Landmarks (3)

Lou Harrison: Scenes from Nek Chand for solo Nation Reso-phonic (Steel) guitar. Music from an imaginary border town between Chandigarh and Honolulu.

Bleak Cities

With some unexpected horizontal time on my hands (ice, ankle), I've managed to do a bit of pleasure reading, including two novels by China Miéville (Perdido Street Station and The Scar) and Paul Feyerabend's autobiography Killing Time. I'll write more about the Feyerabend later, perhaps in connection with the recent dissing of 12-toners in the new music blog land.

For the moment, a word about Miéville: I haven't read much fantasy, in fact, I don't think that I have much patience for it, but never mind, Miéville's not a fantasy writer, he's a first class novelist who happens to write in the fantasy genre (or "weird fiction", as he prefers it). Online criticism seems to inevitably begin with the question of Miéville's relationship to Tolkien; I guess it's a natural impulse, in that Tolkien is the 900-lb balrog in the fantasy cage, but it's a misplaced impulse, first and formost because Miéville can really write (and there's a big brown paper bag out there waiting for Tolkien to write himself out of it). Although Miéville's novels carry the complete, and apparently essential apparatus of fantasy with an entire imaginary world thought out in astonish detail (geographic, ethnographic, etc.), he manages to convey this thoroughness without the obligatory Tolkienesque maps and appendices. The text of the novel sufficed (although, I admit, one might have fun in actually trying to draw some creatures from the descriptions or map-out the seas of Bas-Lag, much as Nabokov so nicely drew Gregor's beetle anatomy or mapped out the Samsa apartment, in his lecture on "Metamorphosis" in Lectures on Literature). I think that the richer comparisons for Miéville's novels are to be found elsewhere, starting, for Perdido Street Station, with the urban visions in Dickens, and for The Scar, with the Odyssey and with Moby-Dick, all voyages with deeply scarred travelers and awesome beasts.

Miéville has a real gift for inventing names for people, places, and the things between, but he also has the gift for giving these inventions an emotional edge, and one that is grounded in a secure moral and ethical viewpoint, even when the real situation is loaded with regret or ambiguity. Curious perhaps, given his academic background, his visions of political structures in Bas-Lag are rather vague. The mayor of New Crobuzon strikes me as as much of a caricature villain as the mayor of Sunnydale in the TV Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The encounter, in Perdido Street Station with the ambassador from Hell is, however, a scene of classic comedy. (When the film is made, only John Cleese, seated behind the appropriate desk, could play this bureaucratic with appropriate elan).

I've already packed Iron Council, Miéville's third Bas-Lag novel for my trip next week to Greece. More about that later.

Landmarks (2)

Mozart Mauerische Trauermusik K477.

As a musical thought experiment, suspend a few beliefs and disbeliefs for a moment and consider Mozart's Freemasonary as a serious religious alternative. The Masonic musical works then uniquely present a Christian sacred repertoire that is neither Catholic nor Protestant. Aside from the texts, what distinguishes this repertoire from other sacred musics, in particular from Mozart's Catholic works?

Two things come to mind: the importance of the wind ensemble, especially the clarinets/bassett horns, and the dynamic shape of the pieces. The wind ensemble represents at once a public form of music-making independent from both court and chapel and the triumph of technical innovation in instrument design with the emergence of the clarinets. The Masses and the Requiem are climactic, perhaps teleological, pieces that inevitably become something larger in the course of a movement. But the Masonic pieces are anti-dramatic (yes, even the Queen of the Night), striking balances rather than climaxes, and often come close to stasis, daring to be simple, clear, yet paradoxically and inevitably, more mysterious.

I think that there is a real tension in late Mozart between an increasingly archaic-baroque catholicism and the classicism of the Masonic works. The "Jupiter" Symphony, a symphony of baroque instrumentation (without clarinets), closing with the finest classical era fugue and possessed by an enlightened transparency, is perhaps the best signal that the composer had found useful resolution to this tension.

