from 100 Questions Composers Are Not Often Asked by Journalists

Nr. 3 What's your day job?
Nr. 8 Do you now use or have you ever used a 12-tone row?
Nr. 9 Do you now use or have you ever serialized a parameter?
Nr. 10 Do you now use or have you ever used chance operations?
Nr. 12 If you were sent to a desert island and could only bring two Betamax cassettes of Hollywood youth films from the 1970s and 80s, what would they be?
Nr. 15 How many notes are too many notes?
Nr. 16 How many times have you been invited to attend a concert or festival featuring your music only to find out that the promised accommodations are a living room sofa or a mattress on the basement floor and a sleeping bag?
Nr. 17 On how many of those occasions did you have to share the sofa or mattress with a stranger?
Nr. 20 How many times have you been invited by a promoter or arts administrator to do lunch at the Russian Tea Room?
Nr. 21 On those occasions, were you asked to go Dutch or did the promoter shout "dine and dash!" leaving you with the bill?
Nr. 23 Have you ever composed under the influence of caffeine, nicotine, or other narcotics or controlled substances?
Nr. 32 If you could have any other superpower, what would it be?
Nr. 33 Are you now or have you ever been a member of a show choir?
Nr. 34 What's the difference between a prepared piano and a ready piano?
Nr. 36 What Hollywood actor should play you and your love interest in the made-for-tv biopic?
Nr. 41 How does one properly eat a peach using only a knife and fork?
Nr. 42 Can you bake a souffle?
Nr. 43 Can you debone a fowl in less than 45 minutes?
Nr. 44 Can there be a teleological suspension of the ethical?
Nr. 48 In your concert experience, what venue has provided the best free reception food?
Nr. 49 If composers got concert riders, what would you insist on having in yours?
Nr. 54 If Stockhausen really was from Sirius, could you explain how humanoid life would have developed and survived in a binary star system?
Nr. 55 Can you name two living composers whom you suspect to actually be aliens?
Nr. 61 Brahms or Wagner?
Nr. 62 Verdi or Wagner?
Nr. 63 Debussy or Ravel?
Nr. 64 Ives or Mahler?
Nr. 65 Schoenberg or Stravinsky?
Nr. 67 Nico Muhly: Ghost or Monster?
Nr. 68 Who serves imperialism more: Eric Whitacre or Mathias Spahlinger?
Nr. 74 Shaken or stirred?
Nr. 75 Innie or outie?
Nr. 76 Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?
Nr. 77 Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin?
Nr. 79 If you were to be the celebrity endorser for a consumer product, what would that product most likely be?
Nr. 82 Did Richard Nixon steal the 1968 Election by secretly persuading Saigon to abandon the Paris Peace Talks?
Nr. 83 Did Ronald Reagan steal the 1980 Election by secretly persuading the Iranian government to delay releasing the US Hostages?
Nr. 86 Do you know the combination of the cupboard?
Nr. 93 What is your weapon of choice in a Zombie Apocalypse?
Nr. 94 Does Pierre Boulez cast a reflection in a silvered mirror?
Nr. 95 Why isn't there more music for Flexatone?
Nr. 96 How many cowbells?
Nr. 97 The Vibra-Slap (TM): Why? and How do we make it stop?
Nr. 100 If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

Need a Venue? Learn the secret handshake...

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

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.)

Only in it for the money

It seems that the sounds of spoken numerals affects the perception of price. (Read here.)  Morton Feldman talked about using instruments in a similar way, getting really expensive sounds out of really expensive instruments, by starting a vibrato on a cello, for example, before beginning to bow, or having a certain touch at the piano, and only on a certain class of piano.  The other side of the coin — as it were — was Feldman's disdain for instruments he considered "cheaper" in quality, the recorder for instance (a judgment I don't share).   I think it will be interesting to hear how well Feldman's instrumental value judgments hold up, if some of his preferences — for that vibrato, or the use of tuba, glockenspiel, or vibraphone with the motor on — acquire a dated quality.  In any case, this research is certainly compositionally suggestive for the composer who wants to lend her or his music a certain aura of value.   

