A wish list for neuroscientists from a musician

From the safe distance of a composer with an armchair appreciation for science, I'm something of a fan of the neuroscience of music. It's really exciting stuff and my impression is that we're only beginning to learn about it. Here are some aspects of music that I'd like — as a composer — neuroscience to tell us more about; as music if the temporal art par excellence, it's not surprising that they have everything to do with how we process events in time:

1. The two irreversible arrows of music: in pitch and in time. Inverting a sequence of pitches creates only a weak equivalence, indeed an equivalence which deteriorates as one moves towards extremes. And in time, a reversal of a sequence, last-on-first-out, is also only weakly equivalent.

2. The perceptual "borderlands" between parameters: between pitch and timbre or between form and rhythm or rhythm and pitch, including such phenomena as interference beating*.

3. The "chunking" of musical memory: apparently we take in music in pieces which are then reassembled, mentally, into a continuity. (Which is closely related to:)

4. The gaps in timing between mental anticipation of a physical music-producing action, the execution of that action, the perception and analysis of the resulting sound, as well as any motor feedback processing related to the action. (When, exactly, does the music take place? What does "now" mean in music when all of these events occur, in objective external time, at different points? How the hell do musicians ever reach a unison attack?)

5. What other sensory mechanisms contribute or might potentially contribute to an enhanced perception of acoustic events? Research so far has pointed to some limits in the perceptual apparatus and this has led to some practical applications — from transmission of speech over a narrow band to noise reduction to compression and sampling rates. But I'm far more interested, as a musician, in expansion than limitations. For example, I know that a considerable part of "hearing" music, for me, comes from the sense of touch as a complement to the stuff that goes through the ears. AFAIC, fine tuning, in a live ensemble, is often easier by feel than audition, through the reduction of beats more felt than heard. Musicians with hearing losses also know this well, but could this also explain things like La Monte Young's massive sine wave complexes (which don't resolve to simple 5-limit harmonies but share a common, if sub-audio, difference tone)? Also, the physical placement of sounds in space is a fascinating topic. How about echolocation? Some humans — particularly the visually impaired — have become virtuoso echolocaters, but I think I've detected the same in babies crying. What a wonderful extra resource for musicians?

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* One of the most interesting results with regard to beating that I've heard about lately is this, a paper on Waves, Beats and Expectancy in speech by Eric Keller. The ways in which speech and music piggy-back on an overlapping set of neural organs is another fascinating topic. While beating in musical contexts is well familiar, that the phenomena was shared with speech was a surprise to me. And while this is wildly prematured and underinformed speculation on my part, wouldn't it be so cool to find a neurological basis, in beating, for poetic and musical metre?

They call it multi-tasking, I call it counterpoint

A nice column by Kevin Drum on the dangers of multi-tasking, here. It's no surprise to learn that most people, when attempting to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, don't perform those tasks very well. This can be an annoyance — I don't enjoy conversing with someone in person who is social-media-ing away at the same time via one or more electronic devices —, or unfortunate — for the student who is expected to know the stuff on the lecture he missed because he was busy checking his email —, or downright dangerous (cell phone, autobahn.) It's too bad that more people haven't picked up on something that musicians have known for a long while: mastery of counterpoint is wonderful, but rare, and most of us spend our entire lives as musicians working at hearing more. The great contrapuntal virtuosi (say Bach, Berlioz, and Ives, to mention three of the best, but stylistically and formally very different composers) form a preciously small company, and as wild as each could get, each clearly understood the potential — and utility — of highly differentiated counterpoint to either cohere or fall apart. [Maybe we need warning labels: EXCESS COUNTERPOINT: HANDLE WITH CARE.] I understand well the impulse to take in as much as possible — as a teenager, I used to spend evenings listening to the radio with headphones, reading, and usually eating, simultaneously, in the same room in our house where the rest of the family watched TV, and I took in a lot of that, too — but I think that time has taught me the value of eliminating distractions, with the quality of perception gaining considerable value over raw quantity.

Creative mistakes stimulate the brain

This study of Shakespeare's linguistic innovations — neologisms, unorthodox syntax, etc. — and the brain is exciting stuff and has, AFAIC, everything to do with compositional innovation and experiment in music. As with Shakespeare, I strongly suspect that every major innovator in music has done things with sounds or their context that make the brain work more than usual and it is precisely that stimulation that keeps this music worth returning to again and again.

I also think that many of the methods, often game-like, of the Oulipo in literature, the surrealists in literature and the visual arts, and many composers, particularly experimentalists, are designed as efficient means for getting right into that more-stimulated zone, often enstranging the familiar through even the slightest shifts in the selection or character of materials or their order in time or space.

