What is missing from too much new music?

Lightness and irony (alone and in combination).

How many composers do you know within three zip codes of your home?

A friend in the US recently made this suggestion:

Many people appreciate the beneficial presence of art galleries in small communities, but these businesses struggle. Art dollars flow towards urban centers on grounds of prestige. How about making local art purchases, say within three zip codes of the buyer's residence, tax deductible?

Republicans and Democrats could get together on this: a tax cut through which the government funds the arts by encouraging private spending. And the government would lose little revenue -- some of the tax burden the collectors avoid would pass through the dealers and artists.

I think this is a splendid idea, especially when it is extended to artists working in non-visual arts. Yep, tax breaks for new music commissions.  It seems even a politically plausible idea, given the preference of Democrats for stimulus and arts funding and Republicans for tax cuts of almost any sort.  (The scale of this proposal would probably be dwarfed by the massively state-subsidized sports stadiums which have been widely supported by Republicans; see, for example, George W. Bush and the Texas Rangers baseball team.)  

An essential part of a more lively future for new music has got to be giving more emphasis to locally made music as a complement and contrast to music representing super-regional centers of funding or prestige and the consensus of large institutional programmers.  A local element necessarily introduces more diversity into the mix, which is healthy for the development of music itself and for performer and audience attention as well as helps to create a better bond between composer and community, which seems like a necessary element in increasing engagement in the music as well as commitment to live performance opportunities.  

In many ways, the contemporary music environment is more like the Baroque era than the late romantic with its quasi-heroic composers striving for international careers.  In the Baroque, there were clearly musicians and elements of music itself which transcended the local, and even the more obscure small-town composer was networked into this, particularly with regard to style, but the bulk of actual music making, for example all of the huge bodies of liturgical music written by a J.S. Bach or a Telemann, was intended for local consumption and was frequently made with the specific resources — be they strengths or limitations — of their communities.

Another useful aspect of a tax break for commissions is that it could help with the imbalance given to the large commissions — operas and orchestral works — over pieces for soloists and small ensembles.  All galleries love the big sales of works of substantial scale by better-known artists, often to large institutional collectors, but the bread and butter business is the sale of smaller pieces to individual collectors.  The same should be true for commissioned compositions.  

 

More Thanatophiles

Tim Rutherford-Johnson points to another one of those classical-music-is-dead-or-dying articles, this time a "manifesto for the future of classical music." It begins with the phrase:

The classical music industry is in decline,

and goes downhill from there.  Just listen to the way that word "industry" clunks up against the word "music":  does such a phrase give you any confidence that the writer actually likes the subject for which he claims to be advocating?   I mean, if you dislike music so much that you can — without any apparent sense of irony, sarcasm, or grotesque —  describe the live production of music in terms of industry, then you certainly cannot expect readers to take your proposals seriously.  

Classical music is not dying, it's changing, and it's changing as it always has changed.  It's changing in terms of the repertoire included by the term, the way in which it is played and presented, and how it is received.   Moreover the change is not monocultural, defined by the movement of a single mainstream of prestige and highly concentrated economic power but increasingly diversified. If anything, this movement is away from any semblance of an industry and towards a resurgence of value in artisanship and craftsmanship.  The most highly commodified form of music, the big label commercial recording, has been completely eclipsed, both by technological possibilities, economic realities, and the aesthetic advantages of having more alternatives available in recorded form and a coterminal restoration of the centrality and prestige of the live public performance.  The format and venue of that live performance may well change, but it has always been changing. Some people and some institutions will lose out in this process, but that's okay as long as the real bottom line of making sure more music gets played and heard live is met.  

How (Music) History Moves

Reading Paul Feyerabend's Against Method for the nth time and can't help but once again recognize how much his anarchic account of how science is done echoes how musical invention is made, how contingent it is on individual experience, taste, insight, and circumstance rather than formal programs or dialectical forces.  Why, for example, was European serialism more reliably musical and musically interesting than the Perspectives of New Music-brand competitor, even though PNM had the more legitimately scientific approach (cf Backus's PNM review of die Reihe), and why was experimentalism even more so than either?  Daring to be naive is often more productive than trying to know everything before moving forward.  Feyerabend: "Confusionists and superficial intellectuals move ahead while the 'deep' thinkers descend into the darker regions of the status quo or, to express it in a different way, they remain stuck in the mud." (fn. p. 53)  

Feyerabend described Against Method as a "collage" which is both accurate and confirming in its self-deprecative tone that the book has, formally, a self-similarity to his own description of the scientific enterprise.  While the history of cosmology is, famously, the central concern, on re-reading, I'm struck by the author's casual but powerful use of other examples, in particular the excourses into anthropology and the techniques of epic composition and recitation.  

Perfect Storms

Last week, C. & I had planned for an anniversary picnic dinner along the Main, and a series of hot, dry days left us expecting nothing other than a pleasant evening but as we reached the river bank — on bikes — it started to sprinkle.  Optimistic as she always is, C. insisted on spreading out the blanket and provisions on the lawn rather than head back into the city for cover, and just as we settled down to eat, a strong gust of hot dusty wind blew both bikes down and was quickly followed by rain, not in drops but constant, like faucets. We scrambled to gather food-and-drink-stuffs and move under a nearby footbridge, which would have provided some protection, were the wind less strong and were the bridge not designed to channel drainage directly below.  Too wet, too windy to make a run for it, there was no alternative to going with the storm rather than against it and, somehow, we managed to make our meal there under the bridge, balancing things on the bikes and remaining prepared to shift from here to there whenever here became the outlet for a new downpour from the bridge above.  Another anniversary was made unforgettable by the unforeseen and — once we made sure by cellphone that the kids and the house were safely hatched down —  the hilarity of our situation overcame any frustration, and we had a marvelous time, picnicking and dodging downpours in the best company I know.

A couple of years ago, we were visiting in Budapest, staying in a small apartment on the Pest side half a block away from the Danube.  It was the St. Stephen's Day, the major national holiday in Hungary and C. and the kids had gone to watch fireworks on the river.  I was stuck in bed with a 100 and some fever and only a hope to hear some of the fireworks.  The apartment was a former servants' room in a rundown late 19th century building, with only a pair of windows to the inner courtyard.  I heard some explosions, and there were flashes of light outside but then came thundering and crashes, and I could see concrete, plaster and roof tiles start to fall into the courtyard.   The window was thrown open by a strong wind, with rain pouring this way and that and, as I rushed to close it again, I could see bits of a sky in which rocketry and lighting were sharply etching a sky which, a hour earlier, was clear but had now been filled with dark clouds.  I got dressed to go look for my family but, fortunately, they were all able to make it back without injury and as they dried off, they told of the huge crowd (a good part of that city of two million people were there) enjoying the fireworks display, shot off from several bridges and hillsides, and the arrival, without warning of a twisting storm from upriver, bringing lightning,  thunder and rain, drawing water directly up from the river and scattering everyone everywhere, running where they could in the search for some distance, some shelter, from the storm, while all the while the rockets continued to shoot off on their planned schedule, but not necessarily on their planned trajectories (it turned out that the company which produced the display felt obliged to continue shooting things off, public safety ignored, as their contract allowed for no payment should the explosives not be ignited on that evening.)  Here was a perfect match of an act of nature meeting human incompetence, and it must only be due to a long-practiced patience and resourcefulness of the Budapestites that so few were killed or injured. 

Our general sense of helplessness in the face of nature's potential and the acoustical power, specifically, of a storm is an natural fascination for composers.   Beethoven certainly knew his storms, as did Mendelssohn (Hebrides Overture), Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Debussy. Both Stravinsky and Britten had their storms, in their treatments of the Noah's Flood mystery play.  But more recently, musical mimesis of storms seems to have become more difficult.  I suspect that the ubiquity of recorded and synthesized sound has altered some of our expectations about how a storm "should" sound in a theatre.  Ligeti famously struggled for many years to make an operatic version of The Tempest and it seems that the storm — for which he wanted to employ non-linear dynamics in the composition — was a particular challenge. Likewise, John Cage had long proposed a work, Atlas Borealis with Ten Thunderclaps, based in part on the ten 100-letter thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake, in which electronic sound processing was to be used to transform vocal and instrumental sounds so that the experience would be "more like going to a storm than a concert." (Cage's terms fit nicely with his transformation of traditional musical mimesis from the imitation of nature in its outward attributes to the "imitation of nature in its method of operation.")   

Ligeti abandoned his Tempest in favor of a never-completed Alice in Wonderland; Cage, who made the practice of not composing without a specific commission and performance, never realized his thunderclaps piece and, indeed, took increasingly less interest in composing for electronics himself, but aspects of the work were perhaps carried forward into the environmental recordings used in Lecture on the Weather and the concert version of Empty Words, and the fascination with Finnegans Wake culminated in his Roaratorio.   Cage, understanding an account that Joyce's plan for a book to follow FW was to be called Ocean, began to plan a work of that title with Merce Cunningham, but did not live to experience the work which Cunningham eventually realized to a score by Andrew Culver, a long-time collaborator. Inasmuch as all storms, ultimately, end in ocean, the possibility that some of Cage's thunderclap ideas would have ended up in Ocean is a fascinating one. 

