I’ve built up quite a backlog of unheard music, and now after a long dry spell it’s beginning to flow public-ward again. On December 7 Michelle McIntire sang a pre-premiere of most of my Ezra Pound song cycle Proença (five songs out of the six) at Missouri Western State University, and I’ve got recordings! Here are the three that I thought came out best:

2. Na Audiart (7:05)
3. Alba (En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi) (5:14)
5. L’aura amara (8:47)

The first is a poem by Pound about Bertrans de Born; the others are Pound translations of troubadour songs. The performers are:

Michelle Allen McIntire: voice
Virginia Q. Backman: flute
Jennifer Wagner: vibraphone
Jennifer Lacy: electric piano
Brian Padavic: electric bass

and the recording is by Jon Robertson, who will be recording engineer next summer when they produce the whole cycle (50 minutes) for David McIntire’s Irritable Hedgehog label. The group was going to give the official premiere in Kansas City on February 13, but that’s the night I’m at Illinois Wesleyan University for the premieres of my Implausible Sketches and Transcendentalist Songs. So they’re going to try to delay by a week, and they’ll also play the piece at Bard College soon after, probably in early March. I’ll give all the details when known. I am, among other things, the vocal-music composer at Bard, with choral pieces, operas, and more than two dozen songs in my output, and it’s great to finally get that music out there. Thanks to Michelle and David and the others for their tremendous dedication. They’ve been rehearsing weekly for months.

Two books I’ve read recently had a notable impact on me. One was Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford) by Douglas Shadle, who’s at Vanderbilt. It’s a history of the relationships among 19th-century American composers, critics and conductors, and particularly of the Europhile bias American composers had to face at every step. Music critics were enamored of what came to be called The Beethoven Problem: a composer of symphonies had to both imitate and expand on the Master’s principles. They developed a set of binary goalposts that could be relocated to frustrate any American contender: If your music was too similar to Beethoven’s, it was derivative; if not similar enough, it failed to build on eternal principles. If it followed the Mendelssohn-Schumann line it was timid; if it veered toward Liszt and Wagner, it was damned for being mere program music. If it used American source material, it lacked “symphonic dignity”; if not, it represented inauthentic European wannabe-ism. If audiences loved it though the critics didn’t, then it merely appealed to the superficial; and even if critics liked it and audiences didn’t, then it may be intellectual but will never appeal to the common man. Meanwhile, Europeans as minor as Jan Kalliwoda were enthusiastically welcomed into the repertoire. As Shadle puts it, “critics relegated the music of nineteenth-century American composers to the dustbin of history while applying mutable standards of criticism to each new crop [p. 263]”. And so each new American symphonist – Anthony Philip Heinrich, William Henry Fry, George Frederick Bristow – would create a frisson of public excitement only to be forgotten and dismissed in short order, creating a mistaken impression that no history of American symphonic music existed.

Critics had more power back then than they do now, but Shadle makes clear that star conductors like Theodore Thomas nurtured similar sets of shifting criteria to save themselves the trouble of performing American works. The book’s arch-villain, though, is famous Boston music John Sullivan Dwight. For decades I’ve tried to find something to admire about the guy because of his connection to the Transcendentalists, but he was the worst of the worst of those who thought the Europeans had said it all and so Americans shouldn’t bother trying, and Shadle hangs him with his own hypocritical words again and again. (I’d like to think his type of critic died out with the late Andrew Porter.)