Dept. of Stolen, then Recovered Instruments

Tutankhamun's trumpet was lifted from the Cairo Museum and recovered days later in the Cairo Metro. Be sure to listen to the sound sample of the old BBC broadcast.

Exit the CD, Gone a Reliable Gift Option

As the last hardware form of commodified recorded music, that optical medium known as the audio compact disk (forward: "cd"), makes its slow exit from the marketplace, it's probably appropriate to take a moment to consider the fact that this creates a serious hole in the list of reliable gift object. Even a notorious recording skeptic like myself has been known to give and receive — and gladly, always gladly — too many of those little plastic discs in their plastic boxes (or, later, cardboard covers). And said cd does have some real advantages over the traditional alternatives: not everyone wears ties, drinks scotch, appreciates a good wine, cigars are out of style, none of my acquaintances is yet old enough to golf, let alone have a tangible use for golf balls, and let's face it, when uncertain about the recipient's tastes, choosing a piece of music seems less risk-prone than a book. While I have never become particularly adept at rescuing a suffocating cd from its shrink rap and I'm equally clumsy at opening the so-called-"crystal case", if I may admit here to a minor perversity: I do take some genuine tactile pleasure in ejecting the cd from its clutches of the circular hub of teeth which grip the disc by its unique and thus topologically-defining central hole by pressing just gently enough on the springy central button of the back media tray. Which is a digression from my main point, which is that, when given the gift of an audio cd, I feel obliged to open and listen to the cd.* I do not regift cds. Nor do I prematurely liberate, examine and/or listen to cds which I have purchased with the intention of giving to others. I do recall, however (TRUE STORY WARNING), that one of the first cds I was given as a gift, a recording of Robert Ashley's Atalanta (which Ben.Harper happens to mention in a very sweet post, here) was given to me both unwrapped (that is, the shrink wrap had been removed; the gift wrapping was, in fact, intact) and already listened to. Which was dismaying at the time, but now, one supposes with some generosity granted by the passage of considerable time, shall we say twenty-five years and four months plus or minus five days?, was just a premature form of file sharing. An unapologetic act of what I then considered to be bad form was simply a vanguard form of a new etiquette. My failure to register, then, an appropriate amount of gratitude to the gift-giver for the gift given, given my misunderstanding of the evolving ethic of music-sharing, viewed through my antiquated and perhaps provincial view that a gift given, save for some object of antiquarian or intimate personal interest and/or worth, should be unused prior to its formal receipt by its intended recipient. (WARNING: LONG CLOSING SENTENCE, ENDING WITH PREPOSITION INDICATING AN IMITATION OF ACTUAL SPEECH RATHER THAN POLISHED PROSE: My regrets at my lack of foresight, and thus my not-bad-but-definitely awkward expression of reduced gratitude are deep but wane, now, in the knowledge that the custom of sharing music via a tangible medium which might bear some concrete signs of its prior use has gone the way of the dodo, and that we have definitely entered the age in which recordings are exchanged, often anonymously, secret Santas all of us, entirely without any indications as to whether a recording has been previously heard or otherwise interacted with.

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* As the costs of producing ones own cd went lower and lower, the exchange of cds by composers and musicians who made them has become ubiquitous. (Indeed, I probably received more cds than business cards from musicians throughout the '90s and oughts; hell, cds had become business cards.) It then became very important to remove the shrink rap from gifted cds received, as the risk of the gift-giver finding the cd still enclosed in plastic, lonely and unplayed on some shelf, when revisting the recipient was one which carried the potential of serious social awkwardness. No, no one would actually have know if the cd had actually been listened to, but left in its wrapping, it would have been absolutely clear that it had not been listened to.

Usefully Informal

Composers, as craftspeople, tend to overemphasize the professional, the formal, the finished, and the perfected. However, a lot of useful and valuable music-making is not professional and not yet formal or finished, let alone perfected, and this emphasis can often be a distraction from opportunities for music-making — indeed most music-making — in situations, environments and on occasions which may well be informal, provisional, and yes, (cheerfully) far-from-perfect.

New music, in order to thrive, has got to go wide and deep into our musical culture, an established if dynamic presence, emphasizing not only the most prestigious occasions and institutions and requiring only the most virtuoso musicians. This means music for amateurs, music for children, music for pedagogy, and music for private use as well as civic and institutional functions.

