Melisma malaise

A common complaint among US composers about opera is that operatic writing over-uses melismas. Ornament, in general, is out, and stretching out a syllable over too many notes is way out. The proffered solution is to ban melismas altogether. Funny thing: this complaint is often made in the same thought stream which says that art music for the theatre ought to sound something more like pop music, or at least borrow generously from pop techniques -- microphones, mixing, clear text setting, clear distinction between melody and accompaniment, everpresence of a beat, maybe even a hook, etc.. But, how does that reconcile with the enduring fashion for ornament, yes even the dreaded melisma, in the pop song world? We're in an odd world indeed in which new operas should avoid melisma while singers in the Top 40 or on American Idol are expected to o.d. on them.

A similar prejudice is that against vibrato, but I think that the problem is neither vibrato or melisma in themselve, but rather lack of control over each, leading to their presence as a default setting in both composition and performance practice. The way out, of course, is that we simply have to do better: singers have to learn to use vibrato as an ornament that can be turned on and off, and when on they must be able to control its depth, duration, and speed, and composers have to give more thought to the use (and possible of abuse) of melisma, as one direction on a field of possible relationships between pitches and words.

Landmarks (24)

Edgard Varèse: HYPERPRISM (1923) for nine wind instruments and percussion. Music was never more "modern" than it was in the "ultra-modern" 1920's* and the controversial issues around that modernism -- dissonance, noise, radical breaks in continuity, extremes of materials, intensity of expression -- have never really been settled in subsequent music history, but rather continue to percolate in-between bouts of more restrained music-making. Condensation is one of the prominent tropes in early modernism, but Varèse's condensation in HYPERPRISM is unrelated to that of the Viennese Schönberg and Webern, for whom condensation was a means of intensifying an expressive tradition. For Varèse condensation is rather a means of concentrating -- viewing through a prism, if you will -- a musical idiom that is assertively a- or even anti-traditional. (While Stravinsky's music is associated with the idea of "tonality by assertion", here we have an "atonicization by assertion"). HYPERPRISM is a miniature in terms of its elapsed duration, but not in terms of the resources required or its ambitions. The percussion section fills an unprecedented portion of the ensemble, the winds play at extremes of register and dynamics, and within the span of just four minutes the piece moves through a dozen distinct changes of tempo and character (it's tempting to speak of movements here). But for all the extremes, there are numerous subtleties, for example the opening c#', shared, rearticulated, recolored by the tenor trombone and horns, and in the percussion, the changes of scoring patterns and composite ensemble rhythms.
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* As long as we're at it, if you consider Pulchinella, music was never more postmodern than in the 1920's!

Happily nonharmonic

Reading an item about a composer very different from myself, I was once again struck by a notion that, despite all the old and familiar and -- sometimes -- unreconcilable aesthetic and stylistic differences, there is in fact one area of new compositional activity in which there is widespread engagement, a common project even, albeit one that is content to find a diversity of compositional solutions rather than embracing any single hegemonic path.

I'm thinking here of the project of working within a tonal environment that includes a wide spectrum of possible pitch configurations, with, on the one end of the spectrum, configurations similar to harmonic spectra and on the other, configurations approaching or including noise. Along this spectrum, one can locate all the familar animals in the tonal music zoo, with structures paralleling harmonic and subharmonic series, and all of the more exotic ones as well, in which pitch space is divided in an equidistant or a more unruly way, or those which are the residua of conflicts between voice leading and harmony, and even incorporate some real harmonic xenofauna, culled from further reaches of the harmonic spectra or other divisions of pitch space. And, through rescaling, one can include musical phenomena that were previously considered too subtle for compositional elaboration if not inaudible, for example those of interference beats and combination tones.

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and generous to describe a project with such a broad scope, but it has real roots in historical theory and compositional practice -- consider the treatment of contrapuntal dissonance and, later, nonharmonic tones, topics that were hot from the start and reached an apogee in the conflicting approaches of Schenker's voice leading and Schönberg's expanded catalog of chords. More contemporary approaches are manifold and resonant: Cowell's attempts to locate clusters in an overtone series, Seeger's dissonant harmony, the Stockhausen of ...how time passes... , the phonetics research, and Sternklang, the largely-francophone timbre/harmony or spectralist project (with its ultimate roots in Fourier and Rameau), Robert Erickson's Sound Structure in Music, James Tenney's John Cage and the Theory of Harmony, and late Cage's own "anarchic harmony", and, most recently, William Sethares's idea-rich book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale.

But a composer needn't approach the notion of an expanded continuum of pitch relationships with a heavy theoretical apparatus; this can be taken in intuitively. A personal landmark for me was encountering La Monte Young's release of a disk with a vocal and electronic performance within a well-behaved harmonic series flipped by a B-side of a continuously bowed gong, a sound that was both distant from and continuous with, the harmonic material of the A-side. When Andriessen and Schönberger, in their delightful book on Stravinsky, The Apollonian Clockwork, observe that Stravinsky often used harmonies with bell-like structures, they are locating Stravinsky's tonal practice on precisely this sort of continuum. While it's certainly possible to elaborate more, I don't think that a compositional (or speculative) theory needs much more scaffolding than that to simply get to the business of composing.

Celebrity

I was always shy about talking to John Cage -- he was, after all, someone of my grandparents' generation, and I seldom imagined having anything to say that would be worth bothering him. When N. O. Brown invited me to join Cage and himself for a walk in the woods above Santa Cruz, that's all I did: walk, keeping enough distance so as to stay out of their chat. My first actual conversation with Cage took place during the Cabrillo Festival in the summer of 1981. I picked up my ringing telephone and immediately recognized that voice with its almost-absent fundamental asking ''Gordon?''. Somehow I put one and one together -- someone with the phone numbers of both Gordon and myself had mixed them up and given mine to Cage -- and very quickly answered: ''Mr. Cage, this is actually a wrong number, but I just happen to have Gordon Mumma's number''. He answered: ''then it isn't a wrong number at all.'' At some point, I did ask Cage about possible composition teachers; he suggested Lou Harrison, Gordon Mumma, and Alvin Lucier. (I also asked him about studying with La Monte Young and he asked whether I was religious.) Needless to say, Cage's advice was sound, and I took it.

Festive Klang

This was the weekend of Hessischer Rundfunk's first "Klangbiennale." The program included concerts with forces from solo to chamber ensembles to full orchestra and a baker's dozen of sound installations scattered around the Funkhaus. The motto -- not quite a theme -- of the festival was "Kraft-Werke", and Elliott Sharp, represented by solo, chamber, and orchestral performances was an appropriate headliner. The featured guest composers included Maria de Alvear, Robyn Schulkowsky, Jens Joneleit, Matthia Kaul, and Dániel Péter Biró. Also included were works by Lucier, Hába, Nono, Tenney, Carter, Adams, and others.

I'm not a critic, so I won't review the program in any depth, but I do have a few observations:

A first observation, unsurprising for a festival devoted to Klänge, was that the music chosen tended to emphasize timbre and texture over other elements, and the European and American responses to such an emphasis could not have stood in greater contrast -- with the European tending toward more intuitive approaches and rather more unruly sounds while the Americans favored formal clarity and simpler harmonic spectra. Hearing Lucier's Navigations for Strings next to Hába's 16th Quartet and then Nono's A Pierre. Dell'azzurro silenzio inquietum next to Tenney's Critical Band made this contrast explicit. (Nota bene -- the Tenney performance suffered because the players played the score in good faith, as written; unfortunately, Tenney had made a substantial change in how he wanted the piece played with regard to a continuous pulse and never corrected the score to indicate this; anyone who would like to play it should consult with players experienced with rehearsals under Tenney's direction. Nota-not-so-bene -- with late Nono, the state of the scores and the electronics required to realize many of them is distressing and that raises some fundamental questions about the nature of the works; but this deserves another post, another time).

A second observation is that sound installations are seriously boring these days. There should be a voluntary moratorium on installations in which recordings are simply played back through any array of loudspeakers, there should be more installations which do not involve loudspeakers in the first place (heck, there should be more installation which do not involve electricity), and it would be nice if, from time to time, an installation involved an object or contraption or an array of such objects or contraptions that was or were lovingly crafted and attractive to look at, instead of being thrown or cobbled together from industrial and consumer detritus.

