Archives for December 2005

I am told that Stephen “Lucky” Mosko (see here and here) has passed away at the age of only 58. He was a wonderful and well-regarded conductor, a faculty member at CalArts, and a composer too, though I’ve never heard any of his music. I know him only by reputation and through some wonderful recordings of Morton Feldman’s music that he conducted. I’m sure more detail on his career will be filled in in coming months. I do know that his father gave him the nickname Lucky, which he carried all his life, by telling him how lucky he was to have him for a father.

Rock Happens, my review of the recent concert of Barbara Benary’s music by the Downtown Ensemble and Gamelan Son of Lion, is now up at the Village Voice. (By the way, her name rhymes with “plenary,” not “canary” – confirmed it herself.)

Postclassic Radio has been found in violation of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, under which Live365.com operates. Because I sometimes play more than two consecutive tracks from the same CD, the station cannot be listed in Live365’s directory – I don’t really know how big a deal that is, I imagine most of my listeners go there direct from this blog. But here’s the e-letter I sent to Live365:

Dear Live 365 Staff,

I see that my internet station, Postclassic Radio, is
listed as noncompliant due to too many tracks coming from the same CD. I
run a classical-paradigm station, on which I sometimes play multimovement
works. According to the rules you’ve set up, it would be inadmissable to
program an entire Beethoven symphony, because that would require four
consecutive tracks from one CD. Surely some exception could be made for
classical works with more than two movements? My station gives exposure to
hundreds of little-known composers who are thrilled that I do this for
them, and some have specifically thanked me for playing entire works,
something no commercial radio station will do any longer.

I submit that this ruling imposes an unfair penalty on classical music. It
should be easy to distinguish multiple tracks that are all from one
classical work from several independent tracks that are truly
noncompliant: the titles will all be the same. For instance, I am now
listed as noncompliant for having a piece by Julius Eastman called “Piano
2,” which is in three movements, and the tracks are labeled “Piano 2,
i,” “Piano 2, ii,” and “Piano 2, iii.” In addition, this
is a private
recording, not even commercially released. No one is losing any income
from my playing this little-known, unrecorded work. Isn’t it possible that
when several consecutive tracks have the same title, except for the
movement number – like “Symphony No. 5” – that some allowance could be
made for it being an integral classical work in several tracks? And how is
it possible for this ruling to apply to works that aren’t even
commercially recorded, and therefore aren’t “tracks from the same CD”
in any meaningful sense?

My station attracts a lot of national attention, and there will be some
public outcry if I have to start scaling back the complete works I play
because a pop paradigm is being imposed on classical music.

Thanks for your attention, etc.

I won’t quote the reply I received, because I didn’t ask permission, but it sort of politely said, Screw you. Here’s a statement from their original notice:

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This piece
of legislation established parameters around which one could build a
business in instances where copyrighted digital material is concerned (e.g. music,
software). It also built in some protections for the content
 companies who produce said digital material, (e.g. the RIAA) as they wanted to
ensure that internet distribution wouldn’t cannibalize sales.

So here I am, paying 30 bucks a month for the privilege of giving my friends’ music away so they can get some exposure, and I’m prevented from doing even that in a way that represents their music correctly because of laws put in place to protect megacorporations from being ripped off by the masses. One can imagine a nearby future in which people will not be allowed to distribute their music to each other unless some corporation is skimming money off the transaction.

Speaking of harmonies that draw specific sources to mind, my friend Bob Gilmore thinks that Morton Feldman ruined the interval of the falling minor seventh – not that it is no longer beautiful, but that using it has become an instant signal of Feldman influence.

Personally, I tell all my students to steal what they want and not worry about their influences showing through. For all they know, their music may be better known a hundred years from now than that of the people they’re stealing from, so they might as well plan for that optimistic eventuality.

Like clockwork, every November of an odd-numbered year I end up teaching Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. And we get to the gorgeous fifth movement “Louange à l’éternité de Jésus” (which I helpfully translate for the students as “Lounging through enernity with Jesus,” using the Spanish “Hay-zeus” pronunciation), and I wonder once again why so many commentators have taken Messiaen to task for using the so-called “added sixth” chord, E-G#-B-C#. Here’s Paul Griffiths on the subject:

There is a discontinuity of taste as well as period…. [T]here comes a little tune of banal perkiness in the “Intermède,” and in the two “Louanges” music that many of Messiaen’s stoutist adherents have found regrettable or else passed over in silence. For not only do the added-sixth and diminished-seventh chords appear at crucial moments and in profusion, but the atmophere is that of the sentimental piety exuding from such similarly scored movements in the French repertory as the “Méditation” from Thais….

This is not to say that Messiaen consciously wrote vulgar music for his two adagios. On the contrary, he has maintained with some fierceness that they are not vulgar at all…. However, a musical sensibility that can form such an opinion is awesome indeed: it takes a sublime, even saintly naïvité to accept materials from Massenet and Glenn Miller, then use them to praise Christ as if they had never been employed for any baser purpose. But this is Messiaen’s way, and though the two “Louanges” offer the greatest stumbling block to the sophisticated, in so doing they only exemplify in extreme fashion a refusal of discrimination typical of Messiaen’s art.

I’m glad to think that Griffiths will think that my musical sensibility is awesome, for I don’t understand what’s wrong with the added-sixth chords at all (nor even the diminished chords, which in the fifth movement are only triads, not sevenths, and which only occur in one transitional measure). Messiaen uses the chord, here and also in the Turangalila Symphony of a few years later, as an ecstatic, sensuous resolution chord, and I find it sublimely perfect for that purpose. Of course there was a period in the swing era in which the added-sixth chord was a standard closing for evergreens and showtunes. So what? What about that invalidates it for use in any other context? The way I see it, the 19th century from Chopin on routinely substituted the third scale degree for the second in a dominant seventh – that is, in the key of C, using G-F-B-E (reading upward) instead of G-F-B-D. To use the sixth scale degree in the tonic triad strikes me as the logical equivalent. Why is such a substitution justified in the dominant (assuming one holds no brief against Chopin), and not in the tonic? It sounds lovely; when I hear it in swing era jazz it reminds me of swing era jazz, and when I hear it in Messiaen, it sounds quite different in context, and reminds me of Messiaen. Yet Griffiths is hardly the only writer to take fierce exception to it.

I have never been able to fathom this mentality that attaches some specific element of music to a certain time and style and thinks it should be buried with that time and style. It seems like a type of insensitivity, an inability to hear sounds in their momentary context. Isn’t it obvious that it’s not what materials you use that counts, it’s what you do with them? In high school I had a composition teacher who wouldn’t allow me to use the chromatic scale because it had 19th-century connotations. I’m happy to report that I have made profitable use of the chromatic scale many times since. I’ve defended a lot of my favorite Downtown music that uses synthesizer from people who say that music with synthesizer reminds them of ‘80s rock, as though that were the most heinous grievance with which a piece of music could be charged.

So, doesn’t the harpsichord sound like 1770’s chamber music? Doesn’t the oboe sound like French Romanticism? How can a timbre, or a harmony, or even a rhythm, so take on the imprint of one era that no one can ever be allowed to use it again? Since Harry Partch used the 11th harmonic, should I abstain? Stravinsky used the octatonic scale, should I leave it alone? And yet, Webern became intimately associated with the major seventh, and for decades afterward, hundreds of composers seemed willing enough to remind the listener of Webern. This guilt-by-association of harmonies and timbres always seems awfully selective, as though the real point is to impress the listener with what company you keep: Webern gooooood, Glenn Miller baaaaaaad. I guess I’m just happy that I’m not sophisticated in Griffiths’s definition, because that much less music is a stumbling block to me.

I’ve also never understood why some people find certain passages in Mahler’s music “vulgar.” Maybe I’m just not very refined.

Opening bars of John D. McDonald’s Kyle Gann in Worcester:

Now up on Postclassic Radio, along with new works by Amy Kohn, Belinda Reynolds, Alvin Singleton, Mason Bates, and Jo Kondo.

One of my cherished self-indulgences is to read each new Gabriel Garcia Márquez novel as it comes out, and he has never disappointed me. His new Memories of My Melancholy Whores, however, contains this startling sentence:

At noon I disconnected the phone in order to take refuge in an exquisite program of music: Wagner’s Rhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra, Debussy’s Rhapsody for Saxophone, and Bruckner’s String Quintet, which is an endemic oasis in the cataclysm of his work. [Italics added]

Do the Colombians know something about Wagner that we don’t? Is there a South American Wagner who isn’t Richard?

Actually, this reminds me of the entrance exams I took to start my Master’s at Northwestern. There was a question on the exam: “Debussy wrote chamber music involving the following instruments:”, and then were listed some pairs of instruments. The only answer at all applicable was “flute and saxophone,” and I knew about Debussy’s Syrinx and Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, but I was pretty certain that he had never written a piece of chamber music using saxophone. So after I was done, I went up and argued with the instructor, Theodore Karp, who later became an important mentor of mine. He claimed there was some chamber arrangement of an orchestral piece with saxophone. Grove Dictionary of Music, as I quickly ascertained, lists no saxophone music among Debussy’s chamber works, but if you rummage around through the orchestral music, there is indeed a piano reduction of his Saxophone Rhapsody mentioned as having been made by one Roger-Ducasse. Even so, that was an awfully obscure bit of repertoire to ask incoming master’s students to know about. It turned out, of course, that if you didn’t pass the test you had to take a remedial course, for which privilege the school charged you an extra $3000. I was the only incoming student that year who passed, and my doctoral exit exams, six years later, were easier than the entrance exams. Ever since I’ve been dubious about grad-school entrance exams, as potentially having more to do with making money for the school than testing worthwhile bodies of knowledge.

Ethan Iverson, himself the rather incredible young jazz pianist of Bad Plus, wrote about my CD Nude Rolling Down an Escalator for Downbeat magazine. (Geez, how hip can I get?) Not content to leave the review there, he’s blogged it here. Not only that, he mentions another mention that I got from blogger Alex Ross. This is getting blogtastic!!