Archives for May 2014

NEW HAVEN – [UDPATE BELOW] I’m spending three days at Yale’s Sterling Library poring over Ives’s manuscripts, for hopefully the last time I’ll need to do so before the book is done. I think today one manuscript page, f3680, taught me more about how Ives composed than I’ve ever known before. I can’t do the page justice by trying to reproduce it here, but it will be in my book, believe me. It’s the beginning of a 1st Piano Sonata, with an inscription “Pine Mt., Aug 1901.” Pine Mountain was a hill in Connecticut within walking distance of Danbury where Ives and his friend Dave Twichell (later his brother-in-law) built a shack to hang out in. Whether he wrote the date on the page at the time or later and got it wrong, who knows and who cares. The page is the beginning of a mildly polytonal sonata movement in a gently rocking 6/8 meter. Had it been written in the 1940s, you would call it mainstream conservative. But if you look at it with Ives’s First Sonata freshly in your head, you notice that the first measure is similar to that of the First Sonata’s third movement, mm. 3-4 from the middle of the first movement, mm. 12-17 similar to the end of the first movement, other measures seeming quotations of the third or first movement, and so on. It’s like a collage of high-profile bits of those two movements, all their major ideas crammed onto one page. So what Ives did, apparently, is start writing a kind of stream-of-consciousness piece, and then go back and focus on the best ideas, and expand and expand and expand from within, sorting out some ideas to one movement and some to another. He used his first-pressing composition as a kind of generator of themes and motives, and then went back and singled out the best ones for extended development.

The First Sonata has more undeveloped sketches to analyze in this respect – I went through more than two hundred pages today – than the Concord does, though the sketches for Thoreau brought me to a similar conclusion. If anyone ever wants to trace Ives’s compositional process from first inspiration to completed score (which is a little outside the scope of my project), the First Sonata’s third movement is a great test case. Ives was able to trust his subconscious to uncritically write a piece of music that had little value or coherence on its own, and then go back and mine it for the best ideas it offered, refining and expanding it again and again. It takes a lot of creative fortitude and not being satisfied with what’s on the page, not even knowing what there is on the page that’s going to turn out to be valuable. Some pretty odd-looking, non-prepossessing musical ideas turn out to be major thematic ones as a result. It’s a creative leap of faith.

One the other hand, I find things in the mss. that merely taunt me. Ives’s sketches are dotted with large chords in whole notes, many of them comprising all twelve pitches arranged via various-sized thirds or fifths. He often places these chords immediately following a double-bar-line where he’s ended a movement. For instance, here are some chords I found at the end of sketches for the First Sonata’s third and second movements, respectively:

I’ve tried correlating the chords with sonorities from the preceding movement, and gotten nowhere. And had that worked, why would he write the chord after the movement is finished rather than at the beginning? I stare at these chords and send out vibes to the hereafter: “Charlie, you’re trying to send me some kind of message here, but I’m not getting it yet. Can you be a little clearer?”

I call him Charlie now, we’re pretty close.

UPDATE: I woke up this morning and the answer was swimming in front of my eyes. I had found it odd that so many of the chords had diminished seventh chords on the bottom, and then I remembered that Ives’s bass ostinatos often jump up and down by minor thirds. Take a look at these two passages:

All the major notes from each passage add up to the chords at the end. That the second example wavers between Bb and B and C# and C in the lower treble fits the paradigm, because some of Ives’s such charts show alternate accidentals for certain notes in the chord. Ives clearly liked to experiment with large vertical sonorities as a way of organizing moments of static texture, often making sure that he didn’t reuse the same pitch in different registers, and as a way of organizing his polytonality with different triads in different registers.

 

In 1917 as Erik Satie was working on his masterpiece Socrate, he penned a little treatise to which he appended the title “Subject matter (idea) and craftsmanship (construction).” The whole is quoted in books on Satie by Robert Orledge and others, but I don’t find it on the internet outside of scholarly writings, and I think it deserves to be better known:

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Craftsmanship is often superior to subject matter.

To have a feeling for harmony is to have a feeling for tonality.

The serious examination of a melody will always, for the pupil, be the essence of an excellent harmonic exercise.

A melody does not imply its harmony, any more than a landscape implies its color. The harmonic character of a melody is infinite for a melody is an expression within the overall Expression.

Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; at the same time as being the form and the subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an explanation of the subject, its reflection.

 

In composition, the various parts, between themselves, no longer have connections with any ‘school’. The ‘school’ of composition has a gymnastic aim, nothing more; composition has an aesthetic aim, in which taste alone plays a part.

Make no mistake: the understanding of grammar does not imply the understanding of literature; grammar can help or be held in reserve as the writer pleases and on his responsibility. Musical grammar is nothing but grammar.

