Orellana

I have been seriously remiss in not including a link to the very nice website dedicated to the work of the remarkable Guatemalan composer Joaquin Orellana.  This is it, and it's well worth a long visit.   While studying in Buenos Aires in the late 1960s, Orellana became familiar with a state-of-the-art electronic music studio, but on his return to Guatemala City, the then-conventional resources available to him for making electronic music were seriously limited, so Orellana devised acoustical instruments — utiles sonoros (sound utensils) — fashioned out of available local materials, including bamboo, hardwoods, and scrap metal, which he used in place of the banks of oscillators and filters and other modules that were then featured, elsewhere, in analog synthesis studios, as sound sources.  These utensils proved to be much more than simple tools for subsequent tape manipulation, and would frequently be featured as accompaniment instruments to increasingly lyrical melodic material.   

About those landmarks

To date, over the past almost-six years, I've written about 46 personal musical "landmarks" on this blog.  These are not exactly items in the usual "best of" list, but pieces that stand out, for one reason or another, as landmarks in a musical autobiography.  Most of the pieces I've lived with for a longer time, but some — the most recent of which is an orchestral work by Richard Ayres — are new discoveries, Eurekas! from first hearing.  With one exception (the Buckinx 1001 Sonates, of which I've only heard a fraction, as the whole lasts about 24 hours!), I've heard all the concert works live. Some I've performed myself, in most cases I've spent time with the scores, and with the electronic pieces, I've spent hours with the recordings.  Charles Shere recently reminded us on his blog of the traditional sense of the term "Discrimination has to do with specific choices, not categorical ones." And discriminatory the list is, indeed, made of specific choices, allowing complete works only in the case of Machaut and sets of works in the case of the Purcell viol music.   The only meaningful categories under which these landmarks fall is my own biography and taste, so it is a bit of an indulgence, but it seems the process of list-making has a life of its own and inevitably starts to assert its own set of rules.  One of the rules has been that I have avoiding, to date, naming a single composer twice.  This has been very hard in some cases (among them Monteverdi, Debussy, Ives, Cage, Lucier, and Young) and in one case, Berlioz, indecision over which piece, exactly, to include, has long kept me from adding a work even though it is insanely obvious that a half-dozen pieces by Berlioz ought to be long overdue for inclusion.  In a couple of cases, the personality of the composer gets in the way of a piece I treasure — is Ruggles's racism a roadblock for Sun Treader or Angels, for example? (I did put Hyperprism on the list, knowing about the anti-semitic streak in some of Varese's letters, so I'm not altogether consistent on this score.)  Finally, for all of the diversity on this list, it's definitely a western-classical-tradition-based assemblage and there certainly aren't enough women.  I can only defend myself here in that in the cases of non-western repertoire that I value highly, even with years of exposure, I don't believe that I am always able to really discriminate wisely among the repertoire. Etenraku is a gorgeous piece, one that I've known since High School, but it's the one piece people know of Gagaku when they know only one piece of Gagaku and including it would be more a marker of my ignorance of a repertoire I don't know well enough.  In the case of Javanese music, which I know much better, the more I know about fantastic pieces like Gadhung Mlathi or Gendhing Bonang Tukung, the more obvious it is how little I really know.  And then, in many other cases, for example South Indian classical music or Diné (Navajo) ceremonial music, using a term like "composition" or "work" or "piece" seems so clumsily inaccurate.   Finally, the list is getting close to the number 50; while it would be easy to name 100 or many 100s of landmark pieces, I think that an honest number — of pieces that I know well enough to stand behind them as a musician — has got to stop around 50 or 60, otherwise it's the equivalent of teenage boys bragging about the size of their record collections.  Anything more than that would be presumptuous.  Or maybe, once I reach 50 or so, the better idea would be to keep that total as a limit and then, if I decide to add anything, I have to strike something else off the list to make room...  

Why is climbing a flight of stairs like listening to Bruckner?

In the study, published Friday in Science, they showed how they measured the effect on a scale of about one foot (33 centimeters) to demonstrate how people age faster when standing a couple of steps higher on the staircase. (Hat tip: here.)

Too much, too little

For many composers, for centuries apparently, part of the primal ritual of establishing a composerly identity has been an obligatory period of conflict with one's teacher(s).  I was lucky in that I was spared that period of conflict.  I got along with my teachers and they (mostly) got along with me and we even continue to get along pretty well.  Now, some of my teachers — Lucier and Young, in particular — came out of their own obligatory periods of conflict with composerly identities employing an absolute minimum of means to achieve a particular maximum of musical quality.  For their perspective, it is probably the case that my music tends to do too much or have too much, but thankfully they have been consistently gracious about it.  

On the other hand, there are certainly a large number of musicians for whom my music appears pretty minimal.  I just emailed a copy of a wind quintet to a friend in the Netherlands who got rather cross with me because the score, with plenty of notes, has no dynamics. There happens to be a reason for the absence — the piece is about something other than dynamics, so as long as the loudness or softness of the players doesn't get in the way of all the things that the piece actually is about, or better yet, brings out some of those things, it's really all the same to me — but for my friend, I was was being irresponsibly minimal.  No matter that I had explained that I had really worked on the issue of the dynamics, that not including them was a serious, not a casual, decision, and that while I could have come up with some system or just written in some dynamics extemporaneously, that would have been, to my ear and mind and taste and temperament, essentially an arbitrary act.  Never mind,  I had violated his notions about the minimum contents of a respectable score.  

People really get angry about these issues and while never quite getting angry, I have worried about them as well.  (See this post about fat crayons and musical pidgins  from 2005.)  I suspect not a few experimentalists and complexists have had some envy for the ability of mainstream composers to sort of skip the issue entirely, riding along on the autopilot of conventional practice.  If I have acquired any wisdom on the topic it's this: The problem is never too many or too few notes, it's having the right ones. My own druthers are for a lower limit, but the choice of a minimum of ways or means requires a certain amount of confidence in your choices.  On the other hand, being more inclusive, more expansive, and/or more complicated can be a good way of covering up a lack of confidence, with a surfeit of apparent labor providing a tempting measure of cover for that lack.  Neither approach is automatically going to be more likely to produce the right notes, so if someone starts to knock you for having too many or too few notes, just knock 'em right back with notice that quantity alone is an inadequate substitute for actually having some criteria. 

Landmarks (46)

Karel Goeyvaerts: Nummer 1 (1950) (Sonata for two pianos).

The name of the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts is probably encountered most in discussions over who did or didn't compose the earliest completely serialized work (a pissing contest that won't be entered here.) The handful of serial pieces Goeyvaerts composed in between 1950 and 1957, for instruments or magnetic tape, are each remarkable, on their own immediate musical terms, above and beyond their technical features. Nummer 2, for thirteen instruments, for example, is a work that finds company well next to pieces like Babbitt's Composition for Twelve Instruments or Wolff's Nine, which are a pair of pieces you wouldn't ordinarily expect to encounter in the same neighborhood.  

Nummer 1, originally given the title Sonata for two pianos and also known as Opus 1, is something of a strict process piece, and to some extent, this process-character makes the piece more like some experimental repertoire than other "classic" serial pieces.*  It is frequently mentioned for a controversial public reading, by the composer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, at Darmstadt, a performance that definitely troubled some critical listeners (Adorno among them) for the piece's stubborn refusal to appeal to traditional musical rhetoric.  Goeyvaerts's ideal was not a music in which tonal relationships unfolded in and articulated time dynamically but rather tonal events were placed in time as elements of a larger, static tone structure.  There is a closeness here, both to Cage's filling-in of a predetermined time structure from charts of possible materials and the static harmony of the radical music with reduced means that would later emerge on the west coast of the US with La Monte Young and his cohort. At the time of composition, Goeyvaerts's closest professional friend was Stockhausen, and it is impossible not to recognize shared elements of both technique and aesthetic in the subsequent work of the two composers (Kreuzspiel, for starters), but one is equally aware of the substantial aesthetic difference between the two, and that, I think, can be located in Goeyvaerts's dark, gentle, and slightly grotesque choice of tones, which would later allow the composer to fashion a more-generalized notion of a static harmony underlying materials more conventionally tonal in character (indeed, sometimes close to later minimal musics) as well.   

At the time of their most active exchanges, both Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen were reading Sein und Zeit and Doktor Faustus and Das Glasperlenspiel, continental philosophical and literary sources with a mixture of ratio and mysticism which were perhaps even more urgent influences than in the music of Messiaen, Schoenberg, or Webern.  The handful of works Goeyvaerts made under this influence, however, hovered around a existential minimum that Stockhausen did not seriously approach in any completed work, and this was perhaps the immediate cause of a halt in compositional output for several years until his re-emergence as a para-minimalist in the late 1960s.    