A third observation is that Maria de Alvear is working in the same thematic territory that Varese was in his late, unfinished, works (Nocturnal, Nuit, Dans la Nuit, etc.), and that being explicit like de Alvear or Varese about sex in music is difficult territory, and any effort is going to be provisional (one-piece stands, if you will). Classical concert audiences are prudish by nature and her piece, Sexo, never found a way to effectively challenge that prudishness other than through assertion and duration (the sexual politics of the piece were not clear), but perhaps that was the point. There is nothing remotely intimate about a full orchestra in a hall like the HR's broadcast hall, gymnasium-sized and covered on all sides by basketball court-quality parquet, and de Alvear's non-stop narration struck me as too syntactic, too full of whole sentences, too full of, well, sense, to ever invite the audience to loosen up, but again, that might have been the point. On the other hand, there was striking orchestration, so strikingly unlike anyone else's orchestration that the border between naive and knowing was clearly in play, making the whole a compelling 70 minutes.

A fourth observation is that Dániel Péter Biró is a young composer to whom attention should be paid. I have rarely experienced music that was both so obviously musical and so unapproachably strange, and Biró's Simanim, for nine players and electronics was just that.

And a final observation is that although HR's programming has always been more friendly to the US than any other European broadcaster, this was ultimately a very European festival. It's hard to imagine any institution in the US sponsoring a festival with a program including as much "difficult music" as this one. It is equally hard to imagine that during a American concert groups of concert-goers would gather together in the breaks and cheerfully argue about Kantian aesthetics while munching down Currywurst.

The piece that got away

How critical should you be about your work? What stays put in the sketchbook or gets tossed into the circular file or erased from the hard drive? When not working on a more substantial project, I try to complete one small piece, an exercise really, but something with a beginning and an end, each day. It could be conventionally notated, or a prose score, or a recording, but it's something finished. A very few of these pieces are keepers, or, with some further working-out, will become keepers, but most are just exercises, written to be abandoned, internalized as ideas or materials or technique, but let go all the same.

But sometimes pieces get away by accident -- a misplaced page, the stolen valise, a ruined bit of recording tape, failure to save before a program crash, embedded in antiquated technology, or even a page of manuscript placed in an open windowsill before rainfall. Some pieces were made to be disposable in the first place, and there is no loss. Other pieces can be reconstructed or even improved, so there might even be some virtue in such accidents. But when a piece is both good work and irretrievably lost, reconciliation with the loss is hard, and you'll find little sympathy for your story about the one that got away.

Hard-learned advice: Save you work, save it in several places and in multiple formats, and when something is lost altogether, it's a opportunity to practice your coolest composure and start all over again.

Another music

Is there anything that brings you closer to your own music than the experience of playing another music? I've played Javanese music since 1979 and did a lot of early music playing before that, and as familiar as both musics have become, they're still not "my" music but other musics, filling the space around my own music, reflecting it, refracting it, giving it definition.

An old saying goes "you don't know a language until you know two." The same applies to musics. And while there is plenty of virtuosity among the monolingual or monomusicial, I'd prefer to err on the side of knowing more rather than less.

My audience

Sometime, every composer is going to be asked: for whom do you make your music? I could probably answer with something ambitious or pretentious or wise-assious. I could say that I do it for fame, love, or money, to satisfy my own curiosity or just on a whim, whether as an intellectual pursuit or emotional release. But, of late, I've had no more attentive listener than my daughter Emma, who listens with fresh ears and is equally ready to share an enthusiasm or a critique and -- devoted already -- almost always asks to hear something again.

More on labels (in which things get complicated)

In a previous post, I discussed a problem with a group of related labels (minimal/minimalism/minimalist) which has come to define, on the one hand, a material quality shared by a broad swathe of compositional activity but, on the other hand, work by a specific grouping of composers. A similar problematic lies with the label "complex" (and its cognates).

The difficulty here is that complexity in itself is not really a useful distinguishing label. All of the music in which I am interested is, in some way, audibly complex, even music which has been produced with means that are modest, clear, even simple. Moreover, most of the music I love is also complex in the way in which it makes connections to other musics (whether from here, there, or then) or to the world around the music. The more interesting question to me as a musician is how a music is heard as more or less complex, and, to a lesser extent, how a particular music is made to be more or less complex. AFAIC, musical complexity is more immediately an issue of perception than of composition.

(As long as we're at it, let's throw out any claims for an inevitable progression in musical history from less to more complex -- it didn't happen as we left antiquity, with its now-lost enharmonic genus and wealth of modal melodic types, it didn't happen in the way from the late 14th through the early 16th centuries, it didn't happen from the late Baroque to classicism -- successive musics focused on different issues, and the location of audible or associative complexity in musical textures moved as well. We need a more complex view of musical complexity.)

My personal preference is for scores in which complexity is achieved by the most elegant of means. Scores, which would appear to harbor the most simple of all possible pieces -- La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #7 (a perfect fifth, b-f#' is "to be held for a long time") , Philip Corner's One Note Once (the title is the score), Cage's Inlets (which features the contingent sounds of water moving inside conch shells) and Alvin Lucier's A Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (for solo triangle) -- reveal, in realization, extreme complexities of musical sound because the frame of observation is so focused that usually-unattended details become vivid. In contrast, many scores of so-called New Complexity composers require a realization in which the notated details are lost or neglected in the production of a broader gestalt.

(Another term often bandied about is "rigor"; I find its usage to often be ironic, in that notationally complex composers -- waving either the Princeton or Darmstadt banners --, no matter which pre-compositional exercises are in play, are ultimately improvising on paper, while experimentalists rigorously follow the consequences of a process. Reich and Young are profoundly rigorous composers.)

A realization of Corner's One Note Once, requires a series of non-trivial decisions about form and materials in order to establish an optimal projection of the idea at the heart of the piece. Beginning with the existential question of "What is a note?, we move on to practical questions: Which note should I play? When, and in which time frame should I play it? And how should it be articulated so as to emphasize the singularity and non-repetitive character of the note? I'll go out on a limb and suggest that a player realizing a work of Ferneyhough enters into a decision-making process that precisely parallels that of the player realizing One Note Once. In Mnemosyne or Terrain or the Third Quartet, the score cannot be realized precisely as notated due to the density and internally contradictory character of the notation but the player must instead determine and project some version of the essence of the score.

(To his credit, Ferneyhough's strongest piece, Bone Alphabet (for solo percussionist), makes more than a nod towards the experimental tradition in that the instrumentation is not determined (although a studied realization might reveal an ever-narrowing set of possibilities); likewise Cage's two virtuosic sets of Etudes, the Freeman and the Australes, share something with the Ferneyhough performance ethic with the provision that impossible-to-play notes may be omitted in order to maintain a tempo.)

Composing Utopias

Harry Brighouse, at Crooked Timber, links to an interesting article by Erik Olin Wright on "Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias". This is very cool, and I couldn't but help recognize that this set of guidelines may apply to composition as well:

1. Evaluate alternatives in terms of three criteria: desirability, viability, achievability.
2. Do not let the problem of achievability dictate the discussion of viability.
3. Clarify the problem of winners and losers in structural transformation.
4. Identify normative trade-offs in institutional designs and the transition costs in their creation.
5. Analyze alternatives in terms of waystations and intermediary forms as well as destinations. Pay particular attention to the potential of waystations to open up virtuous cycles of transformation.

For a composer, this is obviously a wildly alternative set of terms for describing our work, and I'm not at all certain that point three is (or could even be made) relevant, but the distinction between viability and achievability is certainly a real one for composers and it is useful in composing to consider the trade-offs or ramifications which alternative realizations of ideas place upon a finished work. Consider, for example, the problems encountered by Glass and Reich when each started to write for more conventional ensembles: although these are profoundly different musical projects, in both cases, serious questions were raised about the essence of their own compositional idioms, the identification of the music with a certain ensemble character, the translation of the idiom into ensembles with their own features, traditions, and limitations, and the possibilities offered by technology for mediating or even transcending these issues, for example, through electronic amplification and mixing.

Terms of Endearment

I was talking with a friend this morning, a musician in a big local orchestra, and talk turned 'round to Schönberg. My friend said: "I admire some of Schönberg's music but I don't really like any of it." It was a sentiment that I had heard before, but I wasn't going to let it pass this time. I agreed that Schönberg was an uneven composer (the Wind Quintet was my example of the unredeemably lesser works) and we quickly agreed upon a set of pieces that we both found admirable -- the Five Pieces for Orchestra, the Chamber Symphony, Erwartung, Pierrot Lunaire, the String Trio, and the Phantasy -- and agreed to disagree about some others (Gurrelieder, Von Heute auf Morgen, A Survivor from Warsaw).

