In the garden of secret theories

I entertain a suspicion that most musicians have -- at least within the privacy of our ateliers, rumpus rooms, redoubts and cloister cells -- rather idiosyncratic ways of thinking about what we do when we make music. With time and experience, you come to certain understandings with the muse: the terms and metaphors you use to describe music, its parts and its attributes, the habitual networks of associations with which you tie those parts and attributes together, and the external sentiments we attach to both parts and their connections.

On the one hand, this is simply the personalization of the theory that we have received through institutions and teachers, but I think that it is both more and less than that. Personalizing puts weights and values on systems and structures that come to us from "official" music theory with a certain degree of value neutrality. But a personal, private, theory is under no obligation to be either complete or internally consistant, demands that are reasonably made of public theories. (Personal theories are not validated by the truth or logical consistancy of the theory, but by the character of the works and performances they help bring into being.) And personal theories can make connections among repertoire that represent the individual's experience and taste, and that repertoire has no need to be understood as coherent in any terms other than the individual's experience and taste.

The metaphor can come from anyplace. I was told once that the composer Robert Erickson described tonal functions in terms of a baseball diamond. I could well imagine other sporting metaphors (cricket, mumblety-peg, poker, and thoroughbred racing are my preferences) or handwork or programming or even a culinary tact. Algorithms have considerable currency, and an individual algorithm has metaphoric character: given the difficulty (indeed, impossibility) of finding the shortest algorithm required to produce a given work of music, any given algorithm is going to have something arbitrary and tentative about it. (For what it's worth, I used to think about the relationship between algorithmic discipline and impromptu handwork in my own music in terms of tending header on a wheat harvester. (1)

I have a couple of theoretic notions that I keep coming back to in my work, and I like to think that I am able to keep them rich by avoiding or postponing the expression of these notions in formal terms. Perhaps at risk of public doubt of my complete sanity, I'll mention a few of these. One is the notion of a field, a space in which musical materials are assembled.(2) The space could be organized along some strict metric -- pitch height or class, a tuning lattice, a row box, or a Partchian diamond or one of Erv Wilson's Combination-Product Sets -- or it could be filled in some random way, a one dimensional list, or one of Cage's multi-dimensional charts (as in the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra or the Music of Changes), or the pools of material found in some of Christian Wolff's "cuing" pieces. I often think of my scores as paths across such fields. These paths might be random, or weighted, or patterned, or could be forced to follow a kind of gravity. (For example, if you think of the primary, root position, triads in common practice tonality as positions in a series of fifths IV -- I -- V, common practice allows any move to the right, but only moves of one step to the left). Another notion dear to me is that of spacing -- how pitches are assembled vertically. I pay close attention to gaps and densities in the spacing, and often times the choice of a new pitch will come more immediately to me from spatial rather that functional harmonic considerations. I've come to recognize three basic spacing structures: one in which intervals get smaller as frequency increases, in this resembling a harmonic series, I call "harmonic", another when intervals get smaller as frequency descends, I call "subharmonic", and a third, in which intervals are more or less equally distributed, I call "neutral" or "equal". (It's not neccesary that these relationships be precisely harmonic, equal/neutral, or subharmonic, juat the rough characterization suffices). As this is purely a private theory, I'm not going to formalize it, but I do believe that on the basis of a spacing model, you could construct a reasonbly complete description of species counterpoint, tonal harmony (major/minor, consonant/dissonant) or even orchestration (clear/muddy, thin/dense etc.).

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(1) Yes, it is often a good thing that private theories stay private.
(2)In my catalog, there are a number of pieces which come directly out of this : Field Study, Crossing The Field, Fieldwork (String Quartet II.), Afar Afield, Farther Afield, The Art of Fielding. Aside from sharing the notion of the field as a point of departure, these works have little in common.

Free for the plucking

Prickly Paradigm Press is now putting several of its older titles online in PDF format. PPP publishes small books, mostly from social scientists, or those on the edge thereof, and I've found the PPPs that I've read to be thoughtful, playful, and a nice departure from my everyday scholarly music reading (how about some German here: Alltagsmusikwissenschaftlicheslektüre)(!), especially when there's something with which to disagree.

A walk in the woods

from an interview, Lawrence Weschler on Norman O. Brown*:

... I took a walk with him—this must have been 10 or 15 years ago—in the forest outside Santa Cruz. And he was saying, “It’s all been a huge mistake.” I said, “What’s been a mistake?” He said “Freud, Marx, wrong, wrong, wrong.” I said, “What are you talking about.” “Chance,” he said. “I never took chance seriously enough. [John] Cage should have been my master.”
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*I was also fortunate to have Brown as a teacher. I will forever be in his debt: he was patient with my words, he presented me to John Cage, and blessed my graduate study with a recommendation to go to Wesleyan. Officially "Professor of Humanities", and originally a classicist, in the end that which he taught his students, following the example of Charles Olson, was posture, and if composing is about anything at all, it's about posture. Try this: the next time you play or listen to a piece of music, ask yourself if the composer has posture? Has she or he taken a stance towards sounds or silence? Towards the world, towards you, the listener? Does the composer love the world enough to risk the inherently violent act of putting sounds into it in order to change it?

Consorting

It's time to put in a good word for those composers who have put ensembles together to play their own works, and works by like-minded musicians. And special praise goes to those ensembles that respond to scores with open, or flexible, instrumentation, and open or modular structures. (I hereby propose a project: an online "Book of Consort Lessons", an open-ended collection of scores, flexibly orchestratable, and adjustable to resources at hand.)

I am a great partisan of Bratislava's "middle-class orchestra" Požoň sentimentál (sorry but their web site appears to be a bit dismantled at the moment), with a basic instrumentation of flute, violin, piano, and accordion, they are a kind of K.-&-K.-era salon orchestra, playing originals by the four members as well as arrangements of everything from salon standards to Schoenberg. A fascinating take on Kitsch and life in central Europe.


If you are fortunate to be in the LA area on the 24th, you can hear three such ensembles in one evening, those led by Paul Bailey, Jon Brenner, and Lloyd Rodgers:

REALNEWMUSIC FESTIVAL, SATURDAY JUNE 24TH

TOTAL EARCANDY: PBE's LATEST FLASH-BASED MUSIC COMPOSITIONS ADDS SWEET FLAVOR TO DIGITAL MUSIC COLLECTION.

June 9th 2006

Expanding on its line of acoustic and digital music,the Paul Bailey Ensemble today announced a new series compositions designed sure to be a feast for the ears as well as the eyes and come in such tasty colors as coconut white, tropical ice blue, and licorice black.

These new products incorporate our most coveted features in a fresh design that's unlike anything in the market today," said Kelly Davis, senior product manager for at the Paul Bailey Ensemble. "They're a playful and easy way to enjoy live performance; just listening at them makes you want to smile." The compostions are easily played back using both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music files, in addition to supporting WMA and WAV formats. They are compatible with Itunes ™ online music store and include Itunes ® software to import, manage and transfer music collections.

Becoming available at retail stores and at authorized dealers nationwide, the ensemble will be giving a special demonstration of these new products at the realnewmusic festival on Saturday, June 24th at Whittier College. Pricing is flexible, Tickets are $10.00 /$7.50 (students and seniors or anybody two for $10) .

At the conclusion of this event the ensemble will distribute an optical disc that connects directly to a PC for the process of transferring music. These discs provide up to 5 hours of continuous playback and feature a quick-change function that enables individual selection of your favorite musical products. In fact, through recent changes in our distribution system you can access any of this material online for a small fee.

info:
Kelly Davis
Hakim M. Bey
Division of Public Safety
Paul Bailey Ensemble Inc.
314-228-1700

Left Coasters

Here are two great resources for West Coast experimental music, that I've been meaning to post for a good long time:

The first is the Other Minds Archive at the Internet Archive, including much from the tapes of KPFA, the Bay Area Pacifica station. (I like this concert of works by composers mostly connected with the S.F. Tape Music Center (I like the Ramon Sender aquarium piece segueing into the Leedy Octet: Quaderno Rossiniano), this autobiography by Henry Cowell, and this 1947 rehearsal recording of Stravinsky conducting the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There are also treasures by Lou Harrison, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Harry Partch and many others. It is disappointing, though, not to have anything by Robert Erickson, for a time Music Director at KPFA, a fine composer and an important teacher).

The second is a document archive collected by the late Jim Horton.

