Think Again

Repetition is opportunity.

A nice line from Xenakis:

When you say repetition, it is "thinking again about the same thing." This is what I think of as the meaning of "repetition."

(from here), reminds me  (once again) of my favorite Lewis Carroll verse, The Mad Gardener's Song:

He thought he saw an Elephant,
  That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
  A letter from his wife.
"At length I realise," he said,
  "The bitterness of Life!"

(...)

and, of course, John Cage's advice:

If we are suffering, and we are able to recognize it, we have the opportunity to change our minds. 

 

Irreverent

Without thinking too much about it in advance, I recently set some small poems by the late Charles Chase, a hometown poet, radical, sculptor, teacher, instrument repairman, small businessperson, and a great friend.  One of them has gotten me into some trouble:

we're not so crowded / where we're going / but we got room for God / being he don't mind / sharing the work / except Sundays

My settings are for ATB voices, not too difficult technically, and are rather mild in musical character, even pretty.  But the reception from prospective singers has been cool.  I just hadn't reckoned with the fact that most choral groups are either attached to religious institutions, or peopled with church-goers so this modest bit of irreverence was just enough to place it in the not usable column.  

These little songs are not central to my work, so that this is is not a major issue for me or anyone else, but maybe it is a useful illustration of current religious sensitivities.      

 

Language Extinction

It's a good thing that there's so much concern these days about language extinction.  As someone working in a musical niche, I recognize something kindred in endangered, dead, and extinct languages.  These languages, like our musics, are repositories of alternative modes of expression (at their acoustical surfaces, at the very least)  and, sometimes, perception, and the preservation of such creative diversity is a critical task.

This conservative task is entirely complementary to the goal of encouraging new linguistic invention.  Nothing is more deadening to the imagination than prescriptive linguistics when it has acquired political power (in a country like Germany or France, for example, the rules about correct spelling are a highly political affair and inability or disinclination to follow those rules can be highly disadvantageous; I have recently watched the newfound American enthusiasm for the spelling bee with some horror).  The same certainly goes for musical composition:  innovation, like the recovery of neglected historical musical paths, inevitably means a confrontation with or negation of some conventions or rules.  

   

Arts and Crafts

I just read that Sam Maloof has died, at the age of 93.  A woodworker, Maloof famously refused to identify himsef as an artist and insisted that his rocking chairs were to be rocked and his cribs were for babies to sleep in, not just striking objects to look at but exquisite surfaces to touch and be put to use.  He was part of a Southern Californian crafts scene that, to my mind, included people like the ceramicist Paul Soldner (Soldner was a neighbor when I was a kid, with a stone house like ours in Russian Village on the Claremont/Montclair border; Maloof lived in Alta Loma, not so far away) as well as countless others working in niches between the ornamental and the practical that California seemed to have always attracted like a magnet.  

I don't think it's much of a stretch to also associate a number of west coast musicians with these craftsmen — Lou Harrison and Harry Partch and Erv Wilson, certainly, but also John Cage, for all of whom craftmanship (in notation or instrument building, for example) was important, as well as the inventive use of found materials, and were never narrowly constrained by the conventional and narrow definitions of their professional disciplines, but rather an attitude that any interesting line of work could be pursued, DIY.  Moreover these musicians seemlessly incorporated craft elements into their work in contrast to the way in which a Schoenberg kept his hobbies (designing playing cards or a cardboard violin) at home or Hindemith identified the craft of composition with a guild-like professional compentency.  

There is a well-known and rather formal art historical term, Arts and Crafts, that identifies a movement in architecture and the decorative arts that, with probable roots in the English movement of the same name, flowered in California and further up the west coast.  Facing the Pacific, Asian models were as important as those from Europe, and the European models as often as not were filtered through the Spanish and Mexican colonial/mission era.   I can remember, in the 60's, visiting the homes of various elderly relatives, all of which exhibited mixtures of architecture, furniture, decor, and objects which comfortably incorporated all of these influences.  My great grandmother's place in Paso Robles was a white-plastered, red tile-roofed adobe bungalow, where persian rugs inside looked up at wrought iron Mexican lamps, and dinner was served on real blue china from China, the model for her garden was, despite the hot climate, an English one with Japanese-inspired touches. The movement was never exclusive to professional artists.  That house and garden in Paso Robles was sketched on by the owner-builder on butcher paper and later on had hand-made lace, stained glass windows, and wallpapers to accompany the purchased items.  Russian Village was only one of several complexes in Southern California with houses made from rocks, salvaged slabs of flood-wrecked concrete pavement and any other bits of thrown-away but still usable material. (The famous Watts Towers are a close sculptural relation of these houses).   The movement reached outward and downward: a standard field of instruction in public schools was "arts and crafts" rather than the traditional fine arts trio of drawing, painting and sculpture. John Cage's mother, for a time, owed an Arts and Crafts store in LA, selling materials to home hobbyists; his engagement with graphic design and, later in life, with printmaking mixed the seriousness of someone who know the mainstream world of modern art well with the play of someone who was willing to try it himself.  I also think that there's an obvious straight line to be drawn from Cage's can-do music education experiments with his Aunt Pheobe and in WPA projects to his music for percussion and the prepared piano.   

Lou Harrison will always be a professional role model for me: if he needed a particular instrument, he had it built or built it himself.  (A friend once quipped that "with every step forward in technology, Lou was apt to take two steps backward".*) Two of Lou's own role models were William Morris and Arnold Dolmetsch, direct connections to that other Arts and Crafts movement.  His calligraphy was of a different aesthetic than Cage's, connected to older historical models (Morris especially) than Cage's more strictly modernist influences (i.e. Maholy-Nagy), but both had manuscript hands that were attractive, legible, and immediately identifiable as their own, impulses that go at some odds with the emphasis elsewhere on a more uniform professional copying style.    

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* That same friend predicted that Lou would soon be making his own paper, but Lou actually became a serious advocate of non-tree papers and it was Cage who would incorporate his own paper (with ingredients including kitchen scraps) in his visual art works.  Lou was also not-entirely-so-backward with regard to technology.  With Carter Scholz, he devised several sets of computer fonts based on his calligraphy, which are now available from Frog Peak Music.

Shawn on Schoenberg

I've just read composer Allen Shawn's Arnold Schoenberg's Journey (Harvard 2002) and can recommend it highly.  It's a modest length (ca. 300 pages) work of advocacy for the music and for Schoenberg himself, written in a personal and concrete style making it a nice companion to both Charles Rosen's small Schoenberg book and Andriessen and Schönberger's wonderful Stravinsky book, The Apollonian Clockwork.  Shawn discounts his analyses in advance, but his treatment of the Six Small Pieces, Die Glückliche Hand and the String Trio are quite fine, clearly the work of a musician listening closely to music he loves and comfortable with the words needed to share what he has heard.  In his discussion of Schoenberg's life and personality, he is always interesting and musically relevant, whether writing of Schoenberg's complext relationship to religion, his passion for games and crafts, or even giving an entire chapter over to the topic of "On Being Short"*.   

It is a striking fact that Schoenberg remains a composer whose music — and person** —  is so often held only in the most reserved form of respect, only thinly concealing a serious disapproval, that advocacy is still required.  I contend that the difficulty with Schoenberg's music is its style rather than its substance or technique, and perhaps what his works need best is some defense against its devotees, whether from an Adornovian historical dialectic or dry Babbittonian technical description.  In truth, however, the style, one in which expression is so heighted and treats the darkest themes and topics which haunt our souls, has long become a permanent part of our musical language, if only most often encountered in its weak imitations found in film music.  Fortunately, in Europe at least, his work receives regular concert and stage performances and is increasingly well-played.  The 1998 Gielen/HR-Symphony recording of the one act comic opera Von Heute Auf Morgen, for example, was so brilliantly rehearsed that it revealed that the work, long considered only questionably comic and impossible to really pull off, was, in fact, a lost masterpiece, and the players under Gielen learned to play in the style with both the precision and spontaneity required of a comic work.  

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* As someone who is often the tallest composer in the room,  it was very interesting to read that people who are not tall often adopt social strategies that are the opposite of my own.

** A vivid example of this was recently provided by the German musicologist Martin Vogel, who devoted an entire volume to disparaging Schoenberg's music and personality and an entire companion volume to disparaging Schoenberg's influence (Cage in particular) as the "Mistaken Path of Modern Music".   What a waste of paper.

Melodica!

While free-reed instruments have enormous prestige in East Asian and Southeast Asian musics, they have often been a bit undervalued in the west, more associated with popular and pedagogical repertoire.  Occasionally, however, individual free-reed instruments have proven themselves to be valuable in art music as well -- just think of the harmonium in Rossini's Petite Messe Solemnelle, the accordion in Ives' Second Orchestral Set, Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, and many pieces by Oliveros and Skempton, or the bandoneon in Mumma's Pontpoint, Tudor's Bandoneon! or Kagel's Tango Alemán.  (Not to mention the original orchestration of Die Dreigroschenoper or Oliveros' See-Saw (a duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato).   The number of composers who have written for the harmonic is long (here's one list), so I'll only note concertos by Cowell and Hovhaness.  

