Allow me to sharpen the source of some of the disillusionment I expressed in my last entry. Part of what I’m going through is the perceived failure of a project on which I’ve spent much of my life’s energy. And yet it hasn’t failed: it has been victorious – and now that it has succeeded, I can see how circumscribed that success necessarily is. As John Cage liked to say, “Success is just another form of failure.”

I have been called “the Downtown academic” – I am hardly the only one to merit the title, but for many years we were few and far between. Incensed in grad school by the way my favorite then-young composers (Glass, Budd, Meredith Monk, Riley, Ashley, Julius Eastman, even Cage, etc.) were scorned by the professors, I began a long-term campaign to prove that music’s worth to academia. I was going to build the bridge from new/experimental/Downtown music to musical academia, and in so doing win some respect for my musical heritage. I can see now that there might have been better uses of my time, but I had built up a good store of the usual Oedipal resentment.

For one thing, many of those composers didn’t give a damn whether academia respected them or not. I strongly suspect that, deep in his heart of hearts, Phil Glass doesn’t lose any sleep over whether his scores are being analyzed in some university classroom. Glenn Branca is infinitely more interested in where his next gig’s coming from, where he’s going to get to travel, and how he’s going to pay the rent than he is in whether I include a score sample of one of his symphonies in my history text. And who can blame them? They’ve got their priorities straight. This campaign of mine was for my respectability, fought with their music as a weapon. Many composers, of course, have been happy for me to champion their music in that rarefied arena, but others have been only middling cooperative. They want to keep control over their own message, or they don’t want their scores circulating, or they just think it’s silly to write scholarly articles about music that was made purely for pleasure, and that adequately reached its intended audience. And who can argue with that? I was building a bridge from Downtown music to the music school, and it was a bridge many Downtowners had no interest in crossing.

But what were my choices? I wanted this music promoted, so that my own music, when it came along, would have more chance of acceptance. As I’ve said, there were three markets: the commercial one, the orchestra world, and academia. I am an introspective, Scorpionic, charismatically-challenged (if intense) personality, and I was not going to start trotting around to Sony and RCA trying to interest their CEOs in recordings of low-commercial-potential new music. The commercial world runs on values inimical to mine, and I was not cut out to play the entrepreneur. [UPDATE: On second thought, though, I guess I played a commercial role as a critic for as long as was feasible.] The orchestra circuit: I know a lot of composers in that world, but I do not hold much sway with them, and they hold even less sway with the conductors and orchestra managers who are in charge. Had I possessed the persuasiveness of a Leonard Bernstein, and held those people in my thrall, they would hardly have had the power to do anything for the music I was championing. Nor were many of the Downtown composers, once again, seeking an entry to that world, though some of them would have certainly welcomed some orchestra commissions.

That left academia. I knew academia, and understood (to a point) how it worked. I was damn good at analyzing music (better than I am now, I’m afraid). I could fluently speak academia’s faux-objective rhetoric of persuasion. I had read all the articles, and I understood very well how the warfare of musical politics gets waged through journal articles under the guise of disinterested scholarship. I could play that game. Furthermore, that world was also the one that had stirred my resentment.

I never set out to write books. I just wanted to write and perform music, and I fell into journalistic advocacy almost by chance, if fatedly. For many years, too, I couldn’t get a teaching job; having finished my doctorate in 1983, I didn’t teach more than an adjunct course here and there until 1995. In retrospect, I can see that this freed me up to get some publishing momentum, whereas had I won myself a teaching job earlier I would probably have gotten mired down, as I see so many young professors do, in the details of teaching and administration, at great expense to their prolificity. I’ve never written a book simply because I wanted to write a book. The books were footholds in academic discourse, credentials, irrefutable proofs that the music I loved possessed qualities worth talking about. And it worked. Had I not written the Nancarrow book and the American history book, I would never have gotten a job teaching theory at Bard. Now I could fire my cannons at the fortress walls from the inside, since I had long observed that academia is impervious to attacks from outside, and indeed disdains them.

Because I was not firing away alone, my longer-range plan materialized as well. Other scholars, better musicologically trained than myself – Keith Potter, Pwyll Ap Sion, Robert Carl, Robert Fink, too many to list here – also started writing books and articles on minimalism. For the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, we received paper proposals from 76 scholars working in the field. But I had miscalculated as well in thinking that, once there was a bridge from Downtown music to the music school, that academia would walk halfway down that bridge to meet us. I stupidly supposed that the very quantity of my scholarship would prove to musical academia, in general, that the music was valid. What happened instead was that scholars in minimalism carved out their own niche, their own ghettoized specialty. My writings on minimalism have been celebrated, praised, embraced – in that niche. Within the world of minimalist musicology, I’m one of the grand dukes, a major player. But in the academic composition world in general, with its eternal emphases on Schenkerian theory, set theory, the canon, complexity, hard-core pitch analysis, my work is still taken hardly more seriously than Budd and Monk were when I started out. (I heard my latest dismissive Phil Glass joke from a colleague two days ago, and I’m still looking for a local music professor who knows what Robert Ashley’s music is like.)