I then asked: "Are any of these pieces pieces in which "liking them" was a meaningful response?" The grotesque imaginary world of Pierrot or the grotesque real world of Survivor are not inviting, kindly places, but does that neccessarily mean that these worlds should be excluded from musical topics? And if they are musical topics, how well does Schönberg handle them?

I've always though that Berg's famous question (the title of an essay) "Why is Schönberg’s Music so Hard to Understand?" rather missed the point. Understanding the music, from a mechanical point of view, is not difficult, a schoolchild can figure that out. But making a connection to his style, in particular his heightened use of a particular expressive tradition, can be very hard, let alone understanding it. The difficulty lies not in Schönberg's tonal practice -- whether functionally tonal, or pantonal, or twelve-tone -- but rather in his expressionism.

In my first year in Frankfurt, I heard a concert in the Alte Oper, with Gary Bertini conducting A Survivor from Warsaw, fifty years to the day after Reichspogromnacht. I am generally allergic to effects in music designed to force particular emotions on the listener, and Survivor, which I had only known previously from recordings, had, to be honest, left me indifferent precisely because of such effects. But that evening, in that hall, with that audience, the moment in which the mens' choir rises and sings the Shema Yisroel hit like a tidal wave. This was music to which it was impossible to be indifferent. It was also impossible to "like", as "liking" it, at the most generous, was beside the point, and at the least generous would imply some form of assent to barbaric events. But it was also impossible to imagine a more appropriate musical response to its subject.

Minimal labels, maximal coverage

There is something impressive, almost thrilling, about the capacity of a label like "baroque" to sweep a huge amount of repertoire together. While closer examination always starts to wear away at the accuracy of the label, however it may be defined - historically, materially, stylistically -, there is something useful to having a handle with which one can efficiently distinguish one large body of work from others. If we were, for example, to define the baroque by the presence of the continuo accompaniment, it would be roughly accurate as a beginning point, and more roughly accurate as an end point, as continuo survived, for a time, in orchestral, operatic, and a longer time, in several church traditions. Furthermore, it fails to account for genres that clearly belong to a baroque era but do not have basso continuo. Nevertheless, an identification of continuo with baroque does convey some essential quality of both the technique and a historical and stylistic identity. There is a real connection between Cosi fan Tutte and The Rake's Progress (or between Orfeo and Einstein on the Beach) and sometimes precision is less useful and no more correct than fuzziness in describing that connection.

The accelerated accumulation of repertoire has created substantial demand for label making, and the tension between sweeping and precise labels cannot be greater. Take the labels "minimalism" or "minimal music": at root, these labels indicate something about materials, and, in general, that something is quantitative. But in common usage, and derived from association with the materially minimal musics that have become best known, that label has come to be defined not only by the material state but also by other characteristics of those particular musics, thus taking a term that was originally applicable to a wide variety of musical environments or realizations and proprietarily narrowing the musics that can take on the label. Thus because one well-known minimalist restricts pitch usage to tonal collections or another uses generous repetition or another uses long sustained tones, each of these possible realizations of a minimal material state have become necessary conditions for a "minimal music".

(It is also interesting to consider that "minimal" was not the only term in circulation ca. 1970 -- "process" or "systems" were terms with considerable currency in both the US (the "systems group" around Johnson, Corner, Goode, and Benary should be mentioned) and the UK (likewise a systems group around White and Hobbs) -- it just happens to be the one to have stuck. The term process, in particular, makes connections explicit between the musics of Reich and Lucier (Come Out and I am sitting in a room), or even Reich and Cage (try Pendulum Music and Inlets) that would be irrelevant to a minimalism label depending upon pitch usage).

A particular irony here, in the case of musical minimalism, is that the group of composers around whose work the term is most narrowly defined have tended to reject the label, recognizing both the inherent limitations of the term and the problems with construing their work as a meaningful grouping. While some of these problems may be more of a personal, rather than musical, nature, it is also quite clear that the term, when used so narrowly, is used often critically or to create an aesthetic distance from another music, and in particular by other composers who wish to distance their own work from this group of composers, whether as direct competitors or as historical successors. (Marx made the same move against the "Young Hegelians"). Thus contemporary conservative composers of tonal music can simultaneously associate and distance themselves from a body of work that competes with their own, without ever acknowledging, let alone engaging, the progressive musical and intellectual foundations of that work.

None of this, however, does much to convince that the term minimal should be abandoned or replaced. It is useful to have a term that immediately captures something about the material state of a music, and it is particularly useful in making connections across repertoires or establishing distances within repertoires. It is very useful to have a term connecting Young and Riley and Reich to the music of Pauline Oliveros, Douglas Leedy or Harold Budd, some very different west coast colleagues. It also has to be recognized that minimalism's impact was far from parochial, and more simply than an Andriessen or a Ligeti recognizing kindred spirits in a bit of Reich or Riley. The Japanese composer Jo Kondo, resident in lower Manhattan in the early 1970's, began his mature work from a point of departure (the key work is Kondo's Standing) that was intimately connected to his American colleagues, and the music of the German composers Hans Otte or Walter Zimmermann or Ernstalbrecht Stiebler was both decisively impacted by minimalism, and is, frequently, decisively minimal in material content.

The Circle Widens

Two thoughtful bits of writing about composition:

Elliot's Funnel, a new blog by composer Elliot Cole has a smart post on the economics at work when materials are deployed in a composition, identifying two global strategies for constructing unity in work, which Cole defines well as "continuity between a form and the forces that formed it". (I'm not certain that I share Cole's claim that we "learned everything we know about forces from our bodies"; as important as the corporeal is to music, Polyani's notion of a tacet dimension, from which we can know more than we can say, is an intriguingly optimistic suggestion that the corporeal is mot a perceptual limit).

Randy Nordshow, at the New Music Box, makes a case for music that aims for radical somethingness rather than the middle of the road all-of-the-aboveness. I agree, of course, and add that, in the often paradoxical economics of form, taking one parameter to an extreme -- duration, for example -- can offer a composer an opportunity to push a meager or banal material set into unexpected configurations and transformations. Landscapes that appear near-empty or featureless at first glance -- deserts, for example -- acquire a vivid glow (for lack of a better word), exploding with details, when allowed to enter the senses on their own timescales.

A Short Prelude, in D

Refundable entry fees?

Galen Brown has a good post about some organizational irregularities in the recent Pulitzer prize in music composition. The prize winning work had not been entered in writing via the advertised nominating procedure, but had instead been selected directly by the jury during their deliberations in preference to all of the works which had been entered by the required procedure.

AFAIC, the jury's selection is a matter of their own tastes and preferences. However, the Pulitzer organizers do have a good faith obligation to all of those composers who entered in writing, following the published rules, and paying a $50 fee. These musicians had a good faith expectation that the organizers would follow the rules as well and select a winning work from only those works that have also followed the same entry procedure, and that expectation has here clearly not been met.

I believe that the organizers now have an obligation to all the entrants who followed the advertised procedure, and that is to return the $50 fee. Although it might be argued that this was, as described, a "handling fee", it was, for all intents and purposes an entry fee.

Further, I believe that the organizers also have the obligation to state clearly in application materials for any future competitions that the jury has the right to select a work that has not been formally entered, and they are similarly obliged to indicate that they reserve the right not to select any work at all in any given year.

Of course, it would be best of all if no entry fee were required, but barring that, the Pulitzer organization should at least publicly offer the opportunity for entrants to request a fee waiver. As for any actually "handling" costs, it is entirely reasonably to ask that entrants who wish their materials returned submit their materials with self-addressed and stamped packaging for safe return. Composers should not be expected to pay fees to cover costs related either to file-keeping within the Pulitzer organization, payment of jury members, or the prize money itself.

Finally, this year's award strongly suggests that the composition of the jury will bias the selection to one genre or another; for this reason, unless the prize is split among a number of genres, it would be a great service to potential entrants if the jury membership were to be named upfront.

Points of departure

Art musics are musics that, on the one hand, are not limited in their capacity to establish networks of references, both externally, to other musics or ideas from non-musical domains, and internally, within a single work, but also, on the other hand, are open to the possibility of beginning from a blank slate, putting sounds together from first principles. My greatest joy as a composer has always been in those musical moments in which a first principles approach leads to a re-encounter with another music, be it contemporary, historical, or from a cultural context other than, and distant from, my own. In this way a new, or at least unfamiliar, music hedges its novelty with direct connections -- however ambiguous, critical, or contradictory -- to the familiar.

