids collected from his ranch in the mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico.   He looked through my collection of lattices and scores and at an adapted hawai'ian guitar I  had brought along and immediately took me in to his dining room, where he sat me down at the table and started to teach some more economical, elegant, and tonally suggestive ways of mapping tones on paper, or in the three dimensional models of dowels and spheres suspended throughout his house.  It was a total revelation to see how Wilson could accomodate far more than the lousy two or three dimensions I could capture on paper, as he casually drew examples with four, five, even eight dimensions represented.  But these examples were not Augenmusik, but acoustically immediate and vivid, as Wilson's house was filled with re-fretted guitars, a collection of flutes, and a number of keyboard percussion instruments, of metals, wood, and bamboo, each apparently to a different tuning system, with alternative keyboard layouts of Wilson's own exquisite and ergonomic designs.  (Wilson's ear is amazing: once, while using his scalatron out in his garage to tune up some aluminum tubing, I was periodically interrupted by his shouting out the ratios of each new tube "256/243! 16/15!, 13/12!"). 

My use of collections of pitches related by just intonation remained rather unadventurous for some time, as I was essentially replicating the most familar moves in tonal music. This was hard to square with my attraction to more experimental music.  Working with La Monte Young  provided one decisive step in this direction.  The harmonic motion in La Monte's pieces is very much understood as motion around a lattice, with formal sections of works restricted to subsets of the total collection of pitches (incidentally Xenakis is up to something similar in Herma) , but La Monte's avoidance of ratios involving the number five whether as tones used directly or as combination tones creates very different tonal environments, and a number of works allowed performers to improvise within the constraints of rules which effectively constitute the voice leading rules in these new environments.  These rules are related, also, to the "cuing" pieces of Christian Wolff, which have also been very important to me.  I made a number of pieces in which performers moved by a small set of rules through pitch materials, including a set of just intonation Mazes and equal tempered pieces, the best and most-played of which was Multnomah Riffs of 1981.  In Multnomah Riffs, the players worked through a score of four repeated measures or frames, from which pitches could be selected, and played at any time within the frame, omitting or repeating any tone so long as the sequence of tones was preserved.  My friend Jonathan Segel, known perhaps best as a member of the band Camper Van Beethoven, contributed an ostinato for celesta to keep track of the frames.

A second decisive step was provided by a small piece by the mathematician and composer David Feldman called Going Places, for two violins.   Going Places is essentially a canon for the two fiddles, chasing each other in a random walk (run, actually) across an open-ended lattice of major and minor thirds.  Encouraged by David's example, I soon wrote a number of pieces involving random walks across both open-ended and closed lattices of various dimensions, and eventually started trying different sets of constraints and changing the lattice, sometimes quite dramatically, in the course of a piece.  These lattice moves were also related to Lou Harrison's "interval controls"  (Elliot Carter, famously, uses a related technique).  

I would later encounter works by Yuji Takahashi and James Tenney that use similar techniques; I am particularly fond of Tenney's principle, in Changes for six harps, of establishing a tonic, jumping to someplace tonally distant from the tonic, and returning by the simplest possible root motion, often a descending series of fifths, thus recapitulating very familar harmonic territory.  As my own strategies for working with tonal motion had generally been symmetrical, even dualistic, Tenney's example was an important one, in that it better resembled the assymetry of real tonal musics, for example in the German tradition in which I can go to IV or V and IV to I or V but V can only go to I.   (For some great counter examples, with their own assymetries, from non-German traditions, consider the V-IV of the blues, or the extended subdominant chains in Berlioz's Marche Troyenne.)  

In Charles Seeger's breathtakingly prescient little treatise on Dissonant Counterpoint, he introduces the principle that the structure of an existing tonal system can be maintained, but the precise content be changed, in his case changing the hierarchy of consonant and dissonant intervals in a contrapuntal texture.  Following Seeger's example, in these unfamilar tonal environments, whether in just intonation or mapped to an equal temperament, there is plenty of opportunity to experiment with both the rules and material hierarchies, while still preserve qualities that are clearly tonal.  (The musical and mental agility on display in this and other examples of Seeger's writings has provided a decisive spark for experimental music for several generations past and will continue to provoke for several generations to come.  If anyone asks, I'm a card-carrying Seegerite.) 