In the meantime, I’ve come to understand academia better. I mistakenly thought, from my 1970s student’s perspective, that the problem was that a group of academic composers had gotten ensconced in music departments, and their stodginess and lack of creativity were preventing students from being exposed to the most exciting new music around. I have since learned that a college or university is a particular type of money-siphoning machine, and specifically a type that adheres to values foreign to the commercial world. The lack of creativity goes not from the faculty upward, but from the boards of trustees downward. Wealthy people keep the college system alive, and they do not do so disinterestedly. They want, in return on their investment, a kind of cultural prestige, and a kind that cannot be supported by any rabble-rousing populism among the faculty. Arcane, difficult-to-follow academic work feeds that prestige. Sure, you can write about Laurie Anderson in that milieu – but only if you do so in jargon that talks about “postmodern modes of discourse” and “transgendering,” that makes it abstract and difficult to understand and therefore respectable – which means nonthreatening. Exciting young professors get hired (almost by mistake, it seems) and energize the students, but they eternally seem to have more trouble avoiding getting smashed by the edicts handed down from above than the punctilious ones who cloak their research in measured and arcane terminology. The sciences and social sciences in particular thrive in this environment, and they’re the backbone of the institution. Those professors are in their element, and live honest lives. Knowing them is a constant revelation. The artists, on the other hand, are at a permanent disadvantage. The most creative of them cannot present their work with the kind of empirical verifiability that translates as prestige going up the ladder – except by winning awards administrated by other universities. And those who aim for and achieve any kind of popular or commercial success virtually negate the explicit aims of the institution.

Some of you will smile that I was so naive as to have to learn all this. It was doubtless more obvious from the beginning to many than it was to me. In any case, minimalist music, at least, has succeeded, thanks to me and a few dozen others, in the very dubious aim of carving out its own discourse in the peripheries of music departments. Any good-sized department can now afford one token experimental-music whacko, kind of a court jester. At age 27 I stormed the citadel of musical academia on horseback, with spear and helmet, to incite a revolution. 27 years later, in return for my promise not to break any more of the furniture, I’ve been granted a small but nicely-appointed bedroom on the fourth floor, in the back. Success is just another form of failure.

So now what do I do? I won’t say I don’t want to write any more books, but my motivation for writing them will certainly have changed. I wrote books to cement my credibility in academia (thus freeing my music from any such style-deforming responsibility), but the guilty truth is that, except for the Nancarrow analyses, those books were never aimed at academia: those of you who read them, and who read this blog, are probably either 1. composers and music fans outside academia, or 2. academics with similarly eccentric interests who have your own troubles keeping a foothold in that treacherous world. As a populist by nature, I have pursued a populist agenda in exactly that sphere of life which proudly shelters itself away from the mandates of populism. It was kind of idiotic, now that I think about it. Some of you have pointed that out with more accuracy than I credited you for. A temptation has always lingered in the back of my mind that with my accumulated writing skills I should write books for money; once, in a period of chronic financial panic, I asked Yoko Ono to let me write her authorized biography, but she nicely declined. Today I can’t think of any commercially viable subject that I wouldn’t be disgusted to associate with. And I don’t need any more résumé lines. I have to learn what I would write not to score points, not to advance causes, not to do favors, not to support myself, but simply for my own pleasure. Perhaps this blog, absolutely divorced as it is from the possibility of any conceivable career advantage, is the perfect sketchpad.

It would be narcissistic of me to write what I have just written did I not consider it not only my personal odyssey, but the odyssey of my generation. Thousands of us were appalled by the close-mindedness of the high-modernist generation of professors, and wanted to smash the stranglehold of pitch-set analysis as an ultimate criterion of musical value. Many of us have now proved how far we can go in that direction: impressively far, actually, and yet never far enough. The beast must be fed. Outside of academia, however, we have trouble knowing where to turn. As the corporate dictatorship we live in grows ever more restrictive, popular, let alone commercial, success becomes vanishingly elusive. Academia is the sector of society set aside as a safe haven from corporate control. And yet to pursue a career of quasi-populist yearning for fans within the confines of the ivory tower seems like a weird self-delusion. There’s a story about Thomas Edison making 8000 failed attempts to invent a storage battery, who, on being consoled, replied brightly, “Now we know 8000 things that don’t work.” Perhaps all this is merely to pass on to the younger generation of composers that we now know how far the attempt to cure the problems of authentic art production in a corporate dictatorship can be addressed within the halls of acadème – and it’s not very far. What other ideas you got?

[TWO UPDATES BELOW] I don’t submit many scholarly articles to journals anymore. I figured out I can put my research in some journal and only three people will ever read it, or I can post it here on my blog and hundreds will read it, and comment, and link to it.

I’m certainly not going to hand the scores of my music over to some publisher so he can take half the royalties and tie up the copyrights. My music gets around much faster as PDF scores on my website, and with no appreciable loss of potential income on my end.

Likewise, I’ve been debating the wisdom of putting out any more CDs. They sometimes cost a mint to produce, distribution channels are terrible, reviews are almost unheard of, and income from sales? That’s a laugh. I can’t convince myself that any more people will hear my music from “commercial” CDs than from mp3s on my web site, and not making CDs would save me money.

Writing books is a lot of work, and I’m not sure what it does for me. My Cage book got me a couple of nice radio interviews that I had to drive many miles to record. I counted it up, and what I’ve made in book sales in 20 years is dwarfed even by the rare music commissions I’ve had. If I wrote difficult-to-read books with titles like Hexachordal Invariance in the Late Music of Roger Sessions, academia would consider me one of the Serious Guys, and I could write my own ticket at some university – but I’m not going to do that. Analysis of 4’33”?  Robert Ashley? Player pianos? Give me a break. Musicologists are nice to me and quote me, but no music department is going to ultimately import someone with my undistinguished areas of expertise. I’m considering not writing any more books, because I just can’t see the point.

