Archives for September 2005

You’ve GOT to see this priceless photo/caption combination that Jan Herman got hold of. Sometimes the truth just suddenly appears in our midst and announces itself.

I received interesting responses to my post on the “Post-Prohibitive Era,” about why some composers still push their students to write music in mid-20th-century styles.

Matt Malsky quotes Cage’s paraphrase of Sri Ramakrishna in Silence:

“Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words, with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time)?”

Cage’s ambiguous answer [Matt continues] is, “In order to thicken the plot.” But, in a
post-prohibitive age, what is the plot? And what thickens it?

Carolyn Bremer, prof at Cal State at Long Beach, has kind of a stunningly simple answer as to why the big music schools hire more intransigent modernists than the less well-known ones:

University faculties are hired by university faculties. At big composition programs, search committees are stacked with composers. They’ll hire someone they like, which too often translates into someone who will like their music.

At smaller programs, search committees are staffed with musicians of all sorts: performers, conductors, historians, whatever. They have no trouble with diatonic music.

It’s certainly true that you get a more diverse search committee in a small department. It’s also true that search committees made up of composers invariably claim that they’re looking for diversity in the make-up of their department. But they never mean it.

Rodney Lister of the Sequenza 21 crowd notes that each of the schools I mentioned offers at least one professor who will be receptive to whatever style of music a student wants to write in. That might be true. But why is that good enough? Why should, for instance, any student encounter a single composition teacher who tells him he can’t use key signatures, when some publicly successful music has been written in recent decades with key signatures (I might mention Steve Reich’s Octet, or Adams’s Nixon in China)? If a student went to school for chemistry and four of the chemistry professors wouldn’t deal with any element in the periodic table higher than Plutonium, because that was the highest element when they graduated, why should that student be forced to seek out and only study with the fifth professor, who’s heard of Bohrium? Shouldn’t those other professors be pushed into retirement if they can’t keep up with the field? And shouldn’t a composer who seeks to prevent others from using key signatures, majors scales, etc. have the onus placed on him to provide a rational justification for such prohibition, or else put a lid on it? Besides, a lot of damage can be done if the first professor a student encounters lays down some ridiculous law. I had the chutzpah to blow off my teachers’ mandates, but not every freshman is so confident.

Rodney feels that the New Romantic composers have been, in general, more dogmatic than the serialists, and from what little evidence I have, that might be true, too. He and I agreed, though, that the problem is often not intrinsically stylistic, but a result of composers trying to turn their students into clones of themselves. There are two possible motivations – increasing one’s fame down the road by virtue of one’s apparent influence (or simply keeping one’s style current), or the laziness of not having to get inside another creative person’s head. Personally, I find the tactic very foreign. I find it easier to teach a student whose music is very different from mine, because I can come up with more objective solutions to their problems. If a student’s music has a lot in common with mine, I’m too tempted to show them what I’d do in my music, which ends up being a distortion of what they’re trying to do. Of course, for a lot of composition teachers, succumbing to that very temptation is probably exactly the point.

And although Shostakovich and Britten are two composers I never personally warmed up to, I like Lawrence Dillon’s suggestion that their music should have been analyzed in composition departments right along with Carter and Cage, as important members of the same generation. Certainly the ideological bias with which academia separates out acceptable composers from unacceptable ones bears some self-examination. Even the pre-20th-century ones: Brahms is the darling of academia; Bruckner, a genius of large-scale harmonic structure, is ignored, and Liszt, a protean figure who wrote a ton of groundbreaking music among his lesser works, is scornfully dismissed, except for his Sonata. Schoenberg, of course, is rated many times higher in college music departments than he is elsewhere on the planet. Music professors are occupied with primarily the left-brain aspects of music: structure, syntax, motivic development, pitch set transformation. This encourages them to neglect half of the musical virtues, and for most music lovers, it’s the more important half. Given academia’s miserable track record at turning out composers of enjoyable music, they could certainly stand to look their left-brain bias square in the face and make some correctives.

From Bernard Holland’s generally positive review of Diamanda Galas in today’s Times:

Diamanda Galas is, on the other hand, a genuine original and a living, breathing survivor of a largely vanished downtown.

UPDATE: Downtowner Tom Hamilton asks, “Why are we now characterized as ‘survivors?’ Is ‘evacuee’ next, followed by ‘refugee’?”