Increasingly, however, my encounters with musicians and lay listeners have been somewhat disappointing, in that this dimension of reference is often lost. This can mean that I'm not doing my job of making references explicit well enough, or I'm doing my job of keeping those references below the surface too well, or maybe, just maybe, complexity of this sort -- as opposed to complexity due to the overlay of conflicting materials or processes -- is just out of fashion. In part, this is a side effect of the technology of these times, in which people can be exposed to a greater quantity and variety of music, with the paradoxical side effect that they, in general, know a lot of music, but know only niches of it very well, or that the range of possible references is now so great, that the potential for any soul other than my own not catching a reference has increased by a similar factor.

Like any other composer, I bring my own peculiar set of skills and experiences with me, and that peculiarity is both a blessing -- the source of much of my identity as a musician -- and a curse -- the source of my obscurity. So I bring a lot of experience with 14th and 15th century European music, with the early Baroque and classical eras, with 20th century art music and the American experimental tradition in particular, with playing Irish and Mexican music and in wind bands, and 28 years of playing Javanese gamelan, with some critical encounters with the (then-mostly analog) electronic music studio and instrument building and lots of thought about tuning and counterpoint thrown in for good measure. And on top of that, I probably bring a certain measure of irreverence, if not apostacy, to all of these experiences. And if my references (not to mention the irreverent references) don't often include pop music, or jazz, or 19th century classical music it may be exotic, but what else can I do?

Compare and Contrast

So if you ever went back to the States, what would you miss about Germany?

Bread. Paper ballots. And four-state traffic lights.

And what do you miss about the US?

The quarter-dollar coin, a product of pure American ingenuity right up there with the synthetic bowling ball and right-hand turns on red lights. The Pacific coast. And the California vowel shift.

Agitation

For what it's worth, here's an interesting take on the political blogoplan* as an avant-garde movement. The author identifies it as a form of Fluxus-style agitation, which is a swell idea, even though I have to suspend my usual distrust of all things Fluxus to get there (AFAIC, the best work of artists associated with Fluxus happened when they were as far away from Fluxus as possible, although the connection between Fluxus and Lithuanian politics is genuine) and I'd throw a dose of Situationism in there, too.

New musical blogs do not strike me as having yet located the potential in the medium for avant-garde agitation akin to that of our political colleagues; indeed, considering the fact that we're theoretically promoting an avant-garde within our own medium, we have generally done a poor job of exploring the experimental possibilities of the blog form -- our use of language is dull, our ideas old, our enthusiasms mild, and our controversies and rivalries small. No manifestos. Not much in the way of setting violins on fire or topless cello playing or electrocutable piano keys around here nowadays. Heck, we can't even organize a decent boycott against competitions with over-high fees. Children: get to work!
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*Blogoplan is the flat-earth equivalent for the round-earthers' blogosphere. The author is not literally a flat-earther, but someone who recognizes that we organize our daily lives around flat earth coordinates and illusions of simultaneous downbeats and in-phase tuning.

Niblock tells a bit more

Paris Transatlantic has a very good interview of composer and film maker Phill Niblock by Bob Gilmore. Very good, because Phill usually avoids being all-too-explicit about how his music (and films) work, and here he's even tossing about words like "structure".

Niblock is one of a small group of composers (I'd add Young and Lucier) who pioneered work that featured musical environments in which the familiar parameterization (rhythm is not pitch is not timbre is not dynamics is not rhythm) is blurred, broken down, or irrelevant.

Performance practice

This video of John Cage's 1960 appearance on I've Got A Secret, including a performance of Water Walk, is a great document of Cage both as a performing musician and a public figure.

It is also a good example of Cage's pragmatism: all of his scores were composed to be played, and in this case, when a union conflict made it impossible to plug in the five radios required in the score, Cage substituted an alternative, non-electric, instrumental technique. I am sure that this variation from the printed score will receive due attention from musicologists and historically-informed performance practice specialists in the future.

Piled higher and deeper

It used to be the case that a Master's degree, MA or MFA or MMus, was the standard terminal degree for composers. Then, sometime in the late sixties, US institutions started more widely offering doctorates in composition (PhDs or DMAs); without much public ado, that has become the de facto terminal level and doctoral programs in composition continue to open and grow. There are a number of reasons for this development -- on the input level, due to a perception that undergraduates are less well prepared than in the past, but also because a PhD program creates prestige, more interesting course loads for the professorate, and a supply of cheap teaching and research assistants. The big downside of this development is, of course, that there is no correspondence between the increase in advanced degree recipients and available jobs within academia or without, and that the academic job market is increasingly limited by the growth in the professional academic theory specialist and the move of historical musicologists into 20th century and more recent music, areas that had, until recently, been rather safe service teaching territories for composers.

I have noticed, however, that many of the best and best-known of my younger colleagues have chosen not to pursue academic degrees beyond the Master's (or even Bachelor's) level, effectively returning to the credentialing practice of my teachers' generation. On the one hand, this is a realistic response to the working conditions of a TA and the state of the academic job market, but on the other hand, these musicians are in fact spending their journeyperson years figuring out how to make a living (or half-a-living or some other fraction-of-a-living) directly from making music rather than teaching it. I suppose that some of these composers may someday re-enter academe, and perhaps be able to do so at a senior level, but the continuing presence of a class of non-academic composers is an important corrective, and is definitely a good thing.

(For the record, not one of my own composition teachers had a doctorate; in fact, two had no degrees at all and still carried full professorial rank and regalia; a good thing, I think. My own advanced degrees are a composer's MA from a World Music program, and a nominal PhD in Ethnomusicology, as musicology had not yet widely moved into the late 20th century and I had the odd notion that there might be a market somewhere for generalists. I toyed a bit with the idea of pursuing a Habilitation, to add one more degree to my pile of traveling papers, but that notion was met with blank stares by even the most academic of composerly American academics: a Habili-what?.)

A day, made

For one reason or another, this was one of those days when nothing quite went right, except discovering this by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler:

I love this post on “The Edge of the Beat” by Daniel Wolf: it just reads like exemplary, thoughtful blogging to me - it’s about nothing and everything, compact philosophy to keep the imagination ticking over, and loaded with astute observations.

The oddest thing about writing -- words or music -- is that response is entirely unpredictable. The items worked on most often drop like a lead balloon, uncommented, while other items, tossed together with half-a-thought go on to have substantial half-lives of response and controversy. Maybe this, learning to live with this arbitrary indifference, is the hardest part about being a composer or a writer or an artist of any other sort. But you get a few words like these once in a while and all is forgotten: Isn't life grand?

Perhaps it's time to rest on these bloggéd laurels and devote myself instead to cooking, croquet, and composing some Péchés de vieillesse.

Shere's good fortune

Charles Shere ends a delightful report on concerts of Schubert and Purcell with this:

And what came of that was the thing that unites Purcell and Schubert: their fundamental innocence, their good cheer, their generosity of spirit. This is something they share with Mozart and Satie and, I think, John Cage, and with so few other composers. They're not in business for their egos. They're as amazed at the beauty they discover as we fortunate listeners are. They are, I think, in a way, angels, Ariels. How lucky we've been to share two evenings in three days with them!

Toy Opera

This (and this) just might have more potential for the future of opera than the latest forms of digital transmission, populist kowtows, or diva-and-director-driven spectacles. Randall Wong, composer, sopranist, and Curator of Music for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, has joined the Toy Theatre revival movement, and the admixture of camp, surreal suspensions of disbelief, and old fashioned (or even steampunk) theatre magic, all re-made in miniature, would seem to lead inevitably to opera. The idea of being able to pack all of the hardware of an opera production into a valise for parlor performances is an attractive one, with highbrow echoes of Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp and lowbrow echoes aplenty. Besides, who can complain anymore about dwindling audiences when the goal is for the entire audience to be able to move smoothly together from the dining room to the performance in the parlor before the gents adjourn for cigars and brandy in the billiard room? I have the impression that Wong's music for his operas began largely with classical pastiche but is composed increasingly in his own voice. In any case, I can't fault anyone who'd retell the Orpheus myth with toasters and alarm clocks, or who'd render the sexually-retrograde world of Flatland in an appropriately retrograde theatrical environment.

Blogolalia

Interesting new pages turn up all the time:

Mixed Meters, commentary and much story telling from David Ocker, veteran of L.A. new music.

Boring Like a Drill, a blog by experimental composer Ben Harper (not to be confused with my hometown friend, this Ben Harper).

Musical Assumptions, composer Elaine Fine.

The Edge of the Beat

My son and I have been assembling a paper model, and it's been the cause of yet another of my bouts with edge anxiety. You see, I've never figured out if you're supposed to cut on the line, or just before or after the line. These cut-out projects are rarely specific about whether and how the width of the line figures into the width of the piece you're supposed to excise.