(I haven't let go altogether of my youthful dualism:  when I come across the so-called half-diminished seventh chord in classical works (Bach and Mozart, especially), it still makes a lot of sense to think of it as a subharmonic chord, the exact inversion of a dominant seventh chord, and I think that it is sufficient that this chord is arrived at melodically, by voice leading and counterpoint (the Tristan "chord" is another example), without having to argue about the physical and psychophysical status of the subharmonic.) 

*****

At the moment, I am mostly interested in the relationship between the group of tones in play locally and globally,  and especially our sense that a tone belongs or doesn't belong to a moment in a piece or a whole piece.  Erv Wilson's ideas about moments of symmetry come into play here, in that subsets of a tune system can exhibit similar properties of coherence.   Classical diatonic tonality, with its matruschka-doll construction of chords, diatonic scales, and chromatic scales, is one example.  Recently David Feldman demonstrated that there are only a small number of distinct and connected graphs of a diatonic scale onto a 3,5 lattice.  (I'll let David publish his own result, but the number should be easy enough for you to figure out on your own.   He has also figured out the distinct graphs for sets of 12 pitches on this and on other lattices, a calculation which is not so easy).  This was very interesting to me because I have made a number of pieces that could be considered "pan-diatonic" and Feldman's lattices suggested something  more to the point, in that each graph, while preserving the letter names, had an alternative harmonic profile, much like individual moments in real tonal music.  Sometimes an A is the fifth above a D, sometimes it's the third above F, but not necessarily both at the same time.  The graphs could be realized in just intonation, or mapped to an equal temperament, or to an unequal temperament designed to best represent a particular graph or set of graphs.  Moreover, these graphs suggest particular melodic paths, rows, if you will, with built-in harmonic properties.  This line of working strikes me as very rich and, possibly, very musical. 

(from a talk in California, January, 2009).

Polychoral

I heard a very good performance of the Maderna Violin Concerto (1969) on Friday evening with the HR-Symphonie Orchester (there was also a bang-up performance of Punkte, but that's a piece that is almost standard rep for the HR-ers).  As well as it was played, the Maderna disappointed because one of the central features of the work, the spatial separation of the orchestra into several sub-ensembles, didn't really add anything to the music and maybe even detracted from it.  In the concerto, the soloist is positioned conventially, front-and-center, next to the conductor, there are two bowed string ensembles, one immediately behind the soloist and the other at a distance, there is a plucked string group (mandolin, guitar, three harps),  the brass, the percussion, and a wall-o-woodwind to boot.   The spatial distribution was limited to positions in the stage proper, everthing directly in front of the audience, with spatial distinctions largely reducible to left-right, and upstage-downstage.  

The writing for the violin solist was lovely, with cadenza-like playing overwhelming any concertante playing, which made for a pleasingly unusual concerto form.  The problem was that the music for the various sub-ensembles was rather undifferentiated, and distrubuted through the course of the concerto rather too discretely, more in sequence than simultaneously, now this then that, and rarely this against that, rendering any charge the spatial segration might have added rather muted.  (In fairness to the composer, a great deal of sequencing and timing in the concerto are decided, ex tempore, by the conductor, so an alternative interpretation might have led to a more pleasing use of resources.) 

Asking an orchestra to reposition itself for a single piece in a concert is often a stumbling block to getting a work programmed, so if you wish to have spatial elements in a piece, you have to be able to convince others of the added value of the extra effort.   It occurs to me that there might be some general principles of polychoral arrrangements that can be extracted from this experience and might assist in making the case to concert organizers for their utility, necessity, and/or attraction:  

(1) If the spatial distinctions are limited — from the audience's perspective — to a single wall, then the differences in the character of the music played by individual groups can usefully be amplified when heard sequentially.  

(2) If, however, the ensembles are more physically distinct — again, from the audience's perspective — then more subtle differences in the character of the music played by the separate groups in sequence can be usefully underlined.  

(3) If groups are playing simultaneously, however, the more proximate the groups are, the more mixed their sounds will become, thus reducing the separation and clarity of the individual streams in the result polyphony.  

And

(4) when two widely separated groups are playing similar music simultaneously, the effect of the spatial separation can be reduced.  