One cannot criticize the craft of an artist as if it constituted a system. If there is form and a new style of writing, there is a new craft.

To speak of ‘craft’ requires great care and – at all events – great learning.

Who possesses such learning?

The error arises in that a great many artists lack ideas in general and even specific ideas.

The Masters of the past were brilliant through their ideas, their craft was a simple means to an end, nothing more. It is their ideas which endure. . . .

 

Become artists unconsciously.

The Idea can do without Art.

Let us mistrust Art: it is often nothing but virtuosity.

Impressionism is the art of Imprecision; today we tend towards Precision.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

According to Orledge (“Satie’s Approach to Composition in His Later Years (1913-24), Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 111. (1984-1985), p. 157), the original French is published as item 37 in Erik Satie: Écrits (réunis, établis et annotés par Ornella Volta), (Paris, 1977), pp. 48-9, and there is some question as to whether the final, more politically immediate sentence belongs with the rest of the text. I was drawn back to it by finding in Satie’s Art vs. Idea an echo of Ives’s Manner vs. Substance.

I’ve mentioned before that Howard Boatwright, who edited the 1962 edition of Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata, missed or misidentified the sources of many of Ives’s quotations. In consequence he mentions that Ives gets a lot of his quotations wrong, or carelessly paraphrases them, but it’s not as true as Boatwright thought – he just couldn’t locate them all, and sometimes he would find a passage on the same topic and claim Ives paraphrased it. I fully sympathize with the difficulty of finding all these quotations, but it’s regrettable that Boatwright, in effect, blamed Ives for his failures, for his false assessment – “scarcely a quotation in the entire book is exactly like its source” – has been repeated in book after book and even taken as evidence of Ives’s disordered state of mind. Today, luckily, we have Google and Google Books and Open Library, and other resources that make it a hell of a lot easier, and it turns out that Ives was more punctilious than we thought. So here, as a public service, are the sources of the quotations I’ve found so far which aren’t correctly identified in the published edition. I’m grateful to musicologist and minimalism-conference chum Maarten Beirens for painstakingly locating the two French texts for me, which I dare not take it upon myself to translate with my three years of high-school French. You may amend your footnotes accordingly, as I’ve been doing:

Pp. 11-12: …whose heart knows, with Voltaire, that “man seriously reflects when left alone, and who would then discover, if he can, that “wondrous chain which links the heavens with earth – the world of beings subject to one law.” These are not loose paraphrases of Emerson, but closely taken from Voltaire’s poem “On the Nature of Man,” in The Works of Voltaire Introductory and Biographical (Paris, London, New York, and Chicago: E.R. DuMont, 1901), p. 295:

Thought is to those who live in crowds unknown,
We seriously reflect when left alone.
With thee I fain would soar on wisdom’s wing
From this vile world to its Eternal King.
That wondrous chain discover, if you can,
Which links the heavens with earth, with angels man:
That world of beings subject to one law,
Which Plato and which Pope in fancy saw.

P. 13: He measured, as Michel Angelo said true artists should, “with the eye and not the hand” – Emerson, VI. “Behavior” from The Conduct of Life (not V, as Boatwright writes).

P. 13: “soul-confusing labyrinths of speculative radicalism” – Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book 3, Chapter 7

P. 15: “what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no one man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse” – Emerson, “Shakespeare, or, The Poet,” from Representative Men.

P. 15: “Every thinker is retrospective” – Emerson, “Shakespeare, or, The Poet,” from Representative Men.

P. 20: “unsatiable demand for unity, the need to recognize one nature in all variety of objects” – Emerson, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” not paraphrased from “The Sovereignty of Ethics.”

Pp. 20-21: “Draw if thou canst the mystic line / Separating his from thine / Which is human, which divine” – Emerson, “Worship” in The Conduct of Life

P. 22: “Nature loves analogy and hates repetition” – Emerson, “Education”

P. 27: “Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads when once the penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded, — the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees” – Emerson, “Swedenborg,” in Representative Men (Ives does misquote it a little, beginning “All melodious poets…”).

P. 74: “The staging to him (Hugo) was the important thing – not the conception – that in de Vigny, the artist was inferior to the poet”; finally that Hugo and so Wagner have a certain pauvrete de fond” – Faguet, Dix-Neuviéme Siécle: Études Littéraires (Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cle, Éditeurs, 1890), p. 145: “Il me semble que tout cela revient à dire que dans Vigny l’artiste est inférieur au poète, le metteur en oeuvre inférieur au créateur d’idées poétiques. C’est une banalitè que de remarquer que dans Hugo la mise en oeuvre l’emporte infiniment sur la conception, voile parfois magnitique une certain pauvreté de fond. C’est just le contraire chez de Vigny. Il a des idées poétiques qui aboutissent mal; il en a qui n’aboutissent pas.”