This anxiety is akin to one familiar to most musicians - when, precisely, does a beat begin? and does one articulate that beat on, before, or after that beginning? and is this done consistently or flexibly?

The best musical ensembles internalize a common location for their beat, and the very best ensembles can do this with great flexibility. One trick of many European orchestras is to lay back, just behind the conductor's visual downbeat, creating an round or even neutral attack. By opening up that space between the conducted and the played beat, the orchestra can then respond flexibly in passages where a sense of urgency or sharpness is intended. By leaning closer to the visual beat, an impression of acceleration is created without actually rushing the tempo. If, however, the conducted and played beats are identical, there's nowhere to move but to rush).

This is an enormously subtle and subjective phenomena, and I suppose that, for most musicians, one that takes place at a pre-conscious or even involuntary level. Nate Mackey's fine epistolary novel Bedouin Hornbook (1986) had a sweet passing reminder that the word "conspiracy" is, at root, blowing together, and that physicality is essential. The Vienna Philharmonic is well-known for the conspiratorial precision of their ensemble rubato, and one suspects that the hesitation in this traditionally male-only preserve to permit women to become members is an expression of a very male insecurity, not only in preserving a male-only employment sector (a common phenomena in modernizing economies) but also a form of insecurity at a fundamental level of identity, where the physicality of music making has been confused with that of gender.

If it weren't worn by bellicose practice, I'd be amused by the Bushian slogan of "drawing a line in the sand". A line drawn in the sand is even more difficult to hold onto than a line drawn in a cut-out book or a conductor slicing the air with hand or baton. And although sand is tangible and discrete, our perception of sand is that of a mass phenomena with unsharp edges, the detailed reports of individual grains disappear into that edge.

Profligate Symphonists

One trend among composers who fancy writing Symphonies is to follow the Beethoven model and write a small number of substantial pieces. Subscribing to this particular edition of the masterpiece ethic often comes at some personal cost: the completion of each Symphony is another hour gone from a nine-hour clock, ticking away towards some certain end. Mahler, apparently suffering from anxiety over the number nine, still managed to write 10 or 11 symphonies, while the delightful Belgian composer Boudiwijn Buckinx has demonstrated a complete (and, now that I think of it, rather Belgian) exemption from Germanic symphonic anxiety by composing Nine Unfinished Symphonies. (For some reason, composers who choose to stop at four numbered symphonies have a more relaxed psyche, pace Brahms, Ives, or Lou Harrison, happily naming his Fourth the "Last".)

But there are a handful of composers who have no anxiety running well past Nr. 9, and seem to be untroubled by the masterpiece ethic. Hadyn is usually assigned the number of 106 Symphonies, the Bohemian Pokorny wrote at least 140. Nikolai Myaskovsky wrote 27 Symphonies. Havergal Brian wrote 32. Henry Cowell finished 20. Alan Hovhaness left the planet with 67 numbered Symphonies, and although several of them were definitely assigned the Symphony label with some large measure of license, being closer to concerti or other forms, or composed for unorthodox ensembles, Hovhaness more than adequately leaped over the cursed limit of nine. Another American, Rowan Taylor (1916-2005), may be the all-time champion with 265 (of which I've heard not a note). But the current champion is probably the Finnish composer Leif Segerstam who, as of April 10th, 2007, has produced 180 Symphonies (alongside 30 string quartets, 11 violin concerti, and 8 cello concerti).

The closer I get to shuffling off our mortal coil, the fact that I haven't managed a single example of a symphony starts to irritate at bit. Will I be one of those who leave no Symphonies behind? Or one of those -- like Cesar Franck who do it once, do it well, and never do it again, or like Hans Rott or Anton Webern, who did it once, and never got a second chance? (Remember the line spoken by Voltaire after a visit to a certain house of ill-repute: "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert"?) Or might I have a late surge and start churning out Symphonies with the speed of the prolific and greatly bearded Finn? At the moment, no one is knocking at my door, fatefully or otherwise, asking me to write a Symphony, but it's fun to imagine what I'd do if given the chance... let's just say that it will involve large amounts of water and a small supply of fireworks.

Capice?

I just read this in an item by Roger Bourland, the most augustinian* among composerly bloggers:

Moving to Los Angeles freed me from the tyranny of the East Coast music mafia, but soon discovered the West Coast music mafia was just as icky.

I almost let it pass, but then it hit me how often I'd heard composers talk of their colleagues in terms of cliques, cabals, or even -- as here -- criminal rackets. I sort of understood the message being conveyed, but I'm not sure that any of these identifications wouldn't fall apart upon in-depth inspection.

So when Roger writes of a coastal mafia, east or west, who exactly are the mafiosi he is writing about? When I was on the East Coast (from 1983-86, and then for a while in 88), the rivalries among East Coast composers made contemporary Iraq look like a quilting bee. Groups existed, trends existed, but seldom was an alliance anything other than convenient and temporary. Regional, stylistic, aesthetic, tonal or atonal, minimal or maximal, classical or romantic, uptown or down, pop-ish or jazzish, academic or conservatorial, experimental or electrical, straight, gay. male, female, ethnic, waspish, or or some/all/none of the above: for pretty much every form of identity, some grouping could be located. And for pretty much every grouping, some exception could be found. And for pretty much every grouping, someone's going to be left outside. But isn't this simply the consequence of the fact that different people are going to choose to make different music? The group that Roger himself co-founded in Boston, Composers in Red Sneakers, was a response by some (then-)younger composers to the existing musical scene there, and once the Reds has established themselves, there were plenty of locals, older or younger, or coming from similar or dissimilar aesthetic backgrounds, who resented the Reds for both their success and their clicquishness. It's an old story, and I have no patience with either the resentment or the fact that the resentful didn't take the initiative to start their own groups. And the west coast? He's got to be more specific -- are these film composers, or composers associated with the Monday Evening Concerts or the Independent Composers' Association, or composers along the CalArts/UCSD or USC/UCLA axes, the microtonalists around Erv Wilson, the Cold Blue-ers, or whoever? Again, I believe that any closer inspection is bound to fall apart. (Which begs the question: If musicians had really organized ourselves like a mafia, would we all still be working day jobs?)

So why the need to talk about groups of composers in these terms?

Often time, talk of cabals is an expression of resentment, dividing the world into me and an evil other, and locating one's status (usually "overlooked") in that division. On a mailing list with John Cage as subject matter, a musicologist who had interviewed the composer Lucia Dlugoszewski reported that Dlugoszewski felt that Morton Feldman had kept her out of the Cage/Feldman/Brown/Woff/Tudor group in the 1950's. This was an impossibility -- Dlugoszewski was a fine composer, perhaps even Varese's best student, but her aesthetic, especially in its dynamism, was completely different from the Cage group and, moreover, she had a professional and personal connection to the choreographer Erick Hawkins that more or less precluded a close relationship to the Cage group, with its connection to a choreographic rival, Merce Cunningham. But her reputation was never as great as any of the Cage group, and this -- perhaps coupled with some private grievance against Feldman -- was a convenient explanation.

Part of Roger's remarks may be an echo of another kind of resentment, that between students and teachers. I'm fortunate in that I chose my teachers well, and never had major aesthetic differences, or at least managed to keep them on a back burner. But many composers have ended up studying with teachers with whom they share only a mutual disregard for each others' work. Why anyone would end up in such a situation can only be explained by negligent selection in a buyer's market on the student's part, but why anyone would stay in such a situation can only be explained by masochism, and that's icky, if I can borrow a word from Roger.

I've complained often enough on this blog about the misuse of resources and abuse of power in musical politics (publishing, prize-giving, and distribution of fellowships and teaching jobs are the major areas of abuse), but I've also tried to steer clear of blanket incriminations. In general, the work of getting music played is taxing enough on our organizational skills that musicians seldom have the energy to conspire on matters more sinister, and the spoils for which we compete are so modest that whenever such indulgence is on display, which isn't often, the obvious loss of dignity is measurably greater than any material gains.

Our musical lives are richer because we have had compositional work that fit into a Perspectives, or a die Reihe, or a Source, a Computer Music Journal, or a Soundings, a Xenharmonikon or an Ear from either coast, or none of the above. (Not to mention this blog or that one or any other). Some music can be written about (and at length, such length), some music invites speechlessness instead, and neither condition is immediate and necessary grounds for either dismissal or celebration. I'm very particular about the music I do or don't like, but my musical life is lively precisely because I have a diversity of music from which to choose. And even within any of the fortresses of musical journalism mentioned above, closer inspection reveals surprising diversity.

