Colin Marshall of Marketplace of Ideas very kindly did a phone interview with me about my book on 4’33”. You can hear the podcast here.

This week, April 15-17, I am the featured composer at the annual new-music festival at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. There appear to be six concerts, with my music on four of them, mixed with works by student composers there; click on the link to see the official site. I give a talk Friday morning at 11. I love looking at the list of composers from previous festivals: Peter Mennin in ’62, my one-time teacher Kent Kennan in ’63, Persichetti in ’64, Sandor Varess in ’65, Paul Creston in ’71, Ben Johnston in ’72, Elie Siegmeister in ’91, and several I haven’t heard of. But they brought John Luther Adams in ’07 and Peter Garland last year, and given that progression I do look like a logical next choice. Plus the festival’s directed by Brian Herrington and John Lane, the latter of whom runs their percussion ensemble, and I’ve got several percussion pieces, so I fit in. Also, a lot of their composers are Texas-related, and I’m originally from Texas – though I haven’t had a performance in that state since 1976. 

Spring 2010 Concert and Event Schedule (April 15th-17th,
2010)
Admission: FREE for SHSU Music
Majors and Music Faculty, $5 SHSU Students, $10 General Public

Thursday, April
15th

Sam Houston State
Student Composers Concert
Recital Hall;
4:00pm

Artist Faculty
Spotlight: Daniel Saenz, Cello Recital
Recital Hall;
7:30pm

Friday, April
16th

Kyle Gann, Guest
Lecture
11:00am; Music
Building RM 202 (subject to change)

The Chamber Music
of Kyle Gann and Sam Houston State Composers (Concert 1)
Recital Hall;
4:00pm

The Chamber Music
of Kyle Gann and Sam Houston State Composers (Concert 2)
Recital Hall;
7:30pm

Saturday, April
17th

Intersection and
the Sam Houston Percussion Group: The Music of Kyle Gann (Concert 1)
Directed by Brian
Herrington and John Lane
Recital Hall;
4:30pm

Intersection and
the Sam Houston Percussion Group: The Music of Kyle Gann (Concert 2)
Directed by Brian
Herrington and John Lane
Recital Hall;
7:30pm – Pre-Concert Talk; 8:00pm – Concert

[Back from Serbia after a 24-hour door-to-door trip in which my plane made an unscheduled stop in Canada because a woman passenger had a seizure and needed medical attention. It was a classic “Is there a doctor on the plane?” situation out of a movie I don’t want to see again.]

BELGRADE – Saturn is sextiling my Sun and ascendant from my tenth house, if you know what that means. What it means is, I’m kind of difficult to escape at the moment. The always impressive Frank Oteri has a wonderful interview up with me today on New Music Box, in honor of my new book and two recent CDs. I always knew Frank was sort of ridiculously brilliant, but I didn’t realize how brilliant until he started digging into my music and making me see it from a different angle than I’d ever seen it before. In addition there’s another interview with me by John Ruscher on BOMB magazine about my Cage book. There’s also a nice review of my Cage book by Robert Birnbaum at The Morning News. I’m all over the internet today. This, too, shall pass.

Here are two of the best tracks from Nada’s latest CD:

Vuk Kulenovic: Virginal (he lives in Boston now; some of the best Serbian composers escaped during the ’90s)

Irena Popovic: Silence and Nothing

It’s a small but rich and vibrant music scene, pretty much hidden away from the rest of the world due to unfortunate political developments of the last 20 years. One told me that their devotion to this exciting little scene is what keeps them going from day to day. My growing affection for the Serbian music world has taken me by surprise. I’ve tried my darndest to learn some Serbian, which they don’t expect any Westerner to do; their startled delight when I answer “Drago mi je” (“Glad t’ meet you”) is touching. And they found it hilarious that I thought Radno Vreme must be the Donald Trump of Serbia, because his name is on practically every downtown building. “Radno vreme,” it turns out, means “Hours of operation.” (Sava River in the evening, under a full moon:)

I don’t know who might be reading this blog in Belgrade, but in case anyone is, I’ll be speaking about my music (and its relation to American precedents) tonight from 6 to 8 at the University for the Arts in Belgrade. 

OK, kids, gather around, it’s time for Uncle Kyle to continue your education in Serbian music. I’ve already told you about Ljubica Maric (1909-2003), who was the country’s leading modernist composer of the early 20th century, and the only woman to occupy that position in her country’s culture. Nor will I repeat what I said there about Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac (1856-1914), the country’s leading musical patriarch and composer of traditional choral music.

