Lewis on Improvisation

A very good lecture, Improvisation as a Way of Life: Reflections on Human Interaction by George Lewis is online here.

While I was a student and as a journeyman composer, improvisation was an urgent topic, with status in the new music world at some loggerheads over whether one was an improviser or (a) not(ator), with no small amount of macho swagger on either side of the argument.

This argument seems to have lost intensity within a musical community that has become at once more comfortable with diversity and more settled into routines of niche activity with far less acute competition for attention and resources between the niches.

Personally, I started out somewhat combative towards the hard-core improvisers. I improvised myself with bliss in the privacy of my own atelier but was unconvinced by much of what I heard when improvisers went public and, honestly, I saw them as direct competitors for presentation turf and fees. I've long since become considerably more relaxed about the issue, first with greater awareness of the ubiquity of improvisation — ultimately, every piece or performance of music — even the most fixed, systematic, written-down-and/or-out works of a Babbitt, Stockhausen, Cage or Johnson — has components that can only be construed as improvised, carrying a degree of either the arbitrary or the most intimately taste-related that no necessity governs their presence in the work. Moreover, my increase in comfort with improvisation comes with an increased sense that the presence or absence of improvisation is not really all-too-important and certainly neither an ethical nor an aesthetic distinction or value.

Improvisation of one sort or another is ubiquitous in all aspects of life, good bad, or indifferent. The Tokyo Electric Power Company has certainly been improvising big time of late in Fukushima, and although many individual performances by their employees have been heroic, I don't think that we've seen much in the corporate (ensemble) performance of ethical or aesthetic praiseworthiness. The current improvisations in the Arabic world present a similar diversity of results. In neither case are we — from contested distances of physical space, languages, history and culture and through the filters of equally-improvised media — in any position to honestly assess these performances, but some form of response is necessary and, even if that response is itself an improvisation, it has to be done on the basis of some concrete criteria: an accident in a nuclear power plant is very bad, the slaughter of citizens peacefully protesting their government is very bad. While musical performances, and performances of new musics in particular, carry very little that can harm mind or body in the way that event in Japan or Libya certainly can, and musical events have the supremely useful quality that they can be turned off or walked out of when they go badly, our response to music, even our most immediate, from-the-gut, yes Virginia, improvised, response has got to be governed by criteria, ethical and aesthetic, no matter how explicit we ever get about it.

The late music critic Heinz-Klaus Metzger described his work as a "struggle against the absence of criteria" without which music was reduced to only entertainment. While I share Metzger's suspicions about industrialized entertainment, I don't want to disregard entertainment as a value in itself; there are times in the lives of many if not most people when musical forms of entertainment can uniquely provide the comfort, consolation, fantasy or pleasure that makes a life of struggle and work whole. But at the same time, I don't want to deny, through disregard for qualitative criteria, the capacity for music to be more than entertainment.

Lewis clearly hears more inherent value in the improvised component of music-making than I do; I believe that we could at least agree on a minimum, in which the act of making music is more reliably valuable — to whatever degree of improvised content — than a great number of alternative human preoccupations. Lewis's presentation comes tantalizing close to raising these aesthetic and ethical questions without getting specific about criteria under which music becomes valuable. Too bad, methinks, because Lewis is such a good musician that I know damn well that his sense of musical quality is not operating in a criteria-free vacuum.

I do have one material question about the structure of the lecture — a rather formal academic occasion — itself: How much of it was improvised?

Step one: merge. Step two: downsize. Step three: export production.

Sounds like some music administrators are ready to repeat some of the business practices that have made the past two decade just so peachy: American Music Center and Meet The Composer, Two of America’s Leading New Music Organizations, Announce Merger Plans. While there may be some organizational synergies to be had, it's always healthier to have some diversity and competition among those connected to commissioning, awards, publicity, and any other brownie buttons to be handed out.

The one bit of good news in this comes in the subtitle — American Composers Forum Will Assume Membership and Professional Development Services From American Music Center — it was never a very good idea to organize a "national" music information office as a membership organization and it's an even better idea, in terms of both costs and focus, to have the national professional services organization somewhere out in the middle of the country.

Topics

Material
Ambiguous parameters
Presence
Memory & Prescience
Task & Practice
Surface
Resonance
Metric, non-metric, ametric
Precision & Rubato
Approximation
Mapping
Clarity
Order
Symmetry
Necessary & Arbitrary
Identity
Repetition
Ensemble
Echoes and Shadows
Figure & Ground
(De)coherence
Continuity, Line, Narrative
Attention
Distraction
Feedback
Environment
Natural & Artificial
Mo(ve)ment
Pleasure & Pain
Signal & Noise
Calculation — Choice — Chance
System & State
Not-yet-tonal
Center & Extreme
Amplification & Compression
Live & Recorded
Real Time, Musical Time & Zero Time

An Exercise in Modern Usage

All the fuss these days about the new Modernist Cuisine volumes is an invitation to ponder that term "modern" in each of its variants (-ist and -ism and -ernity etc.) and with all of the familiar appendages (anti-, post-, pre, and prae- etc.). Let us review: Modern is clean and lean and clear except when it's messy, thick and dense. Modern is slow and low and empty except when it's swift, sky-scraping and full. Modern is both high tech, knowingly low tech, usually appropriate tech, but sometimes extravagantly tech. Modern is fresh and local except when it's well-preserved and long-traveled, often international. Modern is both futurist and primitive, forward-looking and nostalgic, cold as ice and warm as a pup. Modern is a walk in the wood and a ride in a jet-pack. Modern is atomic and anti-atomic. Modern is dissonance and noise except when it's the same time consonant and concord. Modern is specific except when it's generic, expertly handcrafted except when it's mass-manufactured, one-of-a-kind except when it's infinitely reproducible. Modern is slick, glossy black & white, but also fuzzy-edged, matte and polychromatic. Modern is rough and complex, except when elegantly simple. Modern is ambiguous and ironic, except when it's straightforward and earnest. Modern is knowing when one is acting (or eating) archaic. Modern is all ornament, except when it's plain as can be. Modern is going to extremes as well as focusing on the medium and mediocre. Modern is the 20th century except when it's now the 21st. Modern is now, except when it's that modern back then or this modern up ahead. Post-modern is not modern except when it happens to be modern. Modern is comic except when it's not. And so on (except, of course, when modern is non-sequitor.) With so much contradiction, is the term at all useful? (Have you ever noticed that when you write a word — like "modern" in this item — often enough, it begins to appear strange, misspelled, unfamiliar, even foreign?) Actually, I think modern can be useful, if one is prepared to live with the contradiction, to see it as a term that itself thrives within fields of contention and, ultimately, a term whose value or utility ultimately dependent more on local context and application than universal applicability. And, unless you're prepared to back up your use of the term with sufficient context, be prepared for it to signify nothing at all. Which, in itself, is just about as modern as you can get.

Godzilla the warm and cuddly

One short question: the Japanese series of Godzilla (Gojira) films (1954- ) began with the title character a mutant monster product of atomic detonations, a horrific metaphor for atomic weapons. However, over the course of the series, Godzilla become more of a positive, heroic figure. To what degree was this metamorphosis in character propaganda for the "peaceful use of atomic power" as opposed to simply creating an impetus for the continuation of the series?

Force majeure; Better: silence

I just wanted to catch up on the news, so I turned the TV onto the German-language 24 hour station N-24, only to discover that most of the reportage over the disasters in Japan were rolling features underlaid with the cheapest stock background music, unnecessarily over-dramatizing a story which damn well needs to be reported with only the best facts the reporters can assemble. While all reporting is going to be manipulative in one way or another, isn't it an objective of journalism to either reduce the level of manipulation or at least to be honest about it? AFAIC, this use of background music is an altogether unnecessary abuse of both the viewing audience and of music itself.

*****

Great natural disasters seem to trump even the wildest of musical imaginations. Handel's late oratorio Theodora failed to win audiences in part due to an earthquake a week or so before its premier in 1750. John Cage long tried to write a piece, based on the ten 100-letter thunderclaps which punctuate Finnegans Wake, which was to involve electronic modifications of instrumental and vocal sounds and to be "more like going to a thunderstorm than to a concert". Although some of the ideas ended up in the Lecture on the Weather and Roaratorio, the piece seems to have defeated Cage. Ligeti tried over many years, with plenty of mathematical and computational assistance, to create a proper orchestral Tempest with which to begin a long-planned opera of the same name and he gave up as well.

*****

In a time like this, in which a terrible catastrophe, indeed chain of catastrophes, preoccupies heart and mind, the need to respond in some musical way is simply blunted by the magnitude of the event. Not even my greatest conceits about my skills as a composer can disguise the fact that I haven't the talent to match the demands, the scale, the dynamics, the horror of the moment. A lament? Yes, perhaps, but later, when there is some concrete sense of the nature and dimensions of what has been lost. But an earthquake, tidal wave, or tempest of my own making? No, the shakes and splashes of my own music are necessarily inadequate responses. Better: silence.