Best works of the 1920's

An OT thread on the Finale users' list asked about the best works of the 1920's. This was my list:

Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), Pulchinella (1919-20)
Ives: Orchestral Set Nr. 2 (rev. ca. 1925)
Antheil: Ballet méchanique (1927)
Bartok: Dance Suite (1923), String Quartet Nr. 4 (1928)
Cowell: The Banshee (1925)
Milhaud: Six Petites Symphonies
Puccini: Turandot (-1924, compl. 1926)
Sibelius: Sinfonia 7 (1924), Tapiola (1926)
Varese: Hyperprism (1922-3), Ionization (1929-31)
Webern: Three Lieder, for voice, E flat clarinet and guitar, opus 18 (1925)

I also considered Wozzeck, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, the Copland Organ Symphony, The Makropulos Affair, and some Respighi, all music that I like, but none of which really struck me as more worth listing than the pieces above. The Schönberg Suite, Op. 25, also considered, is one of those historically important pieces that is less than convincing as a piece of music outside of that historical context. (The Monteverdi Vespers are a similar case, but in the case of the Vespers, I say that the sum of the parts, all of them beautiful, outweighs the whole, so I'd definitely keep it on my list of the best works of the 1610's. As long as I'm at it, Lou Harrison's Suite for piano, also a twelve-tone work, is a wonderful piece that ought to have more attention and I find it more successful than the Schönberg model).

This decade offers some surprising juxtapositions of generations and styles, and while some works on my list still clearly reflect a "masterwork" ethic of works of great scale and moment, most of the pieces on this list challenge that ethic in some substantial way -- a single movement symphony, stripped-down, souped-up, or spaced-out orchestras, percussion and extended techniques, and radical miniatures of condensed expression.

Markus Trunk; Games of Chance and Skill

Here's a nice interview with my composing colleague Markus Trunk, a fellow Material Press composer, in a pub over a mushroom pepperpot. Robert Ashley, in Music with roots in the aether, was wise to take interviews with composers out of boring, formal settings, and this transplantation has become a nice experimental music tradition.


I was delighted to learn that Markus used die to solicit random numbers for his pieces. When I've used chance operations, my tool of choice has been playing cards. (A) Because I'm a card player and usually have a deck handy, and (B) Because decks of cards can be quickly divided into useful smaller collections: divisible by two (colors), three (drop a suit), four (all four suits), five and mutiples of five (drop the face cards), six and multiples (drop the kings), etc.. And sometimes I weight the deck, with uneven distributions, or even a wild card or two.


Some of my favorite composers have had intimate acquaintance with games of chance and skill. Mozart was a billiard player, Stravinsky was a passionate card player (recorded in a ballet), Schönberg designed his own playing cards, Cage liked every game from Cribbage to Chess, and even let Morton Feldman teach him to shoot craps. Given such auspicious company, I should probably entertain a larger dose of such vices...

Generational Chatter

Among the new music blogs and newsgroups, there's been quite a bit of chatter about Kyle Gann's blog item on generational differences. I was born in the gap between the baby boomers (like Gann) and the children of baby boomers, which might account somewhat for having a perspective different from Gann's. By the time I got to University, I had the possibility to study with composers (Harrison, Mumma, Young, Lucier) from the experimental side of the tracks, and I didn't face the kinds of struggle with teachers through which my own teachers had gone. In the network of schools to which I belonged, the American experimental music tradition had as legitimate a lineage as any other, and the more significant professional performance possibilities were well-recognized (although the academic prize-, scholarship-, and job-placement capacity remained firmly outside of the experimental scene). By 1985, when I had finished my MA and decided that a move to New York was not realistic for me, the scene there was already splintered and mixed-up. Uptowners were programming downtown music in the hopes of increasing their audiences, and some "native" downtowners (John Zorn is Gann's example, but it just as well could have been Elliot Sharp), were composing music that often sounded more like something from the other part of town, even though Zorn's game-based pieces had a decidedly downtown pedigree, being related to Christian Wolff's "cuing" pieces, for example. More critical for me, as a young composer, and deeply disappointing, was a fundamental change in the way certain minimal musics were understood. Works by Reich, Riley, Glass, Young had been heard as much for the acoustical grafitti that was a by-product of the notes played, as well as for the re-encounter with tonality also suggested by those notes. (Something was terribly wrong for me when I heard a performance of drumming by Steve Reich and Musicians, and the vocal reinforcements of resultant patterns were simpoly omitted.) But the downtown scene was never monolithically defined by a tonal, repetitive, meditative genre nor was it ever defined by a lack of complexity, but rather the location and character of that complexity. As important to me as early minimalism were the social constructions of Ashley, Wolff's cues, or the circuitry of Mumma, none of which neccesarily led to a simple tonal surface. La Monte Young was the composer of both Two Sounds and The Well Tuned Piano. And what about the central figure of John Cage? Or Morton Feldman? Or Jo Kondo?

