Archives for September 2013

I will be spending next week in warm, sunny Long Beach, California, at the Fourth International Conference on Minimalist Music, sponsored by the Bob Cole Conservatory at Cal State Long Beach. It’s the great biennial social event of my life, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m delivering my paper “‘Eventfulness Is Really Boring’: Robert Ashley as Minimalist” on Saturday morning, October 5, at the 11:30 session, and there’s another Ashley paper as well, by Charissa Noble. In addition, on Oct. 3 pianist Bryan Pezzone is giving a piano recital of composers associated with the Cold Blue label, and something of mine is included. I have no idea what, because they’ve never contacted me. It’ll be a nice surprise, and an honor, which I hardly deserve, because even if I do perversely consider myself a minimalist, I could hardly argue with those who insist that I’m not. (To be more exact, I swerve between postminimalism and totalism, depending on the medium.)

I’ve decided every book I write will provide my material for the subsequent minimalism conference. So look forward to the 2015 event, at which I will undoubtedly present “Charles Ives as Minimalist.” I can make the case!

UPDATE: The complete schedule of papers for the conference is up here, with the individual titles and presenters at the bottom of the page.

Displaced quintuplets in apparent 4/4 meter, from my new piece Sang Plato’s Ghost (click for better focus):

 

Today at a local hangout I met Hudson Valley composer Brian Dewan. I knew the name. We got to talking, and he mentioned a composition teacher of his who had enlarged his view of modern repertoire. Idly curious, I asked who it was. “Joe Wood,” he replied.

I think my glass of wine hit the bar with a thud. “Joe?! Wood?! You went to Oberlin?”

He had, eight years after I did. Joseph Wood (1915-2000) was a composer who had come mainly from the commercial music world. Wikipedia credits him with an arrangement of “Chiquita Banana” for Xavier Cugat, a career in Muzak arrangements, and the choral writing for the musical Brigadoon. Yet he had a 1950 orchestra piece, simply called Poem for Orchestra, on a CRI record. He was my first composition teacher in college, and taught the only orchestration class I ever took. As Brian and I both remembered, he was looked down upon by the hot-shot Oberlin comp students as an old fogey, but we each thought of him as a kindly gentleman. There was a persistent rumor that he had written the Looney-Toons cartoon theme. I never quite believed it, and Brian had actually asked him if it was true. He said Joe looked off into the distance for a long moment and replied with some melancholy, “I never did that.” His taste did seem quite wide-ranging considering his personal Romantic aesthetic; I remember being assigned to orchestrate an early Stockhausen klavierstück, though I can’t imagine what the criteria of success would have been. Brian remembered him praising Ligeti as someone who had never written a bad piece.

Joe Wood gave me what was, for its timing, one of the most comforting compliments I have ever received. We were at the Midwest Composers Symposium in Iowa or some godforsaken place, and ended up walking back together after a concert. He was complaining about some horrible piece we had just heard. The previous evening, I had had a piece played that was a godawful improvisatory graphic score filled with theatrical silliness. Pausing after his diatribe, Joe said, by way of contrast, “Your piece was young, but it had talent.” To say my piece was young was an understatement; it was pompously puerile. To say it showed talent was an outright lie; whatever talent I have, that youthful experiment did not reveal. But for him to say that to a freshman conferred a touching dignity upon me at a time in my life in which dignity was still an unfamiliar thrill. I have not heard his name often in the intervening years, but when I have I have always conferred a reflexive blessing upon it.

I am listening to Poem for Orchestra as I write; I digitized it a few years ago for old time’s sake, and keep it on my hard drive. And I drink a toast tonight to a composer mostly forgotten now, but one whom two former students could think of fondly decades after he gently touched their lives.

 

I am in receipt, today, of a few copies of pianist Sarah Cahill’s new compact disc on the Other Minds label, A Sweeter Music. It’s a compilation of eight pieces from her project commissioning composers to write music that protests war and urges peace – out just in time for our Nobel-winning president to bomb the hell out of Syria. On it Sarah plays (and speaks) my War Is Just a Racket, on a 1933 speech by General Smedley Butler, along with other pieces by Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, Carl Stone, Phil Kline, Yoko Ono, and the Residents. There’s a lot of sensuously beautiful stuff on this disc; my piece and the Residents’ are the only ones to use text. Sarah does a magnificent job, as always, and will be recording the other ten pieces from the collection at a future date.

 

Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat?

Because really good teaching is not about seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call counterintuitive, but to the teacher simply means being honest.

– Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, p. 181

At the request of my department chair – and he so rarely asks me for anything, I could hardly have turned him down – I am teaching a 20th-century music history survey course, or rather, music since 1910. I’ve been dreading it, and my fears are so far confirmed. First of all, I have long been convinced that you can’t do the entire 20th century in a survey course. To me, third-semester music history should be 1900-1960, and the fourth semester should take over after that. Not only is there way too much material, there’s no unifying idea to the first and second halves of the century. The year 1976 seems to remain a popular stopping point for many professors and textbooks, and I wonder if anyone (besides me) has ever taught a 20th-century class in which the last three decades got as much attention as the first three.

Secondly, while it’s always easy to know where to start, and has always been tricky knowing where to end, these days ending is impossible. Forty years ago, when I took this course at Oberlin, you could begin with Stravinsky and Schoenberg and work your way up, decade by decade, through the various movements and major figures. It was assumed that the language of music was evolving, and that that evolution could be traced, with a few detours and parallel streams. But of course, now we know what happens: past 1970 the idea of a mainstream evaporates, and – as musicologist Leonard Meyer so shrewdly predicted – we entered a kind of stasis in which many, many styles compete and continue. Everything is permissible; a million things have been done, anything we can imagine will be done eventually, and many things that had been done get done all over again. I suppose if you’re a hard-core traditionalist it’s easier to draw your boundaries, but the Downtown music I like to focus on blends into jazz and pop around the edges. I have to argue with students for the right to teach Laurie Anderson, Pamela Z, and Mikel Rouse as postclassical music. Just deciding what music to include within the definitions of the course requires a whole separate section on the philosophy of music.

And I am finding that the philosophical difficulties extend into the past retroactively. I know perfectly well what I’m supposed to teach, and in fact, I am quite lucky in my mandated choice of textbook: the new Taruskin/Gibbs Oxford History of Western Music. The book itself has revisionist leanings and casts its own sly suspicions on orthodox pedagogy, and so is more in sync with me than any other textbook I could use. The best thing I can say about it is that its pronouncements never make me wince, which I consider high praise in this context. We use it for the entire music history sequence because its quality is so high; the fact that Professor Gibbs is on our faculty is, of course, entirely coincidental (as is the fact that I am heavily quoted in the final chapter).

But given the sequence of the textbook, I have to start out with Schoenberg, and for me, to start with Schoenberg already puts everything on the wrong track. (If this offends you, read further at your own risk, because it’s only downhill from here.) The assumption of Schoenberg’s importance, given the continuing unpopularity of his music, is founded on the further assumption that what we’re teaching is the evolution of the musical language. In fact, the very title of our music history sequence, The Literature and Language of Music (“lit’n’lang” in departmental parlance, reminding me of “live ‘n’ learn”) presupposes that there is a language of music evolving through its canonical examples. If you want to trace a certain absolutist attitude toward atonality, and the development of the 12-tone row as a technical device, Schoenberg is of course essential to the sequence of events. But does his music, therefore, deserve pride of place in the literature?

I consider it the most important thing I can teach my students, assuming I ever succeed in getting it across, that a lot of music that seems nonsensical or off-putting at first is well worth putting the effort into assimilating. Nothing irks me more than the reflexive resistance they put up against music they don’t “like” on first listening. When I was their age, any piece I didn’t understand represented a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down to my musical intelligence. There was not going to be any piece I couldn’t fathom. (Many fine “conservative” pieces I could superficially comprehend, I now realize I dismissed rather too easily.) And yet, there is now tons and tons of difficult, complicated, obscure music, and after 45 years of deciphering it I am aware that not all of it eventually repays the effort. I was determined to master the intricacies of the Concord Sonata, Le Sacre du Printemps, Pli selon pli, Turangalila, Mantra, Philomel, and I love them all, I’m devoted to them, thrilled to introduce students to them. Other works that I committed many, many listening and analytical hours to – almost all of Schoenberg, everything by Berg except Wozzeck, all but a few pieces of Elliott Carter – simply bore me today. I know that Op. 31 Orchestra Variations and that damn “Es ist genug” violin concerto inside and out, but they strike me as awkward and pedantic. I listen to them with acute understanding of how they’re made, but never admiringly. A lot of that music I feel I was brainwashed into taking very seriously, and the effects of my youthful brainwashing are largely worn off.

