Archives for October 2005

My Rochberg talk out of the way, I am now focused on this week’s events. First, as previously noted, the premiere of my microtonal quintet The Day Revisited occurs this Wednesday, November 2, at Bard College’s Olin Auditorium. My son Bernard and I will be performing with the Da Capo ensemble, and other Bardian composers are featured, including faculty members Joan Tower and Thurman Barker, temporary faculty Keith Fitch, a very talented student Marcus Parris, and local composer Jonathan Talbott.

Then I’m giving the keynote address at a festival/symposium called The Extensible Toy Piano Project. The brainchild of directors David Claman and Matt Malsky, the event takes place Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5, at the Razzo Recital Hall at the Traina Center for the Arts at Clark University in Worcester, Massachussetts. My speech is Saturday evening at 7. I’ve never given a keynote address before, and have spent the last couple of weeks thinking about what the toy piano means to me. A lot, actually: on the Saturday concert will be my 1989 toy piano piece Paris Intermezzo, and I also used the instrument (sampled and microtonally retuned) in So Many Little Dyings. Naturally, my talk, as the festival itself, probably, will revolve around John Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano of 1948, which first brought the instrument to serious attention – and which I have added to Postclassic Radio as an homage.

Some readers have a few issues with the “comments” option, and I have a couple of disappointments about the new format myself – or rather, with what the new format does to the old entries. I thought that rather than post them as comments I’d forward them to Doug McLennan and post them here.

First, my issues. Somehow, in moving all my files to the new space, an awful lot of apostrophes and quotation marks got swallowed up, making the posts look a little illiterate. I’ve been restoring those in the articles I care most about, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to all of them. Also, internal links from one post to another are now all incorrect (as are, one presumes, all links ever made to one of my blog entries from the outside). I’m trying to correct those – if you find one that no longer works, I’d appreciate knowing about it.

Readers are concerned that the “Preview” button doesn’t work when you post a comment – you apparently just get a blank screen. I’ve been asked if it’s possible to provide some kind of “your comment is awaiting moderator approval” message to those who try to post, and also if I can create a list of “approved commenters,” so that some people will get carte blanche after the first couple of posts. I’m not so sure about the latter – I’d hate to have to create a two-tier system of people I trust and people I don’t. But I’ll pass the other concerns on to Doug. It’s like any time you move to a new house or new computer or new office, for awhile nothing seems to work right.

UPDATE: I’m assured that the preview problems are fixed – at least posting comments works like clockwork for me and Doug – and there’s a message explaining that comments are screened before posting. Let me know if you have a recurring problem, and tell me what browser you’re using so I can check if there’s some compatability problem. Thanks.

Robert Ashley’s brand new recording of his opera Celestial Excursions is up in its 111-minute entirety on Postclassic Radio. I think it’s his most musically beautiful opera ever, even though there’s not particularly much more music in it than in the other ones – something about the rhythms of the words, the way the repeated phrases make music. It’s his opera about old people:

Old people are special because they have no future. The future is what to eat for breakfast, or where did I leave my shoes. Everything else is in the past. Is this understandable?

So, sometimes old people break the rules. Especially the rules of conversation and being together. They laugh a lot. I mean real, full laughter. Did you ever notice that? They break the rules because, for one reason or another (illness, anger, damage, enough of that, whatever), the rules no longer apply for them.

Or to quote the song about the baguette:

The plate was taken away. The heavy door shut. I heard the lock.

I thought to myself, if Beckett wrote in French,

He must have had to have a baguette for breakfast.

You can’t write in French after a breakfast of oatmeal.

That is, when Beckett decided to write in French,
He had to have a baguette for breakfast.

No, I thought to myself, think clearly. This is your chance.

Beckett wanted to have the baguette for breakfast, though he knew this desire would lead

Him irrevocably to writing in French.

You can’t have the baguette for breakfast and write other than in French.

He chose. It takes courage to be a writer.

Yep.