Meanwhile, Shadle also elucidates the aesthetic strategies of the American Romanticists in a way that made me hear them differently. I had always found Fry’s Santa Claus: A Christmas Symphony rather silly, but Shadle discusses it in terms of Italian operatic stereotypes and Fry’s deliberate rebellion against German paradigms, and I now hear it as narrative and somewhat moving. I also developed some admiration, if not affection, for John Knowles Paine’s Second Symphony, as an attempt to master the Liszt/Wagner vocabulary without giving in to programmatic tendencies. The book introduced me to George Templeton Strong’s programmatic Second Symphony Sintram, which is quite impressive and better than the other music I’d heard of his – another work widely lauded and then quickly forgotten. And in the 1880s the next great American composer was supposed to be Brooklynite Ellsworth Phelps (1827-1913), who is almost entirely forgotten today, and the score to his Emancipation Symphony tragically lost. Shadle and I both consider Bristow overdue some major attention, and he includes some excitingly long musical examples from his 1893 Niagara Symphony, about which I’d never been able to find any information.

More than anything else, Orchestrating the Nation illuminates the origins and myriad strategies of the classical music world’s eternal animus against American composers. As I teach every week among student composers who can’t be bothered with Ashley or Nancarrow but sing the praises of Kurtag and Lachenmann, Saariaho and Haas, I feel like little has changed. If it takes a hundred points to achieve parity with Beethoven, you get fifty free points just for being born in Europe. Shadle shows how long that’s been going on.

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The other book is by art scholar Henry Adams, Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock (Bloomsbury Press). Benton and Pollock have long been two of my favorite painters – my adolescent worship of Pollock has toned down a little over the years, but my fascination with Benton only increases. But the art world, as it turns out, hates Benton for reasons parallel to the condescension of composers toward Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, for his too-late-representational, cheesy-narrative Americana-ness. And so, every account of Pollock’s life soft-pedals his indebtedness to Benton, who was his teacher and lifelong confidant. In the official narrative, Benton was only useful to Pollock as someone to rebel against.

But Adams – whose ability to elucidate art in words is absolutely thrilling – shows at incontrovertible depth that Pollock used Benton’s methods for energizing a painting throughout his career, and especially at the end; that it was Benton who taught Pollock how to organize a painting, and the difference between Benton’s narrative painting and Pollock’s abstractions does not obscure the means they both used to focus energy within a flat canvas. Adams also takes issue with the whole Clement Greenberg ideology about how what was important about Pollock’s and all the abstractionist painting was the acceptance of flatness, which he finds completely wrong-headed given the evocations of three-dimensional depth in Pollock’s paintings. The book surprised me with how much I could learn about art, even art I was already familiar with, by reading about it. And I loved this musing, at the end, by Benton about what he considered lacking in abstract art:

If you notice: the careers of abstract artists so often end in a kind of bitter emptiness. It’s the emptiness of a person looking into himself all the time. But the objective world is always rich. There is always something around the next bend of the river. [p. 361]

Both books very highly recommended.

 

This week, for the first time, I analyzed Ethel Smyth’s music in my 19th-century harmony class. I used the Kyrie from her 1893 mass as well as the beautiful slow movement of her Second Piano Sonata, written in 1877 when  she was only 19:

I found her use of the German sixth to pivot between Db major and F minor rather original. I also used, in addition to Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Sonata slow movement, the intro to the slow movement of his Third Piano Concerto. I find Rachmaninoff’s harmony subtle and quite innovative; he’s not all all the disher-up of Romantic clichés pictured in the academic imagination. As usual, the general academic view of nearly everyone is short-sighted.

 

Death is not taking a holiday. I learned on my way to California that my good friend Martha Herr died on Halloween. She had survived breast cancer twice, and this time succumbed to a brain tumor. She was a phenomenal singer, and though she started out working with the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo, she spent the bulk of her career teaching at The University of São Paulo, where she became the world’s leading authority on Portugese diction for singers. She and her then-husband John Boudler commissioned an early work from me, Cherokee Songs for voice and percussion. And I am even more grateful to her for having made a recording for me of one of my best works, Scenario (2004) for soprano and soundfile, based on a wild S.J. Perelman text. I had lost touch with her and hadn’t seen her in years when she started teaching as a sabbatical replacement at Bennington, and she started visiting me; and she spent a day with me in the studio getting Scenario down. I’m hoping to release the piece on a CD next year. She was a lovely person, a consummate musician, and fun.