Seasonal item

If you had to choose a Hallowe'en costume of a famous composer, who'd it be?  I'm about 16 inches too tall to pass for Richard Wagner and, as cool as his sideburns were, he had that weird under-the-chin beard going on.  Rossini, especially as he reached my age, is a more attractive idea, between the pajamas, the tournedos and, presumably, some other conspicuous signs of a sinful old age.  A choice more consistent with this particular holiday might be Gesualdo, sword and gun in hand (for more colorful and ghoulish parties, however, Gesualdo's cuckolding victim, the Duke of Andria, might make a more exciting apparation, bloodied and wearing Donna Maria Gesualdo's  dress.)  Or how about going soaking wet, as Robert Schumann, freshly fished out of the Rhein?  Or all in black velvet, as Erik Satie?   Perhaps because their images are still so fresh, contemporary composers don't appear to provide many more attractive alternatives, with Cage's denim uniform, fungi basket in hand, or a Brook's Brother-suited RCA synthesizer-operating Babbitt seeming harmless at best.  But perhaps, in the right jack'o'lantern light, encountering a Morton Feldman imposter or La Monte Young double might just cause a fright. 

Admission, granted

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

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

_____

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

 

A Hard Day in Analysis

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

Further Adventures in Bedtime Stories

My daughter — six, almost seven — still expects bedtime stories.  Sometimes I read, sometimes I recollect, other times I make things up.   Like many children, she likes to have some stories repeated, and as certain passages are immutably stuck in her memory, she immediately picks up on the smallest variations from one rendition to the nest.   Luckily, I have a small supply of texts in memory.  One of my favorites, a little story from Finnegans Wake, I've mentioned here before.   Ogdon Nash's The Strange Case of the Irksome Prude is a current favorite.  Thurber's Unicorn in the Garden, of course, with ample opportunity to repeat the mantra "the unicorn is a mythical beast."  But the one Emma likes the most is the stone-sucking episode from Beckett's Molloy.  As I teen-ager, I once watched Jose Ferrer act this out, and I immediately had to learn to do it myself.  This obsessive little combinatorial exercise, compositionally perfect and a perfect entertainment, given the right moment and the right company, begins so:

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I  replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time.  And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else ...

This or That

A meme for New Year's Eve:

1. Josquin or Palestrina?

2. Bach or Händel?

3. Haydn or Mozart?

4. Beethoven or Rossini?

5. Brahms or Wagner?

6. Verdi or Puccini?

7. Debussy or Ravel? 

8. Strauss or Mahler?

9. Stravinsky or Schönberg? 

10.  Cage or Carter?

Bonus round:

1. Astaire or Kelly?

2. Yeats or Elliot?

3. Joyce or Mann?

4. Welles or Hitchcock?

5. Duchamp or Picasso?

A day when all the odd items arrive

Four disturbing links landed in my inbox today. Don't visit any of them if you're having a bad day.  At random, then:

Did Nixon keep peace talks from starting before the '68 election?

In-between generations get no respect.

Stockhausen lies in state.

There is food I don't want to know about, let alone be in the same restaurant with.

Here's a weird childhood memory

The Well-Tempered Blog reports that Liberace's first Palm Springs house is on the market. Not the sort 0f thing I usually remark upon here, but my brothers & I went actually went trick-or-treating to that house when we lived in Palm Springs, probably the Halloween of '68. I don't remember how much candy— if any— we got*, or who answered the door — if anyone. I think that the front landscaping was less green and more desert-like back then, but the circular driveway and the chandeliers are just as remembered. I wonder if this was the house with the grand piano-shaped swimming pool?
_____
* The supposedly miserly Jack Benny was famously generous at Halloween.

Seasonal

Mr. Carter's music surely does perplex
with so many notes and rhythms complex.
Explains the composer, now 99,
"At my age, it helps me to pass the time
and is a reasonable alternative to sex."