Terry Gilliam to direct The Damnation of Faust

This is either the best idea in the world or one of those terrible ideas of such epic dimension that it, nevertheless, should not be missed. Damnation, that marvelous not-opera not-symphony, is a work that, AFAIC, demands the companionship of some visual extravagance; Gilliam has a remarkable track record with neither-fish-not-fowl genres and is no slouch in the extravagance department; connecting the dots between the extravagant and difficult figures of Berlioz and Gilliam (and, okay, we can throw Goethe in as well) is one of those startling moves that seems obvious in retrospect. Let's hope that the producers are up to the demands of both director and composer (yes, Norman, you do need 8 to 10 harps to have adequate presence (not volume, presence) in the finale.) (I wish the video had more visual information.)

To publish or not to publish (1)

Colin Holter has a post at the New Music Box noting Terry Riley's decision to now publish his scores through G. Schirmer. From what I understand, this decision comes out of Riley's preference, at this point in career and life, to get away from the everyday burdens of running his own publishing operation. In the far past, Riley made some of his scores rather widely available — with the original LP of In C including the score and Olson III available in a well-known anthology — but in general he held onto the music he performed himself or reserved for other musicians with whom he had a close, personal working arrangement and only in recent years committed the bulk of his notated works to his own publishing enterprise.

The decision for a composer not to be published for so many years by a conventional publisher has both practical and artistic grounds. Practically, the composer keeps all of his or her publishing and license fees (as opposed to forking over half to a publisher) and maintains a better overview of performances and subsequent fee collections, including exclusive performance rights (which are not unimportant when a composer makes a large part of his or her income from performing his or her own work; the whole issue of "cover" recordings is included here as is the question of a work's market saturation.) Artistically, it allows the composer considerably liberty to continue to define the contents, character, and performance practice of the work that a fixed and sold score might well discourage.

(At the end of Holter's post, he asks specifically about the works of La Monte Young. Having worked with Young in a publishing capacity before my time in Budapest, I can say a couple of things. The first is that although Young's control over access to his score may have frustrated many, Young has given a lot of thought about the matter and has had some very concrete experiences — many of them appallingly disrespectful towards both him and the work itself — with all aspects of the question and come to quite rational decisions about the optimal dissemination of the performance materials, based on a realistic assessment of the market for his work, his need to make an income for himself from his work, and his desire to maintain artistic control over work for which he has unique expectations — no shared programming, performance in specific physical environment, minimum durations and rehearsal periods, his own (or selected colleagues') participation in rehearsal, etc. — and which he clearly understands as very much still in-progress as both compositions and performance practices. Rest assured that Young has long-term plans for all of his works.)

The Lute and the Incongruent Bicycle Bell

Reading Errol Morris's new blog series has reminded me of my own introduction to Thomas Kuhn, in an seminar on the Sociology of Knowledge in Santa Cruz taught by Harry Eastmond, an extraordinary figure, a lecturer both more sharper and more animated and deeply funny than nearly anyone I've ever encountered, Barbados-born, seldom without sunglasses, driver of very fast cars, who took his office hours at the Space Invaders game in a downtown disco, and who was not to last very long in academia, even at the supposedly progressive Santa Cruz. I was a freshman and clearly over my head with the material, but I can still vividly recall how, eventually, the course turned on questions of objective and subjective constructions of knowledge (the ever-controversial Berger/Luckman classic, The Social Construction of Reality, came into play as well), when I had the minor revelation that musicians negotiate this territory all the time. Take loudness. We can haul out a decibel meter and measure absolute loudness, from a particular source, within a particular space, etc., and this kind of information is useful. It's useful to know that a trombone can output so many decibels. It's useful to know how a room responds to such inputs. But subjective differences in loudness can be even more musically relevant: if I have a very quiet stream of music — say, a series of chords played, pianissimo, by a lute —, interrupting this stream with, say, a single stroke on a bicycle bell will be heard as startling, perhaps devastatingly, loud, although the absolute loudness of that bell is not great. There are so many elements that go into the perception of such a musical event, including the very incongruity of the interrupting bell, that even if we were to come up with some formula for adding in objective measures of all these elements, the efficiency of the subjective perception in both approximating the objective and adding in the strictly intuitive seems to me to trump the objective measurement in both acuity and utility. But the main point is that, as musicians, we have it both ways, objectively and subjectively, all the time, and the musical experience is none the worse for it.

Ars Subtilor

How many times have you heard something like this:

But can this truly be the music of the future, or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate musicians who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end composing?

Now note this:

"But can this truly be the food of the future, or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate chefs who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end cooking?"

from a review of the new six volume cookbook, Modernist Cuisine.

Taking Pythagoras Down A Notch or Two (or some incommensurable part thereof)

Errol Morris's new blog series is well worth reading in its entirety, but all musicians with a theoretical interest will especially like part three, here.

Insertions and Deletions

This page is a fascinating record of the editing process of a David Foster Wallace piece recently published in The New Yorker. (The piece, Backbone, is highly recommended as an example of Wallace at his most obsessive.) Curiously, my fascination for the working processes of writers — I'm perpetually getting serenely lost in all those volumes of Joyce's notes, sketches, drafts, and proofs — doesn't extend much to the work of composers, and I've more or less given up on maintaining my own sketches and drafts. I used to love to puzzle through things like this — having worked intensely with manuscript materials by a diverse collection of composers including Machaut, Ockeghem, Lully, Ives, Partch, Cage — but found myself soon imitating methods too much for my own comfort. (Some scores should carry a warning label: Analyzing music other than your own can be infectious!) Perhaps the translation of methods from one medium into another involved in following a writer (or a writer/artist like Duchamp or Klee) provides a useful distance.

Orchestration Oddjob

In an idle pause last night I swept once through the eight TV channels we receive and landed on the German first channel's broadcast of Goldfinger (1964), of all things, a movie I remember from my childhood (watched, IIRC, from the backseat of my parents' 1960 Pontiac Tempest in one of those Southern California drive-ins that has long since been replaced by a track of condominiums or a strip mall.) The famous music — the Bond and Goldfinger themes and their direct derivatives — was well-impressed in my memory, but somehow I had completely forgotten the other soundtrack music (by John Barry), not directly connected to the famous tunes (and only tenuously connected to them by chromatic character and the emphasis on winds) and much of it a- or non-tonal. There is a common argument made against non-tonal music that it has never secured any wide acceptance. But bits of film music like this are indisputable evidence against that argument: the music, while — with the exception of some superb writing for solo contrabassoon* — not particularly sophisticated, is perfectly functional. While I personally have little interest in effective film music (and, by extension, effective films), it's clear that a- or non-tonal music can be extremely effective in supporting a whole array of settings, moods, or situations in which some form of common practice tonal music will probably not work well and may well not work at all.

_____

* I have to really wonder how that contrabassoon sounded from the little drive-in loudspeaker that hung from the car window...

More Community Organizing

(Click image to enlarge.)

Palling Around

Observation: Once a composer starts making music for anyone other than her- or himself, that composer becomes a community organizer.

Oscar rant obligato

(First and last Academy Award-themed item on this blog.) I generally side with Robert Bresson that the best movie music is diegetic — made by sources (on-or off-screen) understood to be part of the scene itself rather than an external accompaniment — and the handful of non-digetic scores I like are few and far between, so I've had to learn to not listen to scores. I do listen closely to sound editing and mixing, however, and find, as a composer, that the sound design is often the most interesting, subtle, and complex part of a film. As far as I'm concern, last year presented some classic examples of mainstream sound design done both very well and very poorly, particularly in the mix. But my ideas of what works or doesn't in a sound track seem to go against the grain: Inception took both sound Oscars this year, but boy, I thought it had a dog's breakfast of a mix. The look of the film was great, but there was almost no differentiation or detail to the sound mix, the leaden Zimmer score (how leaden? it manages to drain all life out of some perfectly good Philip Glass-y turn-around enharmonic chord sequences) was both too continuous and too dominant in the mix which, as a whole, was too dense in the lower registers. While I suppose that an acoustically oppressive sound design might have been chosen for some psychological resonance with the storyline, I think that there are alternatives which would have been even more effective. In fact, if the visuals were not so attractive, the relentless, all-boom, no bite of the sound would had me me walking out mid-film. (And that's saying a lot: I have managed to sit all the way through O.C. and Stiggs. Twice.) On the hand, Ren Klyce & Co.'s mix for The Social Network is a superb example of getting the sound design right. It works without calling overt attention to itself but strongly reinforces the narrative, whether in creating discrete acoustic spaces onstage (the isolated character of these spaces commenting, perhaps, ironically on the whole network topos) or in punctuating the flow of the film with a diverse set of elements, not least of which is the rhythm of the lead actor's speech. (Quite how impressive that the computer screen-based social network of the film was conveyed in the film most vividly by the sound track.)