Both of these resources are Bay Area-centric. We really need some similar resources for Los Angeles, but I suspect that it would be a much more difficult topic to cover. L.A. is spread-out in all ways, centerless, and anything that isn't solid (and much of that which is) simply melts into air. But then again, that's why it's called the City of Angels.*

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* Okay, I know that it's the City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels on the River Porciuncula but I couldn't resist.

Pastimes

So I happen to run into two composing colleagues in the Main Train Station here in Frankfurt. We have a few minutes to chat before the trains start to leave. Turns out that we all had something in common besides our vocation: we're all insomniacs, and we all agreed that when all else failed, there was nothing that went better with that insomnia than televised hold 'em poker at 3:00 in the morning.

Knowing when to stop

Remember the Magic FingersTM machine? Once upon a time, they were installed in motels everywhere, a coin operated gadget that would shake the bed for a few minutes in return for a quarter. I suppose that it was someone's idea of a mechanized massage, but that someone was probably a Calvinist of some sort who had never actually experienced a real massage. But the Magic FingersTM machine did have one great, if unintended, attribute: it felt so good when it stopped.

When everything has gone well, a composer has that same feeling when a piece is finished, especially when all the loose ends are covered: parts made, errors corrected, posted or faxed or emailed in time for the deadline. But if the composer harbors any doubts at all, the strangest, emptiest, feeling can set in. You're not sure if the piece works or not, or if you have really done all the work, or if you have gone too far, meddled a bit too much with something that was better off the way it was before you started mucking about. Or maybe the piece was no good to begin with and no amount of adjustment is ever going to fix the thing.

When I have the luxury of a far-off deadline, I like to tinker with my pieces, especially when it comes to details. I like to load up my notation program with a half-dozen scores, decide which one works least well, and then go in and work on that one first, and then a bit on the others. Then I go through, reassess the rankings, and begin again. This process has the benefit of elevating the general level of quality, but carries the risk of going to far and throwing out some good material along the way (confession: I am miserly with my disk space, lazy about saving interim versions of pieces, and have no intention of changing these habits). It also has a slight masochistic quality to it: by continuously delaying the end of a piece, I am sustaining the euphoria of the compositional experience in exchange for delaying the feeling of satisfaction that comes with completion. Some composers work fast and never revise, others are serious revisors, taking years, if not decades to finish pieces. Analyse this if you like, but I think it takes all kinds to keep our musical lives lively.

Steering the customer

From my Inbox today:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased The Contemporary Violin: ExtENDed Performance Techniques (The New Instrumentation) by Strange Patricia also purchased books by Andrew Lloyd Webber. For this reason, you might like to know that Andrew Lloyd Webber's Andrew Lloyd Webber Classics (Andrew Lloyd Webber Classics) will be released in paperback soon. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 35% by following the link below.

After considerable deliberation, I have decided to pass on this particular item. Nevertheless, my curiosity about Lord Andrew's contributions to extended instrumental techniques has risen from nil to slightly more than negligible.

What's wrong with this sentence?

Over at the New Music Box, I read the following:

Orchestra Summit 2006
No one denies that we all want performances of new orchestral work that composers, musicians, and their audiences will look to with pride and satisfaction. Six key industry players discuss ways of reaching that goal and the hurdles that remain in our path.

If that's an "industry" then it's about as advanced as the Morgan Motor Company. I mean, seriously, do we really want to speak of orchestras as industrial? That's risking a market environment in which I do not believe most musicians are prepared to compete, and I suspect that the introduction of industrial production values may adversely affect product identity. From an industrial point-of-view, it is silly that Morgan still has a woodshop, puts the wheels on first so that the cars can be rolled up and down the hill from shop to shop, and use very few power tools, but those are exactly the elements that make the Morgan's identity as a "hand-made" motorcar so charming and enduring. The endurance of the orchestra as an institution is also in large part due to charm -- evening dress with tails, horsehair bows, coughing between movements, that person in front of the orchestra noiselessly gesticulating -- and it's hard to say what a loss any retreat from these charming elements would mean.

Ever more optimism

I keep running into interesting composers online. Of late:

Celeste Hutchins

Jon Brenner

Practicing theory

Checking up on a few Wikipedia music theory articles, I found a few discussion pages where articles were critiqued for not representing "standard music theory". While the articles in question may well have had some genuinely unorthodox aspects or even contained the -- in Wikipedia forbidden and dreaded -- "new research", this line of criticism hung, however, behind the great fig leaf of music education, the notion that there is a "standard music theory". In practice, most of what is called "music theory", even well into a university-level education, is, in fact getting command of notation and some terminology, with the goal in the best cases of attaching that notation and terminology onto real sounds as an useful ancillary to performance and perhaps some composition. Few students are made explicitly aware of the diffences between music theory as an analytic or synthetic activity, and many students are confused by the relationship between the physics of musical sounds, the perception and cognition of musical sounds, and the cultural construction known as music theory. Further, very few music students leave even a graduate education with any understanding of the breadth of music theory, whether as analytic theory (concerned how existing works of music were put together, are heard, and possibly what they "mean") or as speculative theory (concerned with how works of music might be put together or heard).

I am at best, a casual theorist (besser auf Deutsch: Teilzeitmusiktheoriekonsument), but I have found theory to be useful and even essential to my odd combination of interests, and admire serious music theory as an intellectual pursuit with depth, relevance, and unexplored potential. Writing now as a trained ethnomusicologist who has closely observed theorists in the wild, allow me to offer three observations about the practice of music theory:

(1) Music theory is parochial. Music theory is sometimes practiced within national boundaries, sometimes within networks of theorists or institutions. Comparing the best selling harmony books in Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Russia, or the US can be a startling experience. The premises and the notations can be wildly different. (This has very practical professional consequences: without recognizing the boundaries or networks, is may be difficult for a musician or scholar to make contacts or advance professionally. Tangentially relevant aside: In my own case, I think I aced the music GRE because I happened to notice that the chair of the Music GRE Board at the time was a Berlioz scholar. Sure enough, at least one of the 100 questions had to do with Berlioz; whether or not Berlioz was worth 1% of an exam attempting to cover music theory and history with at least token references to non-western and popular music was besides the point, which was: knowing something about Berlioz is worth something on this test).
(2) Music theory is provisional. The nature, extent, and limits of music are not known, and it is far from known what criteria would a "final theory" of music would have to fulfill. We are probably stuck for the foreseeable future in the state of waiting for better theories to come along. This is an active area of research but at any given time, it has probably been explored more thoroughly through innovative composition rather than theory.
(3) Competing theories of music do not neccessarily contradict or invalidate one another. They may complement one another, filling in each others' lacunae, or tracing the alternative paths in a music which is, in fact, ambiguous, or, in many cases, they may be equivalent, alternative ways of describing the same phenomena. While there may be some institutional power to be had in forcing the hegemony of a single theory or complex of theories, I remain persuaded that having as many theoretical tools available as possible is both more sustainable intellectually, and more humble in the face of the complexity of music.

If the form fits

Over at the Sequenza 21 Composers' Forum, Jodru asked about "Relevant Forms":

By relevant, I simply mean forms that have some sort of social significance, beyond their historical interest, and in my view, there are only two:

Opera
The Album (and by default, its constituent element: the Song)

Non-relevant forms? Sonatas, Symphonies, Concerti, Fugues (and many many more).

I wrote:

The question could rather be: Relevant to what and to what ends does that relevance function?

If your song, dance, or album (now going the way of the dodo in favor of the consumer's iPod list) is "relevant" to the prevailing entertainment market, then it is probably tightly bound to the content restrictions of that market, thus maintaining the status quo, or when introducing innovations, changing it only incrementally. This is a conservative impulse, and is not about learning more about the world, or changing the way one listens to the world, but simply consuming the definition supplied by an economic elite of what music is allowed to be.

If, on the other hand, music aspires to challenge the nature and limits of our listening practice, it will fit unwell into the existing market apparatus and make substantial demands of listeners' habits. One might argue that this anti-conservative impulse demands an "elite" community of listeners who are committed, experienced, possibly learned, and always open. But this "elite" is not comparable to the economic elite in the entertainment industry: membership is open to all and is not a result or sign of economic status or influence. It is an accomplishment -- a deep and personal relationship to music -- on its own terms, but also an affirmation that music, and the world around music, can be different.