Keeping Lists

I usually have a collection of lists on my desk, of pieces or books or films that I'd like to hear or read or see.  For example, here's my little opera list: 

• J.A. Hasse, anything.
• Giachinno Rossini, Guillaume Tell (have heard but have not seen on stage)
• Carl Maria von Weber, Oberon (the English original)
• Hector Berlioz, Beatrice et Benedict
• Hugo Wolf, Der Corregidor
• Giselher Klebe, anything
• Henry Brant, The Grand Universal Circus
• Louise Talma,  The Alcestiad
• Virgil Thomson, Lord Byron
• Robert Ashley, That Morning Thing
• Richard K. Winslow, anything

Nothing on any of these lists is of particular urgency, but each item represents a gap or a curiosity that I'd rather have filled than left open.  Keeping lists also functions as a kind of negative image of the listening, reading or watching which I have done.  I realized recently, for example, that I'd never seen the 1934 Ozu film, Story of Floating Weeds and since Ozu's 1959 re-envisaging of the film as Floating Weeds is such a favorite, this got promptly put on my to-see film list. 

From Vox Humana to "Digital Drugs"

The vox humana stop on organs produces a vibrato-like effect by adding pipes tuned slightly off from the rest of the organ, creating audible beats.   Musicians tune to one another by listening to and eliminating such beats.  The characteristic throbbing and shimmer of Balinese gamelan music is due, in large part, to pairs of instruments being tuned far enough apart from each other to produce desired beating rates.  Much of the music of Alvin Lucier is based around creating audible beats between instruments, voices, and/or electronic oscillators.   Beating is an elementary technique in electronic sound production.

And now we learn that listening to beats — in the form of binaural beating, with sine waves slightly varying from one another in frequency sent to individual headset channels — is being promoted as a "digital drug" and, America being America, groups of bureaucrats, parents and educators have already been found to complain about this as a "gateway drug", with a young person's willingness to experiment with the psychophysics of sound being construed as a warning signal for further experimentation.

Now, it is undeniable that experimentation with sound is a form of exploring the boundaries of perception — right alongside Op Art and eating wasabi or capiscum —;  and it seems plausible that certain acoustical effects, like beats, can have identifiable psychological and, indeed, therapeutic effects*,  but associating such explorations with the consumption of controlled substances is plain BS:  musicians have always been investigating ways to optimize and extend the limits of sound production and perception, using the physical and psychophysical properties of the sounds themselves.  It involves no injection of chemicals and does not lead to physical dependency.  It is about being able to hear more rather than less, and use music to express more rather than less. 

I suppose that what this episode does say is that there continue to be agents out there who wish to instrumentalize the choice of sounds or music we hear for purposes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual sounds or music, but rather much more with distracting the public from attending to real issues and, perhaps, just to be able to demonstrate a capacity for exercising social control, in this case, over what we hear and how we hear it.

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* One of my favorites such effects is that a certain frequency can render Carlsberg Elephant beer unpalatable while another frequency optimizes the taste!

The Fragility of Memory

The Hungarian conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922) was the first real commuting superstar conductor, simultaneously holding positions with the top bands in Berlin, Leipzig, and London while travelling regularly to Russia, Hungary and elsewhere (he was also director of the Boston Symphony for four years). A charismatic conductor with a gently persuasive rehearsal style who always reserved a larged degree of spontaneity for performances, the closest recent equivalent was perhaps Carlos Kleiber; Kleiber, however, never sustained the volume of activity that Nikisch did, and certainly never went into a concert risking the imprecise or incomplete rehearsals Nikisch, with apparently some routine, would risk.

Nikisch was, however, the last great conductor not to have been well-recorded. He died before electrical recording and the few acoustic recording he made are all almost unlistenable, making Nikisch the last major conductor whose reputation is based essentially on the words of those who had witnessed his performances. Fortunately, RadiOM has archived William Malloch's 1965 KPFK documentary on Nikisch (here), an oral history composed of interviews with musicians who had worked with Nikisch. I was fortunate to have heard this documentary in a re-broadcast on KPFA sometime in the '70, where Malloch, the former music director of the station and an interesting composer, held forth for an hour each week with public and extra-academic musicology that was pioneering in its use of historical recordings of musical performances and interviews to investigate performance practice in the early 20th century. (RadiOM also has two Malloch documentaries on Stravinsky and a program on Revueltas which I recommend highly; Malloch's audio oral history I remember Mahler has been commercially available on an album with collected Mahler broadcasts by the NY Phil.)

As much joy as I take from rediscovering some Malloch programs online, it comes with the deep regret that such programming would simply be impossible today. Sure, there is much more information readily available online, between which one can flit at any time, pace, or place one likes, but the qualitative experience I had as a teenager, of being able to stumble upon a program like this (in my case while working at a summer job silk-screening shopping bags) and to become a regular listener to a trusted local voice like Malloch's is something very special.

Are you going to eat us?

The last post mentioned Michel de Ghelderode. If you're not familiar with any of his plays, here's a typically droll excerpt from his Christophe Colombe (among other things, a satire about the search for a better world):

MATELOTS. - Le Nouveau Monde ! Victoire !
COLOMB, dominant le tumulte et la situation. - Entendons-nous ? Messieurs les Sauvages ! Sommes-nous bien en Amérique ?
MONTEZUMA, somptueux, se détache et salue. - En Amérique du Sud, exactement.
COLOMB. - Je n'ai pas de chance. Vous parlez français ?
MONTEZUMA. - C'est une langue élégante. Préférez-vous l'anglais ?
COLOMB. - Il n'importe. Nous sommes faits pour nous comprendre. Que vous êtes décoratifs ! Mais dites-moi vos intentions ? Veniez-vous nous égorger ?

Not New and Not a Substitute for New

I don't understand the degree of praise that has accumulated around Newmusiconlineistan over the New York Phil's recent concert performances of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (30-some years after its premier) and now in advance of a Varese fest in NYC (almost 45 years after the composer's death).  Yes, there should be congratulations for good programming, but none whatsoever is due in these cases for programming new music.  

Yes, it might be embarassing that the [East Coast  of the] US has not yet seem a fully-staged performance of the Ligeti opera, let alone have it enter a house's repertoire.  [Thanks to Lisa Hirsch for correcting me here: there was a full production in San Francisco!]  The piece is entertaining (if stripped, by the composer, of almost all the authentic mystery, cruelty and guignol/grotesque of Michel de Ghelderode's extraordinary play, La Balade du grand macabre, replaced with a silly text and all too many adolescent musician in-jokes*) and has had a significant stage life in European houses, and the performance in New York seems to have been very well-received, but it is reception due a tested work of the last century, not the reception of an unknown — and thus, risky — new work.

And then Varese.  I am deeply attached to the works of Varese, but there are no more brownie points given for novelty when performing his works.  The bulk of the tiny Varese catalog was written before the Great Depression (and Varese's own personal great depression)  and the catalog, as wonderful as most of it is, has been discovered and (supposedly) forgotten ever since with a wave motion, the regularity of which would have provided Kondratiev with a textbook example.  The most recent waves have come with the Frank Zappa seal of approval, probably increasing the audience size by an order of magnitude or more with the addition of a healthy number of lonely young weird-music-obsessed men to the crowd.  But the cycle has been more of spiral, with performances of Varese's music increasingly familiar program points, as established repertoire but not as new music.   (The recorded works have been steadily in print;  Ameriques has become a regular showpiece for conductors and orchestras, Density 22.5 is standard rep for flautists, Ionization for college or conservatory percussion ensembles; I've even heard Equatorial four times live, and that's a piece with a particularly hard-to-cover instrumentation, including a pair of Ondes Martenots)  For, fresh — indeed, renewable, as one says around here — as Varese's music can be, it is not modern music, it is not contemporary music, it is no longer new or experimental but it is — as Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn put it more than a generation ago —  a "look back at the future", at the ultra-modern (cum ultra-primitive) future imagined a very long time ago.  

There have now been several intervening generations of composers whose work shares Varesian concerns but turned into very different directions (including those who knew Varese, like Dlugoszewski or Tenney) .  And there are plenty of young composers today with interesting and alternative looks at a very different future.  The Philharmonic's new music advisor, Magnus Lindberg, certainly has an exuberant orchestration style that owes a lot to Varese, but just as certainly has an urgency that is of our moment.    

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* Ligeti's fundamental lack of understanding for the Ghelderode makes me somewhat relieved that he abandoned his two later operatic projects, a version of The Tempest and an Alice in Wonderland. 

 

Fireworks

This is the time of year in which every ex-pat American must think — if even for only a moment — about those low-explosive pyrotechnic devices used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes, about fireworks.   It's been my experience that not a few US composers have a weak spot for the sights and, especially, sounds of gunpowder used in its optimal form.   (And surely, composers of other backgrounds have their own moments around the times of year — New Year's, or national holidays — when fireworks are at play.)  Sometimes even the most cautious among us eagerly abandon caution, risking injury to limb, eye, and — most critically for a musician — ear, for the chance to cause and experience that uniquely painful and pleasurable combination of effects caused by simple chains of combustion.