So, of the music I cannot honestly advocate to students on account of what I perceive as its inherent virtues, by what criterion do I urge it on them? If historical importance is the guideline, then one needs to climb the ladder of influences, but it turns out that that ladder frays into a maze at the top. And actually, looking back from 1970, any sense of a mainstream had pretty much died as soon as neoclassicism was pitted against dodecaphony. The moment Scriabin, Ives, Stravinsky, Varése all separately agreed to use sonorities never heard in music before, everything really became permissible instantly – it just took a few generations to realize the implications. People today still write neoclassic music, still write 12-tone music. Partch leaped into just intonation only 15 years after The Rite of Spring, seven years after the first 12-tone row, and that’s the course I’m still on. 4’33” is closer in time to Pierrot Lunaire than it is to the present. If we’ve had a hundred years of multi-subcultural stasis, how much does it really matter who did something first? My students get a much bigger kick out of Gruppen and Sinfonia than they do from Webern, and since I agree with them, why not simply detail the pedigree of the 12-tone idea as part of a discussion of serialism? Why play the first 12-tone music instead of the most rewarding?

In fact, to present 12-tone music as a major movement at all, I have to attempt to explain why certain composers considered it so crucial to have some universal new system to replace tonality. And the truth is, I don’t understand why they felt that way. I’m so much more in sympathy with what Ives wrote: “Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see. Why it should always be present, I can’t see.” Tonality is so widely evident in much well-regarded music of recent decades that my students and I share the same incomprehension on this point. It sounds like an episode that belongs in the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Some people in my position would make a countercharge about minimalism, but they would have to contend with the Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt fans among my students; and minimalism never tried to corner the market. (I’m also teaching my minimalism seminar this semester, and the students in there are passionate about the subject, so well-informed that they’ve brought up more obscure pieces than I had planned to address.)

The upshot is that I can no longer teach the canon of early/mid-20th-century music, as it was taught to me, in very good faith. The only criterion I could defend, if challenged, is how much fulfillment I still get from the music today, with some scholarly lip service granted to what pieces posed an influence on the composer’s contemporaries. Certain composers who don’t get much academic attention – Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre, Busoni, Wolpe, Sorabji, James P. Johnson, Vermeulen, Blomdahl, Rochberg – seem to me infinitely more appealing to present than some of the usual suspects. After all, we’ve already gone through this revisionist process for 19th-century music: if we hadn’t, we’d still have to be putting Hummel and Spohr on the listening tests. At the other end, I have only the flimsiest of rationales for teaching all the wonderful array of postclassical music I love while still excluding jazz and pop, the ultimate one being my faulty or nonexistent expertise in those latter fields. I resorted to describing the history of my idiosyncratic career as justification for my particular view of recent history, and while I’m happy for student input, I hardly want to surrender my hard-earned historical understanding to the chaos of 22 variously-informed student perspectives.

So it’s a mess, and an enforced experiment with few visible guideposts. I’m afraid I know the last hundred years of music so well that I no longer know what the history of it is.

 

I picked up Mark Edmundson’s book Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education because of a Times review that mentioned his complaint about a college culture in which professors give slim homework assignments in return for good course evaluations from students. Boy, did that strike a nerve. Those student evaluations carry enormous weight. I do well on them. I’m a pretty good song ‘n’ dance professor. I bring up episodes from The Simpsons to make a point. I slip quotations from The Big Lebowski into my lecture and glance around the room to see who perks up. I am famous for my digressions, and occasionally a student evaluation will even admit, “His stories go wildly off-topic, but somehow they end up being relevant and adding to the discussion.” I like to hear my jaw rattle, and when allowed a captive audience I can get a little manic (as a lot of people who know me socially would have trouble believing).

But you know what? At Northwestern I studied medieval music with Theodore Karp, a round little man with a distinct whisper and a slow, deliberate air. He had no song ‘n’ dance in him at all. Students beyond the front row could hardly hear him. Yet he knew every music manuscript of the 11th through 16th centuries top to bottom, and the calm, munificent way he dignified every student question, no matter how misguided, with a meticulous and carefully qualified reply, at whatever length necessary, made him a glowing presence. He was the Yoda of musicology. I was devoted to him, and after his 15th century class knew that period almost as well as the 20th century. As an undergrad I had an aesthetics professor, too, whose pause-studded lectures could cure insomnia, but we had great discussions in his office afterward. And the music theory teacher whose knowledge I most pass on to my own students today was distinctly lacking in charisma. As I look back, I was impressed by academics who could keep a class laughing, but there wasn’t much correlation between how clever a lecturer a professor was and how much impact he or she had on me. It had to do with something else – perhaps a dogged determination to impart knowledge.