I agree with Gann that there has been a change in the last decade or so, but I don't quite follow this:

Many Europe-oriented, grad-school-trained composers have taken to launching their careers from Downtown spaces as being hipper.

He's buying into a trope about Europe that just doesn't fly, Wilbur. These composers are not Europe-oriented, they're career oriented, and they want to send in all the box tops and push all of the buttons necessary to get gigs in the US. They know nothing about European music in the past thirty years and they study with composers who are famous within US Academe but unknown in Europe. (A friend at GEMA told me that the serious American composers most-played in Germany over the past fifteen years are Cage, Ives, Feldman, Lucier, Reich, Glass, Adams, with Gershwin and Bernstein floating in and out of the list). By and large, Europeans interested in American music identify the experimental tradition as the real McCoy, and the academic scene is basically unknown. [N.B. There is a computer music network, where the connections between Paris and Palo Alto/Berkeley/MIT/San Diego are real, if in constant, funding-determined, flux. But this network is in a niche of its own, where a reconciliation between the former main-frame uptowners and micro-computer downtowns was forced long ago by technological developments.]

But I do hear a connection between the music of the careerists and the move by Reich and Glass away from the acoustical experiments of their earliest works. To my ears, it's an attachment to flashy, exciting surfaces and detachment from ambiguity and the larger issues surrounding the condition of music to which the experimental attitude first opened our minds and ears.

Richard Barrett Interview

Ian Pace has posted an interview with composer Richard Barrett at rec.music.classical.contemporary. Barrett struck me as the strongest composer of the complexity gang, and I have wondered about the relationship between his politics and his music making. This interview deals very directly with that topic. New music is a form of resistance, and in this interview, Barrett gives this resistance one possible (socialist) profile. My own views are decidedly more left-liberal/green (being too much a misanthrope ever to be a good socialist), but the simple shared recognition of the potential for music to resist the status quo leaves ample room for an alliance of broad sympathies.

Composers' web pages

I spent a while this morning surfing through composers' webpages. Many are impressive, with smart layouts and striking graphics, but the content often makes one wonder about the intended readership. I estimate that 90% of the biographies on these pages are basically lists of academic degrees and prizes and almost none try to say something about the music. Possibly good C.V.s for prospective academics but lousy promotionional materials for music. If the readership is gathered primarily from among composers and other musicians, then listing institutions, degrees, and prizes may be a convenient shortcut for establishing some parameters (or pedigree?) with which a composer's work might be characterized. But that's just performing for the choir, and a webpage ought to be able to do more than that. While writing meaningfully in a compact way about music is almost impossible, if the idea of the web page is to call attention to one's work, then go for the impossible and say something about the work.

