Renewable Music

Tacet, non tacet.

2012-01-29T14:33:00.003+01:00

Tacet, a new bilingual (French/English) review of experimental music has just put out its first, John Cage-centered issue. See more, here.

Are we even having a conversation?

2012-01-28T15:21:00.003+01:00

I just listened to a 1957 radio discussion with Pierre Boulez and four Bay Area composers, Robert Erickson, Arnold Elston, Andrew Imbrie, and Jack Holloway from John Whiting's My KPFA website. The themes of the discussion run precisely into issues of continuity and coherence which were controversial then and continue to make music (and thinking about music) lively. Once again, Robert Erickson's down-to-earth but very smart way of talking about music was most impressive, the former Webern student Elston appeared most sympathetic to Boulez while Imbrie just wasn't buying it. Given the early date, the fact that a room full of musicians was straying into philosophical territories somewhat outside their professional comfort zones, some insecure moments (i.e. when Boulez couldn't recall Heidegger's name) and a presumed orientation towards a general listening public, I'm struck by the thought that a conversation like this, which once took place on an American free-to-air broadcast, probably couldn't happen today. At KPFA or another Pacifica station, certainly, where some social/political achievements of the new left — the (in itself, necessary) opening to a diversity of minority interests — led, in the zero sum game of sharing airtime available in a radio programming day, to shutting out a great deal of the programming, particularly any musics weighed down by any degree of connection to the classical tradition, even the most institutionally fragile of these musics, the new and experimental.* (Baby thrown out with the bathtub, you know?) In principle, the resources of the Internet ought to have restored some balance to this and, to a certain extent they have. I am, for instance, able to listen to this old broadcast anytime I want, and the offerings in online recordings, interviews, podcasts, articles, composers' or performers' or critics' webpages etc. are rich in real content. But are we really having serious public conversations (and productive disagreements) anymore about complex or subtle matters, connecting to the larger cultural and intellectual life, or are we, vulnerable to some extent due to our marginality, focused rather more on the pursuit of accessibility?**

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* The Pacifica stations were VERY important for the reception of other "classical" musics neglected by the commercial classical stations, being pioneers, for example, in broadcasting early music or in composers once considered outside the canon. William Malloch, for example, of KPFA (and whose weekly analytical broadcasts were a more vital lesson in 19th and early 20th century music history than any I actually received in University), had a very important role in the Mahler renaissance. And then there are some real commissioning activities of the stations: from Cage's WBAI to Lou Harrison's Homage to Pacifica. What radio station in the US today is commissioning new pieces?

**You know what I'd really like to hear online? How about a conversation about modernity and music between Alex Ross and Charles Shere, two of our most important writers about music and two who have certainly though hard about that topic and taken home very different (if equally provisional) conclusions. And there is a huge number of composers in some wild pairings I'd like to hear converse uncensored and unplanned about technique, aesthetics, da bidniss of music, art, movies, politics, musical politics, cooking...

Advantage: Blogging

2012-01-23T17:34:00.004+01:00

I've been struggling over the past few days to write an article for a (dead tree) academic journal. I was asked to do it by a friend and it's basically impossible to say no, no matter how unenthusiastic I am about the project. In particular, it's the expected form for an academic essay that has become burdensome, and provides some evidence that the blogging form, in all its informality and (most usually) brevity is a better fit for my particular (and godsknow, limited) skill set and temperament as a writer. I completely understand that a public, refereed article needs to be backed up by a certain amount of prosaic bulk and formality and a full set of citations (as well as permissions, when need be, for examples), but academic writing is just not my main gig (and in this case, not a paying gig, which is a real condition for those of us without day jobs in academe), I'm not getting compensated anywhere for that kind of completeness, and if someone really wants more explication and the full bibliography, they're more than welcome to email me for it. Mostly, with writing, I'm just eager to be done with it and go on to the next idea, to the next urgency, and in a blog I can pace myself, while with a journal article, I'm writing to someone else's schedule, which I'm happy to bend to for a commissioned composition but less happy for an article where the pay-off is just another line in my CV. The standard, well-formed essay format, the one you teethed on in high school and training-wheeled on in college, just doesn't fit every research project or opinion piece equally well and making it fit can be pedantic, when not a waste of paper and attention. More importantly, perhaps, as a composer, I think that the blogging format offers the opportunity to experiment with form, to be as laconic or obsessively complete as the writer like. And even though most bloggers don't taken advantage of these opportunities, it's damn sweet to know that they're there.

From a Diary: I:xvii

2012-01-20T18:00:00.004+01:00

Distracting spaces.

I've been fortunate, for the past 12 years or so,* to have had workrooms that were, in all their homely clutter, well set up with everything needed to do all the mechanics of composing. The machinery and stationery and table tops and filing cabinets and bookshelves and all of my instruments (yes, that's a gamelan behind my chair), all within reach, and all more-or-less organized enough to be re-findable when stashed away. With computers at work, a big monitor (or two even) is useful, as are a good amplifier and nice speakers. I find a stable if not-too-comfortable chair is helpful, forcing one into a healthy working posture. Windows, too, are helpful, at the very least to bring some natural light into the dungeon or garret (the windows I had in Budapest, high in the hills, with a view of the parliament building and a suggestion of the Danube to one side and just the roof of Bartok's house, through the greenery, to the other side, went beyond helpful to well, inspirational. My present subterranean studio is less inspirational, but just as utilitarian)

But, as useful and practical as all of that equipment and furniture may be, it can all be a distraction. Sometimes it's better, Ithinks, to be less well-prepared, less well-organized, as the preparation organization itself has a tendency to start infecting methods and can, potentially, attach itself to the work itself.

So I've been finding myself dreaming lately about discovering another, heretofore unknown room in our house, an empty, or near-empty room. (When we were first married, and squeezed into 22 square meters, my wife and I often promised ourselves just such a big empty room; kids and the reality of real estate have long since intervened in that promise.) Big windows to the treeline and sky of course. Maybe a carpet on the floor (think Morton Feldman, think beached whales). Am I old enough to wish myself the all-too American excess of a lazy-z-boy? How about a hammock? Alas, our house is not going to expand anytime soon, and I don't have the resources to rent a secret atelier someplace (Duchamp's clandestine apartment where the Étant donnés was fashioned is the obvious model for me), but long walks with Lucky (my terrier mutt) and time spent in the library are useful recoveries of pre-compositional thinking spaces, and those unlimited dream spaces will have to do.

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* Before then, I was making do with a desk in the corner of a room with some other principal purpose or a writing surface in a passageway that wasn't properly a room at all (my dissertation was written in an entryway) or even no desk or even pseudo-quasi-room at all, or even staking out a table in a library or other public space

From a Diary: I:xvi

2011-12-30T21:18:00.002+01:00

One of the most important elements of the Occupy movement has been the effort to reclaim public spaces, to insist that the entire map is not completely parceled out to private and state-owned-but-exclusive interests, so that every citizen has common space in which to move, to meet, to speak, and yes, even to make music. ~~~~~ Sure, Europe is crowded, but in most of Western Europe, the option of finding a route to travel on foot or by bike from point a to point b on any given continuous piece of land is usually secure. On my most most recent trips to the 'States, I was struck hard by how limited the options have become for any sort of land travel, other than by private auto. (Famously car-oriented California, surprisingly, was much more amenable to foot travel than either Mississippi or New Hampshire, due to more universal sidewalking, but still, I believe a walk along the entire coastline, for example, is all but impossible.) Yes, the network of roads is extensive and largely in good condition, but very few are set up so that you could walk alongside them and certainly not enough to make it attractive to even walk between most neighboring towns. So the price of admission to the right to travel has become equal to that of owning a car and being able to insure it and fill its tank with gas. (Add this to the steady rise in the share of ones income that goes to even the most minimal housing: there is a real rise in the price of admission that most measures of inflation seem to miss.) ~~~~~ Public spaces — free, in both access and cost to use — are essential for music-making, but I think we tend to mis-characterize many, if not most of the places in which live music gets made as truly public. Occupying Lincoln Center is probably even harder than Wall Street (perhaps not least because so many Wall Streeters have memorialized themselves on the plaques that are scattered thoughout the lobbies and foyers?) In the US, large institutions like orchestras and opera houses and many colleges or universities have, as providers of "tax-free" services for "public benefit", certain privileges but are, in fact, privately owned and operated, and the state-owned venues — from school auditoriums to sport stadiums used in down-time as concert halls — are often difficult to access and under political, bureaucratic, or — most outrageously so in the case of heavily-subsidized football stadiums — commercial control. In Europe, it's not much better with the large institutional music producers (add radio stations to concert halls and opera houses) tightly integrated into the state ownership and bureaucracy. To stage a small concert in Germany, it might cost several thousand above and beyond the cost of the performers and license fees just to open the concert hall door, with regulations requiring the presence of a doctor or a fireman and a certain number of stagehands etc.. ~~~~~ The city where I live, Frankfurt, can be a particularly good city for buskers. Whenever I walk through the inner city, the joy of discovering someone making a well-intended noise in a corner I hadn't noticed before is a real joy, a reminder — perhaps especially when the noises made offend — that public spaces can be kept active, taken back, or discovered new.

From a Diary: I:xv

2011-12-07T01:21:00.001+01:00

Rubato has a fractal dimension.

From a Diary: I:xiv

2011-12-05T20:52:00.000+01:00

Harmony is a problem of optimal transportation.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl

2011-12-04T11:33:00.007+01:00

Charles Shere has placed a very good article by Douglas Leedy on the midtone (or three-quarter or neutral second) interval online (go here for Charles's comment and link to the article.) My enthusiasm for Leedy's work should be well-known to readers of this page. He is a fascinating scholar and a composer of some of the best music I know.

I have a small difference here with Leedy over whether Javanese pélog actually uses a three-quarter tone interval (it does, but only as a compromise or temperament, in the instruments of fixed pitch, between two tones which voices and the rebab distinguish depending upon the mode or pathet being played). Leedy asks why the midtone, ubiquitous in musics of the southern half of the Mediterranean, is all but missing from music in the European tradition: Would mid intervals be a commonplace of Western music today had Charles Martel failed to defeat the Muslim forces at Tours in 732-33, when European music was still an essentially monophonic art? and I believe that he is right on focusing upon the issue of a melodic versus a contrapuntal, harmonic music. I suspect that eliminating such intervals, a loss in melodic complexity, representing a level of intervallic distinction and corresponding to harmonic structures found in a region of the harmonic series beyond the tenth partial or so, was — for better or worse — a price paid for the vertical complexity found in European music.

[For what it's worth, AFAIC the greatest mystery in the history of musical materials is the apparent disappearance of the Greek enharmonic genus with the semitone-sized pyknon devided into two smaller intervals. The evidence we have of the actual use of the enharmonic is limited; we cannot say for certain, for example, if the successive microtones were used melodically in succession or were used only as alternative values for a single position in an anhemitonic trichord.]

[For what it's also worth: If someone had in mind the project of a system of counterpoint and harmony for voices and conventional instrumental timbres using intervals including midtones AND having consonance/dissonance distinctions like those found in the European traditions, that is to say, a tonal music with a very different interval vocabulary, I strongly suspect that many questions of consonance and dissonance will be register dependent. An 11:9 netral third, for example, may be an acceptable consonance so long as it is voiced high enough in register to support a plausible position in an implied, potentially audible, harmonic series. This is rather Rameau-vian, but why not?]

From a Diary: I:xiii

2011-12-03T19:12:00.003+01:00

THERE may well be other, parallel universes, but our access to them is certainly limited & their possible existence by no means reduces our obligations towards our own universe. Back at Darmstadt, in the year when Cage & Xenakis were the senior guests, Brian Ferneyhough gave a lecture in which he spoke of their work, of compositional aesthetics & practices other than his own, in terms of alternative universes, explicitly borrowing the device from Science Fiction. Although I'm always in favor of clarifications & making distinctions & I do find metaphors useful, I thought (& still think) that this was an unfortunate rhetorical move, because we all knew (& know) that we were (& are) in the same universe (hell, at that moment, we were sharing the same stuffy, swampy air in the same goddamn room. (Darmstadt. Summer.)) This should not have been such an important matter, it being just a metaphor, after all,* & for the fact that we shut information out all of the time, if only as a way of staying sane, maybe just even surviving, in a universe with too much to take in, so shuffling some body of music off into a metaphorical parallel universe ought not be so objectionable. Except there, in the context of Darmstadt, it came packaged with an inescapable value judgement: there are some musical universes more worth paying attention to than others. Now, this may well be the case — the function of the composers' chalk talks at Darmstadt is very much one of making the case for one's work — but you can't simply shuffle the inconvenient alternatives into their inaccessible space-time regions while at the same time claiming to have some command them, whether intellectually or musically. AND that's just what was going on in Darmstadt that summer as a series of performances of works by Cage were given: under-rehearsed, error-filled, & just plain badly. (Cage himself was furious at a cavalier performance of his Ryoanji). The great irony here, of course, was that all of this revealed about the world's leading institution dedicated to an aesthetic predicated on complexity was a substantial inability to manage diversity, which is, of course, a form of musical complexity.

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* much as we all know that time signatures with whole number denominators other than powers-of-two remain rational, despite the terminological practice of many complexists of describing these as irrational.

From a Diary: I:xii

2011-11-16T20:38:00.003+01:00

I'm not close to the work of Brian Eno, but the title of his essay Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts did register strongly with me as a student. Programmaticaly alligned with British experimental music in the 70s, the essay's title zeroed in on what seemed (and still seems) to me to be a central contradiction — indeed a paradoxical relationship — around which music is necessarily made. We want a certain level of organization (order, coherence, "sense") but we also want enough variety (which necessarily breaks order, coherence, "sense") to sustain interest over the course of a piece. Now, we can radically break in the direction of either extreme, but human beings have a persistent capacity to find order in the face of disorder and surprise and variety in the ostensibly predictable and uneventful. The music of some composers (Cage and Young, for example) thrives in these boundaries, but in the wide middle territory between these extremes, the going gets more subtle, methinks. Jean Barraque's "proliferating series" for example, in which the order of pitch classes in one twelve-tone series is projected onto the succession of tones in a second series to generate a third will, in most cases*, generate a practically endless sequence of rows bearing no audible or intellectual resemblance in either intervallic profile or pitch sequence to the previously heard series. Working in such an environment of built-in, automatically-generated variety, the composer has to impose organization directly, drawing connections between the tones and intervals at the surface of the music that are not inherent in the material.

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* Off the top of my head, I suspect that one could feed two initial rows into the process with properties that guarantee a cyclical return to initial rows, probably after a very large number of iterations, but Barraque — like most Europeans, not informed by the concerns and forms of research going on in American twelve-tone theory — did not select for such a feature, requiring, instead, a practically unlimited variety of series. He certainly got that; any tonal coherence heard in his music is the direct result of the composer's asystematic intervention in the placement of tones in time, instrument, register, dynamic, and articulation.

From a Diary: I:xi

2011-11-16T20:14:00.002+01:00

[This diary is an obvious and modest homage to Cage's Diary: How to Improve the World (You'll Only Make Matters Worse. Like that model, it is to be organized into an imagined month of thirty days, with the length of each daily entry determined by chance operations. Cage completed a decimal "year" of ten months over a period lasting from 1965 to 1982 of interrupted writing and these were published, serially in a number of his Wesleyan University Press volumes, beginning with A Year From Monday. I intend to complete a single month and then dismount from my high horse. As with Cage, chance operations — I use poker decks — here determine the length of each entry. (This entry was assigned a length of zero, so I have inserted this explanation between brackets, rendering it sort-of invisible.) Topics for each entry here are derived from reader suggestions, at least two of which are required to initiate an entry. The topics were suggested by others but I take full responsibility for the direction of discussion here. Cage used a variety of typefaces in his Diary, contributing to the greater fragmentation of his entries. Considering this text to be somewhat urgent, if quixotically so, I decided on a greater, but far from absolute, degree of continuity in both prose style and layout.]

From a Diary: I:x

2011-11-15T17:33:00.006+01:00

I couldn't resist: bought a music box which plays the opening strain of The Internationale. Sweet, nostalgic, smartly (if archaically) mechanized and commodified. Sounds great when played against a Coca Cola (TM) can resonator. Sign on the lawn in New Hampshire, next to a lunch wagon, now in competition with a major chain: BUY LOCAL DONUTS. The modernity and internationalism once dreamed of was not what we got. There is something fundamentally wrong when (a) the most striking features on most of the landscape one passes through in the US (and increasingly elsewhere) are commercial and (b) the major distinction between New Hampshire, for example, and, say, Mississippi, is that the latter has Waffle Houses. A recent campaign in Vermont encouraged listening to locally-made music. BUY FROM LOCAL COMPOSERS. Maybe, in the long term and from a very narrow definition of costs, the Waffle Houses and the Dunkins (or, if you will, the Brittens and the Boulezi) will win out over the local vendors, but (a) all innovators started out local, somewhere, and (b) the locals still have the powerful argument that local content can be fresher, a better fit to local tastes, and sustain forms of variety and innovation that the universal and generic cannot.

From a Diary: I:ix

2011-11-12T03:44:00.003+01:00

(Photo: Pauline Oliveros, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Wesleyan University, November 2011, click to enlarge.)

My great, good fortune: to continue to learn from my teachers. I was fortunate not to struggle with my teachers, but rather to learn from their struggles, which were largely against rigid institutional structures and closed networks and their implicitly pessimistic estimates of the possible limits to how and what music gets made. Their practice, creating new, alternative institutions and networks — often modest, provisional, and transient — remains model and sometimes even a musical modus in its own right. But most of all, against this background, these musicians provided — and continue to provide — a profoundly optimistic assertion that the extent and limits of the musical are not yet known, let alone established. I also learned this: technology is resource and an opportunity, but there is a deep difference between a faith in technology — the technological fix (from the RCA synthesizer to the Synclavier or the 4X) — and the creative ((mis)appropriate) use of what one has available, whether it be sticks and rocks, fine old Cremona fiddles, industrial electronic surplus and hand-soldiered circuits, off-the-shelf consumer products, or just our clapping hands and singing voices. Means not ends, music not institutions.

Lucier Celebration

2011-10-30T19:28:00.005+01:00

I'll be making a rare appearance as a panelist in the 'States for Alvin Lucier: A Celebration at Wesleyan University next weekend. Good times among the leading codgers of new music (incl. Ashley, Oliveros, Wolff, Mumma, Behrman, Braxton) anticipated. Some superb performers (incl. Roland Dahinden, Hildegard Kleeb, Charles Curtis, Anthony Burr.) Nice rooms (other than the one you're in now) available. Sine waves aplenty, alpha waves guaranteed, interference beating more frequent. What more do you want?

From a Diary: I:viii

2011-10-25T20:05:00.001+02:00

It might be useful if we followed the Oulipo and presented our work as potentially music rather than definitively (good, bad, or indifferent) music. If we were more relaxed about the issue, it would eliminate a serious distraction and help to make surprises — particularly those drawn from our preconceptions about the extent and limits of the musical — even more so. Listening to a new piece and recognizing — for yourself, as a listener — that it's not quite music doesn't depreciate the experience altogether and, in the best cases, recognizing that it expands your understanding of the musical demonstrates best the benefit of experiment in music. A life without experiment has been lived to the least.

From a Diary I:vii

2011-10-16T15:44:00.002+02:00

Anarchists don't do theory well, but they do practice superbly. Every time people manage to work, create, cultivate, or collaborate in ways not foreseen by the prevailing system or state, it's anarchy and it's ubiquitous, not exceptional. (See, of course, Feyerabend on method.) What is an anarchic music theory? Provisional, pragmatic, open but not not ambitious (hegemonic). An anarchic music theory might usefully jettison the "theory" word altogether, as it's just practice; doesn't this usefully create an opportunity to question the degree to which or in what sense conventionally ambitious "music theories" are, in fact, theories as well?