*A technical footnote, for those inclined: Let me describe some of the procedures in the second (of four) movements, whose retrograde makes up the third movement.  It involves the simultaneous rotation of two ordered seven-tone sets, each sharing two common pitches which are fixed in register, the eb below middle c and the second a above middle c.  The remaining pitches contract in register through the movement, a process that is perfectly audible, especially when you have the two fixed-register pitches in the back of your ears.  Goeyvaerts serializes additional parameters in a way that ingeniously associates pitches with durations, dynamics, and types of articulation through assigning numerical values to a pitch's intervallic distance from the two fixed pitches; a value to each available duration based on distance above or below a median durational value; a value to each of four dynamic levels; and a value to each of two forms of articulation.  Each individual tone then, through the combination of interval, duration, dynamic, and articulation, has a sum numerical value that Goeyvaerts does not allow to exceed seven. The effect is a net, if subtle, reinforcement of the attraction of the two tonal poles of attraction.  The ways in which the two sets are distributed between the pianos and then between each pianist's hands are fascinating as well, partitioning organized as broad gestures in pitch space, yet not parse-able as thematic material.  

   

Pareidolia

I was out about town today doing some field recordings.  I was focusing on public transportation, conversing passers-by, skateboarding, and water, especially public fountains.  (There are vague plans to make a piece incorporating such bits of acoustical realia.)  One of the most fascinating things about many continuous or repetitious sounds is that when listening, even idly, we all start grouping events into rhythmic, indeed metric, patterns, finding stress accents in stimulus that is essentially undifferentiated, vague, or random.  This phenomenon, usefully, has a name, pareidolia, and is familiar with visual as with auditory sensations, whether finding poodles in cloud formations or rhythmic grooves in streetcar clatter.  Pareidolia definitely has a downside, in that it can provide the stuff to feed some serious misapprehensions about the world (it may well be the root of half the conspiracy theories floating around), but the upside, as a composer, is obvious, as we're actually in the business of turning misapprehensions about the sounding world into musical surprises.

Deep Style

The opera season here in Frankfurt has begun again, and I find myself once again chaperoning an eight-year-old supernumerary to rehearsals and performances of Don Carlo.  While waiting around, I've heard a lot of Don Carlo, and heard it now with several changes of cast.  Verdi is not the turf that experimental composers usually tread, but I've been honestly impressed, and especially by those elements of the music which are simply not to be found in the score.  These, mostly of micro-timing, of tempo, rhythm, and rubato, are constantly in flux at the smallest level, and the practice here is one that comes honestly out of a real aural tradition. It helps, here in Frankfurt, that the orchestra and the conductor have a long relationship of playing Verdi together — more than thirty years — but the key here, I think, is the conductor, Carlo Franci (83 years old, if Wikipedia has it right), who has every note of the score in solid memory and it seems that every nuance of timing and pitch between those notes, each nudge of rubato, or grace of portamento, comes from a strange and wonderful place poised between an absolute identification with the performance tradition and an ability to spring at the possibilities of the moment.  To work with such confidence and security as well as continued discovery is a sign of a performing tradition at its best, style that is anything but surface, anything but facile.

Pak Cokro

A video portrait on the occasion of Pak Cokro's 100th birthday. Pak Cokro (also known as KPH Notoprojo, KRT Wasitodiningrat, KRT Wasitodipuro), was one of the most important musicians of the 20th century, born into the royal house of Pakualaman, the minor court in Yogyakarta, Java, Pak Cokro eventually became music director of the Pakualaman and of the Yogyanese radio station. He was central to a movement to combine the classical gamelan styles of the two Central Javanese kingdoms, Surakarta and Yogyakarta, and became known in the west first through the Nonesuch recording produced by Robert E. Brown, and then directly, through many years of teaching in California. In California, his many students included the composer Lou Harrison. A performance of the Pakualaman's traditional royal entry piece, Puspawarna, under Pak Cokro's leadership was included in the recording which accompanied the Voyager spacecraft, a perfect example of human music-making at its very best.  This informal documentary is a valuable record of one of the last musicians to have worked as a functionary in the semi-autonumous court environment in the colonial era under the Dutch and then during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia and finally functioning as a state composer in the independent Republic of Indonesia.  

An American is a complex of occasions...

Charles Olson reads 'Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]' (Mar 1966)

(Hat tip: Silliman's Blog)

This is not a guillotine.

A list I subscribe to recently had a small item about Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), which is not exactly the kind of thing I write about here.  Dialogues may well be the most-performed opera of the second half of the 20th century.  It's a lush piece, requires limited stage resources, has forgiving vocal writing and is not overly long.  But it's not really a work which pushes any boundaries.  

But this item did mention an interesting feature in the work: two players from the percussion section are assigned the responsibility for the sound of the (off-stage) guillotine, "one producing a crescendo-glissando with a metal object on the edge of a tam-tam(laid flat in order to create a dry scraping sound) as a grace-note to a hammer-stroke on a large wooden box produced by the other player."

This happens to be a superb illustration of musical representation:  Poulenc, writing in 1957, could well have used a recording of real guillotine, or even positioned a real guillotine offstage and have it slice through something head-like (a ham, or perhaps a melon?) for each decapitation in the score, that is to say, treated it like a film or stage sound effect (in film, this would probably be assigned to a sound effects artist, possibly a foley artist, although, not being produced by visible hands or feet, it is not, technically, a foley effect).  But Poulenc decided to treat it as a musical representation, timed to the score, produced by percussionists in the pit, and with not only a technical description of the sound production but a precise musical description of the sounds required and their placement in musical time.  

This sound in Dialogues is thus something that the listener will immediate identify within the narrative as a guillotine, but it is also more than that as the noises are tightly integrated into a rhythmic and tonal context.  It is even possible to imagine the same striking sound occurring in different works of music, completely divorced from its representative function. This is, of course, typical of the history of the European orchestral franchise as, for example, horns and trumpets and trombones gradually became members of the ensemble, initially representing functional sounds, associated, respectively, with the hunt, battle, and the church tower, yet eventually becoming integrated into the ensemble for more strictly — and abstractly — musical functions.   Aside from occasional visits by instruments like the saxophone (an instrument carrying its own associations), the last two centuries in the history of orchestration have featured the gradual addition of percussion instruments, often introduced first in the opera, typically first through either such literal representations of diegetic sounds or the invocation of the exotic.      

 

Erring on the Side of the Angels

At the end of his recent blogged series, The Anosognosic’s Dilemma, Errol Morris quotes Noam Chomsky on the limits of human cognition: 

“We are after all biological organisms not angels . . . If humans are part of the natural world, not supernatural beings, then human intelligence has its scope and limits, determined by initial design. We can thus anticipate certain questions will not fall within [our] cognitive reach, just as rats are unable to run mazes with numerical properties, lacking the appropriate concepts. Such questions, we might call ‘mysteries-for-humans’ just as some questions pose ‘mysteries-for-rats.’ Among these mysteries may be questions we raise, and others we do not know how to formulate properly or at all.” 

It strikes me that musical experiment, the radical music, is always going to tease out such questions, such mysteries, sometimes with success but often courting failure (i.e. music which doesn't "work" or makes no "sense").  In doing so, particularly in accepting the possibility of failure, experimental music distinguishes itself from conventional music-making which more safely plans its effects and affects, using known materials and methods.  Yet, more than that, the radical music errs, when it errs, — and err it does — on the side of the optimistic assumption that the extents and limits of our human musical perception and cognition are just a little bit closer to those of the angels.   

Well, that was short...

It took eight years to go from the Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch to the Justin Bieber stretch-out, and from there, I reckon that it's taken about two weeks to officially become a audio production cliché, which is probably a typical rate of idea consumption and exhaustion in the transition from art to commercial music. In the past week, I've received links to about a half-dozen new stretched pieces, all made, one assumes, in the wake of the Bieber.  Now, as an experimentalist, I have nothing against the use of clichés — there still being plenty (to paraphrase Schoenberg) of good music to be made from stretched out bubble gum — but the music can't stand alone on its slow motion.  Stretching is now just additional material, and a work of music using it will have to have other compelling qualities to sustain that material. 

