You have to listen to Dick Cheney explain in 1994 why an invasion of Baghdad would have been a bad idea.

My esteemed colleagues at Sequenza 21 note that yesterday was the ten-year anniversary of Conlon Nancarrow’s death. (While at the Voice I was always amazed at how many composers die in August – Feldman, Cage, David Tudor, Nancarrow, Earle Brown – and always noted it, because there is a dearth of New York concerts in August, and I was always stuck for column material. Someone usually died in the nick of time, and I always considered their timing their final gift to me.)

Anyway, as I was saying, Nancarrow died in 1997, and the obituary I wrote for him is not in Music Downtown, my collection of Village Voice articles. I don’t know why. I’m sure I intended to include it, but as I was going through the proofs, I noticed its absence, too late to rectify it. I am happy for the bulk of my columns to disappear into oblivion, but of all the ones omitted, the Nancarrow obit is the one I most wish were in there. So I’ve long intended to post it here, and the anniversary is as good a peg as any. This is the pre-edit version, actually a touch longer than the one that was published:

Piano Rolls and Fresh Mangos

Conlon Nancarrow, 1912-1997

Conlon Nancarrow’s wife Yoko Segiura used to tell me that, in the first years of their marriage, she would ask him what to do with all his player-piano rolls after he died. He’d shrug and say, “Burn ’em.” Kind of a black sense of humor, right? And yet, in the nine years I knew Nancarrow, I never found any evidence that he was kidding. He seemed immune to the charms of public recognition. He wrote music because he wanted to hear what it would sound like to have two tempos running at once, one of which was the square root of two times the other. Once he had heard it, that was that. Oh, he’d keep the player-piano roll around because he wanted to hear it again, down there in his comfortably cluttered, garage-like, Mexico City studio. But he didn’t seem to crave applause for that square root of two, and he endured the travels, film crews, and interviews his growing celebrity required with patience rather than enthusiasm. If his public persona was a pose, it never cracked.

Nancarrow’s death at 7:10 PM, August 10, [1997] from apparent heart failure, caused no tremors in the music world. The difficult part was getting a sense that this underground legend really existed in the first place. Except for some brief exposure in the ’60s when Merce Cunningham choreographed several of his Player Piano Studies, he waited until age 65 for real interest to be shown in his work. He didn’t make public appearances to promote his music until 1981, and he only did so then – so his then-manager Eva Soltes tells me – as a way of proving to his teenage son that he hadn’t wasted his life. Even down in the musical backwater of Mexico City where he lived for 57 years, he had few connections to the local, Eurocentric music scene. Until the last few years, if you wanted to know something about Nancarrow, you had to seek him out.

I did so on three trips to Mexico City (resulting in a book, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, from Cambridge University Press). On the first visit, in 1988, I found him as people had told me I would: suspicious, grudgingly hospitable, taciturn, opinionated about politics, impatient with discussing musical details. The interviews I taped with him on that trip contain entire quarter-hours of silence. He’d look at a manuscript I’d ask him about and finally sigh “I don’t know,” but mention Reagan and he’d rail against the Democrats for not putting up a real alternative. (Driving through his home town Texarkana, I once called up his younger brother Charles, who insisted on taking me out to dinner, and told me, “Conlon’s to the left of Che Guevara, and I’m to the right of Atilla the Hun.”) Nancarrow was no musical philosopher; I went with him to a concert and he immediately dismissed any piece that wasn’t rhythmically complex.

By the time I returned a year later he had come to trust me, and became warmly hospitable. If he had a quiet lifestyle, it could be a delicious one. He had an amazing cook who prepared the best Mexican food I’ve ever had, and succulent, fresh mangos and papayas (completely different fruits from what you can get under those names in America) were passed out like dime-store candies. Nancarrow didn’t care for publicity, but he liked the good life.

After his first stroke, his mental abilities were never quite the same. At first he was strictly protective of the studio where his player pianos stood, and in which he had spent 40 years punching on piano rolls the most rhythmically complex body of music ever written. Later he relinquished control and let me explore there by myself. Along with waist-high piles of manuscript scores and correspondence, the place contained complete editions of Source magazine, Musical Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, and other journals that showed how avidly he had kept up with the contemporary music scene that he viewed for decades from a wary distance. The walls were still lined with tempo charts made from Heny Cowell’s New Musical Resources, the 1930 book that Nancarrow had bought in New York City after returning from fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and which suggested using player pianos to achieve complex rhythms.