There has, however, been too little written for the friendliest of the free-reeds, the melodica.  Composer Christian Wolff has often used it as his axe of choice whether playing his music with others and an early tape phasing piece of Steve Reich carries the name Melodica and uses a toy example as its sole sound source.  Now is the time to remedy this lack of repertoire.    

SO HERE'S A CALL FOR SCORES  for the first online anthology of new music for melodica.  Pieces may be for any solo or combination of melodicas (although solos and four-part ensembles seem to be the most popular).  If you use specific pitches, I suggest using the range f to e''', which will cover both the most popular Hohner and generic models  (the Thomann model, for example, widely used around these parts, has the range f to f''').  Please send scores in PDF format to me by the first of September, 2009.

For some sound examples of the Amsterdam-Based Melodica Quartet ((Jeremiah Runnels, Sander Breure, Graham Flett and Taylan Susam - founder), composer and melodicaist Taylan Susam has usefully posted these:

Christian Wolff: Exercise 1
Mark So - Collateral (4)

Also, see this previous item about new music melodica, here.

 

Some Movement

I should be a short-term futurologist*: Steve Hicken is getting serious about twittered scores, here.

I've added some prose scores of my own manufacture to join the good works of the hard-working folk at Upload .. Download .. Perform, here.

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*I've always been amused by that term.  You would think, wouldn't you, that if a "futurologist" was any good, he or she'd be rich from their predictions about the future, and not reduced to peddling books and lectures?

Short Scores

I keep getting asked if I twitter.  I don't and I probably won't, but I do have one prediction: we're sure to soon see a number of twittered prose scores.   It strikes me that the constraints of the form lend themselves to prose scores based around images or tasks.  For example: THREE TRIANGLES THRICE or SO FAST THAT IT SOUNDS SLOW or ALL TUNES ALL THE TIME or CLOUDS BECOME RAIN or SOUNDS WITHOUT EDGES or EACH TONE CONNECTS TO THE LAST TONE or PLAY WITH EACH AND EVERYONE IN THE ROOM ONCE or REPEAT EVERYTHING AT LEAST THREE TIMES. 

Playable

A recent post here about all-white note pieces sent me looking for a copy of Virgil Thomson's Sonata No. 3 for piano (1930), written for Gertrude Stein who like to improvise only on the white keys.  As might be expected from Thomson, it's brief, witty, and wise, alternating between playing the naif and the wiseguy.  The disfunctional harmonies and athematicism keep the (third, of four short movements) waltz, in particular, safe from any out-of-place sentimentality.  That athematicism and all the right wrong notes make this very easy-to-play piece suitable for children and others with very short or very long attention spans.  

Neglected Topiary

I had a nice first performance this weekend in Saarbrücken of a quartet for flute, clarinet, guitar & percussion, Neglected Topiary, a commission by Saarländischer Rundfunk for the Ensemble L'Art Pour L'Art.   

How does a listener make sense of a new piece of music? In traditional repertoires of music, "making sense" of a piece in specific or general terms is highly dependent upon a broader familiarity with the repertoire. But The New Music doesn't necessarily come to us embedded in a repertoire of conventional forms, styles, or figures, and if it does, the relationship to existing repertoire is often more of negation than affirmation.
 
Neglected Topiary is a book of music including 17 pieces played without pause for flute, clarinet, guitar and percussion, each about a minute long and each sharing the same rhythmic structure, which is often articulated by the percussion in the manner of Asian ensemble musics, but here using a battery mostly North American in character. The pieces includes one quartet, four trios, six duets, four solos and two "other" arrangements, the sequence of which was determined by chance operations.  Each of the individual pieces connects immediately to two other pieces, each solo, for example, is derived from the individual voices of the quartet, and each trio is derived, in turn, from a solo, and duos, in their turn, from the trios.  Thus, every piece is connected, if at some distance, to every other and, to a significant degree, the pieces can be described as pseudo-repetitions of one another.

Through this near-repetition, the pieces may allow listeners to gradually form the impressions of a repertoire of music, in turns ceremonious, mannered, sentimental, and whimsical, with all of the internal consistancies and differences encountered in "real" repertoires, not like Pinnochio trying to be a "real boy" by learning to behave well, but like a topiary animal in a forgotten garden, which is ultimately no more real than the observer wants it to be.
 
Something like a serenade, Neglected Topiary may be played inside or out-of-doors in a garden of appropriate size. The title was suggested by a line from Edward Gorey and refers either to the fact that the piece gathers together a group of materials (snare drum rim shots),  images (burst bubbles and torn pages) or lines of work (non-parsimonious voice leading) that I had been neglecting or to the fact that our tired world has, literally, all-but-abandoned too many pieces of once well-sculpted plant matter.  Either way, the piece sometimes verges on the sentimental and nostalgic, the neo-classical revision of a unknown — and fictional — repertoire.  

Cry Dr Chicago

From George Manupelli's Doctor Chicago trilogy, starring Alvin Lucier as the evil (and politically incorrect) surgeon on the lam, Dr. Alvin Chicago, with his sidekicks Sheila Marie (Mary Ashley) and Steve (Steve Paxton, who dies, dancingly, in each episode).

Ride Dr Chicago Ride

From George Manupelli's Doctor Chicago trilogy, starring Alvin Lucier as the evil (and politically incorrect) surgeon on the lam, Dr. Alvin Chicago with his sidekicks Sheila Marie (Mary Ashley) and Steve (Steve Paxton, who dies, dancingly, in each episode). This episode was filmed in Joshua Tree National Monument.

Just What Is It that Makes Today's Music So Different, So Appealing?

Just asking.

(With apologies to Richard Hamilton).

Symphonia Domestica

If I recall correctly, there is a Jules Feiffer sketch about a average middle-aged family guy, who just happened to be a werewolf, growing fangs and claws and getting hairy each full moon.  When his children complained that other fathers didn't do that, he ate them up.  And when his wife complained about that and other, mostly mundane, things, he ate her up as well.  The moral of the story was "werewolves shouldn't marry."

Should composers marry?  Have kids running about?  The material and moral support can be wonderful (not to mention the "restorative affection", as Lou Harrison put it) and even the brutal instant critiques of a captive audience.   But a composer's life can try that of his or her family.  We don't get rich, we sleep odd hours, run around with odder friends, and make all manners of the oddest noises, only some of which are immediately related to music.  Our expectations for quiet or even servitude (i.e. when a deadline is approaching my grammatical moods are reduced to the imperative) from the family can be extreme, our companionship often vague when in the middle of concentrated work,  and at those times our reliability for household tasks is near nil.  When the music or career is not going well, we can get irritable or rude.  But very few of us, as far as I know, ever actually resort to eating our children or spouses.

The one concrete affect I've felt of family life is that my attention span has been reduced due to the complicated schedules of shuttling kids about to school and lessons and the other hunting/gathering activities a household requires.  This has meant either making shorter pieces, or longer pieces composed of many short stretches of material.   Development, in the classical sense, can get shortchanged in favor of multiple and serial expositions leading nowhere in particular, and not always clearly from one exposition to the next.  Things are apt to follow one another with the same unpredictable mixture of care and inattention that children bring to tasks.  As the kids are getting older and more self-sufficient, this has waned somewhat and, perhaps, I'll start back into development and all that.  For the time being, however, this state of affairs (domestic bliss plus restless composer syndrome) is perfectly pleasant.  And no one is getting eaten up.  Composers can marry, after all. 

La Disparition

Some minor blogkeeping:  There have been about 1200 posts here.  Some of them have been deleted, but most of them are still available in the standard blogspot archive format, indexed in the sidebar.  About half of the entries have been tagged by subject.   I have not downloaded archival copies of any of this for myself, and am not even sure if there's a good way to do it.  

But I'm not even sure that I would actually want to keep such an archive.  These items are essentially journal entries by a working composer.   In the interest of helping New Music to have a more lively presence online,  I have made these writings public.  I would have written many if not most of them anyway (in particular, I'd like to have some record for my children to have, if they should later have any curiosity about why Dad made such odd music),  but the blog format has provided a format which encourages some useful discipline, encouraging one to write at a more regular rhythm and keeping it dressed up enough for others to read, while at the same time having neither the formal constraints and length of a journal article nor the forced brevity of a twitter.  The items here have also been written to some compositional constraints that are related to my music: I use chance procedures to determine the timing, length, and, sometimes, topic of each post.  In many cases, formal or vocabulary controls have been applied, sometimes fairly elaborate games or experiments have been attempted, but not as often as I would have liked.

While I cannot say that I have personally received any commissions or performances as a result of this blog,  I believe that the blog has been useful to the New Music community in a few ways. The first has been in contributing to some discussions of musical politics and the composition competition system in particular.  The other is the online anthology of 15 brief piano pieces, A WINTER ALBUM, here.  (A SPRING ALBUM, of percussion pieces, is still taking entries, and I will soon announce a similar project for melodica and melodica ensemble).