Landmarks (1)

(This is the first of a series)

Night Music (1960) Richard Maxfield

First heard on the lp New sounds in electronic music [1967] (including works by Reich and Oliveros, ODYSSEY 32 16 016)

Night Music caught me first for its sound and then, later, for the elegant technical means - what you hear are only the difference tones between the supersonic bias signals of a tape recorder and a supersonic oscillator tone. Gordon Mumma pointed out that as Maxfield was essentially performing with the erase head, this is synthesis without input. But the novelty of vituosic performance techniques in music is (for me) short-lived. The aspect of this piece that has stayed with me is its form, which strikes me as uniquely balanced between what James Tenney calls Ergodic form - statistically flat, without formal landmarks - and its references to a long tradition of pieces about figures in clearings, starting, perhaps, with Beethoven's 6th, "Pastorale" Symphony, and continuing through Berlioz, Ives, and Messiaen. But Maxfield is not giving us single figures in his clearing, instead he populates his landscape with such numbers and every manner of insect or bird, that he achieves a density that borders on stasis.

We really need to have more of Maxfield available. And not just the electro-acoustic works, which have received some welcome attention from the latest generation of electronic musicians. He studied with Sessions, Henze, Babbitt, and Cage. Before his turn to the studio, Maxfield had been a prolific composer of notated works for chamber and small orchestral forces, beginning with neoclassicism, in Berkeley moving on to 12-tone techniques, and continuing these at Princeton. After Princeton, he took -- and then took over - Cage's course at the New School, making a major change of allegiance to the experimental side. This transition from academic to experimental music making catches my attention. Was Maxfield one of the first to recognize the Princeton path as a dead end?

(It's a kick now to look at the list of 12-tonish composers in Babbitt's 1955 essay, "Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition": roughly a third of the names are obscure, or obscure as composers, another third made significant changes in allegiance away from 12-tone techniques (Maxfield, Robert Erickson, Rochberg), and the rest used techniques that deviated seriously from 12-tone orthodoxy (Riegger, Perle). I've never bought either the Babbitt-line on the centrality of 12-tone technique or the anti-Babbitt-line claiming a hegemony for 12-toners over the awarding of academic prizes and positions. Babbitt himself has composed and written about music with integrity and a certain charm, filling out the ramifications of a narrow, precisely defined space in the universe of possible musics, another eccentric figure in a culture full of musical eccentrics. Babbitt's true camp followers are few and lack his invention and wit, and as bitter as the battle often seemed, Babbitt is in may way closer to the experimentalists than to the standard-issue musical academics. The friendships between Babbitt and Feldman or Babbitt and Cage were genuine, if not marked by much comprehension for each others' projects, and many composers were enriched by study with Babbitt - believe it or not, La Monte Young (later a close friend of Maxfield) had planned on studying with Babbitt, but Babbitt's injury in an auto accident intervened in his plans and Young ended up at Berkeley, becoming, in two years, a central force in the west coast scen, and a pivotal figure in minimal music. (And, in truth, most academic prizes and positions go to the harmless, hardworking harmony instructors in music departments with large bands and well-fed football teams.) That said, there is definitely a ergodic aspect to Babbitt's music, as any given sample of any work of his is going to tend to have a flat distribution of pitch classes, registers, instrumental combinations, dynamics, placement of tones within the prevailing metre, etc..

Mid-winter reading

At the moment, three books are stashed in strategic locations around the house, for reading in-between composing, writing, cooking, childcare, and assorted crises:

(1) Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. This is my big, fat, serious book, and at 1000-some pages, it's the book that'll either take up the most time, or so rapidly defeat my modest preparation in math and physics that I'll be properly embarassed for the rest of my blogging career for ever mentioning the damn thing. So far, it's much better than Penrose's earlier efforts for general audiences, despite the fact that he really doesn't hold back on any of the techniques needed for his arguments. I especially like his honesty about matters of opinion and speculation.

(2) Lady Muraski, The Tale of Genji. This is a re-read of an old favorite. While I'm not in any position to judge the accuracy, Seidensticker's translation is simply a great read, and the comfortable strangeness of the world described is unlike anything else in literature I know. This is both much better social-science fiction and much better English prose than anything on the sci fi/fantasy shelves.