Although, from time-to-time, there'll be tactical alliances, and even some real honest-to-goodness friendships, in the end, every composer is their own foot soldier, hit-man, consiglieri and Don in a one-man or woman musical mafia.
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* Augustinian, in the sense that you'd need the confessional chutzpah of St. Augustine in order to admit to ever playing in a rock band named The Raspberry Steamboat.

Teaching musicianship and world music

I was recently forwarded a notice for an Institute on the Pedagogies of World Music Theories University of Colorado (Boulder, Colorado) May 29 - June 2, 2007 (link here).

This is very interesting stuff to me -- I once taught an introductory theory and musicianship class at Wesleyan, and in the context of the University's World Music program, I made some tentative steps in the direction of applying techniques from the world and experimental music traditions there. It was definitely the right idea, but not yet the right time to do it -- it was important at that moment for the individual musical traditions to assert some autonomy, there had been some bad experiences with naively throwing different musics together and hoping that they would complement one another, and the logistics of doing it right -- scheduling, especially -- were not simple. But the idea is the right one, and the way in which, for example, chamber musicans at Wesleyan practiced complicated rhythms with the assistance of South Indian Solkattu, was exciting, musical and not naive.

About the same time, I took part in discussions about the design of a core music curriculum and the committee came to agree on a few ideas that still strike me as very reasonable: teach repertoire, theory, and musicianship in parallel, expect students to explore at least one music tradition in addition to their native or chosen tradition, take a course in acoustics and music perception, keep the divides between the disciplines of performance, improvisation, and composition fuzzy, and to introduce a core sequence of four semester-long courses: melody and rhythm, modal counterpoint, tonal harmony, and 20th century techniques. Critical to this sequence was choosing a specific -- and fairly narrow -- historical repertoire as a source of examples (at Wesleyan, the counterpoint course would have definitely used 15th century counterpoint as its point of departure -- the local preference was for Josquin over Palestrina, and this kept some questions of major-minor tonality on hold until the third semester; on the other hand, there was never any consensus about the reference repertoire of the fourth course). This curriculum was never implemented, but I still haven't heard of a better idea.

Some bloggage

Of Sound Mind: Music, sound and ideas is a blog about experimental music.

PPWCs

This year's list of Pulitzers has come out, and the most interesting factoids on the list, to me, were that the three finalists for criticism came from L.A., which is the cultural equivalent of a switch in the earth's magnetic polarity, and that the winner among the three was the L.A. Weekly's Jonathan Gold, who has been a pioneer in covering the extraordinary diversity of food culture in Los Angeles. (As far as food is concerned, L.A. is the center of the Universe).

As for the Pulitzer in Music, giving it to Ornette Coleman was probably as good as selection as is possible within the present, reformed, phase of the award.

A composer whose work I very much treasure used to quip "Pulitzer Prize... passport to oblivion!", and, in fact, the list of Pulitzer-Prize-winning compositions (PPWCs) includes a number of works that have long secured their places in said oblivion. I actually had some contact as a teenager with the composer Gail Kubik, whose own PPWC (1952's Symphony Concertante) had long faded from the collective memory, but the combination of his being a Pulitzer Laureate and his score for Gerald McBoing-Boing added up to something approximating status in our small world. I'm probably not alone in thinking that the PPWC list reached its apogee in 1947 with Ives' Third Symphony, but that was not Ives at his best and the awards had already made a decisive turn towards recognizing lifetime achievement as often as specific pieces: Congratulations, a bunch of the guys have gathered around in Jack Beeson's office at Columbia and decided that you, too, have joined the club.

(There are, some very good pieces in the PPWC list: Copland's Appalachian Spring, of course, and Thomson's score to Louisiana Story, and maybe Albert's Symphony: RiverRun, a piece that John Cage praised strongly).

Some people really worry about the PPWCs -- Morton Feldman taught a course surveying them, and I'd guess that he would have been happy to have had a piece win; composer Paul Reale has his own survey with comments here. The Pulitzer organizers have worried about the PPWCs too, concerned with the both the process in which works were selected and the character and status of the works selected over the years. The process has been opened up a bit, and the form that that opening has taken has been to allow, at intervals, work representing one tradition in addition to that of the more or less academic East Coasters, Jazz.

This is clearly a compromise in a politically delicate area -- significant work in the Jazz tradition should have been recognized long ago, and one solution would have been to create a separate prize for Jazz. But that would not have been satisfactory to many. Unless the Pulitzers had the will and resources to keep opening up new categories (as have the Grammys), it would have been a form of highly selective segregation, it would have raised serious questions about defining the category, and there has always been a small faction who insist that Jazz was "America's Classical Music". But the present compromise is equally problematic. Those who identify with the East Coast academic tradition have now had one of the rare places in which their work is recognized by non-professional become somewhat less secure, if not devalued, and the annexation of music outside of that tradition may be perceived as an aesthetic challenge.

I figured out quickly that I shouldn't worry about PPWCs -- I came from the wrong coast* and had all the wrong ideas about what music might do, and PPWCs, if anything, were all about reinforcing a particular tradition about what music might do. But observing the musical politics of the process of selecting a PPWC is unavoidably fascinating. The jury this year included a significant number of members with interests in what might be called Jazz (I won't get into the politics of that label, nor will I get into questions about the status of recordings and improvisation) and the jury selected a composer who can be identified with that repertoire. Although the alternative works on the short list could hardly be any different, it's hard to escape the notion that the jury was selected precisely because it might respond favorably to a Jazz selection, and that's troublesome because there's no mechanism for deciding whether a given year is more likely to be a better one for Jazz. The least that can be said is that Jazz now has a relatively good chance to produce as many oblivion-bound PPWCs as the standard academic offerings.

I don't see any satisfactory solution to any of this, let alone an easy one.

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* If anyone has any doubts about this, there is the example of the BMI competition. The only composer of roughly my own generation from the west coast and/or experimental traditions to have won a BMI is Larry Polansky, a fine composer by any measure. But it can hardly be a coincidence that the year he won was the only year that Lou Harrison sat on the jury. So I learned first not to worry about BMIs, then not about PPWCs, Guggenheims, or Fulbrights, and I'll certainly never have to worry about polishing my chair at the American Academy. But, and it's a great consolation, I can instead worry about the decline of bee colonies and my brother tells me that I have an uncle who met Merv Griffin once. Isn't life grand?

Things that buzz

I had intended, in setting parts of Virgil's Georgics, to avoid Book Four, which deals with bee-keeping. I'm honestly not that fond of either honey or the social structure of bee colonies, so I've never gioven bees much attention. Book One, about field crops, gave me a passage the setting of which seemed urgent, about war. Books Two and Three, which move on to legumes, trees, and livestock have other attractions I may pursue. But now, with news that the recent serious declines in bee populations (aka "Colony Collapse Disorder") may be due to their damaged navigation capacity caused by interference from the ever-expanding networks of radio communications -- mobile telephones in particular -- perhaps setting some of Book Four is more urgent.

The nectar and pollen business carried out by bees is essential for much more than the production of honey for human consumption, and a reduction in bee populations has ramifications for both agriculture and nature in general. If radio waves do in fact contribute to this decline, then, as marvelous as a cell phone may be, there is certainly a good case to be made either against blanket cell coverage anytime and everywhere or to locate frequency bands which do not lead to this effect.

I'm certain that many composers have used bees as subject matter, well above and beyond Rimsky's too-famous flight, or the numerous settings of Where the bee sucks from The Tempest. Insect sounds, in general, have figured in much recent music, much of that is nocturnal in character and uses electronic resources (for example, Richard Maxfield's Night Music, the first item on my list of Landmarks, but also works of David Tudor, Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, and even the amplified string quartet in George Crumb's Black Angels).

Addenda: After doing a bit more research, it seems that the mobile phone theory is a highly speculative explanation for Colony Collapse Disorder, and among the several theories in circulation, one concerning pesticides applied to corn (maize) crops appears more likely, but is itself stil speculative. What is abundantly clear is that too little research is being done on the animals who take care of pollination. Although absolutely essential to fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains, beekeeping is the absolute low-end of the modern agricultural system in terms of prestige and profits -- a judgment Virgil would have abhored -- and is a prime example of politics and industrialization making the major mistake of choosing short-term interests over long-tem needs.

This morning, over breakfast, my daughter and I watched a pair of bumble bees pollinating the Mutsu apple tree in our tiny backyard. My appreciation for bees and their relations in the order Hymenoptera has increased immensely. Isn't life grand?

Stokowski pulled out all of the stops

Adding to the thread on orchestral seating arrangements, Gordon Mumma wrote in:

The organ was Stokowski's primary instrument, and as a conductor he never gave up trying different arrangements of the "stops" with his orchestra platform-arrangements.

As an audacious youngster in the early 1950s, I attended two of Stoki's rehearsals, and after one had occasion to talk with him briefly about his "platform" ideas. He said then that he had arrived at an " always useful concept".

As best I remember, he started with the brass: "...best to place them on the sides so that they never face the audience, and when that's necessary they can turn 90 degrees towards the audience for the special effects. The horns should lever be seated with a wall behind them."

(As a horn player, I could have hugged him.)

"Woodwinds can face the audience, but not with the oboes and bassoons next to each other. Strings are separated depending on the compositions; for polyphonic and contrarpuntal music the violins are best opposite, with the 'celli and bases apart from each other. The violas sound fine near the basses..."

The main point in my reference to Stokowski is that he listened to the spatial sonic results of his work, for clarity, just as a good organist would do.

I'll add my two bits to Gordon's: While the organist's discipline was the basis of his technique, the fact that he gave up the organ for the orchestra has also to be figured in, and indeed, Stokowski balanced the mechanics of registration learned at the organ with the primary virtue and difficulty of the orchestra, which us that it is a breathing ensemble of individuals. Stokowski's orchestral sound was praised in its time (and often faulted in our time) for its seamlessness, but close listening always reveals that his unisons and tuttis were always full of grainy details, the product of independent breathing and bowing in the ensemble. And althought the visual focus was on the conductor, he had no difficulty in reconciling "his" global sonic qualities with a personnel policy that inevitably included individual instrumentalists (particularly in the woodwind) with distinctive personalities. One might say, if theoretically inclined, that Stokowski had completely internalized the complex physical behavior of a system, the orchestra, with qualities that might be well characterized by statistical thermodynamics.*

Stokowski is probably the 20th century conductor most out of fashion at the moment, and his style was so intimately connected with his independence from the pack and a unique skill set, that he will probably never be widely imitated, even when historically informed performance practice reaches the mid-20th century. But it is important to note that his style was, in fact, the most innovative of the time, his repertoire was extraordinarily broad (both backward and forward in time), and that he was always at the technological forefront in his concert work as well as in his broadcasts and recordings, less interested in carrying on traditional habits than in real experiment in order to bring out aspects of music that had not yet been heard.

(It should also be noted, especially to those who think classical music has to innovate its presentation style in order to survive, that whatever you're thinking about: pop repertoire, light shows, adding film, everything up to building a cult of personality around a conductor etc., Stokowski probably beat you to the idea by seven or eight decades).

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*That's the most high-fallooting and naive thing I've ever written. Maybe I just should have said that Stokowski did with the orchestra exactly what my uncle the baker did with a batch of bread loaves -- if you looked close enough, each loaf was very different in details, but every loaf tasted unmistakeably like one of Baker Jim's.

Commerce

This week I received (1) a request to review some music software here in return for a copy of the software, (2) a request to add a record firm to my blogroll, and (3) a request from a composer to add some banner advertising here, terms to be negotiated.

I don't do any of these things, but if I had, in fact, added the banner, it would have looked like this:

Seating Order

One small addition to the recent discussion in comments on these pages about orchestral seating orders. The conductors Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez have recently been sharing a Mahler cycle in Berlin with the Staatskapelle. Eleonore Büning, in This morning's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, notes that Boulez has re-arranged the orchestra in the manner of Stokowski, "...the hierarchical-pragmatic variant, in which the outer voices sit far apart, the concertmaster no longer looking directly in the eyes of the solo cellist, so that everything is focused on the central control of the conductor." Barenboim, on the other hand, has stuck with the traditional German seating, an artifact of the historical assemblage of the orchestra, and the arrangement with which Mahler himself would have been familiar.

It's where you play and what you play

I walked past an accordion player today in the Frankfurt Leipzigerstrasse U-Bahn station and recognized him as a street musician I had often seen in Budapest. Not a virtuoso by any measure, but an slightly above average street musician. I greeted him with my rudimentary Hungarian and he immediately stopped played My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean in order to chat a bit.

Given the recent discussion over the experiment with a world-famous violinist busking in Washington D.C. and not earning much with the Bach Chaconne, I was bold and asked how he was doing. He said that he was getting about 200 Euros for three hours playing (I noticed that he was pocketing the money that had landed in his case from time-to-time to conceal the true extent of his success from potential donors). Considering that Leipzigerstrasse is a lively neighborhood but definitely not the center of town, and playing in one of the two station entrances limited his potential audience to only half of the U-Bahn users, I think he was doing well. He also kept his repertoire to popular tunes, old fashioned accordion music that could be recognized, and appreciated for what they were worth, in a passing moment. The Bach Chaconne on the other hand, for all its qualities, is not something that can be really appreciated as passing-by music, as its character is inevitably tied-up with its masterly use of pacing over a substantial duration.

So, before we start to draw too many conclusions from the D.C. experiment, please consider the possibility that a city full of bureacrats, pundits, and politicos in a rush may just not be the best place to busk and, when busking, it may be wise to play repertoire that catches the customers sooner rather than later.

Classical

Paul Bailey has also been thoughtfully working through the recent death/non-death of classical/art music memes. Perhaps part of the difficulty is that the word "classical" has, for musicians, at least three usages -- for music of the late 18th and turn of the 19th centuries, especially Viennese classicism; for the western art music repertoire in general or some broader selection thereof; and finally for an attitude or aesthetic, one emphasizing discipline and clarity, and rather more apollonian than dionysian. My own usages tend to the first and last (with classical antiquity thrown in for some added confusion), and I like the possibility of connecting the classical aesthetic and working methods of a Mozart with those of Alvin Lucier.

But the second definition is probably the most prevalent but also the least helpful: it is aessentially a marketing category, the label under which the (evil, of course) institutional empire of conservatories, opera houses, management services, dinosauraurial recording companies, big-time critics, and the like all like to crawl. But I don't think that it's particularly useful to simply surrender the term and look for another marketing concept. "Classical" has simply too rich an association field to abandon to the bad guys, and besides, the way the world is moving, they're the ones who are scrambling as fast as they can for new marketing concepts for their old ways of doing business, so let them scramble into their post-s, neo-s, and cross-overs, and we'll just gather a little more closely around the classical camp fire.

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Speaking of classics: here's a PDF of the score and a very rough midi-t0-MP3 of my recent setting of a bit of Virgil's Georgics. This is intended to be the soft and sober ending of a small cantata.

Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has died, from a fall, at the age of 84, beating his long-promised "honorable suicide" via cigarettes. Like many in my generation, reading the Vonnegut canon was an essential teenage rite of passage, and then, when the time came to play at being an adult, the equally essential fashion was to dismiss Vonnegut as a passing and somewhat embarrassing adolescent phase, clever and charming, but not of substance or import. Now, with enough time gone to realize that adulthood isn't all that it's cracked up to be, it's clear that adult judgment was in this case not wiser than adolescent enthusiasm. Vonnegut's gifts as a writer were real, much more than their charming surfaces, and although his words sometimes appeared casual, even flippant, the appearance was deceiving and he handled the heaviest of themes with skepticism, differentiation, and all of the weapons a satirist can carry. (It is no small measure of the strengths of his novels as literature that not one of them has been successfully adapted as a film.) The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five are books to keep around.

The Professional

A true story. Or so I've been told. A first experiment in video blogging; the low-tech and stammering product of an idle -- and possibly regrettable -- moment:

Out of the League

Matthew Guerrieri considers the possibility of running major orchestras like Major League Baseball. With all respect to Matthew and his estimable canine companion, that's a really bad idea.

American sports leagues, and Major League Baseball -- with its congressional charter (i.e. a legal monopoly) -- in particular, are designed to value institutions, in this case, privately-owned franchises, over the game itself. Once a major league franchise is granted, it stays a major league team for eternity, with minimal incentive for individual team owners to ensure that their teams consistently perform well.

But this is one area in which the Europeans have a better business and sports model. Teams in a given league do not have secure positions in their leagues, they are continously under pressure to perform well -- the top teams in a league have the possibility to rise to next league up while the poorest performing teams in a league are each year sent down to the next-lower league.