(Chorus:)
Ai, yai, yai, yai,What's next? is on the telly.
So let's have another verse
that's worse than the other verse,
& waltz me around again, Willy!

You don't go to Tanglewood
For the music or the food.
You go to get laid,
while fighting mosquitos with Raid.
— I guess it depends on your mood.

(Chorus:)
Aaai, yai, yai, yai,
a flexatone sounds just too silly,
so let's have another verse
that's worse than the other verse,
& waltz me around again, Willy!

What is the maximum a minimalist can negate
and the minimum a maximalist can inflate?
Over such tough equations
new music wars have been waged and
continue to percol- and irritate.

(All together now:)
Aaaaaaai, yai, yai, yaaaai,at Juilliard they never serve jelly,
so let's have another verse
that's worse than the other verse,
& waltz me around again, Willy!

An Ex-pat's Lament

Sad news: The International Herald Tribune, the newspaper of choice for all US ex-pats lounging about without any apparent means of support in Cafes and Hotel Lobbies, waiting for a rendez-vous or practicing not being seen, has given up its dingbat. Yes, this little picture,


which in approximate form has adorned the masthead ever since Christ left Chicago, filled with iconography promising all the breadth required to cover the dynamics of a world in The American Century, has been deleted in the name of "progress".

If I were drinking, I'd raise a martini high and toss it, glass, olive & all, into the waters of the Seine, and shed a tear for a grand, if odd, little graphic, now gone away.

Luxury Time

I dislike wearing watches, but if someone were to make me a gift of this timepiece, which dispenses with seconds, minutes, and hours, distinguishing only night from day, and does so with all the precision a $300,000 dual Tourbillon swiss clockwork can bring to the task, I wouldn't be seen anywhere without it.

The Oracle has spoken

My bs-meter is usually highly sensitive to claims of the prophetic, whether biblical or astrological, read from palms, tea leaves, or yaro sticks, or discerned from Kondratyev waves. But now, and for the record, I wish to report that I've been completely convinced by the oracle at Amazon.com, which now predicts, based on my past buying habits, that I would be interested in purchasing Things to Do Now That You're Retired by Jane Garton. Well, if the oracle says that I'm retired, I must be retired.* It was a good career, however brief and however modest, and now -- without the advice of Ms. Garton, mind you -- I shall dedicate my reclining years to good living and the occasional composition of a few choice Peches de vieillesse.

_____
* Which reminds me of a story.... sometime in his later tenure at Harvard, Walter Piston was asked by his students about his retirement plans. He is reported to have replied, in his deepest Maine accent, "Why, I've been retired for years."

Another Lost Opera Scene

This scene was apparently cut from the final version of Nixon in China.

This is my mind imagining making money off of your mind on music

In idle moments, I've realized that if I had a tad less backbone, were a tad more evil, and were significantly more greedier than I actually am, I would probably go straight into the pop-therapy/human-potential/psych-training business with a program based on improving your life and my pocket book through immersion in environments of precisely tuned musical sounds, with the sales pitch that the right combination of intervals will sooth your psyche and cure your physical ailments, and bring the world peace and prosperity. Or something like that.

There have recently been a number of well- and even best-selling books for lay audiences on the topic of what music does to our minds (and -- the more interesting question of -- what our minds do with music), including Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neatherthals, Dan Levitin’s This is your brain on music, and Oliver Sacks' new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. I enjoy reading Music 00001, Victor Grauer's speculative blog on the origin of music and Martin Braun's Neuroscience of Music website has also been extremely helpful with his summaries and critiques of recent research; Scott Spiegelberg's Musical Perceptions blog presumably doesn't need introduction around here. The science of musical perception, and the neuroscience in particular is a hot and rich field at the moment, with interesting insights into everything from the origin of music to the evolution and relation between the neurological organs used for speech and for music (and the related question of the use of music as a communicative and as an absolutely aesthetic system) and on to the extent and limits of our musical perception, the last a very interesting question for composers. If I read the research well enough, it seems that we are just at the beginning of figuring out what music does and can do for us.