I don’t write newspaper reviews or program notes or liner notes anymore. That was a tremendous distraction from my natural interests, and it never paid enough to justify it except when I was near-destitute.

I work like a dog trying to write a few pieces of music a year in-between all my other commitments. But my music doesn’t “take off,” whatever little successes I have hardly ever bring new commissions, the new-music groups out there never seem to consider playing anything of mine, and my kind of music is certainly never going to win any of the kinds of awards that would impress musical academia. I’ve been toying with the idea of not writing any more music.

Meanwhile, what do people say when I am introduced to them? “Oh yes, I’ve read your blog.”

Given that I have a day-job salary: why do I do anything but blog?

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

UPDATE: I had a feeling I might have to contextualize this intendedly humorous musing on futility. Here’s the situation: We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist. I and my 400 closest friends don’t fit any of these markets. Back in the 1980s, there was both a Downtown scene and a rising new-music market that looked for years like it really might take off. The scene has been dispersed, the new-music fad has been rolled back. When I was 28 all this was a fight worth taking on. But we haven’t won the fight – things have actually gotten worse. And in a weak moment Doug McLennan convinced me to write this stupid blog, and somehow it has more impact than anything else I do. People meet me, and I’m not the composer, I’m not even the author, I’m the blogger.

I have a nice screened-in porch, with the Catskills visible through the trees. At the liquor store down the road, my friend Jim has a standing order for my 18-year-old Bowmore single-malt scotch, and I have a humidor full of Padrone maduro cigars, smooth and chocolatey tasting. I’m 54 and I’m through fighting the system every day and watching things go south. And I’m very seriously wondering if there’s any reason I should do anything after a day of teaching secondary dominant chords besides come home, sit on this porch, smoke those Padrons and drink that Bowmore? ‘Cause if all this work is never going to lead to anything, I’m ready to decide the answer is no.

UPDATE 2: Forgive me for insisting that some of the moroseness being read into this post is in the reader’s own mind. I am not the slightest bit depressed; I am dissatisfied. I want more money. I want to travel. I want some free time. I want to enjoy myself. And after some years’ achievement in composing and publishing, I find that these activities, even when crowned with all available success, are not bringing me any closer to those goals. Quite the contrary. These extracurricular activities take up virtually all of my free time, and much of my disposable income. I have reached a point in my life at which I have to consider whether continuing to work like a dog for the next 20 years is going to result in any actual personal satisfaction, and if the trajectory suggests that it will not, I will jettison what responsibilities I can not in the spirit of sour grapes, but with a clear conscience and a relief at no longer delaying the gratifications I’ve put off for so long. Music can be the greatest thing in the world and still not be worth martyring oneself for.

One more thing about composing, since these theme columns tend to come in threes.

This is a guilty secret. When composing, I usually imagine more how the piece will sound on recording than in live performance.

There is, as we classical types all too seldom recognize, a difference. I love listening to Feldman’s For Samuel Beckett on disc; I can just melt into it. But I heard it live once (John Kennedy conducting at Lincoln Center), and I felt nearly suffocated, sonically claustrophobic. Ten minutes into it I had an impulse to flee the hall – but I didn’t. On the other hand, I don’t think Feldman’s Second Quartet would mean nearly so much to me if I had heard it only on CD, and not live. I had to live through it in real-time experience to fully get it. And those are two extremely different examples within the same composer’s output. In live performance I expect to be a little more entertained, and can appreciate a more volatile sense of drama. I tend to pick CDs to listen to more for ambience, based on overall consistency and a paucity of dramatic contrast.

And I have many reasons to imagine my music on recording. One is that 98% of the music with which I am extremely familiar I know from recordings, not from live performance. Opportunities to hear my favorite works live are extremely, extremely rare. I was in my 50s before I got to hear Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune and Harris’s 3rd live, and I’ve loved them from high school. As for my own music, for every one person who hears it live, there will be 300, or maybe 3000, who will hear it on a recording. I think most of us are pretty much in the same boat here.

But the most important reason is that I like records. Let me amend that: I
liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike records. I started collecting records when I was 12. (I went down to Melody Shop in downtown Dallas – this was 1968 – and bought, for some reason, The Threepenny Opera and Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet. Heaven opened up to me. I still adore both pieces.) Here is almost a third of my CD collection:

I appreciate the immediacy of live performance, and in some sense I realize I’ve never really heard a piece until I hear it live, and many live performances have changed my life, but I have a lifelong love affair with records. Live performances are nervous-making, and almost never go completely the way you wanted. Becoming a critic was, for awhile, the perfect profession: most of the discs you see
there were sent me free of charge. (It’s a fairly small collection by music critic standards, because your average living composer doesn’t put out new discs nearly as often as jazz and straight classical musicians do.) What would really, really make me feel like a composer, though, as I’ve said before, would be to have my music on an RCA vinyl record with a clear plastic inner sleeve and long, readable liner notes on the back, and maybe Ormandy conducting, with, say, the Berg Violin Concerto on side
2. That’s what composers were when I was a kid, and that would make me feel like I finally achieved composerhood. I don’t expect to ever get it (certainly not with Ormandy).