Passacaglia from FIGURE & GROUND (1994-5)

[The]

There's a new website documenting the new music duo of Ed Harkins and Philip Larson, otherwise known as [The], here.  (Hat tip from the composer Steed Cowart.)  Based in the Music Department at UC San Diego since the early 1970s, Harkins (a virtuoso trumpeter and a specialist in complex rhythm) & Larson (a fine bass-baritone) are definitely not your typical academics, academic musicians, or just plain musicians (or are they dancers?)  [The] grew out of the now-legendary Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble resident at UCSD from 1973 to 1983 and rapidly became a favorite on the new music circuit, with fans including John Cage and George Carlin.  New music is not necessarily a sombre affair.   (The video above is an excerpt from [The]'s signature piece, "for trumpet and dancer," a piece with perhaps the drollest page turn of all time.)

Writing as if Composing

Run-on and runaway sentences; hanging sentence fragments; needling repetition; odd punctuation; obscurities and neologisms;  abrupt shifts of register, both up and down; anacoluthons; non-sequitors; too much stuffed away between ellipses, brackets, braces, or parentheses (when not hidden in footnotes below); seemingly arbitrary settings of text in italic or boldface character; metaphors mixed and mashed; knowingly faulty logic; opinions presented as facts; abused rhetoric (all 38 of Schopenhauer's Arts of Being Right on display and then-some)...  Guilty as charged!  All I can ask is that you, dear reader, bear with me even if these aspects of Renewable Music's house style book grate like so many fingernails on blackboards or even more ants in a bento box on a Saturday picnic turned to thunder, lightning, rain, gentle rain, then too much rain... The idea — and there really is one, here — is that the webblog is still a new medium, and one which has not yet found its extents and limits as a form of prose (or not-prose), and one which is not yet immune to the methods of an experimental composer, thus the breathless and short-of-breath and stuttered lines, the sudden interjections, jarring accents, and ragged articulations, and all those sounds, those troubled, troubling, consoling, caring, sweet, everyday, exotic, exhalted sounds...  What could be better than to aspire to a condition of music?  My fault, my failure then, may not be the experimenting but rather the stubborn fact of not having experimented enough. 

[Except, of course, for careless errors in spelling, grammar, or typos.  The fault, there, belongs to the damn computer.]

From the Armed Man to Single Ladies

The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, has investigated a recent Proms score by Mark-Anthony Turnage, discovering that it is, in part, an amped-up transcription of a recent pop hit  (here and, most astonishly, here).   Between this and the 800% slowed down Justin Bieber tune, noted on this page a few days ago, one starts to wonder if we are moving into a new era in which art music parodies of popular material become a central genre.  While I'm certain that there are some intellectual property thickets to cross through here, if this phenomenon establishes itself, it would seems to be placing the relationship between commercial and art music production back onto a more comfortable plain, and a plain long familiar to composers.  Just think of all those masses built around the Renaissance pop song L'Homme Armé, many of them stretching the melody or hiding it in a dense texture beyond immediate recognition, or the complexes of remembered tunes and landscape in Ives (and, to some extent, Mahler). I've long subscribed to the notion that composers compose out of their acoustical  environments, and such popular musical material is often — and unavoidably — as much a part of the environment as the bird songs, stormy weather, or traffic noises that can appear in musical works.  

How Ideas Come, Get Spent, And Go (And Sometimes Come Back Again)

I really like this list of ten lost technologies.  How do good ideas get forgotten? Often because they have been kept secret (typical in family-run enterprises or with military technologies, in which secrecy has a commercial or strategic value.)  Sometimes, however, good ideas wear out their usefulness and get replaced by alternatives.  There has been a great exchange on this process in economic theory among some prominent social science bloggers (here is a good place to start).  Among music scholars, ethnomusicologists have long been occupied with the process of theoretical change and the so-called new musicologists took up this theme in the '80s (and now, having become institutionalized itself, the new musicology is increasingly confronted with an offense by a more traditional musicology).  Curiously, it is in music theory proper (and its speculative counterpart, composition) that discussion of the patterns of theoretical change seems to be handled at greatest distance.  I suspect that this is, at least in part, due to some deep uncertainty about music theory's status as a theory (e.g. a theory of what, precisely?) and not simply description of compositional practice that lies behind this reticence,  but I may well be very wrong about this. 

In music, generally, there has been an accretion of ideas and techniques over time, making ever-more resources available to a composer and generally increasing the complexity of music produced.  Instrument builders, like those in the Stradivarius workshop mentioned in the article cited above, may keep their trade secrets close, but music itself is essentially "open source", so that musical techniques can usually be decoded and reproduced.   This is not, however, universally the case.  Clarino trumpet playing, for example, largely disappeared after the mid-18th century, and the virtuoso cornett technique disappeared even earlier, with both techniques returning, conjecturally and with mixed effect, in the early music "revival" of the later 20th century.  The subtleties of musical change are best demonstrated in the history of musical style.  Sometimes, stylistic change goes in the direction of simplifying one or more dimensions of music. Thus, some late fourteenth century music is, in some major parameters, more complex than the music which succeeded it, and similar phenomena can be found at several other junctions in music history.  In general, stylistic change is a mixed bag: post-serial musics, for example, may often be computationally less sophisticated than classical serial works, but they can be much richer in historical references and contextual associations.

Stylistic change in music seems to me, however, to be most tightly bound to the life of the institutions which cultivate and present music.  The change from chapel and court patronage to that of American universities and Western European radio stations is significant, as is the change from the live public concert or private music-making to broadcasts and recorded media.  These changes have contributed mightily to the continued liveliness and variety of music itself (indeed, they made the notion of a renewable music possible.)   In this context, it's been somewhat distressing to read the controversy over music in an age of digital technology which has been going on in the recent issues of MusikTexte.  The most distressing item in the exchange is a new article "Against the Deinstitutionalization of Music" by C.-S. Mahnkopf, who appears determined to become the Joseph Ratzinger of of new music in his defense and plea for the extension of the present, state-organized and financed music-institutional landscape in Germany.  Mahnkopf's ex cathedra statements about new music have been part of the background noise in German new music for some time, but this time the noise level has moved beyond  irritation to outright disturbance with his failure to recognize that large institutions inevitably support an ever-smaller variety of music and necessarily put long-tenured bureaucrats into positions of authority over the determination of which music gets made, where and when.  The central mission of such institutions inevitably becomes that of sustaining their own lives and accumulating control over any available resources.  Equally problematic is Mahnkopf's failure to recognize the importance of private initiatives and alternative institutions to music's liveliness, in that each are willing to risk failure in going forward and — like Phoenixes emerging from their own ashes — are better able to respond to the forces of both success and failure, to regroup, and to reinvent or reform themselves around the particular challenges of new musical ideas.  (One readily imagines that Mahnkopf's goal is to set himself up as a central arbitrator of new musical life in Germany, akin to Boulez in France a generation ago, with his inability to recognize that the strength in German post-war new music has largely been its decentralization, which contrasts positively with France's ultra-montane Boulez-led centrism, a definite signal of his intentions.) 

Mahnkopf complains that the discussion in on economic and not purely cultural terms, but we are, inescapably, going to have to talk about economics — at the very least in terms of revenue sources and the allocation of resources;  the notion that culture can exist in an economics-free vacuum, I will simply leave alone.  Mahnkopf further mistakenly confuses the path of deinstitutionalization with economic neo-liberalization, when what is in question is not a strict privatization of the arts, but rather a diversification of the portfolio in investments in the arts in an attempt to optimize the relationship of the arts to contemporary technologies, resources, and opportunities. 

While I would certainly like to see music, and new music in particular, the beneficiary of ever-greater state (and corporate and private) largesse,  that largesse should be spread as widely as possible.  I don't want it to come with any greater degree of state control and I don't believe that simply perpetuating the existing structures of commissioning, presenting and distributing new music in Germany or extending those structures to the rest of Europe, or indeed the entire planet, as Mahnkopf proposes, is a useful idea.  Large institutions can be extremely useful, even essential for making some works possible, and they should have a role in any future mixed economy of musical presentation, but they can also become less useful or even destructive and we shouldn't automatically assume that the end of any given institution, however large or venerable, is necessarily a bad thing. Moreover, no institution should be viewed as an all-purpose,  cookie cutter-model to be arbitrarily reproduced in each and every possible location. It's not hard to recognize that a great deal of the individual character of each institution and the liveliness of the work produced is due in large part to their particular location in geography as well as time.  (Case in point: the acoustics of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus pit are wonderful — if entirely an accident, due to Wagner's desire to make the hall absolutely dark — and it is absolutely possible to reproduce those acoustics in a new hall anywhere, but there is no reason in the world to do that. A reproduction would remove something special about Bayreuth and create something somewhere else that was not special at all!)