Upon my return, Peter Gena wrote to tell me that my graduate medieval music history professor Theodore (Ted) Karp has just died. I’ve written about him here before, as my model for the old-fashioned kind of professor who didn’t feel the need to entertain, but whose dignity and generosity made being in his classroom feel like a rare privilege. It was because of him that I always push the music of Johannes Ciconia (c. 1370-1412), who despite his obscurity was, I think, the first great composer, the one who realized things that music could do (echoes, imitation, form through repetition) that no other art form could do. In the class I took with Dr. Karp we pored over every 15th-century music manuscript in detail, though there are probably new ones now that were undiscovered then. I wrote for him a paper comparing the respective Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini’s of Dufay and Ockeghem (a topic he had assigned, characteristically unsexy but therefore all the more challenging); I still refer to it occasionally.

Martha Herr told me a story about working with Morton Feldman that she didn’t want me to publish, and I had promised not to do so during her lifetime (though she was only a few years older than me). She sang the world premiere of Feldman’s opera Neither – that’s how good she was. There is a section in that piece with constant meter changes of the Feldman variety – 3/8, 6/2, 5/4, and so on – that she found impossible to memorize, so she wrote it out on a long strip of paper and attached it behind the footlights onstage so she could read it when she came to that part. One day the conductor, whoever he was, came to her and pointed out that the entire passage could have been made quite simple if one simply remetered it in 4/4. She took it to Feldman, and said, “Morty, you know this really complicated passage would work out just fine in 4/4.” She says Feldman chuckled and said, “Yeah, isn’t that cool?”

 

My Romance Postmoderne has now been called gorgeous and calming; my suite The Planets has been dubbed weighty and cerebral. I can think of some award-winning composers who would be baffled by at least the second assessment.

In The Atlantic: “Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don’t think about the average person, and they don’t even think about their students when they write… Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.” What have I been saying?

Next week I’ll be in Santa Barbara giving the Karl Geiringer Lectures, named for a famous musicologist who taught there, one (public) on microtonality, and the other (for musicologists) about what we can learn about Ives’s compositional process from his sketches. The latter is mostly about the First Piano Sonata, since we have many more preliminary sketches for that than for the Concord, and there’s really only one page I’m discussing at length: the presumptive first sketch written at Pine Mountain, CT, and dated Aug. 4, 1901. But it’s a fascinating page, an abbreviated and prescient outline for what would become a much longer movement. I’m also relating that at some length to Ives’s discussion of composing in the Essays Before a Sonata, which I think has never been taken seriously enough as a philosophy of what makes music great. When I get back I’ll publish the Ives lecture somewhere on the internet – here, if no more prestigious locale presents itself. I guess the UCSB people decided having a photo of Ives on the poster would bring in more people (or repel fewer) than a photo of me.

If you’re in the area, that’s November 3 at 5 in Geiringer Hall for the microtonality lecture, and November 4 at 3:30 in Music Room 1145 for the Ives lecture. I’ve already given the Kushell Lectures at Bucknell, the Poynter Fellowship Lecture at Yale, and the Longyear Musicology Lecture at the University of Kentucky. I just Googled “named musicology lectures” to see if there was a list I should be crossing off somewhere, but nothing came up. Hit ‘n’ miss, I guess.

 

Gannian events abound. This weekend I’ll be in Philadelphia participating in workshops devoted to performing the works of Julius Eastman, run by the Bowerbird Ensemble. Sadly, my teaching schedule precludes my being there for the opening performance of Crazy Nigger tomorrow night.

A week from Saturday, on Oct. 24, the NewEar ensemble is playing my 75-minute suite The Planets at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City, the first ensemble to do so besides Relache, who commissioned it. Lee Hartman is conducting the piece, which I think is a good idea; Relache did it sans conductor, which is difficult in some movements.