Setting up shop, new music style, looking for the perfect strip mall

On my last visit to California, it became clear that I had been missing something rather obvious. The Los Angeles strip mall is the distributed center of culinary innovation.   The strip mall is the low rent versatile retail property on the main drags of the city and countless suburbs and fronting residential neighborhoods, many of them centers of immigrant communities.  A strip mall is a place where commercial experiments can be tried out with the most efficient commitments of money and time, and the relatively small size of the shops allows for optimal distribution of the risks of business failure.  The combination of the strip mall as a commercial theatre, an large first-generation immigrant community of uncommon diversity,  geographical proximity to both Pacific Rim and North/South trade in foodstuffs, and well as the astonishing productivity of California agriculture makes for unprecedent variety, both in the number of traditional cusines represented or recreated in every degree of "authenticity"  (note the inverted commas: This I know, I know, for the new musicology tells me so)  and for hybrids and other forms of innovations.  (There are actually even lower levels of commerce: for years, smaller citrus crops like kumquats and mineolas were collected from backyard networks rather than groves for supermarket sales, or the Oaxaquenan woman around the corner who sells tamale in banana leaves with black mole, or the wagons that deliver edible exotica (Korean burritos, anyone?)  crisscrossing the Southland on secret schedules designed to evade health department inspection tours.)

The low-rent path to innovation takes place in music, too, but we don't yet have a precise equivalent to the strip mall.  (For recordings, the internet functions well, but I'm talking live, local performance here.)  Major institutions are simply so heavily invested in capital designed for the most traditional and prestigious forms of music-making, and thus cannot take on the financial risks that presenting music which breaks traditional patterns in one way or another may create. If you have one hall for music in town, and it seats 1000 to 2000 people — which is not uncommon in Southern California suburbs — then you will be looking for events that will consistently bring in 1000 to 2000 people, while innovative work needs the try-out in the hall that seats 50 to 100 people.  

The large institutions, by design, are limited to a small number of newer projects, carried out in slow motion, thus they will forever only be able to support a small number of artists, mostly figures who present the least risk to the continuity of the institution.   That's why, in the era of mainframe computing,  big, well-supported computer music centers were far less successful in actually turning out finished pieces that those working with solder-yourself circuitry and the first generation of personal computers.   But that's also why we won't hear Robert Ashley at the Met or the NYCO and West Coast composers in the experimental tradition are now shut out of opportunities at the Cabrillo Festival in favor of composers, mostly East Coast, who already show up regularly on major East Coast orchestral programs in the regular seasons.       

Backgrounds

The figure in a clearing is a rich musical topic or texture.  Something happens occurs before, or against, or within, a background.  That background may be somewhat atmospheric or suggestive (musically or extra-musically), but it must also be somewhat neutral, audible but not listened-to. How is such a background made in a work of music?

(1) silence (Cage's rhythmic (metrical), and — later — time bracket (ametrical) structures.

(2) a scattering of small events (Berlioz: "intermittent sounds"), distributed irregularly and unpredictably. 

(3) erdodic form (Tenney):  completely and randomly filling the available time with events, so that no orientation, temporal or otherwise, on the basis of the background is possible.

(4) events occuring in absolutely regular and preditable intervals of time, providing a strict temporal reference, possibly references for pitch, timbre.

(5) a drone, a continuous sound providing a pitch, but no temporal reference.

(6) a contrapuntally independent stream of music, speech, or environmental sounds.

I love the coincidence here of completely full and completely empty backgrounds.  [Is a blank canvas white or black?  The complete physical spectrum of light tells us one thing (white is a broad spectrum of light, black is an absence of light) while the real experience of visible light, the colors with which a painter works (with a spectrum that our mind folds back up on itself, connecting reds to blues) suggests the opposite: white is the absence and black is completely full.]  This figure usefully focuses on the issue of audibility/inaudibility. While the figure and ground idea is, at root, contrapuntal, the immediate compositional issue is whether or not the listener should be aware of the counterpoint, and this audible/inaudible quality (now you hear it, now you don't)  is determined by the material relationship, the similarity or dissimilarity, between the figure and ground.

See also these Notes on Continuity and this post on Ives and Mahler.

     

Photo of the Day

The pianist, composer, and politician Ignace Jan Paderewski playing the piano at the Paso Robles Inn,  Paso Robles, California.   My father's parents both remembered hearing Paderewski play there.  He came to Paso Robles for the hot springs and mud baths and eventually bought two ranches near the town (one for himself, one for his wife).   Aside from the famous Minuet a la Antique,  one of the staples of the Music the Whole World Loves to Play repertoire and ballet classes everywhere, I know none of Paderewski's own music.  Perhaps something to investigate.