       

 

True Stories (1)

So... two composers, a hard-core complexist and an equally hard-core experimentalist, happen to meet in the lumber department of a hardware store, waiting in line to get some plywood cut to order. The experimentalist asks the complexist why he's there. The complexist answers that he's "working on a very big piece, and I'm using so many oversize charts and graphs and tables and arrays" that he needed a piece of plywood so he could add an extension to his desk in order to accommodate all his paperwork. "Why are you here?" asked the complexist in return. The experimentalist smiled: "I like the sound of plywood going through a really big table saw."

Bacon for the Ears

What bacon is for food, stretching is for electronic music.  It can make anything sound better. Here's a prime example, made with Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch.  

Slowing things down, widening the perceptual frame, was one of the initial impulses in the minimal side of the radical music.  La Monte Young's goal was to be able to "get inside the sound", to bring out all of the detail and complexity of acoustic events which on first impression may appear to  be simple, minimal.  (The ability to slow down music without altering pitch was also one of Steve Reich's initial concerns; not satisfied with the technical possibilities in the analog electronic studio of his day, this kind of process was eventually realized by real live players in Reich's Four Organs.) 

Now that stretching has become so ubiquitous, has it already achieved the status of a cliché?  In film music, I suspect that this is already the case. Fortunately, in experimental music, there are no clichés, just resources worth reconsidering.

(Excuse the sparse posting here.  My recovery is taking longer than I expected.)

The Aerophor Returns

In 2007, I wrote a post here about the Aerophor, a device designed in the early 20th century to assist wind players with sustained passages.   While controlled reservoirs of air have long played a part in creating a sustained tone for certain wind cap and free reed instruments, the foot pedal-operated Aerophor appears to have been a unique machine as it was intended for standard orchestral winds.  

I was able to find little further information about this until, recently, Mr Jacob Polak, of Amsterdam, visited this site and communicated that the inventor of the Aerophor was, in fact, his grandfather, Bernard Samuels, of the Netherlands, for a time conductor at the Royal Opera in Schwerin. (Following other web sources, I had misspelled the inventor's name and misidentified him as Belgian rather than Dutch.)  Mr Polak was kind enough to send some fascinating documentation about the Aerophor which he has permitted me to share here (click on individual images below to enlarge.)  Based on the description contained in the text the last image below, the Aerophor was a more subtle and sophisticated device than I had previously imagined, consisting not only of a bellows and tube, but a reservoir of water and an electric light bulb, insuring that the air supplied was appropriately warm and damp.  Lacking an actual specimen of the Aerophor, perhaps this documentation will be sufficient encourage a recreation of this useful auxiliary instrument!  

[Image sources: 1st picture: unknown; 2nd picture: "How the Aerophor Aids Players of Brass and Wood Winds", The Music Trades, April 4, 1914, p. 41; 3rd picture and details: "Der Tonbinde-Apparat 'Aerophor'", Allgemeine Deutsche Musiker-Zeitung, 8. Februar 1913; final picture: "Artificial breath for wind instruments", Technical World Magazine, August 1914, p. 906.  Again, many thanks to Mr Polak for his research.]

To Publish = To Make Public

There has been a thoughtful discussion at Amusicology about the relatively small number of musicology blogs  (a number substantially reduced Ithinks by the recent end of Dial "M" for Musicology) .  

The reasons are, of course, manifold and complex, but I believe that a major reason has been an attitude towards publication which has come to dominate the practice of academic musicology.   This attitude focuses  on publication directed towards fellow and sister academics rather than to a more general public, and is carried out through the publication forms most likely to be credited in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions (and — coincidentally or not — the ones you can access only if you have the independent wealth to afford a subscription or have access to a good University library or JSTOR).   While there are, indeed, advantages to these publications, the quality filters of peer review among them, and the necessity of some filters given the terrific strain placed on the profession by the limited number of available academic positions must also be recognized, this leads to a general avoidance if not disregard in the profession of forms of publication intended for wider audiences, blogs among them.  

Musicologists do appear in marginal news stories from time to time — when discovering or authenticating a long-lost manuscript or as forensic witnesses in plagiarism cases — but the general invisibility of the profession, particularly in making a wider public aware of some of the more extraordinary attributes and excitements of music has got to be a long-term form of shooting oneself in the foot.  Now we can have some substantial disagreements about the directions which musicology has taken (i.e. the move to a more contextual/historical/sociological musicology and away from the production of editions, biographies and reconstruction of performance practice*), but there ought to be some consensus that a more public musicology would be advantageous in securing and building on the current status and numbers of tenure lines in comparison with the current, closed-circuit approach.  The natural sciences have done a very good job with making their work public and even popular and perhaps that should be the model.   (If there's a Science Friday on public radio, why not a Musicology Monday?)

Two other small observations:  The first is that blogs can fill one particular niche in musicological publication that the major journals appear to have largely abandoned: that of the small item, detailing a minor but not unimportant finding.   Some years ago, I had a great conversation in Budapest with the late theorist John Clough, in which we bemoaned the fact that academic writing in music had become largely limited to the form of a substantial essay, while many results, insights, and discoveries were smaller than that particular breadbasket.  Moreover,  with journal publication schedules on perpetual delay, there was little sense of timeliness in publication, and timeliness is certainly an attribute of the excitement of a discovery.  Blogs, lists, and other forms of internet publication can certainly fill this void.

The second small observation is that with the natural attenuating affect of the tenure process, forms of publication which focus almost exclusively on an audience in the academy are unnecessarily distancing themselves from some of their most astute, best informed, and, potentially, most usefully critical readers.  The function of musicology in a University is not only to produce more musicologists but to produce more professional musicologists but to produce a more musicologically-informed body of musicians and audiences.  Within this body, the trained-but-amateur musicologist is a noble and undervalued element as well as a natural ally outside of aceme who is disregarded at the peril of the profession, and more essentially, at the peril of the advancement of musicology and music-making in general.        

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* Need I note that the long-overdue production of an edition of the works of Johanna Beyer has come about by the volunteer work of a consortium of composers and the Frog Peak Press cooperative, not by musicologists and a University press?

   

Fantastic Symphony

Perhaps unique for a 1983 graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, all of my experience with drug-induced expansions of perception were vicarious in nature and — to date — I've smoked exactly one cigarette, which had nothing but ordinary commercial-grade tobacco in it*. Nevertheless, I was wildly interested in the possibility of be able to hear more, going so far as to replicate John Cage's famous visit to an anechoic chamber and even spending an essentially Santa Cruz evening floating in the warm salt water of a sensory depravation chamber, but these experiences were enhanced by nothing more chemical than perhaps a room temperature can of Mountain Dew or a chocolate-covered expresso bean, my then-favorite means for pulling study all-nighters.

I twice started dissertations about prominent experimental music composers only to get hung up by the fact that I had no idea how to deal with their drug use. The composers in question were active in an era in which drug use among artists was not unusual, and in their personal (one of the two actually spent some time in jail on a drug bust; the other I never met when he did not appear to be tripping) and, especially, musical biographies, drug use was so central that the fact that I had no personal handle on the topic seemed to unduly limit my work. In the end, this was a major reason among several for dropping each project.

My experience with opiates has been, until today, limited to their use in dental surgery. But today, I've taken a plunge: I returned from Budapest last week feeling great, but a day later discovered that the chicken pox which disrupted Christmas Vacation in my first year of grade school had returned with the vengeance known as shingles. The skin blisters I can handle, but the neuralgia that has come with it, making it impossible to sit, lie, stand, lean, or move anywhere for more than ten minutes without irritation, agitation and pain caused me to break down and ask the doctor for a strong pain killer. He obliged with all the appropriate warnings, and I've done my obligatory avoidance of driving vehicles or operating heavy machinery. (Heck, I'm even staying away from the blender and the electric toothbrush, a very scary pair of machines given the right frame of mind.)

So, now I'm having my own long-avoided chemically-induced state of altered consciousness. And so far, I have one salient musical observation, which is that the idea of Berlioz may have been inspired by an opium experience in writing his Marche au supplice, but by no means could he have written it while on opium. For me, I can make some non-consequential sounds on the piano, and I can certainly imagine some more interesting sounds, but nothing like really composing. Well, at least I can blog...
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*For the record, lest I sound like a prude, I did like my bourbon and dark beers, and I very much enjoy swearing. Moreover, I have removed Gideon Bibles from motel rooms. (see: Ogdon Nash, The Strange Case of the Irksome Prude.)

Curses & Snake Oil, Practice & Theory

Alex Ross has a pair of posts (here and here) about a harmonic progression with some significant history, moving, for example, from F# Major to d minor, two chords with no common tones.