We were robbed and didn't even notice

Finally, and for a broad audience, a persuasive case is made that the official results of presidential election of 2004 did not reflect the will of the voters. I'm generally a sceptic about things like this, but if someone set forth to rig an election, this article describes just about the optimal way to do it: not through a single large activity, but through simultaneous smaller, and apparently unconnected, measures netting the desired result with sufficient leeway to allow for the possible failure or detection of any or some of the single elements.* Further, such a program could be executed with total deniability, in that the campaign management need only give the instructions to "do everything possible" to win. When the campaign has already created an atmosphere where the ethical threshold is low, independent operatives at the local level are ideally placed to define "everything possible" in a creative and effective way.

The city of Frankfurt, Germany recently had elections to the city parliament (90-some members) and local councils (up to 19 members). The ballot was a piece of paper the better part of a square meter in size. Voting in the Land of Hessen is complicated -- voters can vote straight party tickets, or mixes of parties, or for individual candidates, or if they vote for party lists, they can strike out individual names or assign more weight to individual names -- and counting the votes is almost rocket science, but it is still a paper ballot, with crosses in little boxes drawn by the voters' hands, and counted by real people one-by-one. Paper ballots work really do work, and they leave a real physical trail of voters' intentions. You have to wonder why so few people in the US are asking why there is supposed to be a need to switch to something other than paper ballots. It wasn't broke, and trying to "fix" the problem actually means trying to fix elections. Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. (in Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow).
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* That's exactly how orchestral tuttis work, by the way.

First things first

"The first casualty when war comes, is truth" - Hiram Johnson, Governor of California (1910-1917), US Senator (1917-1945), co-founder of the Progressive Party.

I guess the present adminstration decided to cut to the chase. They went ahead and let truth fall even before the war began.

Dorodango

Dorodango: lumps of mud polished into shiny spheres, made by small children in Japan.

A good Freudian would blame it on early childhood training: some musicians need to get everything perfect, every detail accounted for, every surface polished and neat; others need to leave some things unfinished, unsaid, a bit messy, uneven; most musicians probably find themselves between these extremes, balancing or oscillating. But I think that there's probably a better music-evolutionary reason for this particular form of biodiversity: it keeps our musical lives lively and interesting, full of variety, even if the basic materials available to us are all pretty much the same.

My literary ambition

...is, before I die, to write a text without one parenthetic phrase enclosed between commas, parentheses, brackets, braces, dashes (be they single or double), ellipses, or any other punctuation device now known or yet to be invented.

(I expect to die at a very old age, shot by a jealous and angry grammarian).

The Convivial Cage

John Cage's musical enthusiasms were broad and he enjoyed sharing his discoveries. Not only his closest colleagues -- Wolff and Feldman, for example -- got his praise, but also composers in ever-wider circles, crossing genres, borders, and generations. He was -- unlike many of his colleagues -- a faithful concert goer and in his last years, if he was in town, he'd be somewhere almost every night. When he was away at Festivals and Conferences, he tried to make a point of being (his words) "one hundred percent" in attendance. I imagine that he saw himself as a member of the community (a member, not a citizen, for the community represented no state), and his interest in that community was more than duty. From La Monte Young or Pauline Oliveros or Alvin Lucier, to the composers in the Once group or the Tone Roads group, the extended family of musicians around the Cunningham company, he was curious, receptive, and supportive. (Milton Babbitt tells about meeting Cage for lunch to discuss the Composition for Four Instruments; Cage was enthusiastic that Babbitt had not avoided triads and other configurations suggesting tonal music. Of course they were talking at cross-purposes, but the point is that they were talking!) He was sometimes critical, of Virgil Thomson (I believe that the Cage half of the Hoover/Cage monograph has some extraordiarily incisive and clear analytic writing on music, and it has been unjustly ignored (but nevermind, I guarantee that there will eventually be at least one dissertation written about Cage as a music theorist)) or Glen Branca, and sometimes puzzled, for example by Richard K. Winslow. From the composers in my own generation, I recall his enthusiasm for music by Gordon Monahan and Mitchell Clark. In later years he singled out Philip Glass, putting him in Cage's alphabetized theatre of ghosts, and Stephen Albert, for the Symphony: RiverRun, product of a shared enthusiasm for Finnegan Wake. Cage used the word "convivial" to describe Glass's music, but that word really fits well to Cage's own works, and particularly those of his last years. Not only was he an active member of his community, but he was trying to compose in a way in which the balance, between sounds and silences, and among the sounds between loud and soft, was itself convivial: a sustainable ecology of sounds, shared on the basis of non-compulsion, mutual respect, and considerable faith in the prospect that when one is open and inventive, good things can happen with even the most modest of means. Damn it, I miss the man.

Listening habits of the leadership class

The media has taken great interest in the recorded music tastes of politicians, with the Ipod listings of C. Rice and H. Clinton in particular receiving thorough scrutiny and analysis. The balances between genres and the relative political leanings of those genres are hot topics, as is the possibility that a politician may be hedging in public about the true nature of their listening habits. Is one of them purposely slanting her purported workout list to the MOR? Or is another watering down her list with pop standards so as not to appear too highbrow ?

The pointlessness of this exercise is that musical tastes are being represented by Ipod frequency-of-play lists. But don't we all know that the music we love most is not the music we utilize the most? The music that we use functionally -- to get to sleep or to exercise or to do housework by -- has to fullfill criteria quite independent of whether it is the "music we like most". In fact, it may often help that such functional music is music that we can hear without listening to it closely. And the music that we really love? Well, we tend to treasure it and take it in measured doses and only at the right time and circumstance in order to give that music all the attention it demands.

Obligato

Some people manage to summon huge reserves of anger for music that they don't like. Just mentioning the names Schoenberg or Cage or Babbitt or Boulez on a listserv can usually guarantee an extended verbal assault. On the one hand, it is a good thing that music inspires passion, and I can understand this reaction when the music is forced upon the listener, without warning, and without escape. (Personally, I like some advance warning that music will be loud, and I like to be able to leave or plug my ears if it is too loud; as far as I'm concerned it's the same as protecting the rights of non-smokers to remain non-inhalers of smoke). In general, however, our most intensive musical experiences, when the music is not incidental to advertising or background for films or tv, the experiences where we can concentrate on the music itself, are in situations where we can assert considerable amounts of choice. So in the face of that choice, this anger towards music that one doesn't like is rather more an impulse to control the music that others hear, and that's just not civil.

The arguments summoned by the angry often attempt definitions of the musically acceptable, territory explored by Plato and the emperors of the Choson dynasty with equally ugly results. Music must have a beautiful melody, remain in a certain mode, be faithful to the spoken language, be danceable, only use consonances, or admit dissonances when resolved properly to the admitted consonances, not be played at certain times, be only played at certain times, be only sung by men, or when sung by women, then not in the presence of men, be tonal, not use instrument, not use organs, not use accordions, not use amplification, only be composed of sounds with harmonic spectra and must conform to the know limits of our psychoacoustical apparatu, it must not use drums or other makers of noise, and most of all, it must entertain as the musician is obliged to the listener. (Not.)

If I want to entertain, I will pick up a tin whistle and a hat and play for Euros on the Zeil in Frankfurt, or I will dig out a coat and tie and do lunch at the Russian Tea Room, planning my papering and conquest of Carnegie Hall, or I will score a few more industrial training films or adult entertainments or space operas, or I will write radio jingles for clogged-drain specialists. But that'd be another job description for me, another career, and I suspect that I'd make a better dim sum chef. The music I'm interested in making comes without a set list of acceptable qualities. As far as my music is concerned, the extent and limits of what music is and what it might be and how it might be used are still unknown, and I'd like to explore that, at least in a modest way. And neither the angry listserver nor the waitress down at Hoho's nor the King of Zembla nor the Pope of Pittsburg nor the CEO of the Yoyodyne is paying to support my music habit, so it's none of their business. And if the angry remain angry, I'll just tell 'em to change the channel and get a life of their own.

Lost in translation

So I'm reading Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories of a City and something in his first chapter doesn't sit quite right with me:

So pay close attention, dear reader. Let me be straight with you, and in return let me ask for your compassion.

It's that word, compassion. If he had asked the reader to bear with him, for patience, or tolerance, I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but asking readers for compassion is strange. I don't know anything about Pamuk's religious beliefs, but he is writing about Istanbul, and the word compassion has a special resonance for me in a context that is, at least potentially, Islamic. I know that Muslims address their prayers to a deity who is "merciful" and "compassionate", so compassion -- if that is the right translation -- is clearly something important to the faithful. It's important in many religions. For Christians, the deity's compassion is understood, not asserted, based in the belief that the deity became a human being, shared human suffering, and demonstrated how one should act in the face of the suffering of others. But the assertion of (and the need by the faithful to constantly re-assert) the deity's compassion in an Islamic context, without a deity who has physically shared in human suffering, strikes me as something quite different to Christian belief and practice, and I can easily imagine that that difference plays an important part in the distance between the two faiths. But then again, I may well be following an error in translation and comparing concepts which are not , in fact, comparable.