February Pieces

The 28th of February — last day, shortest month — is a good day to remember that we tend to take absolute duration far too seriously, particularly when absolute duration is ultimately arbitrary. Competitions, job searches, concert planners continue to be obsessed with defining minimum and maximum durations. While a traditional broadcast (or those performances in downtown LA, finely coordinated to assure audiences optimal on- and off-ramp times for the freeways) will benefit from some precisely-planned durations, the restrictions of an LP or CD side are no longer relevant and we should instead welcome the opportunity to explore new solutions to the compositional problems of putting material into a stretch of time. (Yes, the judges of a competition or member of a job search have a finite amount of time, but they always have the possibility of shutting the score or fast-forwarding a recording and don't suggest that they don't do that already!) In any case, the problem is rarely too much or too many sounds and too long or too brief a piece; the problem is more often the wrong sounds at the wrong points in time. (I recently watched some fifth-graders agonizing over an assignment which included the instruction to "write no more than one page"; the focus of their attentions inevitably became the length, not the quality of their answers: how much better it would have been had they been agonizing over whether they had answered the question in a satisfactory way rather than how many lines of paper they had filled!) The calendar makers were wise enough to recognize that the length of a month could be flexible, in order to compensate for discrepancies between the sum of whole days and the length of a single trip around the sun; likewise, music benefit when composers are wise enough to recognize that one size will not always fit. So, whenever you have doubt that material and the time assigned are not quite in synch, remember you always have the option to write a February piece.

True Stories (3)

The program announced a work for prepared piano, but no one in the audience had ever before heard a prepared piano produce the variety of sounds heard that evening: muted tones to be sure, but others tones sounded more plucked then struck, and lots of bangs and bumps and crashes and scratchs and even cries and sighs emerged and emerged with a growing and puzzling disconnect between cause and effect as the motions of the pianist at the keyboard oft seemed only randomly attached to the sounds coming out from beneath the lid. A very elaborate preparation, apparently; obviously something more than the run-of-the-mill preparations of screws and bolts and erasers and coins and weather stripping; a veritable Rube Goldberg design of a preparation, it must have been. The pianist eventually came to an end, took his applause with the composer at his side and both made their satisfied exit. A few moments later, when the enthusiastic applause had subsided, a stagehand came to the side of the piano, opened the lid, and then helped a boy of five or six years to climb out from inside the piano before scrambling as quickly as possibly offstage.

True Stories (2)

A no-longer-so-young but all-too-complex composer, realizing that there wasn't much traction left in his career decided to try another line of work. Between a small inheritance and some left-over prize money, he invested everything in a line of inflatable chess boards he had designed for use in water — swimming pools, hot- and bathtubs, wading ponds etc.. Unfortunately, he had made a mistake in his production specifications and the first shipment — an over-optimistically-large shipment —came back from the manufacturer with a serious flaw. Instead of the standard eight-by-eight chess and checkers layout, all 12000 inflatable, buoyant, waterproof soft plastic chess board came back with an eleven-by-ten array of squares. After an initial panic and some heated words with the manufacturer in Hanoi which soon enough convinced him that the error lay on his side, he did exactly what might be expected of a trained complexist composer: he researched chess variations played on an eleven-by-ten board. He quickly settled on a game attributed to Tamerlane, the fourteenth-century conqueror of Western, South and Central Asia and became possibly the greatest living expert on Tamerlane Chess. Having ended up — after a long series of moves between temporary academic posts — in the outskirts of Las Vegas, he came up with the marketing idea to reconfigure the Central Asian figures of the original Tamerlane game to his new home town. Thus the kings became casino owners, the war machines were replaced by bouncers, the vizirs by pit bosses, the knights by detectives, the picket became a croupier, the rooks were either solicitors bell hops and the pawns were "escorts" (as "prostitution" is illegal in Las Vegas) ; the elephants, camels and giraffes were, of course, replaced by tigers. The composer thought he had a real winner, but it soon turned out that everyone to whom he had explained the game ended up hopelessly confused by the layout and moves. His most honest friends explained that it was impossibile to imagine this ever becoming a hit with tourists; the idea of hotel guests spending their time between evenings of reckless drinking and gambling by sobering up in the pool with floating games of fairy chess was plain silly. But he was determined not to have a total loss of his investment, and with the advice of a friend who worked for the casinos as a debt collector* and a group of college friends, a few of whom continue to be active in the composing scene, he conspired to recover his investment. Using some discount tickets, they all booked rooms in the same hotel and executed the following move: scattered through the casino at different tables, they would each gamble for a while, using up all their free chips, and then loudly announce that they were going to the pool to play some Vegas Chess. And later, while floating and playing Vegas Chess, they would get very loud with their enthusiasm for the game. This naturally attracted the interest of others poolside, and soon the composer started out handing free sets to people, on the condition that they would play their first game, then-and-there. Pretty soon the management got wind of people skipping out of the casino to play chess in the pool and anything that keeps gamblers from emptying their wallets inside the casino does not make casino management happy. To nip a possible problem in the bud, the casino manager approached the composer and asked him, more or less politely, to leave the premises and take his floating Vegas Chess boards with him. Well — as the composer suspected — the management took the precaution of following the him to the storage unit where he happened to keep the stock of unsold chess sets. The casino — through intermediaries, no doubt — "arranged" for that remaining stock of 11000-some polyvinyl Vegas Chess boards to "disappear". The composer had, of course, insured the contents of the storage unit and was able to recover enough of his investment to move to Provo, Utah, where he still lives, running a multi-level direct marketing company and composing, on the side, for show choir, the genre he has found to be closest to his own deepest musical sympathies.

_____

* The collector, who was named Leroy, was six-feet five inches tall and well over 250 lbs., an imposing figure and not a handsome man. His collecting technique was to knock on the door of the debtor, dressed in in the most elegant pin stripe suit, and then toss a Dixie cup of water in the debtor's face, promising that the next time they met, should the debt not be fulfilled, the cup would be full of acid. I actually met Leroy once (not as a debtor, thank you for asking) and he assured me that his technique was so effective that he had never once had to toss a Dixie cup full of anything other than water.

How not to do it.

I suppose that it's full disclosure when a critic begins an item with a line like:

The City of Angels will be naming a square next month in honour of my late mate Ernest Fleischmann.

But full-disclosure or not, having a music (and music biz) critic confess to having a "mate" in management gives one pause about some of that critic's previous reporting. Moreover, it is no excuse for getting the history wrong:

He broke the mould of US European orchestras hiring elderly Eurpoeans (sic), importing Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen while they were still learning to shave.

Well, no. The L.A. Philharmonic had already broken the mould, seven years before Fleischmann's arrival, by hiring the then-26-year-old Zubin Mehta as Music Director. (Lest anyone counter that Mehta is not comparable to either Rattle or Salonen, I will insist that in those early years, the orchestra and Mehta really shined in his core repertoire (Bruckner, Mahler, and Strauss) and talk of Mehta's Phil breaking the old Big Five ranking system was common; he was not terribly committed to new music, but his Varese was vivid and his was perhaps the best of the bicentennial-year performances of Cage's Renga with Apartment House 1776.)

Fleischmann was no doubt a formidable manager of the Philharmonic but, writing as an Angeleno who grew up in his era (and who spent too many noon hours while working at student jobs listening to him schmooze as a guest on KFAC's Luncheon at the Music Center, the most unintentionally hilarious and camp program on the most unintentionally hilarious and camp radio station in the US), his advocacy for the orchestra was often a terrible roadblock to other musical activities in Southern California. Combined with the tenure of LATimes critic Martin Bernheimer — who was perpetually ticked off for the indignity of having to work in a town without an opera house and whose lack of perspective was often the death blow for attempts to establish new or alternative classical programming — Fleischmann's balance in the City of the Angels was not necessarily a net positive.

Is once enough?

When a piece of new/experimental/avant-garde/contemporary (etc.) music gets its first performance, chances are high that it will also be the last performance. In itself, this is neither a good or bad thing; while in some cases, the lack of repeat performances is definitely regrettable, in other — perhaps most — cases, it is no great loss, and in still others, the ephemeral nature of the event is actually a design feature.

Accepting the single performance can be a practical and economic decision. The supply of new musical works is large and the time and resources for proper audition are severely limited. But there can be an aesthetic, even metaphysical dimension to a decision to consciously limit the realization of a musical idea to a one-off occasion. The legendary ONCE Festival (in at least one version of the legend) perhaps put this idea in the air first. I think Philip Corner's score ONE NOTE ONCE found the condensed, koanic, essence of the idea. (Jean Tinguely's self-destructing sculptures are extreme examples of the idea in another medium.)

I think, however, a decision to affirm the transitory in a piece is a natural extension of the ephemeral character of the materials of music, the sounds themselves, dissipating, or as Marx and Engels had it, melting into air.

*****

A finished score is often only a single instance or realization of a musical idea or process, a one-off performance in the domain of composition. The decision to accept a single result over a plurality might be characterized in music-historical terms as a decision to avoid the creation of repertoire, or maybe it's just a sensible act in an age of mechanical (and electronic) reproduction. (As someone noted, the great lesson of mass reproduction is that we don't want everything to be the same, or you'd never find your own car in a parking lot.)

What interest might there be in taking a process-based piece like Steve Reich's Piano Phase, and using an alternative set of pitches to those Reich himself chose? How dependent on that diatonic-but-not-necessarily-tonal configuration chosen by Reich is the identity of that piece? Idea, instance, identity. Is it interesting or relevant that John Cage used the same methods and materials designed for Music of Changes to compose the miniatures of Seven Haiku, or (in at least one version of the story) the temporal structure of 4'33"? Are these new pieces or just left-overs? (Any composer who cooks knows the value of left-overs.)