As it happens — the lattice of coincidence being what it is —, in Budapest last week, I picked up a copy of Ernő Lendvai's Verdi and Wagner, a volume intended to be the first of several on "Bartók and the 19th century". Lendvai is best known to musicians for his thesis that major structural divisions in Bartók's music correspond to Fibbonaci proportions and the golden section. I've never been convinced that this thesis is precisely true, but find it unremarkable that such proportions in a rough form are present as it simply makes sense that major events in the course of a musical work would be successfully programmed to maximize our attention by appearing somewhere between the half-way point and the end, and a sequence like 1:2, 2:3, 3:5, 5:8, 8:13, ... hovers right in that region.* I suspect that a great deal of hovering around these ratios has been and will be tolerated in the exact divisions of a single musical work, so much so that an over-obsession with precision is probably unneccessary; moreover, in Lendvai's own accounting of Bartók's actual proportions, there is enough variability — particularly due to tempi — that considerable fuzziness in the ratios of real elapsed time are inevitable. This series of books, however, was intended to focus on Bartók's relationship to a harmonic tradition, in particular that of the major later 19th century opera composers, Verdi and Wagner. (It's worth adding here that the two more immediate influences on the younger Bartók's practice were Richard Strauss and Franz Liszt, who could be considered as mediator's between Bartók and those operatic styles.) I bought the book with nothing more in mind than having some streetcar riding material, but it did turn out to be fascinating reading, although in ways Lendvai certainly did not intend. What Lendvai did intend was to describe later 19th century harmonic practice in terms of the interraction between the diatonic and the chromatic, the one irregularly, assymmetricly, divided, the other evenly and symmetrical. So far, so good. But Lendvai's treatment rapidly goes beyond this, constructing an elaborate system with idiosyncratic terminology and then going well beyond his system proper by associating literal "meanings" for particular harmonic relationships with excourses into topics like key characteristics. The bulk of the volume is given over to a description of Verdi's Falstaff.

As far as I'm concerned, music theory of this sort is close to snake oil, with its effectiveness as analysis approximating a placebo effect more than a real account of what our ears and brains do with musical sounds. That said, the fact that real musicians have taken and do take such constructions seriously, as an impetus to the production of real — and often very fine — music, means that it is a real part of the culture around the music and, at the very least, we have an ethnographic obligation to take it seriously as well, at the very least as a locally coventional — if, ultimately, in terms of the psychoacouctical and neurological foundations of musical perception, arbitrary — means of giving constraint and order to musical materials. Lendvai's "theory" is, ultimately, a doctrine, positing for the late 19th century an extension and equivalent to the earlier doctrines of musical figures and affects.

Now, the chord progression which Ross has noted might be described in terms of any number of theoretical "systems" — Lendvai's among them — and individual composers may well work productively with such systems, and it has certainly established itself in the repertoire as a recognizeable figure with an associated affect, but there is probably no real need to call up either an elaborate theoretical apparatus or an existing repertoire of usage to identify the salient qualities of the progression: the two chords are connected by a smooth ("parsimonious" is the term of art) voice leading,** yet — depending upon how one deals with "enharmonically equivalent" tones — do not come from a common diatonic collection. Most tonal music bops along within the same diatonic collection, venturing from time to time to collections that share most tones, so a sudden jump like this one plays with our habits and expectations. The effect — and possibly, affect — is thus both smooth and startling.

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* When one traces the development of the Sonata form, one finds a similar refinement of proportions, successively moving the point of furthest harmonic remove from the center of the simple AABB Sonata further back into a development section.
** It is not a coincidence that the examples here are taken from vocal ensemble and opera, in which changes of texture, i.e. not maintaining a constant four-voice ensemble, are frequent.

What is missing from too much new music?

Lightness and irony (alone and in combination).

How many composers do you know within three zip codes of your home?

A friend in the US recently made this suggestion:

Many people appreciate the beneficial presence of art galleries in small communities, but these businesses struggle. Art dollars flow towards urban centers on grounds of prestige. How about making local art purchases, say within three zip codes of the buyer's residence, tax deductible?

Republicans and Democrats could get together on this: a tax cut through which the government funds the arts by encouraging private spending. And the government would lose little revenue -- some of the tax burden the collectors avoid would pass through the dealers and artists.

I think this is a splendid idea, especially when it is extended to artists working in non-visual arts. Yep, tax breaks for new music commissions.  It seems even a politically plausible idea, given the preference of Democrats for stimulus and arts funding and Republicans for tax cuts of almost any sort.  (The scale of this proposal would probably be dwarfed by the massively state-subsidized sports stadiums which have been widely supported by Republicans; see, for example, George W. Bush and the Texas Rangers baseball team.)  

An essential part of a more lively future for new music has got to be giving more emphasis to locally made music as a complement and contrast to music representing super-regional centers of funding or prestige and the consensus of large institutional programmers.  A local element necessarily introduces more diversity into the mix, which is healthy for the development of music itself and for performer and audience attention as well as helps to create a better bond between composer and community, which seems like a necessary element in increasing engagement in the music as well as commitment to live performance opportunities.  

In many ways, the contemporary music environment is more like the Baroque era than the late romantic with its quasi-heroic composers striving for international careers.  In the Baroque, there were clearly musicians and elements of music itself which transcended the local, and even the more obscure small-town composer was networked into this, particularly with regard to style, but the bulk of actual music making, for example all of the huge bodies of liturgical music written by a J.S. Bach or a Telemann, was intended for local consumption and was frequently made with the specific resources — be they strengths or limitations — of their communities.

Another useful aspect of a tax break for commissions is that it could help with the imbalance given to the large commissions — operas and orchestral works — over pieces for soloists and small ensembles.  All galleries love the big sales of works of substantial scale by better-known artists, often to large institutional collectors, but the bread and butter business is the sale of smaller pieces to individual collectors.  The same should be true for commissioned compositions.  

 

More Thanatophiles

Tim Rutherford-Johnson points to another one of those classical-music-is-dead-or-dying articles, this time a "manifesto for the future of classical music." It begins with the phrase:

The classical music industry is in decline,

and goes downhill from there.  Just listen to the way that word "industry" clunks up against the word "music":  does such a phrase give you any confidence that the writer actually likes the subject for which he claims to be advocating?   I mean, if you dislike music so much that you can — without any apparent sense of irony, sarcasm, or grotesque —  describe the live production of music in terms of industry, then you certainly cannot expect readers to take your proposals seriously.  

Classical music is not dying, it's changing, and it's changing as it always has changed.  It's changing in terms of the repertoire included by the term, the way in which it is played and presented, and how it is received.   Moreover the change is not monocultural, defined by the movement of a single mainstream of prestige and highly concentrated economic power but increasingly diversified. If anything, this movement is away from any semblance of an industry and towards a resurgence of value in artisanship and craftsmanship.  The most highly commodified form of music, the big label commercial recording, has been completely eclipsed, both by technological possibilities, economic realities, and the aesthetic advantages of having more alternatives available in recorded form and a coterminal restoration of the centrality and prestige of the live public performance.  The format and venue of that live performance may well change, but it has always been changing. Some people and some institutions will lose out in this process, but that's okay as long as the real bottom line of making sure more music gets played and heard live is met.  

How (Music) History Moves

Reading Paul Feyerabend's Against Method for the nth time and can't help but once again recognize how much his anarchic account of how science is done echoes how musical invention is made, how contingent it is on individual experience, taste, insight, and circumstance rather than formal programs or dialectical forces.  Why, for example, was European serialism more reliably musical and musically interesting than the Perspectives of New Music-brand competitor, even though PNM had the more legitimately scientific approach (cf Backus's PNM review of die Reihe), and why was experimentalism even more so than either?  Daring to be naive is often more productive than trying to know everything before moving forward.  Feyerabend: "Confusionists and superficial intellectuals move ahead while the 'deep' thinkers descend into the darker regions of the status quo or, to express it in a different way, they remain stuck in the mud." (fn. p. 53)  

Feyerabend described Against Method as a "collage" which is both accurate and confirming in its self-deprecative tone that the book has, formally, a self-similarity to his own description of the scientific enterprise.  While the history of cosmology is, famously, the central concern, on re-reading, I'm struck by the author's casual but powerful use of other examples, in particular the excourses into anthropology and the techniques of epic composition and recitation.  