Instead, I’m going to start with an unknown composer I’m totally fascinated by: Ksenija Zecevic (1956-2006). (That first name might be Xenia in English, and I’m sorry I lack the diacritical markings to get the last name right, but the C’s are both pronounced CH.) She was a child prodigy on the piano and in composition as well, finishing her master’s in music at age 21. There’s quite a bit of stuff about her on YouTube, including an interview done with her when she was just 17. She was a brunette pianist then; later in life she invariably appears as a bleached blonde with bright red lipstick and well-emphasized cleavage. My friend Dragana met her once and tells me she was an incredible character who had no filter between her thoughts and her speech, and made her own career difficult by blurting out whatever came to her mind. (Composers who torpedo their own careers even more effectively than I do always intrigue me.) The music on her YouTube videos is a little New-Agey, and I gather that most of her music was for theater and film. The one recording I found in a Belgrade record store (where I bought four discs for about 1400 dinars, less than $21) is her Requiem for Nicola Tesla, the Serb who invented electricity before Thomas Edison, as the Serbs love reminding me. It’s a four-movement work in Romantic style with some minimalist touches, and I offer you as mp3s the first and last movements. There’s the occasional cursory web site about her, but little information, and she died at 50, apparently of heart problems. She looks like a real original.

In less colorful addition I offer you Lullabies for a Better World, Op. 113 for piano (1994) by Dejan Despic (b. 1930), who lives in Belgrade, and Silenzio (1996) for women’s choir, alto flute, bass clarinet, and piano by Milan Mihajlovic (b. 1945), who teaches at the University of the Arts at Belgrade. In the latter I particularly like the way a Monteverdi quotation runs into a Rachmaninoff quotation about 2/3 of the way through. This week I’ll be meeting Serbian patriarch Vladan Radovanovic – painter, poet, composer – who claims to have invented minimalism, and also be seeing my old friend Vladimir Tosic, my favorite of the Serbian postminimalists, so perhaps I’ll have more offerings later. No younger composers yet, but I’m making inquiries. Freed from Turkish dominion in the 1830s, split off from the grab-bag Yugoslavia only a few years ago, Serbia has the feel of a young nation aggressively on the rise, and one that wants to take its place at the world table. The amount of academic activity concerning new music here is astonishing, and the publishers are still idealistic enough to insist that it gets into print, like America in the 1970s. Attention must be paid.

The great Robert Ashley turns 80 today…

BELGRADE – Everyone here’s been very nice to me, but my first lecture happened to fall on the 11th anniversary of the onset of the NATO (mostly American) aerial bombardment of Belgrade, which a few people mentioned. 3.24 is their 9.11 – except that the bombardment lasted 78 days. The city runs sirens at noon every year to commemorate the day. Professional people – authors, musicians, scholars – have told me stories of huddling in their basements, their knees giving way from fear, making their way to the grocery store through the rubble of buildings, having to forego cancer treatments because the hospitals could only handle emergencies. I don’t know much about the politics behind the engagement, and almost don’t want to – though Noam Chomsky considered the NATO attack unconscionable, and I tend to trust him more than anyone. But there’s got to be some way to resolve international disagreements besides dropping bombs in crowded downtown areas, terrorizing civilian populations, and leaving wrecks like these behind, which I photographed down the street from the music school I’m lecturing at:

(Can’t get the second image vertical, for some reason.) My theoretical complicity in this as a citizen (and Clinton-voter!) is painful to contemplate.

Ba da da da dum (bum, bum – bum, bum):

In case you didn’t get the onomatopoeia, that’s the blue, or grayish-blue, Danube. It begins at Donaueschingen (“fount of the Danube”) in Germany, and, unusually for a European river (they mostly flow north or south), flows eastward into the Black Sea. In the 1770s, ur-musicologist Charles Burney sailed down it to document musical activity in eastern Europe. Me, I’m currently lecturing at the University of the Arts of Belgrade. Half of the students I’ve met are doing projects in American music (Gershwin, Weill, Glass), and I have to assume with them a more detailed level of knowledge than I do with my American students. On the left, in front of her school, is my sponsor, Professor Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, a Nancarrow/Ligeti/Carter expert:

The school is across the street from this park:

Beograd means “white city,” and there must be some kind of zoning laws to keep it that way:

The National Museum is on the left here, the National Theater on the right, and a statue of 19th-century Serbian Prince Mihailo Obrenovic:

There’s a wonderful fortress and park where the Sava and Danube rivers flow together. Because of its strategic position, the city of Belgrade has been involved in 115 wars over the centuries, and razed to the ground 44 times, which explains to me why the drivers (I’ve been driving here) are so nervous and aggressive:

I love the way Serbians transliterate foreign names into their own language as we used to do, so that tabloids write about Dzordz Kluni (George Clooney), Sandre Bulok, and Meril Strip. (Mine would be Kajl Gen.) And it extends to scholarly publications about rock stars as well, as one can see in this biography of – can you guess the singer (name at the bottom, Dz being their letter for “J”)?:

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The paprika-packed Serbian meatballs are to die for. I’ve learned to say “Zelio bih casu viskija sa ledom, molim?” (“Can I get a whiskey on the rocks, please?”), and aside from that and a couple of legal Cuban cigars, what else do I need?