1200 posts over four and a half years is probably enough, if not too much, verbosity for a mid-career composer of modest reputation and ambitions.    Eventually, I will just stop and delete these pages without much ado, retiring to my orchids, bon-bons, and philately*, but for the moment, I'll keep at it, because, on the one hand, it does seem to complement my composing well,  pushing it further along into interesting areas of inquiry and, on the other hand, New Musicland online remains far too quiet.   In the end, I'm blogging because not enough other — and especialy those more verbally gifted — composers are doing it.  If we want our music to be a lively presence in the world, we have to let the world know that our work is deep, lively and available and is full of sounds and ideas to which attention is well worth paying.  Anything less conveys the impression that we do not believe this ourselves to be true.

That said,  June 2009 will be requests month.  What would you like to read about here?

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*No, I don't really have interests in either orchids or philately.  As Sen. Claghorn said, it's a joke, son.

Rep

The word "repertoire" gets used here often.  This is in part due to training in ethnomusicology (see this post), a field in which defining and characterizing a repertoire and its extents and limits is a central concern.  But my concern here is more that of a working composer, trying to figure out how my own work fits into "the rep", if at all.  From an entirely pragmatic viewpoint (especially with regard to the livelihoods of composers), art music took a seriously wrong turn in the 19th century with the development of the masterpiece ethic, which was perpetuated and extended to to a ridiculous — and sometimes pathological — extent in the 20th century.   When the goal became that of making, of each new work, pieces of such import and significance and so conspicuously consumptive of resources for their realization that it becomes all but impossible to perform these works with any real frequency, then one has elevated the work into a Valhalla of special esteem, which certain shows respect for the work, but in doing so has also removed it from everyday music-making with its intimate connections to the normal rhythms of life, the only repertoire that is meaningful to me. It may well be argued that broadcasts and recordings offset this, but I will argue even more strongly that these forms, as marvelous as they can be, are essentially a different experience from live music making, whether private or communal, in realtime and in real physical spaces, and are by no means a substitute.  A record shelf (or an iPod playlist) is a collection but not a repertoire.

Waiting for the repetition

In ninth grade, Mr. Tackett, an English and Drama teacher and my school's resident hipster, handed me a copy of Waiting for Godot with the instructions: "Read.  Now." I started immediately and read during, and with complete disregard for, whatever classes I had that day, and by the time I'd finished the second act, realized something fairly profound about form that is as true for music as for theatre:  You have to be careful to get the repeats right.  If you get them right, you necessarily go beyond simple reproduction, as the experience of the repeat changes the memory of the original.  

The grand audacity of Godot is not that it's a play in which little is said and less happens, but it is a play in two acts in which little is said and less happens, twice.*  The repetition here is not exact, but pseudo-repetition, combining the feeling of worn routine with the sense that the repetition occurs in a world in which time has really passed and the world and the actors and audience in it are all a little more worse (but not necessarily wise) for wear, thus nothing can ever be exactly the same.   The edgy discomfort and awkward laughter of the audience during the first act takes on an entirely different edge when the formal repetition of the second act invites expectations which are inevitably disappointed.  But disappointment is erased, no, transcended, by the joys of variation, whether in major changes (can the blinded Pozzi of Act Two see any less than the sighted Pozzi of Act One?)  or in the smallest details.  

The game here has everything to do with memory, particularly the tension between the memories of the audience and the fragile, fractured memories  of the characters (has the boy come before?)  Moreover, the second act is perfectly scaled down in duration from the first, picking up that trick from slapstick or story- and joke-telling, in which a sequence of quasi-repeated actions gets acted out or told in progressively shorter durations (I wouldn't be surprised if Beckett — intuitively — hit on a golden proportion here), scaled to maximize our attentions.   The effect is uncanny:  even less happens after intermission than before, yet the laughs lose their awkwardness and become relaxed, honest, tender, and sympathetic and the scant bit of hope  that closes the act is just enough to leave one half-hoping for a third act, another day, of similar uneventfulness.

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* None of my observations here are particularly novel.  Wikipedia quotes the critic Vivian Mercier: "a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice." (Irish Times, 18 February 1956, p. 6.)       

Presence

I just got a worried email from some performers concerned about some dynamics in a piece.  In the score, I have a flute playing at a moderate dynamic and suddenly a snare drum rolls over the flute for a measure of forte, after which the flute continues on, more or less as before.  This interruption occurs a few times.  The players were concerned that, during the drum roll, the flute would be inaudible, so they suggested upping the flute's amplitude to match the drum.  I wrote them back not to worry, as the flute, through the continuity of its line and its distinctive character, would be perfectly present, if not literally "heard" and so attempting to balance the two instruments was unnecessary. 

Resourceful

New Musical Resources is a blog with a swell Cowellian name which shows that yes, Virginia, musicologists can do interesting work, too.  Among other things, blogger Peter Gillette is doing research into some American composers who have slipped through the cracks.  In addition to a lot of valuable work about Albert Fine, a composer with connections to East Coast early '60s experimentalism, he has an interest in the ultra-modern music of the early 20th century.* Good stuff, and I hope more musicologists can soon follow suit, allowing people like myself to rest on our imaginary laurels.

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*I was particularly pleased to learn from this blog that the book The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music by the Skryabiniste Katharine Ruth Heyman is now online,  which Dane Rudhyar (perhaps America's best-known Skryabiniste) once recommended to me while a precocious high-schooler (a recommendation which I have filed, for some reason, in a corner for unexplored esoteric advice, alongside that time when Ornette Coleman recommended Cyril Scott's Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages and the Dick Gregory Diet.)   I have mentioned the Skryabinistes here before, as an example of a path mostly untaken by modern music, except for isolated figures like Rudhyar, a handful of Russians and for that all-but hidden thread which runs via Wyschnegradsky and Obouchov to Messiaen and Boulez.  It's strange and heavy stuff to which I've never been able to get particular close, but perhaps that is an inescapable aspect of such a free and intuitive style.

The Joy of Orchestration vs. The Orchestrator's Companion

Over lunch (a plate of left-over chicken momos), skimming through Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration (skimming because you can't really read it, unless, perhaps, you have a thing for excerpts from Kashtschei the Immortal or The Legend of the invisible city of Kitesh or Snegourotchka) , noticed that almost all of the scoring suggestions for string and woodwind ensembles are based upon the reinforcement of score order (flutes over oboes over clarinets over bassoons and strings from high to low) and more eccentric skips and mixtures within the score-ordered lists depricated with, ultimately, the goal of smooth part-writing (especially avoiding voice crossings and cross-relations) and an ideal spacing (approximately that of a harmonic series (intervals getting smaller as the register ascends)).  

Well, okay, Nikolay, but how come almost all of my favorite moments in orchestrated music (violins and contrabasses doubling aeveral octaves apart, bassoon over clarinet over oboe over flute...)  happen to make just exactly the moves you advise against?  Perhaps the Principles could be thought of as the collection of bland, everyday orchestration recipes (bland, but trusted and familar, like The Joy of Cooking) , the default setting you want to avoid whenever you want your music to be something other than bland and everyday (attractive in an exotic and maybe dangerous way, like The Gentleman's Companion).  

Future Imperfect

The New Music Box (of the American Music Cartel Center) autocelebrates its tenth anniversary with one of those rounds of articles prognosticating the future of music.  Among the inevitable appeals to technological progress and even Fukiyama's now-discredited neo-Hegelian (and neo-con) "end of history", there are no real surprises, but it is good to see that at least one contributor, George Lewis, decided to experiment with the prose format.   The money line is the closer:  musicians will take a chance,  which is more to the point then the ever-recyclable Kinder! Schaff' Neues! There ought to be more of this online — composers are supposed to be inventive, after all —  and it was disappointing to read a younger blogger barking at Lewis for doing exactly this.  I mean, if all we expect from words about music is prose, then we can just settle for the sixth ring of hell, you know, the special one reserved for musicologists. 

In any case, congratulations to Frank J. Oteri & his colleagues on ten years of making musical lives more, rather than less, interesting.   And if I tease the Boxers from time to time, it's only out of affection, a loyal fan encouraging the team to do ever better and more challenging work.

A Monday Miscellany

In no order in particular:

Kenneth Woods has a fine essay on Ives & Mahler here, imagining what the conductor Mahler might have found in the score to Ives' Third (my much less elegant attempt the the I & M topic is here;  N.O. Brown once mentioned that Carl Schorske wanted to write a book on the two composers... wouldn't that be something?).

Want to learn Latin?  Here's an online course based on the method of Reginald Foster, whose "experiences" are based on immediate engagement with real Latin texts (and spoken Latin) with grammar introduced as needed (rather than the other way around).

And some music:  Here's Anthony Braxton's Composition Nr. 58 as played by the Taylor Ho Bynum Chicago Big Band.  The video and the performance are both in a rough'n'ready style, which is altogether appropriate to the musical topics in the piece, but I do wonder how the piece would sound in a very tight, precise performance style.  It's not that I think such a style would be better, but it might bring out other aspects of the piece.  (Here are Braxton's own notes on the score).