Perfect Storms

Last week, C. & I had planned for an anniversary picnic dinner along the Main, and a series of hot, dry days left us expecting nothing other than a pleasant evening but as we reached the river bank — on bikes — it started to sprinkle.  Optimistic as she always is, C. insisted on spreading out the blanket and provisions on the lawn rather than head back into the city for cover, and just as we settled down to eat, a strong gust of hot dusty wind blew both bikes down and was quickly followed by rain, not in drops but constant, like faucets. We scrambled to gather food-and-drink-stuffs and move under a nearby footbridge, which would have provided some protection, were the wind less strong and were the bridge not designed to channel drainage directly below.  Too wet, too windy to make a run for it, there was no alternative to going with the storm rather than against it and, somehow, we managed to make our meal there under the bridge, balancing things on the bikes and remaining prepared to shift from here to there whenever here became the outlet for a new downpour from the bridge above.  Another anniversary was made unforgettable by the unforeseen and — once we made sure by cellphone that the kids and the house were safely hatched down —  the hilarity of our situation overcame any frustration, and we had a marvelous time, picnicking and dodging downpours in the best company I know.

A couple of years ago, we were visiting in Budapest, staying in a small apartment on the Pest side half a block away from the Danube.  It was the St. Stephen's Day, the major national holiday in Hungary and C. and the kids had gone to watch fireworks on the river.  I was stuck in bed with a 100 and some fever and only a hope to hear some of the fireworks.  The apartment was a former servants' room in a rundown late 19th century building, with only a pair of windows to the inner courtyard.  I heard some explosions, and there were flashes of light outside but then came thundering and crashes, and I could see concrete, plaster and roof tiles start to fall into the courtyard.   The window was thrown open by a strong wind, with rain pouring this way and that and, as I rushed to close it again, I could see bits of a sky in which rocketry and lighting were sharply etching a sky which, a hour earlier, was clear but had now been filled with dark clouds.  I got dressed to go look for my family but, fortunately, they were all able to make it back without injury and as they dried off, they told of the huge crowd (a good part of that city of two million people were there) enjoying the fireworks display, shot off from several bridges and hillsides, and the arrival, without warning of a twisting storm from upriver, bringing lightning,  thunder and rain, drawing water directly up from the river and scattering everyone everywhere, running where they could in the search for some distance, some shelter, from the storm, while all the while the rockets continued to shoot off on their planned schedule, but not necessarily on their planned trajectories (it turned out that the company which produced the display felt obliged to continue shooting things off, public safety ignored, as their contract allowed for no payment should the explosives not be ignited on that evening.)  Here was a perfect match of an act of nature meeting human incompetence, and it must only be due to a long-practiced patience and resourcefulness of the Budapestites that so few were killed or injured. 

Our general sense of helplessness in the face of nature's potential and the acoustical power, specifically, of a storm is an natural fascination for composers.   Beethoven certainly knew his storms, as did Mendelssohn (Hebrides Overture), Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Debussy. Both Stravinsky and Britten had their storms, in their treatments of the Noah's Flood mystery play.  But more recently, musical mimesis of storms seems to have become more difficult.  I suspect that the ubiquity of recorded and synthesized sound has altered some of our expectations about how a storm "should" sound in a theatre.  Ligeti famously struggled for many years to make an operatic version of The Tempest and it seems that the storm — for which he wanted to employ non-linear dynamics in the composition — was a particular challenge. Likewise, John Cage had long proposed a work, Atlas Borealis with Ten Thunderclaps, based in part on the ten 100-letter thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake, in which electronic sound processing was to be used to transform vocal and instrumental sounds so that the experience would be "more like going to a storm than a concert." (Cage's terms fit nicely with his transformation of traditional musical mimesis from the imitation of nature in its outward attributes to the "imitation of nature in its method of operation.")   

Ligeti abandoned his Tempest in favor of a never-completed Alice in Wonderland; Cage, who made the practice of not composing without a specific commission and performance, never realized his thunderclaps piece and, indeed, took increasingly less interest in composing for electronics himself, but aspects of the work were perhaps carried forward into the environmental recordings used in Lecture on the Weather and the concert version of Empty Words, and the fascination with Finnegans Wake culminated in his Roaratorio.   Cage, understanding an account that Joyce's plan for a book to follow FW was to be called Ocean, began to plan a work of that title with Merce Cunningham, but did not live to experience the work which Cunningham eventually realized to a score by Andrew Culver, a long-time collaborator. Inasmuch as all storms, ultimately, end in ocean, the possibility that some of Cage's thunderclap ideas would have ended up in Ocean is a fascinating one. 

Keeping Lists

I usually have a collection of lists on my desk, of pieces or books or films that I'd like to hear or read or see.  For example, here's my little opera list: 

• J.A. Hasse, anything.
• Giachinno Rossini, Guillaume Tell (have heard but have not seen on stage)
• Carl Maria von Weber, Oberon (the English original)
• Hector Berlioz, Beatrice et Benedict
• Hugo Wolf, Der Corregidor
• Giselher Klebe, anything
• Henry Brant, The Grand Universal Circus
• Louise Talma,  The Alcestiad
• Virgil Thomson, Lord Byron
• Robert Ashley, That Morning Thing
• Richard K. Winslow, anything

Nothing on any of these lists is of particular urgency, but each item represents a gap or a curiosity that I'd rather have filled than left open.  Keeping lists also functions as a kind of negative image of the listening, reading or watching which I have done.  I realized recently, for example, that I'd never seen the 1934 Ozu film, Story of Floating Weeds and since Ozu's 1959 re-envisaging of the film as Floating Weeds is such a favorite, this got promptly put on my to-see film list. 

From Vox Humana to "Digital Drugs"

The vox humana stop on organs produces a vibrato-like effect by adding pipes tuned slightly off from the rest of the organ, creating audible beats.   Musicians tune to one another by listening to and eliminating such beats.  The characteristic throbbing and shimmer of Balinese gamelan music is due, in large part, to pairs of instruments being tuned far enough apart from each other to produce desired beating rates.  Much of the music of Alvin Lucier is based around creating audible beats between instruments, voices, and/or electronic oscillators.   Beating is an elementary technique in electronic sound production.

And now we learn that listening to beats — in the form of binaural beating, with sine waves slightly varying from one another in frequency sent to individual headset channels — is being promoted as a "digital drug" and, America being America, groups of bureaucrats, parents and educators have already been found to complain about this as a "gateway drug", with a young person's willingness to experiment with the psychophysics of sound being construed as a warning signal for further experimentation.

Now, it is undeniable that experimentation with sound is a form of exploring the boundaries of perception — right alongside Op Art and eating wasabi or capiscum —;  and it seems plausible that certain acoustical effects, like beats, can have identifiable psychological and, indeed, therapeutic effects*,  but associating such explorations with the consumption of controlled substances is plain BS:  musicians have always been investigating ways to optimize and extend the limits of sound production and perception, using the physical and psychophysical properties of the sounds themselves.  It involves no injection of chemicals and does not lead to physical dependency.  It is about being able to hear more rather than less, and use music to express more rather than less. 

I suppose that what this episode does say is that there continue to be agents out there who wish to instrumentalize the choice of sounds or music we hear for purposes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual sounds or music, but rather much more with distracting the public from attending to real issues and, perhaps, just to be able to demonstrate a capacity for exercising social control, in this case, over what we hear and how we hear it.

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* One of my favorites such effects is that a certain frequency can render Carlsberg Elephant beer unpalatable while another frequency optimizes the taste!

The Fragility of Memory

The Hungarian conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922) was the first real commuting superstar conductor, simultaneously holding positions with the top bands in Berlin, Leipzig, and London while travelling regularly to Russia, Hungary and elsewhere (he was also director of the Boston Symphony for four years). A charismatic conductor with a gently persuasive rehearsal style who always reserved a larged degree of spontaneity for performances, the closest recent equivalent was perhaps Carlos Kleiber; Kleiber, however, never sustained the volume of activity that Nikisch did, and certainly never went into a concert risking the imprecise or incomplete rehearsals Nikisch, with apparently some routine, would risk.

Nikisch was, however, the last great conductor not to have been well-recorded. He died before electrical recording and the few acoustic recording he made are all almost unlistenable, making Nikisch the last major conductor whose reputation is based essentially on the words of those who had witnessed his performances. Fortunately, RadiOM has archived William Malloch's 1965 KPFK documentary on Nikisch (here), an oral history composed of interviews with musicians who had worked with Nikisch. I was fortunate to have heard this documentary in a re-broadcast on KPFA sometime in the '70, where Malloch, the former music director of the station and an interesting composer, held forth for an hour each week with public and extra-academic musicology that was pioneering in its use of historical recordings of musical performances and interviews to investigate performance practice in the early 20th century. (RadiOM also has two Malloch documentaries on Stravinsky and a program on Revueltas which I recommend highly; Malloch's audio oral history I remember Mahler has been commercially available on an album with collected Mahler broadcasts by the NY Phil.)