And on November 3 and 4 I’m giving two lectures at UC Santa Barbara, the second one the Geiringer Musicology Lecture. The latter is titled “A Harmony of Imperfections: How Charles Ives Composed.” The first one, for a more general audience, is “Beyond G#: Escaping the Tyranny of 12 Pitches.” These don’t seem to be listed on the schedule yet. Nor have I finished writing them, but I’ve certainly got all the material in my head. Busy times.

UPDATE: I forgot to include a performance of my Romance Postmoderne this Friday in Pasadena by micro-pianists Aron Kallay and Vicki Ray. And I’m a little disappointed no one commented on the Simpsonian provenance of my headline.

My mother often told me, and I half-remember it, that when I was a toddler I would listen patiently to her reading poetry for as long as she would do it. It is to this that I attribute my love for writing vocal music. I have always been extraordinarily fascinated by the simple fact that words have their own inherent rhythms without which they can hardly be understood. For me to set words is like setting gemstones, and I always have to choose a setting that makes the sound of the word, not necessarily its meaning, shine to advantage. I know there are other philosophies and methods of text setting, and I don’t disparage them, but I don’t respect them either. Handel and Virgil Thomson are my allies on this point. And the principle was impressed on me by my mother’s voice even before I could read (which was at age four).

My wonderful cousin Ann tells me that as recently as last week my mother recited an entire poem from memory, Emily Dickinson’s “Because I would not stop for death,” on what was virtually her deathbed, following her surgery at Baylor Hospital in McKinney, Texas. The surgery went well, but its aftermath did not. Whether Mom’s funeral, Wednesday, went well was, I suppose, a matter of perspective. The churchly elders who officiated but who hardly knew my mother wreathed her in Christian boilerplate and claptrap that attempted to reduce her to just another devout little old church lady, assuring us that we shouldn’t be sad because she had been welcomed into heaven and was sitting at the right hand of the Father – as though our concern for what she was going through at the moment was uppermost among our anxieties. It was, in bulk, a funeral that would have sufficed for any interchangeable number of old ladies who never missed Sunday school.

My mother was devout and certainly prayerful, and seemed to have become more so in recent years, under the influence, I suspect, of church friends who assailed her from all sides. But she also complained to me that she had to hide from her Baptist friends some of the novels she read, of which they would not have approved. She had an acerbic side and a sarcastic sense of humor, and could manage a sharp tongue. I arranged for some time for the funeral attendees to speak in turn, and at my turn, I rather truculently insisted on reading in its entirety Mom’s favorite poem – “Wild Grapes” by Robert Frost, which she had read to me so many times when I was a boy – even though it was three-and-a-half pages long, even though there were octogenarians standing in the warm Texas sun to wait for me to finish, even though it interrupted the revival-meetin’ atmosphere with a secular intrusion, and with little regard for what her church friends must have thought.

The poem is too well-anthologized and –known to repeat here, but I thought its closing lines were admirably calibrated for ending a funeral:

I had not taken the first step in knowledge;
I had not learned to let go with the hands,
As still I have not learned to with the heart,
And have no wish to with the heart – nor need,
That I can see. The mind – is not the heart.
I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind –
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need learn to let go with the heart.

I read it, as much as I could, with the inflections I remember my mother reading it with. (I can clearly recall, from fifty-five years ago, how she intoned, “I said I had the tree. It wasn’t true. / The opposite was true. The tree had me.”) My voice broke a few times near the end. I don’t know what kind of spectacle I made of myself; several people did thank me afterward. I wish I could tell her that I did it, that I personalized her funeral by revealing what I most learned from her. I had made, to those who could understand it, the point that my mother was not simply a Sunday-school conformist: she had a brain, and wide literary and historical interests, and she thought for herself, and she did not let the bromides of organized religion occupy so large a space in her life as to divide her from the wider world.

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.