During my poker-playing days, in the '80s, rounds of cards in Beatty or Pahrump, Nevada were frequently broken up by parking lot rounds of loud and colorful explosives, one of those Nevada pleasures not possible at home in California.  (I'm usually tight with money, but when the poker game was going well, burning up a bit of cash in the form of fireworks seemed perfectly natural: burnt offerings to Fortuna.)  There was a special delight in composing sequences of colors, sounds (whistles, zippers, crackers, and plain booms), as well as gradually escalating the altitudes achieved by arrays of bottle rockets. For some reason, however, this particular performance art was one I never considered integrating into my own musical works.

Other composers, however, have had no qualms about such an integated musical-pyrotechnical art form.  Handel, famously, made music to accompany fireworks.  Others have required explosions to occur during a piece.  And still others made music about fireworks (Ives's Fourth of July, Stravinsky's Feu d'artifice.)   One of the most endearing qualities about composer David Cope, one of my teachers as an undergrad in Santa Cruz, was his serious affection for fireworks. During my years there, he frequently reported about scouting out the perfect place on the beach for a big piece with rocketry and one piece, Vectors, a setting of texts by Ives, was one of the highlights of those years, climaxing with assembled on-stage musicians, two marching bands and electronics being overwhelmed by an indoor fireworks display, sending all the audience and performers to the exits as the the hall rapidly filled with smoke.  

 

Getting Paid: Still Looking for a Model that Works

If big-time, commercial music can't make a commercial success out of selling recordings, what expectations can we have for music from a commercially negligible genre?  

It's no news that there is no really good model for paying for new and experimental music.  To some extent, new "classical" or "serious" music has either sought to find advantage in low-verhead niche production or been able to parlay its prestige into a modest bit of piggybacking on the success of more commercially successful  musics in rights organizations like GEMA, but the former stream, that fabled "long tail", seems not to have played out as hoped and the latter has seriously declined in the face of stagnant or declining mainstream music revenues.  I've written recently about the inherent difficulties with reproducible media as a commodified form of music, (see also this item) and here are a couple of recent items from musicians representing more popular which reinforce this viewpoint.  

Here's rock star Prince, in the Mirror: 

He explains that he decided the album will be released in CD format only in the Mirror. There'll be no downloads anywhere in the world because of his ongoing battles against internet abuses.

Unlike most other rock stars, he has banned YouTube and iTunes from using any of his music and has even closed down his own official website.

He says: "The internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it.

"The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.

"They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."

Also read this blog item by musical composer Jason Robert Brown, confronting a teenager who wants to download copies of his sheet music for free from a "sharing" site. 

We really, urgently, need to find a better model. I often wonder what such a model would look like if we were were able to start from scratch, without the cumbersome institutions (including rights organizations, management, and production firms)  and legal framework (copyright laws, in particular) that have, like Topsy, just grewed.

Five Pieces for Independence Day

Christian Wolff, Changing the System (revised version)
Charles E. Ives, Second Orchestral Set
Robert Ashley, Public Opinion Descends Upon The Demonstrators
Pauline Oliveros, Big Mother is Watching You
John Cage, Lecture on the Weather

(First posted here on July 4, 2006)

Reliably Astonishing

Just finished Paul Auster's Invisible: once again had the enormously satisfying experience of an author in command of a style.  And since Auster is one of the writers I read all of (well, almost all: I couldn't even start to read his Timbuktu, preferring my narrators not to be canine) it was a distinctive but familiar style  The themes and material and diction were all more or less familiar, riffs off of a pool of Austeriana, but the particular mix was different and once again it was Auster's formal invention that made the whole work,  making the familiar once more new, strange and engaging.  I don't know that I would rank Invisible with Leviathon and The Book of Illusions, two books I have reread several times with increasing appreciation and pleasure (as well as a degree of disturbance!), but it is still a very fine novel with a striking form.

I've long insisted that it's the individual work — and sometime even only a moment in a work — that is important and not the entire catalogue of a composer or the particular repertoire of a place or time.  Catalogues and repertoires are uneven in quality — sometimes interesting just for their qualitative eccentricities — but uneven means good, bad, and everything (i.e. mostly) in-between. However, given the finities of a listening life and the vast vector field of possible music to pay attention to (or, books to read or films to watch or painting to see or dances to watch...), a catalog or a repertoire, when handled critically, can often provide a useful signal.   

Case in point: Last night, I heard The Damnation of Faust in the Frankfurt Opera. I went less because of the piece itself, which I had heard last as a teenager, but rather because Berlioz is simply one of the more reliable brand names among composers, reliable for a capacity to astonish.  And sure enough, Berlioz's Faust is quite unlike anything else.  It's neither opera nor oratorio nor symphony (the composer eventually named it a "légende dramatique" which certainly doesn't bring the matter of genre further) with only four solo roles, crowded scenes but rather discrete use of the chorus, and much of the narrative carried by the orchestra.   Some aspects of the work I can only describe as proto-post-modern  (I use the term with caution, intensely disliking much of the standard PoMo discourse)  with brilliant use of dramatic and musical framing devices, musics within musics, and a staggering use of highly differentiated counterpoint, sometimes using space as a critical parameter (heaven and hell are, acoustically, very different places for Berlioz).  His heterodox harmonic practice (with a particularly rich tension in his approach to voicing as to opposed to standard practice voice leading and tonal function) and his refraction of the revolutionary musical idiom are applied here with particularly sensitivity.  Now, all of these elements are the knowns and familiars about the brand name Berlioz(TM) , but the sui generis form of the individual work trumps all of that; the composer has his riffs and changes but his level of mastery and commitment to the integrity of the work at hand is such that the listener is never left with the feeling that the composer is just playing riffs and changes.   Berlioz could, famously, do large and outrageous things with an orchestra, but that's just not always where the real musical action is: if you have a chance to hear The Damnation of Faust, please pay attention to the variety and subtleties of the string writing first and then to the way in which tune and rhythm form Faust's diction: you will be astonished, well even before Berlioz brings Mephistopheles on stage and the magic begins.     

Complexity: sorry, Lisa, not quite yet.

Okay, I'm not quite done with complexity yet.  As indicated in the last post, complexity, for better or worse or (mostly) in-between, can describe a number of musical qualities or characteristics.  When used in connection with something very specific, especially countable items (notes on a page, for example), the aspect of complexity described can acquire a quantitative dimension and make comparisons within and without a piece of work possible; also, when a clear process is used in composition, one might speak usefully in terms of a measurable computational complexity (which, of course, has its own complications, indeed uncertainties, which many others online can describe much more credibly).  However, some of the most important forms of musical complexity are far less easily reducible to the quantitative, and some methods, while quantifiable, as often not particularly relevant when quantified to any actual music.  Among these forms (incomplete, I'm sure, off the top of my head and jotted on the back of a restaurant napkin) are:

*Linear complexity — How variegated or detailed is a single line of music?  Variety of materials, density and speed of their deployment, differentiation into principle, subordinate, and ornamental parts.  Which may be related to

* Textural complexity — Is a complex or ensemble heard as individual parts or a single gestalt? An ensemble texture may be found to be full of activity, indeed layers of activity — when analyzed into individual components — and there may well be considerable change over shorter or longer periods of time, but the net effect may instead tend rather towards coherence and continuity.  Which may be related to

* Pre-compositional complexity.  Like textural complexity, this is more about forests than trees: in much serial music, for example, the actual set-, row-, and array-work, while possibly comprising the greater part of the compositional time and effort, is actually the lesser part of the final composition. The pre-compositional design can make it possible to guarantee that the final composition has particular characteristics — for example a uniform (or weighted, as the case may well be) distribution of elements — which make the end result, the sound itself, possible, without making the particular methods used at all necessary for a listener to know.  Which may be closely related to 

* Mathematical complexity.  This is used probably more as a term of deprecation than estimation.  However, in itself, using mathematics in composition shouldn't automatically raise objections, and the variety of mathematics used shouldn't automatically lead to a particular evaluation.  Music theory journals happen to be filled with articles about a rather narrow variety of musically-applied mathematics (12-tone so-called "set theory" for example), but this reflects more on a heavily encouraged area of research than on the extents and limits of mathematical applications in music.  There are numerous lines of mathematics-related musical research and composition that have both received less academic attention and are no less deep or complex in their musical applications or mathematical sophistication.  I think, for example, that my recent work with Beckett-Gray codes is such an example, and as applied to scoring patterns in an ensemble work, has an acoustical immediacy that demonstrates perfectly that the mathematically complex can not only be completely accessible but musically compelling. 

*Material complexity.  Literally, how much and how wide a variety of stuff is in a piece of music? There should be abundant evidence out there that simply adding more stuff can make a work messier but does not automatically make a piece of music more complex, while the reduction of some material density can often facilitate the perception of complex musical phenomena that would otherwise go unheard.  Many works of classic early minimalism have this characteristic.