(Also this: An article by Paderewski on tempo rubato.)

Appropriate Technology

Question for the day: Who was the first major composer to regularly transport him- or herself by bicycle?

Time Capsule

Some years ago, I rescued a pile of sheet music from my Grandmother's piano bench.  The collection included a bunch of primers and elementary courses for beginners — my Grandmother gave lessons from time to time — including a number of volumes by a prolific compiler of piano methods, John Thompson, all of which appear to still be in print.  In search of some material for my daughter, I recently thumbed through one of these, John Thompson's Easiest Piano Course, which carries  a copyright of 1955.  

While the little book is nicely laid-out, and is not badly organized as a course, including well-integrated lessons in notation, the treatment of both hands (and two clefs) from the beginning with equal emphasis, and some surprisingly adventurous harmonizations for the teacher to accompany the student, the book soon introduces material that is uncomfortably inseparable of an era gladly gone, and suprising to encounter in an educational work still in print: The Old Cotton Picker,  In a Rickshaw  (a bit of pentatonic chinoiserie accompanied by a picture of a man in a western suit and hat riding in a carriage pulled by a man in traditional Asian clothing), and The Banjo Picker (with a minstrel-style blackface caricature).

While there is no reason to suppose that Thompson's intentions were overtly racist, and it seems likely that he was just gathering arrangements for young hands of tunes with patriotic and Americana themes  (the collection also includes Yankee Doodle, The Seabees, and The Paratrooper), and he may even have intended to project a — for its time — culturally diverse viewpoint, it is hard, if not impossible, to escape the complex and often ambiguous  (minstrel shows, for example?) baggage carried by these materials, even when they were once part and parcel of American musical life.  But using these materials today introduces some heavy culture baggage into childrens' piano lessons.    

So — although it sometimes raises some ethnographic issues of its own — I'll be starting my daughter on the Bartok Mikrokosmos  instead.  For the time being, Thompson's time capsule can stay in the piano bench and perhaps, when it comes time to discuss historical topics in a serious way with my daughter, it can usefully be revisted as realia, illustrating a far different time.

  

High School Musical

I went with my son last night to his Gymnasium's production of Die Dreigroschenoper.   Popular musical theatre is not my thing, but this was an altogether happy affair: staged in exactly the right spirit, viewed in good company, and though Brecht's reworking of Gay's Beggar's Opera remains borderline Machwerk as a play, with some serious drags here and there, once again I had an opportunity to renew my attachment to Weill's songs in their original orchestration.  Too many years ago, I played celesta and harmonium and a bit of percussion in a college production, so I have some hands-on experience with the piece, which is a blast to play in as an instrumentalist.   The scoring, originally for seven players doing an astonishing amount of doubling, is mostly carried by the piano or harmonium, but lines are strategically assigned to winds, especially saxophones, which gives some of the most lyrical bits a raw surface, making the whole, in turns, rough and — surprisingly — tender, flavored with choice moments for celesta, cello, bandoneon, banjo, or Hawai'ian guitar, and the right amount of percussion: a ponderous timpani in the parody overture and otherwise, just punctuation, with a woodblock and a small cymbal, here, or a tom-tom, there. This is robust music which the band of students, with a couple of faculty ringers, handled just fine, but it can also provides interesting stylistic challenges to the best players (no less a band than Ensemble Modern has a standing gig accompanying the local professional production, and their attention to details of historical performance practice is remarkable). 

FX

When first exploring new music, I was excited and impressed by special effects or extended techniques.  As a musician, I eagerly — and to the dismay of my band director — tried to master all the tricks (many of them staples of Spike Jones's City Slickers)  found in Stuart Dempster's The Modern Trombone, especially those involved with altering the spectrum of a tone or playing broken or falsett tones, in-between the ordinary modes of resonance.  At the same time, many of the clever effects in scores by composers like Crumb or Childs got tried out in the safety of my parents' house, on and inside the piano, an old violin, my brother's clarinet, my sister's harp, or on the steady stream of other instruments borrowed from school.  A lot of this was like learning to perform a magic trick, as far as I was concerned, I just wanted to know how it was done and I had little interest in practicing enough to have the fluency required to put it onstage.  