I neglected to notice that the Village Voice turned fifty this week – the first issue was dated Oct. 26, 1955, and I was born soon afterward. My editor Bob Christgau gives a capsule history of music criticism there. True to form, he doesn’t sugarcoat anything:

In 1985 I became a parent and relinquished the editorship to a talented series of successors who know why I’m not name-checking them—they experienced firsthand the space cutbacks that have continued for 20 years (and hey, now pay rates are dipping too!). [I came to the Voice in November 1986. – KG] Many claim our section lost authority around the time I left, and they’re right. This had nothing to do with editing. It was structural. The professionalization and expansion of music coverage, together with the DIY-ization and expansion of music production, topped off by the online DIY-ization of music coverage, have rendered authority, which in any aesthetic matter is provisional at best, an utter chimera, no matter how many 100 best this-es and 50 top thats music media sell ads with….

This is not a great time in alternative rock or alternative journalism—mainstream pop or mainstream journalism either….

Douglas McLennan calls my attention to a nice review of my new CD, by composer Christopher DeLaurenti in The Stranger, out of Seattle (halfway down the page): “Like Stravinsky, composer Kyle Gann has an astounding ability to forcibly deploy complex rhythms without sounding cluttered or pretentiously convoluted.” Woohoo! The West Coast always seems to love me better than the East Coast, and you know what, West Coast? I love you better too.

As many of you have quickly noticed, this new format allows for the possibility of comments (I can set this option or not set it per individual post). The way Arts Journal’s comments work, the ones you send go into a holding pen until I OK them. Most people, so far, have kept repeatedly sending, trying to get their comments to appear, but they won’t, automatically. This is as it should be – I’ve spent enough time cleaning obscene nonsense out of my web site guest page to know that you don’t just hand total strangers a can of spray paint and invite them to express themselves. Your comment will appear when I get time to go into the software and publish it, assuming I find it well-intended and insightful.

The way I look at this is as a time-saving feature. I’ve always tried to post and/or respond to helpful comments I get, but sometimes this takes up lots more time than writing the original post did. Now people can do their own writing – I don’t have to paraphrase or edit, and I don’t have to go through the time and delay of writing people back and asking if it’s OK to quote them. I don’t have to answer, necessarily, either. I’m hoping this will more fully acknowledge the range of wonderful responses I get, while meaning a little less work for me.

On the other hand, I don’t get paid to blog here, and this is my space. I don’t owe nobody nuthin’. Anonymous comments will be deleted without becoming public, likewise abusive ones, as well as comments I don’t see the point of. No one will grandstand in this space but me. I’m all for collective wisdom – but if you want to prove how brilliant you are at length, you can start your own damn blog (are there are places that will give you the space for free). If you want to get a group dialogue going, join some new music forum like Sequenza 21. This is my turf, period, end of sentence.

I’ve been warned, by the way, against going wild with the photos, which take up loads of web space and make the site difficult for some people to access. So sorry about those promised photos of Alex Ross’s cats, it looks like you won’t be seeing them here after all. (Too bad, I paid a pretty penny for them on the black market, and some of them caught the felines in real compromising poses.)

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the composer George Rochberg since he died last spring, and now, by some amazing coincidence, I’ve been asked to speak about him this weekend. The Colorado String Quartet, who are, or which is, in residence at Bard College, will perform Rochberg’s Quartet No. 6 (1978) at 3 PM this Sunday, Oct. 30, at Olin Auditorium here, at Annandale-on-Hudson off of Route 9G. It’s the last of the “Concord” Quartets, with which Rochberg boldly inaugurated postmodernism under the shocked eyes of the classical establishment, and the one that famously contains a theme and variations on Pachelbel’s infamous Canon. So I’ll give a little talk about Rochberg and the piece before they play it. They’re also playing stuff by Haydn and Beethoven (Op. 127), but I don’t know anything about them.

UPDATE: Oops – somehow Franz Joseph Haydn changed into Richard Wernick. I HATE it when that happens.