As a result, when I sit on faculty evaluation committees, I’m the one who ends up defending the boring but expert professors, the ones who get poor write-ups from non-majors who just took the class for a distribution requirement, but whose senior project advisees think of them as gods. And I’m a little ashamed of myself for feeling smug about my ability to entertain 19-year-olds. Though perfectly successful by the available metrics, I am not yet the type of professor I most admire.

One of the problems with college culture throughout the field, I think, is that teaching well is not rewarded much. Everyone smiles indulgently when a student raves about a professor, but it’s publishing (mostly), committee work (somewhat less), and professional honors that raise one’s profile in the institution. I resent switching my focus from my current book project to my next class, partly because it’s the book that’s going to impress my superiors and colleagues. That’s kind of sad. Edmundson is exercised about college devolving into a credential factory, in which we entertain young people for four years and then declare them qualified for a job without having changed their lives, transforming their sense of who they are. He waxes eloquent on the way we present to them the great minds of the past condescendingly, without acknowledging how much superior they were to most of us today. My school recently lost a wonderful music teacher who had come from studying and teaching in Asia, and she was horrified by how lazy American students were. She wouldn’t bend on her assignment workload, and her student evaluations suffered as a result; now she’s teaching in Beijing, where she’s more justly appreciated.

I emphasize that my own school is not extreme in this regard; Edmundson makes it clear, with reports from colleagues at schools all over, that college culture is fairly uniform, and heavily conditioned by mass culture and the internet. I’ve adapted too well to this undemanding milieu, and I’m trying to figure what to do about it. I cut the kids too much slack because they are just like I was at that age: arrogant, fragile, neurotic, and affronted by criticism. They come in having had their self-esteem artificially pumped up in high school, and their expertise in certain things I know little about – technology, pop culture, stuff they’re read about on Wikipedia – is indeed impressive (as, Edmundson insists, our liberal relativism makes us all too quick to admit; wisdom has been reduced to knowledge, knowledge to information, and all information is equal). Yet they’re also personally insecure enough that to hammer them about their cultural ignorance, their inability to think critically, would feel cruel. As one of my more perceptive colleagues put it (who paid his own way through college), “I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to spend my career patting rich people’s kids on the head.” In one respect, many of them are not like I was: I am miserably astonished at how few of them really want to take pride in how good a theory or history paper they can write. Outside their performance major, meeting the bare minimum requirements is too often good enough. As a writer myself I want to push and push them to express themselves clearly and dig beneath the obvious facts, but pressing them too hard goes against the culture, and they’re already insulted by a B-plus that I thought of as a gift.

I do not remember being nearly as focused on social life as kids seem to be today. Parties were a terrible trial for me, and I was little enough socialized that solitude was often preferable (and still is). I’m embarrassed today to recall how many classes I skipped, but I was constantly reading and studying for self-improvement. I remember reflecting that very little learning actually took place in classrooms (a self-fulfilling prophecy in my case), and that the main thing I could absorb from my music profs was their attitude, their jaunty disregard for things that didn’t matter and their laser focus on things that did. That does seem to work for some students (and I seem to be the perfect teacher for the lackadaisical hot-shots who were most like me), but it doesn’t work for them all.

On the other hand, Edmundson – several years older than I am – remembers a college culture in the 1960s that was different from the one I found. He had professors who challenged him, risked offending him, and changed the way he thought. I went to Oberlin in the ’70s, and things, if he is correct, had changed. With the rapid rise in student population in the ’60s, a slew of new young faculty got hired quickly. As I think back, many of them – even some of my favorites – seemed breathtakingly irresponsible. One of my professors spent an entire class reading us a crazy satire of musicology articles someone had written. He was brilliant, and tremendously entertaining. He was also the teacher who warned me that Cage was a charlatan and minimalism a scam, but I didn’t think him less brilliant for that, only limited in perspective. It was not uncommon, at the time, for professors to require almost no work at all. There was a war in Vietnam; guys who flunked would get snapped up by the draft board (actually that ended the month before I turned 18); and grade inflation was through the roof. My GPA was 3.78, and I’ve always sworn I was in the bottom half of my class. In other words, if American college culture has really gone so far downhill, it seems to have begun happening after Edmundson went to school, and before I did.