A composer I admire very much, Andrew Culver, assisted John Cage for many years and part of his work involved writing small computer programs to answer, through chance operations (or, more precisely, effective simulations of the same) questions which Cage had assigned to such decision-making processes in his pieces. When Cage died, Culver had the tools require to generate an unlimited number of new works using Cage's own algorithms. But Culver did not do this, recognizing that Cage himself had the same possibility but had always accepted a single realization of a score. (This is not to discount the fact that Cage did, indeed, often use a lot of trial and error in adjusting his questions until they yielded the broad kinds of results which interested him. Walter Zimmermann's analysis of Quartets I-VIII in the Anarchic Harmony volume describes an example of this working process.)

Recently, when working with some young people, we spent some time with the score and realization of Cage's Williams Mix. An astonishing piece involving a plethora of source sound recordings and a hugely difficult-to-realize score requiring thousands of tape splices in wildly variable but breathtakingly precise dimensions and orientations. I don't know if there have been subsequent realizations of the piece to that made by Cage and colleagues in 1952/53, but Cage, with the publication of the score, explicitly suggests the possibility of new realizations. And now, it seems eminently realizable, in real time, as live computer music, with the computer randomly (or, more precisely, an approximation of randomly) selecting out and processing slices of sounds extracted from a stored library. An indefinite number of new realization could be made, but in doing so, are we learning or experiencing anything substantially different from that original realization?

Music for Merce (1952- 2009)

I just noticed this: New World Records has just released a 10-disk set documenting music used by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company with Works by JOHN CAGE, DAVID TUDOR, TAKEHISA KOSUGI, MARYANNE AMACHER, DAVID BEHRMAN, EARLE BROWN, STUART DEMPSTER, MORTON FELDMAN, JON GIBSON, TOSHI ICHIYANAGI, JOHN KING, ANNEA LOCKWOOD, GORDON MUMMA, BO NILSSON, PAULINE OLIVEROS, MICHAEL PUGLIESE, YASUNAO TONE, CHRISTIAN WOLFF AND OTHERS. Cunningham was a choreographer who used the music of his time with an acuity for the extraordinary ranking alongside only Diaghilev, Balanchine, and Graham and the great variety of composers represented here is only sample, missing works by composers including Gottschalk, Satie, Harrison, Hovhaness, Chou Wen-Chung, Bowles, Boulez, Nancarrow, Young, Lucier, Ashley, Walter Zimmermann and many others. As a student composer, going to a Cunningham concert or even and seeing the company musicians in the pit was — and is — an exciting model of how two (or more) art forms could most usefully cohabitate.

Against the Normative Order

One of the persistent arguments for the western "classical" musical tradition has been that it has a certain caché or benchmark status, marking a form of cultivation, in which listening and performing discipline, knowledge of the tradition as a larger whole and within a historical/cultural context, and the complexity or sophistication of the music itself have been valued highly. Forms of this argument frequently appear in pedagogical contexts, and often in a popular (and highly questionable) form, from the listening-to-Mozart-makes-smart-babies fad to the recent "Chinese mother" furor. Ultimately, this argument is an argument less for the particular musical tradition than for the broader cultural tradition around the music and it skirts around aspects that have contributed to the prestige which are more social that materially musical in character: the status of the opera visit, the importance of continental European immigration to the spread of the tradition, etc.. While the sophistication of the music and the level of skill required to play and listen to it (at least at a technical level) remain constant, I think this argument has weakened considerably with time and weakened to an extent that the principal argument for the tradition, as well as for its descendants (yes, even experimental music) is a no longer sustainable status as a normative form of musical production and aesthetics, but as the exception which challenges the current normative order. A "death of classical music" will happen everytime classical music ceases to be an experience extraordinary to the music which otherwise dominates our everyday experience of listening. We have to do a better job of communicating how extradinary, how strange, beautiful and, yes, difficult this experience can be, from the uniquity, vitality and risk of live performance, the precise, strange, and archaic labor of a large ensemble performance (isn't the orchestra the only form of labor-intensive 19th century European production still in use?), to the profoundly unusual use of shared-time a concert represents, and certainly to the virtues of novelty and variety, however subtle, that only a new musical work can express, once or (sometimes) on renewed acquaintance.

Some Lumber Drop

This has been a week of trial balloons, testing ideas for pieces, some of which have clear premises and some promise, while others are pure speculation. For example: a topical libretto about a pair of spinster sisters, living together but unable to live together, each of whom decides to off the other in slow motion, one feeding the other cans of light chunk tuna, the other overdosing the other on celery sticks, intending a steady accumulation of enough mercury or pesticide, respectively, to do the trick. [Idea discarded for resembling but not improving on Dashiell Hammett's short story Flypaper as well as for the difficulty of sustaining a joke in comic opera.] Or: a perspective piece for live electronics. [Idea discarded for never seeming to gel into anything other than just another guy with a laptop moving patches and buttons and sliders around.] The one idea floated this week which still seems airborn involves perfect card shuffles, but then again, I'm always a sucker for a good card trick...

*****

I don't spend much time with recordings of music intended for live performance (I prefer playing music myself, then listening to live music, then score reading, and then recordings) but I couldn't help listening to a lot of Berlioz this week. Les Troyens is really the center of the Berlioz experience and I get more enthusiastic each time I hear it, a strange and sometimes unwieldy piece on a strange and unwieldy theme. (But then again, that could be said for Benevenuto Cellini, Beatrice and Benedict, and the non-opera/non-symphony that is Damnation of Faust. ) Berlioz was the major innovator of the mature 19th century, but he doesn't get a lot of respect. I think that this is due to a number of unsustainable prejudices: against his heterodox (= non German, post-Revolutionary) tonal practice, against a diction and phraseology based on French, and against a composer for whom instrumentation and orchestration are as important as any other dimension of the work. This prejudice has, methinks, lead to an astonishing deafness to Berlioz's achievements as a contrapuntalist, particularly in his ability to use orchestration (and in some cases, physical space) to radically differentiate the lines of his counterpoint, and to his uncanny use of what he called "intermittent" sounds (yes, Virginia, I connect Berlioz to Cage.)

*****

I have also listened to some new music online. An old favorite is RadiOM, but two interesting webcasts are David Weinstein's Experimental Composers (here) and Sam Harnett's Sound Off (here.)

*****

Finally, with all of the recent remembrances of Milton Babbitt, hasn't it been interesting how people have danced around terms like "modernist" or "avant garde" and "academic" or "intellectual"? (For the record, I think it's reasonable to associate Babbitt with an edition of modernism and he was certainly an academic — and ultimately a conservatory academic at that — but I don't think that he was much of an avant gardist and any intellectual program he belonged to was more of the first half of the 20th century than the second half, with his principal music-theoretical innovations — arrays with particular properties — more or less complete around 1960-65 and his subsequent composition a kind of tactical improvisation, projecting particular features of the array onto the score's surface.) And while I can appreciate the desire, at this moment to emphasize the warm and cuddly aspects of the Milton Babbitt experience — the wit, the baseball, the beer, the pop songs — I honestly wish that someone from his team had come out and said, yeah, he was a ferocious advocate for his party. I think that not acknowledging that fails to account for a substantial part of his work parallel to his composing, which was his advocacy for professional composers and theorists in the academy. The legacy here is decidedly mixed — for one, the academic recognition of the professional music theorist has taken away many jobs that might have otherwise been given to composers; for another, composers and theorists in the academy have turned out to have a broader set of concerns than the particular theoretical and compositional directions Babbitt advocated; for a third, electronic music has certainly gone somewhere else, even though the technology today would have no problem with realizing Babbitt's particular needs — but, at the very least, this institutional work should be recognized, for better or worse, as a piece with his compositional activities.

Conjuring, Control & Just Plain Staying on Top of Things

There is a moment in every bit of stage magic of suspended certainty in which suspense takes over, the spell has been cast, but neither the magician nor the audience can be certain that something — indeed, anything — will happen. For the audience, it is the moment in which the build-up to the illusion reaches its peak, to be followed either with surprise and admiration, or by disappointment or even dismay, while for the performing magician that peak is one of anxiety, for no amount of practice and discipline can always insure a satisfactory rather than disappointing result. Ta-dah.

Musical composition and performance has much in common with the invention and discipline that go into theatrical conjuring, but for my money, music has an unbeatable advantage over stage magic in that the goal of the stage magician is not to be surprised himself, but to command and control the situation so that the audience will reliably be surprised. Music, however, has a way of reliably surprising both author and audience and, indeed, I think that the best composers have a way of eliciting such moments, however risky. (A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.) Moreover, while stage magic leaves the audience with no illusions (bag full of tricks understood), with music at its best, there is no reasonable expectation that any trickery be explained away.

Musical surprises may be modest. I remember, for example, as an earnest undergraduate, talking with Philip Glass after a solo concert in Santa Cruz. He was excited about the woodwind, organ and string orchestration for then-new score to Satyagraha which turned out to have a lively "buzzy" (his word) quality that surprised him. Of course, as a musician with his training and experience, Glass knew all of the elements that went into that orchestration, and he had his expectations, but the result still surprised, and still does surprise.