A road less taken

Back in High School (the late Pleistocene, on a continent far, far, away), my introduction to the musical avant-garde came mostly from libraries and radio broadcasts (especially those by David Cloud and Carl Stone at KPFK, the Pacifica station in LA, which then still had a committment to new music). Among the marvelous artifacts of the era were issues of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde. It had already stopped publication by the time I starting going through them (okay, I'm not that old), but luckily, the music library at Pomona College had a full set, and with written permission from Prof. Wm. F. Russell, long-time chair of the music department, I was allowed to leaf through them, albeit under the watchful gaze of one of the undergraduate librarians, probably certain that the kid from the wrong side of the Santa Fe tracks was going to abscond with a copy of one of those multi-colored, spiral-bound, oblong tributes to an era of extravagance already fading into the dull malaise of the times.

There is a remarkable amount of music, or musical directions, for which Source showed prescience -- Reich, Partch, Lucier, Ashley, Oliveros, Cage, Feldman -- and a few less-well-knowns that ought to be better known -- Leedy, Lentz, Childs, Hunt. But Source also had its share of misses, and one genre in particular seems to have nearly gone the way of the passenger pigeon: the theatre piece. In part, this is probably because performance art emerged as a genre with its own institutional presence and conventions, but also because a lot of theatre pieces just didn't work well or well enough on their own terms. (Theatrical elements were not the sole preserve of the avant-garde -- George Crumb would ask for masks and candlelight, as did countless Crumb-camp followers). But still, perhaps some of these pieces ought to be reconsidered. The scores to Daniel Lentz's theatre pieces are visual delights in the Source volumes, and while a bit slapsticky (i.e. a grand piano giving birth to a toy piano, an idea which could have come from a commedia dell'arte lazzi routine), sometimes a bit of slapstick is in order, and I'd really like to witness some of them someday. Kagel and his students (among them Maria de Alvear and Carola Bauckholt) have maintained a music-theatrical tradition in Germany, and it'd be a shame if the American repertoire just disappeared. I regret never having experienced Olivero's Double Basses at Twenty Paces (a duel, with referee and seconds, between two contrabasses) or Sender's Desert Ambulance.

A friend of mine in college once actually had a dream with a theatre piece by me in it, a piece I hadn't, but really wish I had, composed. If I recall correctly, this piece takes place at night, on a star-lit field, with instruments (now I'm composing: crosscut saw, horn, concertina, perhaps a viola) playing slowly against the background of a slow-moving complex of sine waves. (I was really into sine waves back then). A young woman with long hair walks barefoot across the field to a small table. On the table is a knife, a lemon, a white porcelain bowl, and a small paintbrush. She cuts the lemon in half, squeezes the juice of one half into the bowl, gently paints a line of lemon juice on the cheek of each person in the audience, and then exits, all as slowly as possible.

Invisible orchestras

Someone's come up with a theoretical basis for designing invisibility cloaks. While there might be some use for this in arranging a covert rendez-vous or slipping out of a restaurant in advance of the check, I can't imagine a better use of invisibility cloaks than in orchestration. Why? Nothing kills a surprising instrumental entrance better than having the surprising instrument visible in advance of the surprise. Imagine that an orchestra is on stage, playing an initial theme when suddenly, out of nothingness, a piano and a pianist appear to restate that theme. Or what to do about trombone sections or mighty choruses that are supposed to hang around until fourth movement finales? Cloak 'em. And opera singers with the right voices but the wrong bodies for their roles? Cloak 'em.

I just hope that someone is working on a cone of silence as well, for coughing audience members and horn players in fear of cracking their solos. Cloak 'em all.

More optimism

M. Keiser, of Music in a Suburban Scene writes:

"I have corrupted... the soft and moldable minds of fellow dorm-dwellers with my strange musics."

Which threw me into nostalgia, for Hallowe'en 1981, blasting LPs of Einstein on the Beach onto the dormitory quad at College Five, UC Santa Cruz. Prematurely air-conditioned supermarkets and all the other pleasures of a youth well-spent.

Putting things in order

Faced with an awkward working schedule for the past week (dominated by a four-year old underfoot, allowing work only in fits and starts, late nights and early mornings), I decided to make a set of short pieces, twelve little piano preludes to be exact, one for each tonic, in fifths, from Ab to C#, each with a duration between 30 seconds and one minute. I wanted to make pieces suitable for home music-making, playable by students or amateurs willing to stretch their tastes and techniques a bit, and, more privately, I wanted to dip into a pool of techniques that I've poured together over the years. I made the decision that processes or systems, once begun, did not have to cycle through to completion; time was short, and they could simply remain suggestive. I had the notion that once I committed to completing a set of 12 pieces, the requirement to complete any other list was effectively revoked. The pieces could be tonal, or modal, or neither, or something ambiguously posed in-between any of these environments.

Clear enough, and I've basically finished nine of the 12, but now I'm stuck on a basic formal issue. I just don't know whether the playing order should be Ab to C# in ascending fifths or C# to Ab, descending. On the sharp side, things are more abstract, even primitive at times, while the flat-keyed pieces are more "musical" in some traditional sense, and the Ab prelude, in particular, would provide a rather sweet way to start or to end. I could leave it up to the player, but that strikes me as disingenuous, or even cute, and that's not what these pieces are about. (I do, in fact, leave plenty to the player in terms of tempi, articulation, dynamics, but that's just my view of the standing contract between composer and performer).

Up Front

Composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz is booking a year of commissions online in a project called "We are all Mozart". Whether you want a 30-second solo or an evening-length opera (or anything
in-between), he can schedule your commission into his working calendar for 2007. AFAIK, this is the most audacious and ambitious action of its kind since Pauline Oliveros was selling "cheap commissions". Báthory-Kitsz says that the project is designed to "to create new works and change the perception of the music of our time". While I share the target of completing at least one small work every day, just to keep composerly chops in practice, sucessful completion of a whole year of commissioned work will constitute a remarkable performance in its own right.

Making music with the instruments you have, not the instruments you want

Over the past few years, and not only out of a parent's sense of duty, I've had the opportunity to hear quite a few school music concerts, at the elementary and Gymnasium levels both in Hungary and in Germany. Instrumental ensembles in schools do not have the traditions or standardization found in US schools, they don't have rooms built for ensembles, they don't have stocks of loaner instruments, and, as ensembles as not taught as courses, teachers usually can expect one rehearsal per week. Given those constraints, they do a valliant job. Not having to have bands march certainly helps (in Germany, marching appears to be reserved for the military (which, in past-war Germany has little public presence), for Carnival-season drum and bugle corps, and the Schalmei bands associated with organized labor (increasingly rare)). But music teachers are usually stuck with the instruments that students happen to be learning privately, and without loaners for the less popular and more expensive instruments, the teachers have limited abilities to steer violinists toward violas, or wind players away from flutes and saxophones. That means that the teacher has to go into concerts with odd doublings or substitutions and either going on stage with two dozen flutes or forcing the two dozen flautists to rotate.

So, in the face of a fit of flutes, we've either got to start playing up the advantages of learning oboe or viola or horn (you'll never be lonely if you take up the bassoon!), or start composing and arranging interesting music for flute choirs, or silver-heavy orchestras. A few years back, I made a piece -- a kind of concerto -- for the Swiss pianist Hildegard Kleeb and a Spanish student orchestra. I had to take the instruments they had, which meant too many flutes. But, in retrospect, having five flute parts and a piccolo and a full set of saxophones turned out to be one of the key elements in the piece. It's certainly not a well-behaved orchestration, but it is an orchestration you'll never forget.

Being given an unusual instrumentation to work with is certainly a major constraint on the composer, but maybe composers ought to think more like escape artists, and figure out ways to convince the audience that nothing can hold us down. Figuring out what to do with two dozen flutes is surely the least of our worries.

Awkward Choreography

I like being on the receiving end of applause as much as anyone, and I'm fond of the physical act of applauding after (and especially, between) pieces, if mainly for the chance to unwind a bit from the intensity of close listening. I even find that the high noise content of applause functions as a kind of ear cleaner, wiping away the old sounds, making room for the next.