*Associative complexity: To what degree does a work depend upon its connections to other works or repertoires?  To what degree is does a work depend upon connections to extra-musical phenomena? Which may be closely related to

*Systematic complexity.  How does a work or group of works cohere and create networks of internal or external relationships?   The systematic complexity of Wagner's Ring or Tolkien's Middle Earth books have encouraged generations of geeks to commit large portions of their lives, memories, and imaginations to the acquisition of ever more details, terms, lists, characters, genealogies, maps, languages, motives etc.  in the gradual assimilation of artworks that aspire to evoke alternative worlds.   The material is simply rich enough in its structures and connections — many of them fragmentary, incomplete, ambiguous, or illogical, but hey, what else do you expect from a world? — to sustain indefinitely ethusiastic — geekily enthusiastic — extended examination.   (One common effect of such engagement is its sublimation into gaming, aform of play in which a fictional world can be permutated and extended well beyond the boundaries of a completed piece of fiction.) While neither of these examples are particularly attractive to me, I do think that they exemplify the potential for an artwork enbracing an encyclopedic form of complexity to be successful and even popular.  (I am much more taken in by the of-this-world-ness and flowing diction of Finnegans Wake or the erotic systematics of Duchamp's art and writings than Tolkien's stubbornly wooden diction and prudishness (to be fair, Tolkien suffered from being born into the most deadly wooden age of philology and translation; it shows up on every page of his work); likewise, I find the inter-penetrating worlds of musical and historical experience in Ives's Fourth or Second Orchestral Set or Cage's Songbooks simply more musically attractive and personally relevant than Wagner, but maybe that's just my own geekhood).

 

Complexity: get over it, already.

The ever-estimable Lisa Hirsch has two items (here and here) in response to a Teachout article on musical complexity.   For music criticism, use of the term complexity is something of a blunt instrument. One has to be very specific about the materials or means or relationships which are being described as complex and even when identified as complex then there are no clear or generally accepted ways of measuring relative complexity, whether within a single work or among several works.  

Most critically, in the thick of a real musical event, it is not always clear — and this, in the best cases, is a matter of compositional design — whether composer, performing musician, or listener can catch or is supposed to be able to catch, some or all details or a more general gestalt, or even to move attention between levels of detail, or if the experience of whole and parts is designed to be ambiguous.  Most works of music which have the capacity to stay fresh on repeated listenings — renewable musics, one might say — offer a reserve of additional details and relationships.  To the extent that musical complexity is quantitative, filling a work with detail and internal or external connections, the central issue for composition is projecting and framing that content so that it can be heard.   From this point-of-view,  the most self-consciously minimalist composer is as concerned with managing complexity as the overtly complexist or maximalist;  the critical difference, I believe, lies in how the relationship between musical materials and audition is drawn.   

By my own measure, a work like Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room is a more effective compositional projection of an extremely complex set of internal, acoustical elements and external, and to some extent, extra-musical connections than the elaborate pitch constructions of many a high serial work which are lost to a surface which fails to project the construction in anything but the most impressionistic manner. 

Central Javanese Gamelan music, Karawitan, is  my favorite example of this: it is possible to hear a classical gamelan work coarsely, attending, for example, only to a single trunk melody carried by the loudest instruments, but experienced players and listeners learn, over time, to attend to more and more instrumental and vocal lines, learning to hear not just simultaneities but the ways in which individual lines relate to one another but also to the whole piece as well as to the repertoire and style in general.   

Never underestimate an audience

One of the most vivid musical experiences in my life was hearing Gary Bertini conduct Schönberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in the Alte Oper here in Frankfurt on a concert marking the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht.  I had never before and have not since witnessed an audience so stunned and shaken by a piece of music,  indeed struck deep to the viscera by a single moment in a piece of music, which is that when the male chorus enters singing a setting of the Sh'ma Yisrael.    The match of a piece, a performance, and a setting like this is a perfect illustration of the ability of a music to reach its audience — communication in the way that an iron handle communicates heat — regardless of its supposedly forbidding complexity, construction (it's 12-tone, and rather transparently so), or style (a particularly literal and hyper- version of the composer's Wiener espressivo).

One of the odd factoids about A Survivor from Warsaw that has stuck in the back of my head for further exploration was that its premier took place at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  Stephen Soderberg has an interesting description and meditation on this event in his blog, here. 

Composition Today

Still Fruitful Paths

Recently, I did one of my hit and run spells of teaching "composition" (I insist on the quotation marks, as my understanding of the term is often somewhat unorthodox) to a group of young musicians. One day, one of them made some jokes about serial music (you know the kind — about music for people with 12 fingers, or asking if you take milk and sugar with your serial?, etc.) so I decided to push the issue a bit and take a quick detour through the 12-tone and serial experience.

There was something of a cod liver oil taste to this proposal, but I find, sometimes, that it is useful and surprising to take a new look at a subject that would appear to have been dismissed from further exploration. For example, in one of my reading binges, I decided to re-read as much of the sci-fi and speculative fiction I had consumed in High School and College as I could get a hold of here. As might be expected, I found most of the novels awkward and very hard-going, and was, in general, disappointed with my old enthusiasms. But a significant minority of that stuff actually held up very well, either for ideas or for writing (rarely for both, but that's a high expectation for any fiction, no matter what genre). The more "social science" fiction generally held up better than the hard science fiction and space operas, especially the big space operas. Le Guin's anthropological fiction (a really graceful writer; I like the Hainish cycle, where her writing is best, while I have no patience for her fantasy writing), for example, or Dick's more psychological (Martian Time-Slip and Time Out of Joint are my favorites, examples where he was in control of a writing habit which tended to lose control in a messy, but not reliably interesting way). Others that, books I really enjoyed coming back to included the obvious classics like Cat's Cradle, and some titles that seem to have disappeared from memory: Jeter's Doctor Adder and Billias's The American Book of the Dead. It seems to me that there is still a lot of potential for social science fiction.

The parallel voyage of discovery into all that 12-tone and serial music (AKA the stuff which was supposed to be oppressing to us experimentalists) also turned up some real surprises. Of course I like the Schoenberg String Trio and Phantasie and the Stravinsky Requiem Canticles or Movements, and Webern's vocal music is really the core of his achievement (if somewhat obscure to many musicians who focus on the instrumental music). I had always been fond of Hauer's music, having played some of the piano pieces for more than 30 years, but discovering more details of his technical achievement (the harmonic band technique, especially, which can insure a constant flow of a variety of triads with very smooth voice leading is extremely rich in suggestive possibilities) more than made up for his naivety and arbitrary quirks (like his preference for beginning or ending with minor or major seventh chords). Ernst Krenek was another case altogether; although my own introduction to 12-tone technique came, in 9th or 10th grade, with Krenek's little Counterpoint book borrowed from the Claremont Public Library, and I had actually met the man , Palm Springs tan and all, I had never actually liked any of the music, including the early tonal music, which has always left me with some suspicion that the was just not particularly musical. However, some very beautiful performances of choral works by the RIAS Kammerchor (which have made a specialty of Krenek, singing his works for decades, beautiful to hear, but somewhat disturbing to watch with the constant banging of tuning forks against their skulls to keep on pitch) and a CD by Ensemble Recherche of string trios and solo string music has changed my mind somewhat. Perhaps his music really suffered from bad performances. Perhaps choral music was his genre: the neutrality of the pitch world, mixed with a pseudo-renaissance choral style just seemed to click with the mysticism in Krenek's chosen texts. In any case, we do owe Krenek as a teacher some debt: Robert Erickson was an important composer and I am curious to hear some music sometime by Gladys Nordenstrom, Krenek's student and widow.

It was no surprise that a re-encounter with Goeyvaerts's early pieces (famous in some texbooks, but not often actually heard) was very positive, as with Lou Harrison's Suite for Piano and small opera, Rapunzel, some works of Dallapicolla and of Roberto Gerhard (especially some later chamber works: The Concert for 8 and Gemini, Libra, and Leo (what is it about twelve-toners and the zodiac?!)) All of these examples were pretty straight-forward, technique-wise, but much of the 12-tone/serial repertoire rapidly moved beyond straight-forwardness, especially with the goal of making works of significant length. In the postwar high serial era, it was precisely this issue — of creating large-scale pieces in which the order and deployment of 12-tone or serial resources was anything but arbitrary — that became a central focus, whether in Babbitt's techniques for the composition and projection of arrays or the moves of Stockhausen or Boulez into groups or constellations of elements.

