My major composerly event of the season is the premiere of my septet Sang Plato’s Ghost by the Ghost Ensemble, conducted by David Bloom, this Saturday night (Satie’s birthday, propitiously enough). The ensemble was formed by one of my former composition students Ben Richter, who plays the accordion, and I’ve always wanted to write for accordion. Bloom, another Bard product (if indeed the reverse is not true instead) is conductor of the Contemporaneous Ensemble of skyrocketing reputation. The concert is at the Queens New Music Festival at the Secret Theatre, 4402 23rd Street in Long Island City; hope I can find it. Other works on the program are by Giacinto Scelsi, Pauline Oliveros, Sky Macklay, and Simon Steen-Anderson. When Ben first wrote me I misread his invitation as being to the Queen’s New Music Festival, and was excited about being performed for royalty. My democratic principles quickly reasserted themselves.

I’m really happy with Sang Plato’s Ghost, scored for flute, oboe, drums, harp, accordion, viola, and double bass, which I thought was a dream ensemble. The piece began, in my head, with a tango in 5/4 meter, and spread out from there in both directions. With an accordion, what else could I do?

A brilliant composer friend of mine recently had a reading of a piece done by a major orchestra. All the other composers, she said, and the orchestra management, went around talking about how the orchestra desperately needs to come up with new ideas, so they can build up a new audience. Her piece was very percussion driven, centered around a trap-set part that the orchestral percussionists didn’t know how to handle, and so the reading was somewhat lacking. The other composers, commiserating, told her that the string section really needs to be the driver of an orchestra piece. And as she told me about it, I formed exactly the same question she’d been asking herself: Which is it? Does the orchestra need new ideas, or will composers invariably get screwed over if they don’t stick to the tried-and-true? How do these fucked-up orchestra composers and musicians manage to keep those contradictory principles in their heads at the same time?

UPDATE: I should have recalled that Charles Ives had similar experiences with orchestras, and wrote that the advice he received boiled down to: “If you want something played, write something you don’t want played.”

 

Even beyond Ives, I’m on a roll lately of research on dead American composers (DACs – I wish there were more public interest in LACs, but they are a needy and competitive bunch, and I’ve discovered the pleasures of communing musicologically with the serene and undemanding dead). Aside from Robert Palmer and Johanna Beyer (of whom possibly more soon), I’ve gotten an opportunity to study Marc Blitzstein, whom I’ve always admired for his politics and for the musico-political miracle of The Cradle Will Rock. For years after I’d read about the piece I could find no way to hear it, until I got hold of the 1985 recording produced by The Acting Company. Well, my wife Nancy is general manager of The Acting Company now, which was founded in 1972 by John Houseman and Margot Harley; Houseman was the original producer of Cradle in 1937. And the company is presenting a one-night benefit revival of their 1983 production of Cradle headed by Patti Lupone, with the original cast, May 19 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, which I’m thrilled that I will get to see.