Piano preparations, two sorts of fluttertongue, all sorts of objects to mute tubes or strings, seagull calls from gliding harmonics... wonderful stuff, and extraordinary when a good musician incorporates them seamlessly into her or his technique.   Indeed there are some techniques —  like wind multiphonics, directing the breath so that the tube vibrates at several modes simultaneously, producing a chord — that are so context-, instrument-, and performer-dependent that they are compositionally daunting to incorporate into a work and frequently best left to virtuoso composer-performers who are writing for themselves, or, as is often the case, improvising. 

At the same time, I took two warnings into consideration.  The first was from a talk by Terry Edwards of the Electronic Phoenix Ensemble, in which he remarked that EVT, or "Extended Vocal Techniques", really meant "Everyday Vocal Techniques", which I took to mean that all of these noises had a perfectly ordinary context (visit a busy playground if you don't know what I mean) and that the "standard" modes of singing had their own special status with respect to this larger context.  The second observation was a devastating single word critique I once heard in response to my youthful enthusiasm for a Crumb piece: "precious."  That critique I took as an invitation to more seriously consider the economy of sounds within a work,  a project which continues to be active. 

Recently commissioned to write a piece for a chamber ensemble known for doing all sorts of special techniques and effects,  I went into my bookshelves and dug out a number of works on extended techniques which I had eagerly studied years ago.   They are sort of like cookbooks, with recipes for one sound or another.  (My copy of Gardner Read's Contemporary Instrumental Techniques, which I bought new in 1976, had long ago fallen to pieces from overuse, just like my old copy of The Joy of Cooking.)   But I soon returned the books to the shelves and wrote a piece of some 17 minutes that uses very little more than modo ordinario, and two strategically important events in the score that could be considered special effects are essentially visual, intended to break the continuity as well as to defeat the likelihood of a sound recording.   It's not that I've lost any allegiance to these special effects, but the composition in progress never required them, and in my new piece, if things work they way I've planned, modo ordinario will be quite special indeed.

 

Events, not Waves

Current reading: Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (OUP 2007) by Casey O'Callaghan offers a — to my ears,  musically suggestive, if never musically explicit — new approach to sound and our experience of sound, based, for a change, not in the traditional models of perception derived from vision, but in a model unique to sound and framed no longer in terms of waves in a medium but rather of events in our own environment located at or near objects or events which cause objects to sound.  The writing style is lively and makes some heavy matter refreshingly accessible to non-philosophers.

Misfired Canons

An initiative for the promotion of new music based in Cologne, ON, has released a "key works list of new music."  The organizers have not been shy of the word "canon" and the list is presented as "Cologne's Guide to New Music."  The whole thing is here.  The hat tip goes to MusikTexte, the current issue of which has a fascinating review of the list and the process of arriving at it.  Gisela Gronemeyer, MusikTexte editor notes that the creation of the list was dependent upon voluntary nominations, reflects the institutional biases of the jury, includes nothing by composers outside Europe and the US  (interestingly enough, the US-Americans included are overwhelmingly experimentalists, not the major institutional figures) and, shockingly, includes no women.

Now, making lists can be useful in examining one's experiences and biases, or at the very least, fun, in the fashion of a parlor game or meme.  (I hope that my own on-going and entirely personal series of "landmarks" is understood in this way; it's not a "best of" list, but a list of works intimately tied to my own musical biography, works that changed the way in which I listen.)   List-making, in an attempt to describe a canon is, however, an inherently troublesome business, bound to reflect, on the one hand, the inevitable biases of the canon-makers's own personal experiences or professional interests, and equally bound to create complaints — many of them completely justified — at exclusions or over-emphases.  While most lists of the kind are harmless, a serious problem can ensue when a list aquires some official status, and with it, power to affect programming or commissions or other assignments of favor or material goods.  Were ON's list only an historical record of the preferences and predelictions of a single community of musicians at one point in time, it would be useful and unobjectionable as historical or ethnographic data.  But the attachment of ON's list to a program for the promotion of new music with more than personal or local ambitions is highly problematic. 

