Liturgy’s new album, The Ark Work, wins the number one “avant” album of 2015 over at Rolling Stone. They even mention John Luther Adams in the description. It is a remarkably original album, strongly compositional, and apparently controversial for ignoring some of the conventions of black metal.

 

I’ve found what I think is the best available music by Ethel Smyth: this recording of her Serenade in D (1890) and Double Concerto for Violin and Horn (1927). (Pardon the generic suffragette image on the CD cover, kind of a cheap shot.) Curiously, the Serenade marked her debut in the London music world, and the Double Concerto was one of her last works as she succumbed to deafness. Her Mass is magnificent, but liturgical works don’t leave as much room for personality. The Serenade is melodious and varied enough that I’d rather hear it than Brahms’s two works in that genre. The Double Concerto is remarkably delicate and memorable, and rather Holstian – though she was Holst’s senior by 16 years – and a stronger and better thought-out work than Holst’s Double Violin Concerto, to name an obvious comparison piece. Although I like that too. Holst and Walton have long been my favorite English composers, and Smyth now officially joins them. She deserves far more attention than she gets.

 

You know, continuing the thought from last post, my generation of composers (Downtowners at least) was the “no guilty pleasures” generation. For some reason I associate the phrase first with Anthony Coleman and a subsection of Downtown improvisers, but I remember the slogan becoming quite common circa 1990. “No guilty pleasures” meant that any music we liked, we were going to like openly and use as perfectly legitimate source material and models for our music, whether it was cartoon music, easy listening, C&W, space age bachelor pad music, or anything else. What do kids today think John Zorn playing Ennio Morricone (1986) was all about? Or Eugene Chadbourne doing avant-garde country and western at New Music America? Or John Oswald sampling Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson? Or Eve Beglarian appropriating disco songs? Even one of my microtonal tunes is a surreptitious C&W cover. And the young composers assume people my age will get our knickers in a knot just because they’re into film music? They have zero sense of history. I feel insulted on behalf of my entire generation. If they need us to be the old fogies telling them they can’t do that, we will not oblige. We already won that battle for them.

(Meanwhile, in my experience, those same young composers turn up their noses if we mix genres, say, use a trap set in a notated piece. They’re the ones with prohibitions.)

Please don’t read this unless you read me regularly. I had gotten my blog readership down to about 150, 200 hits a day, and the commenters are almost all regulars, and I’m comfortable with that, because I can’t explain my entire philosophy of life in every post. But for some inscrutable reason my recent anecdote about a student composer concert took off like wildfire, and was read by thousands of people. I always noticed, as a critic, that people have an amazing capacity to convince themselves, when they read something, that it says what they expect it to say rather than what it actually says. I could get bawled out for positive reviews and thanked for negative ones, and was frequently challenged to defend opinions I didn’t hold and had never uttered. It’s the strangest feeling. On top of that, one says things in a blog, inevitably, that, taken out of context by people who don’t follow your monthly monologue, are easily misconstrued.

And so after a concert of pieces that were mostly pretty similar in style, some colleagues made a big deal about how diverse the music was, and I reflected that their frame of reference for new music must be vastly narrower than mine, for them to think that. A friend suggested that the music was influenced by Hollywood; that hadn’t occurred to me, and I thought it interesting enough to report as an anecdote. So it subsequently whirls around the internet that I hate film music and consider it a terrible influence. In reality, I barely think about film music. Maybe ten percent of what I hear I like, ten percent I don’t, and the rest I don’t notice. I would certainly never generalize about it as a genre. You can look through my six books, my 3500-plus articles, and my 1500-plus blog posts, and you will not find a single general disparagement of film music, or Hollywood, nor any strong opinion expressed about it. When students say, “That sounds like film music,” I don’t even know what they mean. How does one “sound like film music”? But a friend of mine said the word “Hollywood” and I reported it, and suddenly I am the great hater of film music, and look down my nose at all young composers who imitate it. Imagine how much slush from your own subconscious you would have to pour into someone else’s 116-word blog post to decide that Kyle Gann is contemptuous of film music and its cheapening influence – after Kyle Gann has published more than four million words without ever expressing a general opinion on the subject. I have to think that all those people secretly consider film music a guilty pleasure, and so they’re constantly on the lookout for intellectuals who despise film music so they can complain about them. In short, I must have inadvertently touched a nerve.

Likewise, people crap all over me for complaining that postminimalist music is neglected, because the word is used, when used at all, in a very loose sense. I use it only in a very strict sense, and since I’ve written the major articles about it, I’ve decided that I know what I’m talking about. When I write for readerships outside this blog I make sure I define the term and the repertoire I intend for it specifically, but I can’t go through all that every time I use the word. Those who read me regularly know what I’m referring to. Also, I have lamented that musicologists neglect new music because they’re all doing gender studies – leading some to make fun of me as an old fogey who’s threatened by gender issues, when in fact I had been cheerleading for gender studies from the moment they started appearing. What I typically object to is everyone doing the same thing.

I did express an opinion that musical ideology, which is generally frowned upon these days, has a close association with musical diversity, which is considered an unalloyed blessing. I was praising diversity, which I thought would be uncontroversial, and lamenting its absence, while trying to rehabilitate ideology, which I consider not as horrible a thing as people today think. It may be an odd opinion – I’ve never run across it in anyone else’s writings – and so, being unexpected and not the kind of thing people say, no one picked up on it. People expect music professors to disdain film music and complain about their students, and I had written some sentences which, hastily read and without knowledge of my general principles, could be easily twisted into that caricature for a satisfying “Gotcha!” moment. And quite a few people did so, in comments here and elsewhere on the internet.

The human race is filled with individuals who simmer with resentment toward certain injustices they see in the world, and their sense of outrage is easily triggered by a sentence or two that appears to imply, or at least not to contradict, some nefarious opinion they’re on the lookout against. I’m not claiming that I’m an exception, but I do avoid commenting on other people’s web sites except to be supportive. Those who don’t know what I’m about are welcome to my books, but I would rather they ignore my blog.

UPDATE 12.23.15: I recalled today that I used to teach suspensions in Theory 1 with Randy Edelman’s film score for Gettysburg, in my own transcription, so I’m on record as not trying to shield them from the genre. I always liked giving the impression that music theory was something you might be able to make money with.</i>

 

The intrepid Kepler Quartet is trying to finish their recording of the complete string quartets of Ben Johnston. Ben’s health is failing rapidly, it seems, and the project has taken on a race-against-time quality. This is possibly the most ambitious string quartet project in history. They’ve got the 6th, 7th, and 8th quartets to go, and the 7th has a reputation as the most difficult quartet ever written: the third movement, based on a 183-pitch row in the viola with no repetitions, employs more than 1200 pitches to the octave:

I haven’t heard the Eighth Quartet either; the Sixth, a lovely, 12-tone, just-intonation work with more than sixty pitches in its row matrix, was issued on vinyl back in the early 1980s. The expense is a big issue, and so the Kepler has started a kickstarter page to help out. They need to raise $15,000 by New Year’s Eve, and are just over a third of the way there at this writing. Perhaps you can give the underground history of music a Christmas present and help bring this phenomenal effort to fruition.

Yesterday I attended a concert of music by student composers. None of the pieces were atonal. None were minimalist. None were postminimalist. None were spectralist. None were written according to any kind of system. All except one had big romantic gestures. Chords crashed down in the piano. If there was a cello, which there usually was, it came barreling up off the C-string into its highest register and then played harmonics. Everything was big, impassioned, virtuoso gestures. And before, during, and after the concert the faculty ran around congratulating themselves on how wonderfully diverse in style the students were.

I asked my savviest colleague what he thought the students were most influenced by. “Hollywood,” he replied.

UPDATE: After so many comments so quickly, let me parse what I think the above means somewhat. It’s an impressionist sketch, and exaggerates – but just slightly. When the students write the way the faculty teach them to, the faculty tend to be satisfied with the range of stylistic diversity – this is probably true everywhere. Minimalism is considered passé. The students don’t know grid-pulse* postminimalism ever existed, because I am its only representative in academia. Spectralism is attractive to the older and more sophisticated (grad) students, but requires some technique. Fidelity to any kind of -ism or movement is seem as an anachronism anyway. Once you declare all ideology invalid, what metric is left but success? I think the students are very aware what kind of young composers are getting a lot of attention lately, and it’s generally the ones whose music makes a lot of noise and allows for expressive virtuosity. It’s a crowded field, yet if you get famous in it by age 30 you can do very well. Individualism will not help you toward that goal – if you’re different, it takes too many decades for people to figure out what you’re about. Being identified with a movement will not help. I got the impression here of a race toward one pinpointed goal, some students reaching it more effectively than others. (I suspect the faculty partly define the race, and that the ubiquity of film music can’t help but shape its direction.)

*Since, just as the masses use minimalism to mean Wagner, Ravel, and Gregorian chant, people now use postminimalist to mean whatever they want it to mean, I am introducing (as I’ve threatened to) the term grid-pulse postminimalism to refer to an important American movement of the 1980s and ’90s that I’ve spent decades documenting. It was a style of steady tempos, diatonic harmony, and occasional elements of quasi-minimalist process, and its notable practitioners include Paul Epstein, Elodie Lauten, William Duckworth, Peter Garland, Mary Jane Leach, Daniel Lentz, Mary Ellen Childs, and many others. The leading article on the style is my “A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, Its Characteristics, and Its Meaning,” in The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (Ashgate Press, 2013). Since I invented the term it means what I intend it to mean, and if you think it can mean something else, you are mistaken. Didn’t realize the Joisey crowd was here tonight, have to define everything.

UPDATE 2: Heavens, more than 1100 hits and so many responses!, to what I thought was a spur-of-the-moment throwaway post. While I have everyone’s attention let me underline one point, and not my main one; my main one was well stated by Stefan Hetzel in the comments, that even student works should have something individual about them that mattered strongly to the composer. The 1980s, with its fight amongst serialism, minimalism, and neoromanticism, is conceived by young composers today as having been a living hell. Today, when one is so bold as to mention postminimalism or any -ism except spectralism (because it’s European), everyone yells “Boo! Hiss!” and forces you to admit that no such distinctions are valid, music is only music, and we’re all individual, like snowflakes. Yet the existence of musical movements did chart out a realm of musical diversity, and drew contrasts among different philosophies of how music could or should operate. Take all that away, tell students that there are no differing philosophies, no schools of thought, and what is there left for them to do, except do their competitive utmost to become, by age thirty, the number-one purveyor of virtuosically emotive gestures, since that is the behavior rewarded by new-music performers and music critics? I realize that I am in a tiny, microscopic minority on this issue, and that there are likely no younger composers at all who agree with me. But I find the prevailing anti–ism, anti-movement consensus anti-intellectual and anti-art. I am a dinosaur, overdue for my extinction, no doubt, but at least you can’t accuse of me of groupthink. And we are seeing the erasure of all philosophical barriers result, I think, in an increasingly stultifying homogeneity – at just the time in which diversity is ideologically prized as being the highest good.

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.

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

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.