I play around a lot with microtones in class when I probably shouldn’t. My counterpoint students, for some reason (and they’re not the first class to do so) find the Picardy third hilarious. One day I ended a three-part counterpoint in aeolian with a major third, A-C#, and they laughingly objected. So I offered to split the difference with them and made it a quarter-tone C half-sharp (a lovely 11/9 interval). I played the result with Sibelius’s pitch-bend plug-in, and it was deliciously sour. One student immediately dubbed it the “Picardy turd.”

I will generally not use this blog as a forum to draw attention to other events, artists, or organizations, but this one is just too important. Sign up.

UPDATE: In fact, the following comment in reaction to a Times article about the UC Davis pepper spray incident is enough to make me return (temporarily) to blogging political:

The police use of violence to quash a peaceful protest serves one aim, and one aim only–to intimidate those on campus and off campus from engaging in lawful, peaceful protest throughout our cities. Living in Chapel Hill, over the past decade I have witnessed bonfires set in the middle of Franklin Street with thousands of students shutting down the street after a basketball victory over Duke, or NCAA championship. Each year, thousands of Duke students camp out in tents to secure basketball tickets for the big game against UNC. Police have never appeared in riot gear, never doused anyone in pepper spray, and to my knowledge never arrested any students. There is never any attempt to clear the tents from campus, or keep students off the street. Why? Because the powers that be have no opposition to the message being sent by the students after a basketball victory. Yet last week when squatters trespassed at an abandon Chapel Hill car dealership that has been vacant for almost a decade, the SWAT team showed up in riot gear with semi-automatic rifles pointed at the protesters.

Amen.

Bj̦rk Р46
Voltaire – 317
Marlo Thomas – 73
Rene Magritte – 113
Friedrich Schleiermacher – 243
Goldie Hawn – 66
Coleman Hawkins – 107
Judith Shatin – 62
Kyle Gann – 56

The PTYX ensemble in France will be playing a number of my works over the next year in a series they’re calling “(d’) apres SATIE,” of music by living composers who followed Satie in some respect or another. They’ve certainly got me pegged right. You won’t be able to read the light print at the top of the poster, but it lists the composers on their Dec. 1 concert: Birtwistle, Duckworth, Gann, Sellars, Skempton. I presume that’s James Sellars, whose music I greatly admire, as I do the others. They’re playing my Kierkegaard, Walking and Minute Symphony on this concert, and they seem to have already played my “opus 1,” which is just titled Satie, a setting of some of his wry comments. And they’re performing in Tours at the Salle Ockeghem, named for another of my favorite composers. Jean-Baptiste of the ensemble says that my music is very different from what they’re used to playing, which I suppose is all to the good.

I’ve been doubtful about how much journalistic attention the 50th-anniversary edition of Cage’s Silence is going to get, but the distinguished literary critic Marjorie Perloff wrote a column about it in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and made several generous comments about my foreword. I appreciate her point that we all think of Cage as such a sunny character, but in retrospect some of those stories in Silence seem darker than we first thought.

Nuts and bolts music history today. In my keynote address to the festival of Charles Ives’s complete songs, I noted that nothing was known about Anne Timoney Collins, author of the poem on which Ives based his song “The Greatest Man,” a poem printed in 1921 in the New York Evening Sun. Liner notes to recordings of this song give no information, or merely mention that she “flourished” in the 1920s. A couple of weeks ago, however, I was contacted by Anne Timoney Collins’s god-daughter, and between her and her mother and the internet I’ve been able to put together a sketch of her life.

The problem is that, after 1921, the poet used the name Anne Collins professionally, which is a pretty common name. But she collaborated with her sister Alice Timoney on at least three plays – Cloaked in Green (1925), Bottled (1928), and Wilderness Road (1930) – and if you look up Alice Timoney, facts start pouring in. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Anne Timoney appears to have been born in June of 1885; Alice was born Aug. 26, 1892. They lived in Boyle County, Kentucky in the early decades of the century, were living in New York City in the ’30s, and ended up in Dade County, Florida, where Anne, according to my informant, died in the 1970s; Alice died in 1980. They seem to have had some success on Broadway in the ’20s, for their play Bottled received positive reviews in the New Yorker of April 28, 1928 and the Time magazine for May 7. Time calls the authors “sisters, southerners, journalists,” the New Yorker says Bottled was “written and acted by unknowns.” It’s a “quiet and delicious” Prohibition-era comedy about siblings who inherit a money-losing distillery from their father and end up bootlegging under their mother’s nose.

So all those programming “The Greatest Man” can now use 1885-ca. 1970 as the poet’s dates, and perhaps the other information will prove useful. Much thanks to the god-daughter and her mother. Any further information is, of course, welcome. It turns out “The Greatest Man” was not Anne Collins’s greatest claim to fame during her lifetime, even if Ives made it the key to her immortality.

UPDATE: A reader has found a record of an Anne T. Collins, born June 1, 1885, and died in Florida May 3, 1979. To obtain the record I’d have to join one of those services like ancestry.com, and I’ve been down that road before: you join, find no information, then they start billing you monthly and you have a devil of a time trying to unsubscribe. Calling them a scam might be too harsh, but they are certainly run unethically. I list the information provisionally. Someday I’ll try to get it straight from the Dade County records office.

SECOND UPDATE: Dennis Aman, composer and genealogy hobbyist, sends me an obituary for Anne T. Collins from her home-town newspaper:

From: The Advocate-Messenger, Danville, Kentucky, Monday, May 07, 1979

DANVILLE NATIVE ANNE COLLINS DIES AT 94

 Anne Timoney Collins, 94, a playwright, poet and prose writer and a Danville native, died Thursday in Miami, Fla. During the 1920’s two of her plays, “Bottled in Bond” and “Bald Mountain,” were produced in New York City. She had also been a reporter for the old New York World and was a contributor to the New Yorker, the Catholic Digest and the New Orleans Item. Survivors include a sister, Alice F. Timoney of Miami, and a brother, the Rt. Rev. Francis J. Timoney of Nazareth, Ky.

So 1885 to 1979 seem to be the confirmed dates. Of course, since she was born in June, that would mean she was actually only 93 when she died, but the obit writer seems not to have had her birth day. I’d also take the New Yorker‘s word for the title of her first play, since their fact-checking is legendary, over that of the Danbury Advocate-Messenger. Dennis has promised me a death certificate, too. It’s amazing the ambiguities that can accumulate about the simple facts of a life.

THIRD UPDATE, March 26, 2013: I’m in the Ives archive at Yale, and I notice that Ives wrote to Anne Collins asking permission to use the poem on Aug. 20, 1921, and that she replied in the affirmative on Sept. 17.

Here’s a MIDI version of a microtonal rag I just wrote for pianist Aron Kallay, a fantastic West Coast player who’s specializing in microtonal MIDI piano performance. It’s the second (and shorter) movement of a piece called Every Something Is an Echo of Nothing – the title, as some of you will recall, is a quotation from Cage’s Silence. Aron will premiere it next summer – I tend to complete my commissions pretty early. And I made it virtuosic because he’s got the chops, but it is humanly playable. Think of the piece next time someone claims that new (or microtonal) music is an elitist enterprise.

[UPDATE BELOW] On October 12 the Third Annual Conference on Minimalist Music will open at the University of Leuven, Belgium, with my keynote address, “The Boredom of Eventfulness.” (Louis Andriessen will present the other keynote address on the 14th.)

One of the urgent topics during the conference, among us Society for Minimalist Music members, will be the proposed location for the Fourth Annual Conference, to take place in 2013. We agreed from the beginning to alternate conferences between Europe and America, but finding an American host institution has not been easy. To answer the obvious question first, Bard College where I teach is not an option. Bard is a rural college three miles away from a few small towns whose hotels fill up quickly. Transportation and housing for a sizable conference with high-profile evening performances would be logistical nightmares here. On top of that I haven’t a single ally here who gives a damn about minimalism, and no grad students. Funding is nonexistent and in competition with well-established music programs run by others. I would encounter resistance and skepticism at every step, while trying to solve insurmountable difficulties by myself. I can’t turn a conference here into a comfortable situation for the attendees.

Some of these problems are endemic to this field. Most of us American academics in the SfMM find ourselves the token minimalism-lovers in our departments. A few have said that their musicology departments might be interested; almost everyone says that the composers in their departments would be unalterably opposed. The academic composition community still sees this 50-year-old movement as a threat and an embarrassment. UMKC, where the second conference was held, was a unique situation, with several passionate/young and sympathetic/old professors, eager and talented grad students, and an unbelievably supportive and knowledgeable Dean of the School of Music, plus a comfortable urban environment in which zipping among restaurants, hotels, and the university was fairly easy. Duplicating all that elsewhere is a daunting prospect. Naturally, it would be optimum for organizational continuity to use a school where one of our SfMM members is on faculty, but this is proving difficult. The University of Washington and Indiana University have both been strongly considered, but with reservations from the relevant faculty. I’m wondering if there’s some scholar out there who would love to be involved, or some department where minimalism is taken seriously, but whose faculty haven’t become involved with the conference yet.

I must say, the first two conferences have been among the most exciting experiences of my life, and I wouldn’t say anything remotely similar about any other conference I’ve ever attended. The scholarship is exciting and new, developing rapidly. Major composers and performers are easily available as star guests. The music has been fantastic – hearing Charlemagne Palestine live at UMKC changed a lot of lives. This is a tremendously energetic venture surging in an era of economic uncertainty against a headwind of idiotic academic prejudices. I hope that someone in a sympathetic department might read this and become interested in laying the groundwork for future involvement. If so, please speak up.

UPDATE: Wow, my heart is absolutely warmed by the interest expressed so far (and I’ve had a few serious private offers). Of course, what we need is someone at the institution willing to take it on; the SfMM isn’t in a position to administrate from afar. I’m thrilled to hear of so many spots where minimalism has taken root in academia. And there’s no reason not to start looking ahead to 2017 as well.

Yesterday, after almost polishing off my article on postminimalism for The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist Music, I posted a description of my LexisNexis search for the origins of the musical use of the term postminimalism. Perhaps you read it before it disappeared. I traced the term back to a Jon Pareles review of March, 1983, and added some references by Joshua Kosman, K. Robert Schwarz, and Keith Potter. Then the inexhaustible Galen Brown wrote in to tell me about some earlier references I had missed. He was right. But then I noticed, in the list he sent, that all of his new references were for post-minimalist and post-minimalism – with a hyphen. This about doubled the references for the period I was looking at, 1980-1996 (and LexisNexis seems to only go back to 1980, so data earlier than that remains in doubt). I started to add updates to the blog post correcting it for Galen’s new info, but I needed one for about every other sentence, and it was a potential mess. Ridiculous. I’d screwed up. So I just took the post down, sending Galen thanks and a promise to rewrite it.

But then I did my own search for hyphenated post-minimalism, and it was very interesting what came up. The bulk of the early hyphenated references, going back to 1981 (and who knows if any further?), were from Times critic John Rockwell. He tended to use the term either as a non-specific vague category, or to refer to the post-1976-or-some-other-point outputs of Reich and Glass, as well as the more flamboyant music of John Adams. Schwarz, whose reference was from his book Minimalists, and thus not from LexisNexis, also applied it to Adams, and also used the hyphenated form. (A couple of morons like Donal Henahan employed the hyphenated form sarcastically, and without having the vaguest idea what they were talking about.) The critics who used the non-hyphenated form, Pareles, Kosman, Potter, and myself, used it in articles about younger, then-less-famous composers writing in a style rather markedly different from minimalism. Search post-hyphen-minimalism (often typeset post-Minimalism with a capital M), and you find articles about Reich, Glass, Adams, maybe Andriessen; search postminimalism, and you find articles on Paul Dresher, Steve Martland, David Lang, Janice Giteck, Rocco diPietro. There’s a little bleed-over, and it’s not always possible to know whether the decision to hyphenate is editorial, but the consistency is sufficiently compelling. In a couple of cases, the same critic will use the hyphen for Reich or Adams, and abandon it for anyone younger. So there seems to be a palpable critical tradition for using post-hyphen-minimalism to distinguish the 1980s music of Glass, Reich, and Adams from their more repetitive 1970s music, and using postminimalism straight up as a style pioneered by younger composers who were never minimalists to begin with. In a sense I had been right all along: Pareles presciently identified the unhyphenated form of the style, and I was the second, in 1988, to refer to it in print. And that distinction will prove very useful to my article.

(I will add that I’ve always been leery of the tendency to draw some big, ripping distinction between the early and late styles of Glass and Reich. Every composer develops as he goes through his career, of course, but these two have changed far less than most composers do, and I’ve never been able to find some major dividing line that’s supposed to separate out the radical early Reich and Glass from the allegedly more palatable later stuff. In Reich’s case, the scores to his recent Sextet and Double Sextet look so similar to those for Six Pianos, Music for 18 Musicians, and Tehillim that I can’t see that much territory has been traversed in-between. And in Glass’s case, any distinction between early and late seems dwarfed by the eternal gulf between his orchestral music and his far more rhythmically interesting music for his own ensemble. The use of post-hyphen-minimalist in the articles mentioned above seems less a firm distinction than a deferential gesture to famous composers who hate the term minimalism, made by critics who want to keep getting permission to interview them. Anyone who can give me a hard-and-fast criterion for post-hyphen-minimalism that will work for every Glass/Reich piece is welcome to try.)