Perhaps unfortunately, I developed my teaching style in conscious imitation of some of those professors, but I don’t dare be as slipshod as some of them were; the climate has changed. Nevertheless, I’m going to try to see how much more I can push my students this year, without injuring their delicate self-esteem. The student evaluations can no longer concern me, because I’ve exhausted all the honors the school can bestow. As the old-timers tell me, I’ve only got two promotions left: “emeritus” and “dead.” Unlike my more vulnerable younger colleagues, I no longer need the students to be my friends. I’m three times their age now, and I’d much rather they astonish me with their commitment, enthusiasms, and bursts of originality. Their lack of intellectual ambition is a perennial disappointment, and I’m going to try to focus on changing that, if I possibly can, rather than on keeping them entertained. I may even have to become boring.

 

From Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education:

It’s his capacity for enthusiasm that sets [a favorite student he has described] apart from what I’ve come to think of as the reigning generational style. Whether the students are fraternity/sorority types, grunge aficionados, piercers/tattooers, black or white, rich or middle class… they are, nearly across the board, very, very self-contained. On good days they display a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there’s little fire, little passion to be found.

This point came home to me a few weeks ago when I was wandering across the university grounds. There, beneath a classically cast portico, were two students, male and female, having a rip-roaring argument. They were incensed, bellowing at each other, headstrong, confident, and wild. It struck me how rarely I see this kind of full-out feeling in students anymore. Strong emotional display is forbidden. When conflicts arise, it’s generally understood that one of the parties will say something sarcastically propitiating (“Whatever” often does it) and slouch away.

How did my students reach this peculiar state in which all passion seems to be spent? I think that many of them have imbibed their sense of self from consumer culture in general and from the tube in particular. They’re the progeny of a hundred cable channels and videos on demand. TV, Marshall McLuhan famously said, is a cool medium. Those who play best on it are low-key and nonassertive; they blend in. Enthusiasm… quickly looks absurd. The form of character that’s most appealing on TV is calmly self-interested though never greedy, attuned to the conventions, and ironic. Judicious timing is preferred to sudden self-assertion….

Most of my students seem desperate to blend in, to look right, not to make a spectacle of themselves. (Do I have to tell you that those two students having the argument under the portico turned out to be acting in a role-playing game?) The specter of the uncool creates a subtle tyranny. It’s apparently an easy standard to subscribe to, this Letterman-like, Tarantino-inflected cool, but once committed to it, you discover that matters are rather different. You’re inhibited from showing emotion, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. You’re made to feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code will get you genially ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm. (pp. 7-9)

I wouldn’t try to vouch for how aptly this description applies to student culture today in general; I try never to assume that Bard is typical. But it certainly explains to me for the first time why so many young composers hold it against me that I took an outspoken part in the serialism-minimalism feud of that allegedly horrible decade the 1980s. Composers in academia went on the attack against minimalism and Cagean influences, and I fought back, almost never so much against their music as against their intolerance. That my part in that fight is remembered today somewhat better than the original attacks is due to three reasons: Babbitt, Wuorinen, Davidovsky, et al attacked via scholarly journals and I was in a popular newspaper; much of their power was wielded behind the scenes via prize-giving organizations; and, since I am a better writer than they were, my words have achieved a longer shelf-life. Among the New Music America types Downtown, the situation unified a lot of us together for a glorious cause to which we were devoted. The collective feeling, the sense that we could make something exciting happen, energized and inspired us. If I had it all to do over again, I would change virtually nothing.

But the young, laid-back composers are horrified by all this. They find public argument distasteful; standing up for one’s aesthetic viewpoint an embarrassing faux pas; generalization about a style or repertoire impolite. As Edmundson goes on to say,

What my students are, at their best, is decent. They are potent believers in equality…

What they will generally not do, though, is indict the current system. They won’t talk, say, about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery. That would be getting too loud, too brash. For the pervading view is the cool, consumer perspective, where passion and strong admiration are forbidden. (p. 9)

No one has ever called me cool. A certain perennial emotiveness has been noted, also the presence of passions and enthusiasms. A total insusceptibility to peer pressure was observed in my youth, and I have never blended in. I find the current system unfair, and I’m always on call to help blow it to bits. I’ve always been willing to stand up publicly for what I believe, and I’ve always considered the willingness to do so one of the signal virtues. But I can see now from this laid-back viewpoint what an embarrassing throwback I must seem, as Edmundson, in the book, suspects he is too, with his own passions and principled stands. One is no longer allowed to believe in his or her own aesthetic path so strongly as to extol it above others. Like Robert Frost’s liberals, we are too open-minded to take our own side in a quarrel. I have long known that my style of being a musician had become deeply unfashionable, but not until reading Edmundson did I grasp the process by which all of my most cherished virtues had become reinterpreted as social indelicacies.