Sometimes the surprise is rather more fundamental in character, shaking the composer's own idea of the piece. Alvin Lucier's Septet is a good example. The piece, in which wind and string players play long tones a precise small intervals from a standing sine wave tone in order to create patterns of interference beatings, worked at its first performance, by a group of fine players who had much more experience with standard classical repertoire than with experimental music, but it was more-or-less just another Lucier piece about beats. However, some years later, the piece was taken up by an ensemble in Berlin which had the time to really live with the piece. The players discovered that they could just focus a bit more on shaping dynamics, smoothly curving them in gradual crescendi and diminuendi over the course of each long tone and that, suddenly, certain harmonics of the instrumental tones would just pop out of the texture. The piece was doing something unintended by the composer and it was beautifully so. This phenomenon could have been anticipated — even calculated, with some spectrograms and a critical band chart — as it was always implicit in the set-up of the piece, but it took a particular kind of engagement with the work to actually discover and bring the phenomenon into focus.

Part of Lucier's legerdemain — in this piece and in others — is the move of saying that "this piece is about x" (in which X can equal acoustic interference beating or room resonances or feedback etc.) and — strategically, depending upon the composition — implicitly or explicitly putting other aspects of the piece into the "not about" box. In some cases, this is genuine sleight-of-ear stage magic: in I am sitting in a room (the one opera that will certainly survive from the 1960's) the piece is explicitly about a particular process but the composer's patter directing you in one way cannot but help the listener from also taking in elements of the piece — in particular a certain emotional drama — which he would appear to be excluding.

With surprising frequency, when a composer says up front that "this piece is not about x" or "I'm not interested in x", element x suddenly becomes very, even urgently, interesting. (It's somewhat like telling someone to "relax!"; given such an instruction, relaxing is just about the last thing you can be expected to do. A composer can ignore this likelihood or perhaps usefully work with it. There's a very nice conversation online between the composers Michael Pisaro and Aaron Cassidy (at Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Rambler blog, here) which, among other things, is a useful illustration of some of the rich territory which experimental music and high complexity share. In it, Cassidy describes tablature scores in which the precise pitch produced is explicitly not the material of the composition, not the compositional subject of the piece. Nevertheless, once realized in performance, doesn't pitch inevitably become one of the most interesting aspects? Now, these aren't pitches representing a precise compositional design, but for all the variations in detail there are inevitably global features to the pitchiness that are composed and it's not altogether important whether this is legerdemain or laissez-faire.

*****

One more remark about this common territory between experimentalists and the complexity crew. I've written here recently enough about complexity, so won't bore you further. This territory also has common parts with the big computer people and the small computer people, and folks that build new instruments, whether powered by breath, muscle, 9 volt batteries or the power mains or those who make installations or recordings or online-ables in preference to concert music. This fractiousness doesn't strike me as very useful to anyone, except in the narrow musical-political function of sorting out grants, prizes and positions. It just doesn't have much to do with music and, critically, with the tendency of camps to produce more camp followers than adventurers, it doesn't have much to do with making innovative music in particular. In an era of increasingly limited resources, this is a serious practical mistake, for it will tend to suck in the mediocre but similar while excluding the extraordinary but varietal. Fortunately, there are examples of composers — Christopher Fox is a good example — who have always been comfortably apart from attachment to a particular camp, finding musical goodwill and utility across these demarcations, and there are even some good signs of thaw from the most stalwart figures (e.g. if nothing else, the non-specified instrumentation of Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet was a friendly gesture in the direction of the experimental tradition.)

How to review a concert

Charles Shere shows us.

Innovation or Stagnation?

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowan has a nice post connecting some threads (including Paul Krugman) about stagnation in technical innovation, with the example of the kitchen, which has seen surprisingly little fundamental innovation since the microwave was introduced (a device whose application still remains controversial; but then again, I can recall, as a kid in SoCal the '60s that there were still a couple of houses that took ice deliveries for their wooden ice boxes, so even electrical refrigeration had its (non-Amish) detractors in recent memory. (And don't tell me about those fancy sous-vide machines; it's not a big deal to hot-wire your crock pot into a working sous-vide cooker.)

How about technical innovation in new music? While we once could have taken a David Foster Wallace turn and sold off each musical year to the highest bidding sponsor (1961: Year of the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, 1967 Year of the Time Point, 1969 Year of the Moog, 1975 Year of the REMO Roto Tom, 1977 Year of Overtone Singing, 1979 Year of the Eventide Harmonizer, 1985 Year of Midi (or was it kelp trumpets or long string instruments or the virgin sample?), 'til somewhere in the 1990's we entered the era of Laptop Gazing, with which the pace of technical innovation seems to have become incremental rather than eventful, and even when eventful (like last summer's fit of stretching) it fatigues quickly. Has anyone noticed any innovation per se of late, or have we fallen into the routines of repertoire niches? If you've noticed innovation, what examples? What are the trends and tendencies? Or have composers simply become comfortable cooking in their old fashioned kitchens? If so, is this for better or worse?

In short, what's novel, lately, about The New Music?

Partitions

In memory of Milton Babbitt, here's a very accessible lecture by Emory University mathematician Ken Ono with some very recent results in partitions. The musical projection of possible partitions of a set — of pitches, or icti in a measure, or of instruments in an ensemble, for example — was very important to Babbitt, an interest I happen to share.

Piano and Violin: Blunt Instruments of Bourgeois Education

I agree with everything that the Tenured Radical, Claire Potter, has to say about the whole "Chinese Mother" child rearing topic, which has been put forth by Yale Professor Amy Chua in a book and a couple of well-placed advance publicity articles.

As a minor addition to this topic, I wish to note that Amy Chua places these two items at the end of her WSJ list of the things her daughters were never allowed to do:

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

So the "Chinese Mother" is not insisting on the q'in or the er-hu, but piano and violin. What is it about that pair of instruments? There is a long western tradition in which learning these two instruments — with perhaps the 'cello as a rather rare variation — is considered acceptable and desirable for bourgeois and upper class children. Children whose parents are determined to set on a path of upward mobility into or within these classes have been encouraged, when not forced, to take up one of these axes. The aim is for the ability to show discipline and training and, perhaps secondarily, to be able to demonstrate a form of virtuosity before private audiences. In rare cases, the aim is professionalism, but generally the goal is considered to be a form of cultivation, in this case closely identified with a particular repertoire, one centered in the Viennese classics and peppered with display pieces from neighboring repertoires. Further, those rare cases of paths to professional musical careers were almost exclusively male, and the cachet for a musically well-trained young woman was not infrequently, a higher value on the marriage market.

This amateur piano/violin tradition was already present in Beethoven's Vienna (think of the young women who were his piano students) and continued, at least until very recently, in Central Europe. (I witnessed the tail end of this in Budapest: violin, piano and the occasional 'cello were still the dominant instruments of urban upper class identification and aspirations, while the rest of the orchestra was filled by instrumentalists whose pedagogical traditions had, both historically and more recently, distinctively rural and military backgrounds.) These instruments were considered to be high culture-bearing; they had significant solo and repertoire by all of the important names and as people from outside of Europe wished to express an affinity for this prestigious tradition, these were obvious instruments of choice. We can still recognize this phenomena in the European immigrant communities in the Americas, through which the present conservatory and orchestral landscape was developed, but the recent waves of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (both in home country and in places of immigration) enthusiasms for this repertoire are more marked in recent memory. The Suzuki-Yamaha divide between violin and piano pedagogy of the 1960's and 70's is now echoed in Prof. Chua's no-instrument-other-than-the-piano-or-violin ideology.

Now, as a composer who likes writing for the piano or violin from time to time, I appreciate the fact that we will have more pianists and violinists among us in the future. And, as I have noted often here, I strongly appreciate the fact that many of those violinists and pianists will be best-meaning-of-the-word-amateurs. But I do wish to add two caveats. The first is that the orchestra (professional or amateur) relatively rarely uses pianos and though there can be many violins, we need violas and bassoons and horns as well. A world full of "Chinese Mothered" violinists and pianists will be a world in which violists, bassoonists and horn players will be valued more highly. (The "Chinese Mother" appears not always to be wise about economics.) The second caveat is that I want to work with and listen to musicians who are not only mechanically competent, but are honestly interested in the music and, generally speaking, cheerful rather than fearful about music-making. Unfortunately the tactical application of fear appears to be a major element of Prof. Chua's pedagogy; in all my experience of music, I have never seen any necessity for fear as an element in its production.

