Archives for August 2009

“Don’t talk to yourself” is a reminder that talk isn’t a part of understanding, but a habit, an arrangement of sounds. The arrangement requires a partner, and thus, historically, marriage followed conversation. “Don’t talk to yourself” means to stop arranging things when you’re alone, and to not use for yourself what belongs to all of us: sounds. “Speak only when you’re spoken to” represents the dilemma of the second historical eon, in which humankind struggled to reconcile its arrangements of marriage and religion, leading to the third eon, in which we make sense: “we have accomplished ourselves, / (Or invented man, as The Philosopher says).” 

The background here is that Ashley was, at the time, immersed in a 1976 book that I also read when it was new, Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes’s theory was that the ancients, for example the ancient Greeks, had no communication between the hemispheres of their brain, and received messages from the right hemisphere that seemed to come from outside, and they interpreted those messages as the voice of gods. So, for instance, Agamemnon hearing the voice of Apollo was actually hearing an auditory hallucination from his own brain. Later man learned to integrate the two hemispheres, so the voices no longer sounded like they were coming from outside. The book was controversial at the time, but the nitwits at Wikipedia seem to suggest that it has withstood scrutiny. (All the cockeyed ideas I ingested about left brain/right brain theory started with that book.) At the other end, Ashley was convinced at the time that he had a mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome, in that he sometimes had to leave parties to let off an involuntary stream of words – and it was in recording those words that Perfect Lives began. So he’s actually tracing a presumed history of consciousness from when speech was involuntary and hallucinatory (the eon before “Don’t talk to yourself”) to its use in creating social connections to its reflexive function in a narrative that gives life meaning – the increasingly conscious employment of language. Ed and Gwyn’s wedding is thereby contextualized at that point in human evolution; on top of which, the vegetarian Theosophist Ed is modeled on a guy Ashley knew in high school who wanted to marry his sister, and who is further described in his opera Dust, and so on. The levels never end.

Also Ashley, let us not forget, was kept from getting a music doctorate by my book’s arch villain Ross Lee Finney, so instead he worked at the U. of Michigan Speech Research Lab, funded by Bell Laboratories, doing groundbreaking research on the causes of stuttering. And so Ashley’s given a lot of thought to the purpose and origins of speech for several decades, and the basic idea of his life’s work since 1978 is that language is music. Some people refuse to consider him a composer because they can’t understand this simple, crucial, and scientifically defensible point. His opera Foreign Experiences is full of profanity because profanity is how we slow speech down and attend to its sound rather than its sense; and one of my favorite Ashley lines is one I haven’t retraced to its source yet: “Who could speak if every word had meaning?” And threaded through his operas you find fragments of an epistemology and a philosophy of language, as in “The Church”:

So for Ashley language is an arrangement of sounds (“Sound is the only thing we can arrange”) that is really music, and its meaning is secondary to its interpersonal and aesthetic functions of binding us together and clarifying our arrangements. He says that Jacqueline Humbert (Linda in Improvement: Don Leaves Linda) and his son Sam pick up the intentions of his operas instantly because they’re both from southern Michigan and can catch his inflections: in other words, his operas are about the music of the way southern Michiganders speak.

Now, there are three reactions you can have to all this, and I have all three at once: This is crazy; This is unbelievably profound; and, There’s some scientific or historical truth being presented in this oblique way, and I ought to be able to tease it out. But it’s all poetry, and so resists both paraphrase and explanation. Perfect Lives is, I’ve become convinced, one of the great epic poems in the English language, the Paradise Lost of postmodernism. Ashley is the perfect new composer for nonmusicians, because his operas deal with crucially essential stuff outside the music world. You have to read a lot of books to fully trace Ashley’s steps, and I’m going to have to write my own book and then read those books: otherwise I won’t know what I’m looking for. For instance, I read in Lama Anagarika Govinda’s introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead that the “illusoriness of
death comes from the identification of the individual with his temporal,
transitory form, whether physical, emotional, or mental”; and it hits me that, in “The Park,” Raoul de Noget muses, 

The more I read Ashley and listen to the details and try to thread it all together, the more awestruck I am. What some commenter here said of Charles Ives is true of Ashley too: he’s so incredible that people can’t believe someone can be that brilliant and insightful and prophetic, so they just assume there’s some hoax going on: the confederacy of dunces phenomenon. I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a more profound figure in the history of music.