As much joy as I take from rediscovering some Malloch programs online, it comes with the deep regret that such programming would simply be impossible today. Sure, there is much more information readily available online, between which one can flit at any time, pace, or place one likes, but the qualitative experience I had as a teenager, of being able to stumble upon a program like this (in my case while working at a summer job silk-screening shopping bags) and to become a regular listener to a trusted local voice like Malloch's is something very special.

Are you going to eat us?

The last post mentioned Michel de Ghelderode. If you're not familiar with any of his plays, here's a typically droll excerpt from his Christophe Colombe (among other things, a satire about the search for a better world):

MATELOTS. - Le Nouveau Monde ! Victoire !
COLOMB, dominant le tumulte et la situation. - Entendons-nous ? Messieurs les Sauvages ! Sommes-nous bien en Amérique ?
MONTEZUMA, somptueux, se détache et salue. - En Amérique du Sud, exactement.
COLOMB. - Je n'ai pas de chance. Vous parlez français ?
MONTEZUMA. - C'est une langue élégante. Préférez-vous l'anglais ?
COLOMB. - Il n'importe. Nous sommes faits pour nous comprendre. Que vous êtes décoratifs ! Mais dites-moi vos intentions ? Veniez-vous nous égorger ?

Not New and Not a Substitute for New

I don't understand the degree of praise that has accumulated around Newmusiconlineistan over the New York Phil's recent concert performances of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (30-some years after its premier) and now in advance of a Varese fest in NYC (almost 45 years after the composer's death).  Yes, there should be congratulations for good programming, but none whatsoever is due in these cases for programming new music.  

Yes, it might be embarassing that the [East Coast  of the] US has not yet seem a fully-staged performance of the Ligeti opera, let alone have it enter a house's repertoire.  [Thanks to Lisa Hirsch for correcting me here: there was a full production in San Francisco!]  The piece is entertaining (if stripped, by the composer, of almost all the authentic mystery, cruelty and guignol/grotesque of Michel de Ghelderode's extraordinary play, La Balade du grand macabre, replaced with a silly text and all too many adolescent musician in-jokes*) and has had a significant stage life in European houses, and the performance in New York seems to have been very well-received, but it is reception due a tested work of the last century, not the reception of an unknown — and thus, risky — new work.

And then Varese.  I am deeply attached to the works of Varese, but there are no more brownie points given for novelty when performing his works.  The bulk of the tiny Varese catalog was written before the Great Depression (and Varese's own personal great depression)  and the catalog, as wonderful as most of it is, has been discovered and (supposedly) forgotten ever since with a wave motion, the regularity of which would have provided Kondratiev with a textbook example.  The most recent waves have come with the Frank Zappa seal of approval, probably increasing the audience size by an order of magnitude or more with the addition of a healthy number of lonely young weird-music-obsessed men to the crowd.  But the cycle has been more of spiral, with performances of Varese's music increasingly familiar program points, as established repertoire but not as new music.   (The recorded works have been steadily in print;  Ameriques has become a regular showpiece for conductors and orchestras, Density 22.5 is standard rep for flautists, Ionization for college or conservatory percussion ensembles; I've even heard Equatorial four times live, and that's a piece with a particularly hard-to-cover instrumentation, including a pair of Ondes Martenots)  For, fresh — indeed, renewable, as one says around here — as Varese's music can be, it is not modern music, it is not contemporary music, it is no longer new or experimental but it is — as Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn put it more than a generation ago —  a "look back at the future", at the ultra-modern (cum ultra-primitive) future imagined a very long time ago.  

There have now been several intervening generations of composers whose work shares Varesian concerns but turned into very different directions (including those who knew Varese, like Dlugoszewski or Tenney) .  And there are plenty of young composers today with interesting and alternative looks at a very different future.  The Philharmonic's new music advisor, Magnus Lindberg, certainly has an exuberant orchestration style that owes a lot to Varese, but just as certainly has an urgency that is of our moment.    

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* Ligeti's fundamental lack of understanding for the Ghelderode makes me somewhat relieved that he abandoned his two later operatic projects, a version of The Tempest and an Alice in Wonderland. 

 

Fireworks

This is the time of year in which every ex-pat American must think — if even for only a moment — about those low-explosive pyrotechnic devices used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes, about fireworks.   It's been my experience that not a few US composers have a weak spot for the sights and, especially, sounds of gunpowder used in its optimal form.   (And surely, composers of other backgrounds have their own moments around the times of year — New Year's, or national holidays — when fireworks are at play.)  Sometimes even the most cautious among us eagerly abandon caution, risking injury to limb, eye, and — most critically for a musician — ear, for the chance to cause and experience that uniquely painful and pleasurable combination of effects caused by simple chains of combustion.

During my poker-playing days, in the '80s, rounds of cards in Beatty or Pahrump, Nevada were frequently broken up by parking lot rounds of loud and colorful explosives, one of those Nevada pleasures not possible at home in California.  (I'm usually tight with money, but when the poker game was going well, burning up a bit of cash in the form of fireworks seemed perfectly natural: burnt offerings to Fortuna.)  There was a special delight in composing sequences of colors, sounds (whistles, zippers, crackers, and plain booms), as well as gradually escalating the altitudes achieved by arrays of bottle rockets. For some reason, however, this particular performance art was one I never considered integrating into my own musical works.

Other composers, however, have had no qualms about such an integated musical-pyrotechnical art form.  Handel, famously, made music to accompany fireworks.  Others have required explosions to occur during a piece.  And still others made music about fireworks (Ives's Fourth of July, Stravinsky's Feu d'artifice.)   One of the most endearing qualities about composer David Cope, one of my teachers as an undergrad in Santa Cruz, was his serious affection for fireworks. During my years there, he frequently reported about scouting out the perfect place on the beach for a big piece with rocketry and one piece, Vectors, a setting of texts by Ives, was one of the highlights of those years, climaxing with assembled on-stage musicians, two marching bands and electronics being overwhelmed by an indoor fireworks display, sending all the audience and performers to the exits as the the hall rapidly filled with smoke.  

 

Getting Paid: Still Looking for a Model that Works

If big-time, commercial music can't make a commercial success out of selling recordings, what expectations can we have for music from a commercially negligible genre?  

It's no news that there is no really good model for paying for new and experimental music.  To some extent, new "classical" or "serious" music has either sought to find advantage in low-verhead niche production or been able to parlay its prestige into a modest bit of piggybacking on the success of more commercially successful  musics in rights organizations like GEMA, but the former stream, that fabled "long tail", seems not to have played out as hoped and the latter has seriously declined in the face of stagnant or declining mainstream music revenues.  I've written recently about the inherent difficulties with reproducible media as a commodified form of music, (see also this item) and here are a couple of recent items from musicians representing more popular which reinforce this viewpoint.  

Here's rock star Prince, in the Mirror: 

He explains that he decided the album will be released in CD format only in the Mirror. There'll be no downloads anywhere in the world because of his ongoing battles against internet abuses.

Unlike most other rock stars, he has banned YouTube and iTunes from using any of his music and has even closed down his own official website.

He says: "The internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it.

"The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.

"They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."

Also read this blog item by musical composer Jason Robert Brown, confronting a teenager who wants to download copies of his sheet music for free from a "sharing" site. 

We really, urgently, need to find a better model. I often wonder what such a model would look like if we were were able to start from scratch, without the cumbersome institutions (including rights organizations, management, and production firms)  and legal framework (copyright laws, in particular) that have, like Topsy, just grewed.

Five Pieces for Independence Day

Christian Wolff, Changing the System (revised version)
Charles E. Ives, Second Orchestral Set
Robert Ashley, Public Opinion Descends Upon The Demonstrators
Pauline Oliveros, Big Mother is Watching You
John Cage, Lecture on the Weather

(First posted here on July 4, 2006)

Reliably Astonishing

Just finished Paul Auster's Invisible: once again had the enormously satisfying experience of an author in command of a style.  And since Auster is one of the writers I read all of (well, almost all: I couldn't even start to read his Timbuktu, preferring my narrators not to be canine) it was a distinctive but familiar style  The themes and material and diction were all more or less familiar, riffs off of a pool of Austeriana, but the particular mix was different and once again it was Auster's formal invention that made the whole work,  making the familiar once more new, strange and engaging.  I don't know that I would rank Invisible with Leviathon and The Book of Illusions, two books I have reread several times with increasing appreciation and pleasure (as well as a degree of disturbance!), but it is still a very fine novel with a striking form.

