Archives for September 2015

Accordionist Veli Kujala did a lovely job on my piece Reticent Behemoth for his quarter-tone accordion. Here’s the recording from the world premiere last Thursday in Turku, Finland (duration five and a half minutes). I do love the accordion, and Veli made the piece sound more delicate and nuanced than I could have expected. I’m hoping to write him another piece or two.

I’ve got a performance coming up at Bard College [where I teach] this Saturday. My office Disklavier will play my Bud Powell homage Bud Ran Back Out, and famous composer Joan Tower, no less, is slated to play the second dance, “Sad,” from my Private Dances. As you can see from the accompanying poster, Kurtág, Corigliano, Ligeti, and I are making a once-in-a-lifetime appearance on the same program. If it weren’t for Crumb and Bolcom I’d feel a little out of place. The MIDI graphic on the poster is a section from my Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, taken from my eponymous CD cover.

The Fifth International Conference of Minimalist Music, in Turku and Helsinki (harbor above), Finland, was a smashing success. I ate sautéed reindeer and plenty of herring. We ended up Sunday night with only a few people left in the upstairs bar at the Torni Hotel, with Helsinki in the background (clockwise: my wife Nancy, Kay and Keith Potter, Dean Suzuki, Jonathan Bernard, Patrick Nickleson):

And here we are eating at the Sea Hors Restaurant: Dean, Nancy, Pwyll Ap Sion, Kay, Patrick, Keith, myself, and Jonathan:

A concert of mostly my music, including my Unquiet Night, Reticent Behemoth, The Unnameable, and Snake Dance No. 2, was presented at the gorgeous Music Centre building in the middle of town, its magnificent lobby shown here:

And I gave what I imagine is the first conference paper on the music of Elodie Lauten, whose reputation seems limited to New York; no one seemed to have heard of her. (I’ll put that paper up in this space soon, but it will take considerable reworking for non-oral presentation.) David McIntire spoke on Ann Southam, Frank Nawrot on Julius Eastman, Dean Suzuki on fine British postminimalist Andrew Poppy, Jedd Schneider on the surprising connections between Krautrock and American minimalism, and Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic on Conlon Nancarrow’s (generally negative) attitude toward, yet interesting connections with, minimalist process. Patrick Nickleson gave a fine paper on the curious ontological status of so much minimalist music, that it tends to not be score-based, but finalized by performance or recording, the score often constructed after the fact by someone other than the composer – with Marc Mellits’s Boosey and Hawkes score to Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians as the quintessential example. I told him that was almost my definition of Downtown music.

At the Finnish music panel I wrote down a slew of names of Finnish postminimalists to look up: Petri Kuljuntausta (whom I enjoyed talking with), Erkki Kurrenniemi, Jan-Olof Mallander, Pekka Jalkanen, Seppo Pohjola, Pekka Kuusisto, Adina Dumitrescu, Pehr Hendrik Nordgren, and of course Juhani Nuorvala, who co-directed the conference with John Richardson. None of us could make head or tail of the language. It seems that, despite some early appearances in Helsinki by Glass and Reich, minimalism and its offshoots have gained a foothold in Finland only in the last decade, largely thanks to Juhani’s efforts.

Here, waiting for the bus from Turku to Helsinki, are Justin Rito (whose paper was on David Lang), Joy and Andrew Granade just past him, Juhani with the glasses, and musicologist Robert Fink and wife in the back:

The Sixth International Conference is now tentatively scheduled for June of 2017 in Knoxville, Tennessee, in connection with the Nief-Norf festival run by Andrew Bliss. It gives me something to look forward to. The passage of my life is measured out in minimalism conferences.

I’m off to Turku and Helsinki, Finland, this week where I will be the featured composer at the biennial conference of the Society for Minimalist Music. There will be a concert of mostly my music Saturday night at the Sibelius Academy Music Centre (since there’s “Mostly Mozart,” I’ve always pictured a “Generally Gann” festival), and I am to be interviewed onstage beforehand. It’ll be old friends week, and you can see the conference schedule here. Robert Fink and Jelena Novak are the keynote speakers. I didn’t need to give a paper this year, but I am: “Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser,” which I just finished today, or at least enough to stumble my way through it. And I imagine I’ll post it here, or at my web site. We have an idea where in the US the next one will be in 2015, and I’ll let you know when it’s official. I think I probably won’t give papers in the future, just go and listen and hang out. I take way too much unnecessary work onto myself.

