Archives for July 2006

I had coffee yesterday with a rising young orchestral conductor, one of the assistant conductors to the New York Philharmonic. He made the remark that he had never seen an orchestra that showed a strong commitment to new music run into financial trouble. When I mentioned the obvious counterexample of Louisville, he said that they had abandoned their interest in new music (or rather, lost funding for the program) ten years before folding. He also commented that conductors who cultivate new and adventurous repertoire (e.g., Salonen and my boss Paavo Jarvi) seem to last in their posts longer than the average six to ten years. He agrees with what I’ve been saying (and said it before I did): that for audience members born after 1975, post-Rite of Spring music is a much bigger draw than 18th- or 19th-century repertoire, and the orchestra needs to start pinning their hopes on it.

I love talking to conductors. They all tried their hands at composing, and they all (though I only meet relatively young ones) feel an idealistic commitment to extending the repertoire toward the present. It’s like living next to a mountain range and then hearing it described by someone who lives on the other side. Of course, the relationship isn’t symmetrical. The eyes of a composer who’s just met a conductor light up with a concupiscence otherwise reserved for scantily-clad statuesque blondes, but the conductors are always nice about it.* Their only collective fault is that they rely too credulously on the composing profession’s official award structures for validation of the music they select. I told the Maestro I thought that being a conductor was the most difficult career anyone could choose; he countered that he felt that dubious honor belonged to composition. He had seen several composer friends reinvent themselves over and over again trying to find a way to survive finanically. But, I replied, when I don’t have a commission, I can always amble into my studio and write another Disklavier piece; I don’t need a group of people to agree to work with me just to exercise my art. I’m sure that my road as a composer would have been easier had I possessed a little charisma, but being a conductor without it is unimaginable.

[*Footnote: Bard has a small MFA program for conductors. I always kid the students that, as they walk across stage to pick up their diplomas, Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and I will be at the end of the line with stacks of our orchestral scores to give them.]

I don’t know much about the Schoenberg scholar Dika Newlin, who just passed away. But from 1965 to 1978 she taught at North Texas State University, and I remember my high school composition teacher speaking of her with reverence and awe. Then one day in college, in a library, I ran across her name and realized she was a woman. I had always thought he was saying “Deacon Ewlin,” as though it were a religious honorific, like “Reverend.” Perhaps because of that, I never managed to bring her into focus. The composer Mason Bates studied with her in Virginia, and speaks highly of her as well.

I bought, because a reader recommended it, The Pimlico Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Composers (1999), by Mark Morris – not the famous dancer, of course, but a Welsh music critic resident in Canada. It is organized by country, which creates some curious ambiguities: for instance, Foss is listed under the U.S.A. and Wolpe under Germany, even though both were born in Germany and emigrated to America. (I think of Wolpe’s late music as highly American, while Foss retains his German accent.) But it has certain advantages, such as listing Iceland’s Thorkall Sigurbjörnsson, New Zealand’s Douglas Lilburn, and Norway’s unfortunate and distinctly underrated Geirr Tveitt, whom most survey histories are unlikely to mention at all.

What’s interesting is the opportunity to see our music world in an exceedingly British mirror. For example, this comment in the section on the U.S.A.:

“It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that in terms of musical impact, and in the reflection of the wider human condition and the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day, none of the American composers has yet matched their European counterparts.”

This is refreshingly frank, and brings up two Eurocentric criteria with which I might have been sympathetic when I was 20, before I became more acclimated to the changes that came with postmodernism. On one hand we have “the wider human condition,” i.e., the programmatic holdover from Romanticism that music is supposed to encapsulate some echo of the bourgeois man’s relation to society. On the other, “the narrower expression of the ethos and ideas of the day,” which seems to reflect a modernist belief that the Hegelian World Spirit, moving ever westward (and stopping for the time being in London, at least until the trains are in better repair), is embodied in a mainstream of music on which all “serious” composers must comment, and to which they all contribute. No dirty rumor of “pluralism” taints these pages. British composers, from that country which the Germans used to call “das land ohne musik,” occupy 72 pages; Americans only 50; Germany gets 49, and Russia 45. Harry Partch, La Monte Young, and Morton Feldman (the most influential composer of the last 25 years) are mentioned only in passing, not granted separate entries, while the names Conlon Nancarrow and Robert Ashley appear nowhere. Meanwhile, the entry on the United Kingdom begins, “The history of British music in the 20th century is a remarkable one,” and includes separate essays on William Alwyn, Ivor Bertie Gurney, Daniel Jenkyn Jones, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Grace Williams, all of whom surely outrank the marginal Feldman.