(3) Julian Rubinstein, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts. This is my just for fun reading. Rubinstein captures much of the spirit of post-change-of-system Hungary, but for all of his enthusiasm for his subject, my impression (after almost five years here) is that his hero, Attila Ambrus, is actually representative of a fairly common stock figure in Hungarian society: an unintentionally funny, super-patriotic displaced transylvanian macho, surviving by holding down multiple jobs, and wondering exactly how's he's supposed to fit into a system where the rules are anything but clear.

Clusters

Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources was begun in 1917 under the guidance of Charles Seeger, essentially completed by 1919, waited for publication until 1930 and was remaindered in 1935. But the book was anything but a failure. Recognition of the book as a source of rich ideas for music experiment has steadily increased. Three ideas in particular have continued to invite composerly invention -- tone clusters, the integral use of rhythmic units subdividing the whole tone other than factors of two (i.e triplets, quintuplets, septuplets, etc.) and the translation of harmonic ratios into rhythmic proportions.

I first read NMR in 1976, in the summer before I turned 15, and a mixture of Cowell, Kuhnau (one of his Biblical Sonatas included three-tone diatonic clusters), and Mozart (those suspensions in the Catalogue Aria) found itself written into my first piano sonata, a sonatina really, where the finale reprise of the rondo has the melody stated in octave wide diatonic clusters. Fun stuff.

I don't think Cowell's "overtonal" claims for clusters have held up, although it would be interesting to make pieces where the clusters are really tuned up in harmonic ratios. IMO, the charm of clusters lies rather in their ability to superimpose precise melodic directionality and a fuzziness about their precise identity. Douglas Leedy's Piano Sonata 1994, (Material Press), a single movement work of ca. 12 minutes duration, composed entirely of octave-wide diatonic clusters is exemplary. It's noted ingeniously, with a typewriter, indicating by letter name the bottom and top notes of each chord, and occasionally with a prefixed # or b to indicate a change in diatonic collections from the collection with all white keys to one with a sharpened F or a flattened B. It's a remarable work, at once severe, lyrical, minimal, and dense. The only thing a bit like it is Cage's original, solo piano version of Cheap Imitation - Cage's name is even encoded in the score - and perhaps some Cowell, at his naive best.

Alternative Universes (2)

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49:

A sudden chorus of whoops and yibbles burst from a kind of juke box at the far end of the room. Everybody quit talking. The bartender tiptoed back, with the drinks. What's happening?" Oedipa whispered. "That's by Stockhausen," the hip graybeard informed her, "the early crowd tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound. Later on we really swing. We're the only bar in the area, you know, has a strictly electronic music policy. Come on around Saturdays, starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session, that's a live gettogether, fellas come in just to jam from all over the state, San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Diego-----" "Live?" Metzger said, "electronic music, live?" "They put it on the tape, here, live, fella. We got a whole back room full of your audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes, everything man. That's for if you didn't bring your ax, see, but you got the feeling and you want to swing with the rest of the cats, there's always something available." "No offense," said Metzger, with a winning Baby Igor smile.

Yibbles?

Alternative Universes (1)

from Philip K. Dick, Cantata-140:

Late at night, Tito Cravelli sat in his conapt, before a genuine fire, sipping Scotch and milk and reading over the written report which his contact at Terran Development had a little earlier in the evening submitted to him.

Softly, his tape deck played one of the cloud chamber pieces by the great mid-twentieth century composer, Harry Partch. The instrument, called by Parch 'the spoils of war', consisted of cloud chambers, a rasper, a modernized musical saw, and artillery shell casings suspended so as to resonate, each at a different frequency. And, as a ground bass accompanying the spoils of war instrument, one of Parch's hollow bamboo marimba-like inventions tapped out an intricate rhythm. It was a piece very popular these days with the public.

But Cravelli was not listening His attention was fixed on the report of TD's activities.

Tape deck?

Croissants

I recently gained entry into the On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences for the the sequence 1, 3, 7, 19, 55. It's probably the only entry in the Encyclopedia with a reference to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two and priority should be assigned to Childs and Beck, but the sequence is also musically interesting. It suggests a family of tunings including 1/3-comma temperament (close to 19-tet) and the 55-tone temperament said to be favored by Telemann.