The problem with applause as an indication of appreciation is that it is a simple sign executed by a mass. It's usually too coarse an indication of what, exactly, has gone right or wrong. With old or familiar music, it's not possible to distinguish between the piece and the performance (or between individual participants in the performance -- conductor, soloists, ensembles). When the work played is new, and the composer is present, this provides added uncertainty to the message. How do you applaud a new piece that you like despite an inadequate performance? How do you applaud a great performance of a work that is otherwise the aural equivalent of a marshmallow?

Applaus gets some disambiguation when it accompanies bowing, as the individual participants each get their turn at the stage apron. But the composer is a serious disadvantage, as she or he ordinarily has to make her or his perp walk from somewhere in the audience all the way up to the stage. That can often mean having to sustain a lengthy period of applause, and when the applause dies out before she or he has been able to bow, we are in for a shared moment of awkwardness. To avoid this possibility, it's probably best to stand and take your laurels from the auditorium, wave a hand or a hankie in gratitude to the performers and then sit right back down as soon as you can.

Music theory: a good read?

A side pleasure in many old music treatises is their form -- a dialogue, typically between a student and a master. While the dramaturgy is usually at a low level, there is at least some literary aspiration in play, a quality seldom featured in more recent theoretical works.

Once, in a moment of admitted light-headedness, I considered the possibility of writing a pair of theory textbooks with literary ambitions of their own. I suspect that the first, Topic of Counterpoint, could have been the first music textbook to sell a million copies, albeit largely under false expectations, while the second, The Rime of the Ancient Harmonizer, might well have been the first harmony primer composed entirely in ballad stanzas.

Fifths, octaves, everywhere,
And all of them parallel!
Fifths of horns and voices crossed,
Learn to hide them well.
...
The sixth, augmented,
Counts its varieties internationale:
Whether Italian, German, or the French,
Each, over-used, can sound banal.
...
A dominant seventh chord, with four different tones,
Alone and complete, presents no trouble.
But when it resolves to another dominant, seventh'd,
One of the tones must now be doubled.

Admirable folly

La Folia is an online music review with a healthy dose of contemporary music.

David McAllester

The ethnomusicologist David McAllester has passed away. One of the four co-founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology, his contributions to the study of Native American music, especially Diné (Navajo), were great. His books on Peyote Music and the Diné Enemy Way are classics. Originally an anthropologist, he switched his affiliation to the music department at Wesleyan (where I was lucky to be the TA for his "Worlds of Music" course). David delighted in singing and dancing, and, in his lecture hall, it was often contageous, which was a marvelous way to make the case that knowledge of the world's diversity of musics was general, not specialized, and belonged in the center of the educational experience.

David had an ethical hard core. He was a CO during the Second World War. He had been quite literally adopted by his Navajo informant family, and had become so trusted by some Native American musicians that they allowed David to make documentary recordings of sacred repertoire only under the condition that David closely supervise the conditions under which the recordings were used, a condition that he honored completely. Although most of David's work concerned traditional repertoire, his ears were always open and alert to new developments in music made by Native Americans, be they pop, country, Mormon, or "New Age". He was not imune to John Cage's (an important visitor to Wesleyan) challenges to the extent and limits of music making, and I recall his enthusiastic response to Pauline Oliveros' ceremonial opera Crow, to Stockhausen's Am Himmel wander Ich, and to David Cope's The Way.

Optimism

Trevor Murphy writes really well about music.

Patrick Swanson writes really well about music, too, and much else.

I haven't heard a note of his music, but I suspect that there isn't a composer out there with either a better web site (or a more unusual career) than Gareth Farr.

Up against it

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

Stearns

I think that Dan Stearns is a fine composer, and a model of uncompromising independence. He's a virtuoso guitarist (I believe he comes out of some corner of the free improv world, but I could be totally wrong about this), he does serious explorations of microtonal possibilities, and, a New Englander himself, his connections to the music of Ives strike me as both honest and deep.

Irwin articulates

Few artists are as articulate about their work as Robert Irwin, and his enthusiasm is infectious -- he's not making any compromises, he doesn't know what's going to happen next, and he's clearly having a blast. That's exactly the career I'd like to have! Here's an excellent video (streaming, RAM).

Ambition

"If you asked me the sum total—what is your ambition?" (artist Robert) Irwin told his friend and biographer Lawrence Weschler. "Basically it's just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is. It's not saying that I know what the world should look like. It's not that I'm rebuilding the world. Basically what artists do is to teach you how to exercise your own potential—they always have, that's the one thread that goes all the way through."

(cited in an essay by Michael Govan)

Still experimenting

Norman O. Brown was fond of pointing out that the German translation of the Christian Lord's Prayer contained the phrase "führe uns nicht in Versuchung", which can be taken literally as "lead us not into experiment". For some reason or another, when it comes to music making I was apparently never properly instructed in the proper Christian avoidance of experiment.

I happen to have no problem wearing the experimental label. The American compositional tradition with which I most identify has often been characterized as experimental. My graduate school composition faculty was a program in experimental music (Lucier, Kuivila), my other teachers (Mumma, Young, Harrison) had no problems with the label, either.

Although my own music often has a surface that resembles some other, familiar music, it is always the result of a project beginning with a "what if" question. As Cage put it: "here the word 'experimental' is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success or failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown."

The willingness to risk failure, by placing success and failure outside the project, and the detachment of composerly intention from the end result, strike me as the vital emblems of experimental musics. This is in contrast to music which has "effectiveness" as its object. I've never been comfortable with the terms of "effective" music-making: tension/release, climax, etc.. It could be that this is a deficit on my part, but I've never much like being manipulated, and perhaps that's the main reason I've been drawn to experimental music.

(And yes, I have noticed that I have appealed twice in recent posts to "comfort"; I suppose that's just a symptom of being a terminally American composer. )

Materia Musica

Given my music-philosophical sensibility, there is nothing that I would more like to do than to be able to put all of the music I care about into that big box called ephemera, and remove it from the real world forces of fads and markets and gossip and gravitation. However, when I learned that with each breath we take in, we inhale at least one molecule of the last breath of the murdered Caesar 2050 years ago -- and, by extension, we can reasonably expect each breath to also have at least one molecule of air pushed around by musicians playing in the first performance of the Monteverdi Vespers, or Beethoven's 9th, or Etenraku, or Gambir Sawit, or the Navajo Blessing Way -- my faith in an essentially ephemeral quality of music was fundamentally shaken. Sounds are real, and their effects are long-lived, if increasingly subtle.

Kuivila says

In an interview, composer Ron Kuivila says a few remarkable things about notation and more.

One phrase in particular captured my own reticence towards a lot of music from Stockhausen to John Zorn:

"appropriation is at least in part a form of virtuoso consumption"

(It's probably clear by now that, when conspicuous, I have a low comfort level with both virtuosity and consumption.)

More Leedy

A while ago, Alex Ross solicited composerly responses to some oddly lyrical words by Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a figure in one of the current Republican administration scandals. I couldn't summon up any creative energy myself to set Libby's paean to the Colorado aspens, but I did immediately recall a set of three three-voiced rounds to a set of short, but famous, texts associated with earlier Republican administration scandal: the Watergate Rounds by Douglas Leedy. I've made a quick and dirty Finale engraving of the score and put it up here as a PDF file.

In a word

a few favorite terms from Dr. W's Miniature Lexicon of Efficient Critical Assaults:

arcane.
baroque.
braindead. A term from Ron Kuivila.
clear. Alvin Lucier: "I like my music clear. Like gin."
clever.
complex. Short for: "I don't want to get into an argument over which definition of complex is applicable to this piece. Not to be confused with complicated or hermetic.
complicated. I don't understand it, and don't expect it'll be worth the effort trying to understand it. c.w. Hermetic
deep. The work displays both internal complexity and a wealth of connections to external phenomena (history, culture, etc.).
detailed. Full of small features.
dog's breakfast, a. Defined by Christopher Fox as a flute concerto by R. Murray Schaefer.
economic. A close match between means and ends.
effective. Music that pushes the listener. Probably the worst thing I could say about a piece of music.
elegant. When faced with a valley that one wishes to cross, a robust solution is to fill it in, an efficient solution is to build a bridge, and an elegant solution is to fly over in a dirigible, wearing white kid gloves.
empty. On zen-ish days, a compliment. On ordinary days, not.
fine.
flat. Without detail.
gnarly. Yes, I did grow up in Southern California.
hermetic. I don't understand it, may never understand it, but I suspect that its worth trying to understand it.
inflated. When market value exceeds intrisic value.
kitchen sink. Indicates that the composer has used at least one more element than was necessary. cw laundry list
laundry list. Indicates that the composer has used up every available element or combination of elements. cw kitchen sink
loose.
loss, a. The effort expended was not worth the result. see also totaled
luxurious. The enjoyment of means well in excess of needs.
mahnkopfed. pubescent. see also complicated.
mannered.
mess, a. When intended (i.e. Christian Wolff, Burdocks) a playful, delightful thing, when not intended, neither playful nor delightful.
movie music.
19th Century.
Poland, (makes you want to invade). The effect of Beethoven on a listener cw the effect of Rossini on a listener. see Pynchon, GR pp440.
precious. Usually used as a negative, indicating the over-application of effects that are best held in reserve.
quality.
real. In a world of cheap reproductions and throw-aways, who could ask for anything more? Reserved for a very small shortlist of pieces.
smart.
strategic. Indicates the use of long-term planning. cw tactic
tactic. A move applied on a provisional or one-off basis. cw strategic
talent. As in "there's no stopping it": a sarcastic response to an underwhelming effort.
tight. Precise, without excess.
ugly. Not neccessarily a negative. I honestly believe that there is not enough good ugly music in the world; the problem is bad and indifferent music, and ugly music can be good, bad, or indifferent.
totaled. A total loss, nothing to recover.
vivid. A dangerous term. While I like music that makes certain features or details vivid, I can't handle music that is only about pushing all levels to 11. A term I have learned from Alvin Lucier and Tom Robbins.

Landmarks (11)

Douglas Leedy: Piano Sonata 1994

With the composer's permission, I have uploaded the score as a PDF file (863kb) here.

Leedy's score -- composed entirely of octave-wide diatonic clusters, with either all naturals or a single b flat or f sharp -- is notated with elegance and efficiency. It bears the inscription ioannis caveae in memoriam, and the Cage of Cheap Imitation is a presence in the Sonata, but I also hear Cowell, and Stravinsky's Chorale in memory of Debussy (later incorporated into the Symphonies of Wind Instruments).

Looking for libretti

In the early 90s, a German composer friend & I would get together to talk shop every couple of months. The conversation would eventually turn to our parallel searches for opera libretti. My friend really needed to find a libretto, as he had not yet secured a professorship and an opera commission was a good way to guarantee paid work for two or three years. Under no illusions about my prospects for getting such a commission, I harbored the fantasy that I could nevertheless make something interesting for the stage. We ended up sharing a lot of interesting reading material, but neither of us ever found the perfect libretto. (My colleague finally got his professorship and I ended up doing a lot of childcare, so libretto hunts eventually disappeared from our conversations).

Since then, I've had more than a couple of ideas with potential -- The Winter's Tale, or Blake's The Island in the Moon, or -- following a suggestion in one of the Stravinsky-Craft conversation books -- Maximillian & Carlotta of Mexico, or Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo, with a perhaps too-obvious part for a swearing treble, or (my favorite) the story of Byron the lightbulb that never goes out from Gravity's Rainbow. Lots of very good, and simultaneously very bad ideas, if you know what I mean...

Part of the problem was (and is) that I suspect that I'm probably best suited to writing a comic opera. My literary tastes are comic. I like the fact that comic opera can enjoy all of the conventions of the form without embarrassment, and I like numbered arias and ensembles, and I do think that recitative can pace and give a motoric and melodic assist to dialogue. But face it, comic opera -- with a few, very special exceptions, and even they don't always work: Von Heute Auf Morgen, The Rake's Progress, Le Grande Macabre, Europeras I & II -- has not been the leading genre of the last century. In fact, sometime after Rossini, comic opera just gave up the ghost when it came to being, well, funny. Serious music became serious and "comic" was largely left to "entertainers".

In late 1999, I stumbled upon a webpage with excerpts from handpuppet plays by Edward Gorey. I had known his small books and drawings, the stage design and costumes for Dracula as well as a ballet, and the fine details of both image and text in that work had not prepared me for the radically reduced world of his puppets and their plays. His puppet plays were essentially dances for hands, accompanied by disturbing words. His puppets were basically rough lumps of paper mache, usually painted white, with a pair of holes for eyes, sometimes a nose, and female figures sometimes had a smaller lump -- a hair bun -- sitting on the back of the bigger lumps. These heads were simply placed on top of simple hand-sewn gloves, and would, with some frequency, fall off during performances (one evening of puppetry carried the title "Heads Will Roll"; when a puppet would lose its head, the other puppets on stage would give comfort to the stump). I immediately wrote to Gorey on Cape Cod, and a few weeks later received a libretto, an "opera seria" for handpuppets in 13 scenes of rhymed verse based on the "Lake of the Dismal Swamp". The opera -- despite Gorey's label, it was definitely a comic affair -- practically wrote itself, and I found myself writing tonal music and real songs for the first time since high school. The performances, in an old clapboard hall in Cotuit, Mass. were done by local players who had worked with Gorey for years, amateurs in the best sense of the word. It had a run of good ten performances, but the performances were also, sadly, a memorial to the librettist, who -- unusually but deservedly -- got top billing over the composer.

The White Canoe, my opera for handpuppets with Gorey, is a great little piece, but I've since been reluctant to allow another performance. It doesn't require a lot: four singers, three instruments, and four puppeteers, but it has to be done right, and I can wait. In the meantime, I'm still looking for another good libretto.

Virtuoso. Recorder.

I wrote that I would be avoiding recordings this year, but while driving and searching for the traffic report, I happened onto some samples from a recording by the Swiss recorder player Maurice Steger and was staggered. It was gutsy, animated, sometimes even over-the-top playing; it was detail-rich and those details were always musical. The repertoire is two concertos and an overture by Telemann, a composer whose music is too often played simply for its abundant charm. These performances chucked the charm and went for genuine shock and awe (we know all about fake shock and awe nowadays; this is the real thing). While the sound design of the recording may have enhanced this impression, Steger's playing with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin achieved a dynamism that forces me, at least, to totally reasess what the recorder can and might be able to do. Long before its forced enlistment into school and summer camp service, the recorder was one of the first instruments to be associated with a large body of notated music at a virtuoso level. While occulted a bit in the 19th century, a huge repertoire was composed for the instrument in the 20th century, and (IMO) the most successful were among works associated with Frans Brüggen, the trio Sour Cream, or the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet. There is an amazing number of good recorder players out there today, and composers should take advantage of this. But I'll go out on a limb and say that Steger's playing suggests a substantially different take on the character of the instrument, and potentially, a new point of orientation for composing some sophisticated music.

Polansky's Road

Larry Polansky has a number of scores available online. Mr. P. is one of the vital figures of his generation, with an attitude, imagination, and relationship to tradition that I admire. In particular, I recommend his piano piece Lonesome Road (The Crawford Variations), a piece of music that can carry the adjective "major" without suffering a bit of embarassment.

Slow going here at the Home Office

Recently, I have gotten halfway through writing a half-dozen posts or so only to toss them, regretting a personal and angry tone that they had taken. This blog is supposed to be about music worth listening to, not about how angry a certain-critic-who-shall-not-be-named or some institution or regime or policy can make me. So, I'll try to stick to the music...

If it hasn't been clear enough already, "renewable music" is an ethical category, not an aesthetic one. And the music I have mentioned here as "landmarks" can heardly be heard as a single, coherent repertoire. It's all just music that I happen to value and wish to share. Much of the music mentioned has fallen off the big public radar screen, and this is a time when music of any sort is increasingly devalued by the forces of markets and institutions that can influence, commodify and control the availability of music and the circumstances in which it is heard. The term "renewable" has a well-known ecological association and that association is intended. We cannot listen to everything, but arbitrary losses of rich but not-widely-known musical repertoire cannot be justified by an economization of listening. The natural musical ecosystem is full of niches that can thrive independently from market forces, but those forces, with their tendency towards an all-encompassing monoculture, are difficult to escape or to resist. If this small blog can be a part of that resistance, then it will be worthwhile.

Still at home in the 19th Century

John Quiggin of Crooked Timber has a nice item about the relative youth of much that we accept as "traditional", with some striking (excuse the pun) examples. It's really quite true for music as well -- very little from before the 19th century has remained a continuous part of "the tradition" (earlier musics had to be rediscovered, or were adapted to later performance practices), and a lot of the issues that musicians confront today -- the modern piano in equal temperament, the romantic orchestra and the instrumental technology that it represents, operatic vocal technique etc. -- are issues associated with 19th century innovations and conventions. And the phenomenon is not only a European and American one: the Court Music repertoire and practice of Central Java, for example, is a colonial-era style, and the trinity of great classical composers of Carnatic music (Tyagaraja, Muthiswami Dikshitar, and Syami Sastri) were, in their prime, contemporaries of the European romantic composers.