 

A Hard Day in Analysis

Here's a physicist's analysis, via FFT, of the opening chord to A Hard Day's Night.  (Hat tip Tyler Cowen.)  As the pop era's moral equivalent to the "Tristan chord" (an ambiguous event in a work of tonal music which continues to create great puzzlement and a regular stream of authoritative pronouncements), I'm sure music theorists will be busy with this for years to come.

Carrillo

Here's a new site (in Spanish), with sound files, texts, and photodocumentation about the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo, whose work was largely microtonal ("El Sonido 13"— the "13th sound") , often requiring the construction of new instruments.  

It's interesting that Mexico produced three important pioneers in musical tuning systems: Carrillo, Augusto Novaro (about whose work too little is known), and Ervin Wilson, with whom I was fortunate to start studying while in High School.

Anagrammatical

Ron Silliman pointed to these poems by Mike Smith, Anagrams of America, some striking poems made as anagrams of existing texts, landmarks of the American canon.

Anagrammatical recycling has been done relatively rarely with musical sources, perhaps due to the close association between tonal function and form and the prevailing aesthetic which maintains this association.  If I understand correctly (I know it only by reputation), Christopher Hobb's The Remorseless Lamb (1970) is a random anagram of Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, the four voices present in any measure of Hobb's piece coming from four different places in the source.   Re-combining materials from existing sources is, of course, a strategy in algorithmic composition, the projects of David Cope, for example, but I am unaware of any such example that uses the complete rearrangement of a single source.  There are clearly rich possibilities to explore.  

Landmarks (40)

Claudio Monteverdi: Lamento d'Arianna ("Lasciatemi morire") (1623).  The only surviving music from Monteverdi's second opera, L'Arianna, the Lamento is sung by Ariadne, distraught at being abandoned by Theseus on Naxos.  This lament is composed with such mastery and emotional power that the possibility that L'Arianna was Monteverdi's best opera is a matter of lament in itself. 

Ariadne sings here in pain, anger, and despair, but ultimately confirms her love for Theseus ("it's my tongue that's spoken, not my heart").   It survives, presumably close to the original operatic version,  as a solo aria with continuo (published in 1623) as well as in two arrangements by the composer, the first, the dramatic center of the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1614),  is startling at all moments in its transfer from monody to an ensemble of five voices (to risk a bit of psychologizing,  when the text is sung by an ensemble, it is as if we were no longer listening to Ariadne's voice, but thrust directly into her head, raging with pain and conflict), while the second recycles the music of the monody but sets a new, sacred Latin text, "Pianto della Madonna" for the collection of Selva morale e spirituale (1641)  in which the Virgin laments her abandonment by her son, interesting for both the implied synchretism between the mythical and religious figures as for the implied equation of two very different kinds of loss.  (Or are they so different? Men leaving women is as old a story as any.)

I have a weakness for, no, I am totally lost to the lament style, and I am constantly astonished to encounter the style as it branched out into strikingly different contexts: as Purcell's Dido sings over and against the regularity of the ground bass, for example, or in Heinrich Isaac's devastating choral setting of Poliziano's lament on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, "Quis dabit Capite meo aquam? The essence of the style, as far as I am concerned, is its very free voice leading  — that is to say, free in the treatment of the approach to and resolution (or lack thereof) of dissonance —  with a rather wide open tonal vocabulary,  features which were, and are, essential to opera.

     

Antitrust

Some news travels slowly. I just learned today, from the new issue of MusikTexte, that the European Commission announced in July of last year that it had lifted two monopolies which had been exercised by European collecting societies: the membership clause, in which members of one organization were prevented from choosing or moving to another, and the territorial restrictions, which prevented individual societies from issuing royalties outside their domestic territories. The collection of licenses for music is in serious transition and it is difficult to guess how this particular decision will play out. On the one hand, I like the idea that an organization with muscle, like Germany's GEMA, will be able, in priciple at least, to start collecting license fees in those countries in which the local collecting society is ineffective (some societies are notoriously ineffective at collecting and forwarding royalties for members of foreign societies, despite cooperation agreeements to the contrary). On the other hand, the experience of the United States, which has three competing collecting societies (ASCAP, BMI and SESAC) but is still unable to provide blanket coverage or collect fees at the level of Germany's GEMA, is not particularly encouraging.

