Archives for August 2007

[Three updates below.]

Ouch. The great savants of the New York Times music section name their favorite minimalist recordings today. Six critics, given four albums each, limiting themselves to Reich, Glass, Adams, and Riley – plus one album each by Cage (huh?), Poul Ruders, and Count Basie (double huh?). Ouch again. What, no Well-Tuned Piano? No Charlemagne Palestine Strumming Music, or Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone? No Eliane Radigue Adnos, or Trilogie de la Mort? No Tom Johnson An Hour for Piano? No Phill Niblock Hurdy Hurry, or Five More String Quartets? No Tony Conrad Early Minimalism? I imagined that these people had large CD collections.

Next week, the Times food critics list their favorite ice cream flavors: Strawberry, Chocolate, and Vanilla! What else is there?

UPDATE: All right, I don’t think any list of under 50 “best” things can be worth a damn, and I won’t do four, but for the record I’ll give my top five minimalist albums:

Young: The Well-Tuned Piano (unfortunately all but impossible to get, I know, but maybe that’ll justify the fifth disc)

Terry Riley: Shri Camel

Charlemagne Palestine: Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone

Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano (though I prefer Tom’s own performance to the recorded Rzewski one)

Eliane Radigue: Trilogie de la Mort

For a sixth, I might put Glass’s Music in 12 Parts on there, for sentimental reasons. And there are some individual Jon Gibson pieces I’m deeply attached to, but no full album. Reich’s Octet plus John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music might make the top ten if we’re really going to consider Adams’s romanticism minimalist. Reader submissions welcome.

UPDATE 2: Let’s analyze these Times lists in terms of labels:

Nonesuch: 9

Sony: 3

Naxos: 3

Cantaloupe: 3

Bridge, CRI, Mosaic (Basie), New Albion, RCA, and Hungaroton, 1 each

And so we see that, of 24 discs, 13 are from media giants like Warner (Nonesuch), Sony, and RCA, three from Naxos which has been a worldwide marketing success, and three from the Bang on a Can label Cantaloupe, which has done very well at getting its product out. Now, how about all those obscure labels that we minimalism fans rely on to preserve all the great hardcore minimalist music not conventional enough for the major labels, like Table of the Elements, Organ of Corti, XI, New Tone, Robi Droli, Lovely Music, Barooni, Cold Blue, Mode, Blast First? Absent. Omitted. Not represented. What this tells us is that the Times recommendation list is extremely skewed by the commercial market, and that the critics are swayed, not solely by musical quality, but by the companies that manage to put their CDs across their desks, whose representatives call them up and push product. I’ve been there. I’ve had product pushed on me. It didn’t work in my case. I once pissed off Nonesuch so badly they didn’t send me anything for years. I listen to everything I can get, I go to Other Music to find the records that don’t come in the mail, I like what I like, and I don’t assume that, just because something’s on Nonesuch, it’s the best music out there.

UPDATE 3: Steve Smith responds in his blog, and I’m very happy to see him list some great pieces whose titles I would have loved to see in the Times.

It crossed my mind that if I publicly signed off on blogging for a spell, I’d immediately have something to write about. I went to see Mark Morris’s dance Looky, set to my Disklavier studies, at Jacob’s Pillow tonight. The Jacob’s Pillow people treated me with breathtaking graciousness. Scholar and Mark Morris biographer Maura Keefe gave a preconcert talk that quoted liberally from my blog entries about Looky, making my vernacular prose sound rakish in so dignified a setting. Ella Baff, the surprisingly young director of the place, welcomed me, and, standing in the theater, suddenly said, “Maniacs is here. Do you know him? Do you want to meet him?” Her mispronunciation of “maniacs” nonplussed me, but something about her gestures forced my brain to gradually reconstrue the word as “Manny Ax,” and ten seconds later I was shaking hands with the pianist Emanuel Ax. (I maintained enough presence of mind to enjoy her dancer’s assumption that, since I’m a musician, I must know Emanuel Ax, and by his nickname, yet.) For his part, Mr. Ax did a lovely job of seeming to know who I was. I assayed to run back to my car and return with a sheaf of my piano works, but he was gone before I could make the suggestion. The dances went splendidly.

I tried to remember whether any other famous classical musician (not counting John Cage, Robert Ashley, and the postclassical crowd I hang out with) had ever been subjected to a public hearing of my music before, and I can’t think of an instance. I’d love to know what he thought, but it’s been my experience that my Disklavier pieces make pianists nervous.

Sorry, I haven’t been blogging. Even those of us who like the limelight tire of public life occasionally, and fall into a none-of-your-business mood. I’m trying to organize my fall tour of Europe, and all I can think of is one of Groucho’s famous lines from Night at the Opera: “I figure if he doesn’t sing too often he can break even.” That’s exactly the way it looks: how many lectures and concerts can I afford to give? Not as many as I’d planned, certainly, and every one seems to add a few hundred Euros to my expenses, with the dollars piling up at an alarmingly more rapid rate. Who knew Europeans were as broke as we are? I hope to redo my PostClassic Radio playlist soon, which, with the imminent demise of internet radio, I’ve been neglecting. Other than that, the next fly I drop in everyone’s ointment may be a European one, which may make me seem… almost respectable.

UPDATE: I would like to note, though, that today you’ll see 735 given as the number of entries on my blog to date. The number seems insignificant – but 730.5 days is two years, and on August 29 (anniversary of Cage’s 4’33” premiere, and of Katrina’s attack on New Orleans) I will have been at this blog for four years. When I first started out, I doubted my ability or inclination to post frequently, but decided that if I managed to post every other day on the average, that I would count that as a respectable blog presence. I’m now enough ahead of my goal to take a couple of weeks off.

Debra Bresnan of Yamaha has written a story about my experience with the Disklavier for Yamaha’s in-house magazine, posted on the web as well. It includes a photo of me taken recently by composer Adam Baratz, taken on my screened-in porch – where I am sitting at this moment.