From rules to practice

The typographic "rule" that one should not (that is, never) separate two sentences with more than a single space (as opposed to the "rule" that one should (that is, always) separate two sentences with two spaces) has received some on-line attention of late. (For example here, with countless arguments for and against scattered through the 'sphere.) While the issue here is, ultimately, trivial, the exercise, Ithinks, is a useful one, a reminder of how often we confuse habitual practice with compulsion or necessity. Classical musicians, for example, get trained in the "common practice", a body of technique roughly identifiable with German/Austrian practice from the middle of the eighteenth century onward for some century and a half or so. While this is a remarkable slice of repertoire and the pedagogical tradition which has grown around it is remarkable in its own way, I think that that technique only really becomes its most exciting when one teases, no digs into, the edges of that repertoire, or — better yet — entertains the possible insights and advantages of traditions which are, with regard to the common line, heterodox. My favorite example of such an uncommon practice comes in works of Berlioz (a composer who, if I weren't avoiding the ten best/ ten most influential business would have a lock on a place in either list) who had absorbed the alternative tonal practices of the revolutionary era composers as well as aspects of text setting in French to derive a tonal practice that in terms of voice leading, harmonic rhythm, metric stress etc. continues to place the common practice in vivid relief. Resolve a 4/2 dominant to the 5/3 tonic? Sure. Use a mediant as a substitute for a dominant? Why not? Sustain passages with only the voicing of a chord changing? Of course! The compositional space between rules closely cut to a particular era's local tradition and all the possible resettings of the parameters in such rules is huge and — pace Schoenberg — that's where there's still plenty of good music to be made.

You're the top, or at least among the top ten...

The musical blogoplan is currently under a wave of ten-best- and ten-most-influential-lists, with regard to composers and recordings. I think that best composer lists are pretty much beside the point, as composers are all uneven in the quality of their production and it's the individual piece that counts with the composer, at best, as a kind of brand name, and then more for stylistic than qualitative consistency. These exercises are useful, however, as a modest measure of the sympathies and passions of the moment and can often be useful, too, for clarifying, for example, the distinction between "best" and "most influential" or between an abstract ideal of a work of music and a single representation of the work in recorded form. Thus, Carlos Kleiber's recordings of Beethoven Five and Seven definitely make my best list (and this would be a best list that is far from limited to dead-white-European-male-made classical music) , but I'm not altogether sure that they have been particularly influential, indeed, I suspect that the performances are so good that they are close-to inimitable.

From the lists I've perused at late, it's been most interesting to see how list makers will hedge on the question of influence by including a Wagner or a Schoenberg with a huge caveat about not actually liking the man and/or the music but acknowledging the achievement. Influence is a tough topic and, to be absolutely honest, it forces us to wrestle with some strange notions. For example, weren't Fux (author of Gradus ad Parnassus, the theory textbook of generations of student musicians) and, more locally, Gedalge (designer of the French conservatory "school fugue"), in their bureaucratically pedagogical ways, more directly influential on subsequent generations of musicians than some of the big names? Influence is often a question of on whom, where, and when. Bach, as unavoidably important as he appears now, was an obscure local figure whose complete output was only slowly re-discovered, and even then through the lens of very different performance styles. Or how about that mighty influence that Wagner is supposed to have had? A post-Wagnerian music drama never really established itself, unless we count the Märchenoper of Humperdinck and Siegfried Wagner or the pair of Richard Strauss Einaktors, and Wagner's most radical chromatic tonal practice was not, in practice, that distinctive from late Verdi. Moreover, the developing variations and complex metric ideas of Brahms (i.e. "Brahms the progressive") were arguably the most forward looking technical ideas of their time. No, the lasting influence really comes from that force field of technique in which Wagner, Verdi and Brahms were all working, and eliding any one of those names would come at an unacceptable loss of musical substance. And, of course, once we've eaten up three slots in our top ten like that, it starts to become clear that any meaningful list is not going to be satisfactory with only ten names!

Elisabeth Klein on studying with Bartók

Here's an interview, by John Moseley, with the pianist Elisabeth Klein (1911-2004). While there is much personal detail here, the most interesting elements of the interview are for me to be found in the description of Bartók's preferred playing style which, although considered anti-romantic (catch words, here: dry, strictly rhythmic, no pedal) in its time, was very much a transitional style which still retained considerable rubato and a dynamic profile which was far from rigidly stratified.

A Place in the Sun

I've just returned from a trip to the US, more familiar than professional, with more time spent in small towns than big cities, and more time than either in some of those now-ubiquitous communities that are in the nebulous somewhere in-between. We don't really have adequately descriptive names to fit the Rancho Cucamongas of this day and age, places with substantial population (comparable, for example, to that of Mozart's Vienna, and larger than most of the towns Bach lived in) but not yet much there, there (as Stein famously said of Oakland). Where are the great novels about such places? Who are the great composers in these places? Really talented, imaginative people come of of these places, but they don't tend to stay, making their careers if they can instead in the big cities, competing against fellow asylum seekers for the few available places in the sun. And that strikes me as a major opportunity that we ought not let go. Because there is poetry in these places, and both substance and potential in the locales and letting that go — ceding it to the anti-intellectual, anti-diversity, anti-cultural economic elite, the one with the real temporal power, the one that is steadily making over the US into a land of interchangeable strip malls filled with the same coast-to-coast chains of minimum wage-staffed shops and fast food joints — is a tragic mistake.

Mumma in MusikTexte

The current issue of MusikTexte has a feature suite of articles (in German) on composer Gordon Mumma. Among the contributions is an item by Chris Brown (who teaches at Mills College) discussing Mumma as a teacher. Mumma was (and is) the teacher who was most consequential to my work, a valued extra set of critically acute ears, a walking compendium of technicalia and music-historial realia, and a constant source of questions and encouragement (emphasis on the "courage" part) to push the conceptual envelope on one's ideas and practice. His own compositions for both electronic and acoustic media are elegant in both form and detail and continue to provide both pleasure for the own sake and as rich models for new music; they should be better-known and I can recommend these articles as well as Daan Vandewalle's recent recording of works for piano by Mumma.

Sonic obsessions, revisted (7)

I spent part of the morning of this last day of 2010 recording sounds from the San Antonio Creek, which flows down the south side of Southern California's Mt San Antonio (usually called Mt Baldy.) There's been enough rain and snowfall so far this year that the creek is full enough to get a decent roar from the falls down to the modest rapids below where white water pours over granite. This little stream is probably the body of water I know best, having lived for some time up in Baldy village as a kid and then moving down the mountain to a house on the San Bernadino/Los Angeles County line which was actually set along the old creekbed of the San Antonio which had long been diverted, first as water was drawn for citrus groves in the late 19th and early 20th century, and then, finally, as a concrete flood control channel was dug some half a mile to the East. The rivers and creeks of Southern California have been almost erased, and its almost spooky to consider that in the mid-19th century both the Los Angeles and the San Gabriel were navigable, with a ferry delivering those who arrived at the harbor of San Pedro to the City of the Angels. Stream and creeks and the faster-moving rivers are acoustically the most interesting waterways, with every obstacle — rocks and fallen trees, beaver dams etc — making fine articulations, sudden accelerandi, surprising sprites of sound. And this, too: We were at the Getty Center in Malibu a few days ago, focusing as one inevitably does, on Robert Irwin's Central Garden. Though artificial, it was the central stream which registered most for me, and registered mostly as an acoustical experience, with the shapes of the riverbed carefully composed to deliver something very special.

Useful Symmetry

Symmetry in music is most interesting, I suspect, when it allows us to focus on the given asymmetries in our perception.  Time — for our purposes here, at least — can't go backward and our sense of pitch is radically asymmetrical.  Cage once quipped, in a bit of self-criticism of an early palindromic work that it suffered from its symmetry and that, for him, "symmetry indicates the absence of an idea."  And he was certainly right, in the sense that just writing out a palindrome or pitch-symmetric passage was, at its worst, just an automatism (and one quite typical of student composers venturing into the serial), generating more volume out of the source material, but the stuff generated was not necessarily going to be interesting, let alone musically useful.  But that's the worst case and, in the better and best cases, in which the composer is using symmetries — whether notational, or exact (as is possible with electronic media) — in ways that allow the material to articulate or bring out or even make vivid the real asymmetries, as in Feldman's use of rhythmic and metrical "crippled symmetries" — borrowing from the rug makers' trade the use of slight variations in repeated and mirrored patterns — or even in that sometimes classy, sometimes cheesy emblem of early live electronic music, ring modulation.   

New Music News from the Lowlands

The Ear Reader is a new web magazine from the Netherlands.   The first issue includes items from Louis Andriessen, Samuel Vriezen and Anne La Berge, so it's definitely on the right track.  Let's hope it continues, as a namesake, in the spirit of its bifurcated pair of North American forerunners, the Ear Magazine West & Ear Magazine East. In any case, the ear is a favorite organ, so there's no reason The Ear Reader not to become a favorite organ on its own terms. 

[|: until no longer recognizable :|]

Language Log comes up with another item for my little notebook about repetition, and yet more evidence that the minimal impulse is anything but simple:

It is well known that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over and over again, the meaning drops away. 

Read the whole thing, here.

The Whole Enchilada

In the middle of one of the recent drive-bys of the death-of-classical music trope, someone smartly observed that a good portion of the youth (and no-longer-so-youthful)  who would otherwise have been deeply engaged by music — whether as performers or listeners — had probably had their time and attentions and pocket monies siphoned off by some form of gaming, electronic or otherwise.   I think this observation is a smart one because gaming done well does more than resemble the kind of immersion in pseudo-encyclopedic synthetic worlds that thoroughly absorbed generations past and the raw numbers plotting the growth in the gaming market against the simultaneous decline in recorded music sales are quite convincing.