The Dessoff Choir’s March 6 performance of my Transcendental Sonnets, based on poems by the Transcendentalist poet Jones Very and conducted by James Bagwell, is now up on my web site:

1. The Son
2. Enoch
3. Love
4. Faith
5. The Word

This weekend I’ll be in Ottawa, Canada, for the conference of the Society for American Music. Sunday morning I’m chairing a panel on experimental music theater with respect to Cage and Berio. Then Monday I fly to Serbia, where I’ll be lecturing about my music and American music in general at the University of the Arts at Belgrade for a couple of weeks. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about that, and posting photos. Never been there before, but I have a bunch of Serbian musicologist friends I’ll be glad to see. 

Microtonal theorist Timothy Johnson, of whose theoretical skills and even more his work ethic I stand in awe, has sent me the MIDI file he made of the first 30 measures of the final movement of Ben Johnston’s Seventh String Quartet, of which I wrote in my last post. At 2:41, this represents about a sixth of the third movement, which must total 16 minutes. I can’t listen to it enough: exotic consonances floating in a totally free, gridless pitch space. This is truly the music of the distant future. He made the file with piano sounds, since MIDI string sounds are vulgarly inadequate, so you’ll have to imagine this played by a string quartet. I wish I thought I would live long enough to write music like this, but I’m too pragmatic, not visionary enough. The score is published by Smith Publications, if you’re interested in studying it yourself.

One of the best things the Microtonal Weekend at Wright State University did for me was initiate me into familiarity with Ben Johnston’s Seventh String Quartet. Written in 1984, the piece has never been played. It has a reputation as being the most difficult string quartet ever written. Timothy Ernest Johnson of Roosevelt U. gave a paper analyzing the third movement (his doctoral dissertation is on the entire work and also Toby Twining’s Chrysalid Requiem), and for the first time I learned exactly wherein that difficulty consists.

If you know much about Ben’s Third Quartet, you know it works its way measure by measure through a 53-note microtonal scale. The finale of the Seventh is built on a similar plan, but the structural tone row consists of 176 pitches – all different, 176 pitches within one octave, heard in the viola on each successive downbeat. Many other notes are heard in the other instruments whose harmonies link each note to the next, and Tim tells me that altogether there are more than 1200 discrete pitches in the movement – more than one per cent, five times as many as most people can perceive. That does sound a little tricky to play. Tim demonstrated how the players are supposed to proceed from the opening C to the subsequent D7bv-, a pitch ratio of 896/891. The violist is tasked to move upward from this C and come back down on a pitch 9.7 cents higher – just under one tenth of a half-step – than she started on. At the downbeat of the next measure, the violist lands on Dbb–, pitch ratio 2048/2025 – another ten cents higher. And so on for another 175 measures until the viola ends up traversing the octave and ends at C again. A good half of Tim’s paper was spent talking us through the performance challenges of the first two measures. Between the first and second downbeats (pictured below), the quartet is supposed to tune the F to the C and the Bb- to the F, the Ab- and Eb- in the cello to the Bb- in the first violin and the 7th harmonic G7b- above that, and find the 11th subharmonic below G7b-, and, voilà, viola, you’re on D7bv-. It’s just 4/3 x 4/3 x 2/3 x 2/3 x 7/4 x 8/11, and bob’s your uncle, there’s your 896/891. It can’t be too much more difficult than four people traversing a 177-meter tightrope together without holding hands, or manually flying four biplanes in parallel in and out of the mountains through a dense fog. I mean, it’s not like they’re calculating all this while playing an accelerating tempo canon, for god’s sake.

The tempo is slow and the rhythms relatively simple, though there are serialized aspects to the rhythm and meter, correlated to pitch differences in the row. Ben recalled that his original proportional scheme would have made the piece last 48 years. Tim Johnson was applauded by others in the audience who had tried to untie this Gordion’s knot and failed; he’s been working on it for five years, and developed a set of computer programs to help him process the cascades of pitches and ratios. Best of all, he played a MIDI version of the movement’s opening 30 measures. It was, indeed, breath-taking: consonances slid into slightly new consonances in recurring patterns, but with no sense of a background fixed pitch grid whatever. [UPDATE: Tim kindly sent me the MIDI file to post, so listen for yourself. It’s done with piano sounds, so imagine a string quartet playing it.] I think I can truly claim that never, in the history of the world’s music, has such deeply-layered complexity sounded so translucent.