Now, rather than being burned as he suggested, all those scores, sketches, rolls, and even the pianos have been sold to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland (Sacher being the industrialist who bought, among many other things, the manuscript of Le Sacre du Printemps). That’s how he had money to live on the last few years, after the inheritance Charles left him when he died ran out, which is what he lived on after his 1983 MacArthur Award ran out. Mexico cancels your health insurance at age 70, and he was paying his own hospital bills. I wish Nancarrow’s studio could be preserved as a historical site, a kind of musical Thoreau’s cabin; after all, the museum-houses of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (whom he knew) are several blocks away. But it isn’t going to happen.

Nancarrow no longer talked on the phone in the last year and a half of his life. A series of strokes had rendered him liable to forget who he was talking to, and his laconicism became exaggerated to the point of monosyllabic answers. He remained lucid long enough to look through the book I wrote about him and express confused appreciation. Problems with his back, lungs, and teeth confined him to bed, although according to Yoko he rallied at the end, and was energetic enough to walk with assistance the day he died. He was cremated the day after his death, with only a couple of local composers – Julio Estrada, Mario LaVista – and Yoko’s friends present.

I once pointed out to him that he was probably the only American composer complex and modernist enough to be admired by Elliott Carter fans and also free and vernacular enough to be loved by John Cage fans. He chuckled in surprise. I don’t think it had ever occurred to him.

I just had dinner with Alex Ross, here for the Bard Festival. My conversation is greatly inhibited these days because any story I tell, the response tends to be, “Oh yeah, I read that on your blog,” so it suddenly occurred to me as we sat down that, since Alex and I read each other every day, we wouldn’t have a thing to say to each other. But we both thought for awhile and came up with some news we hadn’t blogged about.

Geez, now I can’t start a conversation by telling anyone I had dinner with Alex Ross. As Alex said, “Maybe we need to be a bit more mysterious.”

[Three updates below.]

Ouch. The great savants of the New York Times music section name their favorite minimalist recordings today. Six critics, given four albums each, limiting themselves to Reich, Glass, Adams, and Riley – plus one album each by Cage (huh?), Poul Ruders, and Count Basie (double huh?). Ouch again. What, no Well-Tuned Piano? No Charlemagne Palestine Strumming Music, or Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone? No Eliane Radigue Adnos, or Trilogie de la Mort? No Tom Johnson An Hour for Piano? No Phill Niblock Hurdy Hurry, or Five More String Quartets? No Tony Conrad Early Minimalism? I imagined that these people had large CD collections.

Next week, the Times food critics list their favorite ice cream flavors: Strawberry, Chocolate, and Vanilla! What else is there?

UPDATE: All right, I don’t think any list of under 50 “best” things can be worth a damn, and I won’t do four, but for the record I’ll give my top five minimalist albums:

Young: The Well-Tuned Piano (unfortunately all but impossible to get, I know, but maybe that’ll justify the fifth disc)

Terry Riley: Shri Camel

Charlemagne Palestine: Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone

Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano (though I prefer Tom’s own performance to the recorded Rzewski one)

Eliane Radigue: Trilogie de la Mort

For a sixth, I might put Glass’s Music in 12 Parts on there, for sentimental reasons. And there are some individual Jon Gibson pieces I’m deeply attached to, but no full album. Reich’s Octet plus John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music might make the top ten if we’re really going to consider Adams’s romanticism minimalist. Reader submissions welcome.