That is not to say that I put out CDs conceived as “records,” any more than most
classically trained composers do. For some reason we keep writing as though for live performance. I haven’t managed to put out “concept albums,” although some of my electronic works have tended that way, if I could get enough of them together on one disc. I think The Planets works well as a total CD because of its length and stylistic unity; it’s my best record whether it’s my best piece or not. As I’ve said many times, I think the only new-music composers who are really geniuses at putting out records have been Bob Ashley and Paul Lansky. Perhaps there are a few others I’m not thinking of. But I do suspect that the flatness, the consistency, the Zen, the drama-lessness of my music stems not just from my personality, but partly because I want to listen to it on a record.

UPDATE: I should add the obligatory depressing postlude. A few weeks ago I threw away, for the first time, a CD that had deteriorated to the point of unplayability: Brahms string quintets on Nonesuch. Picked it up out of the machine, held it to the light, and it had a dozen or so pinpricks where the coating had, I dunno, fallen off or collapsed or something. I listened instead to the mp3s on my hard drive. I’ve transferred most of those CDs to three hard drives, and hopefully will transfer those files to newer ones before the hard drives quit working. I can pass my vinyl down to my grandchildren if they want it, but I will probably outlive my CD collection. The only permanent storage medium my music is preserved on is the paper the scores are printed on. Everything else is designed to expire.

Since people seemed to like the subject of keeping the performer in mind while composing, it’s been on my mind, in response to a couple of comments, to hopefully blow apart a notion I regard as superficial and misleading: that the composer “writes what he hears.” Creative activity is virtually infinite in its
forms, and I would never claim that no composer does this, but I think it must be fairly rare. Of course, in a sense I certainly do write the music I want to hear (my ability to relisten to my own CDs verges on narcissism), and I do “hear” my music before I compose it; but it often comes out sounding different than I expect, and I almost always end up rewriting it into something I never quite expected to hear. I’d be disappointed if my music didn’t regularly surprise me.

Take this blog entry, for instance. I’ve started it because I’ve got a bug up my ass, as happens, about some mistaken notion I see myself in a position to correct. It’s been running through my mind for a few days, and the mental form it always takes is that the initial, central idea always comes first, and other related ideas, or apropos phrases, group themselves around it in no particular order, like spokes around the hub of a wheel. Now I’ve sat down to write, and all those disconnected ideas must arrange themselves in series, into coherent paragraphs. Some of them don’t link logically. Transitional ideas must be grabbed out of the air. I struggle with introspection, because at this exact point in writing
my initial idea has been stated, but the other eloquent phrases I’m eager to use don’t fit in yet. Very, very often I find, as I think any serious essayist must, that what I end up meaning as the essay takes shape is not exactly what I expected to say. I might possibly find myself contradicting the gist of this
blog entry and not finishing it. What’s given, though, is that the linear format of these paragraphs is not isomorphic to my obsessive musings of the past few days, and that I cannot possibly simply throw the latter down on paper (or screen) as they exist in my head. The impetus is transformed by the process. In a sense I had something to say and I will have said it, but more accurately, I will have found out by the end of this essay what I think. Which is the value, for me personally, of writing a blog – and would continue to be even were no one reading it.

Music is not language (though recent studies are suggesting that it uses the same part of the brain [h/t McLaren]),
and parallels between them are always tenuous. You might imagine, however, and correctly, that
writing music and writing words have become particularly conflated in the lifestyle that has chosen me. In a sense I’ve been better professionally trained to write words than music – only because being edited for a newspaper is a strict and arduous process – and my composing has increasingly borrowed reflexes from my writing. (There’s< a point I didn't expect to think of.) Everything I've said about my experience writing this blog entry applies to my composing, more or less depending on the piece. I always have an idea I want to get across, or an effect I want to create; but most of the time (not all), I find that the idea doesn't get across, or the effect doesn't happen, the first way I write it down. These little bits of nonlinear music that float through my brain don't map onto the linear page without some organization. Ultimately, the piece goes where it wants to go, and I'm smart enough to try and get out of the way. It is common to believe, I gather, that people think the material of music is simply sound, and that, being so incorporeal, music is the freest of the arts, that the composer can simply make something appear and it happens. For me this has never been the case. The materials of music exert as much resistance back to the artist as clay does to the potter, paint and color to the painter, granite and steel to the sculptor, words and syntax to the poet - and even more so, I tentatively think, because the materials involved, at least in composing via notation for human performers, are heterogeneous in origin. It depends, I suppose, on how you define your materials, and this is how I define mine:

1. 12 pitches and their octave equivalents (unless I’m composing microtonally, in which case I gather pitches like a kid with a credit card in a toy store until I’m a little freaked out by how many I have to carry home; and in this case they tend to group themselves into clumps of associated pitches);

2. Musical notation, which includes rhythm within all its humanly possible limitations;

3. The instruments and the sounds they can make that I find attractive or acceptable (for instance, I’m just not into multiphonics or sul ponticello);

4. Insofar as I can anticipate it, the trained psychology of my performers, which may vary
in specificity depending on how well I know them.