The real buzz, which got me started on this, is that as a result I got to go to the office and spend time with what is apparently Houseman’s copy of the score, which The Acting Company has in their files, and which he used to direct the 1983 performance – and may have used for the 1937 premiere as well: Since 1999 there’s a new, engraved version, but for decades everyone relied on an old score, part hand-written and part printed, using several songs that Blitzstein published separately. There is lots of scrawled evidence of changes made in rehearsal, and comical marginal commentary. I’ve always loved Cradle and wanted to get better acquainted with the music, but since you had to rent the score for a performance to get it, never had the chance. Looking through it, I’m super impressed with Blitzstein’s composing technique: he was at the same time a determined populist and determined modernist as well (somewhat like myself), and while I knew the tunes, I was unaware how smoothly he integrated feisty modernisms into the accompaniment. Look at this opening, sung by Moll the prostitute: From the get-go the left-hand accompaniment runs a 5/8 accompaniment across the 2/4 meter, and the bass note always seems a second away from the melody, as though the left hand is playing a different piece, but it’s so smooth that I’d hardly noticed the discrepancies. Plus the melody itself is in 7-beat phrases, for a 14-against-5 polyrhythm so normal-sounding that I’d never noticed anything odd about it. Although the songs are catchy, I’ve always found the melodies difficult to recreate exactly from memory, and now I can see why. Blitzstein’s song-form logic is solid in an unexpected, original way, and once I play through the piano accompaniments, the harmony makes such quirky sense that the song sticks in my head instantly. Probably my favorite scene is the one in which Sasha the violinist and Dauber the painter vie for the attentions of Mrs. Mister, the town millionaire’s socialite wife and premiere arts patron. Their song “There’s Something So Damn Low About the Rich,” on a text dear to my heart,  is in D-flat, but goes from C# minor through A minor to A major, and then uses the leading tone of A as V of D-flat again. Then, having gone to A major a second time, it moves up the scale chromatically to E-flat, which becomes V/V back to D-flat with exquisite comedy: And of course there’s the title song, which is an incredibly harmonically complex song for a political musical aimed at the proletariat. I had never been able to quite get, by ear, the fairly bizarre final chord sequence: To shift from B major to C minor at the climax, and then end on a tritone root movement, strikes me as daringly adventurous for a 1937 musical, and probably for a more recent one as well (though I don’t keep up with recent musicals); and yet the melody is not hard to sing. Blitzstein was apparently the only composer to study with both Boulanger and Schoenberg; he preferred the former. I’m reading Eric Gordon’s biography of him, and now that I’m up to the Airborne Symphony period, I’m curious to see what form his slide from international fame into relative obscurity took. I’ve always admired him politically, and I’m glad to learn that he can be admired for the originality and personality of his compositional technique as well.

This morning I dreamed, honest to god, that an editor was coaxing me to write an online music theory text. So I started mapping out, on paper, a starting point and an endpoint, and a tree diagram of ways to get from one to the other. At the point where you study triads, both classical and jazz terminology would be given. Then, to go to seventh chords, if you click on classical it will take you to a page on the five standard classical seventh chords, or if on jazz, to a page with the seven or eight or nine (depending on who I’ve been taking advice from) jazz seventh chords. The jazz links eventually ended up in modal improv, and the classical links in set theory. The pop/folk route had a shorter trajectory. But it was a complete multicultural approach  to theory through which one could ultimately learn pop, jazz, and classical theory.

Not that I ever want to write any such thing. I have no (waking) interest in packaging information that’s already common knowledge, and I think writing theory texts is deadly for a composer’s reputation (think Piston and Kennan). I much prefer telling people things that no one already knows. But I certainly wish I had a resource like the one I dreamed.

 

God knows I think Charles Ives is god – or rather, Charlie knows I worship him – and I bristle like hell when he’s called an amateur, but I have to admit his rhythmic notation makes me tear what’s left of my hair at moments. Below are mm. 84-86 as taken from the second movement of the Piano Sonata No. 1, and below that the corrected rhythmic notation as I feel sure he intended it:

In the original, the first half of the first measure has only seven 32nds duration in the right hand, and the second half of the second measure has twelve 32nds instead of eight. Now, poor Lou Harrison edited this from the manuscript, and perhaps the mistake is his addition. But Ives does seem to get befuddled when he starts using 32nd-notes and 64th-notes, and I’m not convinced that his conception of a double-dotted note matches what most of us think it is. I’ve made my alterations based on how the rhythmic motive plays out in the rest of the passage, and on how the two hands are laid out relative to each other. The point is to show how Ives used ragtime rhythms and motives to create static textures of phrases going out of phase with each other.

I’m analyzing the First Sonata to have something to use as a contrast to the Concord, and that chapter is threatening to become an entire second book. I have to guiltily admit, too – I think I slightly prefer the First Sonata to the far more celebrated Second. Jeremy Denk tells me that the First is harder to play. And there are many places in it where I recoil from what’s on the page and think Ives clearly meant something else. We’ve never had a clear, fully professionally engraved score of either work, nor are likely to in the forseeable future.