You may not have heard of Noah Creshevsky (born 1945), but he is, and has been for decades, one of the most amazing figures in current American music. His music, all electronic as far as I’ve heard, which he aptly terms “hyperrealist,” is a surreal mix of samples, chamber music from Mars. Weird as hell on first listening (and second and third), it nevertheless flows with its own inner logic, and is easily acclimated to. I’ve told him that, if I had the amazing electronic-music chops he has, I’d be trying to do something similar. Perhaps because I just returned from southern Mexico, it strikes me as bearing a kinship to mesoamerican art, very cleanly etched and clear in its intentions yet extraordinarily strange in its shapes and materials. I can’t think of anyone whose aesthetic is more original. He hasn’t received his due because there are so few distribution venues for bizarre electronic music, and because his lifestyle, as he likes to claim, is highly reclusive. Nevertheless, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote a lovely tribute to him in New Music Box several years ago.

So Noah’s newest CD Hyperrealist Music, 2011-2015 is now out on EM records. The first piece on the disc is titled Pulp Fiction, and in it he used samples from my Disklavier CD Nude Rolling Down an Escalator. I think it the best piece on the disc, though not by much, and his use of my rapid piano gestures is extremely flattering, like overhearing myself complimented by strangers. And I obtained his permission to post the piece here, for awhile. You should get the disc, and all his discs, because they’re phenomenal.

Another three-Disklavier piece in my 33-pitch 8×8 tuning:

Futility Row (2015), 8:53

It’s in the key of E-13-flat minor. That is, since my 1/1 is E-flat, the tonic here is the 65th harmonic (major third of the 13th harmonic), 27 cents sharper than E-flat. I have a penchant for minor keys, and it’s difficult to write a minor-key piece in a scale constructed from harmonic series’. I gained a new empathy for Haydn, who, in his minor-key symphonies, always seems to modulate into the major as quickly as possible. Schoenberg remarked that Chopin was lucky because, if he wanted to do something that sounded new, all he had to do was write something in F# major. Well I’m way ahead of Chopin, because not only am I the first to write something in E-13-flat minor as far as I know, I have lots of other exotic keys left to use. This is a particularly Gannian piece in form and gestural style. But I got the idea while humming a song by Mikel Rouse, and so I dedicate it to him, whose music has so often been a means of bringing me back to earth.

I can now offer the recording of my Snake Dance No. 3 as performed at the Bang on a Can marathon at Mass MOCA on this past Aug. 1. The intrepid performers are David Cossin, Kaylie Melville, Colin Malloy, Wade Selkirk, percussion; Vicky Chow, Karl Larson, keyboards; and Cody Tacaks, bass. It’s a weird piece, the only time I’ve combined the wild percussion rhythms of my Snake Dances with microtonally-tuned synthesizers, in a 19-tone completely irregular scale. I limited the number of pitches so that the fretless bass player wouldn’t have to learn too crazy a scale, given the crazy, tuplet-filled rhythms involved. It is indeed a weird piece. Right after the performance one of the presenters (who might not want to be quoted by name) came up to me and said, approvingly, “That’s a really weird piece.” And several people present mentioned that it stood out on the festival as being different, and that people either loved it or hated it. Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham not being represented, it was neat to be, for once, the wild, loud piece on Bang on a Can, since I am perfectly capable of writing the kind of tonal, pretty pieces that were otherwise prevalent. It was a really attractive festival.

The word weird grates on me a little bit, since in the signatures in my 1973 yearbook for Skyline High School in Dallas, the word weird is remarkably prominent in almost every entry. I seem to have been the weirdest guy anyone in my high school had ever met. (I was playing atonal piano music by Wolpe and Rochberg in a Texas high school in the early ’70. Some kids concluded, upon hearing me play, that I was completely incompetent.) But even by my exalted standards, this is a weird piece, the farthest out on a ledge my music has ever ventured. The 2010 world premiere by the Sam Houston University Percussion Ensemble was impeccably well played, but technically problematic, since all the synthesizers (including the fretless bass part I myself played on keyboard) were run through a single speaker, and didn’t blend with the percussion at all. I revised the piece for this performance, and I think it’s much tighter, and there will never be a better performance. But I have to admit, it’s a weird piece – perhaps the weirdest piece from an apparently pretty weird composer.