Richard Wagner's success, for one, was in turning a mix of complex and ambiguous myth and fiction into musical stage works which worked simultaneously at broad narrative and local detail levels, and at both literary and musical streams, allowing for multiple paths to their comprehension.  Neither of Wagner's major contemporary rivals — Verdi and Brahms — offered comparable stuff with which to engage generations of, well, nerds — smart kids with sufficient leisure time and a certain amount of detachment from ordinary life.  

(A similar phenomena is to be found in the Tolkien audience, the hard core of which delights in every aspect of that other Ring World, Middle Earth, with all its lore and legend, the hardest core of those devotees going so far as to master (and sometimes extend)  all that is known of the scripts and tongues Tolkien invented.  (Although I found the ravishing of the Shire chapter near the end of TLOTR to be genuinely moving, a prescient bit of environmentalist writing, I was never a Tolkien partisan.  This was largely because I found Tolkien's diction dull and all of the detail with which some of my classmates at Serrano Jr. High were obsessed — you know, the Elvish graffiti on their lockers and endless map making of exotic realms — was actually little more than decoration for a predictable story line.  (I probably lost a lot of friends here; just thank goodness I didn't get started on Wagner...)))   

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Wagner's success was the fact that it has been so little imitated.  No other composer has succeeded in writing and mounting a similar cycle of operas, let alone getting such a cycle into repertoire production. (Stockhausen's Licht cycle has not yet been performed in entirety and I'm not altogether sure that either (a) it would be worth the resources required to produce and/or (b) that the mythic/narrative content is actually of similar engaging substance to the Wagner.)  To their credit, several of the "new complexity" gang have worked in cycles of pieces and although some of these composers have used such cycles to create operas, these are individual evening-length works, so above and beyond the question of whether the musical language of the complexistas would be attractive to an audience who would otherwise be gaming, I strongly doubt that the content, both internal and in the accompanying apparatus, is quite enough to keep them away from their cards, consoles, joysticks, keyboards and monitors. It's pretty obvious, though, that there is a real opportunity hear to create large scale musical works with multiple narratives, associative complexity, and interpretive ambiguity using game-like media.  I think the audience is out there for such a work, indeed for such a commodity, and although it is not the kind of work I believe I could do particularly well myself, I would be delighted to learn what diversities of musical materials, styles, textures, continuities other composer may find to sustain such works, such worlds.

 

 

Full Disclosure

This article, comparing the WikiLeaks strategy with that of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets is one of the strangest and more compelling items I've read of late.

Composers have secrets, too.  There is a lot of debate over whether a piece of music should be explainable, down to the smallest single glyph of notation, according to a formal plan.  I simply don't know if that is even an interesting question, let alone criterion with which to evaluate a piece of music.  For one, any piece can be described by an indefinite number of algorithms and I am unaware of any convincing means for determining which algorithm is most efficient, relevant, meaningful etc., thus whether it is necessary to know the particular plan followed by the composer in order to understand how the piece works (let alone what it means)  is pretty much up in the air. For another, I am pretty much convinced that composers, whether formally or informally, negotiate between calculation (the plan), chance (or circumstance or whim), and choice (or habit or taste).  This negotiation is highly individual, tied in with one's identity as a musician, even as a person, and I don't think that many musicians are very articulate about this — it gets close to self-analysis — nor  do I think that they need be, nor do I think we need be party to such.  The work itself is what interests us, and an interesting work has a life well beyond its construction.        

The composers that mean the most to me seem to share one aspect of their working biographies. It is this: they each went through a period of rather fundamental research, identifying the materials that most interested them and developing a body of techniques that would be the foundation for mature work, if no longer necessarily followed with much of a system.  In some cases, there is some honest appeal to mysticism (Ferneyhough, for one, is upfront about this; Stockhausen was upfront about his own youth in thrall to Cologne-style Catholicism and to Magister Ludi; I think Nono's Marxism is, in its way, an equivalent faith, as is Babbitt's positivism — so clear and complete and precise as to be incomprehensible —  in its own way), but isn't an appeal to mysticism generally a way of signaling a level of complexity one hesitate to penetrate further, and thus for obscuring the wonderfully mixed and diverse impulses and efforts that lead to one's work?  For me, the ad libitum approach to their tool boxes used by Harrison, Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Kondo has been influential, but I cheerfully take responsibility for every note, even especially the ones I cannot explain. 

Sonic obsessions, revisted (6)

Drones and harmonic sweeps. At one point in time, I think I was prepared to have all my music made of nothing more than long sustained sounds, as long as breaths would hold, maybe even as long as the electricity stayed on. Sustaining sounds created an opportunity to — as my teacher La Monte Young put it — get inside them, to hear how they develop over time, to attend to individual components, partials, of these sounds. (This interest was naturally connected to my work in just intonation.) This was indulgent — and I was particularly indulgent of harmonic spectra & finding ways to sweep through them — but that was California around 1980, a rather indulgent time. The fashion was clearly for harmonic singing, for tamburas and didgeridoos and Tibetan long trumpets and alphorns, composers from Erickson to Stockhausen to Tenney made beautiful drone- and harmonic-series based pieces and, of course, a cottage industry of new age-y offshoots developed.

That time, for me at least, has long passed, and with it much of the particular acoustic Zeitgeist. While someone like Young can still find wonderful music within these particular resources, either my own compositional patience or taste has changed or I've simply worn out my imagination with this particular range of materials. In a recent ensemble piece, a rising harmonic sequence of tones reads more as coy and ironic than profound. (The coming or going of a style or trend or a fashion is a mysterious thing. The ability to predict and act on the onset or demise of such a style, trend, or fashion can be the road to fame or fortune, if you're after that; misreading the trends, on the other hand, can lead to obscurity and penury, whether you're after that or not.) Nevertheless, the work with drones and sustain harmonic spectra continues to have emit background radiation against which I work. Knowing how musical sounds will interact with a sustained tone or how vertical arrangements of tones line up in relationship to a harmonic (or subharmonic, or equidistant) spectra, is enormously useful and, indeed, a given for my own internal understanding of harmony and orchestration. My little catalog of musical sounds classifies tones first as to spectra, both as to density (sine-tonish, selective, full) and arrangement (harmonic, less harmonic, inharmonic). I find that making distictions within a mixed ensemble along these lines is highly useful. But these things are ultimately less systematic and more individual in character and I expect that other composers think quite differently about this.

Sonic obsessions, revisited (5)

A distant horn. Curious how so many favorite sounds have as much to do with their embedding in space, often particular spaces.  Christian Wolff said that he wrote his Groundspace specifically because he wanted to hear Gordon Mumma's horn in the distance.  The association of the horn with the hunt, as in hunt to kill, I can do without, but there is something about the chase as a ritual event in a particular space, with an acoustic element, and the unique, if brutal, clarity of the relationships between the participating animals (wild, domesticated, and people) that goes deep into some part of our consciousness.  The horn, the horn, the lusty horn/‘Tis not a thing to laugh to scorn.  Posthorns, a form of communication ancillary to the delivery of other media; the image of the posthorn (as every reader of Pynchon knows well) still adorn the post offices of many countries.  Ives remembered, beautifully, his father's horn (in his case, a cornet, descended from the smaller, 4' hunting horns (see also the Fürst-Pless-Horn); the French horn descending from the larger cor de chaisse or parforce horn) played over a lake.  I suspect that modern orchestral horns reference our senses and memories of outdoors spaces in multiple ways, through their literal associations, through their marked directionality (you can always hear which way the bells are pointed) and through the way that they anchor the orchestra, if only temporarily, in a particular harmonic series, an instance of the natural in an ensemble marked as much by artifice. 

Sonic obsessions, revisited (4)

The doppler-shifted sound of a passing freight train.  Fixed in memory are the sounds heard in the early morning in my parents' old house in California, just a few blocks below the AT&SF tracks; especially when the air was thick, shaping, focusing the sound like an acoustic prism. Many composers have been fond of or inspired by railroads and railroadianna: Honegger, Partch, Toch, Krenek, Reich, probably too many others to mention.   In the early sixties, my father was fond of showing off his stereo to guests with the demo lp of railroad sounds, from steam to diesel and electric, that came with the set.  Later, I loved to put an ear close to my model railroad and listen to the miniature approximation of the big iron stock, feeding oil and aspirin tablets into the chimney of the engine to make it steam, whistle, and smoke.   But already, it was clear that those sounds, once emblematic of modernity, were increasingly the stuff of nostalgia.  Doppler shifted sounds, whether concrete, electronic, or produced by instruments (i.e. brass players moving their bells) are extremely useful musical sounds, with or without any associations, but then, what kid doesn't like to listen to a train passing by?

Sonic obsessions, revisited (3)

Sul ponticello.  Playing at the bridge of a bowed string instrument makes the relative amplitudes of the partial tones unstable, discontinuous, unpredictable.  It is very useful in contrapuntal environments in which the register of the individual instruments should be ambiguous (see the third and fifth movements of my string trio, Figure & Ground.) 

Great Expectations

This story, about a public conversation between Steve Martin and the art critic and journalist Deborah Solomon is a telling slice of our times.   The promoter and some slice of the audience apparently expected a series of funny take-home lines and some celebrity-grade gossip and insider talk but were disappointed to instead hear a serious chat about modern art, for which the promoter is now offering full refunds.  