Thus, in Europe, it is possible for a famous, but underperforming team, like Borussia Dortmund, to be threatened (as it is at the moment) with a drop into the second league, while less well-known but talented teams can move up into the big show. If we were to transpose this into American orchestral terms, underperforming orchestras, like the Boston of the late Ozawa era or the present NYPhil, would have had the pressure of second league status (and second league funding) as a major incentive to play better, while less-well recognized but better playing orchestras (like the two major teams in California) would have had clear public recognition of their major league status, which may well have figured into funding and salary issues.

Competition boycott on a roll

Over at the Olist (International Mailing List for Orchestras), there's been a healthy discussion of entry fees for composition contests, a topic that I've covered here before, and my call for boycotting contests with disproportionate fee-to-prize ratios has now been joined by several other musicians.

I don't believe that anyone has illusions that staging a competition comes without organizational costs, and it is entirely reasonable to expect all entrants to submit their materials in the appropriate format and to included self-addressed, postage-paid packaging for the safe return of those materials.

However, there are no circumstances in which an entry fee is justified: neither as a way of funding the competition itself, nor as a way of pre-selecting entries. Pre-selection is better done through a clear description of the contest criteria and materials required (that is to say, pre-selection is done on a musical basis and not on the basis of cash in a checking account). And using the fees to fund the competition is absurd: it is asking the weakest links in the music-financing food chain to ante up for everyone else.

Anyone planning a competition who is unable to raise third-party funds sufficient to cover both organizational and prize costs should simply not be in the business of staging a competition. Basta.

I made my first call for a boycott in December and have received nearly unanimous (if mostly private) support. But it has not yet been taken up by any of the organizations that are supposedly in the business of composer advocacy. So how about it, American Music Cartel Center?

Explicit

There's been some confusion about my post on the Thanatophiles who are pushing the "death of classical music" meme. Let me now be a bit more specific:

The mid-20th century way of doing classical music was built on a strict hierarchy, at the top of which were a handful of name-brand musicians, managed by a smaller handful of name-brand managers, performing in a handful of name-brand houses, recorded by a small handful of recording firms, and reviewed by a handful of critics published by newspapers and magazines which were printed on dead trees. This way of doing business focused, inevitably, on a narrow repertoire of music, performed within an even narrower band of interpretive possibilities.

The "death of classical" meme is being pushed by those who are most immediately threatened by the demise of the old way of doing business. The best example would be a newspaper critic or radio presenter who has focused his (to my knowledge, never a her) career on big artists who play in big halls and record on big labels. When the action moves beyond those small circles, as it has, and the said newsprint critic has to start taking blogging seriously*, or taking download-able recordings seriously, the earth has shook.

This way of doing business has gone the way of the dodo, but in this case, a bit of extinction has made way for greater musical biodiversity: in the newer environment, the hierarchies have been flattened, allowing for greater numbers of artists to perform in a wider variety of venues, to be recorded, to have those recordings available in a wider variety of formats, more flexibly packaged and deliverable through completely new channels, and -- most musically important -- to offer a wider variety of interpretive possibilities. The production and market conditions have so changed that the successful realization of the Naxos business plan -- unlike that of the behemoth Karajan-era Sony -- does not preclude the success of its competitors. Yes, the earth has shook, but we're very much alive, with the potential to thrive, in spite of the death chanting partisans of the old hierarchy.
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* If I still haven't been explicit enough, contrast the predominant assent to the death meme among the dead-tree critics who have been assembled at the ArtsJournal corporate blog with the optimism -- and hard statistics -- of Alex Ross, who has managed remarkably to do both his New Yorker paper route and to blog independently.

Thanatophiles

As I've written here before, I profoundly disagree with the notion of a "death of classical music". This is largely because "classical music" is a moving target, always changing its nature, extent, and limits. It always has been and always will be. Likewise, there is no singular and fixed audience for art music. This is a story well told in the change, in Europe, from courtly to private to popular patronage, or in the relationship between emigration patterns and classical music institutions in the United States, or in the association of western classical music with industrialization in many parts of the world (East Asian countries and Venezuela offer the examples of the moment). Further, hidden by our lament for lost ages inhabited by giants of composers and their heroic interpretors, we tend to lose the perspective that there has never been so much activity in terms of both composition and interpretation as there is today, that there has never been such a diversity of activity, and as difficult as a life as a composer or performer may now be, has it ever been really any easier?.

That said, I agree that -- as wrong as it is -- the "death of classical music" trope is widespread, and that spread is a phenomenon that should undergo some sociological and ethnographic study. In particular, we need to ask who are the individuals and institutions declaring it dead? and what are the individual and institutional needs that are fulfilled by declaring it dead? A death certificate is the first step in an assertion of inheritance and there are plenty of interests with a strong interest and potential for profit in making such a claim.

Declaring the death of a repertoire puts a clear boundary around that repertoire, and the (usual) suspects with a motive for closure and implicit control over that repertoire are clear. (There's nothing more controlling than an embalming, and musical embalming is always done best in a conservatory, or in a recording firm that has grown so large that it no longer has the flexibility to react to the most rapid changes in music or the musical marketplace).

While it's clear that much of 20th century classical musical life can be characterized by the active rejection of new composition in favor of the interpretation of older work, we desperately need some smarter ideas about the ways in which repertoires integrate or reject innovation, and perhaps we can get some ideas from religious and literary scholarship about the ways in which communities for whom the canon has been closed still maintain a creative life.

We still understand very little about the impact of the various technologies for "fixing" a music -- from oral transmission, to notation, and onto sound recording in its changing modes of exchange. A bit of music may or may not have some platonic ideal behind it which these various technologies reproduce to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy, but these technologies raise all sorts of questions about both liveliness and morbidity and further questions about how to distinguish between these two states in an environment in which a parasitic attachment to past liveliness is -- for better or worse -- a substitute for getting on with real change.

Hard to recall

I was in London this past week, for just a bit of unashamed tourism. As it happens, I looked at a lot of theatres, not really for performances and not a single one of them in any depth, but the impressions were vivid and comparisons were unavoidable -- a Punch and Judy player near Covent Garden, that opera house itself, the reconstructed Globe Theatre, the construction site about the South Bank complex, and the commercial theatres all about the center of the city -- and thinking about theatres turned my mind to the classical notion of a theatre of memory (about which Frances Yates has most famously written), a technique of memorizing some material by analyzing the material into bits and associating each bit with a location in a real or imagined physical space -- rooms in a house, niches in a temple, plots in a garden, etc..

Architecture was especially well suited to theatres of memory because real buildings offered at least three dimensions of organization and each of those dimensions could be summoned easily by imagination. When the material you wished to commit to memory was not reduceable to a single list or a two-dimensional matrix or table of relationships, then sometimes such added dimensions of relationships could come in handy. London offers a particularly rich variety of real architecture from which to borrow for memory-work -- from the Punch and Judy stage, upon which the figures only enter or exit, and in a sequence of characters defined rigidly by tradition (i.e. a Punch and Judy play is structured like a simple list), to the Globe, a theatre in which the audience spaces are rigidly classed, and the stage can be parsed simply (left/right or inside/outside, or upstairs/down) or in more complex combinations of spaces, or even theologically (heaven, earth, and hell), or cosmologically (sun, moon, planets, and figures from the zodiac). The Globe clearly offers a number of ways to structure a two or three dimensional matrix of information. But perhaps the largest potential theatre of memory available to a Londoner is the map of the Underground system -- representing a network of extreme complexity with lines, branches, stations (including a number of rather mysterious discontinued stations), junctions, and a naming system that is so often divorced from immediate connections to the places near lines or stations that one sometimes wonders if the Underground is itself a theatre of memory for some long-forgotten text of indeterminate dimensions of complexity.

One measure of the complexity of a bit of music is the amount of difficulty required to commit the music to memory. This is not necessarily the best measure -- certainly not with a memory as poor as my own -- and may sometimes even be misleading. I am able, for example, to write out the score for Steve Reich's Clapping Music or Piano Phase, with a combination of memory and a bit of logic, but those scores hardly represent all of what one would want to recall about the music as experienced. Steven Schick's description of the process of memorizing Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet might be another counter-example, in that the piece as learned and performed was quite something quite distinct from the piece as a compositional performance.

But this form of measurement may still have its uses: a lot of music strikes me as being assignable in memory to a list of Punch and Judy-like single dimensionality and relatively little music demands more than two dimensions of classification. I am altogether uncertain that there is any music with the complexity of the London Underground, unless we move from bits of music to considering entire repertoires (Javanese Karawitan is a useful example, in that the better musicians are continually assimilating repertoire and making material connections between pieces in the repertoire with each performance; the entire repertoire can be heard as a single work of continuously growing dimensional complexity).