Other composers will conceptualize their materials differently, depending on medium or performing abilities, but I expect that for virtually everyone it’s kind of an odd assortment – or becomes so with experience. (As several commenters have suggested, realizing pieces electronically changes the game entirely – but even there, with my limited skills, the medium resists with a vengeance.) I push all of these materials to do what I want, and I am accustomed to finding that they push back. I want to create effects that turn out to be inelegant or unwieldy or a pain for the performers, and in composing (or, more strictly, revising) I find how those effects can realize themselves within the materials I’ve got.
Everyone knows that Stockhausen asked Feldman what his “system” was, and Feldman replied: “I don’t push the notes around.” Stockhausen: “Not even a little bit?” It becomes painfully obvious to me, in composing, when I’m “pushing the notes around,” and I back off.

For instance, in the string quartet I’m writing, there’s a lovely pandiatonic passage on the D-major scale. The section preceding it ends on an A7 chord, which I considered a nice link. But that preceding section was too complicated, difficult to play in rhythm, and with an unmemorable melody; so I rewrote it, and its voice-leading led to a B7 chord. I tried transposing the D-major, and it just ruined the resonance of the cello. I was despondent for about ten minutes, but playing through it realized that the A7 to D sounded trite, and the B7 to D was not only charming, but expressed my overall, non-causal
expressive intentions better. The notes seem to be smarter than me. Thank goodness the purpose of the piece is not to demonstrate to the world how smart its composer is (which strikes me as being the case with some pieces I hear).

Another compromise I made: In the first movement of Desert Sonata, I have an isorhythmic passage (in 41/16 meter) in which the bass line runs through a repeating rhythmic cycle and a pitch cycle that go out of phase. Given my usual numerological inclinations, I would have had something like 17 notes in the rhythm and 19 in the pitch, so that they’d never come back in sync within the time framework of the piece. But the cognitive demands on the pianist would have been outrageous. Finally I settled for the non-mutually-prime numbers 15 against 18, so that the whole pattern would repeat every five measures, and it sounds great – not only easier to play, but easier for the listener to grasp what’s going on. 

Parenthetically, though it furthers the point, I find that some composers write more effectively
for solo strings than I do because they can keep in mind what all the open strings are, to take advantage of them for double- and triple-stops. I just don’t like letting those “special pitches” interfere with my freely composed harmonies, and so to this extent I arrogantly fail by my own criterion. I’m an emotion/intuition type, and not earthy at all. For the same reason I find classical guitar nearly impossible to write for. The physical material is too eccentric.)

The point about keeping the performers is mind is that I have found that I ignore category no. 4, performer psychology, at my peril. The first version of the “Moon” movement from my The Planets turned out to be impossible to play without a conductor, and since the rest of the piece doesn’t require one, this was unacceptable. (I actually strolled onstage to conduct “Moon” at its first performance, which I felt reflected something of a failure in my composing.) One of the most difficult things about my music, which is hardly ever virtuosic, is that I try to create rhythmically free situations in which various performers have virtual downbeats in different places, often unrelated to the meter and especially to each other. The idea must get across, or else I won’t feel like the piece is mine. But in this instance I rewrote the work with more frequent articulated downbeats, especially in the percussion, so that the players could keep track of where they were. It may seem like a compromise to some, but I was certainly happier with the performance as it turned out.

I doubt what I’m saying is particularly controversial (though I have given up trying to anticipate reactions). My colleague Joan Tower, who’s from a completely different side of the aesthetic tracks, likes to say, “When you’re composing you think you’re in control, but you’re not,” and other well-established composers have said similar things to me in conversation. They say the young Mozart conceived works all of a piece, and I suppose it sometimes happens. David Galenson’s book Old Masters and Young Geniuses suggests that planning a work out in advance is more typical of young artists, and experimenting to “find” the piece more typical of older ones, which accords with my experience; I used to plan too much, and the
results didn’t always flow. I know a retired composer who says that he always hears music in his head, and when he starts composing he just writes it down; but he hasn’t had much of a career.

What makes the point worth stressing, I think, is that we are still emerging from a kind of collective macho mindset which overrated the untrammeled will of the composer. I have been strongly influenced by Pauline Oliveros’s famous 1984 article “The Contribution of Women Composers,” in which she drew a contrast between two types of creativity:

(1) active, purposive creativity, resulting from cognitive thought, deliberate acting upon or willful
shaping of materials, and (2) receptive creativity, during which the artist is like a channel through which material flows and seems to shape itself.

Quoting both Mozart and Beethoven in support of the idea that we need both kinds, she
goes on to say,

“Artists who are locked into the analytical mode with little or no access to the intuitive mode are apt
to produce one-sided works of art. Certainly many of the totally determined, serial works of the post-war years seem to fit that category.”

The emphasis I bring to my composition students is that the piece is king, they are servants; the needs of the piece they’re writing are more important than their own needs. “This piece wants something from you,” I’m always telling them; “what is it?” And the disappointing response I usually get is, “Well, that’s just the way I want it,” which I consider a miserable failure as a rationale. Or else they’re giving the performers something that’s going to take tremendous trouble to play for very little or confusing effect.

A live-performed musical experience is something that it takes several intelligences to create, and the composer is only one of them. For me to ignore the way my performers will react to the notation, in order to effect some pre-ordained system of my own, would be as stupid, I think, as for a painter to ignore how differently water-colors act than oil paints. Those musicians are the clay I have to work with. The composer has something to learn from his or her own music just as everyone else does. And while we talk loosely about the composer “writing down the music he hears,” I think we do more justice to the complexity and reciprocal value of artistic experience by admitting that the composer is just as subject to his or her materials as anyone else. All praise to the composition – but the composer should be humble.