 

 

Every couple of weeks I get a query from a stranger asking me to explain some mathematical aspect of microtonality, and I am so fanatical on the subject that I tend to answer them quickly and at generous length. But for just as many people, I seem to be a go-to guy on the issue of whether we should maintain A as 440 cps or raise or lower it to 432, 442, or whatever. I suppose it says a lot about how immersed in microtonality I am, and how vague the concept is to the general population, that I am astonished that people think these issues are interrelated. I could not possibly care less what standard frequency we tune to. I abstractly understand that for opera singers and custodians of historical instruments it’s kind of a big deal, but since there are no compositional decisions riding on the issue, I wouldn’t even try to form an opinion. Harry Partch’s instruments are tuned to a G at 392 cps, and La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations to 60 cps, and those are the only facts relating to absolute pitch that I keep in my head. I’ll admit that 440 is convenient for theory classes, since one can build a harmonic series on 110, 220, 330, 440, 550, and so on, and students tend to get it quickly; 432 would be 108, 216, 324, and not as obvious. Otherwise, it baffles me, and sometimes starts to annoy me, that people imagine I would give a damn.

On Saturdays we sometimes drive back from breakfast just as the NPR opera is starting up. Today’s was Strauss’s Arabella. The male and female commentators were discussing it, and the man mentioned something about the emotionalism of the music being especially appropriate because “this is an opera that really deals with issues of human emotion.” No kidding? As opposed to all of those operas that don’t deal with human emotion? What a curious departure from the norm. A moment later the woman pointed out that Strauss and von Hofmannsthal had written six operas together, “and the amazing thing about them is that they all have two soprano roles. And this one has three!” If I weren’t already heavily invested in classical music, this kind of fatuous twaddle would drive me to steer well clear of it. It reminds me of a hallowed old bit of dialogue from the British TV comedy Fawlty Towers:

Colonel: Fawlty, did you know that the female gibbon gestates for seven months?

Fawlty: Seven months! Well, well.

In sitcoms we know this is a joke, but in the classical music world it passes for cultural commentary. I don’t know whether listening to Mozart can make you smart, but it is frequently clear that listening to a lifetime of silly classical-music mythology can turn a person into a babbling moron.

I’m terribly sorry to read in the Times that saxophonist and composer Fred Ho died, at only 56: I knew he had been fighting cancer for years. He gave me a splendidly colorful interview in 1997 that’s reprinted in Music Downtown, beginning, “Fred Wei-han Ho knows how to cut your carotid artery with his hands….” What he learned at Harvard, he said, was that “privilege doesn’t equate with talent, ability, intelligence, or hard work. Privilege is simply privilege.” Fred could be a difficult guy, and no matter how much I tried to support him, I couldn’t quit representing the white power structure in his eyes. Once I published an interview with black violinist Leroy Jenkins in advance of Jenkins’s opera The Mother of Three Sons. I ran into Fred at Leroy’s performance, and volunteered an apology that I was going to have to miss an upcoming concert of his that I had hoped to hear. He shook his head and muttered, “New music is a white man’s game.” Another time I wrote an enthusiastic review of a concert of Fred’s, but took him lightly to task for some rhetoric that I thought was over the top. Almost two years went by, and the next time he saw me he handed me a multi-paged typed rebuttal – as we were backstage at the Kitchen and I was poised to walk onstage to give the New York premiere of Custer and Sitting Bull. Once his back was turned, I did him the profound favor of throwing it away, because I knew if I had let him upset me before that performance I would have never forgiven him. But Fred was a phenomenal performer and a very original composer, with a take on protest music that came from way outside the feckless bourgeois platitudes of academic political music . He died way too soon. (As sometimes happens, it may be easier to give his music its due now that he’s gone.)

 

One of my student composers was talking today about wanting to write a really simple unpitched percussion piece. I told him about Mary Ellen Childs’s piece Click, for three people playing merely claves in incredibly detailed choreography, which was one of the wildest and most enjoyable performances I ever reviewed for the Village Voice. We looked, and naturally it’s on Vimeo. It’s a total classic, a postminimalist paradigm, up there with Piano Phase and Music in Fifths.