Another illustration of the elasticity of the term minimalism in an article about the poet Robert Creeley: "an interesting instance of a post-Modernist writer whose career was to a considerable extent the 'story' of the development of Miminalism in America"

Trademark

Recently overheard, from a pair of student composers chatting: "Arpeggio?  Philip Glass so OWNS the arpeggio!"

I recognize the sentiment — it's widespread enough that the arpeggio-heavy theme music to the TV series Fringe was instantly pegged online as faux-Glass — but still, if that's the case, that's a major piece of musical territory to own, at least on par with Ted Turner's two million acres and share of the North American bison herd, and also something of a limiting factor for others writing tonal music.

Which made me wonder... if all existing music were wiped from the planetary memory, and you could stake a trademark claim to any one musical element or figure, strictly on the basis of its income-generating potential, which would be the most potentially lucrative by locking others out of your territory?  A major triad?  An authentic cadence?  Common time?     

 

About Time

Musicians can usefully pay attention when others are talking about time.   Here, via a Blogging Heads conversation*, is an elegant essay by physicist Julian Barbour on nothing less than The Nature of Time.   The two basic problems of time for physicists — the definition of duration and simultaneity of events at spatial separation — are also very much problems for musicians, complicated (of course) by questions of perception, cognition, memory, and cultural or personal habits. Barbour views about time (especially in his book The End of Time) are controversial among physicists, but his notion that time is an illusion is perhaps a useful metaphor for the sleight-of-ear aspect of the work musicians do: extraordinary musical moments as unique configurations of space.  

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* Still waiting for a new music Blogging Heads episode... I'd give an eyetooth to watch Lisa Hirsch go up against A.C. Douglas...

Concentration of Cultural Capital

This brief article, Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital, is well worth a read.  It is precisely the same sort of social concentration in the mainstream new music world which concerns me; the fact that the kinds of composers who are invited to the Cabrillo Festival these days, for example, overlaps so much with those who study at, say, Juilliard or already get play in the major orchestra circuit probably also means that the range of ideas exchanged is necessarily going to be limited, and that kind of limitation does not readily lend itself to the outside-the-box thinking that can often lead to the musically exciting.  

Music for an Epidemic

Here, reposted from February 2007, is a prose score by Bhishma Xenotechnites  (Douglas Leedy) related to a current news topic:

H5N1 (Environmental Music )

This music is for whistlers, or very high treble instruments from any musical tradition (either/or, I think, but maybe one or two whistlers could be in a qroup of instrumentalists, but not vice-versa) . Winds or whistlers need to produce a steady tone of at least 20 seconds' duration. Time is to be indicated by the sound of antique cymbals at intervals as will be specified below. No sounds may be produced or amplified by means of electronics.

Sound any pitch at all (not just "scale pitches") above f''' (which is ca. 1400 Hz.) . There is no upper limit. Choose a pitch and let it sound out steadily (no vibrato) for as long as it can be held; violins, 30 seconds or so up to around a minute (not more). Coming to the end of a tone, take a silent rest of one to two thirds the length of the tone that you just completed. Then repeat the same cycle using next a different pitch. The level of the loudness: not particularly high, but make a full sound. (Crescendo at the start and at the end a fade are good, so long as the pitch is steady.)

The performance will last at least six minutes, or longer, if the performers agree on a duration; the composer thinks the best result will probably ensue if the tone-rest sequence is performed at least a dozen times, and perhaps not more than about twenty, though a still longer performance could be done.

At the first sounded note, the piece will begin. The antique cymbals, as a sort of marker, will be struck three times, at well spaced intervals, and then twice in close succession at the end — five seconds or so apart. On hearing this signal, the performers will finish the tones, one by one, that they may be sounding, and when the last tone falls silent, the performance ends.

Listeners: what you will hear is what you get.

Bhishma Xenotechnites
2006

(some minor revisions, 2007)

(cc) Part of the Public Domain, 2006.

Complexity Wars, revisited

Very often, the comments to blog posts are where the really interesting activity happens but, hidden away behind an additional click in the archives, they often turn into lost bloggage.  

I think  this thread on the complexity wars at Tim Rutherford-Johnson's The Rambler is well worth revisiting.   There is a lot of red meat here from every side of the issues, and I think the dialogue between experimentalists and complexists has more common ground and is much more fruitful than that with the quietists who control much of the musical status quo.  Both of our parties are uncomfortable with music, as it is, and are willing to rock the boat so that it, and life around music, might be something different.

I probably should have pushed one of my points in this thread more: not only is Drumming damn hard to play and an authentically complex musical experience for the listener, part of the difficulty and, yeah, complexity of Drumming lies in the fact that the accuracy of the players is verifiable — by player and listener alike — to a degree both unimaginable and irrelevant to, say, Bone Alphabet.   Consequently, this leaves the player in an exposed position with precious little room to fake her way through it.   The one disappointing aspect of the thread is that it ends with the almost inevitable one-upmanship that characterizes a lot of the macho talk which prevails in the complexity scene: "name the time and place, Buster, and I'll play you a 13-against-7"; I personally prefer the attitude, found more often in the radical music community, in which greater performative or perceptual accuity is most immediately and optimistically adressed as a compositional problem, that is to say, making a music that more clearly makes the nature of its material articulate for the listener seems to be about inviting the listener to hear more rather than less and not simply witness virtuosity for its own sake.   

Rational

Edward Lawes points to this rather nice video of composer Brian Ferneyhough rehearsing his Bone Alphabet for solo percussion.  It's a great little piece and the film is a good document of Ferneyhough's amiably non-dogmatic approach to working with good players.  Just one little complaint:  Ferneyhough insists on describing non-power of two rhythmic relationships as "irrational", a habit that's frequent among the complexity set.   3:2, 4:3, 11:7, 17:13.... as complex as they might be when used to articulate a rhythmic relationship, these ratios of whole numbers are all, by definition, rational, nor irrational.  

Bárdarbunga!

Boy, was I disappointed to learn that the Imagem Music Group had acquired the Rodgers & Hammerstein catalog!  If I had known that they were in the market for a corpus of music like that in the R & H musicals, then my partners in the Music Division of Wolf Industries of Gulfport, Miss. would have been more than happy to make an offer.

Thanks to a series of proprietary algorithms developed by our staff of highly-paid, well-trained, fine-mannered, and not t00-tough-on-the-eyes music industry scientists and technicians, we have the capacity to rapidly deliver single works of music or works for the musical stage and screen on demand equivalent to any known work, but different enough from said works to guarantee adequate distinction in the case of any copyright infringement action via sophisticated music-theoretical procedures including parody, transposition, inversion, retrograde, and a complex operation involving moving a lot of notes around on the page that we like to describe as variation.  

For example, our staff has already produced the musical about the 1950's Southern California land grab, Oh, Pacoima!, which, in addition to the cheerful title song (Oh - P - A -C - O - I -M - A!)  includes the abstinence-only theme song commisioned by the Bush adminstration I'm A Girl Who Just Says No!.   For those with more exotic tastes, our cold war musical North Atlantic was a great success in previews during the 2002 Norwegian cruise season. The lyrical paean to the great Icelandic volcano, Bárdarbunga,  sung by the comical flight mechanic Muddy Barry, was a particular hit with the over-eighty set.  (Unfortunately, our catalog novelty for 2006, the Hitchcock-like musical, about a family of eight adorable singing Austrians in Lederhosen trapped in a unstoppable falling elevator, The Sound of Muzac, cannot be supplied at the moment due to a cease and desist order from the Muzac Corporation.) 

Young's Paradox

I was recently asked to write something about La Monte Young, as a teacher and friend, but those relationships are works in progress and I'm loathe to sum them up as there is too much left to be done.  Here, though, is one observation about his music: 

There is a central paradox in Young's composition and performance practice that gives the music a large part of its highly individual character and charge.  Although his earliest mature compositions were frequently without a global tonal center (a number of the early pieces are twelve-tone, but the slow tempo often strongly invites a localized sense of tonality), his subsequent concern for precision in the domain of pitch has continuously increased, and with it, he has progressed up into unexplored regions of the harmonic series,  reinforcing a form, if highly expanded, of tonal centeredness.  However, in his rhythmic practice, the actual articulation of those pitches in musical time, remains free, from regular metre and, often, from even a steady pulse.

The Well-Tuned Piano, for example, alternates in texture between a free articulation of the simplest pitch configurations, both melodically and in simple harmonies, dyads or triads, in a manner suggestive in speed and mood of an alap, an unmeasured prelude, or a very deliberate recitative, and "clouds",  which are larger pitch collections, frequently at or past the boundary between a chord and a fused sonority of timbral rather than chordal complexity,  articulated by a continuously developing motion of the hands and individual fingers, keys, hammers, and wires, intuitively adjusting the speed and patterns in order to lock into textures in which the entire acoustical complex is self-reinforcing, bringing out internal melodic and harmonic patterns as well as phenomena — beating and combination tones especially — which create a whole larger than the sum of the component parts.  