One of the issues I deal with every day as a composer (every day I get to compose,
that is), is the tension between what I want to hear and what’s “grateful” for
the performer to play. I suspect a lot of us are in this boat now. It started
with minimalism. There are a lot of postminimal pieces I love listening to, and
then I open the score and see page upon page of streaming 8th-notes without
rests, or multiple tied whole-notes for wind players, or intricate
permutational passages within small ranges, and think, “Boy, I love hearing it,
but I’m glad it’s not me who has to play it.”

I wouldn’t want to seem critical by naming pieces, but the locus classicus I show to students in this respect is Steve Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards of 1979.
Stunning piece, I love hearing it, but I look at those wind parts, and my first
thought is “oxygen deprivation.” My second is, “Imagine the kind of
concentration needed to keep all those fast patterns lined up right through
changing meters for 20 minutes.” And Tehillim? Jeezus, what a workout! I remember when the Netherlands opera orchestra started working on Glass’s Satyagraha and the players leaked bitter complaints to the press about having to saw away on 8th-notes for quarter-hours at a
time. The paradigms for that music came from Reich’s and Glass’s personal ensembles, either keyboard- or mallet-percussion-based, and – I don’t really know about mallets – but it’s kind of easy to lose yourself in a mechanical groove fingering away endlessly at the keyboard. Breathing’s not an issue, nor do you have to continually keep your elbow in the air.

Glass and Reich also had a few wind and string performers, like Jon Gibson and
Barbara Benary, who developed the technique for it; plus, in those early works
it was sometimes acceptable to drop out occasionally for a few notes and come
back in again.

In general, though, performers aren’t too happy to be handed endurance tests, and
a lot of my compositional technique has gone toward preserving the qualities I
want from minimalism while giving the performers something graceful and
rewarding to play. I’m writing a string quartet. My impulse would be to keep
the players pretty much confined to one string for ten minutes at a time, but I
want them to use the whole range of their instruments, not get too tired, and
feel each phrase as something musical. So I’m wracking my brain to introduce
frequent variety and gently nuanced phrases without introducing any drama,
anguish, or climaxes whatever, anything that will disturb the placid, uniform
surface I want. And page turns! – boy, did that get me in trouble with my guitar
quartet Composure. We all agreed that having a page-turner next to each
guitarist would look pretty silly, so I went back and finagled some two-measure rests in so they could keep going. But the postminimalist textural paradigm I favor tends to keep everyone playing all the time. This was more feasible when the music was so repetitive that the score would fit on two pages, like In C.

I’m also working on a piano piece whose concept keeps the pianist’s left hand in
the lower half of the bass clef throughout, and it’s a pretty quick piece. So
I’m carefully arranging rhythms in intuitively graspable heirarchies so the panist’s
brain can proceed by phrases rather than tediously note-to-note. One of the
most dangerous things I ever did in this respect was the last movement of Transcendental
Sonnets, in which each of the chorus’s SATB parts never strays more than a minor third
from the pitch it starts on; turned out to be kind of exhaustingly difficult,
as I taught myself before turning it in by singing through all the parts
myself. I went back through and added occasional appoggiatura inflections to
make it a little easier, and that helped. I love that effect of the chords
hovering almost motionless as the harmony changes, but the singers would have
had a much easier job leaping around from time to time.

The problem is that I’m trying to introduce into live performance a paradigm that
comes from ambient music, and whose origins are electronic. In the abstract, this
is not a novel concern. In the ’50s and ’60s, composers like Boulez and
Stockhausen and Ligeti were introducing concepts from electronic music (like
bandwidth) into their music, which gave the performers some new challenges.
Many from my generation infuse postclassical music with the gestures of rock.
Classical music isn’t really a receptive medium for all these foreign
paradigms. It’s strange, when you think about it: Ligeti should have made
electronic music, Michael Gordon should have been a rock star, and I should
have made ambient music, but instead we pick up new paradigms in these areas
and bring them back to torture string quartets and orchestras with. The serialists,
finding saftely in numbers, managed to create a class of performers specialized
to play their atomized rhythms and textures. (I know of one soprano who’s made such a
career of singing major sevenths and minor ninths exquisitely that she sounds
pretty shaky trying to effect a major scale.) Will we postminimalists ultimately nurture a
repertoire of performers suited to our exorbitant needs? Well, we’ve got Joe Kubera the human player piano, who’s great for all those relentless devices
that drive everyone else nuts. But other players I know will play such things
when they have to, and hope they don’t have to too often.

Some composers, of course, take the attitude (and will write in with it here), “Just
write the music you want to hear and let the performers deal with it, it’s
their problem.” But I really want my performers to enjoy playing my pieces, and
most of all, I want the music to sound like the performers are really into it. After
one concert I reviewed for the Voice I remarked that I wanted to go onstage and
cordon off the performers with a yellow “Men at work” banner. I want to hear performers play, not work. I treasure the fact that Sarah Cahill finds my Private Dances fun to play. And I’m going to continue losing sleep over this string quartet until it plays like Schubert
and sounds like me.

