main: May 2010 Archives

I have changed the name of the composer and the work because I have no wish to draw arbitrary attention to the offending author in this instance; dozens of other examples would have served as well. But this is clearly a book analyzing the form of some modern work. Anyone old enough to be reading such a book is also likely to be educated enough to know that textbook cases of sonata form are extremely rare, and, in 20th-century repertoire, almost unheard of. But here the author, like so many of them, starts out to say that the work, as is very common, makes reference to the conventions of sonata form. Then he has a sudden, disquieting thought: perhaps his reader is a college sophomore music major who has learned about sonata form just recently, and will jump to the conclusion that the piece is in textbook sonata form! No no, he must be dissuaded from this in the next sentence! And thus the author addresses me as though I must be reading a book waaay too advanced for me, and he must condescend to guide my little mind out of the ruts it doubtless fell into in my early undergraduate years. 

The other form this usually takes is in a discussion of some famous modern composer who uses a device common in classical music, or also used by other composers. BUT THIS DOES NOT IMPLY that he has used it unoriginally, or without putting his own delectably brilliant spin on it. 

And in my mind, I invariably interrupt the flow of my reading to respond:

OF COURSE it doesn't imply that, you condescending prick.

UPDATE: The redoubtable Walter Simmons gives a detailed tribute to Muczynski that reinforces and fleshes out the image I always had of him. His description of the music can't, I think, be bettered.

It's pretty singable if you don't try the repeat. [UPDATE: It occurs to me that it would be more consonant and easier to sing if the repeat used P11 (down a half-step), the next repeat P10, and so on. Sort of like "12 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."] [Still other versions could use P10 on the repeat and descend via whole-steps, or repeat with P6. It's kind of amazingly flexible.]

I feel it's also a nice mnemonic device.

I'm donating all royalties to the Society for Minimalism Music.

I didn't get a chance to write about the contemporary music festival at Sam Houston State University at which I was the featured composer. I spent several days that week on the street that Kate Winslet runs up, trying to forestall Kevin Spacey's execution, in the film The Life of David Gale. I highly recommend the movie, and the surprise ending is too good to tell you much about it. It's about the Texas prison system, and the "walls" unit at Huntsville, Texas, where prisoners are executed and where the ending of the movie takes place, is two short blocks from the SHSU music school. A few years ago in real life, someone on death row shot a guard, escaped, and hijacked a car being driven by the music department's piano tuner, holding her hostage for a few hours. She's reportedly still in therapy about it. (Puts Bard's inconveniences in perspective, I guess.) At 1:55 in the film you can see a corner of the music building behind Kate Winslet as she's running - unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera, and can't give you a comparison shot. I got kind of a kick out of it, and also out of the excellent local barbecue.

Also from the honor and the performances, highlights of which came from John Lane's superb Percussion Ensemble, which played all three of my Snake Dances on one concert; and from my old friend Rob Hunt, who was among my inner circle at Skyline High School in Dallas (back when it was the arts magnet school), and who now teaches piano and accompanying at SHSU. I also enjoyed meeting SHSU composers Brian Herrington, Carlo "Vini" Frizzo, Kyle Kindred, John Crabtree, and Trent Hanna, who had pieces performed. All are considerably younger than me (while at 54 I'm still the youngest composer at Bard), and it was refreshing to spend a few days among young music professors with new initiatives and ideas. It's quite an active and varied music scene down there - and I found it similar to music schools in the 1970s midwest in terms of being very stylistically open-minded. It's so ridiculous, in 2010, to be otherwise.

As a result of that and other events, I've got a spate of new recordings up on my web site. While I was in Texas, John Kennedy conducted my orchestra piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things from this Once So Promising World at Oberlin, creating my first usable recording of that piece; and at Ball State guitarist Derek Johnson made a nice studio recording of my electric guitar quartet Composure (with Collin Marone, Zachary Barr, and Andrew Cowling). From SHSU I got a recording of the premiere of Snake Dance No. 3 and a couple of early songs no one had ever sung before (Jacklyn Kuklenz and Rebecca Costillo, singers). So here's some 38 minutes of new recordings:

The final two songs, with texts by Ellen Sturgis Hooper and Henry David Thoreau respectively, are from a projected song cycle of Transcendentalist songs that I never got very far with. Their stylistic anachronism may seem puzzling; I was much taken, at one point, with Ezra Pound's concept of setting poetry to music as a species of literary criticism, and I always tried to fit the music to the style and milieu of the poem. 