From a Diary I:vi

2011-10-16T15:16:00.003+02:00

Fuller famously said "Dare to be naive." But I think that's not quite right. Whether an idea is naive or not is a function of perspective, experience, available information. More precisely, then: "Dare to reconsider your assumptions." If the radical music had (or has) a common denominator, it's probably that: explore the extent and limits of the musical. The minimal impulse comes directly out of this: the elimination of distractions. Of course the laundry list of the Occupy protesters is unrealistic and if many demand were to be realized immediately, the result would be immediate and deep human tragedies. But by keeping attention on fundamental issues, even if our utopias are always indefinitely postponed for the immediate needs, it does strengthen the case of the reformers who might do some real good in the meantime. While there was always a conservative tonal music being produced and played in the heyday of the avant-garde — indeed, conservative tonal music in functional repertoire (= for media, education, church & state) has always predominated quantitatively — the radical music, particularly through its minimalist strain with its reconsiderations of the basic elements of the musical, was decisive in the reemergence of the tonal and straight-forwardly metrical in "serious" concert repertoire. The radical music's challenge of assumptions made a repertoire of neo-conservative and, yes Virginia, naive, music possible. We have much more work to do.

From a Diary I:v

2011-10-15T23:13:00.002+02:00

Notes inégales: a convention of performance practice in which notes of equal written duration are played with unequal duration. Our local edition of the Occupy movement established itself today with a march from (the profoundly appropriate) Rathenau Platz to the European Central Bank, on Willy Brandt Platz, facing the Frankfurt Opera. I walked alongside (not marching; I gave up marching with marching band in the 9th grade) enjoying the optimism and commitment of the participants (who had an astonishing age range; interestingly, it was the old '68s, many of whom are now securely in their pensions, who did the angry-voiced street theatre, with drums and bullhorns and ratchets, while the youngsters, who may never see a pension of similar value, were the mellow ones, practicing consensus rather than confrontation and using silent gestures rather than noise makers), glad that political parties generally stuck to encouragement rather than trying to assert themselves, and was even amused and nostalgic at a few encounters on the fringes with the usual sorts one finds at the fringes (yes, count on the LaRouchies and Young Sparts to show up, here, cheerfully, to no effect.) If the program of the protests here is, as yet, unfocused, that's okay, because the problems are complex and time were surely allow for some coalescence around a group of core issues (e.g. financial transaction tax, limits on political participation by corporate persons, unequal compensation, progressive taxation etc..) The organizations or informal movements closest to the protest in program, or at least those with the most dovetailing interests, like Attac or Anonymous, participated without appearing to dominate. It was a beautiful day for a walk through the city, with the clouding discrete enough to make their reflections in the mirrored surfaces of so many skyscrapers something approaching the poetic. At one point, an impromptu amphitheatre formed on the steps of Commerzbank Tower, and as the marchers passed in the little canyon between Commerzbank and the branch office of Deutsche Bank, a single older and hippy-ish handdrummer in the middle of those steps, with several dozen camera'ed folks forming a chorus line to his left and right, caught just the right tempo to play in time with his own echo. A big planned demonstration of this sort — especially when institutions like the European Central Bank is are on the route — is always going to face surveillance from authorities and Frankfurt's police seemed both practiced and restrained. However, with the ubiquity of digital cameras and mobile communications possibilities among the participants, it was striking to consider how an old basic inequality of official surveillance has been evened out. This was an event with thorough and independent documentation. As it happens, this evening I returned to the Opera house with my wife and daughter for an entertainment, Chabrier's opéra bouffe L'étoile. Looking down from the opera foyer at the now-tented protesters, now in for the long haul in the park with a camp fire set before the ECB, I was surprised by the lack of dissonance. Chabrier's operetta-like fantasy was silly, but the protesters were having their own fun alongside the serious business of getting the financial world to save itself from destroying its own ecosystem. Moreover, L'étoile is itself something of a political parody, of a kingdom in which the literal exercise of the law is not always optimum, indeed can be very cruel. Actually, quite a nice bit of political theatre complementing some of the street performances earlier in the day.

When Free Speech Is Not Available, Try Singing Instead

2011-10-07T09:55:00.004+02:00

The City-State of Singapore is notorious for its restrictions on expression, especially political speech critical of the state itself. A solution has been proposed to have complaints sung chorally. (Some examples of the mix of political and social complaints: "We get fined for almost everything."; "People put on fake accents to sound posh/And queue up 3 hours for donuts."; "People blow their nose into the swimming pool/And fall asleep on my shoulder in the train"; "My oh my Singapore/ What exactly are we voting for? / What’s not expressly permitted is prohibited.") But the authorities are not allowing foreigners to participate in the performance of complaint songs.

From a Diary I:iv

2011-10-06T21:16:00.002+02:00

Life in the archipelago. There have always been differences, controversies, feuds, even, among musicians, composers in particular. These differences can have a productive effect, especially when it concerns aesthetics, styles, or technique (e.g. Artusi and Galilei), but too often they are counterproductive turf wars over the modest resources, rewards, and spoils our micro-economy has on offer. My sense is that, over the last forty years or so, disputes of the former sort — over musical issues — have become less heated and less salient except as fronts or proxies for the musically unproductive material disputes (our mad battles for crumbs) of the latter sort. (Thus a label like experimentalist or complexist or traditionalist or technologist or whatever can become, when dolling out prizes or positions, a cover for nepotistic or tactical awarding.) In general, while The New Music could once be divided into a manageably small number of factions, and composers, musicians, and audiences could keep aware of the major genres, styles and ideas floating around, the situation now is more like an archipelago — computer people here, circuit bender and hardware hackers there, analog synthies over there, noisy folk right here, pen and paper holders to the east, software engravers ot the west, bands, choirs, big bands, school orchestra composers in that direction, grown-up orchestra people to the left, opera people to the right, "new opera" people somewhere in the middle, composers with your own ensembles go find an island or get a raft!... — with lines of communication not always as clear as one would expect, sometimes due to chance or habit, sometimes to protective territorial instincts. My sense is that things are much more amiable between factions since we've moved to the islands, but this has come at the cost of some decline in the productive exchange of musical goods and ideas.

From a Diary I:iii

2011-09-30T14:25:00.002+02:00

Statement from GEMA, awarding me five cents for two performances of a piece in the US. Can't figure out why one performance was worth two cents, the other three. But at least those are Euro cents! Norman O. Brown: The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future. Tonality is likewise about postponement via diminution, prolongation; sustained dissonance, functional cul de sacs, harmonic misdirection: musical capiscum, the pain that makes the suspension of resolution ever more pleasurable. The dynamic of tonality is in large part masochistic, like a good mole or curry, a mixed succession of pains and pleasures. Cadences — see Cage/Thoreau on syntax and armies marching — are a settling of tonal accounts. Graeber emphasizes the role of violence (or implied violence) by the state in reinforcing the payment of debts and, yes, musical sound — pace Girard, Violence and The Sacred — is a violence done to silence. But consider cadential resolution, the final reckoning, whether in a stretch of music, an accountant's ledger, or in an act of state-controlled force: is perpetual suspension actually worse than the alternatives?

From a Diary I:ii

2011-09-26T19:50:00.002+02:00

Taleb and Blyth: Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. They're writing about political economy, but it applies to music as well, for example in the commissioning programs of major American orchestras, which tend never to go below a certain safety net of style, idea, ambition. The problem — the fragility — here is that the repertoire of major institutions, so constrained, becomes increasingly predictable, dull, and less exciting and attractive to the audience, and ends up reinforcing the tendency of the institutions to duck back into their tortoise shell of historical repertoire (most of which was innovative in its own time.) The orchestras and opera houses and festivals and concert series which are bucking the trend and thriving are those which are least concerned with suppressing repertoire volatility.

From a Diary I:i

2011-09-25T12:03:00.004+02:00

The Eleventh Commandment, so goes the joke, is Never introduce a musician to a loan officer. Protesters are occupying Wall Street: it's only fair, as Wall Street has been occupying us for a very long time. See anthropologist David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. See also Victor Grauer's Music 000001. Could hocketing (singing in complementation) be a model of exchange without monetized debt sustained by threat of violence? The violent response of the police to peaceful protest shows the limits of Mayor Bloomberg's progressivism. What is the collateral value of a piece of music, when everyone wants to have it for free?

Bauermeister/Stockhausen, Public/Private, Modern/Amodern

2011-09-09T18:25:00.005+02:00

I was just given a copy of artist Mary Bauermeister's new memoir of her life with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ich hänge in Triolengitter. I was somewhat awkward in accepting the gift. I'm usually on the shy side about sharing intimate matters and, consequently, have always had some serious misgivings about musicians' biographies, particularly when they focus more on the personal than on the public and musical aspects of a life. As Bauermeister's book had been promoted more for the private elements — Stockhausen's polyamory in particularly — and as a slice of the swinging '60s,* I was more than a bit hesitant about reading the book. But I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the book was a compelling witness's narrative of an important era and scenes in late 20th century music, particularly in Cologne and lower Manhattan, indeed a useful corrective or contrast to existing narratives (i.e. Stockhausen's own) as well as the degree to which Bauermeister's use of personal detail illuminates the musical work.

(Is it just a function of my age that I happen to find details about a composer's financial affairs more reliably interesting than those about their love affairs? I do find it interesting that, during his two marriages, Stockhausen lived with women who were financially much more secure than he and, in light of this, I do find Bauermeister's claim convincing that she was decisive in Stockhausen's move from his unsatisfactory relationship with Universal Edition to self-publishing: competent financial advice.)

In Stockhausen's music, for all the abstract structure (and all those famous chalkboard presentations at Darmstadt), there are indeed numerous elements of substance that have direct biographical references, a strong contrast to many of his contemporaries — i.e. Boulez, Cage, Babbitt — for whom a distancing or erasure of the personal was a marked aesthetic element; Bauermeister illuminates many of these in Stockhausen's works between Kontakte and Licht with special attention to Originale and Momente.

Bauermeister's book is also the memoir of a young woman artist establishing herself in the pre-feminist era and I find that it complements the autobiographies we've had by Judith Malina, Yvonne Rainer, and Carolyn Brown. I'm not altogether certain if Bauermeister would identify herself, then or now as a feminist, but it's a document treating some issues — the career of a woman in the visual arts, the integration of family and working lives, a troubled relationship to a violent man (her partner before Stockhausen), and not least the unequal relationship to a prominent male artist — which speak seriously to feminist themes. If I could have had any single element corrected in this book, I would have like to have read more about the author's own development as an artist. I don't really understand her work, but would honestly like to try.

Finally, I think that this book goes some distance towards explaining the amodern quality of Stockhausen's music and for me, how he failed to live up to his earlier promises as a composer. Sure, there are the Formschemes, the beepsnort electronics, the emphasis on scales and lists and a Varese-like appeal to science, but there are also appeals to mysticism, spirituality and all of these personal references that make Stockhausen something rather more of a late romantic than a high modernist. It's the romance of science and Urantia Book-inspired space opera rather than hard science and I have the impression that the way in which Stockhausen remained in a decisively pre-Feminist era is a substantial component of this amodernity. (One of the reasons I treasure my partner, Christina, is that she insisted we walk out of a performance of Montag aus Licht, the episode of Stockhausen's Licht cycle dedicated to the maternal figure "Eva"; neither of us could handle the cliche-filled treatment of women in the piece. And neither of us could handle the insipid synthesizer sounds; I suppose if I heard them now, it would be rather nostalgic experience, to the early portable electronic keyboard era, but jeez, they just had the least engaging envelopes, didn't they?)

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* Not to mention the creepy pink cover with the Elke Heidenreich blurb on the back...

A Title & Unexpected Consequences

2011-09-07T15:36:00.006+02:00

An example of an obsequious music administrator mixing awkwardly with politics:

Kodálys The Peacock Variations was removed from a program opening a new center dedicated to the composer by Pannon Philharmonic manager Zsolt Horváth "because the piece could insult the Mayor of Pécs (Hungary)", whose last name is Páva, Hungarian for peacock.

The Chief Conductor of the Pannon Philharmonic Zoltán Peskó has now resigned because he cannot have his artistic freedom restricted in this way. Mayor Páva himself is reported to have said that he "had absolutely no objection" to the piece and that he didn't know what Horváth was thinking with banning the piece from the program. (Source: here; hat tip: Pusztaranger.)

Across the river, they also sing by the campfire light

2011-09-01T12:08:00.005+02:00

Tim Rutherford-Johnson reviews two concerts — by complexity specialists ELISION and by the experimentalists at Music We'd Like To Hear — and observes:

On paper, they were two very contrasting concerts from opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. In actual fact, not so much, both marked by seriousness of intent, skill in execution, and musical intelligence from performers, programmers and composers alike. I’m calling time on new complexity, new simplicity, new complicity; it’s old-fashioned doing it right.

I believe that this complexity/simplicity opposition was always something of a distraction, and in terms of musical politics, an unfortunate one, with parties on either side not always behaving well.

(From an old post here: Tragic but true: when the smoke had cleared, the new music wars had been won not by towners up or down or coasters east or left, but by a rear guard of trained symphonic band composers from big state universities in the middle of the country. The surviving rebels were exiled, retrained, or forced into dayjobs in data processing and direct telephone sales.)

There are real and productive (or at least potentially productive) commonalities between the complexists and experimentalists, with differences of degree and style, not of technique or ambition. This was made most vivid for me when, during a lecture by Brian Ferneyhough at Darmstadt — to which I had gone ready to be an opponent — I had a sudden déjà vu moment, transported in memory to a lesson I had had with Lou Harrison. Harrison had described how he worked with formal phrase systems, a sequence of measures with shifting metres and numbers of icti, for example, that was permutated systematically, and on each permutation received some kind of transformation — interpolated beats, ornaments, diminutions, etc.. Although Mr. Harrison's model composition was sweetly pentatonic and clear in content, Ferneyhough, with his own favored set of materials and characteristic density of activity was executing precisely the same kind of transformations in terms of rhythm and form.

I don't want to diminish the differences here. These can be very great, particularly with regard to expressive intent and what might be called a virtuosity of surface, and I will not hide my own preference for a kind of clarity (or even honesty) and pragmatism in notational practice as well as acoustical and psychoacoustical qualities. But these differences ought to be the beginnings of discussions rather than ends and our musical lives are definitely more lively for the variety.

There has always been music which has flourished in the stylistic and technical space between these extremes, even if their work hangs between some hardened conventional programming categories like a tightrope between tall buildings perilously swinging in a strong wind. I am thinking now of Clarence Barlow, Christopher Fox and Gordon Mumma as technically distinguished and provocative yet always musical composers whose work might be so characterized.

Christopher Shultis, Walking, Thinking, Musicking

2011-08-29T18:07:00.003+02:00

I don't do review recordings here, but will, as an exception, make a recommendation: Devisadero, music by Christopher Shultis (various artists, 2011, Navona Records). This is music for wind ensemble, large and small, a set of songs, and a sequence of piano pieces. This is music about the New Mexican desert, but especially about walking through that desert, and I take it here that walking is not hiking with its suggestion of sport, but something more like Wandern, in which the environment provides deep accompaniment and encouragement to thinking and here, thinking-through-music. The album (can we use that word again, in the spirit of those 19th century sheet music collections?) is also a beautifully made whole, with the texts (not just prose) and images closely connected to the music.

Nocturnal: Risks & Benefits

2011-08-27T14:31:00.002+02:00

Here's a new thesis about Mozart's death: that he died of too little sunlight, and thus, too little vitamin D. Here's a 2007 post meditating on the nocturnal life of composers:

The working habits of the wild composer are as diverse as the music. Some, especially those pedagogically engaged, are early risers and writers, often finding their muse well before a proper breakfast has been hunted and/or gathered. Others keep strict bankers' hours and, when fortunate, their muses are equally punctual. But concerts and theatrical events in the western tradition are generally evening events (any doubt? is there anything worse than a concert in Darmstadt on a Summer's afternoon?) and many composers, like their concertizing colleagues, shift their timeclocks appropriately, four or more hours forward. After a concert, often the first item of discussion among the empty stomached participants is locating a local restaurant with late hours. (The comedian Don Novello once did a TV promo for the San Francisco Art Institute, identifying the artist's late waking hour as an advantage over other professions, like medicine or the law). None other than J.S. Bach, during his mature years, would adjourn each evening to compose, alone but for the bottle of Weinbrand which he emptied each night. My evidence is only personal and anecdotal, but I am convinced that the ratio of the truly nocturnal to the more-or-less diurnal among composers is higher than that among the population at large. I count myself in that number.

Whatever the immediate causes -- refuge from a necessary day job, or the business of family life, insomnia, or plain choice, working at night has its advantages. You are composing at an edge of consciousness, between waking and dreaming, often the ideal state of mind for imagining a new music. It is the more quiet half of the day, and the less social, less interrupted by the rhythms and counter-rhythms of the modern day. It is a time of day in which natural sounds tend to dominate the mechanical. Growing up in the overgrown desert of Southern California, the night was charged by the increase in moisture in the air and sounds traveled differently at night, with choruses of crickets joined by the doppler-shifted moans of passing AT&SF trains or speeding cars on Route 66 with all the green lights lit. But I digress.

Whether rising early or late, the composers I've known tend to be nappers. Some have mastered the art of napping during the works of unfavored colleagues. Most are deep sleepers, indeed dreamers. Me, I'm far too evil to rest. Should you encounter a wild composer, he or she may very well want to follow you home. This is not always advised, but if you do choose the companionship of a composer, feed them well (or let him or her feed you well, as we are often good in the kitchen), find them a comfortable place to nap, and never introduce her or him to a loan officer. In return, your composer, when correctly domesticated, will provide you with hours of entertainment and perhaps even a bit of affection in return.

Anonymous Takes Down GEMA for a Day & Why I Don't Like Spotify

2011-08-23T00:37:00.003+02:00

Although I'm a GEMA member, and in general appreciate the fact that GEMA does about as good a job as any organization in collecting licenses fees for performances, broadcasts, and recordings, I have to admit to taking some pleasure in Anonymous's take-down of the GEMA website today, if just as a reminder of GEMA's inability to deal — technically, legally, economically — with the internet and as yet another marker of the screwed-up state of musical rights (protection, longevity & orphaning, compensaton).

*****

I was recently astonished to learn that someone had written a blog item identifying pieces from this blog's Landmarks list available in recorded form on Spotify. While I appreciate the research effort here, the compensation model for anyone involved in the production of recorded music at Spotify is just not a good one and if you respect musicians, please don't use Spotify. I realize that more and more people simply expect to get recorded music for free (& I'm personally indebted to countless recordings borrowed from libraries or heard on radio, back when there was interesting music on radio in SoCal, so I know the feeling, but those recordings were purchased by the libraries and those radio stations reported and paid license fees for those broadcasts), and I recognize that the wind is blowing in a direction in which, ultimately, only live performances will generate real income streams for most musicians, BUT, the Spotify model in which a composer gets paid only fractions of a cent (dollar or euro) for a streamed listening is — above and beyond the insult — simply not a sustainable one. Brian Brandt's (of Mode Records) article on this topic is well worth reading.

Need a Venue? Learn the secret handshake...