The two best descriptions of the nitty-gritty of compositional technique in the high serial era I found were Stockhausen's booklet about his In Freundschaft and Lake's article about Babbitt's Fifth Quartet. I'm not a great fan of either composer, and certainly much less a fan of their respective camp followers, but each have works in which envelopes of the truly weird have been opened and the musicality of the results are abundant enough that we shouldn't allow ourselves to be prejudiced by our expectations. The key serial works of Stockhausen, for me, are the early piano pieces and tape pieces, while Babbitt really comes into his own with the move into super-array compositions, in which the dogma of 12-tones gets loosened by the so-called "weighted aggregates" and it becomes more than clear that the real substance of the work is not the pre-compositional array (indeed, he uses and reuses a small collection of arrays, some of them second-hand arrays, assembled by others) but the actual composed-out surface of the music, the notes, some of which are very nice, some teasingly naughty, and others nothing much to write home about. (Here's a homework assignment: what features of In Freundschaft share techniques associated with Babbitt? what features are shared and what are different in the arrays of Babbitt and Boulez and the charts of Cage? compare and contrast partitioning operations in Babbitt and Boulez... Okay, okay, this stuff was just built for classroom instruction...)

The music of Barraque remains very puzzling to me, as the scores are all messes, in many cases without a final, definitive form, and the proliferating series technique generates a series of rows in which there are simply no audible clues for connecting one to any other. Nevertheless, there is some real style to his writing, maybe the inexhaustible source of rows was simply an impulse to improvise while insuring a continuous circulation of pitches.

The two pieces I began my little survey with a bit of a tease, but still very close to my own sensibilities: a solo flute piece by Howard Skempton and the Christian Wolff Duo for violins, the first of which is transparently, tunefully 12-tone, the second of which uses 12 discrete pitch configurations but not 12 pitch classes; I found that these usefully and transparently illustrated a number of polar aspects of the entire 12-tone/serial project, and pointed to aspects that remain vital concerns for composers, including melody, order, variation, variety, pitches versus pitch classes, the relationship between horizontal and vertical projections of material, collections, tonality versus an even distribution of pitches, particular versus undifferentiated collections of intervals, etc..

Of course, when you start taking such a broad prospective, moving away from the "classical" four row-form technique described by, say, Eimert or Krenek, it becomes less and less tenable to speak about a uniform and hegemonic technique and repertoire. This is a good thing, on the one hand because it is much closer to the historical reality, a reality in which, for example, early minimalism came, in part, out of concerns that cannot be entirely separated from the serial project, but on the other (and more important) hand, because attending to such historical diversity can be highly suggestive of the potential for new compositional ideas.

One to Nothing

Whatever you think of soccer, or of sports in general, and even if you're ill-disposed to either country involved or think that competition between teams representing nation-states is silly, the game yesterday between the US and Algeria was a model of formal beauty: sustained activity and attention captured for 90 minutes without a score, delaying any satisfaction for the duration while aware, the entire time, of an ominous score from the parallel game, until a single goal pops elegantly in the second minute of penalty time.  Talk about delayed resolutions! Talk about saving everything for the coda!

Generating Heat, Generating Light

(An encore posting from February, 2007)

We've all heard the talk about the low-level of attention, support, appreciation, etc. for new, contemporary, and experimental music. After having spent too much of the past two weeks monitoring activity in the online new music blogs and fora, I've come to the conclusion that one problem is that we, as a community, are generating simply too little heat: too little new of interest in the way of sounds, scores, or ideas, and too little controversy or passion, and even too little in the way of intellectual challenges. But most of all, through the underwhelmingly small amount of material we present to the world, we're simply giving out the impression that nothing is really happening in little Newmusicville. At this point in time, a new music equivalent of the "Instapundit" could probably get by with a bi-weekly post delivered by burro.

It's not so much a matter of clever promotion, it's more a matter of reporting and record-keeping. More information has to be out there, and more useful information. Media are cheaper and more accessible than ever, but we hardly have a presence, and when we have a presence it's shocking to see and hear how badly we use the media. Composers' webpages are usually prefaced with lists of institutional affiliations, awards, and scholarships. Come on, children, grow up! No one cares about your diplomas and merit badges! Dare to say something about your music and yourself first (or at least pretend for a moment that you are not the in-vitro product of those institutions). And composer's blogs are rare, and usually far too timid. Why the caution? Is is fear of repercussions from hiring and prize committees? It's a composer's job to have a posture, an attitude, and opinions about music, and it's through that posture, attitude, and opinions the we make the decisions that form our work, making it distinct from the work of others. We are going to disagree, and often be disagreeable, but that's how we keep music lively. We talk about it, in and among ourselves, all the time, but why are so few willing to make it public and write it out?

In a functioning cultural landscape, there is no way that this blog by this composer ought to be in the top 50 music blogs. I could list 50 other composers off the top of my head who ought to be out there before or instead of me, with their sharper ideas and sharper words. And there are hundreds more about whose work I'd like to know more: tell us what you're writing, or about with whom you're working. Got any fresh program notes to share? How about some sound or score snippets?

There are dozens of schools around the planet with lively composition programs, with pieces being produced by the rows and rows of apt disciples. Tell us about it. There are schools with staffs of faculty composers, each with a handful of grad students: show us your work, UCSD, UIUC, Yale, Eastman, Princeton, Cal Arts, Mills, Den Haag, Berlin, Brunel! Academic activity is supposed to end in publication, and online publication is a much better service to both you and to the new music community as a whole than via direct deposit to a personnel file in a closed cabinet. A composition professor who is not encouraging his or her students to get online is not helping those students, and students who are not getting online by themselves are not helping themselves.

As people who take music seriously, who want to present work in a high qualitative standard of production and presentation, we want both heat and light. But that second quality, light, is only going to be recognized if the context is known, and, I assume for most composers, that context is one rich which is rich in experiences of sounds and ideas, precedents, contemporaries, sketches, fragments, missteps, even failures, such that it is only by keeping the volume of our recorded activities high will we ever be able to let potential audiences even begin to recognize the qualitative in our work.

Heat and light. Don't take this as a rant, but as a sober recognition of opportunity. Never before has there been such an opportunity to present ones work in its own depth, not to depend upon the received local cultural and historical context. This is an opportunity to fashion an optimal context for an encounter with your work, to share it, and yes, to promote it. For better or worse, this, my friends, is the direction that publication will inevitably go, and not taking the opportunity now carries a risk for your own work, but also for the new music community at large, and that is the risk of becoming invisible, inaudible, and irrelevant.

Known and Unknown Unknowns

Here's a prime example of why Errol Morris is the best blogger on the whole damn blogoplan. The problem of known and unknown unknowns faces every composer the moment a hen scratch or flyspeck is applied to a sheet of manuscript paper.

No greater pleasure

You won't get rich, you won't get any measure of real fame, and it's not usually a guaranteed route to love and affection, but, seriously, is there any greater pleasure than imagining a music that hasn't been made before and then making it?  I can look back now on 30 years of living like a student, countless day jobs, no paid vacations, no pension plan, and unpredictably long gaps between freelance gigs and commissions.  Wife, kids, and dog all could have lived in more luxury — having a great big fridge or going to a restaurant together more than semi-annually, for example — but they seem to support and value my music, even when they don't altogether understand it, which is a great gift, and on the whole, we're very happy. We've managed the mortgage and paid for the car and the shed full of bikes and even that supreme folly of a whole gamelan in the basement.  My music has brought me to interesting places and through music, I've met people I shall always treasure.  Riches can be lost, fame can flee, but music — ephemeral as it is, just molecules of air being pushed about — stays with you.  It really doesn't get any better than this.

Glass: Kepler: bring on another Zamboni!

I skipped the soccer game last night and instead watched a broadcast of Philip Glass's opera, Kepler. I rather like the odd and (small "b") baroque balance of stylistic forces that have come to settle into Glass's stage music: a set of harmonic patterns reminiscent of the gallant style, sometimes interrupted by moments of polytonal overlay which function here a bit like cinematic cross-fades and an orchestration style, first noticed in Glass's section of the CIVIL warS, that reminds me of Meyerbeer's, of all things, here punctuated by some startling percussion, temple blocks, IthinksIhears. Dennis Russell Davies led a well-shaped and precise orchestral performance and the choir and young soloists were all quite good. I still can't wrap myself with much affection around the solo vocal writing, but here the problem clearly begins with the German libretto, which is basically one declarative sentence after another that Glass sets as one square declarative phrase after another, parroting the punctuation of the sentences. The choral writing is both more fragmented, textually, and phrased more eccentrically. The staging, in which the soloists basically wandered aimlessly, staring here and there without much apparent reason, with Kepler's upward gazes most annoying, made one realize how good both Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars are at giving performers on stage purposeful movement in highly abstract settings. Finally, the stage setting was a pair of all-purpose sets that conveyed little or no purpose, let alone specific connection to the opera, at all. Once again, letting a Zamboni meander and gad about onstage would have been far more interesting and, in an oblique way, maybe even more relevant to the subject matter.