I didn't finish the song cycle, though, because it is difficult to get singers to give time to new repertoire, and as a student I had absorbed Cage's advice about never writing a piece without a performance prospect in mind. He had seen Adolph Weiss become bitter because he had produced so many scores that never got premiered, and he advised young composers not to fall into this trap. I took the advice perhaps too seriously, and have almost never written anything without setting up in advance the means of its performance. I'm changing my mind about this. If there's anything I'm bitter about today, it might be the pieces I thought of writing and never did because no performance opportunity ever came up. Instead, when faced with a commissionless period I wrote only Disklavier pieces and electronic ones I could perform myself. I think I'm not going to limit myself this way anymore. After all, performances aren't everything; they're often disappointing (though the ones above are lovely), the recording doesn't come out well, the critic doesn't show up and if he does the reviews are stupid or meaningless, and I get sufficiently excited from hearing the music in my head and knowing what I've achieved. Anyway, I'll be spending the first part of the summer writing a string quartet for which I do have a performance lined up, and afterward I'm thinking of embarking on some more quixotic projects. I may even set to music a few of those poems I never got around to.

The first was by composer Thomas Adès, who reviewed my Nancarrow book for the London Times. He accused me of having squelched, for some nefarious reason, the third of Conlon's Three Canons for Ursula. In fact, Conlon had told me he had given up on the third canon as too difficult; he showed me a sketch, and told me to disregard it, though apparently he completed and released it later. Adès also noted that Study No. 31 was the only one whose tempo canon lines didn't converge until after the piece was over, and puzzled over why I failed to notice the fact; meanwhile, the diagram of that study, on page 31 of said book, is accompanied by the note, "the only canon whose convergence point lies beyond its temporal frame," and I reiterate the point in my fuller discussion of the piece on page 129. Overall, Adès's review contained more mistakes than my entire book.

The second was even worse, a review in Music and Letters by some hack whose name I have taken the trouble to forget. He claimed that for me, every Nancarrow work was a masterpiece, and that I conceded no faults to even the least offerings of his output. Actually, about half of Nancarrow's works I characterized as "merely experimental," or "not his best work." (And I was more generous than Nancarrow was to himself, who was more self-critical than he needed to be.)

And now a purported Englishman yclept Nikil Saval [UPDATE: turns out he's Asian-American from California, but it's the lousy editorial policies of English publications that are at issue] has reviewed my book on Cage's 4'33" in a magazine called The New Statesman. Mr. Saval claims that in my book I say that Cage explained the piece to the audience before its premiere; that the piece was met with polite applause; that I compared that premiere to the premiere of The Rite of Spring, forgetting that Stravinsky's work precipitated a riot; and that I claim that 4'33" blurred the difference between art and life. Of course, I wrote none of those things. The first three are patently untrue, and the fourth an opinion to which I would not have committed myself.

I have had American critics disagree with things I've written, sometimes snidely, but no American reviewer has yet made up things I never said (or claimed that I didn't say things that I did) in order to chastise me for them. I never wanted to generalize based on only two examples, but after three out of three, I am moved to conclude that English book reviewers are perhaps the most incompetent and mendacious book reviewers in the world, or at least to ever disgrace the English language. And I wonder how a country that has produced such a glory of literature can abide such pathetically low standards in its literary magazines.

UPDATE: I did a little checking on Saval. He's a grad student in English at Stanford, and a fan of Brian Ferneyhough, the big composer at Stanford and someone absolutely unsympathetic to Cage [or perhaps not - see comments]. This sheds a little light on why Saval would waste his time reviewing a book about a piece he obviously didn't respect in the first place. I hope his idol gave him a pat on the head. Whether Saval is man enough to print corrections of his misstatements, I'm waiting to see. [UPDATE: He never did, the little weasel. Not a true critic.] I, meanwhile, while still wondering why English magazines have such low standards, must retract my generality about English critics. 

FINAL UPDATE: Let me be clear: this is not about me getting a negative review. I've gotten negative reviews in the last few years and have never mentioned one on this blog before. This is about professional ethics. I have said here before that when critics make factual errors, they need to be called on it, to keep them honest. When you get caught on a factual error, you automatically print a correction, no quibbling about it. I followed that rule as a professional critic for 23 years - indeed, my editors would never have let me do anything else. When I brought a couple of factual errors to Saval's attention, he quibbled, and admitted I hadn't written what he attributed to me, but thought it was close enough. That would not have been acceptable behavior at the Village Voice in my day, and if it is acceptable at The New Statesman, I'll never look at The New Statesman. It was at that point that I wrote the blog entry. Had he responded professionally and responsibly, you would never have heard about it. A critic who is not embarrassed about factual mistakes and who will not reflexively correct them is a disgrace to the profession, and should be called out.

UPDATE: And by the way, for those of you who were getting malware warnings when trying to access my blog, Fearless Leader Douglas McLennan explains. Sorry about that.