2011-08-16T21:07:00.005+02:00

The factoid that Haydn and Mozart were members of Masonic Lodges suggests something about their liberal/enlightenment/secular associations in Josephine Vienna but probably doesn't influence the social lives of many composers nowadays. However, it might, in fact, suggest an interesting solution to the problem of finding a venue for performing your work. Many of the traditional "fraternal" societies, like the Masons, Foresters, Odd Fellows, Moose, Elks, Raccoons, Haymakers, Sons & Daughters of Lichtenstein etc., have been in continuous decline in membership for many years (here's a table for US Masonic lodges). Indeed, in many localities, they verge on extinction for lack of membership. But some of these groups have substantial lodge buildings, often with theatre-like facilities, and often in very convenient locations. And, as a bonus, they usually have their tax-exempt status all worked out, sometimes offer decent insurance policies, and may even have some endowment funds. So here's the opportunity: if there's a moribund Lodge in your neighborhood, gather your musical friends together and for the price of membership (and, yes, all the — knock three times, don't forget your apron — ceremonial and charitable duties that entails), you may gain access to an useful space for presenting your music.

Closed <—> Variable<—> Open

2011-08-15T21:22:00.004+02:00

As a follow-up to my last post, which touched on open forms, let me mention two interesting items well worth reading. Among many other things, these items made it clear that my casual appeal for open forms was really an appeal for a field of possibilities, including flexible forms situated between the poles of the closed and finite and the open and potentially infinite, as well as the fact that these qualities need not apply to all parameters in the same way. First, Renewable Music commenter Scott pointed to a fascinating article on "game mechanics" and the relationship of players to those mechanics, a nice parallel to musical questions of the relationship of the player or listener to musical structures and perhaps of special interest to composers concerned with sustaining interest over large-scale forms. Second, the new issue of MusikTexte just arrived and, among many good things, there is a German translation of an article, originally published in Perspectives of New Music (Vol. 46/1 (Winter 2008): 152-93), by the English composer James Saunders on Modular Music. Saunders covers a lot of ground, from the usual musical suspects (Stockhausen, Cage, Brown*) to IKEA furniture and the sculpture of Carl Andre or Dan Flavin, as well as his own music. It is fascinating how Saunders frames his discussion in the very modern terms of production and productivity: greater flexibility, reduced product development time, parallel development of products and product systems, reduction of production time. As a formal theory, Saunders concentrates on formal networks — how the various component parts (may) fit together — and this is truly exciting stuff and, to a large extent, independent of medium, genre or aesthetic. (For a great example of a networked narrative (and a real page-turner, so to speak), I recommend my former librettist, Edward Gorey's, masterpiece, The Raging Tide: or, The Black Doll's Imbroglio. Best page: "27. Figbash, Naeelah, and Skrump fell upon each other with loofahs. If you would love a romantic ending, turn to 30. If you would prefer an ironic one, turn to 29.") IN ANY CASE, let me append to this discussion the thought that an aspect of these forms in addition to their networked or network-able character — which is a topographical quality — regards the material, and particularly spatial or temporal, character of the parts and their relative, indeed proportional, similitude. What happens when an actual metric is assigned to an abstract network?** I suspect that the architect Le Cobusier, in his roundabout attempt to harmonize English and metric measurement systems via a projection onto the proportions of an idealized male (initally a 175 cm tall Frenchman, later a 6-foot tall Englishman) body (echoing, of course, Leonardo and, in turn, Vitruvius) into his Modulor system, came to address similar concerns. Le Corbusier was here, of course, working at his most inspired nuttiness (as were Leonardo, and, in turn, Vitruvius), but the notion of quantities and proportions directly derived from the human body does have some honest dignity to it and perhaps there's something useful to be recovered from it, in musical proportions.

[Please also see this earlier item on The Modular, among other things a paean to a childhood well spent among Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Togl and Lego.]

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* If I were writing a larger article on a similar theme, I might have begin with Satie (especially Parade and its cinematic Entr'acte) and generic silent movie music, then moved on to Henry Cowell's Mosaic Quartet and Lou Harrison's "Theatre Kits" as early examples of modular musics. I might have also included Morton Feldman's prescient Intermission 6 instead of Stockhausen's similarly variable piano piece and would have pulled out a number of modular examples from the 1960's radical west coast repertoire. Heck, I might have even started with Javanese gendhing lampah, flexible-length forms, based on a common underlying tonal pattern but elaborated with contrasting tempi and moods, and flexibly connectable as accompaniment to theatre and dance or attachable to or bridging fixed-length and -form compositions. But then again, that would have been an altogether different article, wouldn't it have?

** This question is also relevant to the theory of melodic contours.

Out of the Open

2011-08-13T22:50:00.002+02:00

Since I've spent a good part of the summer working with pieces from the 1960s in "open" forms — modular, with multiple and/or flexible orderings of the component parts — I've been puzzling over how little current music takes advantage of such features. I also find it particularly surprising in that similarly open forms are abundant in contemporary game playing, whether narrative, competitive or constructive in character. But then again, I know next to nothing about games not played with a poker deck, a croquet mallet, a pocket knife, or a pony. I do, however, have contemporary role-play gaming to thank for the widespread availability of non-cubical dice: although my favored instrument for chance operations remains a deck of card, these dice are very useful for chance operations on the fly.

Of late...

2011-08-10T11:19:00.002+02:00

Here are three of my recent scores, downloadable for your perusal or playing pleasure:

— Field & Stream, for five computers.

— Among the Wires, an Illusion Space, piano solo for Alvin Lucier on his 80th.

— A Map Drawn from Memory, portrait of Nanne Meyer in two parts, a small piano piece.

These are small pieces, two of them occasional, so I won't say much about them, but that Field & Stream came out of work with some young people, writing for an increasingly common ensemble (i.e. laptops) but not to be in the business of writing software or patches or collecting samples, but rather to compose a structure (another Beckett-Gray code piece BTW) for musicians who do all of those things well and not to get in the way of their individual approaches. And it's about sounds of water: rain, river, ocean, drippage & drainage. Among the Wires, an Illusion Space, is a study in acoustical beating and microtones for an unprepared piano, featuring near-unison harmonics, and is a direct homage to the music of its dedicee. I think of it as a kind of electronic music without electronics. And A Map Drawn from Memory was simply through-composed, after seeing a gallery exhibition by Nanne Meyer.

Return to (the) SOURCE

2011-08-09T21:59:00.004+02:00

The new anthology SOURCE: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973, edited by Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn has arrived (UC Press, 2011*) and a revisit to that eponymous journal is well worth it, if only for a bit of time travel into that lively era**. The anthology has a good smattering of the content of the eleven published issues, including scores, articles, questionnaires, photo-documentation, and transcribed interviews/conversations. It is not as visually striking as the orginal multi-colored, multi-textured spiral bound original volumes, but I suppose that's just another example of how all the advantages of current technology and publishing don't necessarily add up to affordable production at the quality and variety of times past. But, all-in-all, the book is delightful and it is constantly striking how prescient Austin and his editorial brethren were in identifying music to which attention ought be paid, from Cage and Feldman to Steve Reich and Daniel Lentz to Harry Partch, Robert Ashley, and Pauline Oliveros, to new instrument builders acoustic and electric, indeterminate scores, theatre pieces, environmental musics, political musics, etc..

My major quarrel with the publication is the low ratio of whole scores to everything else; in the end, the music itself, as represented by the scores, was the main attraction and many of the most extraordinary of them really did get played with some frequency and had a real lasting impact, thus not emphasizing them risks giving undue weight to the persistent myth that the avant-garde music of the time didn't have any traction in the concert hall or effect on music today. The scores that were included reflect the editors' own tastes (and, one imagines, some complicated practical questions about space and publishing rights), and I can't argue with that, but a few personal favorites were among the missing: Daniel Lentz's gorgeous music-theatre scores, Slonimsky's Minitudes, Leedy's usable music I for very small instruments with holes, and the photo spread of Robert Erickson's homemade instruments for Cardenitas.

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* For the record, I was not sent a review copy; I bought the book myself.

** Best line-of-the-times in the book: Terry Riley, when asked if his music had been used for political or social ends, replies "You mean the big politics in the sky? No, i don't think so." Second best line, Pauline Oliveros quoting Loren Rush: "the reason for studying counterpoint is that you may have to teach it some day." (I happen to disagree with that, profoundly disagree, in fact, but that takes nothing away from the fact that it's still funny.)

More from the Lost & Found Dept.

2011-08-06T20:03:00.004+02:00

Barney Childs, Keet Seel (1970) for mixed chorus (ACA).

I knew Childs (1926-2000) slightly, as he taught in Redlands, not so far as the crow flies from where I lived in Southern California but a bit out of the way for a teenager limited to bicycle transport, and in retrospect I wish that I could have known him better, as he was the more experimental and interesting of the local composers (who included Gail Kubik and Karl Kohn.)

Childs's academic background — via Deep Springs College, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) and Stanford — was in English literature and it seems his initial ambitions were mostly as a poet. He was largely self-taught as a composer, but could count Aaron Copland and Leonard Ratner among his teachers and kept an open ear out from the useful distance of the desert, to whatever was going on at the moment in new music. Childs is probably best known for his solo instrumental works (especially the Sonatas for Trombone and Bass alone and Mr T., His Fancy for bass, and a large number of woodwind pieces, many of them written for clarinetist Philip Rehfeld) and the extravagantly extended-technique and partly indeterminate ensemble work Jack's New Bag, which was published in an issue of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde. Material Press, my own publishing project, carries Childs' Eighth Quartet it its catalog. When last we spoke, at a Bertram Turetsky recital at New Music America in L.A. too many years ago, Childs pointed to his Four Pieces for Six Winds and his setting (for voices, wind ensemble and big band) of Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd as his major works, but I've only had the fortune to hear the first (which features a desert-still gamut study as a slow movement) and recordings appear not to be available of either of these.

I happened to pick up a copy of Child's Keet Seel for mixed chorus recently and have spent some time working with the score, in part writing a large section of the piece out in a notation program, so I could figure out how the opening, a passage of some mensural complexity, works. In this opening, a small gamut of pitches are used (entering, in order: soprano only on e', alto moving from e' to g' and then a', tenor on d' and c', and last bass on b and a.) Through non-aligned repeat signs, the simple melodicles get combined and re-combined to create and sustain more of a tonal color than a tonality, a not-yet-functional harmony, as we put it in these parts. But what is most remarkable, compositionally, is how Childs sustains both rhythmic interest and a steady ensemble density gently shifting only in details while sticking to a very clear syllabic text setting when the mensural system would tend to invite more happenstance than continuity. The rest of the piece alternate between more declamatory/soloistic sections and further textural sections, sometimes overlapping ("shingling" is the term of art, I believe) to create clusters, sometimes suggesting a diatonic tonality otherwise clustering chromatically. The text, by Childs himself — though later augmented by snippets of Donne, Shakespeare and George Herbert, seems more about sound and rhythm than semantics, just words to float in and out of the quiet ensemble texture and is eventually — and most mysteriously — interrupted by large spread-out divisi chords loudly singing the name of Keet Seel, that Anasazi cliff dwelling in Arizona's Navajo National Monument. What does this mean? It's music of the desert, but also music which recalls English choral traditions. The non-functional shifts between harmonies and the fragmented and disparate text should make for something less than coherent, but it all comes together with a peculiar, but clearly musical, force.

This is music — challenging music — that is worth renewed attention by a gifted choir.

Hearing —> Changing

2011-08-02T19:01:00.003+02:00

I just reread Charles Shere's fine book Thinking Sound Music: The Life and Works of Robert Erickson. His final paragraph, on Erickson's final, enigmatic composition, Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Timpani is wonderful writing and absolutely on point:

Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Timpani is cheerful and outgoing. It makes no attempt to investigate new territory; it is unconcerned with introspection or dark contemplations; it makes few demands of its performers (trumpet part aside). It is engaging and straightforward, as if to close a distinguished , inventive , and finally profound catalogue of over seventy compositions on a note of modest triumph. Music can be complex or simple, expressive or neutral, eventful or calm. It can contemplate things dark or transcendental. It can grieve or rejoice. It is profound solitude or communal cooperativeness. It is everything to its composer, at work on it; to the audience, it might mean anything. In the end — in Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Timpani — it is a diversion, notes on paper, then in the air, then gone; six minutes of entertainment at the end of a program. The music is heard; the audience applauds; the performers are content. The music, for the moment, is over. Hearing it changed the way we knew our world.

Getting Out From Under Cover

2011-07-23T21:02:00.008+02:00

To this day, the covers of some records in my father's lp collection remain almost as vivid to me as the music pressed onto the disc. (That Monteux record of the Rite of Spring with the Henri Rousseau "Snake Charmer" on the cover, or that Cal Tjader Latin Jazz concert (pressed onto a deep red disc!) with the cartoon of the band playing in a bullfight arena with a balloon coming out from the crowd shouting "Nixon Go Home!".) Record covers, of course, first got shrunk (into cd covers) and are now becoming nothing more than digital images. For those composers, musicians and listeners who take seriously those ancient commandments against imagery — the iconoclasts —, the emergence of recorded music transmitted without tangible packaging offers an opportunity to deal in music as a commodity without having to cover it with a piece of visual artwork. But the moment appears to be one in which the cover image is having its dues for at least one more round. First, we learn that the major innovator in record cover design, Alex Steinweiss, has just passed away. And second, we learn that the cover image still has potential to create controversy: follow Pliable's links, here.

The Quietists, Keeping Quiet

2011-07-22T15:32:00.009+02:00

James ~~Primrosch~~ Primosch has a review of the 3rd edition of Paul Griffith's Modern Music and After, in whch he complains that a whole laundry list of American composers [Harbison, Corigliano, Martino, Shapey, Davidovsky, Zwilich, Tower, Reynolds, Johnston, Kernis, Rouse, Lieberson, Melinda Wagner, Powell, Schwantner, del Tredici, Currier, Mackey, Hartke, Wernick] are not included as well as details some additional slights, among them to Wuorinen and Crumb. (I don't know the 3rd edition, but I have the 1st edition with the slightly different title right at hand, and it not only includes Wuorinen as a composer, but includes a bit of score sample.)

On principle, I don't think that laundry lists of the un-included are a particularly useful way to critique monographic musical histories; the historian is responsible for fashioning a narrative and the more productive question is whether the composers included support and enhance that narrative or the composers excluded detract from or would serve as critical counter-examples to that narrative. My own narrative for the same post-war period might well include Poulenc, for example, excluded by Griffiths, but it's perfectly clear why Poulenc's conservativism does not fit into Griffith's post-war narrative, which concentrates on more innovative repertoire. (I believe that Poulenc is treated within Griffith's A concise history of avant-garde music: from Debussy to Boulez, a book with an obviously longer timeline.)

In this case, however, I'm prepared to support Griffiths with regard to Primrosch's list, excepting the names of Reynolds and Johnston, two figures who have been pushing some real boundaries of music-making, because his list is otherwise one of establishment East Coast composers — many of them abundantly talented — who simply do not challenge the extent and limits of the musical as given to us by tradition and institutions. Yes, these are composers who do well within contemporary musical-institutional life, their works may even be short-lived local repertoire pieces, but their works do not make, or even bother to make, musical history. And yes, I do believe that their "not bothering" is not only the usual symptom of a conservative musical mentality but a tactical move, not to dirty the nests of the schools and foundations and orchestras and opera houses within which they operate and apparently thrive. To borrow a term from Poe and Ron Silliman, these are musical quietists.

I am certain that there are partisans of these composers who disagree with me fundamentally, but they are simply not making the case. In part, they don't because their institution position is comfortable enough that they have no urgency to make the case* but also, I believe, they don't make the case because it is difficult if not impossible to do so on musical-historical terms. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong! I really prefer to have multiple narratives, because music is rich enough to sustain that diversity. Where is the quietist who disagrees with Griffith's narrative (or mine) AND is willing to make the public case for their own?

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* That comfort level has been endangered a few times, for example when Paul Fromm realized how little of the music he had supported financially actually found a place in a living repertoire.

Flotsam, Jetsam, and Lagan

2011-07-20T13:49:00.005+02:00

A message recently crossed my screen complaining about experimentalists (English experimentalists in particular, but I cheerfully join their company on this matter) being attached to "third-rate justly neglected composers from the past." This sentiment struck me as both misplaced and uninformed. Misplaced, because (a) we don't know the music we don't know, (b) we should always be vigilant about ratings and those-who-would -rate as opportunities and opportunists for or prone to abusing musical-canonic politics (which is something altogether different from music itself), and (c) we certainly know enough about music history to recognize that useful, indeed wonderful, music can be left neglected and revisiting abandoned repertoire — all the same whether it ultimately rates good, bad or gloriously indifferent — can be useful on its own terms as well as contribute productively to the synthesis of new music.

This message struck me as uniformed because it appeared not to take the relationship of experimental music to musical materials at all seriously. On the one hand, experimental music deals, from first principles, with the acoustical flotsam nature and physics have left us. Radioastronomic signals, whale song, and sine waves are all fair game. But on the other hand we don't have to discriminate against sounds because they fall into the great gray area of the insufficiently "natural" or "artificial", because they have already found particular musical uses, or have been found wanting in previous musical contexts and thus been abandoned, with or without ceremony. Music history is full of cul-de-sacs, wonderful dark and craggy paths (a) tested — like toes in waters of uncertain temperature — but not really taken to their consequences, (b) abandoned (with or without the equivalent of an orphaned babe's basket), or (c) left tied to the buoys associated with the sidekicks and curiosities of musical history in favor of that one-way Autobahn of musical progress through grand hegemonic processes of dialectic and evolution. But much that gets left to wayside has potential musical value. Yes, English (and other) experimentalist may have interests in the Alkans and Saties and Lord Berners, and yes, the Standard & Poors or Moody's of the Official Musical-Institutional Timocracy (OMIT) have rated these as sub-investment grade, but the musical evidence contradicts the judgment of the ratings agencies. These musicians simply do different things with their music, and those things — taking their own good time, for example, rather than pushing it around — they sometimes do very well indeed.

I happen to find much of value in Berlioz or Sibelius, composers to whom both OMIT and the Officious Avantgarde Factions (OAF) have not always been kind or — a recent discovery — Stenhammar (playing through string quartets at the piano from a set of parts (no score) is my latest parlor trick). I find that works of these composers can present heterodox practices in voice leading and alternative approaches to form that are for me, indicators of unexplored potential for new music. If material appears to have new musical potential, then I have no qualms at all about grabbing it from flotsam, jetsam, or lagan.

*****

Not quite a footnote, but definitely lagan-related enough to append here: Since we've recently been treated to the first major Havergal Brian revival in the Age of the Internet, with the Proms performance of the Symphony No. 1 in D minor, "The Gothic", there's been lots of Gothic-related chatter. (Start with Kenneth Woods for the serious low-down.) May I add the rather obvious observation that the scale at which Brian was trying to work is highly problematic for composer, player, and lister alike? It comes down to economics, the distribution and consumption of materials over time. Scale is a serious concern among experimental musicians. La Monte Young, Robert Ashley and Morton Feldman have really thought and worked hard on issues of scale, with interesting — if interestingly uneven — results (i.e. as wonderful as Feldman's lengthy Crippled Symmetry and For Philip Guston are, I honestly don't think that his For Christian Wolff gets the economics of the material-to-time-scale right.) Both Young and Feldman, methinks, were onto something important in recognizing that there was a paradoxical decrease in the optimal ratio of materials to time, but the rich variety in the character of musical materials can add so many variables that I suspect it is not something that lends itself to rational calculation. In this particular case, Brian's Gothic, the all-too regular eventfulness, the succession from one stretch of music to another very different stretch of music is such that I'm never sure if it is fragmentary by design or just incoherent. The immediate succession from one section to another almost always makes some plausible sense, but whether the individual sections succeed in making broader time-scale connections or not, let alone whether those connections create any meaningful musical charge, is uncertain to me. My musical memory is pretty good and I suspected that things that happened early on got picked up again and shook around a bit very much later, but I remain only suspicious. (Another suspicion is that the Gothic, the first of 32 symphonies by Brian, is not the one we ought to be paying much attention to, but that's for another discussion.) Another British composer on the margins of official music-making, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, presents a very different style but a similar problem of scale, coming from the opposite end of material eventfulness, in that his harmonic saturation and imitative counterpoint are so dense that it sounds less horizontally eventful than it ought. (For a very useful, if unorthodox, introduction to Sorabji's music, I recommend this web site, with some painstakingly synthesized versions of Sorabji scores.)