I was 19 when I wrote the first piece that I still, today, consider worth performing. A 180-degree departure from my previous music, it was all on the C major scale, with no sharps or flats. My composition teacher at the time, one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, utterly disapproved. He told me I should be using “good 20th-century intervals like tritones and sevenths and ninths.” Even at that age, I had enough common sense to wonder how in the world a brilliant guy like that could hold a notion as silly as the fiction that there was some kind of mystical link between certain intervals and certain historical eras. In the moment he said that, I kind of realized that the last remaining strings that tied me to 20th-century modernism had been cut.

Today young composers come and tell me that their professors won’t let them write the kind of music they want to. What’s wrong with the music they want to write? It’s too… tonal, or too consonant, or too triadic, or it doesn’t have climaxes, or it’s not tense enough, or not gestural enough, or it’s too slow, or too happy, or too static, or too pop-influenced, or it doesn’t have enough dynamics marked. One student from a prestigious grad school said, “Will you take a look at my music? The faculty and other students make fun of it because I use key signatures.” None of this is any less silly than “use good 20th-century intervals like tritones and sevenths and ninths.” They come to me at my school, from other schools, sometimes even across the country, because they’ve figured out somehow that I will let students compose any kind of music they want.

I know exactly what their previous teachers think of me because of that. They think that I have no standards, that I’m wishy-washy, that I don’t understand the Great Musical Tradition, that I’m not dedicated to quality. (I once heard second-hand what George Perle thinks of me: “I don’t get this Kyle Gann guy, he seems to only criticize every piece on its own merits.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. And a colleague recently accused me of “false-fueling” the students, i.e., letting the “untalented” ones think they were pretty good.) It’s not true. I criticize plenty of things in my students’ music. This week a composer working in pure conventional tonality came, and among other things I substituted a VII chord for his IV chord because his harmonic rhythm lagged in mid-phrase. A few years ago I had a brilliant guy writing a big, bangy Uptown piece, and I made sure that no extraneous gestures vitiated the noisy climax he was trying to create. One student wanted to write an atonal string quartet, and I stopped him, not because I don’t allow atonality, but because he had never even heard an atonal string quartet before, and was just dutifully fulfilling some expectation he’d gotten from somewhere. In all these years, after dozens of students, I’ve only had about three who wrote the same general kind of postminimalist music that I do. I’ll allow any kind of music I know how to criticize, and if I can’t criticize it, I’ll send them to someone else. One kid doing a kind of dance-oriented electronica was just out of my field, as was another student writing algorithmic Max/MSP charts. But God forbid any student should ever tell a composer, “Kyle Gann won’t let me write the music I hear in my head.”

I don’t pretend to be unique in this regard, but we are less numerous than is usually admitted. Lots of composition teachers say they never discriminate by style, only by quality, but in reality they consider the “wrong” style deficient in quality. And in my experience, the teachers who match my liberality tend to be at the lesser-known music schools. The young composers who complain to me about their repressive teachers don’t come from Tennessee Tech and University of Arkansas, they come from Peabody, Eastman, Columbia, UCSD. It does seem that the nearer you are to the top of the compositional heap, the more invested you probably are in a specious historical essentialism without rational foundation, an idea that 20th-century music MUST express a certain kind of tension and anguish, a certain dissonance and complexity. Earth to composers: the 20th century is over! Or they say, these are violent times, and our music must express that violence – a simplistic reflex that no reputable aesthetic theory of the last 3,000 years would support. Lacking any intellectual framework for their mandates, the only message they really have is: CONFORM. How depressing that composers, of all people, should push that particular button, and what vivid evidence that, though they may put notes on paper, they are not artists.

I talked to Peter Garland recently, a composer of gorgeously simple diatonic music, and he made a wistful comment that by now we ought to be living in a “post-prohibitive” age – that is, there should be nothing that is off-limits for composers to write. Certainly composing is a dialogue with the past, and any good composer should be extending or inventing some tradition, commenting on and building on and criticizing and rejecting some music he or she loves. But composers have so many different pasts now, and who are we to tell them their past is the wrong one?

“HEY YOU – you’ve got the wrong past. Get out, and don’t come back in here until you get a different one.”

The students who listen to their big-shot teachers and obey go out dutifully writing the kind of dreary, complicated, tension-filled, angst-ridden music they’ve been told to write, and their big-shot teachers get them commissions and orchestral premieres, and that timid, uncreative music sticks in our orchestral tract like an indigestible meal. I can’t believe that, thirty years after “good 20th-century intervals” were urged on me, I’m still fighting this laughable generational impasse. And when composer Cary Boyce, in Sequenza 21 this week, characterized late-20th-century music as “the sentimentality of despair,” I was thrilled to realize again that there are other composers out there rebelling against the conformity.