Live and Local

Let me out myself once more: I like live music, played by warm bodies, for warm bodies, in real rooms.   I prefer live performances of music made for live performance to recordings.  I like the spontaneity and variation a live performance necessarily brings to a work and I like the way the music dissipates in a real room or out-of-doors space, as the sound waves are absorbed and reflected into both air, architecture, ear, and memory.  A live performance of music is a unique event in time, space, audition and memory for which there is no adequate substitute.  I prefer even a clumsy live performance by an amateur but spirited group of local musicians to the best-engineered recording by the most prestigious big city orchestra.  Recordings do have definite virtues, as tangible, portable, divisible comodifications and records of a part of that experience (and, though I harbor serious doubts, I don't discount the potential of such media to have some positive economic effects), but I find them most valuable as a medium for music made specifically for a recorded format.* 

This article, by Terry Teachout, proposes a "thought experiment" (the quotation marks are Teachout's own) in which, essentially, all but the upper tier of big-city professional orchestras are abandoned and those of us in localities without big orchestras are to be satisfied with recordings. Teachout sees the minor leagues in the orchestral world as no longer performing a function they filled in the days before recordings.  This is historically wrong, as the local orchestral life in the US developed in parallel with recordings and, in the early part of the 20th century, was closely connected to immigration from Europe.  (Before that, the US had largely been a wind band country with orchestral and operatic music largely restricted to the biggest cities.)  Further, Teachout sees other locally-produced art forms as more diverse, innovative and higher in quality in offerings and the orchestra standing in a zero-sum competition for resources with those other organizations.  I believe that this is missing something important about the nature of orchestral music-making — what other archaic performance form, aside from sport regularly puts the better part of a 100 people on stage? —  with its unique relationship to a community.  

Not all concerts are perfect environments for either those bodies or the music they make or hear — far from it — but there is always opportunity to optimize the experience and, if history is any indication, the experience will change.  There are indeed survival-level-serious questions about local orchestras, but thinking about these problems from the top-down, from the vantage point of big-league orchestras is exactly wrong and in many cases, the greatest contributor to these problems has been a fixation on commuting conductors and big music management.  Local orchestras, if they are to survive, will have to recognize and capitalize on their advantages of locality, flexibility, accessibility, cost, and diversity.  They can only profit from emphasizing that they can do things that the major orchestras don't and that their recordings cannot.   The range of living composers played by the majors, for example, has been seriously restricted to coteries of "approved" composers** and the only possible solution to this cartelization of orchestral opportunities lies in the locals.  By doing business in a town like Pasadena, or Teachout's "Podunk", you have the absolute luxury not to parrot what is being done in the big town.  And this is where I agree substantially with Teachout:  the solution is not in "schlock" (Teachout's word) entertainment concerts, no Wookies-on-ice-with-lasers-meet-Benvenuto Cellini, but in an authentic extension of what they actually can do best.   I do not wish to suggest that local orchestras are doing a particularly good job of this now, but finding common cause with local musical innovators is a real part of the solution.  If serious music is to do more than survive, if it is to thrive, then it has got to be an active presence both deep and wide, from children to seniors, from amateurs to professionals, from the living room to the school auditorium or church  to the fancy endowed concert halls on campuses and in big cities.

_____

* Recordings have become so cheap and ubiquitous that their main function among new musicians is not as an object of commerce but as an advertisement for concert music, for the gigs where money is actually made.  We used to hand out calling cards, now we hand out cds. 

**The worst part of this is that the effect is self-sustaining: a small group gets all of the opportunities to compose for orchestra, and the ensuing lack of experience with composing for orchestra gets used against programming or commissioning composers who are outside of the group.  This is in best (worst) evidence with the present regime at the Cabrillo Festival, which is now basically a summer satellite activity of east coast conservatory composers at the expense of Cabrillo's traditional commitment to west coast experimentalism. 

Just a reminder

The radical music isn't so much a way of composing, or even a repertoire of music associated with a way of composing, but rather a way of listening.  And listening not so much to music, as for the possibility of music.

Off the Scale

Maybe it would be useful to rethink the whole topic of engagement with musical scale. I have written here previously about composers — including Ashley, Young, and Feldman — for whom issues of scale were or have been important. I suppose that obsession with larger (and evermore-larger) scales of musical production goes back really to Berlioz and Wagner (with both inspired by the example of Beethoven's Ninth, the only non-Wagner work ever programmed at Bayreuth). Thus, in music as in economics, scale became a central concern with industrialization and nationalism and remained central in the parallel developments of corporate capitalism and state socialism (still active, for example, in the military-owned enterprises in China). Attributing a thematic, ideological, or causal relationship between the lengthy works of Young or late Feldman and corporate capitalism is, of course, a ridiculous proposition and an unnecessary line of inquiry. As with Stockhausen supposedly "serving" an imperialism that couldn't give a damn about his formulae, moments, groups or points, the works of Young and Feldman as well as Ashley are essentially invisible and inaudible to the economic powers-that-be, but they are clearly dependent upon conditions of corporate capitalist life — leisure time, tax deductions for charitable contributions, rent-protected industrial lofts, the reliable delivery of electrical power etc.. I don't believe that this is a terribly profound point, and certainly not one which would constitute a major point of criticism (indeed, one may well credit these composers for resisting the imperative of corporate music production to ship everything in three minute and album-length packages), but it does make me want to listen more closely now to musical miniatures (my family is sort of obsessed with Howard Skempton's all-miniature and mostly solo accordion CD Home and Abroad) as well as pursue the idea of works with wildly variable as well as "anonymous" (i.e. not particularly either small or large) scales.

Utopia, un/Limited, or The Flowers of Progress

One of the paradoxes of the radical music is that it thrives at both extremes, at densities both close to zero and at or past the point of any perceivable order or distinction among constituent parts. A further paradox here is that, on the one hand, an ever-lower limit on materials or methods can create  ever-more mysterious and inscrutable musical objects and processes while, on the other hand, ever-more densely overlaid materials and complicated procedures can lead to sum totals which are heard as ever-more elementary surfaces or gestalts.  YET A FURTHER PARADOX is that composing under ever-more narrow restrictions or limits may yield ever-larger numbers of possible realizations while a lack of limits may force a composition into a density that is essentially ergodic in nature.  

Among composers, John Cage and James Tenney were perhaps most focused on these paradoxes, composing at both limits, but the concern is widespread: much of the music of Nancarrow and Ligeti depends on it, Alvin Lucier's string quartet, Navigations for Strings or La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano feature it.  Heck, Monteverdi's concitato style and Berlioz's use of spatial polyphony with very restricted pitch materials and even the Javanese irama system, coordinating material density with tempi, depend upon it, too.  And, outside of music proper, the productive use of restrictions are extremely interesting: the Oulipo, of course, or the fiction of Walter Abish, the Dogme 95 films, or even the Mundane Science Fiction movement are all good examples that limitations can focus and form work but are not necessarily limiting.

The Stuff of Legends

Composer Tim Parkinson has begun a great series of video interviews with some legendary UK experimental composers, including John White, Richard Emsley, Chris Newman and Michael Parsons, here.

The Drone from South Africa

The sound of those plastic stadium horns is a constant background presence in the broadcasts from the Soccer World Cup in South Africa. Although there must be considerable variation in the exact size and shape of these instruments with consequent variations in frequency, it all averages out in a massive example of the chorus effect into such a warmly modulating Bb that each time I pass through the room where my son is watching games, I annoy the hell out of him with an inability to refrain from launching into bits of South Indian solfege: sa ri ga ma pa dha ni sa! or some rough and ready overtone singing (betraying, among other things, definite signs and symptoms of a musical youth in early 80's Santa Cruz). Bb is a comfortable tonic sa for me and after only two games the TV looks like it's going to become my tamboura-ersatz of choice, replacing our aged fridge for the rest of what looks to be a seriouslz drone-y World Cup.

Z is for Zero

One impulse for the radical music is the notion — some would say conceit — of a music built from scratch, from first principles and their consequences rather than built within the default settings of an existing tradition or practice. The turns to minimal means or algorithmic composition or free improvisation or even the use of chance or the dense overlay of so many processes that the end result is unpredictable were or are, often, chosen precisely to follow this impulse. My own conceit is that my pieces are games very much akin to the language games in late Wittgenstein, experiments in the consequences of finite sets of materials and rules for their deployment with the potential (the Oulipo has it right with their idea of a potential literature) to emulate or even achieve the condition of music, but very much also the potential to fail to achieve that condition. The problem here, of course, is that there is an inherent conflict between the clarity of this experimental approach and the obscurity and elusiveness associated with defining the musical. Of course, one could just pull a Potter Stewart and be satisfied that one "knows music when you hear it" — after all, I spend most of my waking hours with music and music traditions I love and know with some intimacy — but isn't that just avoiding the responsibility associated with a commitment to an experimental approach to composition, which is to keep exploring and redefining through composition the extents and limits of the musical, as played and heard? Yeah, my conceit is that the piece begins from nothing, that it is only constructed (a la intuitionist mathematics), but as each sound or structure or process or pattern begins to shape that nothing into something, all of my prior experience of the musical inevitably enters in, sometimes setting rules, sometimes imposing an inexorable logic, sometimes calling on training or habit. There is a wonderful, tense, unpredictable interplay here between forces — choice, consequence, chance — that is the very source of the joy I find and recognize only in the practice of composition.