To an extent, the book indeed complements my own American Music in the Twentieth Century. But I have trouble thinking how I’ll explain away its anglophile exaggerations, and I have ended up taking Paul Griffiths’ more equitable Modern Music and After for my 20th-century music survey class.

My old friend Joshua Kosman, irreverent critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, whom I don’t see often because he’s on the wonderful coast and I’m on the dull one, has succumbed to the tempation to start a blog, titled On a Pacific Aisle. It promises to be entertaining. Joshua is the coiner, among other things, of “Kosman’s Law”: never trust a piece whose title is a plural noun. (Think of all those horrible academic ’70s pieces with titles like Algorithms and Perspectives and Concatenations.)

[UPDATE: The final two sentences of the above entry contain a joke that Joshua and I considered a riot 15 years ago. You may not find it funny, but there’s no reason to get indignant about it. You can’t expect all the jokes to be funny.]

I am informed that my Private Dances will be performed August 12 by pianist Kentaro Noda, at Tokyo Music University, at the end of a four-day piano festival. Mr. Noda’s program for that afternoon (1:00), titled “The Next American Piano,” is:

Justin Henry Rubin: Monumentum pro Giacinto Scelsi ad annum C (2005)

Kyle Gann: Private Dances (2000-2004)

Larry Polansky: tooaytoods #1-11 (2001-2005)

Dary John Mizelle: Piano Sonata no.4 (2001)

Dary John Mizelle: Transforms 1-34 (1976-1994)

All of these are Japanese premieres, and the Polansky and Mizelle are world premieres. This is not only my first performance in Japan, but the first time (as far as I know) that someone’s performed one of my works from downloading it off my web site.

American pianist Blair McMillen will be playing two of the Dances at Caramoor on August 16, and at the Tenri Institute in New York on September 8. Details later. They’re getting around.

My son’s band Architeuthis played CBGB’s last night. (I know, I should have advertised it in my blog. But he had thought they’d play after 10, then they were supposed to start at 8, until they found out there was an opening singer and they were moved to 8:30, so I wouldn’t have been able to tell you when they’d be on anyway. That’s what I always hated about reviewing groups at CBGB’s and Tonic and even the Knitting Factory – the lackadaisical time aspect, the lack of printed information, the casual conviction that you should just hang out with the scene and expeeeeeerience it. For one thing, ten years ago when I’d review groups at CBGB’s I’d be the only audience member over 25, and last night I was really the only audience member over 25. I skulked around in the back with my umbrella, looking, I imagined through the youngsters’ eyes, about as hip as Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca. A friend of Bernard’s recommended that I pass myself off as a record company talent scout. I realize there’s something to be said for just experiencing the music, never knowing what or whom you’re hearing, or when any particular performer is playing, or titles of pieces, or names of players, and that a lot of groundbreaking music has been introduced this way. But when I was a critic trying to write about what I heard it was tremendously frustrating, and now that I’m twice the age of even the bartender, it’s no fun “hanging out” quasi-enthusiastically with people who suspect you just wandered in from Paramus and that someone, as a joke, gave you the wrong address for the theater where you had tickets for Rent. I always had a policy – if I was the only person there over 22, I’d refuse to review the concert, and around 1998 I just swore off those three spaces altogether. I’m an old fart and a classical musician, and I want to sit in a cushioned chair, consult the concert program, and have the music start five minutes after the hour. Respect me less if you want, but I’ll know what I’m listening to.)