I have bowed low before many an unfathomable musical achievement, but before this one
I absolutely prostrate myself. Imagine Ben writing in pencil, in 1984, a string quartet that would later require multiple computer programs to unravel again! How can a mere MIDI-piano version of 30 measures of a yet-unperformed work change your ideas of what music can achieve? Boulez and Stockhausen, you are hereby blown out of the water, your musical understanding has been revealed as merely rudimentary by this Burj Khalifa of sonic conceptualization. The Kepler Quartet, from whom violinist Eric Segnitz was present for the conference, is expected to record the piece for their series of Ben’s complete quartets on New World. Good. Luck.

Thankfully, due to another analysis paper by Daniel Huey of U. Mass., we also got to hear Ben’s Tenth Quartet (1995), which I’d also never heard before. This is a considerably simpler piece, and in fact the final movement is a theme and variations on the tune “Danny Boy,” which isn’t revealed until the very end. The harmonies are tight, fluid, elegantly voice-led, and creamy. The Kepler’s next CD (SQs 1, 5, and 10) comes out in October, and I guarantee you’ll enjoy the 10th. Its simplicity-within-complexity and complexity-within-simplicity will gratify biases all across the spectrum, and with its resonantly pure yet exotic chords it just sounds great.

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

In other news drawn from the colloquium (which was astonishingly dense with relevant news, considering it flew by in a mere 29 hours), the other honoree was the late piano tuner Owen Jorgensen, who wrote the massive book on the history of keyboard tuning manuals in English, Tuning (I won’t take the time to look up its voluminous subtitle). Momilani Ramstrum of Mesa College talked about Jorgensen’s life and said that he rather embarrassed Michigan State as their staff piano tuner by becoming more of a celebrity than most of the faculty, so they made him a full professor and let him teach piano tuning. On the other hand, registered piano technician Fred Sturm of UNM gave a polite but exhaustive tirade against Jorgensen’s influence, charging that since he limited himself to British sources, and Britain was a few decades behind the Continent on tuning issues, he’s created a misleading picture of tuning history that others (myself included) are now quoting uncritically. This sounds perfectly plausible, and doesn’t interfere with the pleasure I get from Jorgensen’s passionate speculations about the relation of composing to tuning. However, it turns out there’s a new tome in English now by Patrizio Barbieri simply called Enharmonic which contains a more accurate and voluminous documentation of the history of tuning all across Europe and across the centuries. You can obtain it, as I soon will, at Barbieri’s web site, and I will expect you all to have read it before I blog on the subject again. Frank Cox passed around a copy, and it looks massively impressive.

Microtonal guitarist John Schneider, slapping an endless series of interchangeable fretboards on his axe, started us out with a 100-minute introduction to the history of tuning that hit every salient point, made every principle clear, demonstrated every nuance beautifully on the guitar, and was thoroughly delightful and entertaining. If you ever need a lecturer on this topic, he’s your man. I couldn’t have done it. In five hours or 15 weeks I can make a lot of good points about tuning, but he’s distilled it into a compact traveling road show. And John Fonville led a group of students though a continuum of perfectly tuned tone clusters in Partchian otonalities and utonalities whose beauty we could all appreciate. He’s looking to take that to various schools as well. If I can ever get these guys up to Bard, I will jump at the opportunity.

Ben Johnston offered some lovely reminiscences on his education and career, which microtonal composer Aaron Hunt quotes on his blog, so I refer you there. Aaron gave his own colorful presentation on the microtonal instruments he’s selling through his HÏ€ company, to whose web site http://www.h-pi.com/index.html I additionally direct you. Thanks to Franklin Cox and Wright State University for a colloquium that delivered more punch per presentation than just about any academic event I’ve
ever attended.

I’ll only add that, in addition to what Aaron quotes, Ben Johnston and I shared a moment I’ll never forget. After my address in his honor, he hugged me and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I replied, “Ohhhh, thank you.” And he looked me right in the eye with the old twinkle I remember from decades past, and growled cheerfully: “You’re welcome!” False modesty on his part would have been devastating at such a moment. For him to acknowledge some small honor I could pay him was pleasant, but for him to acknowledge what he’d done for me - spinning my life off in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, yet one that expressed perfectly what I needed to do – was ten thousand times more fulfilling. If decades hence any student ever thanks me for my impact on his or her life, I’ll remember how important the words “You’re welcome” can be.