Prodigies

There has recently been quite a bit of internet chatter and US media attention about a prodigious young composer, Jay Greenberg. I have only heard fragments of Greenberg's music, but enough to agree that his is a real talent, although one that -- from the viewpoint of new musical materials or techniques -- has not yet led in any earthshattering directions. I wish him well and expect that his imagination will soon lead him down more adventurous paths (and perhaps even paths well beyond Julliard).

I happen to have stumbled upon the work of a prodigy of a different sort, and one whose work, although not showing the technical gifts of Mr. Greenberg, immediately strikes the mind and ear with features that fundamentally challenge my understanding of the qualities that music might possess. This composer, Marco Melanson, an Acadian/French-Canadian of Bathurst, New Brunswick, is now in his mid 20s, mostly self-taught, and prolific. He identifies himself forthrightly as a classical composer, writes works in classical forms (sonatas, symphonies, serenades), and his inspiration is a unique mix of Viennese classical music (I stumbled onto his webpage when searching for midi files of Haydn Baryton trios; he has pages full of midified Baryton trios and Mozart piano sonatas) and pop music (French-Canadian chanteuses, and Boygroup pop, with a violent aversion to Eminem).

Melanson has organized his list of works into chronological periods, some of which are named after the pop musicians to whom he then gave allegiance. Many of his pieces are online in midi format. Most of the early pieces are monophonic, sometimes with a rudimentary accompaniment, with an initial essay at a bass line appearing only in his 70th composition, the Simardian Concerto No.2 in E flat ("Simardian" refers to Nathalie Simard, the pop singer who was Melanson's idol during his creative period extending from 1992 to 1996). Latter works demonstrate an increasing mastery of the classical idiom and a functional harmonic language, albeit with considerable room for the development of more contrapuntal features. Most of the pieces are identifiably tonal, but some work within constraints that Melanson himself identifies as "avant-garde", for example, using only black or white keys in a movement, or using wide chordal voicings that recall -- for Melanson -- John Cage.

A random listening to a selection of Melanson's earliest midi files and especially the huge number of improvised "Melansonatas" yielded some moments recalling children improvising patiently at the keyboard, others the music of Chris Newman (albeit more tightly organized), or of Howard Skempton (albeit less economical). His later works recalled the 100+ Sonatas of John White or the 1001 Sonatas for violin and piano by Boudewijn Buckinx (or, albeit in a more modest way, my own 32 Sonatas for solo keyboard). Melanson's pieces share a simple surface with all of these but -- and this is very much like White or Buckinx -- his relationship to traditional repertoire is not simple: at once one constantly hears real fragments of familiar music, but the fragmenting process itself is constantly disarming in ways that David Cope's "recombinant" algorithmic pieces for comparison, are not. The truncated version of the Ode to Joy melody appearing in the first movement of Melanson's Symphony No.4 in D "Jeremy Jordan Symphony", M3. 138, is one good example. Melanson's use of repetition is also striking, in that the appearance and frequency of repetitions is never predictable. Sampling his midi files chronologically shows a composer gradually acquiring all the elements of a musical tradition, with each element internalized and redefined in his own terms.

From the biographical remarks elsewhere in Melanson's webpages, one can learn about some of the personal circumstances that have led to his musical work, his working methods, and some of his proclivities and obsessions. The relationship between his overtly classical textures and his affections for pop music just plain puzzles me. (When Melanson writes about his dreams, idols, or obsessions, he use language that could have come straight out of the journals of Joseph Cornell). However, these aspects strike me as ultimately unimportant. He is not an avant-garde or experimental composer and his works bear none of the irony or distance found in works of White or Buckinx, but it is precisely in the naivete of his works that honest traces of the experimental spirit can be found. I believe that calling attention to his work is not a case of my liberal ethics gone too far. Melanson has a unique take on music, and his development as a composer is worth some attention.

Well a man with a prophylactic in his wallet...

...is prepared...

First steps

What was the difference between a prepared piano and a ready piano?