I was just interrupted in my writing by a couple of Christians of some stripe or another come to the door to hand me some inspirational literature, much as I was brainwashed into doing as a teenager. One of them brought up the inevitable subject of Hurricane Katrina, and asked if I believed that God intentionally allowed such massive suffering. I told him that I didn’t know about God, but that an awful lot of suffering was allowed by the human beings in charge that they should have prevented. He looked genuinely surprised, as though gripped by a quasi-Islamic fatalism convinced that all suffering is God’s will, and that there’s nothing the Hand of Man can or should do to ameliorate it.

I wonder what he would have done if I had knocked him down my porch steps with a good punch in the nose and said, sorry, that was God’s will. Reporting me to the police would have been a little inconsistent, wouldn’t it?

Holy crap! On top of everything else, Maynard G. Krebs died!

By the way, this is the first anniversary of Postclassic Radio. I moved a little closer to an all-woman-composer playlist by adding Diamanda Galas’s You Must Be Certain of the Devil in its entirety last night. Sorry the playlist on my web page is so divorced from reality.

I’m pretty swamped by writing jobs at the moment. Mostly for money – Bard pays the mortgage and electricity, but if I want to continue smoking Padrone cigars and drinking Old Vine Red, those liner notes and program notes have to keep coming. But one job I’m doing I’m very excited about: liner notes for the first commercial recording of music by Julius Eastman. Eastman (1940-1990) was a brilliant singer, fabulous pianist, politically aggressive gay African-American, outrageous personality, and one of the important musical figures of the generation just after the minimalists. Peter Maxwell Davies wrote Eight Songs for a Mad King for his versatile, sepulchral voice. [CORRECTION: Oops, this is in dispute, and I’m told the piece was written for Roy Hart; but Eastman became famous for the amazing recording.] Julius somehow let his life go to hell after 1983; at one point he was evicted from his New York apartment, his scores and belongings thrown out on the street by the sherriff, and he ended up sleeping in Tompkins Square Park. He died all alone in a hospital in Buffalo in 1990, and no one on the music scene even knew about it. But I got wind of a rumor, called Julius’s family, “broke” the story, and wrote an obituary in the Village Voice eight months after he died.

Julius’s music has been difficult to reconstruct, but thanks to Mary Jane Leach, Peter Gena, and others, New World has gathered enough good recordings from Julius’s lifetime to put together a well representative three-CD set. Three of the pieces are from a concert at Northwestern University that I attended and assisted in as a student there: three huge, hammering, pent-up-energetic essays for multiple pianos called Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla. As far as I know, the only place they’ve been heard publicly in 20 years is on Postclassic Radio, because I saved the recordings. Without having heard those pieces, I probably wouldn’t have written my Long Night for three pianos just afterward; and an echo of Gay Guerrilla survived in the primary motive of my chamber piece Hovenweep. Julius was a big musical influence on me, and then he nearly disappeared to history.

I first heard Julius perform in 1974, last ran into him in 1989, and got to know him somewhat in several encounters in-between. Some of my stories about him I can’t use in my liner notes, like the time at New Music America 1980 when I unwittingly let him lead me into a gay bar in Minneapolis – it took me a moment to figure out why all these burly men were wearing midriff shirts, but I kept calm, stayed 15 minutes before excusing myself politely on account of other commitments, and thought I handled it pretty coolly for being only 24 and very inexperienced. He used to try to talk me and Peter into trying out gayness in that mellifluous deep bass of his. He griped at us for using deoderant, saying, “Only straights use deoderant these days,” to which Peter would yell, “Julius, whaddaya think we are?!” He was an incredible character. I’m so glad his music is coming out in a big chunk, and proud to be involved. Look for it on New World in a couple of months.

Vivian Perlis, the great pioneer of oral music history, and Libby Van Cleve, expert oboist-turned-musicologist, are coming out with their first volume of oral American music history, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale Univ. Press, two compact discs included). I got an advance copy, and it’s fascinating reading; can’t put it down. Here’s an excerpt from some 1977-78 interviews with the great Virgil Thomson:

I came from Europe in the fall of 1940. I didn’t have any money, and wasn’t going to be earning any, so I came home. I took a job as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune and stayed there until I had nothing more to say – fourteen years. I had not any experience at all with newspaper routines, but you learn those overnight. [How true.] I’ve always been a fast writer. I had no trouble meeting deadlines – I like them. If you know how much time you’ve got, then you know what you can do. I think music reviewing should be a serious musical job. You must try not to be a victim of your power or start throwing your weight. Whenever I wrote about music, I was writing about my own profession and speaking from a responsible point of view. I wasn’t teaching music appreciation not knowing anything about it. I was explaining music as I knew it and believed it to be my duty. All living musicians, including critics, are part of one great band or conspiracy for the defense of musical faith and its propagation. They are always treading on each other’s toes, but they all have membership in the professional world of music. Their quarrels are family quarrels.

