Archives for March 2011

Tomorrow night my string quartet Concord Spiral is being premiered by Contemporaneous, the remarkable new-music ensemble of Bard students run by Dylan Mattingly and David Bloom that’s not connected with Bard, they just do it. They give several concerts a year here, and tour from Hudson to NYC. This concert’s at 8 PM at the Bard Chapel, and also includes world premieres by Ryan Chase and William Zuckerman.

And I’m still on a high from my residency at Central Michigan University, who on Tuesday presented the best-performed one-composer concert of my music I’ve ever had. It was nice being back in the midwest, the vibe less snobbish, the students more eager to learn – though perhaps one can’t generalize just from CMU. It’s a subject for when I have time to write more, which I may not for a few more weeks.

I’m in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, which the locals freely admit is smack in the middle of one of the flattest expanses of real estate in North America. Were it not for fences and the occasional bridge over a highway, I think I could roll a golf ball from here to Detroit. Here, the music department of Central Michigan University is kindly presenting a concert of my music for this Tuesday evening, and I’ll be meeting with composition students until then. I was invited by Director of Music Events John Jacobson, but my host has been composer Jay Batzner, whose name I hear all over the country, but whom I’d never met. In fact, he seems to be one of a group of former UMKC/University of Louisville grad students, including also Brent Miller, Rebecca Doran Eaton, David McIntire, and Brian Herrington, whose names I encounter so ubiquitously in my travels that I’ve concluded that they’re a cabal intent on taking over all new-music activity across much of the United States, in which venture I wish them every success. CMU is a farflung campus of large buildings, with a huge, stone, yet dashingly designed music center. The concert is Tuesday night, March 29, at 8 in the Staples Family Concert Hall in said music building. Students and faculty are playing my Snake Dance No. 2, New World Coming, Olana, Minute Symphony, and Kierkegaard, Walking, and I’ll play Charing Cross and Solitaire. If the only way you can get here is by bicycle, at least it’s a straight shot.

Nervous as I get when I’m in charge of something, the minimalism colloquium I directed at Bard last weekend was nevertheless a continual pleasure. Eight of us musicologists got together to air the more-or-less-completed torsos of our chapters for the Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music. The Brits (Keith Potter, Pwyll Ap Sion, John Pymm) were the energy behind this, and it seems a rather British way of doing things; I’d never been through such a process before. But we do want to make sure that the different chapters balance each other well, and that every aspect gets covered. We meet with the European contributors in Birmingham in a few weeks. We’ve already found that some of the people mining Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain for political resonance will have to find another example, or else truth in advertising will require that we retitle the book the Ashgate Companion to It’s Gonna Rain. For some reason, that piece is an unsuspected mother lode of semiotic treasures. Emphasis on Reich, Glass, and Riley is pretty overwhelming, and I realized in mid-paper that we have no one slated to cover Harold Budd, which would be an unforgivable omission. For some of my California composer friends, he was the Alpha Minimalist, and from afar he was a tremendous influence on me as well. A history of minimalism without him would be laughably incomplete.

Interesting insights arose. Jonathan Bernard wrote about minimalist influences on pop music (the reverse would be an equally worthwhile topic), and he pointed out that almost all of his examples were instrumental; because, he said, once you put vocals over a minimalist-sounding track, it ceases to sound minimalist. David First, who was in attendance because I had brought him in to punctuate the proceedings with a concert, murmured, “Same with minimalism.” David and I had already talked about his feeling that the distinguishing feature of minimalism is that you’re listening to a background, and that the moment you add a distinct foreground element, the impression of minimalism vanishes. This fits hand in hand, I think, with my own formulation that minimalism separates out and dissociates left brain and right brain aspects of music, leaving the left brain somewhat at sea because of the resulting lack of time-orientation. (I mentioned to Bill Duckworth the next day that David had said minimalism was all background, and he responded, “But there’s a transient middle-ground.” I’ll have to think about all this.) There are certainly different repertoires covered by different emphases of the word minimalist, which Keith Potter sums up by separating the “radical” minimalism of La Monte Young and Phill Niblock from the “conservative” minimalism of post-1975 Glass and Reich; it occurred to me to call these the “raw” and “cooked” forms. Wide as the cultural applications may ultimately be, there are those of us who still want our minimalism raw and difficult, and I had picked David to get that point across, which his growling music, pulsing in acoustic beats rather than notated meters, certainly did.

One more quote I can’t resist repeating came from Rebecca Eaton’s paper. She had compiled an exhaustive history of film music by the major minimalist composers, and cited a critic who wrote that minimalist music, once considered weirdly experimental, had by now become a kind of “spray-on gravitas” for Oscar-seeking films.

The occasion also confirmed what’s been dawning on me for a while: that, in general, musicologists are a lot more fun to hang out with than composers. Each composer sees most of the others as his or her competitors for the same small list of gigs and honors. I find these days that most composers come out of grad school with a long list in their heads of what composers aren’t supposed to do in a piece of music, and they use those don’ts to disqualify other composers, if possible, from serious consideration. When I walk into a room of composers I’ve come to expect to encounter a certain veil of resistance and disapproval. Musicologists, by contrast, are all in this together. When one publishes a book on Michael Nyman, it doesn’t step on the toes of the one who’s writing a book on Gavin Bryars, but rather provides welcome information. We’re all contributing to the same edifice of knowledge, and no one is expecting personal immortality to be the reward. As reluctant as many composers are to consider me a composer, the musicologists have unhesitatingly embraced me as one of them, even though all my degrees are in composition. No one tells me, “That’s not really serious musicology.” And I’m not the only one who feels this way; some of our minimalism mavens (David McIntire, Pwyll Ap Sion, David Dies) are also composers, and I’ve noted here before that I meet more and more young composers getting their graduate degrees in musicology. It’s a happier and more open-minded field. The realization is changing the direction of my career. Five years ago I’d determined not to write any more books and to concentrate only on my music, but I’ve since decided to keep musicologizing, simply because I like hanging out with those guys.

I never liked Facebook. I joined by accident. Someone contacted me asking about a pianist who played my music 30 years ago, and I looked her up and found a Facebook page. I had to join to see her page, and it turned out to be the wrong person anyway. I didn’t understand the privacy controls at first, and my Facebook page was a morass of conversations by people I’d mostly never heard of. I figured most of the people who wanted to friend me were musicians advertising their concerts and recordings, and I had no particular reason to turn anyone down. I have a phobia about crowds (I’ve always said that determined my choice of musical genre) and Facebook seemed like a virtual Chinatown. Then a couple of composers started a thread bewailing my malign influence on American music, and I was receiving notifications of each new insult. It was Christmas Eve, and so I joined the thread to post, “And a very merry Christmas to you gentlemen as well.” Then I went to Facebook (I just now typed “Fecabook” as a Freudian slip) and found the FAQ “How do I delete my Facebook page?”, which I thought it was interesting that that was a FAQ, and I followed directions. I’m happier. My e-mail in-box is far less cluttered, I have more spare time, and I was already the easiest person on the internet to contact via e-mail anyway.

But now I’m getting the occasional plaintive query from friends, “Why did you remove yourself from my Facebook friends?” Please know that you weren’t singled out. It was a grid that I never liked being on.