The special charge here, for me at least, is that the potential tension between the clarity of the immediate pitch relationships — however expansive the particular relationships may in fact be — and the complexity of the actual sounding surface is always resolved by an optimistic assertion of a greater potential for our capacity to perceive music  (this assertion is related to, but not identical with, John Cage's assertion of a universal music-interpretive competence;  "I can eventually figure out if I'm in the best seat" (Young) is a different proposition from "everyone is in the best seat" (Cage).)  

The sources of Young's style are a heterodox assembly of consequences and influences that happen to have reinforced themselves particularly well.  Young's own study and practice of forms of Bebop and free jazz as well as an alap-heavy style of North Indian Classical vocal music both landed the composer-performer in ametrical territory (not to mention the important experience of musical traditions with their own solutions to the real time articulation and ornamentation of static pitch configurations), and while Young has always been a man with the tempo of a tortoise in the exercise of everyday life and he grew up in a household and church in which talk of both "all time" and "eternity" was everyday chatter, the pursuit of ever-greater accuracy in intonation, requiring an ever-longer sampling period and Young's attachment to electronic tone generation, with its potential for both more accuracy and more continuous playing durations, have only increased the openness of his rhythmic and, indeed, formal sensibility, while altering none of the rigor of his pitch selection.    

    

The Routine

"Pulitzer Prize in Music?  Passport to oblivion."  — Richard K. Winslow

Let's get over the Steve-Reich's-Pulitzer-Is-Well-Deserved-But-30-Years-Too-Late trope, okay?  If you go through a list of the music composition awards* (or the poetry or editorial cartooning awards, for that matter), it's pretty clear that they stick to a pattern of handing it out for several years in a row to mid-career musical quietists (mainstream conservatives, and yes, I mean quietist, even when the music is loud)  and then tossing in a neglected senior figure from time to time, either someone really unavoidably significant, but never within the acceptable middleroad (Ives, Brant, Coleman) or someone very much a part of the establishment but not actually having produced a great piece (Sessions, Powell, Gould).    

Ron Silliman, from whom I cheerfully steal the E.A. Poe term "quietist", has a great post this week (here), in which he notes that in US poetry, it has only been new formalists who have made an attempt at stealing the brass ring from the quietists.  East coast 12-toners seem to have once made a serious attempt along these lines in the Music Pulitzer's, with Wuorinen and Martino each getting through, as place holders, perhaps, for Babbitt, who was eventually settled with an honorary "lifetime" award,  but the awards themselves quickly returned to the routine of less obstreperous selections.  While it may well be possible that Ben Johnston, for example, a figure who has does some bridging between the experimental and academic worlds might yet see an award, and an award for Glass  is probably only a matter of time, major American composers — all composers, in fact, whose work is understood now, in terms of concert performances and recordings, to be essential American repertoire — for whom the ring was simply never available have included Harrison, Cage, Feldman, Brown, Nancarrow, and Erickson and probably will continue to include Riley, Young, Lucier, Ashley, Oliveros.  

The bigger story about the Pulitzers is, of course, the continued slighting of online journalism.  I suspect, for better or worse, that the first such award will come in criticism, given the continuing reductions in critic positions by print journals. Fortunately, there are some blogging critics out there who have already demonstrated the perceptiveness and writing chops required as well as a command of the medium's unique possibilities to do the job imaginatively.  

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*Here's my list with estimated ages of the recipients at the time of the award:

1943: William Schuman (32), Secular Cantata No. 2: A Free Song
1944: Howard Hanson (47), Symphony No. 4
1945: Aaron Copland (44), Appalachian Spring, ballet
1946: Leo Sowerby (50), The Canticle of the Sun
1947: Charles Ives (72), Symphony No. 3
1948: Walter Piston (56), Symphony No. 3
1949: Virgil Thomson (53), Louisiana Story, film score
1950: Gian Carlo Menotti (38), The Consul, opera
1951: Douglas Stuart Moore (57), Giants in the Earth, opera
1952: Gail Kubik (37), Symphony Concertante
1953: no prize awarded
1954: Quincy Porter (57), Concerto Concertante for two pianos and orchestra
1955: Gian Carlo Menotti (43), The Saint of Bleecker Street, opera
1956: Ernst Toch (68), Symphony No. 3
1957: Norman Dello Joio (44), Meditations on Ecclesiastes
1958: Samuel Barber (48), Vanessa, opera
1959: John La Montaine (41), Piano Concerto
1960: Elliott Carter (51), String Quartet No. 2
1961: Walter Piston (67), Symphony No. 7
1962: Robert Ward (44), The Crucible, opera
1963: Samuel Barber (53), Piano Concerto
1964: no prize awarded
1965: no prize awarded (See Duke Ellington)
1966: Leslie Bassett (43), Variations for Orchestra
1967: Leon Kirchner (48), Quartet No. 3 for strings and electronic tape
1968: George Crumb (38), Echoes of Time and the River
1969: Karel Husa (47), String Quartet No. 3
1970: Charles Wuorinen (31), Time's Encomium
1971: Mario Davidovsky (37), Synchronisms No. 6
1972: Jacob Druckman (43), Windows
1973: Elliott Carter (64), String Quartet No. 3
1974: Donald Martino (42), Notturno
1975: Dominick Argento (47), From the Diary of Virginia Woolf
1976: Ned Rorem (52), Air Music
1977: Richard Wernick (43), Visions of Terror and Wonder
1978: Michael Colgrass (46), Deja Vu for percussion and orchestra
1979: Joseph Schwantner (36), Aftertones of Infinity
1980: David Del Tredici (43), In Memory of a Summer Day
1981: no prize awarded
1982: Roger Sessions (85), Concerto for Orchestra
1983: Ellen Zwilich (44), Three Movements for Orchestra (Symphony No. 1)
1984: Bernard Rands (50), Canti del Sole
1985: Stephen Albert (44), Symphony RiverRun
1986: George Perle (70), Wind Quintet No. 4, for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon
1987: John Harbison (48), The Flight into Egypt
1988: William Bolcom (49), 12 New Etudes for Piano
1989: Roger Reynolds (54), Whispers Out of Time
1990: Mel D. Powell (77), Duplicates: A Concerto
1991: Shulamit Ran (41), Symphony
1992: Wayne Peterson (65), The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark
1993: Christopher Rouse (44), Trombone Concerto
1994: Gunther Schuller (69), Of Reminiscences and Reflections
1995: Morton Gould (81), Stringmusic
1996: George Walker (73), Lilacs, for soprano and orchestra
1997: Wynton Marsalis (35), Blood on the Fields, oratorio
1998: Aaron Jay Kernis (38), String Quartet No. 2, Musica Instrumentalis
1999: Melinda Wagner (42), Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion
2000: Lewis Spratlan (60), Life is a Dream, opera (awarded for concert version of Act II)
2001: John Corigliano (63), Symphony No. 2 for string orchestra
2002: Henry Brant (88), Ice Field
2003: John Adams (56), On the Transmigration of Souls
2004: Paul Moravec (46), Tempest Fantasy
2005: Steven Stucky (55), Second Concerto for Orchestra
2006: Yehudi Wyner (76), Chiavi in Mano, (piano concerto)
2007: Ornette Coleman (77), Sound Grammar
2008: David Lang (51), The Little Match Girl Passion
2009: Steve Reich (72), Double Sextet

More on competitions etc.

Jessica Duchen is on the trail of the (corrupt) music competition system.   The career stakes for performers in these affairs are generally higher than those for composers, for whom the main problem is that entrants are too often being asked to fund the competition prize through entry fees without clear-cut aesthetic criteria for the judging offered up-front, but the nepotism and abuses of the jury system indicated here are alarming.  

Music is not a sport and simply doesn't operate by the kinds of rules that lend themselves to fair judging, so maybe the best solution is to simply recognize that competitions — unless very carefully, ethically, and openly organized, like the "Iron Composer" competition, for one — are by nature  prone to abuse.  Given that recognition, we can then either ignore them altogether or take them in a much lighter spirit, as a none-too-serious form of entertainment. 

The best way for a young musician to establish a reputation for playing is through playing, especially with other musicians, not competing against them.  Play lots of different music in informal settings, as a soloist or chamber musician, and cultivate your "works well with other skills" as well as the purely musical chops.  Playing for free in such events is far more useful than trying to finance your way into the competition circuit.  Organize your own soirees and concerts.  The finest musicians I know have established careers in just this way and their independence from the conservatory/competition/agent system has meant that they can play a greater number of concerts with a greater variety of music and have more interpretive freedom than their colleagues who are locked into narrower repertoires with lower levels of interpretive tolerance.  The per-concert fee of a good new music pianist, for example, may be lower than that of a good Chopin player, but the new music pianist is going to play more music more often and can more readily establish a niche that looks like a real career than the mainstream player who is always subject to the whims of the current market.  

Fashion

Like most American males, I learned to dress at the age of 12 and have learned nothing more about it since.  My own sartorial preferences have remained in that age, when the two principal models were that pair of boys' lit Toms, Sawyer and Brown.   In Grad school, the choreographer and scholar Susan Foster encouraged me to read Roland Barthes; while I really liked Empire of Signs (the book about a country very much like Japan) , The Fashion System was totally lost on me, and I've never been quite sure whether my deficit was due to intellectual weakness on my part, or just an ordinary heterosexual allergy to fashion.  Nevertheless, I have recently made some modest efforts to up my wardrobe, but the direction is more retrograde than original.  I'm back to wearing hats, but now going with wide brims rather than the caps of my schooldays and in Kathmandu, perhaps risking the dismay of some vegetarian friends, I had a couple of extra-long leather ties and a suede vest made for me, figuring that both were about a generation out of style, so there was a chance to beat the curve for once.   Moreover, having not worn a tie for about five years (and that last one was a bolo at that), maybe it was time to at least imitate the appaearance of a grownup.

Which brings me to my (small) musical point.  Many of my recent pieces have been coming out with surfaces that recall familiar musics enough to be heard as, well, neo-classical.   Inasmuch as my current working mode has emphasized, instead of first principles, digging into historical repertoire and locating alternative paths not taken, the label certainly fits. But only if the "classical" part is loosened up a bit more (neo-subitor, neo-serial, neo-experimental...).  In any case, there is certainly nothing less fashionable at the moment than to assert a relationship to the classical, even when neo- or pseudo- or quasi- or just plain faux-.   And the musical point of this is that one only moves forward, does or makes or discovers something really new, when one is out of step with fashion.  When the world zigs, kiddos, it's time to zag.

Global Modernity

Noted: the average DVD shop in Kathmandu has a better selection of classic art films than the average shop in LA.  You can walk out of one of those places with the complete works of Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, Griffiths, Renoir, Buñuel...  I know that these are all copies of dubious legality made locally, but they are beautifully packaged, required some capital investment, so you have to wonder what the intended market is?  Are there that many cineaste expats in town? Or are the Nepalis serious film buffs?

For Walter Zimmermann

The composer Walter Zimmermann has just turned 60.  For many younger composers — wayward North Americans (like myself) in particular — Walter has been an essential and nuturing presence.  I know of no other composer in this country who has, on the one hand, been so generous with their time and resources and, on the other, so uncompromising and impatient with any effort — whether his own, or that of a colleague — that was less than complete or lacked commitment to the essence or core of a musical idea.  In his own music, Walter has no fear of handling hard topics and his Lokale Musik project, in particular, showed a path out, if not a solution, to making a traditional music (and perhaps even the historically troubled landscape around that music) into something new and transcendent.  Walter is a fine composition teacher and has a special gift for stepping into a moribund scene and making it more lively with his enthusiasms and challenges.  In a country where most artists are content to roll along with the restrictions of institutions and habit, Walter has been a champion of self-reliance and has never been content to do things in the default fashion.  (One of my favorite examples was when he adjourned a scheduled "chalk talk" in Darmstadt for an outing to an rustic Inn on an Odenwald hilltop; he and the late Stefan Schaedler, as independent producers, were responsible for the last major Cage festival assembled with the composer's cooperation in Frankfurt, Anarchic Harmony, and, of course, Zimmermann's self-published anthology of interviews with experimental American composers, Desert Plants, was a decisive influence on many of us).   I am very lucky to call Walter a friend and mentor and my debts to him, both material and ideal, are immense.

(I recently made a small set of pieces facile, called Some Handywork, for piano with limited ambitus for Walter Zimmermann's 60th;  the Bransle above recalls our mutual delight in AGON and the music of social dances). 

From Chitwan, Nepal

With electricity eight hours a day at most and internet connections slow and unpredictable, turning on a computer and blogging about a family holiday seems somewhat besides the point. (As the Doctor put it: ""You Two! We're at the end of the universe, eh. Right at the edge of knowledge itself. And you're busy... blogging!", Doctor Who, "Utopia") Nepal is a country which overwhelms, perhaps mostly in the contrast of tragic conditions of most human life here against the spectacle of the land itself, especially the mountains. Outsiders here, whether tourists like myself, mountain trekkers, seekers of one denomination of enlightenment or another, or aid workers in brand-new ATVs too wide for the roads, seem like distractions in a country which has a lot to settle on its own terms, from ecological catastrophes, the numbing divisions of caste, ethnic group, region, class, and gender, the unsettled heritage of regicide, revolution and civil war, to the all-too-common difficuties of the transition from agrarian to urban society. Some of these problems do have an international dimension, for example the effect of climate change on glaciers and the resultant water supply problems. Religion seems an area of relatively calm, with an astonishing fluidity between the various sects in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, but their are signals that this may no longer be the case, with (ironically, perhaps) the new "non-sectarian" state attempting to control some religious practices - for example, the appointment of priests to temples - in something, for better or worse, like the Turkish model. That said,my overwhelming impression is that the land functions and people survive, if only at a subsistence level, in a complex of informal networks and markets, independently from when not despite the institutions of state. (I think Hardt and Negri's Multitude gets some of this right, but their attachments to some pretty ugly ideological and theoretical baggage ultimately sinks their project.)

All that said, I appreciate the quiet and kindness of all the people I've encountered here. (Even theauto horns, though used frequently, are at least 30 db quieter than those in Germany). The residents of Kathmandu all seem to have a highly advanced sense of proprioception as they manage to negotiate their bodies through streets filled with every kind of transport medium. My children are having a grand time, even sharing a river bath with elephants. And I've learned to cook momos, the local version of the stuffed dumpling. When I'm back next week, I may even have something to write about music.

Bake Sale

This story makes me very happy:  Newspeak and Ensemble de Sade are holding their "1st Annual New Music Bake Sale".  It's not quite the pancake breakfast suggested here, but it'll certainly do.  In order to thrive, New Music has to go wide and deep, not only concentrating on the elite institutional life of opera houses, major orchestras, university music departments and a handful of venues in Manhattan, but reaching and integrating our music-making into homes, schools, and communities, a task not made any easier by the increasingly disconnected patterns of contemporary life.   I can't make it on the 17th — I'll be with the family in Nepal — but if you do, have a slice of banana bread and think of me.

Simmer and reduce

Reduction in cooking eliminates bulk and intensifies taste. The equivalent move in the radical music*, the reduction of materials to a minimum serves a similar function.  I'll repeat, again, the most useful definition of minimalism: "the elimination of distraction" but add this: the intensification of the experience of sound.

Here, from a famous set of small piano pieces for small hands:

In these very famous pieces, the right hand is busy with only five notes at a time in a piece or section of a piece, one for each finger.  The left hand sometimes gets to play with a few more than five.  With so few tones available, and each tone consequently subject to frequent iteration, we should be able to settle quickly into a comfortably familar neighborhood of the tones used singly, in sucession or in combination .  But the composer always manages to surprise, bringing out unexpected depth in what would initially appear to be a rather shallow field of possibilities.  The chord above to which the forefinger is pointing is a case in point.  Yes, this is music about exquisite — and, sometimes, exquisitely familiar if not banal — voice leading, and habits of voice leading should excuse the b in the left hand as a neighboring tone, just passing by, but we do also hear this coincidence of lines as a chord, in its context, and as a very special chord indeed, perhaps the most sonically dissonant possible assembly of three tones extractable from this collection.  Such clear means, such reduced materials, and yet such a complex sensation, at the limits of our tonal sensibilities, conditioned as they are by musical experience and probably some neurological hard-wiring.  Okay, this is not The Famous Minimalism,  and there are other things going on, especially in the realm of metre and accent, but the impulse is the same: simmer, reduce, and the materials are given a new context or frame, one in which we can pay attention to details that would otherwise get (dis)missed.

Or this:  I've recently been playing through Charles Shere's sonata ii: compositio ut explicatio  (related to a lecture by Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation and, in one version, playable as accompaniment to a rhythmicized performance of that lecture). This is a large-scale work for solo piano, about an hour in duration, with a particular wealth of variety in registration and texture.  The generous scale of the work and the way in which similar figures and textures are almost rhetorically deployed over its course are so engaging that it scarcely registers that the piece only uses the white keys.*  There is almost too much material in those seven pitch classes.  Additional chromaticism, given the variety of gestures and textures, would probably be a distraction.  Again, simmer, reduce until the flavor is more intense than the sum of the ingredients.

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*For more about the Radical Music, see this collection of posts, or these fragments of a manifesto.

** This is also a Stein reference, in that the writer liked to improvise on the white keys only. Virgil Thomson's Piano Sonata No. 3, written for Stein, is also a white key piece.  Another large-scale work for the white keys only is John Cage's Four Walls.  These pieces would make a swell program (hint hint).

     

The Ancient Habits of Musicians

Afarensis reports on the excavation of a 2700-year old tomb in Yanghai, China:

The burial is that of a 45 year old male. The grave goods included bridles, archery equipment, a harp, a leather basket, and a wooden bowl. Both the basket and the bowl were filled with vegetative matter - about 789 grams (~ 1 pound 11 ounces). Radiocarbon dating was performed and a calibrated date of 2,700 years BP was returned. Analysis of the vegetative material indicated it was Cannabis sativa. Furthing testing indicated it was psychoactive.

Yep, a harp and psychoactive vegetative matter. No doubt we will soon see some cultural conservatives rallying around this ancient evidence of the connection between music, dope, and death.  

K.V. Narayanaswamy

During a recent viewing of A Composer's Notes, Michael Blackwood's Philip Glass documentary, I noticed that Glass's comments about the importance of Indian music were made during a concert in Chennai (Madras) featuring the South Indian vocalist K.V. Narayanaswamy (1923-2002). I had the fortune to hear KVN (as he was called) live only once, and it was one of the most astonishing concerts of my life. Considered one of the finest Karnatic vocalists of the 20th century, he was, in universal terms, a real classicist, with no gesture or ornament wasted. While capable of the most virtusosic runs and most complicated rhythmic patterns, the music was clearly more important to him than his own ego and he always focused on getting to the core of the raga and composition at hand. In this video (one of several of KVN on YouTube, all of them rather rough, but still valuable), in Raga Ranjani, pay close attention to the exquisite intonation of the third degree of the scale, sung to the solfege syllable "ga", especially towards the end of this clip.

Evening

Sommerzeit, the local version of "Daylight Savings Time" has just begun in this part of Europe, extending daytime by one hour. Try as I may, I cannot imagine making music to be played in daylight -- even my out-of-doors music prefers the night --, so this supposed energy-saving measure registers as more of a music-saving measure, with the lengthened afternoon shoving the prime concert time into ever-later and, for working people, marginal hours. There are, perhaps, composers and musicians with sunnier dispositions, who know how to make the magic of a musical performance function under natural light and before an audience which is fully alert and awake (unlike the evening audience, advantageously prone to reverie and other semi-conscious states), but I am not one of them. Even in musical traditions -- those of India in particular -- in which modes and compositions are designed for and understood as belonging to particular hours of the day, the bulk of the repertoire is evening music, suggesting that the musical advantages of the early darkened hours are widely recognized.

See also this item from 2007: Nocturnal.

Our Other Orchestra

Here's a Google map of gamelan orchestras in the US.   Compiled by Chad Bailey Nielson, it's color coded: blue for central Javanese, red for Balinese, green for Sundanese, teal for Cirebonese, and purple for mixed.  The gamelan, in one variety or another, has rapidly became an alternative orchestral form in the US, and not a few composers have had more large ensemble experience with gamelan than with traditional western orchestras.

The Vanishing Niche

Here's more evidence that the big online distributers are increasingly turning away from niche business, in this case via recommender systems. This is not a good development for new music.

Revolution?

The half-joke in the Clinton years was that if the amount of wealth which had been transferred upwards had gone in the other direction, we'd have called it a revolution.  It was only a half-joke because most people remained comfortable enough and the word "revolution" had lost much of its currency in the dull years that followed the '60s and 70's.

Now, here's a small article by Felix Salmon that seems to have the general measure of temperaments these days right, and, to be honest, I'm more than surprised by the ease with which terms like revolution, class, and even class warfare are now being thrown about:

"That dream is shattered -- and, what's worse, it turns out that very overclass is responsible for the working classes' own present straits."

Musicians, and especially new musicians are very much on the the margin of any debate structured in terms of class, let alone warfare and revolt.  (Cage or Cardew's writings about revolution now seem odd, even quaint)  We have the pocketbooks of the working class, yet make our livings by packaging our selves and our wares for the pleasure of an intellectual and capitalist class and the state that they have made.   But the condition and survival of new music in rough times is a serious topic, serious in the practical terms of assuring our livelihoods, but also in the aesthetic terms of the nature of our work.   Sometimes, historical examples provide some guidance.  However, for better or worse, it is next to impossible to generalize about new musical pratice in previous times of stress, as there is no general pattern.  Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner were each influenced, profoundly, by revolutionary times, but they are too far in the past to provide transposable examples.   After the First World War and during the Vietnam era, there were moments of true musical radicalism, some of which may now echo well with the popular anger of the moment, I suppose.  But after the Second World War, there was a turn to cooler forms of modernism, and during the Great Depression, the coincident styles of neo-classicism, folkloric nationalism, and socialist realism were all aesthetically conservative, if populist, moves.  Of course, technology is always the wild card here:  it may just be that the means of musicial pro- and repro-duction are efficient and cheap enough to sustain a greater diversity of both substance and style.   The half-joke of the '60s, that the revolution would not be televised, may have to be revised to the affirmative that the revolution will be online.

 

 

Embedded, from the Opera Ball to the Pancake Breakfast

There is no musical genre as resource- and personnel-intensive as opera, and yet, despite the extravagant costs and the fairly limited potential size of its audience, opera and the institutions which produce it continue to maintain prestige and position even through the deepest of downturns, when other musical institutions, even those requiring much more modest resources, are seriously affected.  There are several reasons for this special status, both artistic — opera is a unique amalgam of activities and can present spectacle, virtuosity, and complexity for both eyes and ears — and social, but I suspect that the social considerations are the more critical.  Opera is embedded in local social networks, and often wealthy and powerful networks, with the prestige of these networks lending opera the aura of importance, class, value, and indispensibility.  

Which isn't to say much of anything new, except perhaps this: New music doesn't need the scale or the prestige of opera, much less the institutional status.  Indeed, it would probably lose much of its essential character — its novelty and urgency — if placed under such institutional care.  However, to thrive, even at the margins, new music needs a similar social embedding, a connection to civic life.  No, nothing as large in scale and extravagance as the annual Opera ball, rather something more like the annual pancake breakfast the local Little League holds, an event that brings a community together in regular intervals, does some useful outreach and fundraising, and does so in an informal and comfortable way.  That said, we can skip the paper plates and plastic forks (can we stipulate that there is nothing worse than eating syrup-drenched pancakes off a paper plate with plastic forks?).

Too Big To Fail

The current crisis in banking is, in large part, due to the massive deregulation of the financial sector, which included a removal of restrictions on the types of business that single institutions can carry out as well as the end of restrictions on interstate banking, creating the banks (and other private financial institutions) which are now identified as "too big to fail."

I contend that new music appears much less lively, diverse, and interesting than it actually is because there is a similar concentration of public attention on a limited number of markets, venues, and providers.  A recording on Nonesuch, for example, is more likely to get reviewed and will receive optimal distribution, while recordings on more local and upstart labels and without the backing of a major media firm like Warner, will largely be ignored.  A one-off performance in New York before an audience of 12 in a Soho loft gets reviews, but a run of 12 sold-out performances on Cape Cod is ignored entirely.

The more egregious effect, however, is on the music itself.  A commission for orchestra is rare and an orchestra is a large and expensive institution, and composed as it is of a mass of people with well-practiced working habits, even quite talented people, tends to learn new things slowly, so rehearsal time is precious.   Consequently, presenters tend to play safe with the orchestra, the musical institution "too big to fail," and play it safe by choosing composers with track records for playing it safe and working successfully with other orchestras (remember second grade: "plays well with others"?  diplomacy is ofen a real substitute for real musical interest).  The chosen few composers, in turn, protect their track records by providing just enough novelty ear candy to maintain the aura of the new while fundamentally remaining in the safety zone in terms of both performance difficulty and audience receptivity. 

This situtation is most unfortunate because it seriously misunderstands the central function which risk plays in musical change and underestimates the capacity for serious musicians to successfully negotiate risks.  Each landmark in music history can be reasonably heard as an example of a composer and performers successfully resolving risks.  (There are even a small number of extraordinary works in which the risks have never been successfully mastered, yet it still seems worth our while to keep working at them).   The relationship between success, failure, and risk in music-making is something altogether different from that in commerce and finance, but I daresay that music managers have been doing as damn bad a job as their colleagues in finance in risk management.    

Feyerabend

If the anarchic qualities of musical change and discovery are to be taken seriously, then the writings of Paul Feyerabend seem increasingly useful.  Take this small text, for example, on epistemological anarchism, and substitute "compositional" or "aesthetic" for "epistemological". Or take this, from Against Method, and substitute "music" for "science":

“The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too simple a view of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause, their development. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to increase our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity. In addition, the idea is detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical and historical conditions which influence scientific change. It makes our science less adaptable and more dogmatic: every methodological rule is associated with cosmological assumptions, so that using the rule we take it for granted that the assumptions are correct. Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest and not hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. Empiricism takes it for granted that sense experience is a better mirror of the world than pure thought.”

SP'sD

Another St. Patrick's day has past, which in the US has become a curious spectacle of elective affinity for an imagined identity.  Bars and parades are full of one-day-a-year patriots drinking green beer, singing A Nation Once Again, without ever wondering if the supposed nation was ever there in the first place, let ago ready for reappearance. And don't get me started on corned beef and cabbage... 