While there is perhaps something to be said here about truth in advertising, as the expectations of the audience, when offered a public conversation with Mr Martin, were probably reasonable when given no explicit indication that the theme of the evening would be modern art (a topic both participants know well) rather than mass media entertainment.  On the other hand, however, it's a bit disappointing that no one (the promoter in particular) has made the case for the value of the topic chosen, whether advertised beforehand, or — and more refreshingly so — delivered to the audience as a surprise, a present making some respectful assumptions about the audience.

In any case, I will admit myself to have, on at least one occasion, delivered a talk on a topic other than that which had been announced beforehand.  Rather than talking about some detail of composition, I spontaneously decided to talk about games of skill and chance — poker and ponies, to be precise — and somehow managed to keep my audience with me for the appointed hour and, as far as I can tell, not one member asked for a refund.  But before you assume that I was slacking on the assumption that sometimes you can just get away with it, let me assure you that games of skill and chance — and poker and ponies in particular — have everything to do with composing music, as far as I'm concerned.  But that's another topic, for another post, another day.

     

Sonic obsessions, revisited (2)

Bowed metal, of all sorts.  Sustaining complex sounds with non-harmonic spectra with unpredictable developments, yet sounds which are intensely gratifying to the ear for their internal proportions, the way they fit together and create musically coherent continuities.  Pride of place belongs to the saw, of course, and not just for its haunting melodic capacity (isn't their something deeply compelling about metallic sounds with clear pitches that slide?), but its harmonic dimensions as well, both from high pressure multiphonics from a single bow stroke and for the ability to sustain overlapping tones produced at more than one position along that s-curve which places the metal in exactly the right tension.  Then comes the bowed flexatone, a useful and portable auxiliary to both the saw and the hammered flexatone (use lots of rosin).  Bowed vibraphone and marimba come next, best in a careful choreography between notes produced at front and back, with some possibility for producing harmonics, by lightly touching nodes of the bars.  Then bowed cymbals, tam tams, flat gongs, cowbells:  sustaining sounds that are most familiar as sharp attacks and smooth decays, allowing real surprises to emerge. (See, for example, La Monte Young's Studies in the Bowed Disc, using two bows to create unbroken continuity on a piece of sheet metal cut round as a piece of sculpture.)

(Image: sculpture of Tom Scribner, saw player,  by Marghe McMahon, 1978.)

Sonic obsessions, revisited (1)

There was a time when I had had an obsession with kites, in particular with the use of kite strings to convey and wind to power assorted noise makers (in three categories: clackers, whistlers, things that go buzz). The intention of my research was to eventually put these sounds together into a composition for an ensemble of kite-fliers in a meadow on a windy hilltop, or perhaps a beach.  It would have been very much a Santa Cruz-kind-of-piece.   The materials (seven kites, each with its own set of wind-driven noise-makers) and the variables (distance, timing) were clear, but, not wanting to make a recorded work, a concert was problematic, contingent upon weather.  Abandoned project, but now realize (following Cage and DeMaria) the usefulness and beauty of a contingent situation; there is really no necessity that each performance be "effective" thus this piece might be usefully revisited.  

(Image: the composers David Cope (trumpet), Steed Cowart (umbrella), and Daniel Wolf (kite); publicity photo for April in Santa Cruz Festival, 1983.)

Antin on Cage: "Preposterous and Wonderful"

I've recommended some talks by David Antin previously, but overlooked this Q&A session following his "line music counterpoint disjunction and the measure of mind".  About a third of the way into this recording, Antin gives the most concise and on-target critique of Cage's working methods — both his question about the division of labors (here, between composition and listening) and the use of chance and indeterminacy — that I have encountered.  (The talk itself, and several others, all worth your while, can be found here.)

Extramural

A friend and I were recently talking about John Cage and his close relationships to important contemporary innovators in other art forms (Cunningham, of course, but also several generations of visual artists (Duchamp and Miro to Tobey and Graves to Rauschenberg and Johns to Anastasi and Bradshaw), and writers (from Jackson Mac Low to Chris Mann) as well as some major unclassifiables (like Fuller, MacLuhan or N.O. Brown) and how these relationships gave a wonderful charge — without superficially or arbitrarily mixing ideas, forms, media — to his own work.  

While almost every composer I know among my contemporaries has some non-trivial, indeed deep and productive, interests in the extra-musical,  few, if any, composers working today can claim a wealth or variety similar to that enjoyed by Cage.  In part, this is because of a simple management issue: there's so much going on, in music alone, that it's tough to have any overview here, let alone to have real bearings out there in literature and/or dance and/or visual arts and/or film etc..  Also, in part, it is due to a certain insularity among musicians reinforced by the market pressure of such quantity and diversity within our discipline; perhaps because we need to continuously woo and cultivate performers and presenters, our social networks tend to be rather musician-centric. 

I was lucky, as an undergraduate, to be in an arts-themed liberal arts college where more of my friends happened to have been writers or visual artists than fellow or sister music majors.**   To this day,  I can recall, almost word-for-word, the conversation of so many late nights spent in dorm lounges or all-night diners arguing over a novel (the term of art back then was "lit wanking") a gallery show gone well or a performance art event gone awry.  Today, I still have my own set of reference points among writers, visual artists, and film makers, even a dancer or two,  but I will confess that this is, with some small additions, close to the list I had when I was still a student, and among those artists still kicking about, most of them are of my teachers' generation rather than of my own.   This may just be part of aging, but I honestly think that I haven't done a good enough job of keeping up with my contemporaries outside of music.  A quick read-through of McSweeney's or n+1 * or a chance walk-through of an interesting gallery or keeping a handful of blogs under casual surveillance is not really keeping on top of things very far afield, let alone a real avant-garde.  I realized this perhaps most acutely when David Foster Wallace died, a writer from my own age cohort, and it struck me that the writers I was otherwise following most closely — Pynchon, Abish, Matthews — were dancing about 70, not my own age. My New Year's resolution is thus set:  I've got to make more time to pay more attention and to pay attention outside of my habitual interests.

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* BTW: This article, picked up from n+1, about the divisions between the country mouse of academic creative writing and the town mouse of NYCentric writing is well worth a read; there are interesting parallels and contrasts to the relationship between academic and free-lance composing.  

Low rent, real return

This article, subtitled Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless is well worth the read.  As new and experimental music all too frequently gets placed in a similar category (heck, by- the-book Marxists will dismiss it as superstructure — and an insignificant fraction thereof, at that — so we're pretty much used to getting disrespect from all sides), it's a bit refreshing to see the captains (and admirals, and commodores) of finance in the light of their costs and benefits to society.  On balance, I think, new and experimental music comes out looking pretty good in comparison: we produce something real, if a perishable good — sound waves do dissipate — and our rent is, in real terms, cheap.  But that small investment in a musical good has proven potential, if very tiny, to provide returns for centuries.  Next time you join some friends to sing some Josquin, just think: Wall Street, which of your recent investments is going to be paying off like this in 500 years?   

I would prefer not...

Someone pointed me to this presentation by Lawrence Lessig, all about the present copyright mess and the use of existing materials in new creative work (in particular the question of fair use with creative methods based on recycling, parody, plundering, mashing, remixing and all that.) It's not a surprise that Lessig, a law professor, is addressing this as a primarily legal issue, and the fact that the everyday practices of a good portion of the population are not legal is a real problem, so Lessig's clear articulation of this problem is welcome.  (This topic is also fascinating as it is essentially a conflict between two liberal positions, the first which recognized that creators have a right to claim forms of meaningful ownership over their work, and the second which views access to forms of information as a universal and necessary — to the production of new work — right.)  

However, in the larger debate, it's once again disappointing to find that the legal and economic issues continue to drown out an ethical issue which I would frame in the following way: an artist (composer, writer, choreographer, etc.) may often — not always, but often — identify with his or her creative work in a deeply personal way, and may view the manipulation of their work by others as hurtful or injurious, with this view completely independent from any question of whether or not she or he receives compensation in whatever form or amount.   Unless the work in question can be identified immediately as political in nature or the artist in question can be identified unambiguously as a public political person, I happen to believe that it is a matter of simple decency, of respect for the private dignity of the person who has created the work as well as for the integrity of the work itself, that the creator has the right to say "no, I would prefer than my work not be used in this manner."*  As long as a creative artist is still alive and kicking, and has not had the last chance to revise her or his work or put it into a final form, I believe that it is a real question of character, completely independent of legal or economic questions, on the part of the re-user, whether or not that preference is respected.   

I hope that it is clear here that I am distinguishing between an artist asserting such a right as a personal or aesthetic concern — which I support entirely even if I should loathe the work (or the person who made it) — and an assertion of rights for purely economic motives.  I well understand that, in the real world, it is not always possible to make such a distinction, but I'm not altogether certain that that should even be a primary concern.  Rather this: wouldn't it be a preferable state of affairs if an honest attempt to determine whether the original artist has a preference one way or another were a standard social convention?   

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* an echo here of Melville's Bartleby is intentional.