As I say, Architeuthis played CBGB’s, or rather the CB Gallery downstairs. Bernard Gann on guitar, Sam Brodsky on bass, Greg Fox on drums. They played seven pieces based on repeated riffs, with some 13/16 meter, a 7-beat ostinato at one point, considerable forays into atonality, and a tendency to suddenly cut off a mass of sound to strip down to one element and then build up again. Somewhat early-Sonic-Youthish, I thought, with loud energy, wider textural range than I would have credited from only two guitars, and considerable compositional finesse. I was thrilled to hear it whatever the circumstances.

It doesn’t get better than this. I just had another serendipitous conflation of recordings. I’m transferring Zemlinsky’s Fourth Quartet, with its marvelously nervous fugue theme in the sixth movement, all 8th-16th-16th, 8th-16th-16th, 8th, and on the other computer was, precisely in tempo, the Balinese monkey chant: “Chaka chaka chaka chaka chaka!” Perfect.

I spent all day writing program notes for the Shostakovich Eleventh Symphony, and I finally pinpointed why I can’t love his music as much as I do Mahler’s. It often demonstrates the same contrapuntal saturation, timbral variety, and rhythmic drive as Mahler, but it lacks meaningful background harmonic movement. A foregrounded chord, tensely sustained, will finally shift to another chord – and then back again, instead of onward toward another, continuing harmony that would make the move seem significant. Long sequences are not unified, as they are in Mahler, by a large-scale voice-leading that leads somewhere. Instead, the large-scale harmony wavers, and fluctuates, and diddles around, leaving the impression that he’s just stretching out the length without a goal in mind. The melodic aspects are great, but the tonal background has no tautness. You can feel the approach to an inevitable Mahler climax ten minutes in advance, but Shostakovich, for all his many virtues, just too often feels harmonically arbitrary. And, as a composer, large-scale voice-leading is one of the things I pay most attention to in my own music. I’m kind of fanatical about it.

And whatever legitimate oppressive hardships Shostakovich had to work under, I doubt that Zhdanov and the Communist Party Central Committee ever cracked down on large-scale voice-leading.

[AFTERTHOUGHT: By the way, I don’t say here that Shostakovich wasn’t a great composer. I say that I can’t love him as much as I do Mahler (one of my very favorite composers) because I’m highly attuned to large-scale harmonic movement. On a good day I’m very precise in my formulations.]

Unfortunately, I have a lot more urgent things to do than update Postclassic Radio, but I did manage to give it a long overdue facelift today, and will continue. I acceded to listener demand by adding some of the out-of-print vinyl I’ve been transferring to disc, including the following:

Morton Feldman: Piece for Four Pianos

Per Nørgård: Spell

Per Nørgård: Gilgamesh, side one

Pauline Oliveros: Horse Sings from Cloud

Pauline Oliveros: The Well and the Gentle (excerpts)

Henri Pousseur: Trois Visages de Liège

Stefan Wolpe: Form IV: Broken Sequences (postclassical? dunno, but I love it)

It finally dawned on me that I have greatly neglected Jon Gibson, and I’ve been remembering how beautiful his early music is, so I’ve added a lot of that, along with some Lou Harrison (from Tony DeMare’s piano album), Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Paul Epstein, David Borden, and a blues, played by Jon Gibson, by one of the earliest minimalists, Terry Jennings. Golden stuff.

Were it not Postclassic Radio, I would also treat you to Franz Schmidt’s silken Piano Quintet in G Major, written in 1926 for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. It’s such a delight to discover it again.

Somewhere recently, and I’ve forgotten where, I read an essay by a Cage fan so avid that he had gone to some trouble to secure a recording of the piece Quantitäten (1958) by the Swedish composer Bo Nilsson, just because of a joking reference Cage had made to it. In his lecture “Composition as Process,” Cage repeats over and over at intervals, as kind of a refrain, the question, “Would you like to hear Quantitäten by Bo Nilsson whether it’s performed for the first time or not?” I chuckled, because I’ve always, thanks to Cage, had a humorous association with that piece myself, though I didn’t remember having ever heard it.