Wagner staging: bring on the Zamboni!

I heard a first class Das Rheingold this evening at the Frankfurt Oper, the first production in a new Ring cycle.  Sebastian Weigle, the General Music Director of the house, began his musical career as a horn player, and the benefits of that experience were once again clear in his ability to balance local details and ensemble balance with long-term development.  As is typical for Frankfurt, the choice of singers was fortunate all around, and Kurt Streit's Loge and Meredith Arwady's Erda, in particular, were in top form both musically and dramatically. 

The only reservation I have with this production is the set.  It's yet another variation in the Wieland Wagner brand of discs/rings, intended as an abstract and all-purpose set for use throughout the cycle.  In this case a huge computer-controlled stage machine with a central disk on a lift and four outer rings independently revolvable about the center, the whole perilously raked (the singers in LA have nothing to complain about), so that the pieces can be turned in countless ways suggesting waves and paths and caves etc..   It's an impressive piece of machinery, but damn, aren't we bored of the rings already?  Even with imaginative lighting and projections as well as discreetly added props, I'm not sure that I'm prepared to sit through another twelve hours and change of looking at this thing turn about.   

Despite the world economic crisis, there appear to be a record number of new Rings in production or planning (we'll actually be having a autobahn series of Rings, soon, as Darmstadt, a half-hour down the road, is beginning one as well), and it's been fascinating to see the bits and pieces of productions that have appeared on TV or online.  I have a particular fascination with old fashioned stage magic and have been rather disappointed that newer technological possibilities do not appear to have consistently or reliably offered improvements on the old.  A Spanish cycle televised last Winter, for example, was dominated by on stage lifts and cranes.  Nice idea, one would think, to let Gods and Goddesses float about a bit; not so nice, however, when one sees (and hears — for they never get all the creaks and groans out of these things) more of the cranes than of the crooners.  If you want stage magic, you don't want to see wires carrying Peter Pan, you don't want to see Edgar Bergen's lips move when Charlie McCarthy speaks, and you don't want to see lifts or the underbelly of a Wieland Wagner carousel.  (And why is it that some part of the audience always starts clapping when the big machine does a 180?)  I want stage magic to be magical and appropriate technology.  If there has to be large machinery on stage, I'd much prefer that they bring on a Zamboni between acts.  If we're going to see machines on stage, the proto-steam punk of the Chéreau Ring was definitely a better point of departure: by setting the work during the Industrial Revolution, it maintained a frame of reference with a sufficient degree of mythological distance to our own technological landscape; a stage technology will appear magical if it is either so ancient or so advanced as to be unfamiliar. 

The other problem with an abstract set is that abstraction necessarily means a reduction in details.  The Ring, more than other operas, thrives on its details; their presence enables listeners to engage ever more closely with relationships and cross references and to go deep from the broadest thematic connections to the most conjectural arcana.  While it is possible, Story Theatre-style, to encourage audience imaginations to fill in an empty set, it is not always a reliable solution, nor do we want to be locked into that model of audition. (Not to mention the fact that an empty set often suggests a poverty of both imagination and resources on the part of the production team and management, respectively.)  Achim Freyer's new Ring staging in Los Angeles has the virtue, no matter what you may think of his style, of filling the stage with detail and detail that is directly derived from Wagner's content, thus capable of reinforcing or bringing out more rather than less of the score.   

(My fatigue with all-purpose sets is not limited to disc'n'ring Wagner stagings.  The current Don Carlo set in Frankfurt, for example,  uses a generic castle-like set and makes two very big, very basic mistakes in scenery:  the set pieces are imitation brickwork (which always looks cheap; junior high drama club cheap) and some of the imitation brickwork, including some very large pieces of imitation brickwork (pillars, stellae, whole walls) are made to move, up and down, right in front of our very eyes, a guaranteed killer of suspended disbelief.)

Addendum: I should have mentioned the one theatrical coup through which director Vera Nemirova successfully subverts the restrictions of the giant discman:  instead of using a projection behind the set or rearranging the rings, Valhalla is represented as the auditorium itself: the lights come up in the hall and the Gods, in black evening dress, gaze upon and then enter the hall as opera-goers taking their places before a performance. A nice break in the physical frame and a useful way to identify the evening as a prelude for things to come on stage. 

Y is for Yorick

Cage/Duncan

An interesting article about John Cage and Robert Duncan, anarchy and the re-use of existing texts, here.

1/24th

An Hour is an interesting series of broadcasts by Ophir Ilzetzki featuring interview/portraits of composers working in experimental directions. Recommended.  

Passing, smartly

In the recent post about China Miéville's new novel, Kraken, I neglected to note one small but truly cool passing reference, and one which actually has something to do — if via a filial tangent — with experimental music.  It is a reference to John Cage's father.  Yes, the composer's father.  I suspect that this is the first appearance of the senior Cage, an engineer and inventor, in a work of fiction.   In the passage in question, Miéville appears to be referring to John M. Cage Sr.'s work in the design of submarines.

Addendum:  Gordon Mumma wrote:

re John Cage Sr.'s inventions, his work went far beyond
the early submarine projects. Cage Sr. held patents on
many devices and concepts, all the way through the 2nd
World War. And (composer) Cage Jr. assisted his father
with some of that research, even when it was "classified
war-work." That activity was one of several reasons the
composer Cage was not conscripted into military service.

All that above is from what Cage told me privately back
in the 1960s. Now there is excellent research underway
by Richard Brown (at USC) in which he has located
many recently de-classified documents involving patents
for Cage Sr.'s work in the 1940s. Brown gave a superb
presentation of his research on this subject at the 2009
Philadelphia American Musicological Society meeting. 

Now that I think about it, it's actually pretty surprising that the elder Cage has not been a more frequent figure or model for a character in fiction.

  

A Brief Message Regarding a Title

To the composer out there who is considering TOP KILL as the title for a new piece of music: 

Please don't.

More on the economics of the era of recorded sound

John Gruber cites a BBC interview with Mick Jagger:

But I have a take on that — people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

That date in the late 90's coincides rather precisely with the mass introduction of cheap digital recording equipment and media as well as the widespread use of portable digital players.  The old model of radio advertising paying royalties for recorded music which were licensed cheaply for broadcast with the idea that randomly-heard broadcasts of songs were advertisements for the purchase of albums — which allowed the listener to select particular songs on their own — pretty much collapsed at that point in time.  The technological innovations leading to ever-cheaper and ever-more accurate recording and storage capacity were inevitable but the whole thing gets ugly when one considers that the firms selling the new recording technologies were, in many cases, also publishers of the music that was inevitably going to be recorded.   

And so the grand experiment in the commodification of music more or less collapsed.  While it may become possible to design some mechanisms for mass surveillance of online music consumption and to find some way of collecting fees, it seems highly unlikely that this is going to be done in any way that gets meaningful remuneration for anyone but the most popular musicians and the largest publishers, as even the most lucrative models are in terms of very small fractions of a cent for a single usage.  Although recordings and webcasts may have some advertising function, in the end, the grand experiment may leave us back where we started, with live performance the most important — and in many cases, only — opportunity for a musician to earn money. 

A Difficult Taboo

A couple of years ago, I drafted a libretto loosely based on reports of palace life in the People's Republic of Korea.  The effort soon convinced me that I was not a librettist (and that Alaisdair Gray's novella Five Letters from an Eastern Empire had treated a similar theme much better than I ever could) but I don't regret having learned a lot about that strange and — for its own people, and potentially its neighbors — tragic country.  (If you're interested in the topic, I recommend Bradley K. Martin's book, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader and the blog North Korea Leadership Watch;  I am also fascinated by the Pyongyang Metro webpage.)   I have tried to keep up with news from North Korea and was fascinated by a recent item describing the country's National Defense Commission Reconnaissance Bureau which included this:

The general bureau now consists of six bureaus for operations (Bureau 1), reconnaissance (Bureau 2), overseas intelligence (Bureau 3), inter-Korean talks (Bureau 5), technology or cyber terrorism (Bureau 6) and for support of other divisions (Bureau 7), according to sources. There is no Bureau 4 due to a traditional Korean taboo on the number four, which is pronounced the same as “death” in Korean.

Now, the taboo against thirteenth floors in high buildings found in the U.S. is silly enough, and a sign of residual superstition in a country that has never been shy about its relationship to "faith" of one sort or another.  But it is ultimately something one can work around, as even the biggest cities have limited numbers of buildings over twelve floors high, and you can always stick a 12A or a storage space up there between 12 and 14.  A taboo against the number four, however, would have to be a more frequently encountered obstacle and is a sure sign that we're talking about a country which is definitely not being run from an entirely rational worldview.