English 101 and the Musical-Industrial Complex*

2011-07-15T17:27:00.003+02:00

Why can't composers' prose be more imaginative, more lively? Why do articles, program notes, blog items, and websites tend to read like grant and job applications or Rotary club laudatios? Time was, when composers — Ives, Cage, Jerry Hunt, Robert Ashley come straight to mind; hell even Babbitt at his most thorny — could shine in words as well as sounds, experimenting in form, syntax, style and vocabulary, unafraid to push the conventional limits of making sense, making language more like music. Is our present moment so conservative, so institutionalized that composers who can throw caution to the wind with their music rush to cover of safe but dull sentences in well-formed paragraphs in well-formed essays, formed, well, to the model set forth by your 7th grade English teacher? We can do better and if we value our music we should do better by showing through our words that our sounds are indeed special, out-of-the-ordinary.

____

*The title for this item plays on the famous section of Richard Ohmann's English in America, in which, among other things, the uniform style, rhetoric and form of bureaucratic documents (like the The Pentagon Papers) are sourced to their origins in mass collegiate English composition instruction.

Publication today.

2011-07-14T18:54:00.006+02:00

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has a couple (here and here) of good items on the state of new music publishing with some lively comment threads.

Traditionally, music publishers had effective monopolies over music engraving and printing as well as distribution to local music shops. They had more-or-less efficient systems for dealing with rental catalogs and they had promotional capacity, both through schmoozing with prospective musicians and managers and through direct advertising for sheet music. Having made investments in their sheet music that could only amortize over long periods, they kept close control over their catalogs and inventory and they were often staffed with musically knowledgeable employees who could watch for errata and make sure that the materials sent out were the ones required to make a piece work. Moreover, getting published by a name house carried a professional caché, with which the road to tenure, for example, could be paved, and without which, one could be considered professionally deprecated.

None of this is true any more. Engraving and printing, although getting them done right remains an art, are no longer tightly-held secrets of the "industry". Every composer can, in principle, engrave and print her or his own work to a high level of quality. The local music shop with a large inventory of sheet music has basically gone the way of the dodo and was never that good, anyways, in ordering anything even slightly obscure. Publishers, always reluctant and sometimes even loathe to dealing directly with the end consumer of sheet music, have, for the most part, not warmed or gotten more efficient at the job and, again with a few exceptions, though they tend to be staffed with highly educated and truly music-loving musicians, they have downsized to the point where they only rarely can deal with errata or that second violin part with the impossible page turns. Advertising budgets do remain for a few houses, but it tends to be reinforcing the dwindling existing markets (i.e. to the handful of specialist journals and in festival programs) rather than reaching any significant mass (i.e. in the days when a Schirmer ad could be found in the Christian Science Monitor, right next to Nicolas Slonimsky's column on the kid's page.) Finally, the prestige of big name sheet music publication has diminished even in the most ivy-covered of tenure cases.

Instead, composers can pretty much go it alone (the great models here are Tom Johnson and Karlheinz Stockhausen) or in cooperation with colleagues (like Frog Peak or Material Press or Wandelweiser), with their own web sites serving as catalogs and ordering platforms for score delivery by post or email. The most immediate advantages for the composer are that he or she gets to keep all the license fees (instead of ceding the usual 50% to the publisher), has control over the quality of the materials produced, and has oversight over score sales and to some extent performances, recordings, and broadcasts. Scores in your own catalog will not get neglected or orphaned as they might in a publishing house that loses interest or get merged with or acquired by larger concerns. On the other hand, investment in score production and part extraction is all your own, you are on your own for promotion and you have to be available to answer inquiries and to send your materials out at any time (and yes, many score orders will come your way Sunday morning at 4:00 am, with a request that it be sent ASAP and preferably earlier than that.) The disadvantages also include not being able to use sales and license fees from the back catalog to subsidize new catalog items as well as having to organize promotional contacts and networks from scratch.

Clearly, each composer has to work out the balance of advantages and disadvantages between going with a traditional publisher and going it alone for herself or himself. Personally, the greater advantage for me is not to got to a traditional publisher, but if my catalog had more choral and school band or orchestra music, the distribution logistics for handling the volume might throw the balance in the other direction. (That said, it appears that a number of composers are now able to use direct sales of school ensemble music to earn a fair income, so if you can deal with a large volume, go for it.) In any case, if you do decide to go with a traditional publisher, it seems wise to insist on these terms as a minimum: (1) the composer should not have to pay in any cash up front for publication, especially when print-ready scores or parts are delivered by the composer, (b) the amount and form of promotion to be made by the publisher should be defined in detail in the contract and may be reflected in the publisher's share of license fees or sheet music sales/rentals, and (c) should promotion not be carried out by the terms of the contract or should the materials be orphaned by the publisher, all publication rights should revert to the composer.

Filling the Big Empty

2011-07-12T21:28:00.002+02:00

New music, all-too-often at the bottom of the musical resource food chain, doesn't often get made with much choice about the environment (room, hall, studio, gallery, theatre, church, club, pub, arena, field, etc.) in which it gets presented. And — all-too-often, again — this can have serious effects on the music itself. If a main attraction of the music is a certain level of detail or subtlety, for example, all that attraction can be effectively wiped out in a room with too much ambient noise or with too much resonance. On the other hand, a music with a considerable amount of blank space — "silence" — may not work out in concert halls otherwise considered to have fantastic acoustical properties for music making, but conventional music-making with the conventional continuity of concertante composition. Earlier on, I made a lot of music that was more rests than notes, but concerts and recordings were too frequently frustrated by the space in which they were made. Paradoxically perhaps, I discovered that out-of-doors spaces — with a prevailing constant and predictable ambient sound level were much more forgiving for music with Sierpinski-like ratios of silence to sound, in that expectations of noises external to the music event proper can lead to a useful amount of unhearing, while the contrary expectation, in a church or concert hall or morgue etc. can lead, in the event of a sudden crackle in a fresnel lamp or a settling bit of architecture or furniture or some embarrassing body noise can distract, with some finality, from the continuity of the work. (As Heinz-Klaus Metzger put it: "Webern was the last composer before the advent of air conditioning.) For all my apostacy in other matters minima musicalia, the one part of the original minimal faith I've always tried to keep is the stricture that minimalism is the elimination of distractions. For this reason, among others, I made something of a serious turn in my own music away from big empty spaces in the direction of filling-up the available time. I hear this mostly a pragmatic way of dealing with the real potential of unanticipated sounds in real concert spaces to distract, and am generally more lenient with pieces intended for performance outside or in unconventional spaces. I have considerable reservations about accepting this move as a general, let alone permanent, aesthetic principle, but since there is actually quite a large body of silence-dominated music around these days (much of Wandelweiser repertoire, for example) my retreat shouldn't be much of a loss.

Exploding Program Notes!

2011-07-10T14:39:00.008+02:00

One of the legends of my college years was of a composition student before me* who had printed the programs for his senior recital on conjuror's flash paper so that when the programs were first opened, each would literally go up in a flash of smoke. For another recital, given by the composer Steed Cowart, the host was kind enough to fill the program with interesting reading material, including (IIRC) a nice passage from Ulysses, some fascinating information about arthropods, and a tasty Moroccan recipe. Steed provided this material as a complement to the musical program, not an explanation, just good stuff to read.

Musicians and audiences go round and round about program notes. Are they informative or explanatory? Is informative or explanatory necessary? Are they a distraction (from the music, for better or worse)? Is there a minimum or maximum of information a program ought to have, i.e. minimum: personnel and titles of pieces, maximum probably somewhat less than a dissertation. (German program books often approach scholarly quality, but then German opera houses and radio stations usually have musicologists on staff (in the opera as dramaturgs) or on call who are hired to thoroughly research and write their articles.)

Lou Harrison insisted on attaching music stands to his homemade gamelan instruments, in contrast to traditional practice in which notation, if used, was discretely hidden from audience view, quipping that he didn't want to watch a gamelan onstage with all of the players continuously "staring at their crotches." At the opera recently, I noticed a few audience members reading their lap-stationed programs with help of the light from the their mobile phone screens. (To the best of my knowledge, the live-twittered concert or opera has not yet come into practice here**.) This was distracting and not pretty. I guess, if I had my drothers and a bit of stage magical skill, I'd have programs that went up in flames immediately before the performance began and miraculously reconstituted themselves when the lights came up again.

As to the content of program notes, if or how technical they should be, or whether they should be more intellectual and abstract or more personal and concrete (or the other way around), all I can say is go with your own strengths as a writer and don't bother us with dropping names (whether of persons met, institutions occupied or prizes bestowed). If your strength is in depth and expansion, then have courage to write more, if your strength is in concision, then make it less. If your words aspire to poetry, then a dose (keep it modest) of poetry may do us good, while words more technical or theoretical should be rationed in measures appropriate for the audience at hand. And yes, if you cannot or will not summon words to accompany your music, that's okay, too, your job description does not include the provision of anything more than the score and your score may well not want for the company of words.

______
* One of the facts of being a Santa Cruz student in the late 70s and early 80s was that one was ever among the belated, and not among the originals, the legendary, wild ones of the late 60s and early 70s. Of course, that was only legend, and we did have the one advantage of belatedness, which was the gift of retrospect, under the graces of which we were invited, no, required, to be innovative, even more wild, and indeed, when we succeeded, we could ourselves provide ample stuff for the legends of those of the real belated years, which I reckon run from the late 80s until now.
** A good thing ithinks, because although the live commentary does offer the possibility of interesting enhancements and counterpoints to the musical event (which I've blogged about here before), it seems a natural development that once this comes into play, with live cell phones in hand, many audience members will inevitably take up channel hopping, away from the concert feeds, and eventually be doing anything but paying attention to the concert. As something of a free speech absolutist, I don't see any reasonable argument around this, but recognizing the real potential for disturbing the shared concert, see no alternative to polite and civil encouragement for shutting the things off, or even, gently reminding of that special hell set aside for those who talk in theatres.

Keeping a Commonplace

2011-07-07T12:57:00.003+02:00

The composer Jeff Harrington recently pointed to a page transcribing the contents of H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, here. Lovecraft left enough interesting ideas as unused material for several careers worth of weird fiction, heck even a few weird operas. (I have to admit to never having read Lovecraft; maybe I should remedy this.)

To some extent, blogs are performing, in public, the function of the Commonplace Book, the place to keep record of one's own education, jotting down gathered notes and quotes, observations, ideas. This page actually began as a more-or-less smooth transitition from the marginalia I habitually scribbled on the edges of sketches and scores. But being public has altered the scope of this project. It tends to be more political and, though something of a record of my current musical obsessions, it's not as iniitmately connected to my compositional projects as my marginalia was, indeed, I find myself rather shy about writing directly about my own compositional concerns. At the same time, my entire cogitating-sketching-composing-editing procedure has changed quite a bit. Whereas I used to be fairly rigorous in the march from sketch to score, leaving a substantial paper trail, I now do more work directly in notation software now and try to keep my sketches to bits of paper (usually A6 size) that I scatter around my desk while working — some bits of notation, formal schemes, reminders of work to be done etc. — and then brush them aside into the waste basket when no longer needed. (I think having a crowded house with kids and dog underfoot has made me much less patient about maintaining an archive of sketches (on the other hand, in my role as publisher, I'm fairly obsessive in maintain any bit of paper from the other composers in my catalog.) On the other hand, I have several hundred uncatalogued pieces in various stages of development in the form of computer files for notation programs; I have no idea how or if I'll maintain these. )

But the idea of keeping an idea book like Lovecraft's, for my music, especially for all the plans and fantasies for work-to-come, is very attractive. I do have a short list with titles and short descriptors of pieces I'd like to write (titles are very important to me), but it's just another piece of paper hanging on the wall before my desk, not a real book. An idea book is something like a diary, but more like a dream diary than a record of daily and mundane accomplishments. Like diaries, however, I think that the very "bookishness" of such a document gives it a degree of seriousness and commitment that is useful for a composer. La Monte Young, for example, has long kept an Idea Book (and some of his ideas, from the peek I've had, are really quite wonderful and surprising, in particular a pair of operas.) Do you keep an idea book?

Lou Harrison on Arnold Schoenberg

2011-07-06T14:50:00.002+02:00

He was a lovely and delicate man, very nervous when airplanes flew over U.C.L.A.; who once hushed us, too, in order to hear a bird outside.

(...) When I was about to leave for New York, he asked me why I was going there and I replied that I did not really know. "I know why you are going," he said. "You are going for fame and fortune. Good luck! And, do not study anymore — only Mozart!"

(from the preface to Harrison's fine Suite for Piano, C.F. Peters.)

Double Bill, Durable Goods

2011-07-03T23:03:00.002+02:00

We went this evening to a double bill at the Frankfurt Opera: Dido and Aeneas followed by Count Bluebeard's Castle. The production and music in the Purcell was transcendent (particularly Paul Murrihy's Dido), the Bartók was well-sung and well-played but shockingly dull on stage. It was also a nice reminder of (a) how flexible an opera house like Frankfurt's, a substantial institution, can actually be, here using two entirely different but stylistically appropriate orchestras and stage arrangements in one evening, the baroque half with a scaled down orchestra and historically-informed instruments, pitch-level and playing style (albeit with a few creative alterations: the Sorceress and witches were sung by countertenors, making menancing barbate but full-skirted villains) an expanded continuo group, and added recorder, baroque oboe and bassoon, with some discrete percussion to brighten the orchestral texture, apparently all string in the original) played before the proscenium and breaking into the auditorium with the pit somewhat raised, and (b) how curious it is that particular pieces come to be repertoire items, in this case quality of composition overcoming some substantial disadvantages, like language (English and Hungarian (wonderful to hear some Hungarian again, being deprived of it since my Budapest years)) and being short of a full-evening in length.

Dido, especially with a lively continuo, just flows, and Purcell's text setting is continuously startling, uncanny. It has two ground bass laments to die for (literally) and the balance between the chromatic and diatonic is absolutely right. It has taken time, but it has become a core piece of the repertoire, and possibly the single English language item that ought to be until, well (and here I jump on a limb), the original version of Weber's Oberon. It will ever, however, be on the look out for an appropriate and complementary partner to fill out the evening, because the Bartók just doesn't fit as either a complement or an extension. In recent years, Bluebeard has taken — correctly I think — its own place in the repertoire. It is compact, dramatic, tonal enough for anyone who's ever been in a cinema, and has a pair of vocal lines that sit very well and are supported rather than overridden by the orchestration. The clear, tight structure of the piece is right there with Wozzeck or Turn of the Screw and this is a good illustration of how strong musical structural elements can help a work attract and function securely in productions of radically different character. If there is a weakness in the piece it is that the tonal language — thank the movies — has become familiar, less exotic, and that the rhythmic invention and pacing are somewhat disappointing. (But Purcell, with all of the nuances of ornamentation and pacing that period style makes available to musicians, clearly has some advantage here, so perhaps the partnering was unfair.)

Rescuing Orphans

2011-07-01T16:27:00.004+02:00

A must-read article by Severo Ornstein, son and devoted editor of the composer Leo Ornstein, has some particularly clear illustrations of the how disfunctional traditional music publishing can get. In Ornstein's case, former-global-media-behemoth-now-fragile-subsidiary-of-Citigroup EMI apparently earns license fees for works it has never actually published, and EMI's refusal to communicate and the understood threat of unmatchable legal power keep them from even entering into a dialogue to do what is most reasonable for the music itself. And of course, Ornstein's rights organization, BMI, lacks the human resources to support the Ornstein family in sorting their side of this out. Any reasonable person will recognize that Ornstein's catalog is never going to earn meaning royalties for EMI, but the huge size of their catalog and their massively downsized staff probably make it impossible for EMI to afford the labor required to look into the matter. What is required for cases like this is some legislation freeing up works effectively orphaned by negligent publishers, either returning full rights to the works in cases where there are heirs willing to assert their rights and promote the work as Severo Ornstein has so admirably done in his father's behalf, or automatically releasing orphaned and unclaimed works irrevocably into the public domain. But I suspect that any hopes for such a reasonable treatment of creative work are hopelessly optimistic.

[Let me also note that my small publishing project, Material Press, has recently begun, with pieces by Jerry Hunt and Barney Childs, to publish orphaned landmarks of the avant garde. Any other suggestions for this project are more than welcome.]

Pay Attention to the Netherlands and the UK

2011-07-01T10:03:00.004+02:00

Pay attention to the developments in cultural support in the Netherlands and the UK. In both cases, right-wing governing coalitions are making massive cuts (and massive increases in fees, for higher education in the UK in particular.) But in neither case is the motivation primarily economic. In the UK, it is practically class warfare, but this time it's a revolution from above, dishonestly made by a pair of parties who ran in the last election ostensibly to the friendly left of Labour on many issues, while in the Netherlands it seems that the cuts are being made unashamedly not because they have to be made (i.e. for budgetary reasons) but that the coalition partners, no longer even pretending to represent a broad consensus of the population, can and want to make the cuts from cultural grounds, among them the xenophobic (with xenos, in this case, being both strange (foreign) and strange (novel)).

When I returned to Germany in 2005, after half a decade in Hungary, a constellation of three major funding sources for new musical activity — the German Music Council, the public radio stations, and GEMA — had each, for different reasons and in different circumstances, but tragically in near-simultaneity, made massive reductions in their support. (The Music Council went through a period of serious mismanagement and was "reformed" with music less emphasis on new concert music, the radio stations, while having net increases in fee revenues, found themselves in competition with the privates for soccer broadcast rights, encouraging massive waves of reductions in and attempts to monetize other areas of their operations, most painfully those which exist with no attention, let alone competition from the privates (Neue Musik: bingo!), and GEMA, once governed with some parity between "serious" and "entertainment" composers, left the parity model altogether in a grab by E-producers faced with massive reductions in their income in the post-CD era. ) All this happened rather quickly and quietly and with practically no complaint from musicians, who were in any case largely shut out of the policy discussions. My impression is that most musicians still haven't registered what has happened.

If there is any bright light in the events in the UK and Netherlands, it is the fact that musicians and other artists are not passive. They are taking the developments seriously and are engaged with hard questions about the role of artistic production in society and are, in many cases, speaking loudly and unusually articulately about the actions of their governments in a strong contrast to Germany (or the US, for that matter) where measures of similar gravity just happened with a whimper. In parliamentary democracies, a majority-is-a-majority, so I don't think we can expect much change in these plans anytime soon, but I do think that the governments may have seriously underestimated the charge that their reductions have given to the creative community, intellectually and politically, and the conversations now taking place in that community and with the public at larger may have a greater defining role for the future for both the material support of the arts and its content and mode of production than any of the immediate (and, let us hope, temporary) policies of the present (and let us hope, temporary) governments.

Goodbye, Columbus.

2011-06-27T18:27:00.003+02:00

So novelist Philip Roth has been interviewed and confesses...

"I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did."

Well, gee. That really doesn't make me enthusiastic about running out and reading some fiction by, say, Philip Roth. It may very well be true and he may well have earned the right to be bored with fiction after half a century of writing it, but was this really a wise thing to say? It's not exactly an infectious sales pitch for novels as a genre or the specific exemplars (54 and counting) of Mr Roth himself.