My summer hobby, as it turns out, pursued in-between writing a string quartet and finishing my Ashley book, will be relearning the history of music at the feet of Richard Taruskin. That is, from his five-volume Oxford History of Western Music. I should have bought it earlier, and I know what a brilliant writer he is, but I thought it would be full of things I already knew, perhaps kind of a super-Grout (and no former music student will need to be told that I am referring to Donald J. Grout’s omni-required and stultifying A History of Western Music). But, stuck in New York City recently without my Kindle and with a few hours to kill, I bought Taruskin’s Volume Five, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, and learned within minutes how groundless any such fears were. It is a thorough and creative rethinking of all of Western music. I could hardly put it down, and weeks later, going backwards, I’m halfway through Volume Four.

Volume Five’s opening chapter is the most transcendent music history writing I’ve ever read, along with Rosen’s The Classical Style – and possibly above it.
He starts with the bombing of Hiroshima, using it as a grand metaphor for what he calls “Zero Hour” – the attempted total redefinition of music at Darmstadt. And yet, he brilliantly juxtaposes this with the Zhdanovshchina, the official rebuke that Zhdanov made to Soviet composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, calling on them to eschew abstraction and write accessible music using folk
tunes. Through several long chapters Taruskin charts the century’s most amazing
musical paradox: that under a totalitarianism that mandated simple, melodic
music, the mechanical algorithms of total serialism came to represent freedom.
And at the same time, on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, total serialism
came to express mankind’s existential despair in the face of the possibility
of nuclear annihilation. What a head trip!

For instance, here he is on Stefan Wolpe, whose early music was often political
agitprop:

[Wolpe’s thorny late] music no longer communicates with the directness of a Kampflied. A listener would be hard-pressed to paraphrase its “message,” or guess its precise motivation, with any confidence. But if it thus frustrated willing listeners, it also frustrated would-be censors, and that may well have been the
point. The hermeticism of Wolpe’s postwar – or rather, Cold War – music was a
deliberate and demonstrative refusal to comply with the directives of the
Zhdanovshchina. And yet, the question nags, how did an artist with Wolpe’s
social conscience feel about a decision, however honestly arrived at, to
insulate his artistic integrity within a music that eventually became so
abstract that its content would be a riddle, its style so advanced that few
except fellow musicians could take pleasure in it, and so demanding of its
performers that almost no one could play it? [p. 14]

Adorno, he says, in his Philosophie der neuen Musik,

added an existentialist argument to the older doctrine of progress… If, as the
existentialists argued, authenticity can only be personal and justified from
within, never collectively asserted or justified from without, then a music
that by virtue of its difficulty shunned popularity had to be a more authentic
music than one that potentially spoke for the many. Responding only to what
Adorno called “the inherent tendency of musical material” rather to any call
from the wider world, twelve-tone music seemed to embody a perfect artistic
autonomy. [p. 17]

And yet, in another sharp irony, the collective pressure put on composers to switch
to dodecaphony would have seemed to destroy the autonomy of the composer, and
thus the authenticity of his music. Referring to Boulez’s infamous “Schoenberg
is Dead” article,

The violence that Leibowitz had predicted certainly came to the fore in Boulez’s
frantically coercive and intolerant rhetoric. No one who has read the article
has ever forgotten its frightening climax [the line about any composer who
hasn’t understood the necessity of the 12-tone language being USELESS]…
Not even Zhdanov had ever voiced a judgment more categorical or intransigent (and
indeed it is obvious that Boulez’s rhetorical model was the Communist
journalism of his day). [p. 19]

Further:

…rather than an expression of simple nihilism, or belief in nothing, the renunciation
total serialism demanded might rather be seen as expressing existential
despair. It was the passionately intense reaction of artists who could no
longer believe in the supreme value of the individual self, the “autonomous
subject” exalted by romanticism, at a time when a hundred thousand selves just
as individual as theirs might vanish at the push of a button. [p. 43]

Virtually every argument Taruskin makes is buttressed by telling details from obscure
corners of history. He analyzes Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel, an early work I’ve always
heard of, but have never actually heard (and there seems to be no currently
available recording). Because it has a steady drumbeat running underneath it,
it was attractive, and Stockhausen suppressed it:

Within the ascetic world of “total serialism,” at any rate, Kreuzspiel counts as easy listening.
That may be one reason why Stockhausen supressed constant pulsation in the
works that followed, and also withheld Kreuzspiel from publication for
nearly a decade, despite positive audience reactions. [p. 48]

Later, Taruskin credits the anti-Communist backlash in the U.S. as having partly
motivated a turn toward 12-tone music, since “accessibility” had earned a
politically suspicious reputation. Evidence? The month in which Aaron Copland
was first denounced by a rightwing group for his Communist connections happened
to be the month he began his first 12-tone piece, the Piano Quartet. The
contradictions of the age had made over-intelligibility politically incorrect. I hadn’t realized that Erno Lendvai had been dismissed from his Academy post in Budapest for writing his book about Bartok’s axis system and Golden Sections.
The book made Bartok sound like a decadent formalist, but Ligeti broadcast
Lendvai’s ideas at Darmstadt to revive Bartok’s flagging reputation among the
12-toners, and thus add prestige to his own lineage.

This is history written in very broad strokes, and they are dazzingly creative,
flexible enough to be encompassing, while supported in enormous detail. The major theme Taruskin brings out for the
postwar era is the question of whether a composer is indebted to history or to
society. If to history, then the important thing is to build on past music and
to keep progress going; if to society, then musical style doesn’t matter, even
to the point of seeming anachronism, as long as the point gets across. I
vividly remember feeling crucified on this exact point in the 1970s, torn
between systematic composing methods and Cardew-esque political critique. (In
fact, my have-your-cake-and-eat-it solution to that puzzle – making my music lyrical and harmonically
simple on the surface, while hiding my secret innovations in the backgrounded
rhythms and tuning – occupies me to this day. I spent the morning wrestling
with it.) Interestingly, Taruskin brings all this out in the volume’s center
with a contrast between Benjamin Britten and Elliott Carter, two composers
whose “followings tended to be mutually exclusive.”