I was looking for some old papers and stumbled across this piece that I wrote as a first-semester freshman at Oberlin, in 1973. It’s a setting of a poem by Jean Valentine, The Knife, which I’ve written about here before. This isn’t the final score, which is lost, but a first draft – and since we did actually perform it, I hope to god I was forced to put in bar lines and rhythmicize all those damn grace notes in the piano. I was somewhere between Berio’s Circles, Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke, and George Crumb, with lots of piano pizzicato and the flutist and pianist whispering certain words in echo of the soprano. Geez. I think somewhere I may even have a recording of it. I promise to destroy it before I pass on to a better world.

Anyway, you can see that I was a nice, enthusiastic, obedient modernist at one point. I so impressed people with the complexity of this piece that I was admitted to private lessons my second semester, instead of spending a whole year in the composition class, which was the intended norm. But in summer of ’74 I discovered Glass and Reich, and though I wrote one more cerebral, dissonant, unfinished piece after this, I wrote a piece called Satie in spring of ’75, entirely in the C major scale – I had acquired a new girlfriend, always the impetus behind a major creative breakthrough for male composers between 17 and 23, and I leaped into minimalism like a man leaping from a sinking ship to a fragile raft. It may have been the most sensible move of my life.

Of course, what made my atonal music so awful in that period was my monochromatic criterion for choosing each next note: as dissonant with the preceding as possible. The moratorium I truculently upheld on fifths, sixths, and thirds is absurd. Today if a student brought me crap like this I’d try to show him or her some second-level way of working with pitch sets or interval sequences that would allow for more harmonic nuance and variety. By the time I wrote Satie I had had, however briefly some of them, six composition teachers: Howard Dunn, Alvin Epstein, Joseph Wood, Randy Coleman, Karl Korte, Greg Proctor. I don’t remember any of them dealing with this issue, though it’s entirely possible that they did and I was just too immature to grasp the problem or take the bait. I have never felt comfortable with the mechanical or algorithmic generation of pitches, though ironically it seemed more acceptable in a diatonic or pitch-restricted context, where the results had a simpler profile. I do wonder how things might have been different had I found a simpatico teacher as an undergrad, which I never did. I am far closer to some of my composition students than I ever was to an undergrad composition teacher, and I give them a hell of a lot more encouragement than I ever received.

There is a broad continuum, of course, between language-based and image- or idea-based, with most composers in-between somewhere, but I think I am nearer the latter extreme. Moreover, I think the same is true of many composers of my generation, particularly those who once got excited about minimalism or conceptualism. 

So I habitually explain this phenomenon in terms of postminimalism, but I also regard it as something of a pop sensibility in my music. That may, indeed, only relate to Brian Eno. I was excited, back in the ’70s, to discover Eno’s instrumental albums Music for Airports and especially Another Green World. It would be too simplistic to say I got the idea from Eno, but I immediately grasped something I wanted to copy in Eno’s little instrumentals that simply repeated the same motif over and over, with a characteristic rhythm and timbre. It was also far more true of his songs than of most pop songs, too: songs like “The Fat Lady of Limbourg,” “Julie with…,” “Blank Frank,” “King’s Lead Hat,” “Here He Comes,” were remarkably distinct in their identities, each with a characteristic, instantly recognizable accompaniment pattern and sound. I saw that distinctness as a delightful virtue that set Eno far above the other pop music I heard. I thought Another Green World‘s vignettes were perfect in their way but shorter and more simplistic than what I wanted to aim for; I imagined pieces like his but lasting for ten or 20 minutes, with the materials revealed less repetitiously, more intuitively or permutationally. A composer’s education being what it is, I remained wrapped up in the more classical language-based paradigm through the ’80s (I’itoi Variations, The Convent at Tepoztlan), but I’ve kept that goal in mind, and seem to be getting closer and closer. 

The thing is, I don’t think we have much of a tradition yet for discussing music in such terms. We recognize Feldman’s musical language, and Xenakis’s, and Ligeti’s, and Glass’s, and we talk fluently about composers who develop the same language in piece after piece. We have more trouble discussing in general terms composers like Larry Polansky, Jim Tenney, Eve Beglarian, Clarence Barlow, and myself who may write atonal pieces, microtonal pieces, tonal pieces, world-music-influenced pieces, process pieces, idea-based pieces, and who devote more creative energy to the specific world of each piece, the working out of each idea, than to the development of a general language in which one could sit down and write a song, a concerto, and a quartet using similar textures and materials. I believe there is a throughline (though I don’t worry about it much) to the types of ideas I grapple with, even though the surface materials change radically from work to work. It’s a fairly new, piece-based rather than style-based paradigm that I hope writers on music start to wrestle with, because in discussions of style, I and some of my favorite composers are likely to be left out – for reasons that are entirely intentional on my part, and that I have no desire to reverse.