Well, I’ve been wallowing naked in all my old vinyl lately, and I ran across Quantitäten on a record of Scandinavian piano music played by Elisabeth Klein. I disremember whether Fanfare sent me the disc for review, or whether I bought it for Per Nørgard’s powerful and imaginative Second Sonata on the flip side (I used to be a big Nørgard fan, but we don’t hear much about him in the U.S. these days). The liner notes mention that Quantitäten contains 85 different time-values; I have no earthly idea why the composer would consider this important. In any case, others may have a similar curiosity, which I feel compelled to gratify. And so:

Would you like to hear Quantitäten by Bo Nilsson whether it’s uploaded for the first time or not? If so, click here.

It is with some pinch of nostalgia that I put the final touches, this morning, on the list of my complete Village Voice articles, which you can find here. There were 522 of them, from Rebecca LeBreque and Iannis Xenakis to Barbara Benary, from December 2, 1986 to December 5, 2005, 19 years to the week. I decided not to stick around for my 20-year gold watch. I was proud of having outlasted all previous Voice new-music critics, though of course my longevity was dwarfed by Leighton Kerner’s, who was kinda the Uptown critic, but he wrote surprisingly well about Downtown figures before that area was siphoned off to others. I have no regrets about putting it behind me. From 1986 to 1997 it was the greatest job in the world, and I could have done it forever. But by the time my column space had dwindled down to 650 words, and I was no longer hanging out in NYC often enough to grasp what was going on with the younger composers, I had become ashamed that I was holding on to it. Over the last eight years, from the moment the paper went free (and I didn’t see it coming), the Voice ceased to feel like the paper I used to write for, and I felt more and more alien there. Too bad. But I needed a new life as a composer, and I am dubious about the possibility of remaining an expert on music of people a generation younger than oneself. I salute what the Voice once was and, in a sense, will ever be. The new-music community owes a profound gratitude to Bob Christgau, Doug Simmons, Richard Goldstein, Chuck Eddy, and the other editors there who felt that new music was important news. They kept the music we love in the public eye for 45 years.

You know, no one ever taught me how to teach music theory. I’ve been winging it in 16 years of on-the-job training. And if anyone’s got a new idea of how to teach it, I’m all ears.

Several people, in response to my long case for the prosection against college theory, have suggested that a theory curriculum should begin with the study of rhythm. I’m much in sympathy with this idea. Who wouldn’t be? Rhythm is the part of music everybody likes, the part that can lead to every different culture. African mbira music, and Balinese gamelan, and roots-rock reggae, and Renasissance polyphony, and the blues, and Japanese gagaku, and Bulgarian folk music don’t all have harmony in the same sense, and they don’t all use the same pitches, but all God’s chillun’ got rhythm. So let’s start out with the feel-good subject that everyone gets excited about.

And I do. After a little section on pitch notation and a lot of basic rudiments (it’s always surprising how many students don’t know that 15va means two octaves, and you’ve got to explain fermatas, and double sharps, that ties go between noteheads not stems, and get everyone on the same page), we study rhythm. Nearly all my students come in knowing how to read music. We tap 8th-notes in 2/4 and 3/4, and that takes up about 45 seconds. Differences between 3/4 and 6/8 take about another two minutes. The idea that there are 3 beats in 9/8 and 4 in 12/8 is not going to sink in clearly for weeks, if ever, but I introduce it. Then, being a composer, and having 62 minutes of class time left, I get fancy, as composers do. I chart the possible organizations of 5/8 and 7/8 and 11/8. I play them amazing recordings of Bulgarian folk songs in 11/16 and 7/8 meter. I go into polyrhythms, and show how to figure out 4-against-3, and 5-against-6, and “PASS the GOD-damned BUTter” and “SHE’S PREGnant, DON’T know WHAT to DO,” and all that. They find it interesting. I mention fractional meters, and non-power-of-two meters like 4/6 and 17/24, as found in Boulez’s music and my own. I have even gone so far as to beat a steady quarter-note, have half the class clap 4-in-the-space-of-5 and the other half 5-in-the-space-of-4, and let them figure out that they’ve just performed 16-against-25. It’s a blast.

Now, before you bring up the obvious objection, let me say that, the arbitrary way we organize it, I don’t teach ear-training. We have a young woman who teaches that, who sings a hell of a lot better than I do, and thank goodness she’s not as good-looking as me or the contrast would be really depressing. Teaching students to perform rhythms accurately, or to notate them from dictation, is a long, grueling, never-ending process. It’s performative, and it takes practice. I don’t do a lot of that in theory class. She does.

But let’s just survey the progression theoretically. The students have learned that Bulgarians have no trouble singing in 11/16, and that 16-against-25 is performable. They never imagined such possibilities. The entire rhythmic world seems open and full of adventure. What do we do next? We look at a friggin’ Mozart minuet. BAA-dum-dum, BAA-dum-dum, BAA-dum-dum. Short of inviting some actual Bulgarians into the classroom (and there are never any around when you need them), there’s not much I can bring into class as examples that pursues these newfound possibilities aside from a few pieces in Bartok’s Microcosmos. What am I going to say to freshmen, “Now that you’ve learned how to do 11 over a 4/4 meter, let’s open Stockhausen’s Gruppen“? The sad truth is that all the music they’re going to encounter before they see The Rite of Spring in my Modernism class, and in fact 98% of the music they’re going to run into in their entire life, falls, rhythmically, into two categories:

1. Classical-based notated music which is almost inevitably in 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, or 12/8, and

2. Pop music whose rhythms are basically unnotatable, but are tortured into wildly inaccurate quasi-syncopations in the sheet music that would sound wretchedly stilted if you actually sang them that way, and are almost all in 4/4 anyway.

The sad truth is, we in the West come from a rhythmically impoverished culture, and to the extent that our rhythms are livelier than Schubert’s, it’s in a performance-based way that is not capturable in notation. Were I a faded reggae star sent to pasture in the classroom, I’m sure I could give some wonderful demonstrations of different ways to swing a 4/4 beat, but, take my word, a Kyle Gann in dreadlocks is not a sight you want to spring on a bunch of impressionable freshmen.

By now you’ve got your finger on the “comments” button, but stop!: I already know what you’re going to say. The rhythmic interest in classical music isn’t in unusual meters or polyrhythms, it’s much more subtle than that. It’s in the different hierarchical ways to combine measures into phrases, the way a measure or group of measures can play anacrusis to a structural downbeat. It’s true. I took a rhythmic analysis course in grad school, and while my fellow RILM addicts did their final projects on Bartok, Stravinsky, Ginastera or somebody, I rather negatively astonished them by analyzing the Adagio of the Bruckner Seventh. And what I found impressive was the way that the delayed resolution of Bruckner’s large-scale structural syncopations, all pointing toward that cymbal crash at the climax, interacted with the harmonic rhythm and tonal resolution. But it’s obvious from the very words I’m using that this is a subject requiring considerable sophistication. I am not convinced that the hierarchical rhythmic organization of classical music can be reliably discussed without reference to harmonic rhythm, and thus harmony. To dissect rhythmic organization in classical music requires knowing the harmonic rhythm, and how dissonance and resolution affect rhythmic perception, and thus you have to know harmony first.

In addition, large-scale rhythmic organization is not unambiguous, but prone to subjective interpretation. One chamber music coach will tell the players to move the music forward to this point, another to that point. How many arguments are there in print about the correct accentuation of the opening of Beethoven’s First String Quartet, or the Fifth Symphony? It is not, I don’t think, something you can teach freshmen by pointing to on the page without first teaching them, through performative experience, a large number of relevant analytical and right-brain criteria without which they will be incapable of deciding whether a beat is “important” or “emphasized” or not.

Someone suggested the book The Rhythmic Structure of Music by Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer, which is a good book that I hadn’t looked at in many years. I’m not going to go back to campus for my copy on a lovely summer’s day, but one can reread excerpts at Amazon, and on page 15 I find the following:

Because the more a tone seems to be oriented toward a goal, the more it tends to function as an anacrusis, rising melodic lines, particularly conjunct ones, tend to become anacrustic. The energy and striving implicit in a rising line make each successive tone move toward the one which follows it, rather than from the one preceding it. A rising melodic line feels very much like a crescendo. Indeed, most people perceive it as such. This is shown not only by the tendency of performers to crescendo in rising passages and of composers to indicate crescendos over rising passages much more frequently than over descending ones, but also by the fact that people actually tend to hear higher pitches as louder, even though intensity remains constant.

To the seasoned musician who reads this, this is very clear, and is validated by experience. It draws together a million intuitions one has had in the playing of music, and creates articulate order from myriad vague impressions. To the young guitarist in a garage band who’s just found out there’s music beyond Phish, I can’t imagine what this could mean, if anything, beyond a platitude that he would immediately contradict by writing a crescendo over a descending line. If forcing them through augmented sixth chords is torture, what would this be? The book’s preceding examples of different ways to notate “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in order to suggest different rhythmic organizations seem designed to challenge a web of assumptions that the beginning musician has not yet formed. The subtle higher-level organization of classical rhythm is, it seems to me, a subject for which an experienced musician can draw on his experiences, not an empty theoretical container that the 18-year-old musician can fit her upcoming experiences into as she gathers them.

In short, I can’t see that the theory of rhythm can be taught, at the beginning of a musical education, in anything like the same methodical and exhaustive abstract way, on a blackboard, that the theory of harmony can. The music of India is one of the most rhythmically complex and sophisticated on earth: how does the Indian student learn rhythm? From observing his teacher, who is a master performer, and who says, “Watch me and repeat what I do.” At its deepest, rhythm is a feeling that enters the system through the body and the right brain. Analyzed before it is felt, it becomes stilted. I believe that my student’s piano teacher can teach him more about rhythm than I can, by saying, “No, play it like this. Put the accent here. See how much better it sounds?” After a few years of that, and with an understanding of harmony under his belt, the student can then embark on the rhythmic analysis of entire works, which is a fascinating study.

I would that it were not so. Perhaps I’m mistaken. If anyone can offer a different way to think about it, it would be a relief to jettison all my inconvenient opinions about the subject.

For the first time in many years, I’ll be teaching a 20th-century history survey this fall. In preparation I’m transferring a lot of old vinyl records to CD, and a lot of CDs to my external hard drive (more than 8500 mp3s so far), so that any time a title flashes through my mind, I’ll be able to punch it up and play it in class. My entire musical youth, including many pieces never available on CD, is going onto this hard drive, and it’s a trip down memory lane. I’m using one computer to record the vinyl, another to rip the CDs, and so I’ve been enjoying a Cagean clash of simultaneous composers: Ligeti, Harbison, Jon Gibson, Betsy Jolas, Diamanda Galas, Barraqué, Del Tredici, Niblock, Sculthorpe, Nono, Carter, Ferneyhough, yada, yada, yada.

At one point I had Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony playing along with Diamanda’s Tragouthia Apo To Aima Exoun Fonos (Song from the Blood of Those Murdered). Diamanda was riffing off a high B, hitting notes all around it and always returning. The Rachmaninoff was in E minor, modulating in a way that kept B in the harmony as a pivot note. Like an avenging angel, she poured her passionate lament into Rachmaninoff’s gently commiserating chorale, perfectly in tune, like it was all planned out. It was the most thrilling musical moment I’d had in awhile.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Actually, it was in harmony, but out of tempo, which sounds like an average description of my own music. No wonder I loved it.