P. 77: “”an infinite source of good…the love of the beautiful…a constant anxiety for moral beauty” – Francois Roussel-Despierres, L’Idéal esthétique, esquisse d’une philosophie de la beauté, Paris, Alcan, 1904, p. 41: “La beauté est une source infinie de bien. L’amour du beau, le souci constant de la beauté morale, forment le plus puissant ressort de la moralité pratique.” https://archive.org/stream/lidalesthtiquee00desgoog#page/n10/mode/2up

P. 78: “What you are talks so loud, that I cannot hear what you say” – from Emerson, Letters and Social Aims; he actually wrote, “What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary,” but it had commonly become misquoted even by Ives’s day.

P. 95: “It matters not one jot, provided this course of personal loyalty to a cause be steadfastly pursued, what the special characteristics of the style of the music may be to which one gives one’s devotion.” Daniel Gregory Mason, “The American Musician,” published in The Outlook; not paraphrased, as Boatwright avers.

P. 96: “He should never fear of being called a highbrow – but not the kind in Prof. Brander Matthews’ definition.” That definition is not the one Boatwright attempts. In the New York Times for March 5, 1916, Matthews is quoted as defining the highbrow as “a person who has a habitual attitude of contempt toward that which is popular, and also as a person who, generally, is educated beyond his intelligence.

“But,” continued Professor Matthews, “the highbrow has not been educated enough to know that in all the arts the really good things, the vital things, have always been popular. Of course that does not mean that all popular things are good or vital. In fact, many popular things are almost worthless, something thrown out to catch the taste of the moment. Perhaps the highbrow is not sufficiently sure of his discrimination and his ability to tell what is vital and what is not, so condemns everything popular rather than run any risk of accepting the wrong thing, a sort of safety first for highbrow reputations.” “Prof. Brander Matthews Defines a Highbrow,” New York Times, March 5, 1916. The quotation, “A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence,” seems to have taken on some popular currency.

I’ll add others if I find them. Ives’s erudition was astonishingly broad.

I keep thinking about this self-indulgent course I want to teach, all European music. My Advanced Analysis seminars usually encompass three pieces from different historical periods, analyzed in depth. And I desperately want to teach one based around the unfinished fugue from Bach’s The Art of Fugue; Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, which is based on that Bach fugue; and Kaikhosru Sorabji’s five-hour Opus Clavicembalisticum, which also uses the same fugue theme and is heavily indebted to Busoni. I figure I’d probably attract one student, if I taught it in a year in which I had one student who was totally devoted to me. And he’d probably drop it.

I write music you can hum.

New recording, from the other night, of Sang Plato’s Ghost, played by the Ghost Ensemble under the baton of David Bloom. Expert young musicians, they did a fine job. The drums are a little too evident on the recording, imagine them softer. On June 7 I have a performance of The Stream (Admonitions) by the New Music Ensemble of the Australian National University in Canberra. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, that anyone has simply plucked a score off my web site and decided to play it – after seventeen years of posting PDF scores then.

I’ve been engulfed in graduating-senior crises, and my last responsibility as arts division chair is to oversee the division end-of-year party tonight. Tomorrow morning my life will be my own again.

A student of mine had a performance with a very professional new-music group, and one in which he participated. He told me about a rehearsal they had which was going really well, in which all the players were locked in and the music was really soaring. One of the instrumentalists abruptly stopped the music, explaining: “We were making a crescendo, and there’s no crescendo notated.”

It’s like Miles Davis said: robot shit.

My major composerly event of the season is the premiere of my septet Sang Plato’s Ghost by the Ghost Ensemble, conducted by David Bloom, this Saturday night (Satie’s birthday, propitiously enough). The ensemble was formed by one of my former composition students Ben Richter, who plays the accordion, and I’ve always wanted to write for accordion. Bloom, another Bard product (if indeed the reverse is not true instead) is conductor of the Contemporaneous Ensemble of skyrocketing reputation. The concert is at the Queens New Music Festival at the Secret Theatre, 4402 23rd Street in Long Island City; hope I can find it. Other works on the program are by Giacinto Scelsi, Pauline Oliveros, Sky Macklay, and Simon Steen-Anderson. When Ben first wrote me I misread his invitation as being to the Queen’s New Music Festival, and was excited about being performed for royalty. My democratic principles quickly reasserted themselves.

I’m really happy with Sang Plato’s Ghost, scored for flute, oboe, drums, harp, accordion, viola, and double bass, which I thought was a dream ensemble. The piece began, in my head, with a tango in 5/4 meter, and spread out from there in both directions. With an accordion, what else could I do?