UPDATE 2: Let’s analyze these Times lists in terms of labels:

Nonesuch: 9

Sony: 3

Naxos: 3

Cantaloupe: 3

Bridge, CRI, Mosaic (Basie), New Albion, RCA, and Hungaroton, 1 each

And so we see that, of 24 discs, 13 are from media giants like Warner (Nonesuch), Sony, and RCA, three from Naxos which has been a worldwide marketing success, and three from the Bang on a Can label Cantaloupe, which has done very well at getting its product out. Now, how about all those obscure labels that we minimalism fans rely on to preserve all the great hardcore minimalist music not conventional enough for the major labels, like Table of the Elements, Organ of Corti, XI, New Tone, Robi Droli, Lovely Music, Barooni, Cold Blue, Mode, Blast First? Absent. Omitted. Not represented. What this tells us is that the Times recommendation list is extremely skewed by the commercial market, and that the critics are swayed, not solely by musical quality, but by the companies that manage to put their CDs across their desks, whose representatives call them up and push product. I’ve been there. I’ve had product pushed on me. It didn’t work in my case. I once pissed off Nonesuch so badly they didn’t send me anything for years. I listen to everything I can get, I go to Other Music to find the records that don’t come in the mail, I like what I like, and I don’t assume that, just because something’s on Nonesuch, it’s the best music out there.

UPDATE 3: Steve Smith responds in his blog, and I’m very happy to see him list some great pieces whose titles I would have loved to see in the Times.

It crossed my mind that if I publicly signed off on blogging for a spell, I’d immediately have something to write about. I went to see Mark Morris’s dance Looky, set to my Disklavier studies, at Jacob’s Pillow tonight. The Jacob’s Pillow people treated me with breathtaking graciousness. Scholar and Mark Morris biographer Maura Keefe gave a preconcert talk that quoted liberally from my blog entries about Looky, making my vernacular prose sound rakish in so dignified a setting. Ella Baff, the surprisingly young director of the place, welcomed me, and, standing in the theater, suddenly said, “Maniacs is here. Do you know him? Do you want to meet him?” Her mispronunciation of “maniacs” nonplussed me, but something about her gestures forced my brain to gradually reconstrue the word as “Manny Ax,” and ten seconds later I was shaking hands with the pianist Emanuel Ax. (I maintained enough presence of mind to enjoy her dancer’s assumption that, since I’m a musician, I must know Emanuel Ax, and by his nickname, yet.) For his part, Mr. Ax did a lovely job of seeming to know who I was. I assayed to run back to my car and return with a sheaf of my piano works, but he was gone before I could make the suggestion. The dances went splendidly.

I tried to remember whether any other famous classical musician (not counting John Cage, Robert Ashley, and the postclassical crowd I hang out with) had ever been subjected to a public hearing of my music before, and I can’t think of an instance. I’d love to know what he thought, but it’s been my experience that my Disklavier pieces make pianists nervous.

Sorry, I haven’t been blogging. Even those of us who like the limelight tire of public life occasionally, and fall into a none-of-your-business mood. I’m trying to organize my fall tour of Europe, and all I can think of is one of Groucho’s famous lines from Night at the Opera: “I figure if he doesn’t sing too often he can break even.” That’s exactly the way it looks: how many lectures and concerts can I afford to give? Not as many as I’d planned, certainly, and every one seems to add a few hundred Euros to my expenses, with the dollars piling up at an alarmingly more rapid rate. Who knew Europeans were as broke as we are? I hope to redo my PostClassic Radio playlist soon, which, with the imminent demise of internet radio, I’ve been neglecting. Other than that, the next fly I drop in everyone’s ointment may be a European one, which may make me seem… almost respectable.

UPDATE: I would like to note, though, that today you’ll see 735 given as the number of entries on my blog to date. The number seems insignificant – but 730.5 days is two years, and on August 29 (anniversary of Cage’s 4’33” premiere, and of Katrina’s attack on New Orleans) I will have been at this blog for four years. When I first started out, I doubted my ability or inclination to post frequently, but decided that if I managed to post every other day on the average, that I would count that as a respectable blog presence. I’m now enough ahead of my goal to take a couple of weeks off.

Debra Bresnan of Yamaha has written a story about my experience with the Disklavier for Yamaha’s in-house magazine, posted on the web as well. It includes a photo of me taken recently by composer Adam Baratz, taken on my screened-in porch – where I am sitting at this moment.