Roots, Trunk and Branches

A composer's catalog ought to be straightforward, just a list of pieces, just the facts, Ma'am.  And for a small handful of composers with only a small handful of pieces (e.g. Ruggles, Varese, Webern, Evangelisti), a straightforward list works fine, whether chronological, alphabetical, classified, or graded for performance difficulty, like beef graded for tenderness.  

But not all catalog are so neat and compact, and not all pieces in catalogs were made equal or made even in the same order of magnitude and purpose.  Eventually a talented and/or lucky composer will have his South Pacific  (paraphrasing composer Ron Kuivila), the hit, or the ambitious, large-scale work intended for travel and —perhaps — destined for war horse status, but many of us will have many more, smaller pieces of less scope and ambition but made,  perhaps,  with just as much art, craft, and care as the big ones.  Add to this the backlog of juvenalia, incidental, and occasional works, some of which should stay cheerfully buried in a box in the back corner of Mom's guestroom closet, some of which was only intended for one-off usage, but others of which still carry sparks that might help recharge new work or even deserve an on-going performance life.  

In my own case, as I probably write 20 or more of these minor pieces for each attempt at a South Pacific, it would be nice to have a catalog format that more readily reflected this hierachy of roots, trunk, and branches.

(Here, incidentally, are scores to two recent branches, or even just twigs, from my catalog:  The Long March, a prose score for four melodicas, worked out during a music workshop with young people, and Written Off As A Scoundrel (& I Haven't Even Met The Wife), a small study for piano.)

 

Self-Criticism (3)

Too much continuity.  Too few rests, breaks, openings, windows, white space, disconnects, junctures.  All too full.  Too motoric.  Carrying out processes to the bitter end.   Exhaustion of lists, sometimes even gray coded.  Excess baggage from a minimal youth?  The residue of too much time spent in the electronic studio, where pulling the plug was often a substitute for figuring out a form?

 

Self-Criticism (2)

A piano is not a neutral instance; a score for piano is not written on a blank slate and cannot be arbitrarily transferred to other resources, without loss or accretion of information.  Such additions and losses may or may not be useful, interesting, or musical, but they are certainly compositionally provocative.  A score "reduced" from an ensemble of voices or instruments is not necessarily an interesting piano piece, but it may raise interesting musical issues which could lead to an interesting piano piece, particularily regarding questions of "orchestration" for the piano: registration, texture, polyphony, doublings, etc..

Curious thing, that the piano is often a default setting for composition. Yes, composers are often piano players, and yes, the piano can do some things very, if not uniquely, well  (e.g. attack dynamics, some polyphony).  But too often, we either forget or ignore the uniquity of the instrument, its unique specializations: its temperament and "stretching" of the tuning across the range of the instrument;  the radical timbral differences between registers;  the unmistakeable attack and decay; the various technical kludges that can be used to suggest — among other things — a physically impossible degree of sustain; the complex interactions among the ensemble of wires, particularly sympathetic vibration; the fact that most pianists play the instrument available for a concert — a found sound, if you will —, rather than bring their own, the one with which the relationship is most intimate.

But then again, having some form of a blank slate is VERY useful.  The "open score", for example, is  a way of gathering material while suspending judgement on the ultimate assignations of the material, keeping options open to both practical circumstances and ideals, exploring the plasticity of the material, allowing the material some productive promiscuity.   Blank & open, yes, but not yet necessarily a piano piece.

Self-Criticism (1)

"Some of the songs in this book... cannot be sung" — Charles Ives, "Postface to 114 Songs".

Not writing enough (i.e. almost no) songs.  Why?  A terrific fear of words  (sounds, meanings of words, appropriate scansion, emphasis) and not being, myself, a singer.  The last, in part, due to the highly gendered ideas about singing (i.e. boys don't, except rock stars) with which I grew up. But still no excuse.  

The still-precocious Mr. Muhly has a useful handle on songs (here, amid sensational footage), focusing rightly on their plasticity & transportability  (qualities common with currency — are songs the currency of dreamers?), their ability to survive intact in alternative arrangements.  (All Along the Watchtower, anyone?)  But still, the term "setting" is unnerving, as if one is taking words and putting them someplace so that they don't run away.  You see, I want words, like sounds, to run away, to go to all the places they can take us, and fixing them to tunes can often tie them down to one meaning rather than another, making an uneasy balance of gains and losses. Perhaps that's why the best songs are seldom settings of the best poems: the loss of textual ambiguity is made up for in the added value of the music, which might even add ambiguity of its own (are there better examples than Schumann's In Wunderschönen Monat Mai and Ives's The River?).  