I can write quite easily, almost without correcting, except what you correct as you go along. Perhaps the only time I made extra drafts of things was on the [auto-]biographical book [Virgil Thomson, 1966], because you don’t know how to write about yourself. You have to find an attitude, and it takes some trial….

I am not a careless writer. As I say, I don’t mind correcting indefinitely and finding a better word or a more courteous way of saying something, but the main draft goes straight through. There is no point in getting angry to colleagues. Those are the people that you are going to live with all your life, whether you like their music or not, and liking it or not is the least interesting thing you can say about it. The most interesting thing you can do is describe it because your attitude will come through automatically in your choice of words. You know as well as I do that in writing it’s a willingness to tamper and correct until you get it acceptable to yourself, and you try it out on people – I have not been the least bit afraid of editorial help. I like it. You find out (I tell this to students all the time) you not only have to say what you mean, you have to be willing to mean what you have said.

And elsewhere:

Anybody can use anything he wants to, but the twelve-tone period is a very strange one in the history of music. Every time I’ve tried serialism, I’ve found it deadening. There is no audience for it anymore. There never was. It was in the composers’ minds that there might be. If Schoenberg and his two pupils, Berg and Webern, had not been such wonderful musicians so that some kind of expressive thing came through from time to time, the serial business would never have got anywhere.

One of my favorite pieces that I got to hear live for the first time on the recent Bard Music Festival was Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune. I knew every note by heart, but I wasn’t prepared for the unsettling live effect of Thomson’s whimsical orchestration. A chorale would suddenly be taken over by the three trombones in the back, or the entire orchestra would sit there silent as a cello played a long simple solo; then the concertmaster would play by himself, and a piccolo would start up behind him. Nor could I have anticipated how hilarious it was to watch an entire orchestra rip along through “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” A recording flattens out these incongruities, and you just don’t notice them. It was absolutely audacious music, radical in its use of the orchestra, which revealed the orchestra not as an illusion of a great blended mass, but as a group of individuals, any one of whom might have his or her own points to make. No wonder so many professional composers didn?t respect his music: it abandoned illusionistic expertise in favor of humorous realism. I admired Copland for accepting that. When a friend mentioned that Thomson’s music was “dumb,” Copland replied, “Yes, I know, but it’s intentionally dumb. He’s the American Satie.”

In fact, I’ve been thinking lately that, despite all our magnificent innovators that my ilk make such a big deal about, the American classical music audience is actually a dull, pedestrian audience, like the British audience. They actively prefer music that is expert, prestige-oriented, conventional, and forgettable to music that is imaginative and audacious. They give complexity a condescending pat on the head, and are affronted by frank simplicity. I’ve always tried to believe that it is due to composer politics that great composers like Thomson are shamefully neglected (why had I never had a chance to hear Symphony on a Hymn Tune live before?). But sitting in that audience, relishing every confrontational asburdity of that nose-thumbing score, I got a feeling that the people around me were uncomfortable, and wished they could get back to something like the bland, sedately “serious” thickness of Copland’s Symphonic Ode, which allowed them to daydream undisturbed.

Over at Sequenza 21, composer Galen H. Brown has written an essay explaining where my blog fits into musical politics, and arguing eloquently for my continuing it. He transplants into the musical realm David Brock’s argument from his book The Republican Noise Machine that the Republicans took their own lunatic fringe overly seriously in order to alter the public perception of where the center of the political spectrum lies, moving it far right from where it used to be. Therefore, argues Brown, substituting the concept of Mainstream Classical Media for that of Mainstream Media, I need to be pushing the most extreme Downtown elements in music, no matter how much resistance I encounter, in order to move the public perception of the Uptown-Downtown spectrum Downtown-ward so that it more accurately matches the current reality – since the MCM (Mainstream Classical Media) has the perception skewed way in the direction of Uptown. And the time to do this is now, while internet coverage of classical music is still in a nascent and malleable state. It’s an elegant argument. I acquiesce to my fate.

UPDATE: Brown had called me “the Rush Limbaugh of Classical Music,” but Jerry Bowles now pipes in and claims that I’m not a “fat, stupid druggie.” Shows how much he knows.