Unfortunately, a lot of composers — and composers without the 50 years of hard labor behind them — are prone to making similar statements, emphasizing that they don't listen/play/spend a lot of time thinking about new music. Instead, they offer up their bona fides as teenage garage band rockers or jazz musicians or would-be musical writers (remember Milton Babbitt command of Tin Pan Alley songs?) or anything other than new music maker/listener/devotee. As if it's something strange that one ought to be embarrassed about or at least qualify one's interest by admitting that you like the "real" stuff as well if not better. If the composer him- or herself likes other music better than why should we like the composer's music any better?

Here's a better sales pitch, and AFAIC, it's true:

I will now confess that I listen, play and think about my own music and other new music about 90% of my musicking hours, awake or asleep; it's the carbs, veggies, and protein in my musical diet. I top my musicking off off with trips into music history or ethnography (come September, I'll have been playing gamelan for 33 years!) but that's just dessert, friends. I like new and experimental, (ex/post/prae)modern, contemporary, avantgarde, circuitbent, scare-the-dog music more than any other, I like my own music and I like the music of my contemporaries and find a remarkable reserve of musical depth, integrity, excitement, charm, emotion, and continuous surprise in the music and I'd like to invite you to discover these qualities as well.

Harley Gaber (1943-2011)

2011-06-26T18:34:00.005+02:00

News comes that Harley Gaber has died, too early. By the time I was a musical adult, Gaber had cleared out of Newmusictown and his career was already something of a legend, the guy who worked all the mainstream new music institutions in New York for a while then wrote and recorded a very long, very slow, and at-the-time-very-controversial piece for strings (The Winds Rise in the North), his adé to new music, after which he was said to have given it all up to be a tennis pro in Southern California.

Of course the story is more complex than that, with a parallel visual arts career and a late shift from tennis to 9-ball pool playing, but his music remains an interesting road not-quite taken, a student of Kenneth Gaburo who worked through one form of serialism to its own radical end, which the composer insisted had a directionality not shared with drone-based minimal music. One historical footnote: it is entirely possible that Gaber's 1965 Omaggio a Feldman for two pianos was the first piece written by another composer in a Feldmaniste style; in any case, it's an interesting piece that ought to be played more. Fortunately for us, he has a substantial website, here.

Lost & Found & Lost Again

2011-06-26T16:25:00.003+02:00

After I posted my last item, in which I mentioned the composer Gladys Nordenstrom, I realized I just didn't know enough about her or her music. I had met her once, aorund 1980, as she accompanied her husband (Ernst Krenek) to a talk at my college*, but I have only heard two or three pieces. My curiosity piqued, I ended up, as so often, in the archives at Radiom.org, a project of Otherminds. There, I found a only short taped interview with Nordenstrom**, but once inside the archives you naturally start to wander. Soon, I located a performance of Barney Child's Sonata for Solo Trombone, played by its commissioner, Stuart Dempster. (One thing that younger composers might emulate from Child's catalog was the fact that he composed a series of significant solo pieces for a diversity of instruments, the kind of pieces which "useful baggage" as Aaron Copland is said to have put it, simply because good solo pieces are likely to find players.)

And then I did a search on the name of one of my favorite composers, Douglas Leedy, only to discover a newly-listed recording of a piece which was not listed in Leedy's catalog, a 1962 Trio for trumpet, horn and trombone. The performance recorded was a concert recording by KPFA played by a student group, rough edges in, but the contours of the piece were evident and attractive, especially the very long tones, the microtonality, and the bits of quasi-harmonic ornamental flourish. It struck me immediately as part and parcel of the West Coast radical moment, alongside the music of his comillitones like Young, Riley, Byrd, Oliveros, Rush or Moran. Since I publish, through Material Press, a number of Leedy's pieces, I immediately wanted to verify the piece and beg to carry the score in the Material Press catalog. So I called the composer ASAP and learned that it was, in fact, his piece, that he was unaware of the recording of what was probably the first and only performance, that the score had some interesting details — the staves were clefless (players chose their own clefs as appropriate), the loose pages were not in a fixed sequence, but some pages had indications affecting the tempo of the following page, and that the microtones were specified as slightly or more sharp or flat than the notated tone. Mr Leedy also indicated that he did not have access to the score. So that single recording is all the record we have of the piece. Lost, found, lost again. Here, a recording is clearly valuable, but frustratingly not enough to recover the piece for new performances.

_____

* For a previous account of an afternoon in Santa Cruz with Krenek, read here. Composer and UCSC Professor David Cope, in his memoir, Tin Man, also recalls the day.

** Later, I found a lengthy video documentary about Krenek with extended interviews with Nordenstrom, online here.

Ignoring the Music In Our Own Backyard

2011-06-25T23:11:00.004+02:00

Mark Swed gets it absolutely right. Music Festivals in California have been doing a terrible job of paying attention to music from California and the West. I have previously complained here specifically about the Cabrillo Festival, founded by Lou Harrison, Robert Hughes, and friends, which had a long history of taking local composers seriously. While the present directorship has, to its credit, put the focus on contemporary music right up in the name of the festival, it has largely focused on the same set of middle-of-the-road names that can regularly be found in East Coast regular season orchestral programs. Indeed one gets the impression that the music director uses Cabrillo as a try-out for her own regular season repertoire. The complaint that West Coast Experimentalists are not welcome at Cabrillo has been met with the line that these composers don't have enough experience working with orchestras. I call BS and I call this a bad bit of vicious circularity: They don't have enough experience, so Cabrillo can't invite them even though Cabrillo was one of the few places which made it possible for West Coast composers to acquire orchestral experience in the first place. But, in fact, there are numerous current West Coasters who have the orchestral chops and who ought to be in play at Cabrillo. Here are just some senior names (that is, older than me), just from the top of my head: How about Paul Dresher, Chris Brown, Brian Ferneyhough, Bill Alves, David Cope, Janice Giteck, Paul Chihara, Aurelio de la Vega, Lloyd Rodgers, Roger Reynolds, Chinary Ung, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Anne LeBaron, Clarence Barlow, Karl Kohn, Jim Fox, Anthony Davis, or Gladys Nordenstrom? And how about some of the composers in the West Coast musical legacy — in addition to Harrison and Cowell — Robert Erickson, Glenn Glasow, Barney Childs, Will Ogdon, James Tenney, or Mel Powell and even some interesting conservatives-but-all-the-same-West-Coasters like Gail Kubik, Ingolf Dahl or William Denny?

Manual Transmission

2011-06-25T18:01:00.003+02:00

Before sound recordings became widely available, a primary medium for the spread of new orchestral music was the piano transcription, in particular the transcription for four-handed playing.* Nowadays, I don't think there is a major music publisher that would pay for the extraction of a four-handed arrangement of a major new piece (piano concertos perhaps excepted.) While some things were definitely gained in the change of media — timbral variety, of course, but certainly the volume and spatial presence of a large ensemble in a larger room, as well as the record of particular musicians' interpretations, with all the wonderful nuances that can be included — some things were also lost. These include a tactile relationship with the notes that can only come from playing them oneself and also — in four-handed playing especially — the joy of making music in company. But also, the fact that practice, even for the most gifted sight-reader, means working in fits and starts, moving in and out of the piece's own temporal continuity, can leads, in combination with that tactility, to a more immediately analytical and interpretive engagement with the music. This is not to say that listening to recordings can not be analytical and there is certainly music which is so technically difficult to play from the page, that one may scarcely have an instant's thought about what one is playing, but generally speaking, recordings do invite passive listening (you can, after, do the dishes while listening to a recording, but not while playing secundo in a four-hander of a Mahler Symphony) and playing from the page is a qualitatively different experience, not least because, when playing, you, with all of your experience, tastes, and talents, are an essential element of the performance.

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* I caught the tail end of the American music-making-in-the-parlor experience. My father's mother was a very good piano player and once even played Paderewski's famous Minuet for the composer who was taking his usual cure in her hometown of Paso Robles. Her favorite composer was, however, Sibelius, and she still had part of Valse Triste under her fingers in her 80s. My maternal grandparents were not wealthy, but they did afford themselves a piano, a pretty good upright Steinway, with a bench full of sheet music, mostly popular classics and the whole corpus of sentimental Irish-American popular songs. I loved to play four-handed with my grandmother, but I loved best of all, at the end of some party, when one of her school teaching colleagues would sit down to play what they called "Honky-Tonk". He played pop songs from the early 20th century and a smattering of tunes from the Methodist Hymnal (my grandmother, Irish, was R.C., my grandfather, Dutch and Reformed, but the Methodist Hymnal seemed to be preferred by all) by ear, all in F#, that is, mostly on the black keys, and everyone would sing along. To this day, I probably have a better command of popular music from the first three decades of the 20th century than of the last four.

Sethares on Rhythm

2011-06-19T01:53:00.003+02:00

I can recommend William Sethares's Rhythm and Transforms (Springer 2007), especially the earlier chapters which have as clear an exposition of the complex issues of perception and musical time — our ability to deal simultaneously with multiple levels of time in particular — as I've seen. For those of you who know Sethares's landmark Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale, his approach, as an engineer and a musician, will be familiar, but it's still a refreshing way to look at some issues fundamental to music. While the book's grand trajectory — toward machine recognition of rhythmic activity — is more directly of interest to engineers than for musicians, there's plenty of real musical interest along the way. One warning, like most books intended for academic library purchases, this one is expensive, so it's likely to be library reading for most of us.

Keeping Score(s)

2011-06-17T14:53:00.002+02:00

Do you like to keep musical scores about? I don't have a huge library of sheet music, largely because I can't afford to have everything I'd like, but I make of point of collecting scores of the music that I value most and that's still several hundred items and continuously growing, in spite of transcontinental and transatlantic moves and a habit of giving things away.

My impression — and I may well be wrong about this — is that a score collecting habit has become something of an antiquated pastime. Certainly, more people are satisfied with just having recordings, but for me, (excluding, of course, those pieces made especially for recorded media) a score can still have a potential multiplicity of interpretations — readings, imaginings, hearings — that a recording can all too often cancel out. (Which is okay in a few cases; I don't need the score for Beethoven's Seventh, because I honestly don't think that there's more to it than in my favorite Kleiber recording...) Also, I think that collecting scores — whether bought, gifted, copied, or lifted, and whether an orchestral or chamber score to study or an album of piano pieces to play for my own pleasure — is one important way of being a good citizen in the community of musicians.

One very good thing about my blogging experience has been that it has led to some intense exchange of scores with colleagues, many of whom I only know online. Those scores, whether delivered by post or as email attachments, are among the most substantial pieces of mail I've ever received, damn close to love letters, I'd say.

Letting the hand slow down the ear

2011-06-15T21:52:00.005+02:00

As I understand it, a good part of my job as a composer — my discipline, if you like — is paying attention to music other than my own, listening to it, playing it, finding out something about what makes it work (or not, as the case may (also usefully) be). I like to work with scores, to read through them, play through them, and — here is my own old fashioned (& maybe slightly perverse) way or working — copying or transcribing all or parts of them.

There is something deeply satisfying about being so close to a piece of music that you can rightly claim to have spent time with every single note, and not just listening to it or playing it, but actually writing it down in its scored context. I used to do this by completely by hand (& I swear there's no better training than copying by hand) but now I enter it into a notation program, which speeds some elements of notation up but I still insist on entering note-by-note, if only as a way of effectively slowing down my analytic listening process.* (I even use that program's playback capacity from time-to-time, but mostly for working with tempi or complex rhythms, a matter that I find enormously sensitive to the slightest changes; I don't ever quite trust the playback for its representation of pitches or instrumentation or articulation or balance, but it is one heck of a metronome. )

As part of my summer's plan, I've laid in my annual store of scores I'd like to know better and by the end of the summer, I expect that a good amount of them will have been copied, added to all the scores — from Machaut to La Monte Young — I've copied by hand over the years. It's an old habit, one that started as a teenager working in libraries, but not one I plan to give up any time soon.

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* See this or this older post on Slow Listening.

Some Advice

2011-06-15T15:44:00.003+02:00

Here's a small bit of unsolicited advice for my composing colleagues: Don't use the default layouts, but take an extra minute to make your computer-engraved scores look good.

I was just sent a large-ish collection of piano scores by a colleague. I like what I've played through in the scores, but the (default Finale) layout is so bad that I refuse to play any more. The staves are too large, there is no space between systems (so that the bass of an upper system is hard to sort out from the treble of the system below), the title and composer's name are squeezed into the upper margin, the copyright notice practically buried in the bass of the bottom system, and all the text is in the default Times New Roman font (and everyone knows that nothing shows you could care less than using a default Times New Roman.)

As someone who is seriously near-sighted and astygmatic, what I want most is NOT the largest staff size possible, but the clearest image. Give a little extra space; you can afford the extra paper. Yes, there's a definite macho caché — and the dense-notating complexists have a definite macho streak, but that's for another item to discuss — to having a lot of marks on the page, but the page doesn't have to be more black ink than white space. Give enough room to your title and name above and copyright notice below, even if this means having one system fewer on the first page. (And, by the way, unless it's a piece with a composer and a lyricist to sort out, all you need in the right hand is your name, not a "by John Smith" as in grade school. We're grown-ups, now, and we know the convention that the composer's name goes up there on the right so that preposition is unnecessary.) And, let me repeat, choose a nice text font that says I care at least enough about my music to take the 15 seconds time and change the damn Times New Roman to something distinctive.

Legal notice: This advice is solely my own, kiddoes, and your own mileage may vary. And one caveat: When I was a composing youngster myself, there were contests in which the secret requirement was sending in (stinky, fading, yellowing) ozalid copies. Xerox copies were automatically discarded as "unprofessional." Only a small number of inductees were aware of these secret requirements. There were rumors, of course, but what the hell did "Ozalid" mean to some kid from the desert and even if he did know about it, how could he practically get an Ozalid made on a paper boy's income? There may well be some jerks running competitions or admissions committees nowadays who accept only scores with Times New Roman fonts or printed on saddle-stitched portrait-format 9"x11" paper or with embroidered lilies on Corinthian leather coverstock. I cannot accept liability for any failed submissions to such competitions and admissions committees due to such secret requirements.

Pematurely interred orchestras in oversized mausoleums

2011-06-13T21:39:00.000+02:00

Word has come that another American orchestra is closing shop, this time in Bellevue, Washington.

Oh, wait... it's not exactly shutting down: "It is the board’s hope that when Tateuchi Center (PACE) is completed, the orchestra may again play on the Eastside in a venue that will support us, both acoustically and in seating capacity."

Yep, "the orchestra", not "an orchestra" but "the orchestra". The intention is clearly to revive the same orchestra, absolved, of course, of any old contractual obligations.

And yep, at the same time they're putting the orchestra down or into mothballs, a new concert hall is being built to seat some 2000 people. An orchestra whose management couldn't sustain it in a 400-seat hall is now supposed to make it with a 2000 seat hall.

There is an absolute mania for large halls in the US and while they may be useful for large public assemblies where talk or travelogues or Amway recruitment evenings are the main focus or for (amplified) music from more popular genres, I think that this has been a seriously mistaken way of testing a dubious hypothesis that (a) halls of this scale are appropriate if not necessary for orchestral music and (b) halls of this scale are required to sustain large musical organizations economically.

As to the first point, a survey of the best concert halls and opera houses in Europe will quickly show that, except for a very few representative buildings, anything above 2000 seats is rare, with the acoustically best halls considerably smaller and 2000 an upper limit for even rather large cities (examples: the Großer Musikvereinssaal in Vienna seats 1744, the Concertgebouw is just around that upper limit.) Most of the "classical" repertoire has always been played in much smaller venues, and the earlier and more contemporary repertoire has been most often played in even smaller halls. I don't doubt that the Burghers of Bellevue take pride and have mighty aspirations for their metropolis and I have even less doubt that there are architects and engineers delighted to build a prestige object of such scale. But is architectural prestige really a trump for musical utility? Unless the hall is, acoustically, truly spectacular most of the repertoire playable by an orchestra is really going to suffer as it gets lost in a cavern of such size.

As to the second point, it is perfectly obvious that the orchestra had been able to sustain itself in a 400-seat hall for more than 40 years, but there is no evidence at all that it will have the draw, when resurrected, to sustain itself in a 2000-seater. Moreover, the possible image of that hall filled to 20% capacity for orchestral concerts is hardly going to be the stuff to create enthusiasm for orchestral music. I know that the professional thanatophiles out there on the lecture and consulting circuit will be perfectly happy with a new and underpopulated 2000-seat mausoleum for classical music, but that strikes me as a totally perverse use of limited resources and an embarrassing substitute for the orchestra's management and board actually doing the heavy lifting of enough fund raising and expansion of the audience base to get over the present hump.

Hasn't he run out of his "Get Out Of Jail Free Cards" already?

2011-06-13T10:50:00.003+02:00

Here's another interview with Pierre Boulez including his inevitable sign-off line:

That is why, if I am healthy enough, I will now devote my time to compose (sic).

I'm sorry, but he's now publicly made this promise to retire from the podium and spend his full-time composing for just about the n-thousandth time in the past 40 years, and boys crying wolf do not get more believable with repetition. Leonard Bernstein was also famous making the same un-kept plan (and more recently Lorin Maazel has made similar announcements of intentions to abandon conducting for composing which he has similarly not kept, instead just moving on to the next music directorship.) Let's face it, the primary gig for these gents is conducting. They get paid very well for it, people like to see them on the stage, orchestras like working with them, and they actually appear to enjoy making music with high quality bands all around the world. Agonizing alone in a garret over a score is a different experience altogether. With Boulez, as with Bernstein, composing is a sideline, and there's nothing wrong with that. Blaming a successful conducting career for any faults in ones composing — whether of quality or of quantity — just doesn't wash.

So when Boulez compains about the work of colleagues like this:

But it represents creative exhaustion. If you spend a whole piece repeating just one chord [as Glass tends to do] it's like being in a red room, and staying in it for your whole life.

It is entirely keeping with the same spirit of criticism to ask if a career spent working with a handful of techniques developed in the 1950s — and saturated with those 0 1 6 chords — is also a lot like being stuck in a (insert your color here) room for a goddamn long time. While Boulez's music has certainly gained some polish over the years — and his practical experience with orchestras was certainly responsible for much of this polish — it is a perfectly legitimate question to wonder about the lack of development on a deeper musical and intellectual level in Boulez's music. And no, the interference of a conducting career is not an excuse. That stack of Get Out Of Jail Free cards ran out a long time ago.

If recorded sports events are so boring to watch, what about recorded music?

2011-06-12T21:03:00.002+02:00

An interesting essay pondering our disinterest in watching recorded rather than live sports events.

Okay, I'm being provocative with the title of this item.* Discuss.

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*While I think Klosterman is spot-on about recorded sports and find his distinction between rational and irrational reasons to be extremely perceptive, tentatively, I'd say that my own take on recorded music (excluding music composed specifically for fixed recorded media) is different from my take on recorded sports. As audiences I believe we return, in memory, to music, in a fundamentally different way from sports, in that revisiting some stretch of music can reliably and sustainably comfort or disturb us in manifold ways and music happens to be so rich in such stretches that (a) we don't really ever play the same piece in the same way twice and (b) we don't really hear the same piece in the same way twice, so that playing it again, Sam, is not necessarily a boring proposition.

Beyond a small handful of remarkable plays (say Cal-Stanford '82 or Bob Beamon's jump in '68) , repeated viewing in sports simply does not carry the same detail- and connection- rich charge, so that revisiting some stretch of a sporting event is of interest primarily to specialists, for example coaches attempting to improve or recreate particular tactics or in evaluating prospective players or opponents.

Also this: the relationship of parts to the whole in a sports event has a bottom, carry-away, line: the final score and while the dynamics of these parts in their whole-game context may contribute to the immediate sense of drama, the value of the drama diminishes when the game enters memory, and viewing a recording of the game when the final score is known to exist — even if it is unknown to you personally — makes the viewing anticlimactic, diminishing its original temporal proportions, thus we are able to grab the remote and fast-forward with abandon. Music, even with the experience of sampling all around us, is much more protective of its continuity, leading to a very different sense of eventfulness with scores rarely parseable into discrete moves and plays. Yes, a football game or a hockey match can exhibit — and thrill with — considerable sense of momentum, but this sense is seldom recoverable, while the design of a musical work does not resolve to a score with a winner and a loser.

That said, it's obvious that a recorded performance of a work of music is fundamentally different from a live performance because the recording is fixed in ways a live performance cannot be, and a live performance is unpredictable in ways a recording cannot be. Being able to operate within the range of possibilities offered by this distinction strikes me as very useful and interesting. I happen to avoid recordings in preference for live performances, but your possibilities and preferences may well be different from mine. In any case, it would be a loss not to have that variety.

Electronics &

2011-06-09T20:45:00.004+02:00

There's some heavy thinking going on about electronic music as instance and opportunity for composition, performance, and audition. Composer Nicolas Collins (aka Mr Hardware Hacker) has a smark and usefully provocative essay, Semiconducting — Making Music After the Transistor, online here as a PDF. Another useful & related recent item online is Colin Holter's note at the New Music Box, here. Casting a big shadow over both of these items, ithinks, is Richard Maxfield's classic essay on Music Electronic and Performed, in which Maxfield's ideas for presenting ostensibly fixed recorded sounds in live performance settings remain richly suggestive.

It is striking how much the topic of electronic music continues to be discussed in terms of oppositional pairs* — electronic versus acoustic, recorded versus live (in turn related to composed versus improvised), analog versus digital, hardware versus software, homemade and commercial, etc. — and ultimately, thinksmyself, the liveliness of these discussions turns on the ephemeral qualities of music, with the advent of electronic technology making these issues more explicit and acute. Again, I am astonished by the prescience of Maxfield's analysis and his ephemeralizing tactic of un-fixing recorded media as a reminder that these pairs need not be seen as strictly segregated but rather more productively as poles within a continuum, with very rich possibilities to move and position musical work in between.

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* Several of the terms in these pairs are, due to their vagueness and ambiguity, very tempting to frame in scare quotes, but I assume here that we are adults and understand this, accepting the terms as the conventions they are rather than precision instruments of discrimination they are not, so no scare quotes.

Plate of Shrimp

2011-06-04T12:18:00.005+02:00

Although my own reserve of faith is modest and my religious interests mostly ethnographic, I do have a special pocket of conviction in the power of the lattice of coincidence. (Don't know about the lattice of coincidence? See Miller in Alex Cox's film Repo Man: "A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate o' shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.") On the one hand, this is mostly surprising but ultimately trivial connections that are, statistically seen, bound to happen, like those six degrees of separation games. For example, I would eventually study with La Monte Young, but as a kid, without any knowledge of Young's music, I had already encountered a number of people with non-trivial connections to him: a neighbor in tiny Mt Baldy Village who had been La Monte's housemate and best friend in the 1950s, who was then living with composer Terry Jennings and happened to have the most beautiful singing voice I have ever heard, and when we moved down the hill to our rock house astride the border between tweedy Claremont and working class Montclair, one of our neighbors would turn out to have been composer Richard Maxfield's partner during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Maxfield has been another close friend of Young's. But more important to me are the kinds of coincidence that can help kick a musical work into the realm of the astounding. John Cage's Winter Music is a piece that seems to do this unreasonably well, with unpredictable continuities between those cold and brittle aggregates continuously shattering the expected discontinuity. Or this: Berlioz's "intermittent sounds" which seem to be scattered across the surface of the music like salt on snow, unpredictable in pattern, but so right in coincidence. The ostensible non-sequitur is all too often the most convincing, if surprising, sequitur.

Sharing: Costs and Benefits

2011-06-01T11:12:00.002+02:00

From The Wire (Hat Tip: Jonathan Segel): poet and archivist (UbuWeb) Kenneth Goldsmith, following a series of minor epiphanies, supports file sharing (ironic and so-Zeitgeistlich money lines: The minute I get something, I just crave more. And so something has really changed – and I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed have become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself) and in response, musician Chris Cutler discusses the Collateral Damage. (Carry-away line: Where is honour?)

I am not much of a recorded music person, so I've not been much affected by this debate, but I have followed the discussion and have been disappointed by the reluctance to find a reasonable and ethical middle ground. If I say "Share and sample away!" then fine, permission granted, but if I say that I would prefer you not share or sample my work, in my my honest Bartleby-inspired tone, the you shouldn't share or sample my work. But not because of my time-limited, fair-use-limited legal title to the work (let alone the financial consequences of that title), but simply because my connection to my work is personal, even intimate, and it is a simple matter of dignity and respect among human beings to recognize that creative works do belong to a personal sphere that can only be entered with consent.

One Shocking Trombone

2011-05-29T17:17:00.004+02:00

The first good visualization of shock waves — faster than the speed of sound — produced by a trombone, here. The visual is subtle (use the fullscreen view), but rest assured that the effect is great enough to explain at least part of the discomfort woodwind players may feel when seated directly before the low brass.

Why orchestras come and go but music itself keeps growing

2011-05-29T08:17:00.003+02:00

A video chat, with physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster.

West's observed connections between growth rates and the mortality or open-ended growth of an entity, is fascinating and I strongly suspect that it might also apply to music and musical institutions. If we begin to see orchestras, opera houses, and conservatories as corporate in their growth and innovation patterns, then their inherent mortality as individual organisms ought to be better recognized and, indeed, seized upon as a structural opportunity for innovative alternatives to replace them, for the problem is not that the community around an institution can no longer sustain musical institutions or that music itself lacks in attractive, compelling and novel content, but that the institutions themselves are, through lack of innovation (i.e. programming, performance and presentation style) and unsustainable growth (particularly in bricks and mortar and administrative ballast) failing to sustain themselves.

The present classical music landscape is, in many localities, dominated by old institutions which consume resources, and, because we have a tendency to lock in long-term public and private suuport to the older and bigger institutions (i.e. in Europe where opera employees have all the protections of civil service jobs) artificially slowing down paths towards bankruptcy, they may often temporarily crowd out of opportunities for innovative start-up firms.

West: "...most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. It closes down. "

That 50-100 number looks an awful lot like an orchestra which, coupled with the archaic nature of 19th century labor relations in an orchestra, says a lot about the ability of those free-lance early music and contemporary music groups to survive without comparable institutional support. Suppose we adopted a model in which the normative orchestras were organized around core memberships of ca. 25 players with core repertoires in 18th or late 20th/21st century repertoires, with 19th and early 20th century repertoire covered by combined groups at strategically opportune moments. Would that be a model sustainable until the next alternative emerges?

How Virgil Thomson Decided Music Made No Sense

2011-05-28T20:41:00.003+02:00

It was also at Thones-les-Bains that Virgil Thomson, in a hotel room, lying on a down quilt he had placed on the floor for sun bath purposes, received the revelation that "Music makes no sense." He had, of course, been preparing himself for such a revelation in all his previous work. For, if one can break the rules given by a strict teacher and receive, nevertheless, the teacher's congratulations, obviously music makes no sense.

Passage deleted by Virgil Thomson from John Cage's manuscript, eventually published in the Cage/Hoover Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music. (Source: Tommasini: Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle.)

Notes & Rests, Nuts & Bolts

2011-05-26T11:39:00.003+02:00

Most readers of books and articles about music are probably more interested in context and biography and in an impressionistic rather than deeply technical approach to describing the music itself, perhaps focused on the "meaning" of a work in extra-musical terms. (Interestingly, it's writing about popular musics that shies away most from technical description.) But — and perhaps it's the bias of a practicing musician, and a composer at that — I honestly prefer more technical descriptions and am eager to have some better ideas about how a piece was put together. I'm not embarrassed at all about discussions of materials and systems and processes and plans. I like lists and counts and charts and diagrams and lots of notated examples. And however provisional the relevance of a particular method may be to the madness of the music which ensues, I'm all in for the ride, because my intention is to learn, copy (which is composers' polite-talk for steal) and adapt, whenever something, even the tiniest trick, appears promising.

In connection with some recent deep study of music by Berlioz, a figure I consider as important and as radical as Ives and Cage, Julian Rushton's The Musical Language of Berlioz has been a constant companion. While Berlioz's life and times provides (and has often provided) ample material for biographers and cultural historians, the real interest is ultimately in the music itself and getting a handle on that achievement simply requires talking about technique, which Rushton does beautifully and concretely. More importantly, for me as a composer, Rushton lays out the material elements of Berlioz's practice in such a way that they are constantly suggestive of paths for making music that mainstream music history more or less abandoned, cul de sacs well worth re-exploring.

Books like Rushton's might be described as constructive, and indeed they read a bit like do-it-yourself books for building this or that (as a kid I had a small collection of stage magic and puppetry and outdoorsy arts-and-crafts books, so it's long been one of my favored genres.) Lou Harrison's Music Primer and Messiaen's The Technique of My Musical Language are good examples of a composers letting us in on how they work in a direct and constructive way and I've been lucky to have learned from both since High School. There are also useful bits by Boulez and Reich and Stockhausen writing as concretely about their own music (Stockhausen's little book on In Freundschaft is practically a recipe for making the piece.) Ives' Memos have some wonderful hints about technique as well. While much maligned elsewhere, I have long been enthusiastic about John Cage's analytic half to the the Cage/Hoover Virgil Thomson; Cage has a refreshingly direct way about discussing a piece of music, unafraid of counting notes and often salvaging useful technique from a piece that has otherwise sunk. (One of the greatest hours in my life was spent in a hotel in Houston when Cage discussed his understanding of Mozart's materials and methods; I would gladly loose a limb for a time machine and a tape recorder to recover that lesson!) Charles Shere's elegant book on Robert Erickson, Thinking Sound Music, remarkably conveys a lot of usefully concrete information almost exclusively without the use of notation. Finally, I find three examples from ethnomusicology richly suggestive to composers: Paul Berliner on the Mbira, Michael Tenzer on the Balinese Kebyar orchestral style, and Simha Arom on African polyphony.

(Here's an older item with my list of favorite books on composition.)

Making Splashes

2011-05-18T14:16:00.002+02:00

Some composer colleagues are nicely represented online of late:

A nice article about Larry Polansky, here. (Nice line: "Like most countries with sufficient access to leisure, America has its classical music, but we're so confused about whether we ought to resent or admire the broader world (esp. Europe) regarding matters of class and taste that we often have trouble perceiving it with anything like confidence.")
Christopher Fox, in a quartet of soloists caught performing Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, here. Has anyone else had the feeling that the Ursonate still refuses to resolve itself as music? And that that fact would be a sign of its continuing success? Statistically seen, Schwitter's peculiar economy of vocal sounds is definitely not linguistic in its character, but — attempts at conventional musical-formal analysis all defeated — neither is it musical in any familiar way. (In contrast, the works of Varese long ago asserted their musicality, in terms of economics of materials and their dynamic use.) Indeed, Schwitter's is a kind of pre- or post-music, certainly more clearly supplied and organized than, say, the Voynich manuscript appears to be, but definitely requiring that notorious "Ur" before the "sonata". This video performance, with the performers each somewhat birdlike in posture, makes, for me, a pretty good argument for Wolfgang Mueller's thesis of a connection between the Ursonate and bird song heard at Schwitters's exhile hut in Norway. Yep, just another imitation of nature in its form of operation...
Innova has released a multi-media DVD documenting a large scale graphic score by Mark Applebaum. The video component is viewable online, here, and is a nice signal of the recent rapprochement between factions in newmusicland, with card-carrying complexists, improvisors, and experimentalists as well as those who decline to be pigeon-holed having shots at interpreting and commenting on Applebaum's score. (Yep, Brian Ferneyhough and Paul Dresher on the same video, the whole Bay gang is there.) With some exceptions — and David Weinstein's monumental Illuminated Man and some works of Daniel Lentz are my leading exceptions — I'm somewhat allergic to the graphic notation scene, but the performances are done in a good spirit, the score itself is quite beautiful to look at, and it seems to illustrate a point I have observed to be common to works — or better, projects — of a certain discipline, scale, complexity, and ambition, like Weinstein's or the cued works of Christian Wolff or Cornelius's Cardew's Treatise, that with serious interpretation they have the capacity to assert systematic coherence, within which consistently applied rules usefully define, if through limits, the unique character and dimensions of the work. (I would really have liked to have heard one additional interpretation of Applebaum's piece, in which a performer prepared a meticulously picayune performing score based on very clear encoding of the pictographs, precise measurements of the score etc., a la David Tudor's earliest approach to graphic scores. )

Alvin Lucier is 80

2011-05-14T00:01:00.009+02:00

Clarity, focus, classicism. Alvin began as a neo-classical composer. "I like my music clean, like gin." A reduction to essences, distractions eliminated, the original minimal impulse.

Pulses, stutters, beats, swarms. Alvin was once a drummer, playing trap set in dance bands or drumming for the Yale Marching Band. Music for Solo Performer is the piece Ionisation ought to have been, composing directly for percussion ensemble without the mediation of fixed notation, specialized players, rehearsal. The composer listens: Bird and Person Dyning.

Breaking down parameters: Pitches becoming rhythms becoming timbres becoming pitches again. Navigations for Strings, Septet. Subverting cause and effect: Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums, and Acoustic Pendulums or — through a massive increase in physical scale, going far beyond simple classical effects to the non-linear, the chaotic and catastrophic — Music on a Long Thin Wire.

Sounds articulating spaces: "I'm not interested in expression, but I am interested in expressivity." Music as a means of finding ones way in the dark (Vespers). Music made from sounds made visible (The Queen of the South) or the outline of a landscape translated into tones (Panorama.) A voice articulates a space (I am sitting in a room) with all its expressive and individual physical and autobiographical attachments erased in the process, so that the expressivity of the room itself is revealed; or, in The Re-Orchestration of the Opera "Benvenuto Cellini" by Hector Berlioz audaciously using the space in which the voice is produced to transform the timbres of a work by the greatest orchestrator.

Object lessons: Chambers. W.C. Williams: No ideas but in things. Realizations of Chambers tend to one of two extremes: either the most perfect acoustic match between object and sound source or the most perfect, if frequently surreal poetic match, i.e. the sound of the Cologne Hauptbahnhof coming from a thimble (the ideal, one supposes, would be: tempest, teapot).

Risk everything: A fundamental commitment to the experimental music project. Risk failure, risk nothing happening, and try again'n'again to find the optimal means for a phenomena to happen, to express itself, as music. Allow the phenomena to determine the form. Robert Irwin: "Ever Present, Never Twice the Same. Ever Changing, Never Less than Whole." Composing is often a letting-go of the composer's monopoly over composition.

And too: choral conductor, actor of underground legend (Dr Chicago), rider of bicycles, patient fly fisherman, reliable and generous cook of pasta for tired dancers (and impoverished young scholars). I am honored to have been — and still be — Alvin Lucier's student, for his challenges, his clarifications, his purposefulness, his directness and humor. Some teachers of composition try to give you everything, you belong to their "school"; Alvin instead gave polish, to help you be better at what you do, not be second best at what he does, and he gave posture, to help stand up for your work.

A true story: In Berlin, many years ago, with an evening off in-between concerts and Alvin's wife and daughter, Wendy and Amanda, already flown back to Connecticut, Alvin and I ended up in the opera. Arabella, of all things. Not exactly what you'd expect the composer of I am sitting in a room to be watching. A traditional production, with plenty of old-fashioned stage magic, with Lucia Popp and Julie Kaufman as the two sisters. The curtain came up on the second act and it starts snowing on stage — I told you, it was old-fashioned stage magic — and Alvin jabs me with his elbow and says, just loud enough for everyone within a three or four meter radius to hear: "Look at that snow... have you ever seen anything like that? Isn't that terrific?" No, I hadn't, and yes, it really was terrific.

(Photo: Amanda Lucier.)

Brief Orchestration Note After a Night at the Opera

2011-05-08T08:39:00.003+02:00

Aren't the obbligati for bassett clarinet (in Parto, parto, ma tu, ben mio) and bassett horn (Non più di fiori) in La Clemenza di Tito just about the greatest things in the world?

Perfect Careers

2011-05-06T15:15:00.004+02:00

"If I were only in it for the money, I think I'd hook myself up with one of those gigs on the fast-growing and lucrative death-of-classical-music circuit, jaunting off to foundations and conservatories and sunny island conventions and well-catered, bubbly-lubricated board meetings, lecturing and consulting and prognosticating and doing the shake-down rounds in hotel bars, just me and my expense account doing our very best to help drain those rapidly-depleting coffers that otherwise be spent on, well, music."

Mozart et les fonctions harmoniques, part III

2011-05-05T21:26:00.000+02:00

An animated introduction to French-style functional harmonic notation, here via the Lacrymosa from the Mozart Requiem, K626. (Hat tip: Walter Zimmermann)

Cheerful Lapses Into Completism

2011-05-04T15:57:00.003+02:00

What an incredible season for reading! David Foster Wallace's posthumous "unfinished novel" The Pale King has some of his finest writing, and some of his funniest, but it also makes one of the best case for the novel as moral instance, with his argument for the dignity of ordinary lives right up there with Pynchon's "keep cool but care." And then there's China Miéville's Embassytown, which I read in a non-stop, non-sleep frenzy and immediately — that is, now — started rereading just to get a better conceptual grasp on a book that is both the author's long-awaited space opera and a deep turn into some startling and compelling exolinguistics. But there's more — the last Paul Auster, Sunset Park (almost up there with Leviathan and The Book of Illusions) is not to be missed...

But this perfect storm of wonderful reads is a season spent with all my old favorites — all that is missing for me this season is a new Pynchon or a Harry Mathews — points out a certain abandonment of principles in my reading habit, and one that infects my music consumption as well: The broken record around here has gone: It's the individual work, sometimes even just a movement or moment in an individual work that counts, not the entire catalog of a composer (or author). Composers are perfectly human, which means perfectly fallible, and even the composer who is capable of making the most extraordinary works most reliably is capable of much less, and that wonderfully human inconsistency helps make the music world so reliably variable and interesting. Who know? Maybe there's a cosmic balance sheet, entered into which the price of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is the Battle Symphony...

So, it's the work that counts, not the catalog, but I'll readily admit to my regular lapses into completism, which seems to happen whenever someone's track record has simply been so good that his or her name becomes a track record. So I eagerly wait for each and every new work I can hear by Jo Kondo or Richard Ayres, for two examples of composers with reliably astonishing craft, style, and ideas. Sometimes a composer gets around my completist barrier simply by virtue of having a small catalog: complete sets of sheet music for Machaut and Ockeghem (those three volumes of endlessly variegated lines were one of the best birthday presents I ever gave myself!) and Ruggles, Varese, and Webern take up only modest shelf space, and they've all been resident, complete as I could get them, in my shelves for decades. Some composers' work have become scattered and obscured with time, so a certain collector's mentality takes over, gathering each scrap of Richard Maxfield or Terry Jennings that I can scavenge. A good portion of Harry Partch's music, so important to me earlier on, sits, copied-out in a transcription style of my own, from days when I couldn't afford quarters for the photocopier. Other composers are models or teachers or good friends, and the urge to have their works with me is equal to the urge to spend time in their company: Leedy, Mumma, Lucier, Young. But there are also larger catalogs for which having everything would strike me as an entirely reasonable proposition: Mozart, Berlioz, Ives, Cage, perhaps Feldman or Christian Wolff.

May Day

2011-05-01T19:59:00.002+02:00

While May Day — in any of its forms — has faded as a public holiday, turned more into an extra day of personal or family vacating rather than mass public celebration, marking the day still seems worthy, whether as a pseudo-(or not-so-pseudo)-pagan celebration of the arrival of spring, with garlands and dances around the maypole and other such minor bacchanalia, or as a day honoring labor. I grew up in a place where neither was much celebrated: California had, arguably, too much Springtime and too brief a Winter to make celebration necessary and, although both my parents and 3-out-of-4 grandparents were union members, my lifetime has been one in which organized labor has moved from concentration on blue collar and private industry jobs to white collar and public employees, with all those years we weren't supposed to buy table grapes or iceberg lettuce so as to support Caesar Chavez's Farm Workers Union now just a childhood memory of another noble battle not-quite-won. So I've never learned to set up a Maypole, let alone dance around it, and composers have never unionized themselves in a lasting and useful way (not to mention my Groucho Marxist principles: not wanting to join an organization that would have me as a member), but I'll celebrate May Day all the same, and like every good day, by doing my work, whether at my desk composing or taking a break to go out-of-doors and make sure that the tomatillos and coriander and habaneros and the epazote have begun to sprout, and top it with an evening well-spent with the people I love most.

A wish list for neuroscientists from a musician

2011-04-26T18:19:00.004+02:00

From the safe distance of a composer with an armchair appreciation for science, I'm something of a fan of the neuroscience of music. It's really exciting stuff and my impression is that we're only beginning to learn about it. Here are some aspects of music that I'd like — as a composer — neuroscience to tell us more about; as music if the temporal art par excellence, it's not surprising that they have everything to do with how we process events in time:

1. The two irreversible arrows of music: in pitch and in time. Inverting a sequence of pitches creates only a weak equivalence, indeed an equivalence which deteriorates as one moves towards extremes. And in time, a reversal of a sequence, last-on-first-out, is also only weakly equivalent.

2. The perceptual "borderlands" between parameters: between pitch and timbre or between form and rhythm or rhythm and pitch, including such phenomena as interference beating*.

3. The "chunking" of musical memory: apparently we take in music in pieces which are then reassembled, mentally, into a continuity. (Which is closely related to:)

4. The gaps in timing between mental anticipation of a physical music-producing action, the execution of that action, the perception and analysis of the resulting sound, as well as any motor feedback processing related to the action. (When, exactly, does the music take place? What does "now" mean in music when all of these events occur, in objective external time, at different points? How the hell do musicians ever reach a unison attack?)

5. What other sensory mechanisms contribute or might potentially contribute to an enhanced perception of acoustic events? Research so far has pointed to some limits in the perceptual apparatus and this has led to some practical applications — from transmission of speech over a narrow band to noise reduction to compression and sampling rates. But I'm far more interested, as a musician, in expansion than limitations. For example, I know that a considerable part of "hearing" music, for me, comes from the sense of touch as a complement to the stuff that goes through the ears. AFAIC, fine tuning, in a live ensemble, is often easier by feel than audition, through the reduction of beats more felt than heard. Musicians with hearing losses also know this well, but could this also explain things like La Monte Young's massive sine wave complexes (which don't resolve to simple 5-limit harmonies but share a common, if sub-audio, difference tone)? Also, the physical placement of sounds in space is a fascinating topic. How about echolocation? Some humans — particularly the visually impaired — have become virtuoso echolocaters, but I think I've detected the same in babies crying. What a wonderful extra resource for musicians?

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* One of the most interesting results with regard to beating that I've heard about lately is this, a paper on Waves, Beats and Expectancy in speech by Eric Keller. The ways in which speech and music piggy-back on an overlapping set of neural organs is another fascinating topic. While beating in musical contexts is well familiar, that the phenomena was shared with speech was a surprise to me. And while this is wildly prematured and underinformed speculation on my part, wouldn't it be so cool to find a neurological basis, in beating, for poetic and musical metre?

They call it multi-tasking, I call it counterpoint

2011-04-21T15:03:00.004+02:00

A nice column by Kevin Drum on the dangers of multi-tasking, here. It's no surprise to learn that most people, when attempting to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, don't perform those tasks very well. This can be an annoyance — I don't enjoy conversing with someone in person who is social-media-ing away at the same time via one or more electronic devices —, or unfortunate — for the student who is expected to know the stuff on the lecture he missed because he was busy checking his email —, or downright dangerous (cell phone, autobahn.) It's too bad that more people haven't picked up on something that musicians have known for a long while: mastery of counterpoint is wonderful, but rare, and most of us spend our entire lives as musicians working at hearing more. The great contrapuntal virtuosi (say Bach, Berlioz, and Ives, to mention three of the best, but stylistically and formally very different composers) form a preciously small company, and as wild as each could get, each clearly understood the potential — and utility — of highly differentiated counterpoint to either cohere or fall apart. [Maybe we need warning labels: EXCESS COUNTERPOINT: HANDLE WITH CARE.] I understand well the impulse to take in as much as possible — as a teenager, I used to spend evenings listening to the radio with headphones, reading, and usually eating, simultaneously, in the same room in our house where the rest of the family watched TV, and I took in a lot of that, too — but I think that time has taught me the value of eliminating distractions, with the quality of perception gaining considerable value over raw quantity.

Creative mistakes stimulate the brain

2011-04-19T14:39:00.003+02:00

This study of Shakespeare's linguistic innovations — neologisms, unorthodox syntax, etc. — and the brain is exciting stuff and has, AFAIC, everything to do with compositional innovation and experiment in music. As with Shakespeare, I strongly suspect that every major innovator in music has done things with sounds or their context that make the brain work more than usual and it is precisely that stimulation that keeps this music worth returning to again and again.

I also think that many of the methods, often game-like, of the Oulipo in literature, the surrealists in literature and the visual arts, and many composers, particularly experimentalists, are designed as efficient means for getting right into that more-stimulated zone, often enstranging the familiar through even the slightest shifts in the selection or character of materials or their order in time or space.

Dept. of Stolen, then Recovered Instruments

2011-04-19T12:00:00.003+02:00

Tutankhamun's trumpet was lifted from the Cairo Museum and recovered days later in the Cairo Metro. Be sure to listen to the sound sample of the old BBC broadcast.

Exit the CD, Gone a Reliable Gift Option

2011-04-16T21:09:00.007+02:00

As the last hardware form of commodified recorded music, that optical medium known as the audio compact disk (forward: "cd"), makes its slow exit from the marketplace, it's probably appropriate to take a moment to consider the fact that this creates a serious hole in the list of reliable gift object. Even a notorious recording skeptic like myself has been known to give and receive — and gladly, always gladly — too many of those little plastic discs in their plastic boxes (or, later, cardboard covers). And said cd does have some real advantages over the traditional alternatives: not everyone wears ties, drinks scotch, appreciates a good wine, cigars are out of style, none of my acquaintances is yet old enough to golf, let alone have a tangible use for golf balls, and let's face it, when uncertain about the recipient's tastes, choosing a piece of music seems less risk-prone than a book. While I have never become particularly adept at rescuing a suffocating cd from its shrink rap and I'm equally clumsy at opening the so-called-"crystal case", if I may admit here to a minor perversity: I do take some genuine tactile pleasure in ejecting the cd from its clutches of the circular hub of teeth which grip the disc by its unique and thus topologically-defining central hole by pressing just gently enough on the springy central button of the back media tray. Which is a digression from my main point, which is that, when given the gift of an audio cd, I feel obliged to open and listen to the cd.* I do not regift cds. Nor do I prematurely liberate, examine and/or listen to cds which I have purchased with the intention of giving to others. I do recall, however (TRUE STORY WARNING), that one of the first cds I was given as a gift, a recording of Robert Ashley's Atalanta (which Ben.Harper happens to mention in a very sweet post, here) was given to me both unwrapped (that is, the shrink wrap had been removed; the gift wrapping was, in fact, intact) and already listened to. Which was dismaying at the time, but now, one supposes with some generosity granted by the passage of considerable time, shall we say twenty-five years and four months plus or minus five days?, was just a premature form of file sharing. An unapologetic act of what I then considered to be bad form was simply a vanguard form of a new etiquette. My failure to register, then, an appropriate amount of gratitude to the gift-giver for the gift given, given my misunderstanding of the evolving ethic of music-sharing, viewed through my antiquated and perhaps provincial view that a gift given, save for some object of antiquarian or intimate personal interest and/or worth, should be unused prior to its formal receipt by its intended recipient. (WARNING: LONG CLOSING SENTENCE, ENDING WITH PREPOSITION INDICATING AN IMITATION OF ACTUAL SPEECH RATHER THAN POLISHED PROSE: My regrets at my lack of foresight, and thus my not-bad-but-definitely awkward expression of reduced gratitude are deep but wane, now, in the knowledge that the custom of sharing music via a tangible medium which might bear some concrete signs of its prior use has gone the way of the dodo, and that we have definitely entered the age in which recordings are exchanged, often anonymously, secret Santas all of us, entirely without any indications as to whether a recording has been previously heard or otherwise interacted with.

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* As the costs of producing ones own cd went lower and lower, the exchange of cds by composers and musicians who made them has become ubiquitous. (Indeed, I probably received more cds than business cards from musicians throughout the '90s and oughts; hell, cds had become business cards.) It then became very important to remove the shrink rap from gifted cds received, as the risk of the gift-giver finding the cd still enclosed in plastic, lonely and unplayed on some shelf, when revisting the recipient was one which carried the potential of serious social awkwardness. No, no one would actually have know if the cd had actually been listened to, but left in its wrapping, it would have been absolutely clear that it had not been listened to.

Usefully Informal

2011-04-15T12:59:00.004+02:00

Composers, as craftspeople, tend to overemphasize the professional, the formal, the finished, and the perfected. However, a lot of useful and valuable music-making is not professional and not yet formal or finished, let alone perfected, and this emphasis can often be a distraction from opportunities for music-making — indeed most music-making — in situations, environments and on occasions which may well be informal, provisional, and yes, (cheerfully) far-from-perfect.

New music, in order to thrive, has got to go wide and deep into our musical culture, an established if dynamic presence, emphasizing not only the most prestigious occasions and institutions and requiring only the most virtuoso musicians. This means music for amateurs, music for children, music for pedagogy, and music for private use as well as civic and institutional functions.

Fortunately, we have some very good models of composers writing pieces designed to reach wider sets of players and audiences which are nevertheless integrated into their work as a whole. For example — and looking only at piano music (we could as easily look at vocal music or music for guitar or recorder or school instrumental ensembles) — the collections of small-scale piano pieces by Bartók — most famously the six volumes of Mikrokosmos — and, later, Kurtág's Játékok (Games) and transcriptions for piano two- and four-handed, or Virgil Thomson's two collections of piano Etudes and the large series of Portraits. Mikrokosmos was compiled initially as piano lessons for the composer's son, Péter, but grew to be a progressive collection, varying from sketches to substantial pieces, illustrating nearly all of Bartók's technical concerns as a composer and pianist and in many cases serving as a sketchbook for other concert works. The Játékok includes repertoire intended for private and public use by the composer and his wife, occasional pieces for friends and colleagues, and, like Mikrokosmos, preliminary and intermediate steps to major concert works (the various metamorphoses of the enig- and emblematic Virág az ember materials as particularly fascinating.) Many of Thomson's Portraits, likewise, find their way into substantial concert works, often orchestrated, but the origins, as portraits of named persons who sat for Thomson in the manner of a portrait painter, were opportunities for the composer to experiment without the pressures of the formal, finished and professionally polished, often executed in the kind of automatic writing that, despite Thomson's insistence on his professionality, indulges in the advantages of — as Buckminister Fuller put it — daring to be naive, echoes the practices of modernists in other disciplines (i.e. Stein, the surrealists), and reliably delivered Thomson his most interesting music.

Among more recent examples of the usefully informal, I would add the scores of exquisite small-scale piano pieces by Gordon Mumma (some of which are available as scores from Material Press, and the recent double cd of these, played by the great Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle is highly recommended) and also mention Lloyd Rodger's The Black Book, a project of composing approximately a piece a day for year, in ink without edits. (I haven't seen the scores, but I believe that they are in open score form, again, a very useful idea.) This seems to resonate with Lou Harrison's suggestion, for the "stuck" composer, of composing a whole piece each day, every day: the idea is not to try and write perfect pieces, but to practice writing performable complete pieces, however small the scale or modest the ambition, to concentrate and focus and practice craft, allowing the ambitious, formal, polished, and perfected to emerge on its own terms.

If it isn't the hybrid semi-Babbitt, bring in the dusky tribal drums

2011-04-14T21:06:00.003+02:00

From a review of the new television adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones:

At points, the soundtrack departs from its strongest mode—cool semi-serialism, a hybrid of Milton Babbitt and Hey, is that my phone?—and the presence of dusky tribal drums signal that people are doing it doggie style.

Ordinary Unhearing

2011-04-14T10:52:00.004+02:00

Here's a very good essay by political scientist Henry Farrell on China Miéville's The City & The City. Without giving away the plot, while Miéville is known as writer of fantastic or weird (his preferred term) fiction, Farrell's essay addresses the fact that the most distinctive characteristic of the setting of The City & The City is one which is not fantastic but actually quite real, indeed completely ordinary, the social construction of our environment, what we learn to see and not to see. (One of the great trajectories for the reader involves the gradual realization that the book is not, as a genre, fantasy, but rather more properly police procedural. ) My own personal revelation about seeing and not seeing came first during one of those teenage summer jobs, bussing tables and washing dishes in a restaurant for minimum wage when I discovered, after a week or two, that it had become possible — if not necessary, to both coordinate our ensemble work and to preserve some sanity — to look across a crowded dining room and only see the other employees.

There is definitely an auditory equivalent to unseeing. Obviously, anytime we want to pay attention to a particular subset of the sounds within an acoustically crowded or noisy environment, we try to filter out what we don't want to hear. But there is a more subtle filtering, acquired over long exposure, which is associated with hearing music. I can still recall the shock I experienced when I first listened seriously to live orchestral music (the summer before my 14th birthday, sitting in the front corner of the left balcony in Little Bridges Hall of Music at Pomona College during the last Claremont Music Festival.) I was shocked because I had not yet learned to unhear the thick band of noises and scratches which comes with every bowed string instrument, nor had I learned to unhear key clicking and spit valves, and rustling sheet music and squeeky chairs or crackling parquet floors. And those coughs, those coughs. Sometimes so much distraction, so little music.* Gradually, after years of concert-going, I have learned to unhear much of that sound which we define as not music. I still have problems with the crackling parquet and stage lighting in some of the halls here (the Sendesaal at Hessischer Rundfunk, otherwise acoustically glorious, is my particular bete noire for these particular noises) and I seem to be completely unable to unhear key-clicking or mouthpiece squawks on the saxophone. I love the idea of the saxophone, and have heard some extraordinary musicians wrestle with it, but I just can't hear it as completely musical yet. But, rest assured, I'm working on it and maybe one day will be able to hear much less of the saxophone.

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* The classic art history definition of minimalism as "the elimination of distraction" usefully illustrates the degree to which the minimal impulse in the radical music tradition was an impulse with tremendous sensitivity towards the material conditions of music and the environment in which it is made.

I Wayan Sadra

2011-04-14T09:35:00.004+02:00

The remarkable Indonesian composer I Wayan Sadra has died at 57. The balance between experiment — and his experiments were often radical, combining voices, gamelan, western instruments and new resources (once even throwing eggs at a large vertical hotplate) — and tradition — he was also a virtuoso "classical" Balinese musician, specializing gender in wayang — was at the center of his work: “Regardless of the form, I always base my work on local music, especially gamelan. This can’t change.”

The Unpredictable Elasticity of Composing Time

2011-04-09T22:59:00.002+02:00

How is it that I can make ten minutes of orchestral music in an afternoon, but spend a week worrying over a single cross relation in a tiny piano piece? As far as I can tell, when it comes to getting a musical idea right, the compositional labor involved bears no reliable economic relationship to the scale and density of the music produced.

Great Expectations

2011-04-08T22:15:00.005+02:00

I'm quite fond of the series of novels (four, to date) by the (pseudonymous) James Church featuring the Pyongyang-based Inspector O. On the surface, they are detective novels with an exotic setting, but just below that surface they're something rather more, with proper resolution of the police procedural seldom on offer (the North Korean system inevitably makes that impossible) yet carried by the real mystery in the motivation and character of the central figure, O, and actually quite a lot of beautiful prose, much of it so tangential to the plot that the books sometimes seem like experimental literature.

Indeed, in the third of the novels, Bamboo and Blood, there is one of strangest formal moves I've encountered in a work of fiction. At the end of a chapter, just about in the middle of the novel, O is sent to New York City. Naturally, from the perspective of a western reader, this very unusual trip for a North Korean police inspector ought to be something very important, something truly momentous, and all expectations are for a detailed account of the unlikeliest adventures in the Big Apple. However, the next chapter instead begins with O already back in Pyongyang, as if nothing momentous at all had happened and, indeed, the fragments of information we receive in the rest of the book about the New York visit add up to very little. Church not only makes a surprising formal move, disappointing our expectations for significant, plot-driving action, he plays with expectations based upon our deepest biases. It's our conceit that we simply expect a North Korean police inspector to be impressed, if not overwhelmed by the city that never sleeps. Instead, from what we can gather, the inspector was so much more annoyed by the interference in his quiet and careful life at home and in the office — not to mention the possible personal risks associated with the opportunities of foreign travel — that O simply refuses (a) to let much happen in New York and (b) to register much about the city that he might take home in memory subject to interrogation.

In the play of expectations in a musical work, an example like Inspector O's laconic trip to NYC is a very useful one. A satisfying piece of music is not necessarily about satisfying musical expectations. It's also not necessarily about holding back material or an event (a lot of 12-toners made a big deal about "saving notes", often confusing a useful tactic with an all-too-obvious strategy; let me be clear: saving a note is a musically useful notion, but it's inadequate to sustain an individual career, let alone a repertoire*). But it can be about seriously disappointing expectations and offering something totally outside of the framework we had assumed the piece was operating within. And that moment in which we suddenly become aware that our assumptions weren't even wrong is a wonderful one.

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* Paradoxically, perhaps, the opposite strategy, of allowing all the marbles to fall from the very beginning, allowing all material to be available — the gamut-based pieces of Cage come to mind — can be powerfully disarming to expectations. You think that you know all of the furniture in your living room, but switch the positions of the sofa and the coffee table and it might feel as if the earth has shifted just a bit on its axis.

True Stories (4)

2011-04-06T21:17:00.003+02:00

It was the end of the 1950's and a promising young composer from Akron had been awarded a traveling scholarship to Europe for the Summer between the two years of his studies for his Master's degree, then the terminal academic degree in the US for composers. He had a grand time, dropping in at music festivals throughout the continent, getting to know some of the famous avant-garde music written by composers who had only been names to him before going across the pond. As his scholarship was in dollars, then a very strong currency, he had the fortune to be able to use very good exchange rates and some arbitrage in order to stretch his stay well beyond the summer. Indeed, he only began to worry about money sometime in March of the following year, when he was able to cash in his return ship ticket, which gave him an extra month, when, considering the possibility of taking a job locally, he was surprised to learn that he had "come into" (as they say) a small inheritance from his grandmother, who had left Ohio the year before, only to die from pneumonia in her retirement place near Miami. As long as he wasn't picky about the size and quality of his apartments or his meals, this sum set him up for a few years to come, and he quickly settled into a very modest career as an ex-patriot composer. He managed to get a few performances and broadcasts of his pieces, nothing earth-shaking in attention or particularly lucrative, but enough to have the feeling that he was really doing the whole European composer thing. About a year after coming into his inheritance, he got a fan letter forwarded to him from a radio station which had broadcast a live performance of one of his pieces from a local woman, about his own age, who had heard the piece on the radio, and loved it so much that she absolutely had to meet the composer. They met, seemed to hit it off, and soon were married, much to the convenience of the composer, whose residency status was perpetually in question. Now fast-forward about six or seven years. The composer and his wife and their two small children are now all living in the same two-room apartment with shared conveniences he had rented while living the lifestyle of the young Bohemian abroad. Now he was living the lifestyle of a husband and father, but it was getting seriously crowded and uncomfortable, leaving the composer without any room and certainly no time to composer, as he had had to take on work translating and teaching in order to pay the bills for four as his inheritance had long since been swallowed by the continuously dropping value of the dollar. Although his wife still professed her love for his music and he loved her for that and they were both devoted to their children, their love for one another seemed to have cooled, fueled most by their unhappiness with their material situation and the fact that he had received an ever-smaller number of performances and practically no commissions and had increasingly been unable to compose at all. He felt that his lack of time and suitable space for composing had contributed to this situation. One day, she overheard some neighbors talking about a one-room flat not far from their own which had recently become vacant. It was a state-subsidized apartment and could be secured as a studio for the composer if he were able to establish that he was poor enough to qualify for the housing. She immediately thought that this could be the ideal solution to their problem: if she borrowed some money from her parents, they would be able to afford the small rent on the single apartment and she could take a half-time job to allow him to have at least one year in which he could spend more time composing in an appropriate studio. To make a complicate series of bureacratic steps brief, the composer was able to get the apartment, but becoming qualified for the apartment had required that the couple divorce, thus demonstrating to the authorities that he required the second domicile although their means had not increased, and so they divorced on what they had agreed was a pro-forma basis. Once he had moved into the apartment, however, the composer found himself somewhat lost. He was out of practice with his composing, unused to working with adequate space and without the background noise of small children. So he spent several months looking for the right chair or the right table or the right pen or the perfect piece of manuscript paper. Nothing. He took to walking out late at night in the city, not going anywhere in particular. He would get on a random streetcar and ride it to its end station and back and then choose another. Nothing. He memorized his table top and counted the trees visible from his window or the stars at night. Nothing. He spent less and less time with the family. One night, returning from one of his walks, in the entryway to the apartment house, he ran into the wife of the concierge, a woman some 20 years his senior. She was not looking well and, asking what was wrong, he was genuinely shocked to learn the news that her husband had died, suddenly, while doing some work around the house. He offered her his condolences, she asked him in for a cup of coffee, and they started talking, in an intense conversation that lasted until the next morning, accompanied by more coffee and some schnapps and so on. That intense conversation proved to be the beginning of a relationship that, in some months time, became physically intimate. The composer eventually gave up his apartment, moving in with the concierge's widow and taking on the concierge's job full-time. He remained a devoted father to his children who went on to have happy and successful live, while his ex-wife, after a very difficult period of hurt and adjustment, fell in love with a successful culinary photographer whom she married, and the concierge and his ex-wife eventually were able, after a period of detente, to develop a genuinely warm friendship. The concierge never returned to composing, having decided that he didn't actually have a gift for it after all, but he discovered that he was, in fact, a pretty good handy person and settled into a long life with his predecessor's widow, retiring a few years ago to a small place they bought on one of those Spanish holiday islands.

Lewis on Improvisation

2011-04-02T22:00:00.004+02:00

A very good lecture, Improvisation as a Way of Life: Reflections on Human Interaction by George Lewis is online here.

While I was a student and as a journeyman composer, improvisation was an urgent topic, with status in the new music world at some loggerheads over whether one was an improviser or (a) not(ator), with no small amount of macho swagger on either side of the argument.

This argument seems to have lost intensity within a musical community that has become at once more comfortable with diversity and more settled into routines of niche activity with far less acute competition for attention and resources between the niches.

Personally, I started out somewhat combative towards the hard-core improvisers. I improvised myself with bliss in the privacy of my own atelier but was unconvinced by much of what I heard when improvisers went public and, honestly, I saw them as direct competitors for presentation turf and fees. I've long since become considerably more relaxed about the issue, first with greater awareness of the ubiquity of improvisation — ultimately, every piece or performance of music — even the most fixed, systematic, written-down-and/or-out works of a Babbitt, Stockhausen, Cage or Johnson — has components that can only be construed as improvised, carrying a degree of either the arbitrary or the most intimately taste-related that no necessity governs their presence in the work. Moreover, my increase in comfort with improvisation comes with an increased sense that the presence or absence of improvisation is not really all-too-important and certainly neither an ethical nor an aesthetic distinction or value.

Improvisation of one sort or another is ubiquitous in all aspects of life, good bad, or indifferent. The Tokyo Electric Power Company has certainly been improvising big time of late in Fukushima, and although many individual performances by their employees have been heroic, I don't think that we've seen much in the corporate (ensemble) performance of ethical or aesthetic praiseworthiness. The current improvisations in the Arabic world present a similar diversity of results. In neither case are we — from contested distances of physical space, languages, history and culture and through the filters of equally-improvised media — in any position to honestly assess these performances, but some form of response is necessary and, even if that response is itself an improvisation, it has to be done on the basis of some concrete criteria: an accident in a nuclear power plant is very bad, the slaughter of citizens peacefully protesting their government is very bad. While musical performances, and performances of new musics in particular, carry very little that can harm mind or body in the way that event in Japan or Libya certainly can, and musical events have the supremely useful quality that they can be turned off or walked out of when they go badly, our response to music, even our most immediate, from-the-gut, yes Virginia, improvised, response has got to be governed by criteria, ethical and aesthetic, no matter how explicit we ever get about it.

The late music critic Heinz-Klaus Metzger described his work as a "struggle against the absence of criteria" without which music was reduced to only entertainment. While I share Metzger's suspicions about industrialized entertainment, I don't want to disregard entertainment as a value in itself; there are times in the lives of many if not most people when musical forms of entertainment can uniquely provide the comfort, consolation, fantasy or pleasure that makes a life of struggle and work whole. But at the same time, I don't want to deny, through disregard for qualitative criteria, the capacity for music to be more than entertainment.

Lewis clearly hears more inherent value in the improvised component of music-making than I do; I believe that we could at least agree on a minimum, in which the act of making music is more reliably valuable — to whatever degree of improvised content — than a great number of alternative human preoccupations. Lewis's presentation comes tantalizing close to raising these aesthetic and ethical questions without getting specific about criteria under which music becomes valuable. Too bad, methinks, because Lewis is such a good musician that I know damn well that his sense of musical quality is not operating in a criteria-free vacuum.

I do have one material question about the structure of the lecture — a rather formal academic occasion — itself: How much of it was improvised?

Step one: merge. Step two: downsize. Step three: export production.

2011-03-29T19:42:00.002+02:00

Sounds like some music administrators are ready to repeat some of the business practices that have made the past two decade just so peachy: American Music Center and Meet The Composer, Two of America’s Leading New Music Organizations, Announce Merger Plans. While there may be some organizational synergies to be had, it's always healthier to have some diversity and competition among those connected to commissioning, awards, publicity, and any other brownie buttons to be handed out.

The one bit of good news in this comes in the subtitle — American Composers Forum Will Assume Membership and Professional Development Services From American Music Center — it was never a very good idea to organize a "national" music information office as a membership organization and it's an even better idea, in terms of both costs and focus, to have the national professional services organization somewhere out in the middle of the country.

Topics

2011-03-28T01:32:00.002+02:00

Material
Ambiguous parameters
Presence
Memory & Prescience
Task & Practice
Surface
Resonance
Metric, non-metric, ametric
Precision & Rubato
Approximation
Mapping
Clarity
Order
Symmetry
Necessary & Arbitrary
Identity
Repetition
Ensemble
Echoes and Shadows
Figure & Ground
(De)coherence
Continuity, Line, Narrative
Attention
Distraction
Feedback
Environment
Natural & Artificial
Mo(ve)ment
Pleasure & Pain
Signal & Noise
Calculation — Choice — Chance
System & State
Not-yet-tonal
Center & Extreme
Amplification & Compression
Live & Recorded
Real Time, Musical Time & Zero Time

An Exercise in Modern Usage

2011-03-19T16:41:00.006+01:00

All the fuss these days about the new Modernist Cuisine volumes is an invitation to ponder that term "modern" in each of its variants (-ist and -ism and -ernity etc.) and with all of the familiar appendages (anti-, post-, pre, and prae- etc.). Let us review: Modern is clean and lean and clear except when it's messy, thick and dense. Modern is slow and low and empty except when it's swift, sky-scraping and full. Modern is both high tech, knowingly low tech, usually appropriate tech, but sometimes extravagantly tech. Modern is fresh and local except when it's well-preserved and long-traveled, often international. Modern is both futurist and primitive, forward-looking and nostalgic, cold as ice and warm as a pup. Modern is a walk in the wood and a ride in a jet-pack. Modern is atomic and anti-atomic. Modern is dissonance and noise except when it's the same time consonant and concord. Modern is specific except when it's generic, expertly handcrafted except when it's mass-manufactured, one-of-a-kind except when it's infinitely reproducible. Modern is slick, glossy black & white, but also fuzzy-edged, matte and polychromatic. Modern is rough and complex, except when elegantly simple. Modern is ambiguous and ironic, except when it's straightforward and earnest. Modern is knowing when one is acting (or eating) archaic. Modern is all ornament, except when it's plain as can be. Modern is going to extremes as well as focusing on the medium and mediocre. Modern is the 20th century except when it's now the 21st. Modern is now, except when it's that modern back then or this modern up ahead. Post-modern is not modern except when it happens to be modern. Modern is comic except when it's not. And so on (except, of course, when modern is non-sequitor.) With so much contradiction, is the term at all useful? (Have you ever noticed that when you write a word — like "modern" in this item — often enough, it begins to appear strange, misspelled, unfamiliar, even foreign?) Actually, I think modern can be useful, if one is prepared to live with the contradiction, to see it as a term that itself thrives within fields of contention and, ultimately, a term whose value or utility ultimately dependent more on local context and application than universal applicability. And, unless you're prepared to back up your use of the term with sufficient context, be prepared for it to signify nothing at all. Which, in itself, is just about as modern as you can get.

Godzilla the warm and cuddly

2011-03-18T17:58:00.003+01:00

One short question: the Japanese series of Godzilla (Gojira) films (1954- ) began with the title character a mutant monster product of atomic detonations, a horrific metaphor for atomic weapons. However, over the course of the series, Godzilla become more of a positive, heroic figure. To what degree was this metamorphosis in character propaganda for the "peaceful use of atomic power" as opposed to simply creating an impetus for the continuation of the series?

Force majeure; Better: silence

2011-03-18T13:10:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to catch up on the news, so I turned the TV onto the German-language 24 hour station N-24, only to discover that most of the reportage over the disasters in Japan were rolling features underlaid with the cheapest stock background music, unnecessarily over-dramatizing a story which damn well needs to be reported with only the best facts the reporters can assemble. While all reporting is going to be manipulative in one way or another, isn't it an objective of journalism to either reduce the level of manipulation or at least to be honest about it? AFAIC, this use of background music is an altogether unnecessary abuse of both the viewing audience and of music itself.

*****

Great natural disasters seem to trump even the wildest of musical imaginations. Handel's late oratorio Theodora failed to win audiences in part due to an earthquake a week or so before its premier in 1750. John Cage long tried to write a piece, based on the ten 100-letter thunderclaps which punctuate Finnegans Wake, which was to involve electronic modifications of instrumental and vocal sounds and to be "more like going to a thunderstorm than to a concert". Although some of the ideas ended up in the Lecture on the Weather and Roaratorio, the piece seems to have defeated Cage. Ligeti tried over many years, with plenty of mathematical and computational assistance, to create a proper orchestral Tempest with which to begin a long-planned opera of the same name and he gave up as well.

*****

In a time like this, in which a terrible catastrophe, indeed chain of catastrophes, preoccupies heart and mind, the need to respond in some musical way is simply blunted by the magnitude of the event. Not even my greatest conceits about my skills as a composer can disguise the fact that I haven't the talent to match the demands, the scale, the dynamics, the horror of the moment. A lament? Yes, perhaps, but later, when there is some concrete sense of the nature and dimensions of what has been lost. But an earthquake, tidal wave, or tempest of my own making? No, the shakes and splashes of my own music are necessarily inadequate responses. Better: silence.

Terry Gilliam to direct The Damnation of Faust

2011-03-15T16:59:00.003+01:00

This is either the best idea in the world or one of those terrible ideas of such epic dimension that it, nevertheless, should not be missed. Damnation, that marvelous not-opera not-symphony, is a work that, AFAIC, demands the companionship of some visual extravagance; Gilliam has a remarkable track record with neither-fish-not-fowl genres and is no slouch in the extravagance department; connecting the dots between the extravagant and difficult figures of Berlioz and Gilliam (and, okay, we can throw Goethe in as well) is one of those startling moves that seems obvious in retrospect. Let's hope that the producers are up to the demands of both director and composer (yes, Norman, you do need 8 to 10 harps to have adequate presence (not volume, presence) in the finale.) (I wish the video had more visual information.)

To publish or not to publish (1)

2011-03-13T18:16:00.004+01:00

Colin Holter has a post at the New Music Box noting Terry Riley's decision to now publish his scores through G. Schirmer. From what I understand, this decision comes out of Riley's preference, at this point in career and life, to get away from the everyday burdens of running his own publishing operation. In the far past, Riley made some of his scores rather widely available — with the original LP of In C including the score and Olson III available in a well-known anthology — but in general he held onto the music he performed himself or reserved for other musicians with whom he had a close, personal working arrangement and only in recent years committed the bulk of his notated works to his own publishing enterprise.

The decision for a composer not to be published for so many years by a conventional publisher has both practical and artistic grounds. Practically, the composer keeps all of his or her publishing and license fees (as opposed to forking over half to a publisher) and maintains a better overview of performances and subsequent fee collections, including exclusive performance rights (which are not unimportant when a composer makes a large part of his or her income from performing his or her own work; the whole issue of "cover" recordings is included here as is the question of a work's market saturation.) Artistically, it allows the composer considerably liberty to continue to define the contents, character, and performance practice of the work that a fixed and sold score might well discourage.

(At the end of Holter's post, he asks specifically about the works of La Monte Young. Having worked with Young in a publishing capacity before my time in Budapest, I can say a couple of things. The first is that although Young's control over access to his score may have frustrated many, Young has given a lot of thought about the matter and has had some very concrete experiences — many of them appallingly disrespectful towards both him and the work itself — with all aspects of the question and come to quite rational decisions about the optimal dissemination of the performance materials, based on a realistic assessment of the market for his work, his need to make an income for himself from his work, and his desire to maintain artistic control over work for which he has unique expectations — no shared programming, performance in specific physical environment, minimum durations and rehearsal periods, his own (or selected colleagues') participation in rehearsal, etc. — and which he clearly understands as very much still in-progress as both compositions and performance practices. Rest assured that Young has long-term plans for all of his works.)

The Lute and the Incongruent Bicycle Bell

2011-03-11T13:21:00.003+01:00

Reading Errol Morris's new blog series has reminded me of my own introduction to Thomas Kuhn, in an seminar on the Sociology of Knowledge in Santa Cruz taught by Harry Eastmond, an extraordinary figure, a lecturer both more sharper and more animated and deeply funny than nearly anyone I've ever encountered, Barbados-born, seldom without sunglasses, driver of very fast cars, who took his office hours at the Space Invaders game in a downtown disco, and who was not to last very long in academia, even at the supposedly progressive Santa Cruz. I was a freshman and clearly over my head with the material, but I can still vividly recall how, eventually, the course turned on questions of objective and subjective constructions of knowledge (the ever-controversial Berger/Luckman classic, The Social Construction of Reality, came into play as well), when I had the minor revelation that musicians negotiate this territory all the time. Take loudness. We can haul out a decibel meter and measure absolute loudness, from a particular source, within a particular space, etc., and this kind of information is useful. It's useful to know that a trombone can output so many decibels. It's useful to know how a room responds to such inputs. But subjective differences in loudness can be even more musically relevant: if I have a very quiet stream of music — say, a series of chords played, pianissimo, by a lute —, interrupting this stream with, say, a single stroke on a bicycle bell will be heard as startling, perhaps devastatingly, loud, although the absolute loudness of that bell is not great. There are so many elements that go into the perception of such a musical event, including the very incongruity of the interrupting bell, that even if we were to come up with some formula for adding in objective measures of all these elements, the efficiency of the subjective perception in both approximating the objective and adding in the strictly intuitive seems to me to trump the objective measurement in both acuity and utility. But the main point is that, as musicians, we have it both ways, objectively and subjectively, all the time, and the musical experience is none the worse for it.

Ars Subtilor

2011-03-09T20:26:00.003+01:00

How many times have you heard something like this:

But can this truly be the music of the future, or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate musicians who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end composing?

Now note this:

"But can this truly be the food of the future, or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate chefs who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end cooking?"

from a review of the new six volume cookbook, Modernist Cuisine.

Taking Pythagoras Down A Notch or Two (or some incommensurable part thereof)

2011-03-09T15:22:00.004+01:00

Errol Morris's new blog series is well worth reading in its entirety, but all musicians with a theoretical interest will especially like part three, here.

Insertions and Deletions

2011-03-09T14:24:00.002+01:00

This page is a fascinating record of the editing process of a David Foster Wallace piece recently published in The New Yorker. (The piece, Backbone, is highly recommended as an example of Wallace at his most obsessive.) Curiously, my fascination for the working processes of writers — I'm perpetually getting serenely lost in all those volumes of Joyce's notes, sketches, drafts, and proofs — doesn't extend much to the work of composers, and I've more or less given up on maintaining my own sketches and drafts. I used to love to puzzle through things like this — having worked intensely with manuscript materials by a diverse collection of composers including Machaut, Ockeghem, Lully, Ives, Partch, Cage — but found myself soon imitating methods too much for my own comfort. (Some scores should carry a warning label: Analyzing music other than your own can be infectious!) Perhaps the translation of methods from one medium into another involved in following a writer (or a writer/artist like Duchamp or Klee) provides a useful distance.

Orchestration Oddjob

2011-03-06T15:18:00.005+01:00

In an idle pause last night I swept once through the eight TV channels we receive and landed on the German first channel's broadcast of Goldfinger (1964), of all things, a movie I remember from my childhood (watched, IIRC, from the backseat of my parents' 1960 Pontiac Tempest in one of those Southern California drive-ins that has long since been replaced by a track of condominiums or a strip mall.) The famous music — the Bond and Goldfinger themes and their direct derivatives — was well-impressed in my memory, but somehow I had completely forgotten the other soundtrack music (by John Barry), not directly connected to the famous tunes (and only tenuously connected to them by chromatic character and the emphasis on winds) and much of it a- or non-tonal. There is a common argument made against non-tonal music that it has never secured any wide acceptance. But bits of film music like this are indisputable evidence against that argument: the music, while — with the exception of some superb writing for solo contrabassoon* — not particularly sophisticated, is perfectly functional. While I personally have little interest in effective film music (and, by extension, effective films), it's clear that a- or non-tonal music can be extremely effective in supporting a whole array of settings, moods, or situations in which some form of common practice tonal music will probably not work well and may well not work at all.

_____

* I have to really wonder how that contrabassoon sounded from the little drive-in loudspeaker that hung from the car window...

More Community Organizing

2011-03-03T09:55:00.001+01:00

(Click image to enlarge.)