Maybe the key is avoiding falling in love with a text.  The more I read of the Georgics, for example, Virgil's incredible didactic poem about fields and groves and cattle and wine and honeybees and nymphs and gods and Orpheus and everything and everyone else, the greater my trepidation of committing to one aspect and not others and of tearing into the poem with the brutality necessary to make a song.  I don't know a piece of music which contains as much of this world as this poem does, and I don't know that a piece of music can even have that ambition. And as much as I want to share my enthusiasm for these words, and am willing to be musically ambitous about it, the injury of the necessary excerpt is increasingly hard to accept.  Composers: love words, but not too much!   

New Music & Philosophers

Philosophers have only sporadically paid serious attention to the new music of their time  (let's count the names: Plato... Boethius... Rousseau... Nietzsche... Adorno...).  Even when they've paid attention, it can often be a decidedly uneven bundle of ideas and words.  Nevertheless, I'm always prepared to at least consider the ideas and words of someone prepared to take music seriously and I often get some compositional kick-back from the effort, if only to negate an idea that strikes me as profoundly off from my own experience.  (Interestingly, philosophy more in an Anglo-American positivist mode about music tends to yields results which are easy to agree with, but difficult, as a practicing musician or composer to do anything useful with).  Two more recent thinkers-about-music-now have useful web presences: the late Daniel Charles (mostly in French),  here and the very much still-with-us-and-at-us Heinz-Klaus Metzger (in German) here.

Feed & Fuel

It's reasonable to suppose that, beyond the wars and the financial crisis, the abiding contribution of the Bush years will be the total coupling of food and energy prices.  In the abstract, this makes sense, as proteins, grains and fat are just fuel for animals and the production and delivery of foodstuffs necessarily includes the expenditure of other forms of energy, so the volatility of one will have to track that of the other.  But the logic of the equation doesn't make it any less painful to economically weaker parties, whether as consumers or producers.   Here in Europe, for example, the butter price has moved in similar motion with the oil price,  with consumers hurt both at the peak prices of last summer and the reduced pocketbook of the moment while small farmers who geared up for the high export demand for China and India are now faced with surpluses and trying to stem increasing loss margins.  If you add in the connection between the nature of our food supply and the resultant medical costs directly associated with food content and quality, it starts to become clear that getting energy policy right means getting food and health policy right as well.  It's a not a matter of fixing something, but fixing everything.

An activity like new music (or dance or poetry)  isn't significant to the markets described above, although the people who make this music are irretrievably stuck inside them, so we tend to do what the system orders rather than actively resist.  But wouldn't it be more useful, to ourselves, our work, and possibly the larger system itself, to find better ways of working in the margins, the statistical insignificant underground?  Often times, the smallest irritation (like a grain of sand in the wrong place in your left shoe) can become an agent of real change.  Yes, this is the case for a vanguard or an elite, if you will, but when the whole is not functioning well, it's high time for experimentation in the parts, even the smallest parts.  

The slow, seasonal & local food movement may well be the best model for us.  In my recent trip to California, I was struck simultaneously by the huge number of fast-food restaurants, the ever-larger size of American bodies and the still-large auto sizes (people are stuck with big cars cause they can't sell them or get financing on new, smaller, ones) on one hand and the near-absence of home fruit and vegetable gardens and reduced produce sections in groceries (not to mention home solar heating or energy generation;  even worse is the news that the series of food contamination scares have driven people towards more consumption of processed foods rather than frech) on the other.  The phenomena are directly related to one another.  More garden production is not going to feed the masses more healthily and economically, but it is an irritant, a positive one, that can lead to mass producers improving both the quality and variety of their foods.  

I believe that the same goes for music.  If more new, local, and live music were introduced into life at the local level, starting from homes, schools, churches, and in community and civic functions, this would lead to a net increase in variety and quality as well as break the hold that large institutional publishers (and institutional censors, like UIL described in a recent post) and their house composers exercise over repertoire.  Moreover, the creation of bonds between creative artists and their communities can be part of a community's identity, an a more interesting part of the identity than, say, the architectural variety of local strip malls. 

See also this old post about composers and localities.