Tuesday through Saturday of next week, August 7 through 11, the Mark Morris Dance Group will reprise Looky, the dance Mark choreographed to my Disklavier studies, at the summer dance festival at Jacob’s Pillow in the town of Becket, in western Massachusetts. Other pieces on the concert employ music by Bach, Brahms, and Stravinsky. Mark’s dances are incredibly beautiful, and, as his reputation attests, intimately derived from the music he chooses.

Those of you who do not hold academic positions and wish you did may take some comfort from the following medical statistic. Last December my blood pressure was 145/100; after seven months of absence from the camaraderie of my esteemed colleagues, it is now 107/76.

Richard Fleming is a philosophy professor at Bucknell University, where I used to teach, and thus an old friend. Beneath his cynical sense of humor, he’s a wonderfully clear, wonderfully articulate thinker, capable of tracing lines of logic in such a translucent way that even the nonprofessional memory can easily recall them afterward. The philosophy of music is his special passion, and, with composer William Duckworth, Fleming was editor of the books John Cage at Seventy-Five and Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, as well as author of several books about Wittgenstein, Cavell, and others. Richard knew both Cage and Leonard Bernstein, and – crazy as this sounds – he used to teach a course comparing their respective Harvard lectures. (Bernstein’s set, The Unanswered Question, relies on Chomsky to argue that there is a universal grammar for music; Cage’s lectures are randomly written and non-informative.) In short, Richard has an amazing and a surprising mind.

Richard’s and my erstwhile common student, Tony DeRitis, who is music department chair at Northeastern University and an incredible character in his own very different way, brought both me and Fleming together last week to teach a group of 19 international students (from Mali, Ireland, India, Brazil, South Africa, and the U.S.) in a program called Fusion Arts Exchange, bringing American music to those of other cultures. Fleming gave the lecture on Cage, and, to end it, told a story, never before in print, that he’s kindly given me permission to pass on to you:

Fleming visited Cage late in his life, and asked how he was doing. “Well, I’m just fine,” Cage replied, “but all my neighbors in my apartment building are very upset.” “Why is that?” “The fire alarm broke last night,” Cage explained, “and rang all night. No one would come to fix it, and none of my neighbors got any sleep.” “Then why are you all right?,” Fleming asked. “Well,” replied Cage, “I just lay there and worked the sound of the fire alarm into my thoughts and into my dreams, and I slept just fine.”

The story is coming out in a book by Fleming called Evil and Silence: Philosophical Exercses, Socrates to Cage. I’ll let you know when it appears; I’ll be reading it immediately.

Riffing off of politics again for a moment, I truly hope it is redundant for me to point out that everyone who is worried about the nature of political discourse in this country should be reading Glenn Greenwald over at Salon every day. He is a brilliant researcher and fiercely relentless critic of mainstream media news coverage who has forced some of the worst offenders at Time and the New York Times to modify their rhetoric and admit mistakes. His column today is especially gratifying, as it takes up the use of the epithet “serious,” the term that habitual Bush-supporters use these days to distinguish themselves from Democrats and liberal commentators. Dick Cheney and Joe Klein at Time, in this usage, are Very Very Serious because, while they’ll take issue with the President here and there, they understand the basic rightness of what he’s doing; Nancy Pelosi and Michael Moore aren’t serious, because, even though they were right a million times where the Neocons were always wrong, they were never on the Bandwagon to begin with.

The thing I love about it is, of course, that “serious” has also long been the word that High Modernist composers use to distinguish themselves from composers who try to appeal to the audience, who think about accessibility, who are influenced by pop music, who don’t build up dramatic climaxes, who appreciate Erik Satie and Virgil Thomson, who don’t try to impress each other with the sophistication of their techniques. “Serious” is a condescending but tolerant-seeming word that connotes, well, yes, these postminimalists are composers too, and amateurs may find in them a certain entertainment value, but we must not forget, of course, who the really serious composers are. I’ve long speculated that, if artists are, as they are called, the “antennae of the race,” that trends we hear in music may subsequently filter through the rest of society; and that, since we had a generation of composers who were so in love with their own power within the profession that they didn’t feel they had to give a damn about the audience, we now have a generation of politicians so in love with Beltway power that doing good for society no longer even occurs to them. In short, Neocon ideology may be more or less the 12-tone music of politics. By this analogy, of course, the lightening up of music in the last 20 years may presage a similar lightening up and return to sane reality in politics. The analogy may well be totally misplaced, but it does allow me a certain optimism.