A brilliant composer friend of mine recently had a reading of a piece done by a major orchestra. All the other composers, she said, and the orchestra management, went around talking about how the orchestra desperately needs to come up with new ideas, so they can build up a new audience. Her piece was very percussion driven, centered around a trap-set part that the orchestral percussionists didn’t know how to handle, and so the reading was somewhat lacking. The other composers, commiserating, told her that the string section really needs to be the driver of an orchestra piece. And as she told me about it, I formed exactly the same question she’d been asking herself: Which is it? Does the orchestra need new ideas, or will composers invariably get screwed over if they don’t stick to the tried-and-true? How do these fucked-up orchestra composers and musicians manage to keep those contradictory principles in their heads at the same time?

UPDATE: I should have recalled that Charles Ives had similar experiences with orchestras, and wrote that the advice he received boiled down to: “If you want something played, write something you don’t want played.”

 

Even beyond Ives, I’m on a roll lately of research on dead American composers (DACs – I wish there were more public interest in LACs, but they are a needy and competitive bunch, and I’ve discovered the pleasures of communing musicologically with the serene and undemanding dead). Aside from Robert Palmer and Johanna Beyer (of whom possibly more soon), I’ve gotten an opportunity to study Marc Blitzstein, whom I’ve always admired for his politics and for the musico-political miracle of The Cradle Will Rock. For years after I’d read about the piece I could find no way to hear it, until I got hold of the 1985 recording produced by The Acting Company. Well, my wife Nancy is general manager of The Acting Company now, which was founded in 1972 by John Houseman and Margot Harley; Houseman was the original producer of Cradle in 1937. And the company is presenting a one-night benefit revival of their 1983 production of Cradle headed by Patti Lupone, with the original cast, May 19 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, which I’m thrilled that I will get to see.

The real buzz, which got me started on this, is that as a result I got to go to the office and spend time with what is apparently Houseman’s copy of the score, which The Acting Company has in their files, and which he used to direct the 1983 performance – and may have used for the 1937 premiere as well: Since 1999 there’s a new, engraved version, but for decades everyone relied on an old score, part hand-written and part printed, using several songs that Blitzstein published separately. There is lots of scrawled evidence of changes made in rehearsal, and comical marginal commentary. I’ve always loved Cradle and wanted to get better acquainted with the music, but since you had to rent the score for a performance to get it, never had the chance. Looking through it, I’m super impressed with Blitzstein’s composing technique: he was at the same time a determined populist and determined modernist as well (somewhat like myself), and while I knew the tunes, I was unaware how smoothly he integrated feisty modernisms into the accompaniment. Look at this opening, sung by Moll the prostitute: From the get-go the left-hand accompaniment runs a 5/8 accompaniment across the 2/4 meter, and the bass note always seems a second away from the melody, as though the left hand is playing a different piece, but it’s so smooth that I’d hardly noticed the discrepancies. Plus the melody itself is in 7-beat phrases, for a 14-against-5 polyrhythm so normal-sounding that I’d never noticed anything odd about it. Although the songs are catchy, I’ve always found the melodies difficult to recreate exactly from memory, and now I can see why. Blitzstein’s song-form logic is solid in an unexpected, original way, and once I play through the piano accompaniments, the harmony makes such quirky sense that the song sticks in my head instantly. Probably my favorite scene is the one in which Sasha the violinist and Dauber the painter vie for the attentions of Mrs. Mister, the town millionaire’s socialite wife and premiere arts patron. Their song “There’s Something So Damn Low About the Rich,” on a text dear to my heart,  is in D-flat, but goes from C# minor through A minor to A major, and then uses the leading tone of A as V of D-flat again. Then, having gone to A major a second time, it moves up the scale chromatically to E-flat, which becomes V/V back to D-flat with exquisite comedy: And of course there’s the title song, which is an incredibly harmonically complex song for a political musical aimed at the proletariat. I had never been able to quite get, by ear, the fairly bizarre final chord sequence: To shift from B major to C minor at the climax, and then end on a tritone root movement, strikes me as daringly adventurous for a 1937 musical, and probably for a more recent one as well (though I don’t keep up with recent musicals); and yet the melody is not hard to sing. Blitzstein was apparently the only composer to study with both Boulanger and Schoenberg; he preferred the former. I’m reading Eric Gordon’s biography of him, and now that I’m up to the Airborne Symphony period, I’m curious to see what form his slide from international fame into relative obscurity took. I’ve always admired him politically, and I’m glad to learn that he can be admired for the originality and personality of his compositional technique as well.