Practically everywhere you turn, walls appear (delineated by what? the Enlightenment? Colonization? Nationalism? Modernism? Secularlism? Capitalism? the Industrial Revolution?), before which memories become vague, and after which explositions of invention took place, explosions from which, apparently, we have not yet recovered.

Voices

I recently posted a comment to an item at Sequenza 21's Composers Forum about Ned Rorem's new opera Our Town:

Rorem was very wise to limit the size of his orchestra. Modest resources would seem to match the modesty of his subject matter and the economy of means has other practical and musical uses. Personel costs can be real impediments to productions and it's reasonable to assume that the smaller pit will make the piece more attractive. A lighter orchestra, however, creates some interesting opportunities for flexibility with vocal types. A lot of the discomfort audiences and composers alike have with operatic voices comes directly from the development of a vocal technique designed to compete with a large orchestra (even then, at Bayreuth, of all places, the unique construction of the pit attenuates the orchestra considerably so that singers don't need to overproduce), while often sacrificing comprehension of the text. If opera is going to renew itself in any major way, I think that either a more "natural" vocal technique combined with a more intimate orchestra, or an electronically amplified and mixed environment is going to be part of the equation. (Another way of thinking about it is that the furture of opera lies with Monteverdi and/or Robert Ashley, composers of operas with intimate ensembles, comprehensible texts, and equally rich in vocal details).

A few more scattered thoughts about voices and new music: Nowadays, popular music is dominated by vocal music (popular instrumental music -- and especially big band dance music -- never really recovered from the Musician's Union strike during the Second World War, and popular successes in instrumental music now tend to be novelty items) while prestige among "serious" composers has usually been reserved for instrumental genres. Of course, this is all generalization, and operas/music theatre, choral music, and art song have their niches, but I believe that it's generally true. One reason for the prestige is simply that vocal music tends to have texts, and the concrete references of lyric or narrative texts run against more abstract impulses. Vocalise, essentially the use of a textless voice as an instrument, has been a minor genre (albeit with interesting examples, an a capella choral Petit Symphonie by Mihaud for one), although many composers and singers have unintentially created vocalises with either text settings or performance styles that render the text unrecognizeable. Another reason for the prestige of instrumental forms is that composers tend themselves to be instrumentalists, and few in the ranks are gifted singers (there is actually a style of shorthand singing that many composers use when going through a score -- intervals tend to get squished, preserving only a semblance of the contour -- not a pretty sound). The exceptions, however, from Samuel Barber to Robert Ashley, tend to be composers whose vocal music is worth hearing.

One sentiment often expressed by contemporary composers about singing is a distaste for classical vocal technique, and vibrato gets singled out as especially undesireable. I'd like to refine this complaint a bit and hazard the notion that the problem is not vibrato per se, but rather the inability to control vibrato. The singer should be able to turn it on and off, as well as to control the speed and depth of the vibrato. I recommend highly a small article by the late and extraordinary early vocalist Andrea von Ramm, titled simply " Singing Early Music", in Early Music 1976 Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 12-15. She goes firmly against the idea of a single vocal technique to fit all musics, and instead advocates mastering a body of flexible techniques that can be fit to the music at hand. I don't think composers of new music could wish for anything more, and the real exchanges that have taken place between early and new music specialists (as well as those engaged in musics outside of the western tradition and in vernacular genres) can only further enrich vocal practice. To my ears, there is more than a close fit between the ideas of early music specialists, like von Ramm or Paul Hilliard, and those of musicians specializing in new, extended vocal techniques, like Meredith Monk, William Brooks, or any of the overtone-singing specialists.

I realize that I may create some dissonance when I identify Robert Ashley as a gifted vocalist. Ashley doesn't exactly sing, he talks, but he does so under the constraints of a discipline that can only come out of extraordinary musicianship. And from The Wolfman in the sixties to his most recent operas, Ashley has completely opened up the space that exists between speaking and singing. But perhaps this was simply neglected space -- in his Music Primer, Lou Harrison recommended Chinese Opera as

"complete music theater, for it includes & offers all that can be done with text & music. Plain speech, unaccompanied. Plain speech accompanied. Rhythmitized speech unaccompanied. Rhythmitized speech accompanied. Song unaccompanied, etc., up to & including Chorus accompanied."

Sørensen's Symphony Wins in a KO

I went to the Forum Neue Musik concert last night at Hessischer Rundfunk, a program of recent orchestral music by four composers (James Clarke, Klaus Lang, Bruno Montovani, Bent Sørensen) played by the HR-Sinfonie Orchester. Forum Neue Musik has been an important series, essential, for example, in establishing the orchestral works of Feldman and Scelsi, but also in exploring the periphery of the repertoire from Carillo and Obuchov to Chris Newman and Maria de Alvear. The orchestra played well last night, as usual, but with real engagement saved for a single work on the concert. In theory, there was something for everyone on the program -- some complexity, some minimal-meditative pianissimoism, some "jazz" riffing on accompaniment figures from Schubert Lieder, two pieces with soloists (percussion, bass clarinet) -- and although the first three quarters of the way through the program, the orchestral-writing competence of all the composers was everywhere in evidence, I was suffering from a real bout of the tired-new-music-cliché-blues. Clark, Lang, and Montovani all made the mistake of using all of their toys in their instrumental toy boxes. I think that if you're going to use a lot of instruments in a piece, you have to have good reasons for using each and everyone of them, and simply having the instruments pre-paid in an orchestral roster is not a good enough reason for me. The Clark Maailma, for solo percussion and orchestra, had a typical new music concert array of percussion and used all of it in turn. It was a bit like reading a percussion cabinet inventory without any ear-convincing rationale for doing so. It's a shame: Clark's rhythmic writing is inventive, and had he simply kept those rhythms intact and had the soloist play a single instrument -- let's say, a tom-tom -- it would have been a more intense experience. The orchestral writing for strings and brass was excellent, and a bit more economy -- why not just eliminate the woodwinds and orchestral percussion? -- would have usefully tightened the piece. Klaus Lang's Tausend Kraniche, a "mourning music with obliggato harpisichord", should have been the piece on the program closest to my own sympathies. But instead, it was one large empty gesture with a bad joke thrown in at the end. I don't feel competent to say much about the Montavani Mit Ausdruck for bass clarinet and orchestra; I simply can't assess the relationship to Jazz that the composer claims, and the relationship to Schubert lieder was not vivid enough for me.

I could have left the concert at that point and the program would probably have been forgotten by the time I reached the parking lot, but I stayed, and I'm glad that I stayed because the fourth work on the program was excellent and will remain in memory for a longtime. I had never before heard a single note by Bent Sørensen, probably because we come from very different neighborhoods in New Music Land. Sørensen's Symphony was one of those rare pieces that had enough connections to traditional repertoire (Mahler, everywhere, but to many others as well -- Bernard Herrmann, perhaps?) and to traditional orchestral interpretative practice that the orchestra was fully engaged. At the same time, Sørensen made no compromises and his work was always something new and of a piece with itself. The piece worked both globally and locally; long term connections were underlined by striking details. The quiet lamento high strings over loud and narrow contrabass sighs at the close of the work, just barely suggesting nostalgia for a contrapuntal world beyond the confines of the piece, both tied the Symphony together, and left it shattered. Although both technically and musically difficult, the orchestra simply liked playing the piece, and I really liked listening to them play it.

Economies of scales

One more note about tunings. I first started to explore tunings in the seventies (I was a precocious High schooler) and the instruments I used most for exploration were simple metallophones made from aluminum conduit, modeled on those built by Erv Wilson. They sounded great but had one major drawback -- every distinct pitch I required required another piece of metal, and each new piece of metal has to be playable integrated into the instrument, which couldn't expand too much simply due to lack of space. You can probably imagine how quickly a cost/benefit picture comes into view, with costs rising at an alarming rate. A Just Intonation array was plausible only as long as modulation was limited and my total pitch vocabulary was restrained; otherwise tempered alternatives showed advantages of which I sometimes took.