This will be the most trivial thing I’ve ever blogged about – reminds me of those “pet peeves” ranted about by Andy Rooney – but perhaps it will serve as a public service announcement. I’m a technological dunce, but there’s one thing I can do better than a large swath of the population: navigate spam filters. I love my spam filter. I activated it a few years ago, and it saves me a good five minutes a day of tedious work. But a lot of people mistakenly think its purpose is to prevent me from hearing from strangers.

If you’ve never e-mailed me before, and you do so, you receive a message back:

Sorry, I’m so inundated with spam that I have finally had to turn on EarthLink’s high-powered spamBlocker. In order for your message to be moved to my Inbox, I need to add your email address to a list of allowed senders, which I’ll be happy to do. And if you’re already a friend, don’t bother responding, because I’ll recognize your name and just add it to the list. Don’t panic, messages really do get through. If you don’t hear from me within 24 hours, it’s because I’m carrying on four careers, NOT because your message didn’t reach me. Thanks for your patience! KG

I considered this message touchy-feely enough to reassure the most self-loathing and pathetically insecure orphan, but I get the feeling that many people simply read the first sentence and panic anyway. Earthlink then provides a little form to fill out, which takes about ten seconds, which sends a request to me to add someone’s name to my “allowed address” list. But as I say in the message, that isn’t even really necessary, because every day I check my blocked e-mails to see if someone I want to hear from is trying to get through to me. It takes me a lot less time to do that than it used to to individually select and delete all the Nigerian fortune offers and cheap cialis deals that used to flood my in-box.

Most people seem to work their way through this little labyrinth, but only most. A surprising number decide that repetition is the key. They seem to think that if they keep posting the same message and hitting “send” over and over again, that the cumulative force of all those duplicate messages will burst through my spam blocker and ram its way onto my laptop screen in the middle of a Digital Performer window, or whatever other software I’m working in at the moment. I can’t tell you how often I look in my blocked messages and find the same message left six times in quick succession. Others contact people who know me, so that I get messages from friends saying, “I’m forwarding a message that my friend Fred tried to send you, but it was blocked by your spam filter.” Others simply give up, and I meet them one day and they say sadly, “I sent you an e-mail once, but your spam filter wouldn’t let it go through.”

So here’s the PSA, which applies not only to me, but to anyone else you’re trying to reach: SPAM BLOCKERS ONLY BLOCK SPAM. That’s why they’re called “spam blockers.” If you follow the simple instructions, you are guaranteed to get a message through to the person you’re contacting. If you personalize your subject heading, like saying “I’m a fellow composer,” or, “Responding to your blog,” you’ll further increase your chances of being noticed quickly; if your subject heading is “Wow her with three more inches” or “MRS. MBOTU WILLIAMS URGENTLY READ PLEASE,” you may indeed get deleted anyway. Of course, I could solve the problem by immediately responding to every e-mail, which would entail giving up my careers as composer, musicologist, professor, and so on, and eventually no one would have any further reason to e-mail me. But in these past few years, only two people (out of thousands) have ever convinced me that they sent me an e-mail that didn’t reach me, and misfires of that frequency used to happen even before spam blockers existed.

In any case, I wish that the webmail companies would do a better PR job of telling the public what this highly useful device is all about, and I hope my little notice will contribute to the general education. We return to our regularly scheduled programming.

In case you’re having trouble keeping your spirits sufficiently depressed on such a beautiful day, here’s a BBC Radio 4 report, and accompanying article, that link Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current White House resident, with the Business Plot of 1933, in which a number of wealthy businessmen tried to convince Major General Smedley Butler to help them lead a coup against FDR, instituting in his place a fascist government allied with Hitler and Mussolini. Apparently the Bush family’s interest in turning the U.S. into a fascist nation goes back a long way. (Of course we all knew that Prescott Bush bankrolled the Nazis, but I didn’t realize it was based on anything more than financial interests.) Speculation, at the end of the report, is that FDR agreed not to expose the main conspirators in return for them making Wall Street back down and allow his New Deal measures to pass.