Archives for July 2008

I neglected to note that my profile of the composer Alvin Singleton is out in Chamber Music magazine this month (somewhat overshadowed by Frank Oteri’s long article on – uvallpeople – Charles Wuorinen). I’ve always been impressed by Singleton’s music, and I grew more and more so researching this article. I think calling him a Downtowner would be a stretch, but he’s certainly an imagist in the Messiaen-Shapey-Feldman vein, and his best music is accessible without being obvious, and soulful. I am informed of two gaffes I made: his piece Truth is based on Sojourner Truth, not Rosa Parks, and that was a total brain fart on my part. Also, apparently he lived for awhile in Austria, not Germany, but since he received an award from the city of Darmstadt, I just couldn’t quite keep it straight. 

(My favorite Wuorinen story: When I wrote my book American Music in the Twentieth Century, the publisher sent the manuscript out to four readers for evaluation. Two of them, no less, singled out for praise the fact that I omitted to mention Wuorinen. The guy’s made a lot of enemies. As have I.)

I learned from the internet that Sarah Cahill will be playing my Private Dances on July 18 at Old First Concerts in San Francisco. God bless her.

David Toub alerts me that the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) is back up and running, having overcome copyright difficulties. God bless it too. Although I haven’t found any really cool new offerings to bring to your attention. [UPDATE: In fact, I just clicked on a couple dozen scores and found every one blocked pending determination of copyright status.]

I’ve been looking for newer recordings, on CD. But every other recording I find is too fast, too textural, too “expressive,” too classical – too Uptown. They’re ultrasimple pieces, all white keys, nothing but pentatonic scale in No. 2. As with much of my own music, I sense that classical musicians find the bare notes too uninteresting, and think they have to “interpret” them to breathe life into them. There seems to be no sense anymore that a pure, stately, slow melody (such as one finds in Renaissance polyphony or Japanese Gagaku) can be beautiful. Post-Ligeti, post-Carter, post-Debussy, everything has to be turned into texture, into an illusionistic surface that transcends the notes. No! No!, a thousand times no! Sometimes the notes, played slowly and with dignity and clarity, are all one needs, as in Socrate, as in Musica Callada, as in In a Landscape, as in Snowdrop, as in Symphony on a Hymn Tune, as in The Art of Fugue. 

It strikes me, though this would be difficult to document, that the ’70s were a high point for performers understanding that principle, and we’re now in a deep trough, because lately I’ve had a difficult time getting performers to play my simple music slowly enough; they encounter so little technical challenge that they start to rush, trying to buoy what they fear is dull music through some hint of the virtuosity they’re so proud of. But such music turns trivial when played as quickly as it’s easy to play it, as does much of Cage’s music of the 1940s. Bernas and Wyatt and Eno, coming from the pop world, exhibit far and away a more instinctive understanding of the Zen simplicity Cage was aiming at than any of the more recent renditions. I fear I’ll never find another really beautiful recording of Experiences 1 & 2 again.

An odd thing about Experiences No. 2 is that Cage omitted the final two lines of Cummings’s Sonnet, which I think are the best lines:

But it’s still a gorgeous song, and most gorgeous of all when sung the clean, blank way Wyatt sings it.

Now, imagine me reading that slowly, with pauses between the phrases, and with David Tudor making electronic noises in the background. Doesn’t that sound like it could fit in the recording Indeterminacy? Or try this one:

I’ve never thought of my life as being the kind susceptible to story-telling, but plunging back into the stories that Cage sprinkled liberally throughout his early books has made me rethink. All you have to do is isolate some comment you remember, or event or change of mind, state it flatly with no affect in as few words as possible (or with an optional colorful phrase or two), and – most important of all – without context. By doing so, Cage spread such a Zen flavor around these stories, like they were koans, making his life seem like a series of nonsequiturs in which all the people around him were slightly crazy. Memorized by musicians of my generation and repeated by every biographical commentator for lack of better documented information, these stories stand almost as a smoke-screen against those trying to get insight into Cage’s life. So many of them end in absolutely opaque punchlines that cry out for explication:

Recognize them all, don’t you? And though he didn’t start publishing them until the age of 49, all those enigmatic little stories seemed so perfectly hip for the upcoming ’60s decade whose humor would be defined by nonsense and nonsequiturs like the ones spearheaded by the TV show Laugh-In. It was an amazing anticipation of the ethos of a new era, and reminds you that in his brief career at Pomona College, Cage was known, not as a musician, but as a short-story writer. It strikes me that the stories in Silence had every bit as much to do with Cage’s exploding popularity as the actual lectures and essays did. His sense of style was elegant and irresistible, but, as it turns out, entirely imitable. I’ll try one more:

UPDATE: All right, maybe that last one is a Morton Feldman story. I’ll try another, though one you’ve heard here before:

We’re inviting all scholars working in the area of minimalist music to submit proposals of papers for presentations of 20 minutes each. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to, the following:

Deadline for proposals, from 300 to 500 words, is October 31, which should be e-mailed to 

and 

The committee to select papers will consist (as of now) of myself, Keith Potter, Pwyll ap Sion (codirector of the first conference, and author of a new book on Michael Nyman), and Andrew Granade. 

The first such conference was a tremendous success. We all enjoyed being able to talk freely to academic colleagues about repertoire not always granted much respect in academia. This time we’ve got some dynamite performances lined up, including some seminal minimalist works that haven’t been heard publicly in decades. We’ll be sending this invitation out via various mailing lists shortly, but this is the first public announcement. Please spread the word to anyone you think would be interested. Mikel Rouse has promised to treat us to the world’s best barbecue, which apparently can be found in Kansas City! We’ve gone about as fer as we can go.