I've long insisted that it's the individual work — and sometime even only a moment in a work — that is important and not the entire catalogue of a composer or the particular repertoire of a place or time.  Catalogues and repertoires are uneven in quality — sometimes interesting just for their qualitative eccentricities — but uneven means good, bad, and everything (i.e. mostly) in-between. However, given the finities of a listening life and the vast vector field of possible music to pay attention to (or, books to read or films to watch or painting to see or dances to watch...), a catalog or a repertoire, when handled critically, can often provide a useful signal.   

Case in point: Last night, I heard The Damnation of Faust in the Frankfurt Opera. I went less because of the piece itself, which I had heard last as a teenager, but rather because Berlioz is simply one of the more reliable brand names among composers, reliable for a capacity to astonish.  And sure enough, Berlioz's Faust is quite unlike anything else.  It's neither opera nor oratorio nor symphony (the composer eventually named it a "légende dramatique" which certainly doesn't bring the matter of genre further) with only four solo roles, crowded scenes but rather discrete use of the chorus, and much of the narrative carried by the orchestra.   Some aspects of the work I can only describe as proto-post-modern  (I use the term with caution, intensely disliking much of the standard PoMo discourse)  with brilliant use of dramatic and musical framing devices, musics within musics, and a staggering use of highly differentiated counterpoint, sometimes using space as a critical parameter (heaven and hell are, acoustically, very different places for Berlioz).  His heterodox harmonic practice (with a particularly rich tension in his approach to voicing as to opposed to standard practice voice leading and tonal function) and his refraction of the revolutionary musical idiom are applied here with particularly sensitivity.  Now, all of these elements are the knowns and familiars about the brand name Berlioz(TM) , but the sui generis form of the individual work trumps all of that; the composer has his riffs and changes but his level of mastery and commitment to the integrity of the work at hand is such that the listener is never left with the feeling that the composer is just playing riffs and changes.   Berlioz could, famously, do large and outrageous things with an orchestra, but that's just not always where the real musical action is: if you have a chance to hear The Damnation of Faust, please pay attention to the variety and subtleties of the string writing first and then to the way in which tune and rhythm form Faust's diction: you will be astonished, well even before Berlioz brings Mephistopheles on stage and the magic begins.     

Complexity: sorry, Lisa, not quite yet.

Okay, I'm not quite done with complexity yet.  As indicated in the last post, complexity, for better or worse or (mostly) in-between, can describe a number of musical qualities or characteristics.  When used in connection with something very specific, especially countable items (notes on a page, for example), the aspect of complexity described can acquire a quantitative dimension and make comparisons within and without a piece of work possible; also, when a clear process is used in composition, one might speak usefully in terms of a measurable computational complexity (which, of course, has its own complications, indeed uncertainties, which many others online can describe much more credibly).  However, some of the most important forms of musical complexity are far less easily reducible to the quantitative, and some methods, while quantifiable, as often not particularly relevant when quantified to any actual music.  Among these forms (incomplete, I'm sure, off the top of my head and jotted on the back of a restaurant napkin) are:

*Linear complexity — How variegated or detailed is a single line of music?  Variety of materials, density and speed of their deployment, differentiation into principle, subordinate, and ornamental parts.  Which may be related to

* Textural complexity — Is a complex or ensemble heard as individual parts or a single gestalt? An ensemble texture may be found to be full of activity, indeed layers of activity — when analyzed into individual components — and there may well be considerable change over shorter or longer periods of time, but the net effect may instead tend rather towards coherence and continuity.  Which may be related to

* Pre-compositional complexity.  Like textural complexity, this is more about forests than trees: in much serial music, for example, the actual set-, row-, and array-work, while possibly comprising the greater part of the compositional time and effort, is actually the lesser part of the final composition. The pre-compositional design can make it possible to guarantee that the final composition has particular characteristics — for example a uniform (or weighted, as the case may well be) distribution of elements — which make the end result, the sound itself, possible, without making the particular methods used at all necessary for a listener to know.  Which may be closely related to 

* Mathematical complexity.  This is used probably more as a term of deprecation than estimation.  However, in itself, using mathematics in composition shouldn't automatically raise objections, and the variety of mathematics used shouldn't automatically lead to a particular evaluation.  Music theory journals happen to be filled with articles about a rather narrow variety of musically-applied mathematics (12-tone so-called "set theory" for example), but this reflects more on a heavily encouraged area of research than on the extents and limits of mathematical applications in music.  There are numerous lines of mathematics-related musical research and composition that have both received less academic attention and are no less deep or complex in their musical applications or mathematical sophistication.  I think, for example, that my recent work with Beckett-Gray codes is such an example, and as applied to scoring patterns in an ensemble work, has an acoustical immediacy that demonstrates perfectly that the mathematically complex can not only be completely accessible but musically compelling. 

*Material complexity.  Literally, how much and how wide a variety of stuff is in a piece of music? There should be abundant evidence out there that simply adding more stuff can make a work messier but does not automatically make a piece of music more complex, while the reduction of some material density can often facilitate the perception of complex musical phenomena that would otherwise go unheard.  Many works of classic early minimalism have this characteristic.

*Associative complexity: To what degree does a work depend upon its connections to other works or repertoires?  To what degree is does a work depend upon connections to extra-musical phenomena? Which may be closely related to

*Systematic complexity.  How does a work or group of works cohere and create networks of internal or external relationships?   The systematic complexity of Wagner's Ring or Tolkien's Middle Earth books have encouraged generations of geeks to commit large portions of their lives, memories, and imaginations to the acquisition of ever more details, terms, lists, characters, genealogies, maps, languages, motives etc.  in the gradual assimilation of artworks that aspire to evoke alternative worlds.   The material is simply rich enough in its structures and connections — many of them fragmentary, incomplete, ambiguous, or illogical, but hey, what else do you expect from a world? — to sustain indefinitely ethusiastic — geekily enthusiastic — extended examination.   (One common effect of such engagement is its sublimation into gaming, aform of play in which a fictional world can be permutated and extended well beyond the boundaries of a completed piece of fiction.) While neither of these examples are particularly attractive to me, I do think that they exemplify the potential for an artwork enbracing an encyclopedic form of complexity to be successful and even popular.  (I am much more taken in by the of-this-world-ness and flowing diction of Finnegans Wake or the erotic systematics of Duchamp's art and writings than Tolkien's stubbornly wooden diction and prudishness (to be fair, Tolkien suffered from being born into the most deadly wooden age of philology and translation; it shows up on every page of his work); likewise, I find the inter-penetrating worlds of musical and historical experience in Ives's Fourth or Second Orchestral Set or Cage's Songbooks simply more musically attractive and personally relevant than Wagner, but maybe that's just my own geekhood).

 

Complexity: get over it, already.

The ever-estimable Lisa Hirsch has two items (here and here) in response to a Teachout article on musical complexity.   For music criticism, use of the term complexity is something of a blunt instrument. One has to be very specific about the materials or means or relationships which are being described as complex and even when identified as complex then there are no clear or generally accepted ways of measuring relative complexity, whether within a single work or among several works.  

Most critically, in the thick of a real musical event, it is not always clear — and this, in the best cases, is a matter of compositional design — whether composer, performing musician, or listener can catch or is supposed to be able to catch, some or all details or a more general gestalt, or even to move attention between levels of detail, or if the experience of whole and parts is designed to be ambiguous.  Most works of music which have the capacity to stay fresh on repeated listenings — renewable musics, one might say — offer a reserve of additional details and relationships.  To the extent that musical complexity is quantitative, filling a work with detail and internal or external connections, the central issue for composition is projecting and framing that content so that it can be heard.   From this point-of-view,  the most self-consciously minimalist composer is as concerned with managing complexity as the overtly complexist or maximalist;  the critical difference, I believe, lies in how the relationship between musical materials and audition is drawn.   

By my own measure, a work like Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room is a more effective compositional projection of an extremely complex set of internal, acoustical elements and external, and to some extent, extra-musical connections than the elaborate pitch constructions of many a high serial work which are lost to a surface which fails to project the construction in anything but the most impressionistic manner. 

Central Javanese Gamelan music, Karawitan, is  my favorite example of this: it is possible to hear a classical gamelan work coarsely, attending, for example, only to a single trunk melody carried by the loudest instruments, but experienced players and listeners learn, over time, to attend to more and more instrumental and vocal lines, learning to hear not just simultaneities but the ways in which individual lines relate to one another but also to the whole piece as well as to the repertoire and style in general.