So back to my dastardly plan: I would devise a course, dished out in small, and ever-more-expensive units of training by lab-coated trainers in small cubicles with ultra modern decor, Lazy-boy chairs, some LED-studded machinery and very comfortable headsets, in which subjects were immersed in precisely generated synthetic environments of tones, beginning with the most simple intervals in ratios of just intonation, and moving on to ever more complex ratios. * (I would orient the course towards intervals rather than precise frequencies; although some have tried (and marketed) courses in learning absolute pitch, a disposition for AP appears to have a genetic component that is not universally distributed, and aside from AP and some military research on the use of very low and very high frequencies for crowd control, the best result I've encountered for the influence of frequency is a study indicating -- I kid not -- that certain frequencies can improve or ruin the taste of Carlsberg beer. If I were an innkeeper, that'd be useful...) Simultaneously the sounds would begin with sine waves, gradually move on to more complex and even noisy wave forms. The subjects would learn to recognize and even reproduce each new interval, and eventually chords and clusters, with the objective of mastering ever-larger vocabularies of sounds with ever more accuracy. As the trainee would be able to internalize ever more complex acoustic phenomena, the phenomena of tonal dissonance would be eventually become relative rather than an absolute, with the sales point being that ability to control a dissonant and noisy sound environment is a precondition for being able to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex, indeed dissonant, world.

In other words, a glossy new package for some old-fashioned ear training.

_____
*I would orient the course towards intervals rather than precise frequencies; although some have tried (and marketed) courses in learning absolute pitch, a disposition for AP appears to have a genetic component that is not universally distributed, and aside from AP and some military research on the use of very low and very high frequencies for crowd control, the best result I've encountered for the influence of frequency is a study indicating -- I kid not -- that certain frequencies can improve or ruin the taste of Carlsberg beer. If I were an barkeeper, that'd be useful, but I'm only a composer.

Reception History

Here's a time-lapse video by the composer Lee Weisert, assembled from samples taken every minute, of someone listening to the complete recordings of works by Ferneyhough over twenty-four hours time. It's interesting, although perhaps inevitable -- coincidentia oppositorum and all that -- that such complex music should elicit such a minimalist response.

My own youthful all-nighters usually involved minimalist musical fare, more food and drink, and were seldom done in solitaire. But then again, those days were generally more convivial, as well as better fed and better lubricated. It's sobering to consider what conviviality we have lost in a generation's time.

In any case, I predict that there will someday be a dissertation on the importance of the sofa in the reception of recorded contemporary music, importance that is second only to those exquisite Anatolian carpets, upon which guests of Morton Feldman were allowed to lounge like beached whales while luxuriating in Feldmaniana of exquisite length and aural charms.

The Unknown Harry Partch

You would have thought that the superb scholarship of Bob Gilmore and Philip Blackburn had exhausted the subject of Harry Partch. Well, apparently, not. Read here for all about Harry Partch and the Deathly Hockets.

(Why is musician humor so geeky?)

At home in Pyongyang

The New York Times is reporting that the New York Philharmonic is considering touring to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Odds are probably against playing there, but if they do end up visiting Kim Jong-il's bizarre and tragic little kingdom, the orchestra players might want to prepare themselves ahead of time by getting acquainted with the Pyongyang Metro.

I was definitely surprised to learn that a country which cannot feed itself has not only a nuclear program and a modest film industry (including outsourced subcontracted animation for such films as Disney's The Lion King and Pocahontas), but also a subway system. The extent and exact plans and timetables of the system are, however, state secrets. The best source of information is probably this webpage, one of those specialized sites in which the web shows its true potential.

And, as long as they're making travel plans, they ought to have a chat with Bobby Egan, the owner of Cubby's restaurant in Hackensack, New Jersey. He's apparently one of Pyongyang's chief cultural interpreters for all matters American.