Fortunately, we have some very good models of composers writing pieces designed to reach wider sets of players and audiences which are nevertheless integrated into their work as a whole. For example — and looking only at piano music (we could as easily look at vocal music or music for guitar or recorder or school instrumental ensembles) — the collections of small-scale piano pieces by Bartók — most famously the six volumes of Mikrokosmos — and, later, Kurtág's Játékok (Games) and transcriptions for piano two- and four-handed, or Virgil Thomson's two collections of piano Etudes and the large series of Portraits. Mikrokosmos was compiled initially as piano lessons for the composer's son, Péter, but grew to be a progressive collection, varying from sketches to substantial pieces, illustrating nearly all of Bartók's technical concerns as a composer and pianist and in many cases serving as a sketchbook for other concert works. The Játékok includes repertoire intended for private and public use by the composer and his wife, occasional pieces for friends and colleagues, and, like Mikrokosmos, preliminary and intermediate steps to major concert works (the various metamorphoses of the enig- and emblematic Virág az ember materials as particularly fascinating.) Many of Thomson's Portraits, likewise, find their way into substantial concert works, often orchestrated, but the origins, as portraits of named persons who sat for Thomson in the manner of a portrait painter, were opportunities for the composer to experiment without the pressures of the formal, finished and professionally polished, often executed in the kind of automatic writing that, despite Thomson's insistence on his professionality, indulges in the advantages of — as Buckminister Fuller put it — daring to be naive, echoes the practices of modernists in other disciplines (i.e. Stein, the surrealists), and reliably delivered Thomson his most interesting music.

Among more recent examples of the usefully informal, I would add the scores of exquisite small-scale piano pieces by Gordon Mumma (some of which are available as scores from Material Press, and the recent double cd of these, played by the great Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle is highly recommended) and also mention Lloyd Rodger's The Black Book, a project of composing approximately a piece a day for year, in ink without edits. (I haven't seen the scores, but I believe that they are in open score form, again, a very useful idea.) This seems to resonate with Lou Harrison's suggestion, for the "stuck" composer, of composing a whole piece each day, every day: the idea is not to try and write perfect pieces, but to practice writing performable complete pieces, however small the scale or modest the ambition, to concentrate and focus and practice craft, allowing the ambitious, formal, polished, and perfected to emerge on its own terms.

If it isn't the hybrid semi-Babbitt, bring in the dusky tribal drums

From a review of the new television adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones:

At points, the soundtrack departs from its strongest mode—cool semi-serialism, a hybrid of Milton Babbitt and Hey, is that my phone?—and the presence of dusky tribal drums signal that people are doing it doggie style.

Ordinary Unhearing

Here's a very good essay by political scientist Henry Farrell on China Miéville's The City & The City. Without giving away the plot, while Miéville is known as writer of fantastic or weird (his preferred term) fiction, Farrell's essay addresses the fact that the most distinctive characteristic of the setting of The City & The City is one which is not fantastic but actually quite real, indeed completely ordinary, the social construction of our environment, what we learn to see and not to see. (One of the great trajectories for the reader involves the gradual realization that the book is not, as a genre, fantasy, but rather more properly police procedural. ) My own personal revelation about seeing and not seeing came first during one of those teenage summer jobs, bussing tables and washing dishes in a restaurant for minimum wage when I discovered, after a week or two, that it had become possible — if not necessary, to both coordinate our ensemble work and to preserve some sanity — to look across a crowded dining room and only see the other employees.

There is definitely an auditory equivalent to unseeing. Obviously, anytime we want to pay attention to a particular subset of the sounds within an acoustically crowded or noisy environment, we try to filter out what we don't want to hear. But there is a more subtle filtering, acquired over long exposure, which is associated with hearing music. I can still recall the shock I experienced when I first listened seriously to live orchestral music (the summer before my 14th birthday, sitting in the front corner of the left balcony in Little Bridges Hall of Music at Pomona College during the last Claremont Music Festival.) I was shocked because I had not yet learned to unhear the thick band of noises and scratches which comes with every bowed string instrument, nor had I learned to unhear key clicking and spit valves, and rustling sheet music and squeeky chairs or crackling parquet floors. And those coughs, those coughs. Sometimes so much distraction, so little music.* Gradually, after years of concert-going, I have learned to unhear much of that sound which we define as not music. I still have problems with the crackling parquet and stage lighting in some of the halls here (the Sendesaal at Hessischer Rundfunk, otherwise acoustically glorious, is my particular bete noire for these particular noises) and I seem to be completely unable to unhear key-clicking or mouthpiece squawks on the saxophone. I love the idea of the saxophone, and have heard some extraordinary musicians wrestle with it, but I just can't hear it as completely musical yet. But, rest assured, I'm working on it and maybe one day will be able to hear much less of the saxophone.

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* The classic art history definition of minimalism as "the elimination of distraction" usefully illustrates the degree to which the minimal impulse in the radical music tradition was an impulse with tremendous sensitivity towards the material conditions of music and the environment in which it is made.

I Wayan Sadra

The remarkable Indonesian composer I Wayan Sadra has died at 57. The balance between experiment — and his experiments were often radical, combining voices, gamelan, western instruments and new resources (once even throwing eggs at a large vertical hotplate) — and tradition — he was also a virtuoso "classical" Balinese musician, specializing gender in wayang — was at the center of his work: “Regardless of the form, I always base my work on local music, especially gamelan. This can’t change.”

The Unpredictable Elasticity of Composing Time

How is it that I can make ten minutes of orchestral music in an afternoon, but spend a week worrying over a single cross relation in a tiny piano piece? As far as I can tell, when it comes to getting a musical idea right, the compositional labor involved bears no reliable economic relationship to the scale and density of the music produced.

Great Expectations

I'm quite fond of the series of novels (four, to date) by the (pseudonymous) James Church featuring the Pyongyang-based Inspector O. On the surface, they are detective novels with an exotic setting, but just below that surface they're something rather more, with proper resolution of the police procedural seldom on offer (the North Korean system inevitably makes that impossible) yet carried by the real mystery in the motivation and character of the central figure, O, and actually quite a lot of beautiful prose, much of it so tangential to the plot that the books sometimes seem like experimental literature.

Indeed, in the third of the novels, Bamboo and Blood, there is one of strangest formal moves I've encountered in a work of fiction. At the end of a chapter, just about in the middle of the novel, O is sent to New York City. Naturally, from the perspective of a western reader, this very unusual trip for a North Korean police inspector ought to be something very important, something truly momentous, and all expectations are for a detailed account of the unlikeliest adventures in the Big Apple. However, the next chapter instead begins with O already back in Pyongyang, as if nothing momentous at all had happened and, indeed, the fragments of information we receive in the rest of the book about the New York visit add up to very little. Church not only makes a surprising formal move, disappointing our expectations for significant, plot-driving action, he plays with expectations based upon our deepest biases. It's our conceit that we simply expect a North Korean police inspector to be impressed, if not overwhelmed by the city that never sleeps. Instead, from what we can gather, the inspector was so much more annoyed by the interference in his quiet and careful life at home and in the office — not to mention the possible personal risks associated with the opportunities of foreign travel — that O simply refuses (a) to let much happen in New York and (b) to register much about the city that he might take home in memory subject to interrogation.

In the play of expectations in a musical work, an example like Inspector O's laconic trip to NYC is a very useful one. A satisfying piece of music is not necessarily about satisfying musical expectations. It's also not necessarily about holding back material or an event (a lot of 12-toners made a big deal about "saving notes", often confusing a useful tactic with an all-too-obvious strategy; let me be clear: saving a note is a musically useful notion, but it's inadequate to sustain an individual career, let alone a repertoire*). But it can be about seriously disappointing expectations and offering something totally outside of the framework we had assumed the piece was operating within. And that moment in which we suddenly become aware that our assumptions weren't even wrong is a wonderful one.

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* Paradoxically, perhaps, the opposite strategy, of allowing all the marbles to fall from the very beginning, allowing all material to be available — the gamut-based pieces of Cage come to mind — can be powerfully disarming to expectations. You think that you know all of the furniture in your living room, but switch the positions of the sofa and the coffee table and it might feel as if the earth has shifted just a bit on its axis.

True Stories (4)

It was the end of the 1950's and a promising young composer from Akron had been awarded a traveling scholarship to Europe for the Summer between the two years of his studies for his Master's degree, then the terminal academic degree in the US for composers. He had a grand time, dropping in at music festivals throughout the continent, getting to know some of the famous avant-garde music written by composers who had only been names to him before going across the pond. As his scholarship was in dollars, then a very strong currency, he had the fortune to be able to use very good exchange rates and some arbitrage in order to stretch his stay well beyond the summer. Indeed, he only began to worry about money sometime in March of the following year, when he was able to cash in his return ship ticket, which gave him an extra month, when, considering the possibility of taking a job locally, he was surprised to learn that he had "come into" (as they say) a small inheritance from his grandmother, who had left Ohio the year before, only to die from pneumonia in her retirement place near Miami. As long as he wasn't picky about the size and quality of his apartments or his meals, this sum set him up for a few years to come, and he quickly settled into a very modest career as an ex-patriot composer. He managed to get a few performances and broadcasts of his pieces, nothing earth-shaking in attention or particularly lucrative, but enough to have the feeling that he was really doing the whole European composer thing. About a year after coming into his inheritance, he got a fan letter forwarded to him from a radio station which had broadcast a live performance of one of his pieces from a local woman, about his own age, who had heard the piece on the radio, and loved it so much that she absolutely had to meet the composer. They met, seemed to hit it off, and soon were married, much to the convenience of the composer, whose residency status was perpetually in question. Now fast-forward about six or seven years. The composer and his wife and their two small children are now all living in the same two-room apartment with shared conveniences he had rented while living the lifestyle of the young Bohemian abroad. Now he was living the lifestyle of a husband and father, but it was getting seriously crowded and uncomfortable, leaving the composer without any room and certainly no time to composer, as he had had to take on work translating and teaching in order to pay the bills for four as his inheritance had long since been swallowed by the continuously dropping value of the dollar. Although his wife still professed her love for his music and he loved her for that and they were both devoted to their children, their love for one another seemed to have cooled, fueled most by their unhappiness with their material situation and the fact that he had received an ever-smaller number of performances and practically no commissions and had increasingly been unable to compose at all. He felt that his lack of time and suitable space for composing had contributed to this situation. One day, she overheard some neighbors talking about a one-room flat not far from their own which had recently become vacant. It was a state-subsidized apartment and could be secured as a studio for the composer if he were able to establish that he was poor enough to qualify for the housing. She immediately thought that this could be the ideal solution to their problem: if she borrowed some money from her parents, they would be able to afford the small rent on the single apartment and she could take a half-time job to allow him to have at least one year in which he could spend more time composing in an appropriate studio. To make a complicate series of bureacratic steps brief, the composer was able to get the apartment, but becoming qualified for the apartment had required that the couple divorce, thus demonstrating to the authorities that he required the second domicile although their means had not increased, and so they divorced on what they had agreed was a pro-forma basis. Once he had moved into the apartment, however, the composer found himself somewhat lost. He was out of practice with his composing, unused to working with adequate space and without the background noise of small children. So he spent several months looking for the right chair or the right table or the right pen or the perfect piece of manuscript paper. Nothing. He took to walking out late at night in the city, not going anywhere in particular. He would get on a random streetcar and ride it to its end station and back and then choose another. Nothing. He memorized his table top and counted the trees visible from his window or the stars at night. Nothing. He spent less and less time with the family. One night, returning from one of his walks, in the entryway to the apartment house, he ran into the wife of the concierge, a woman some 20 years his senior. She was not looking well and, asking what was wrong, he was genuinely shocked to learn the news that her husband had died, suddenly, while doing some work around the house. He offered her his condolences, she asked him in for a cup of coffee, and they started talking, in an intense conversation that lasted until the next morning, accompanied by more coffee and some schnapps and so on. That intense conversation proved to be the beginning of a relationship that, in some months time, became physically intimate. The composer eventually gave up his apartment, moving in with the concierge's widow and taking on the concierge's job full-time. He remained a devoted father to his children who went on to have happy and successful live, while his ex-wife, after a very difficult period of hurt and adjustment, fell in love with a successful culinary photographer whom she married, and the concierge and his ex-wife eventually were able, after a period of detente, to develop a genuinely warm friendship. The concierge never returned to composing, having decided that he didn't actually have a gift for it after all, but he discovered that he was, in fact, a pretty good handy person and settled into a long life with his predecessor's widow, retiring a few years ago to a small place they bought on one of those Spanish holiday islands.

Lewis on Improvisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topics

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

An Exercise in Modern Usage

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

Godzilla the warm and cuddly

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

Force majeure; Better: silence

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

*****

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

*****

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

Terry Gilliam to direct The Damnation of Faust

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

To publish or not to publish (1)

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

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

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

The Lute and the Incongruent Bicycle Bell

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

Ars Subtilor

How many times have you heard something like this:

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

Now note this:

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

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

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

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

Insertions and Deletions

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

Orchestration Oddjob

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

_____

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

More Community Organizing

(Click image to enlarge.)

Palling Around

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

Oscar rant obligato

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

February Pieces

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

True Stories (3)

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

True Stories (2)

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

_____

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

How not to do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is once enough?

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

Music for Merce (1952- 2009)

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

Against the Normative Order

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

Some Lumber Drop

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

Conjuring, Control & Just Plain Staying on Top of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

How to review a concert

Charles Shere shows us.

Innovation or Stagnation?

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

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

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

Partitions

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

Piano and Violin: Blunt Instruments of Bourgeois Education

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

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

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

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

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

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

From rules to practice

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

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

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

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

Elisabeth Klein on studying with Bartók

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

A Place in the Sun

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

Mumma in MusikTexte

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

Sonic obsessions, revisted (7)

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