I'm as much of a mutt as most Americans, with some fractional advantage to those ancestors whose last European home was in Ireland (with the rest from Holland or Britain),  We've kept in touch with relations on that island and my mother even has an Irish passport, but identifying myself as Irish-American seems odd.  In fact, the whole business of program note biographies and encyclopedia entries which inevitably begin with some national identity (American composer Philo T. Boxtop... ) seems even more odd.   How obligatory or meaningful is such an identification? Does a composer identify musically with a nation state?  With a piece of real estate?  With a language or the traditional customs of some tribe or folk?  

(For the record, my earliest haplogroup (M168) hasn't made me any more attached to the Rift Valley, although I am certainly fond of Doro Wat and Injera).

My personal attachment to the mountains, desert and coast of California is real, but it seems presumptive to claim that they are embedded in my music.  On the other hand, my few years on the East Coast were mostly unhappy and more foreign, in their way, then time spent in places where I had to get my passport stamped.  (A few weeks in the Deep South of the US were certainly the most exotic experience of my life.)  So identification as an American composer seems rather coarse to me, no matter how honored I'd be to share the designation with Ives, Cowell, or Cage.  

On the other hand, though I've been in Europe for a long enough time, coming here was unplanned and unexpected, personal rather than professional, and staying here is as much due to relatively good schools and health care for the family as any geographical or cultural attachments, of which I have few and increasingly fewer.  That said, whenever a work of mine is played here, the advertisement is inevitably of a work by an American composer, which I can sometimes get the organizer to temper to Californian, but when a piece is programmed in the States, I just as inevitably get the qualifier "Frankfurt-based." (Does that mean I'm following in the steps of Telemann, Humperdinck and Hindemith, or that I ought to be expert in the writings of Goethe or Adorno?  Or maybe I should have a special relationship to Rindswurst or Grie Soß?)

This lack of attachment comes with advantages and disadvantages.  Musically, especially for work with experimental ambitious, this detachment can lead to a useful distance from habit or tradition.  But there are real practical disadvantages in not being a fully enfranchised member of the local polity:  my status is perpetually that of a tolerated guest (and during the Bush wars, even this was not always clear) and I can't vote here, but must pay the same taxes as those who can.  At the level of the nation-state, this pains little, but I do like to participate in local affairs. More critical, however, is that I often fall between the cracks for music presenters and musical funding sources.  Not being German, my work can't be supported by a number of sources and not being resident in the US, a number of sources there are — whether by rule or by practice — cut off from me.  But most critically, the attachment of one label, whether American or experimental or minimal or serial or complex or neo-/archao-/post-/prae-/ad hoc-whatever, can lead to the uniform identification of all of ones work with that label.  If your particular label does not fit the fads and fancies of the current programming season, tough luck.  (And if you hairstyle doesn't fit, even worse luck...)

Years ago, in grad school, I noticed that most of the composers in New York, the most saturated marketplace for composition in the US, tended to discipline themselves so that their work was ever-more focused on a particular specialization.  This is probably an inevitable behavior in such a market, and to its credit, New York manages to support competing streams of music-making to some degree or another, but it also leads to precisely the labelling described above.  I'm less interested in catalogues of composers than in individual works of composers, and sometimes only even in moments, marvelous moments, in those individual works, so this labelling is essentially a filtering device for programmers and marketers and a distraction, away from the music, for me.  Moreover, the capacity for talented composers, and American composers perhaps particularly so, to, chameleon-like, elect one identity or another, just like American politicians all becoming Irish for one day in 365,  is something that surely should raise suspicion. 

You would think that, with all of the ease of communication and travel, such labels should be increasingly discounted.  (Not disregarded, just discounted).   I suppose, however, that an economically marginal activity like new music is going to hang onto these for sometime longer in that the filtering, segregating, and isolating effects still have an economic function, a crude but practical filter on a supply of music far in excess of demans.  Restraint of trade, one might say.  But if we practice a bit more suspicion of the labels, perhaps we can restore some more valid utility to them.  There are, indeed, qualities that are inescapably French to the music of Berlioz, Debussy or Boulez or American about the music of Ives or Piston or Harold Budd, and it can be useful to talk about these qualities, if the talk is more than an arbitrary, casual and prejudiced application of labels, but rather as nothing more than an opening to a discussion of real differences in music.   

Just when we thought we were done with Bushian slips

On his plans to write a book:

"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened," Bush said. (from here)

Marathon

I spend as little time with recordings as I can, but a recent gift of the Sony boxed set of 22 cds worth of Stravinsky-led Stravinsky has provided an excuse for an all-Stravinsky marathon.  Boy, with very few exceptions (and maybe only The Flood, at that), this is all renewable music.  Both the music itself and the fields of association around the music are incredibly rich,  with each new listening suggesting new paths in and out of the music.   I'm particularly struck this time by how useful irony is to Stravinsky in creating this manifold if not open-ended quality.  Neither Viennese expressionism nor Russian mid-20th century musical sarcasm have this particular power.  

It's probably not good to play favorites with so much good stuff, but I am very taken with the disk which included the ballets  Apollo, Agon, and Jeux des Cartes.  Agon has always been a favorite — with its crispy and splittered orchestration, so well-made for nimble feet (those galliards, those bransles!) — and Jeux des Cartes is a romp with amazing, almost non-sequitorial, roll-offs and flourishes for the various shuffles and gambits (I've never been sure whether the game described should be more in the style of Lewis Carroll or of Ian Fleming).  But this time, it is Apollo that captured me.   There is something naive, almost artless about surface here, but Stravinsky always manages to pull in something unexpected, if only the smallest bit of uncanny voice leading.  And likewise, although the string ensemble initially appears a neutral, plain, a monochromatic white even — the score, a ballet blanc, after all, is full of white space — by the middle of the variations (in which Apollo partners with each of three muses in turn), the ensemble comes to seem almost too bright, too colorful.  The whole is refined yet radiant, completely in keeping with the title character.    

 

Continuing Ed

I've been brushing up on Fourier transforms, which can be useful in musical applications.  This video lecture series by Brad Osgood of Stanford  at Academic Earth has been helpful.  Too bad there aren't any courses in music at AE yet.  

Standards of (Performance) Practice

Composers depend upon performers to turn marks on paper into real sounds and — when everything works out — music. When the music works, it's often far from clear which party is most responsible. On the one hand, some scores are so robust, they can survive the worst approximation and most dispirited rendition. And on the other hand, I know some musicians who can take my breath away just playing scales, so the actual notes played, or supposed to be played, are beside the point. But when the music doesn't happen, it's just as difficult to assign blame. Performers can sabotage a piece, but maybe the notes were never going to be music in the first place.

I just toured a brand new shopping center in the middle of Frankfurt. Designed by a star architect, it has a great deal of flash and some virtuoso features, and has received a lot of press attention. But almost everywhere there are small details in the construction that have gone wrong: surfaces not smoothly joined together, walls too roughly plastered, light fixtures that are not sealed properly, windows slightly out-of-line, a hinge to fire extinguisher box on crooked so the thing doesn't quite close... all of these small things gone amiss are the architectural equivalent of wrong notes. There is a clear failure in performance practice here, but I understand that the construction industry deals with such failures in terms of tolerance, legally codified as standards of practice. The assumption in the building trade is simply that some percentage of the work will not be done to spec, and the on-going negotiations between client, architect, and contractors during construction largely concern whether or not that percentage is acceptable. The ideal execution — note perfect, in musicians' terms — is just not a possibility and everyone goes into the project understanding this.

I think composers and musicians have some advantages here over architects and builders. Musicians really do come closer, and more often, to the note- and style-perfect reading of a score, than builders come to perfect realizations of ideal architectural plans. Also, the working relationship between composers and musicians is rarely loaded with the monetary considerations that a major work of architecture must have, and, in general, composers and musicians work together with considerable respect and even a mutual cultivation of talents (and even careers). At the very least, a musical error (whether of composition of performance) is ultimately a transient event. We can survive a bad piece or a bad performance and move on to something better. An error in execution of an architectural plan, on the other hand, can carry a risk to life and limb that render any smaller aesthetic considerations trivial. But the greatest advantage of all that music brings is the fact that it is entirely possible for a performance to err from the letter of a score and nevertheless capture the piece in spirit, or even go beyond it. In musical performance, the ideal is not the enemy of the real, but a means to it.

Free and Open Notation

MuseScore is a promising free WYSIWYG music notation program, licenced under GNU GPL. It already has a set of features superior to Finale Notepad or other entry-level notation packages (offering, for example, unlimited staves and a set of microtonal accidentals), making it ideal for most classroom applications and probably good enough for serious projects requiring only conventional notation.  It appears that the programmers are actively working on some additions required for more complex scores like nested tuplets.  It's cross platform, but currently only for Linux and Windows, with Mac available only in a prototype version.  The output I've seen from MuseScore is comparable in style to that of Lilypond.

Perspective

"From the modernism that you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve." -- David Antin