Thanks to Douglas McLennan, from whom all blessings flow, I have now joined the newer, sleeker ranks of Arts Journal bloggers whose wisdom is couched in the snazzy new format. No longer will I turn from Jan Herman’s blog to my own and hang my head in shame! And before, somehow because I’m on a Mac, I could never post images. Now, with the new software, I can! and I celebrate this newfound ability with an experimental post of Erik Satie, the first postclassical composer and patron saint of all who have come since. Coming up soon, I have a lot of never-before-seen photos of Alex Ross’s cat!

It seems like every month another young composer shoots out of grad school and starts blogging, brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez. I have nothing against that music. And if I did, what would it matter? Might as well rail against Brahms. What depresses me, and makes me feel trapped in an age of endless musical conservatism, is the ever-renewed enthusiasm, the sense that that old, old, well-known music, music with no more secrets to divulge, music of a past century, needs ever to be championed by the young, the young of every era and for all time.

In 1973 I came out of high school brimful of enthusiasm for the musics of Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez. By the time I graduated college, I had discovered the next generation – Reich, Riley, Glass, Oliveros – and by the time I was through grad school I was grappling with Adams, Lentz, Meredith Monk. That means that during seven years of higher education I went from studying music by composers 30 years older than myself to those who were 20, 15, even 10 years older than me. Now I mainly pay attention to the music of my numerous brilliant contemporaries, and I’ve even had my music influenced by people younger than myself.

Did this happen because staid, prim Northwestern University was exposing me to Meredith Monk? HA! That’s a laugh. Most of the faculty there still considered Hindemith a little outré. My generation didn’t trust our teachers to tell us everything, and we did our own research.

Now, in an endless stream, come the 21st-century postgraduates, children of the 1980s, who brush me aside as irrelevant because I don’t fawn over the important music of our time: Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez! And I think to myself, “Kids, those people are your grandparents’ generation, except for Carter, who’s your great-grandfather.” Had I followed that pattern, I would have come out of college all excited about Copland, Hindemith, Milhaud! instead of the postminimalists. If the young composers were on my timetable, I’d be considered old-fashioned by now, and they’d be grappling with music by composers born in the 1960s and ’70s. There’s a big difference between thinking about music that has been irrefutably validated by history, and music that is still in doubt, music that needs to be examined, music that no one in power will yet vouch for, music that makes your teachers uncomfortable. How do you become a composer wrestling only with a history already etched in granite, rather than interacting with still-pliable movements and a repertoire whose course you will be called upon to alter and direct?

Of course, what’s obvious is that grad school teachers are pushing Ligeti, Carter, Xenakis, Berio, Boulez!, and doing so very persuasively. But – why are these young composers listening to their teachers? My generation rebelled against our teachers, and so today’s young generation is rebelling against us by – not rebelling?

I love it when bloggers blog about bloggers. Two of my confréres have written about my interview with Frederic Rzewski at Miller Theater last Thursday, David Adler and Darcy James Argue. As a paid participant of the event, I would consider it unseemly to add my own evaluative comments about the concert – nevertheless I can say that I thought they both captured the evening’s atmosphere well.

I was going to send my mother the poem by W.H. Auden that I quoted recently, which doesn’t seem to be on the internet anywhere, so I thought I might as well post it here, where, after all, she’s likely to read it. There is an audio file of Auden reading the poem via the New York Times, but it’s very late in his life and he seems to make it a little more trivial, so I recommend reading it yourself first. It’s one of my favorite poems about music ever, with some sagacious observations about the changes in performance practice wrought by time and mores:

Metalogue to The Magic Flute

(Lines composed in commemoration of the Mozart Bicentenary, 1956. To be spoken by the singer playing the role of Sarastro.)

Relax, Maestro, put your baton down;
Only the fogiest of the old will frown
If you the trials of the Prince prorogue
To let Sarastro speak this Metalogue,
A form acceptable to us, although
Unclassed by Aristotle or Boileau.
No modern audience finds it incorrect,
For interruption is what we expect
Since that new god, the Paid Announcer, rose,
Who with his quasi-Ossianic prose
Cuts in upon the lovers, halts the band,
To name a sponsor or to praise a brand.
Not that I have a product to describe
That you could wear or cook with or imbibe;
You cannot hoard or waste a work of art;
I come to praise but not to sell Mozart,
Who came into this world of war and woe
At Salzburg just two centuries ago,
When kings were many and machines were few
And open atheism something new.
(It makes a servantless New Yorker sore
To think sheer Genius had to stand before
A mere Archbishop with uncovered head;
But Mozart never had to make his bed.)
The history of Music as of Man
Will not go cancrizans, and no ear can
Recall what, when the Archduke Francis reigned,
Was heard by ear whose treasure-hoard contained
A Flute already but as yet no Ring;
Each age has its own mode of listening.
We know the Mozart of our fathers’ time
Was gay, rococo, sweet, but not sublime
A Viennese Italian; that is changed
Since music critics learned to feel “estranged”;
Now it’s the Germans he is classed amongst,
A Geist whose music was composed from Angst,
At International Festivals enjoys
An equal status with the Twelve-Tone Boys;
He awes the lovely and the very rich,
And even those Divertimenti which
He wrote to play while bottles were uncorked,
Milord chewed noisily, Milady talked,
Are heard in solemn silence, score on knees,
Like quartets of the deafest of the B‘s.
What next? One can no more imagine how,
In concert halls two hundred years from now,
When the mozartian sound-waves move the air,
The cognoscenti will be moved, then dare
Predict how high orchestral pitch will go,
How many tones will constitute a row,
The tempo at which regimented feet
Will march about the Moon, the form of Suite
For Piano in a Post-Atomic Age,
Prepared by some contemporary Cage.
An opera composer may be vexed
By later umbrage taken at his text:
Even Macaulay‘s schoolboy knows today
What Robert Graves or Margaret Mead would say
About the status of the sexes in this play,
Writ in that era of barbaric dark
‘Twixt Modern Mom and Bronze-Age Matriarch.
Where now the Roman Fathers and their creed?
“Ah where,” sighs Mr. Mitty, “where indeed?”
And glances sideways at his vital spouse
Whose rigid jaw-line and contracted brows
Express her scorn and utter detestation
For Roman views of Female Education.
In Nineteen-Fifty-Six we find the Queen
A highly-paid and most efficient Dean
(Who, as we all know, really runs the College),
Sarastro, tolerated for his knowledge,
Teaching the History of Ancient Myth
At Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Bennington, or Smith;
Pamina may a Time researcher be
To let Pamino take his Ph.D.,
Acquiring manly wisdom as he wishes
While changing diapers and doing dishes;
Sweet Papagena, when she’s time to spare,
Listens to Mozart operas on the air,
Though Papageno, we are sad to feel,
Prefers the juke-box to the glockenspiel,
And how is – what was easy in the past –
A democratic villain to be cast?
Monostatos must make his bad impression
Without a race, religion, or profession.
A work that lasts two hundred years is tough,
And operas, God knows, must stand enough:
What greatness made, small vanities abuse.
What must they not endure? The Diva whose
Fioriture and climactic note
The silly old composer never wrote,
Conductor X, that over-rated bore
Who alters tempi and who cuts the score,
Director Y who with ingenious wit
Places his wretched singers in the pit
While dancers mime their roles, Z the Designer
Who sets the whole thing on an ocean liner,
The girls in shorts, the men in yachting caps;
Yet Genius triumphs over all mishaps,
Survives a greater obstacle than these,
Translation into foreign Operese
(English sopranos are condemned to languish
Because our tenors have to hide their anguish);
It soothes the Frank, it stimulates the Greek:
Genius surpasses all things, even Chic.
We who know nothing – which is just as well –
About the future, can, at least, foretell,
Whether they live in air-borne nylon cubes,
Practise group-marriage or are fed through tubes,
That crowds two centuries from now will press
(Absurd their hair, ridiculous their dress)
And pay in currencies, however weird,
To hear Sarastro booming through his beard,
Sharp connoisseurs approve if it is clean
The F in alt of the Nocturnal Queen,
Some uncouth creature from the Bronx amaze
Park Avenue by knowing all the K‘s.
How seemly, then, to celebrate the birth
Of one who did no harm to our poor earth,
Created masterpieces by the dozen,
Indulged in toilet-humor with his cousin,
And had a pauper’s funeral in the rain,
The like of which we shall not see again:
How comely, also, to forgive; we should,
As Mozart, were he living, surely would,
Remember kindly Salieri‘s shade,
Accused of murder and his works unplayed,
Nor, while we praise the dead, should we forget,
We have Stravinsky – bless him! – with us yet.
Basta! Maestro, make your minions play!
In all hearts, as in our finale, may
Love be crowned, assume their rightful sway.

And remember, if you’re going to hear Marilyn Nonken play music by Frederic Rzewski tonight at 8 at Miller Theatre (116th St. and Broadway), you might as well catch an early dinner and hear me interview Frederic onstage at 7 before the concert.

I have a new work being premiered at Bard College’s Olin Auditorium on Wednesday, November 2 – and repeated next January 24 at the Knitting Factory in New York. It happened in this wise. Pat Spencer, flutist of New York’s Da Capo ensemble, played in my microtonal opera Cinderella’s Bad Magic, which we performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Pat is, of course, (with apologies to Walter Piston) an incredible flutist. She has mastered much of the world’s most difficult flute repertoire, and is a relentless perfectionist. She once showed me a rhythm in a work that only an insane or incompetent person would have written, a quintuplet inside a septuplet with rests and dotted notes or something, and was berating herself for not being able to get it perfect. I said to her, “Has it ever occurred to you that the composer wouldn’t be able to play that rhythm accurately himself, and that maybe it’s his fault for writing an unplayable rhythm, not yours for not being able to play it?” It had never occurred to her. That’s the kind of musician she is. If it can be written, it can be played, and the composer is never wrong.

So she played in Cinderella’s Bad Magic, which uses thirty pitches to the octave. It’s kind of a graceful, lyrical, light-sounding piece, as you can hear in excerpt here if you want, and you never suspect how devilishly difficult it is for the flutist. Basically, the only pitch she could play unaltered was A, and the other 29 all required fingerings and lip alterations foreign to conventional flute music. The ordeal would have made any sane woodwind player swear off microtonality forever, but Saint Pat, martyr to new music, not only wanted me to write another microtonal piece for her, she got Da Capo’s clarinetist Meighan Stoops interested, and they both wanted a microtonal piece. Well, a microtonal flute-and-clarinet duo sounded like an exercise in futility – why go through the horror of microtones for only two lines, which would barely let you hear the in-tuneness of the intervals? So I added a virtual piano part (which will be played on keyboard sampler by Blair McMillan, who recently had a nice profile in the Times), a fretless bass (played by my son Bernard, who’s been putting up with dad’s bizarre tunings his whole life), and a layer of background reference chords on sampler which I’ll play myself. In short, Bernard and I are playing with the Da Capo ensemble, and I have the easy part.

The 13-minute result, which you can listen to a fake MIDI version of here if you’d like, which I made to help the players find their pitches, is called The Day Revisited. That’s not the title you’ll see on the program, however. For some reason I’ve been kind of obsessed by my music of the early 1980s lately, and the idea that came to me was to take some themes and chords from a little piece I wrote in 1982 called As the Day Is Long, for semi-improvising flute, drums, and synthesizer with a tape background, and reuse them in a purely-tuned context. (Actually, you can hear a really poor-quality recording of As the Day Is Long from my web site here.) So the piece looks back on that moment of my life from a 23-year perspective, with all the tendencies purified into something smoother. Once again there are 30 pitches to the octave – different ones this time. For awhile I called the new piece As the Day Is Long (Revisited), but that seemed a little clunky, and it gradually shortened in my mind to The Day Revisited, which still captures the rather nostalgic flavor. I didn’t make that change in time to get it right in the program – but such complications can make the history of a work all the more interesting, n’est-ce pas?

Anyway, if you’re not near Bard November 2, I’ll put in a reminder about the January 24 performance in New York.