This is a revisionist history, but unlike Carl Dahlhaus’s otherwise wonderful Nineteenth-Century
Music, it is not a revision that requires one to have read the original first. It
explains everything clearly enough from the ground up that I think undergrads
could deal with most of it (I gave that first chapter to my modernism class to
read). The only things that might daunt them are the rather detailed analyses
of Boulez and Babbitt, which do contribute to Taruskin’s overall points. In
fact, the book ripples with musical analysis. This is a history book by someone
who loves to analyze music, and does it very well, capturing the essence of
musical styles with a few well-chosen and deeply plumbed examples. The sections
on pitch relationships in Debussy and Scriabin have greatly deepened my
understanding of two composers I’d never gotten around to looking at closely. I
can’t escape the impression, actually, that it is a history of music written
specifically for composers: I can’t quite imagine any other group getting as much
out of it. Virtually every historical generalization eventually gets pinned down to specific instances of compositional technique. (I’ve told the story here before that Taruskin was one of the
external evaluators for my tenure; he made such penetrating comments about my
compositional technique that I changed my style in response to them. It was the
best composition lesson I’ve ever had.)

Of course, I’ve been policing Taruskin like a hawk on the American composers I’m most invested
in. He sometimes looks likely to overdo an emphasis, and never does; every crucial point is hit, every ameliorating factor noted. His parsing of Ives, for instance, is that he was a maximalist but not a modernist: that is, he shared the early 20th-century tendency for ramping up levels of complexity and dissonance (maximalism), but
conservatively held to a 19th-century view of music’s appropriate expressive
ends; I’ve said something similar myself, though without documenting it nearly
so well. (In fact, Taruskin quotes me at some length on music after 1970, so a few of my agreements with him approach tautology.) He even collects Ives with composers like Crawford and Rudhyar as Americans who used technical innovations toward spiritual ends, which is a nice point I’ve never seen anyone make. People get left out –
Nancarrow, for instance, isn’t mentioned – but his framework is so
all-encompassing that the reader can fit them in for himself later.

I’ve ordered a vocal score to Salome and downloaded from IMSLP (because the available scores cost
a fortune) one of Elektra, two operas that impressed me when I was a teenager but that
I’ve hardly listened to since; Taruskin’s analyses resparked my interest. I’m
beginning to get out recordings I haven’t listened to for years, and I’ve taken
up an interest in Andrzej Panufnik, whom Taruskin contrasts curiously with
Ligeti. In short, I am swept up in the irresistible flow of Taruskin’s vastly creative musical logic, and, with 3000
pages to go, the rest of my summer is pretty well planned out.

[May I conclude with a didactic point for those whom it may concern? You’ll notice I’ve quoted Taruskin heavily, and
allowed him to make his points with his own words. This is how you write a book
review. Read a book through once, describe it from memory, and you’ll
invariably falsify it. This is what happened with that idiot who reviewed my
Cage book, and it’s not the first time. As you read a book for reviewing, copy
out things you’ll want to quote, and add the page number. Look at them again in context while you’re writing. It’s astonishing how often you’ll find that the author didn’t actually say what you first imagined he said. If you want to damn the author, do it with his own words and he can’t complain. In fact, I’ve overdone it a little here for emphasis; people don’t like to read too many long quotations. A book review without quotations, however, is never,
ever to be trusted.]

I used to have an apartment in Queens, but I missed the grinding roar of power tools so much that I just had to move out to the country again.

Here’s a common academicism that always irks me:

As is the case in the other works of Hartmann’s maturity, the layout of the Horn Concerto is best understood against a background of formal conventions familiar from the music of the Classic and Romantic eras. This does not imply that the music merely conforms to the outlines of, say, textbook sonata or rondo forms; on the contrary, key features of such stereotypes are placed in focus just sufficiently for the listener to be alert to the ongoing play of near-repetitions, etc.

I have changed the name of the composer and the work because I have no wish to draw arbitrary attention to the offending author in this instance; dozens of other examples would have served as well. But this is clearly a book analyzing the form of some modern work. Anyone old enough to be reading such a book is also likely to be educated enough to know that textbook cases of sonata form are extremely rare, and, in 20th-century repertoire, almost unheard of. But here the author, like so many of them, starts out to say that the work, as is very common, makes reference to the conventions of sonata form. Then he has a sudden, disquieting thought: perhaps his reader is a college sophomore music major who has learned about sonata form just recently, and will jump to the conclusion that the piece is in textbook sonata form! No no, he must be dissuaded from this in the next sentence! And thus the author addresses me as though I must be reading a book waaay too advanced for me, and he must condescend to guide my little mind out of the ruts it doubtless fell into in my early undergraduate years.

The other form this usually takes is in a discussion of some famous modern composer who uses a device common in classical music, or also used by other composers. BUT THIS DOES NOT IMPLY that he has used it unoriginally, or without putting his own delectably brilliant spin on it. And in my mind, I invariably interrupt the flow of my reading to respond: