Draw a straight line and follow it.

Apparently I’ve just broken copyright law. I can’t believe what’s holding up my Cage book: you are no longer allowed to quote texts that are entire pieces of art. This means I’ve been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young’s “This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean,” and Yoko Ono’s “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn’t responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I’ve excised the pieces from the text. 

Speaking of titular colonicity (a term that has entered my vocabulary permanently), as we were, there’s another universal constant in academic writing that sends shivers up my spine: “lies outside the scope of this paper.” (I just Googled it and got 335,000 sites.) It appears so consistently once in every academic paper that you couldn’t force me to write it with two thugs twisting my arm. And yet, when I wrote my article “La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano” for Perspectives of New Music, the editors inserted it: 

As one moves around the room, the audible overtones change markedly over the distance of a few inches, dependent on where one is among the nodes of pitches reinforced by the acoustics of the room. This aspect of the WTP is almost entirely unrepresented by the recording under average circumstances; since it is determined by room acoustics and position in space, no microphone can entirely convey the variety of audible phenomena the WTP generates. Analysis of such transient effects lies outside the scope of the present paper. (Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31 No. 1 [Winter 1993], p. 149; emphasis added)

Since my book for Yale is part of a series (first in the series: The Hamburger: A History), I didn’t think I would have any choice over the title, but it turns out they wanted me to come up with one, and so it’s going to be No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”. I’m not much of a fan of colons in titles, considering them an academic affectation, but I don’t think this one was avoidable. I had been worrying about how I was going to finesse being “the author of 4’33”,” or “the author of John Cage’s 4’33”.” Colons in titles of musicology papers are so ubiquitous that when I was in grad school, my teacher Peter Gena and I used to joke about the paper we were going to submit to the AMS: “The Colon in American Musicology: an Overview.” Someone recently told me about a grad student she overheard saying, “I’ve finished everything about my dissertation except for the part of the title that goes after the colon.” Seems to me that if it’s not bleedin’ obvious what goes after the colon, you don’t need anything. Moby Dick: The Search for a White Whale. Bleak House: The Tale of a Long Legal Case. Colons in titles: Blech.

Curtis MacDonald has made a piece with samples of Conlon Nancarrow’s player pianos, which don’t sound like normal pianos. On one of them Conlon covered the hammers with steel straps, on the other he put leather straps capped with a metal tack. Like Lou Harrison’s tack piano, they sound harsh and kind of honky-tonk, almost like harpsichords, and Conlon clearly came to rely on the extra clarity they gave his thick polyphony; I once heard Study No. 48 on a regular big Disklavier grand, and it sounded like mush. MacDonald’s piece makes me realize that someone needs to go to Basel and sample the original Nancarrow player pianos, as Mikel Rouse did for the prepared piano of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes: partly so we can make our own true realizations of Nancarrow’s pieces, and partly to compose with those wonderfully wacky tones ourselves.

Beethoven had to churn, to some extent, to make his message carry. He had to pull the ear, hard and in the same place and several times…
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata

Ah, it’s like the old days again – just when I think the blogosphere has finally resignedly inured itself to Kyle Gann, furor can again erupt. I apparently mortified a number of people by mentioning, in a brief aside, what I thought was one of the most bare-faced facts in the musical universe, that Beethoven was not a subtle composer. (You can look up the comments.) Some think I insulted Beethoven, which is a terrible thing, because I wield so much influence that now Beethoven will cease to be listened to, and the responsibility will be on my head. 

You know, I’m sitting here in my office doing creative work on Digital Performer, and I’ve had a couple of Nancarrow queries lately from people doing intensive analytical work on him, and it occurs to me that I’ve got all these Nancarrow player piano rolls as MIDI information on my computer, including more than 60 that were found in his studio that don’t correspond to the canonical studies (and I do mean canonical, not canonic). Nancarrow was hypercritical of his own music, and, I think, consigned to oblivion some pieces just as good as some of the ones everyone knows. Many of the unidentified rolls are mere fragments or tempo experiments, and some, highly restrictive in pitch, are presumably for the roll-driven percussion machine he invented that never worked right and was abandoned. But some are fully fleshed out, quite impressive pieces. These tend to be a little more abstract than Nancarrow’s usual style, and perhaps he thought the ideas didn’t come across strongly enough. So here are five of the unknown rolls to listen to, lettered the way Trimpin lettered the rolls as he found them:

Roll A
Roll MM
Roll R

Romantic roll
Roll with “hello”

With some slight hesitation I post a new and rather comical work to the internet. It was supposed to be titled Triskaidekaphonia 2 because it uses the same tuning as my piece Triskaidekaphonia, but it turned out so programmatic that I couldn’t leave it with such an abstract title. So it’s The Aardvarks’ Parade (click to listen, just over ten minutes), in honor of an animal with which I had a childhood fascination. For the first time ever I’ve written a microtonal piece in a scale I’d already used before, and it’s the simplest one I’ve ever used: all the ratios of the whole numbers 1 through 13 multiplied by a fundamental, yielding 29 pitches. The form is AAAA: I was musing about a melody repeated over and over, in simple quarter-notes and 8th-notes, but so intricate in its tuning that several repetitions wouldn’t be enough to make it predictable. If I Am Sitting in a Room is the conceptualist Bolero, maybe this is microtonality’s Bolero. I tend to repeat things four times in my pieces: partly because it’s an American Indian tradition, paying homage to the East, West, North, and South, and partly because my first college composition teacher, Joseph Wood, told me that you could only get away with repeating something three times in a piece, instantly stirring my innate rebelliousness.

I have to say, this has become one of the most richly fulfilling summers I’ve ever had. On one hand I’ve done all this work on piano recordings by Harold Budd and Dennis Johnson, plus a long John Luther Adams analysis I’m finishing and my Robert Ashley biography (3000 words written today, after hours of composing); on the other, recording my piece The Planets with Relache, and then a slew of music rushing out of me lately, with a ten-minute microtonal piece written this week (of which more soon), and two other new pieces begun in the same span.

Cage wrote a mesostic for Nancarrow that reads, “oNce you / sAid / wheN you thought of / musiC, / you Always / thought of youR own / neveR / Of anybody else’s. / that’s hoW it happens.” I think I probably could have been as reclusive as Nancarrow, had not economic necessity forced me into the public life of music criticism. But I certainly am not like Nancarrow in this other respect. A life exclusively focused on my own music seems unimaginable. My musicological work feeds my composition, and vice versa. When I’ve been doing too much critical work and not composing, I get cranky; and when I’ve been composing continuously, I dry up a little, and I start to need the interaction with the music of others. It’s not that I steal so many ideas from other composers, though of course I never scruple to do that. Nothing about the other people’s music I’m working on went into the piece I just finished, though I do absorb inspiration from the brilliant things Ashley says, and Budd always reconfirms my love for the major seventh chord. I just need that rejuvenation from other artist’s ideas, the mere presence of simpatico music I didn’t write.

I seem not to be unique in this respect among my close contemporaries. Larry Polansky, a far more prolific composer than myself, has done loads of important musicological work on Ruth Crawford, Johanna Beyer, and Harry Partch, not to mention running Frog Peak Music for the publishing of other composers’ music. Peter Garland, in between writing his own wonderful pieces, published the crucial Soundings journal for many years, and made available the music of many who didn’t seem so obviously important at the time as they do now. Some of us need this close interaction with the music of our contemporaries. Nor does it seem like just an American thing. Schumann certainly spent a lot of his career inside other composers’ heads, and seems to have enjoyed having a trunkload of Schubert’s manuscripts in his apartment, from which to draw for the occasional world premiere whenever he fancied. Liszt played the piano music of every significant contemporary except Brahms (who offended him by falling asleep at the premiere of Liszt’s B minor Sonata).

Part of it is what I think Henry Cowell sensed: that there’s no such thing as a famous composer in a musical genre no one’s heard of, and so one’s personal survival depends on a rising tide raising all boats. But Morton Feldman also tells a story of an artist in the ’50s who, after seeing Jackson Pollock’s first astounding exhibition of drip paintings, remarked, “I’m so glad he did it. Now I don’t have to.” And Feldman adds, for thoughtful emphasis, “That was not an extraordinary thing to say at the time.” Some of us do have this feeling that art is a collective activity, that it’s not all about ourselves. I hear an exquisite piece like John Luther Adams’s The Light Within, and I do think, somehow, “I’m so glad he did it, now I don’t have to” – partly because I want to hear that kind of ecstatic wall-of-sound genre, and he can so it much better than I could. Mikel Rouse’s music is so much more sophisticated than my intentionally naive fare, but listening to him gets me back on track. I listen to Eve Beglarian’s music, and I hear things I might have been tempted to do, but she’s got them covered. These aesthetically close colleagues free me up to pursue what I do best, but I somehow need to participate in their achievements by analyzing them and writing about them. 

We Americans are taught to worship individuality, in art above all, but there is a strong collective aspect to creativity that many composers strenuously ignore or deny. I have no idea why I’m so attuned to it, especially being as anti-social as I am by temperament. But I do know that if anyone ever regrets that I had to write all these books and articles instead of working non-stop on my own music, they will have missed the point. It’s all the same thing.

If you have a friend who’s considering becoming a microtonal composer, and you are frantic to spare him a life of agony and unfulfillment, I’m about to do you a big service: just have him read this. All day yesterday and this morning I spent hours filling my little sketch book with pages of notes and numbers like this:

I’m transcribing my interviews with Bob Ashley (kind of in shorthand, I don’t have time to do a real transcript; some student can do that someday if he wants). A name of one of Bob’s contemporaries would occasionally come up, and he’d give me a frank appraisal of the person’s music. Sometimes he’d asked me to switch off the tape recorder to do so, sometimes he’d instead hesitate a moment and then say, “You can put that in the book.” After one of those, he said, “There’s got to be somebody who says something about somebody.” Amen.

Composer David Bruce has an interview with me up on his Composition:Today web site.

What a pleasure it was to find Robert Carl’s new book about Terry Riley’s In C (from Oxford) in my mailbox today (or actually, on top of it, which was poor judgment on the mailman’s part, since it’s rained here every day for the last month). I wrote a blurb for the back cover and shouldn’t say anything more, but I’m impressed once again with the smoothness and non-academicism of Robert’s writing style – I thought composers had to work for a newspaper for years to achieve that. Also with the number of people he interviewed in great detail about Riley’s early career, which is stuff that I’ll surely end up quoting. There are people I won’t have to interview because Robert’s already done it. It’s about time we had a book on In C, which was my generation’s Rite of Spring. My Long Night (1980), though quite opposite in atmosphere, was, formally, closely modeled on it. My only thought was, if some card-carrying musicologist had written the book, and Robert had written his Fifth Symphony instead, I would be twice as happy. Why is the musicology of new music (and not all that new at that) being left to us composers? It’s a question to bring up at the minimalism conference, at which Robert will be giving a keynote address.