Promising

I like to keep track of new notation/engraving programs, and here's an interesting new one: Nihavent.  It's designed immediately for notating Turkish maqam and microtonal music with appropriate accidentals and accurate playback, but the structure of the program, as a whole, even in this beta version, is very promising for general use.   Among other things, it may well have the easiest learning curve for any notation program available, with the seven page users' guide all you really need to get started; I was able to compose a small piece on screen immediately after opening the program for the first time.  [As a bonus, AFAIC, I was able to enter time signatures with non-powers of two denominators — 2/3 or 6/5, for example — and not only to space and print correctly but playback without a hitch.  Henry Cowell would have been very happy about this!]

This is a beta version and a number of additional features will be required to make it competitive with well-known general-purpose professional engraving programs, but it's a great start and — for maqam and microtonal music — already a serious player, offering capacity out of the box that the majors don't have without serious  kludges.  I recommend testing the program and am curious to see if this can developed, with feedback, in more useful ways for new music.

As Good As It Gets

In the past week, chaperoning a young supernumary, I've heard a rehearsals and two performances of Don Carlo, which has been ample reminder that, in the 19th century, opera was the principal genre for innovation in orchestration and that, among opera composers, Verdi was an orchestrator with only one major competitor, Berlioz.  (Yeah, Berlioz, I've been wanting to add Les Troyens to my list of landmarks for long, long time but have been more than a little frightened by the prospect of writing something, even something very brief, about the grandest of the grand operas; the piece, as a whole, and in so many details, is more than remarkable.)

In any case: Verdi, orchestration. Pay attention to these things: the economy of his ensemble writing, allowing for the most potent use of the entire range of scoring patterns, from solo instrument (in Don Carlo, exquisite writing for clarinet and cello in particular) to chamber-scale groupings all the way up to full orchestra, choir and soloists, a combination that registers more on the memory than actually appears in a score, then his usage of the on-stage bands to achieve very subtle spatial distinctions, and his reserve with the use of the full string section, with the weight of winds, particularly solo winds, but also the horn and trombone (agile, originally for valved instruments) sections, used as sharp points of contrast. To some extent, these are features of orchestration that we have more or less internalized as a standard of good practice, but the degree to which Verdi is responsible for that practice is either overlooked or taken for granted.

The 20th century started out blockbusters for opera orchestration, between Debussy and the two Strauss Einackters. Why then, with the exceptions of radically different pit bands for Glass or Ashley, so late in the century, did opera so lamentably stop being a genre for instrumental innovation? I suspect that the "too big to fail" scale and status of opera houses and orchestras as institutions played a major role, with considerable inertia in the composition and usage of the pit orchestra. In any case, the failure to innovate has come at a large cost to the genre as both a wider public attraction and a musical/intellectual playground.

Mit Schmalz

Once again, from the lattice of coincidence:  My daughter and I are in the kitchen planning a rainy day baking project and listening to the radio.  We settle on an oatmeal cookie recipe, on an old 3"x 5" card in my grandmother's handwriting, but attributed to one of her neighbors in Sacramento. The recipe, conspicuously, includes butter as half the fat in the recipe with the other half assigned to lard, yep rendered pig fat, an ingredient that almost shocks with its out-of-stylishness.  As we discussed whether to double the butter or even to use a substitute vegetable shortening for the lard, with a long detour into the pros and cons of rendered pig fat*, Emma began to giggle at the music coming from the radio.  It's an old recording with plenty of wobble and rhythmic surface noise and the solo violinist is using a lot of shockingly out-of-style portamento.  

The more I listened to the soloist, the more I became convinced that his portamento had been exactly right for the music.  I didn't, however, have the same confidence when baking, and the chosen substitute for lard made good cookies but not great ones, and certainly not authentic ones. 

______

* My daughter Emma, who spent her first years in Hungary, was exposed to a lot more lard than most American or German kids these days.  In addition to its ubiquitous use in cooking (most Hungarian recipes begin with frying onions in lard), a typical childrens' meal in Hungary is a slice of bread, smeared with lard and dressed with red onions and a dash of paprika.   As such, it was basically unavoidable.

Cracked

Here's a guilty pleasure: China Miéville's latest novel, Kraken.  Among many other things, it's the big squid book that someone one "i" and an accent more than the famous author of a famous book about a big whale was bound to write and it's the author's long-overdue take on the whole cult'n'conspiracy-thriller genre, from Dan Brown on down, adapting an appropriately brisk diction to rush from a recognizable London by a serious of ever-more startling leaps of imagination and suspensions of disbelief to an ever-weirder revision of the city.  It begins in the preserved specimen jar collection of the Darwin Center at the left end of the Museum of Natural History (which is the closest thing to a cathedral for non-believers as the city has, and frames the story nicely for its dynamic between science and religion) and rapidly moves into parts of town more reminiscent of Miéville's UnLunDun or even the parallel cities of The City & The City or the unmatched weirdness of Perdido Street Station's New Crobuzon (yeah, disturbing urban environments are a Miéville specialty).

Here's a small sample that could serve as a description of Miéville's methods:

"I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?"

"Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen," Dane said.

(Which, now that I've typed it out, strikes me as pretty good advice about much new music as well.) 

The best thing here, though, is the fact that Kraken is a comic novel, the only possible intelligent response to such a wooden genre and in the pair of killers-for-hire, Goss and Subby, Miéville has created his most frightening creatures yet. 

The Claque

At a concert last week featuring works by a handful of younger composers, a phalanx composed of friends-of-composer-X positioned themselves across the last row with the intention of providing the loudest possible acoustical approbation for the performance of a new work by amigo X. No problem there: bringing an ample number of claqueurs to a concert is an old and even semi-honorable tradition. Unfortunately, the members of this claque also decided to use their forces to provide the loudest possible acoustical disapprobations for works by composers Y & Z. This was not good form. Further, they were unrestrained in audible comments during the performances of pieces by Y & Z. This was even worse form. The pieces on the concert complemented, even amplified one another, so there was was no competition among them, no zero sum to be protected for the net bonus of composer X, and no one would have been in the least insulted had the entire team entered only for X's piece and waited out the rest of the concert at the bar.

Landmarks (45)

Guillaume de Machaut: Ma fin est mon commencement.  

I'm going to cheat here and let this little rondeau — with all of its play of multiple symmetries and self-similar constructive wit uniting text and tunes — stand in for the whole corpus of Machaut's music, because I came to know the whole surviving catalogue more or less at once and I'm attached to all of it, secular and sacred, monophonic and polyphonic, and must refuse leaving anything out.   It may be fairly argued that Machaut's musical style is not sufficiently distinct from the surviving music of his contemporaries, but none of his contemporaries, nor his immediate successors left a body of work comparable either in size or variety to Machaut's, and none, to my ear, was his match for the shape of his tunes or sensitivity of his ensemble textures. (And, of course, his musical work was a complement to his poetry.)      

The Machaut celebratory year of 1977 was an important one for me, as discovering Machaut's music showed that music research and performance could be complementary activities, and the combination of both activities was compositionally inviting.   A summer workshop in the mountains, with a collegium led by La Noue Davenport, was an exciting introduction to the rhythmic and tonal vigor of this music and an incredible contrast to the fare in high school band or choir.  Copying out scores by hand, with the ambition of getting friends to sing or play them, was an opportunity to gain fluency in all the c clefs and try to puzzle out the Medieval French, but most importantly, to discover, for the first time and from inside-out, how a style of music, and the formal or textural variants within that style, actually worked.   In the polyphony, especially, I was drawn to the great degree of freedom that voices could have between points of resolution or cadences, an experience marvelously echoed in the elaborating voices and instruments in Javanese gamelan music, Karawitan, which come together at seleh, targeted tones at the end of formal units.   All the elements of this style — the fixed forms, some syllabic, others melismatic, the cadential formulae, the use of accompanying tenors, the use of extended syncopations and hockets — all registered, deep, in my musical consciousness, and with this a certain aesthetic ambition, that music should be able to live both in the depths, in its construction, and flow, at its surface.  

X is for Xenophile.

The New in The New Music immediately suggests an element of the unfamiliar, unusual, strange, foreign, or alien.  Sometimes this may indicate wholly novel materials, but mostly the novelty is in the deployment or arrangement of the materials (John Cage/N.O. Brown once again: syntax is the arrangement of the army).  Sometimes a rage for the new (Morse Peckham: Man's rage for chaos; biology, behavior, and the arts) is a form of criticism, a more-or-less explicit expression of dissatisfaction with existing states of affairs.  Sometimes this is an ethical judgment, other times this is simply fulfilling a need for variety.  We all have some need for variety: in music, in food, in clothing, in landscapes, in the arrangement of furniture in our living rooms. And, most likely, we have some need to manage a balance between variety and stability, between the unexpected and the predictable. (In his later years, Cage always wore the same kind of clothes, French worker's denim, so that he needn't think anymore about them.) Someone once told me that variety reminds us that we're alive, by inserting events into our lives, while repetition reminds us that we're still alive, and measures our lives by creating intervals between events.  Thus a passion for the new is not necessarily a discounting of the old, familiar, but can be a way of renewing our experience of the old, through ever-new contexts.

(N.B.: X is done, and without hiding it behind an "e" (exile, extreme, exotic), nor grabbing onto the musician's inevitable xylophone.)