Nowadays, working primarily with electronic media for my microtonal work, the constraints on materials and space have become less critical, and theoretically I should be comfortable working with any number of pitches. In practice, however, I like to have some sense of or feeling for the entire pitch collection in a piece of music, and my experience, with Just Intonation, is that only feel in command when that collection has no more than 20-22 or so pitches. At the same time, and again, even though cost should no longer be a great concern, I find that the advantages of temperaments are rapidly outweighed by costs when the total number of pitch classes exceeds 20 or 22 or so. There is much to recommend a tuning like 31-, 53, or 72- tones to the octave, but the qualities recommended are largely those of Just Intonation, so I find that unless I absolutely need to extensively modulate pitch sequences, I'd just as soon tune in Just Intonation. And should I be interested in using functional relationships that are not available in a Just environment, it's fortunate that the equal divisions of the octave from 7 to 23 tones offer a substantial number of such functional possibilities at the cost of reasonably small total collections of pitches with which to become familiar.

Books on composition

(This was a personal response to a question on the Make Microtonal Music list.)

These are a few of the books more-or-less directly about composition to which I have returned frequently over the years:

Cowell, Henry, New Musical Resources
De la Motte, Diether, Kontrapunkt (This, unfortunately, has not yet been translated into English).
Erickson, Robert, The Structure of Music, A Listener's Guide
(Erickson's later book, Sound Structure in Music, mostly about timbre, is also interesting, but for whatever reasons, I have never returned to it)
Harrison, Lou, Lou Harrison's Music Primer
Kühn, Clemens, Formenlehre der Musik (needs to be translated)
Morley, Thomas, A Plaine and Easy Introduction to Practical Music
Mozart, W.A., Attwood-Studien (The harmony and counterpoint notebooks of Mozart's student Thomas Attwood)
Seeger, Charles, Harmony (Sadly, very difficult to find!)
Seeger, Charles, Dissonant Counterpoint (article)

These come from the visual arts, and say nothing explicit about musical composition, let alone tuning, but they are so rich in ideas that I can't imagine not having them near my desk:

Klee, Paul, Pedagogical Sketchbook
Wechsler, Lawrence, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One
Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin

I'm not alone among composers in having found this valuable:

Thompson, D'arcy, On Growth and Form

These are more recent additions to my library, so have not yet faced
the test of time, but are certainly worth a look:

Andriessen/Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky
Ashley, Robert (ed.), Music with Roots in the Aether
Lucier, Alvin, Reflections/Reflektionen
Tenzer, Michael, Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music
Wolff, Christian, Cues/Hinweise

I continue to be impressed by John Cage's contribution to the Hoover/Cage Virgil Thomson; Cage was a gifted writer about practical musical technique.

One of my students recommends this so strongly that I include it here despite my own reservations:

Mathieu, W.A., The Harmonic Experience

We still need a contemporary volume to replace Helmholz's The Sensations of Tone. William Sethares' Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale is an important book. Richard Parncutt's Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach is one of the more interesting pieces of scholarship in the field. It's out of print, but the publisher has admirably allowed for free downloads, via:

http://www-gewi.uni-graz.at/staff/parncutt/hapa.html

Armchair reading you won't find in my house

I would really like to spend some time with Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra (Hardcover) by Richard Taruskin. I was able to take a look at a copy in the local University library; unfortunately it's considered too valuable to check out. It's two big, beautiful volumes, and I have just the armchair I'd like to read then in. However, with a list price of USD195, it's just not going to happen.

Landmarks (10)

William Brooks Madrigals (1977-78) four pieces for SATB quartet, amplified.

Brooks' Madrigals are virtuosic, demanding both impecable conventional musicianship and extended vocal techniques, but at the same time very much music written by a composer who loves to sing for singers; they are complex, deep, both intellectually (Brook's analytic skills -- of both words, tones, and their interplay in timbre -- are everywhere apparent) and culturally (his re-imaginings of Orlando Gibbon's Silver Swan and Stephen Foster's Nelly was a Lady are astonishing), but these pieces are also emotionally immediate, at turns touching, comic, and amazed.

Keeping new music new

If the level of activity in the new music blogoplan is significant, there's not much in the new music world to write home about these days. In the 50s, 60s, 70s, there was excitement as each precious bit of information on the new music scene arrived. Publications and recordings were rare, communications were slow, but the sensation that something new was going on was real, and intellectual and emotional engagement - whether of support or controversy -- were lively. (In high school, in the seventies, I once actually rode my bike thirty miles to UCRiverside and thirty miles back home in order to read Soundings. I used to copy out whole scores by hand from libraries because I couldn't afford photocpies). But now that so much material is out there and readily available, not much seems new and less inspires passions of any sort.

If the new music blogoplan is going to challenge this state of affairs -- and it should because there is exciting, demanding, and moving work out there that should be better known -- then we've got to up the ante a bit. There have got to be a couple of new music blogs where there is really actually something new to read every day and the blog as a whole takes a clear posture towards the world and its need for new music. This probably means a group blog in which each contributor commits to a regular flow of words. The composers forum at Sequenza 21, perhaps, is the closest to the right track, but I'd like a bit more direction in terms of the community of writers and the pace of articles.

Simple doesn't necessarily mean that complexity is lacking

An article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker on the Shakers and their artwork; Gopnik usefully clarifies the parallels between the Shakers and some minimalist visual artists.

The initial generation of American musical minimalism produced work, like the Shakers, out of the force of strong, experiential rather than doctrinal, beliefs, and like the Shakers, the minimalist composers did all things by going to extremes. The distancing from, if not absence of, these qualities in the "post-minimal" era was perhaps necessary, but still somehow disappointing. The acoustic grafitti -- or halo -- produced by combination tones and other acoustic ephemera that hung over the works by Young, Riley, Reich, Glass, Maxfield, Leedy, Lucier and others marked the unpredictable, unstable, complex and connecting elements in tapestries that were otherwise regular, straight, and narrow.

A return to those heady days is both impossible and unwanted, but a reinvigoration of our music, now, with those radical impulses is not only desireable but also necessary, if we are to get out of the present slump.

"It was a dream."

Es war ein Traum. February 17th will be the 150th anniversary of the death of Heinrich Heine, a poet and journalist of many dimensions, the one reason to learn German if you need only one, a man totally resistant to the boundaries of a single school, nation-state or ideology, a prophet of personal independence and political liberalism, but most of all, a musician's poet.

Dentistry

I'd willingly have a tooth pulled without a pain killer if, in return, I would never again have to hear a composer who has just received an opera commission1 say: "Of course, I don't really like opera."2
_____
1. Opera commissions are rare, doled out in an unpredictable mix of real competition, insider politics, and caprice. Once made, a good opera commission can help feed a composer for up to two years composing and try-out time. And if the opera has legs, it pays grand rights. All-in-all, it ought to be enough to make you find something attractive about opera.

2. I've really heard that sentence about not really liking opera from at least five new recipients of operatic commissions. Typically, the next sentence begins with some back-pedaling: "So, I will make an anti-opera/non-opera/theatre piece/staged oratorio/live film score etc. instead."3

3. And the next sentence will include the obligatory line about not liking vibrato (to which I respond "I like vibrato well enough, I just don't like singers who can't control it.)

Defending Ockeghem from his devotees

It's time to let Ockeghem be Ockeghem again.

For a long time, the "complexity" gang has summoned Johannes Ockeghem up as an essential figure in a reading of musical history where composers are emphasized for the complexity of their works.

Now, I've just read something by a critic-and-composer-who-shall-not-be-named, who probably would go to great lengths not to identify himself with the complexity crowd describing a "Johannes Ockeghem, who smoothed over all seams in his music for an absolute minimum of contrast"

How do these two views add together? On the one hand, Ockeghem is a composer who has left us with a few major pieces based on rather sophisticated musical ideas -- combining several meters or modes, and by making extremely long melodies that are essentially unpredictable in their contour or in the succession of note durations. No motives, sequences, very little repetition. On the other hand, those melodies are indeed smooth and the tight ensemble character is only broken by small local peaks in the melodic curves or a bit of ficta-induced variety from time to time. Ockeghem succeeds in a remarkable balancing act between the unpredictable and the continuous. In his L'homme Armé Mass, the cantus firmus is not sung continuously. Instead, it comes in and out of the piece, disappearing and then suddenly reappearing, as if it were just another tributary, adding to the mainstream of sound without punctuating it dramatically. This is music full of contrast, but think of the kind of contrast that you see at twilight; it's compressed in absolute value, but within that compression the relative peaks are startling, and the details vivid if fleeting. My early music teacher, Shirley Robbins, described Ockeghem as sounding "like chocolate."

I recommend the three volume collected works of Ockeghem, it's just the kind of thing for anyone who likes to sing or play music that rewards both the mind and the senses. I don't have the complete works of many composers in my home library, but this one was essential to have.