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Music in the Prison’s Shadow

I still have a couple of full days this week, but the bulk of my school work came to an abrupt halt last night, giving me today my first chance to breathe in weeks. Except for their orchestral performances this Friday, my seniors are pretty much packed off into the world to start figuring out, come Sunday, what they’re going to do with their lives.Â

I didn’t get a chance to write about the contemporary music festival at Sam Houston State University at which I was the featured composer. I spent several days that week on the street that Kate Winslet runs up, trying to forestall Kevin Spacey’s execution, in the film The Life of David Gale. I highly recommend the movie, and the surprise ending is too good to tell you much about it. It’s about the Texas prison system, and the “walls” unit at Huntsville, Texas, where prisoners are executed and where the ending of the movie takes place, is two short blocks from the SHSU music school. A few years ago in real life, someone on death row shot a guard, escaped, and hijacked a car being driven by the music department’s piano tuner, holding her hostage for a few hours. She’s reportedly still in therapy about it. (Puts Bard’s inconveniences in perspective, I guess.)Â At 1:55 in the film you can see a corner of the music building behind Kate Winslet as she’s running – unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera, and can’t give you a comparison shot. I got kind of a kick out of it, and also out of the excellent local barbecue.

Also from the honor and the performances, highlights of which came from John Lane’s superb Percussion Ensemble, which played all three of my Snake Dances on one concert; and from my old friend Rob Hunt, who was among my inner circle at Skyline High School in Dallas (back when it was the arts magnet school), and who now teaches piano and accompanying at SHSU. I also enjoyed meeting SHSU composers Brian Herrington, Carlo “Vini” Frizzo, Kyle Kindred, John Crabtree, and Trent Hanna, who had pieces performed. All are considerably younger than me (while at 54 I’m still the youngest composer at Bard), and it was refreshing to spend a few days among young music professors with new initiatives and ideas. It’s quite an active and varied music scene down there – and I found it similar to music schools in the 1970s midwest in terms of being very stylistically open-minded. It’s so ridiculous, in 2010, to be otherwise.

As a result of that and other events, I’ve got a spate of new recordings up on my web site. While I was in Texas, John Kennedy conducted my orchestra piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things from this Once So Promising World at Oberlin, creating my first usable recording of that piece; and at Ball State guitarist Derek Johnson made a nice studio recording of my electric guitar quartet Composure (with Collin Marone, Zachary Barr, and Andrew Cowling). From SHSU I got a recording of the premiere of Snake Dance No. 3 and a couple of early songs no one had ever sung before (Jacklyn Kuklenz and Rebecca Costillo, singers). So here’s some 38 minutes of new recordings:

Snake Dance No. 3Â (11:29)
ComposureÂ Â (13:43)
The Disappearance of All Holy ThingsÂ (11:38)
I Slept and Dreamed that Life Was BeautyÂ (1:45)
In the Busy StreetsÂ (0:43)

The final two songs, with texts by Ellen Sturgis Hooper and Henry David Thoreau respectively, are from a projected song cycle of Transcendentalist songs that I never got very far with. Their stylistic anachronism may seem puzzling; I was much taken, at one point, with Ezra Pound’s concept of setting poetry to music as a species of literary criticism, and I always tried to fit the music to the style and milieu of the poem.Â

I didn’t finish the song cycle, though, because it is difficult to get singers to give time to new repertoire, and as a student I had absorbed Cage’s advice about never writing a piece without a performance prospect in mind. He had seen Adolph Weiss become bitter because he had produced so many scores that never got premiered, and he advised young composers not to fall into this trap. I took the advice perhaps too seriously, and have almost never written anything without setting up in advance the means of its performance. I’m changing my mind about this. If there’s anything I’m bitter about today, it might be the pieces I thought of writing and never did because no performance opportunity ever came up. Instead, when faced with a commissionless period I wrote only Disklavier pieces and electronic ones I could perform myself. I think I’m not going to limit myself this way anymore. After all, performances aren’t everything; they’re often disappointing (though the ones above are lovely), the recording doesn’t come out well, the critic doesn’t show up and if he does the reviews are stupid or meaningless, and I get sufficiently excited from hearing the music in my head and knowing what I’ve achieved. Anyway, I’ll be spending the first part of the summer writing a string quartet for which I do have a performance lined up, and afterward I’m thinking of embarking on some more quixotic projects. I may even set to music a few of those poems I never got around to.

There Will Always Be English Book Reviewers, Unfortunately

[UPDATED BELOW, + FINAL UPDATE] Literarily, if not always musically, I am something of an Anglophile, a frank worshipper of that scepter’d isle, that earth of majesty and seat of Mars, the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Dickens, and Trollope. But I have now had three book reviews from English critics, and they have been appalling in their incompetence.

The first was by composer Thomas AdÃ¨s, who reviewed my Nancarrow book for the London Times. He accused me of having squelched, for some nefarious reason, the third of Conlon’s Three Canons for Ursula. In fact, Conlon had told me he had given up on the third canon as too difficult; he showed me a sketch, and told me to disregard it, though apparently he completed and released it later. AdÃ¨s also noted that Study No. 31 was the only one whose tempo canon lines didn’t converge until after the piece was over, and puzzled over why I failed to notice the fact; meanwhile, the diagram of that study, on page 31 of said book, is accompanied by the note, “the only canon whose convergence point lies beyond its temporal frame,” and I reiterate the point in my fuller discussion of the piece on page 129. Overall, AdÃ¨s’s review contained more mistakes than my entire book.

The second was even worse, a review in MusicÂ and Letters by some hack whose name I have taken the trouble to forget. He claimed that for me, every Nancarrow work was a masterpiece, and that I conceded no faults to even the least offerings of his output. Actually, about half of Nancarrow’s works I characterized as “merely experimental,” or “not his best work.” (And I was more generous than Nancarrow was to himself, who was more self-critical than he needed to be.)

And now a purported Englishman yclept Nikil Saval [UPDATE: turns out he’s Asian-American from California, but it’s the lousy editorial policies of English publications that are at issue] hasÂ reviewed my book on Cage’s 4’33”Â in a magazine called The New Statesman. Mr. Saval claims that in my book I say that Cage explained the piece to the audience before its premiere; that the piece was met with polite applause; that I compared that premiere to the premiere of The Rite of Spring, forgetting that Stravinsky’s work precipitated a riot; and that I claim that 4’33” blurred the difference between art and life. Of course, I wrote none of those things. The first three are patently untrue, and the fourth an opinion to which I would not have committed myself.

I have had American critics disagree with things I’ve written, sometimes snidely, but no American reviewer has yet made up things I never said (or claimed that I didn’t say things that I did) in order to chastise me for them. I never wanted to generalize based on only two examples, but after three out of three, I am moved to conclude that English book reviewers are perhaps the most incompetent and mendacious book reviewers in the world, or at least to ever disgrace the English language. And I wonder how a country that has produced such a glory of literature can abide such pathetically low standards in its literary magazines.

UPDATE: I did a little checking on Saval. He’s a grad student in English at Stanford,Â and a fan of Brian Ferneyhough, the big composer at Stanford and someone absolutely unsympathetic to Cage [or perhaps not – see comments]. This sheds a little light on why Saval would waste his time reviewing a book about a piece he obviously didn’t respect in the first place. I hope his idol gave him a pat on the head. Whether Saval is man enough to print corrections of his misstatements, I’m waiting to see. [UPDATE: He never did, the little weasel. Not a true critic.] I, meanwhile, while still wondering why English magazines have such low standards, mustÂ retract my generality about English critics.Â

FINAL UPDATE: Let me be clear: this is not about me getting a negative review. I’ve gotten negative reviews in the last few years and have never mentioned one on this blog before. This is about professional ethics. I have said hereÂ beforeÂ that when critics make factual errors, they need to be called on it, to keep them honest. When you get caught on a factual error, you automatically print a correction, no quibbling about it. I followed that rule as a professional critic for 23 years – indeed, my editors would never have let me do anything else. When I brought a couple of factual errors to Saval’s attention, he quibbled, and admitted I hadn’t written what he attributed to me, but thought it was close enough. That would not have been acceptable behavior at the Village Voice in my day, and if it is acceptable at The New Statesman, I’ll never look at The New Statesman. It was at that point that I wrote the blog entry. Had he responded professionally and responsibly, you would never have heard about it. A critic who is not embarrassed about factual mistakes and who will not reflexively correct them is a disgrace to the profession, and should be called out.

Go Figure

ThirteenÂ Sixteen kids have signed up for my 12-tone Analysis seminar, and only 6Â 7 for my Beethoven class.

UPDATE: And by the way, for those of you who were getting malware warnings when trying to access my blog, Fearless LeaderÂ Douglas McLennan explains. Sorry about that.

Dinner with a Genius

Vladan Radovanovic: Arms (1992)

One of the coolest things that happened to me in Belgrade was that my musicologist friend Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic secured me an introduction to Vladan Radovanovic. Born in 1932, Radovanovic founded Yugoslavia’s first electronic music studio in Belgrade in 1972, and ran it until 1999. He first came to my attention as a supposed precursor of minimalism for some austere works he wrote in the ’50s, but that turns out to be the least of his achievements. He refers to his work as “Art Synthesis,” and besides being a composer he is an amazing painter, computer-graphics artist (see Arms, above), concrete poet, sculptor, and conceptualist. He makes images out of words, and writes texts of overlapping sentences that can be read in multiple directions – in Serbian, of course, so I couldn’t fully enjoy them, and they are untranslatable. One of his pieces is the Serbian word for mirror with eccentric capitalization – OGleDalo – bisected by a mirror, demonstrating that it can be written as a vertical panlindrome. He showed me a film called Variations (1985) in which the images of three musicians performing tunes he wrote use retrogrades, palindromes, canons, and such, correlating the visual processes with the musical devices. He’s made incredible artist’s books like Changes (1991-2), below, in which the images metamorphose continuously, encompassing the whole of human experience:

He’s got a text written on rings of paper inside a box that expand into a readable sphere when you open the box – I can’t describe it any better than that. He’s got a detailed portrait of Nicola Tesla made from a handwritten biography of the scientist done in different-colored inks. He played me a video of a piece called Constellations (1993-7) in which 12 singers carry lighted spheres while singing, and rearrange themselves in the form of various constellations in a darkened performance space. His music is often made from graphic scores, often employing spoken word and electronics, like this section from The Small Eternal Lake (1984):

He’s produced tons and tons of work, all seemingly thought-provoking, original, relentlessly crafted, and extremely clever. Belgrade gave him a major retrospective a few years ago, but he’s been out of touch with Western Europe because of Serbia’s political situation in the last couple of decades. And he and his wife Ljiljana treated me to an absolutely delicious dinner, surrounded on either side by fascinating conversation. I really felt that I had stumbled across an isolated genius – someone who, if he lived in Paris or Berlin or Warsaw, would be a household name.Â

Unlike his visual work, which seems to me completely sui generis, Radovanovic’s music roughly fits into a 1960s avant-garde East-European aesthetic, but it certainly has a distinct personality. I’m going to upload two longer works for you, because I think they’re worth the time. One isÂ VocalinstraÂ (1972-76), a 21-minute work for voices and instruments that mimics electronic sounds without using electronics. The other is a more neoclassicÂ Sinfonia ConcertanteÂ from 1956, in which Radovanovic’s take on the style is idiosyncratically peculiar and kind of fascinating. I feel that this is far too little work to convey the Promethean impression he made on me, but it’s a start, and perhaps will inspire some research.Â As a composer alone, he would be a distinctive and prolific voice; as a visual artist, he’s an amazing innovator; as a poet I suspect he’s one-of-a-kind. As all three, and more besides, he makes the mind boggle at the unity-within-variety of his massive output.

Vladan Radovanovic at home, March 2010; and as a proto-performance artist in 1957:

Discussing Silence on the Radio

Colin Marshall of Marketplace of Ideas very kindly did a phone interview with me about my book on 4’33”. You can hear the podcastÂ here.

Ending Up at Huntsville at Last

This week, April 15-17, I am the featured composer at theÂ annual new-music festival at Sam Houston State UniversityÂ in Huntsville, Texas. There appear to be six concerts, with my music on four of them, mixed with works by student composers there; click on the link to see the official site. I give a talk Friday morning at 11. I love looking at theÂ list of composers from previous festivals: Peter Mennin in ’62, my one-time teacher Kent Kennan in ’63, Persichetti in ’64, Sandor Varess in ’65, Paul Creston in ’71, Ben Johnston in ’72, Elie Siegmeister in ’91, and several I haven’t heard of. But they brought John Luther Adams in ’07 and Peter Garland last year, and given that progression I do look like a logical next choice. Plus the festival’s directed by Brian Herrington and John Lane, the latter of whom runs their percussion ensemble, and I’ve got several percussion pieces, so I fit in. Also, a lot of their composers are Texas-related, and I’m originally from Texas – though I haven’t had a performance in that state since 1976.Â

The comical thing for me is that when I was growing up Huntsville was where the big prison that executions were performed at was, and still is, and “getting sent to Huntsville” was our everyday grade-school euphemism for going to prison and maybe getting fried. Later I taught at Bucknell in Lewisburg, PA, where another famous federal pen is – the one where the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were incarcerated. When my family visited San Francisco we toured Alcatraz, and the prison guard-guides there were excited when they found out we were from Lewisburg – wanted to hear all about our prison. It’s a closely-knit subculture, I guess. So while the town, near Houston, was where our legendary Sam Houston lived, the place looms large in my childhood imagination for other reasons. And I’m finally going there after all.Â

My orchestra piece The Disappearance of All Holy Things from this Once So Promising World is also being played Friday, the 16th, at my alma mater Oberlin Conservatory, conducted by John Kennedy. The schedule of the SHSU festival is below. [UPDATE: it turns out that they’ve scheduled several early works of mine, mostly songs, that have never been performed before, so that there will be at least four world premieres, including the work I wrote for the occasion, Snake Dance No. 3 for percussion quartet and three keyboard samplers]:

Spring 2010 Concert and Event Schedule (April 15th-17th,
2010)
Admission: FREE for SHSU Music
Majors and Music Faculty, $5 SHSU Students, $10 General Public

Thursday, April
15th

Sam Houston State
Student Composers Concert
Recital Hall;
4:00pm

Artist Faculty
Spotlight: Daniel Saenz, Cello Recital
Recital Hall;
7:30pm

Friday, April
16th

Kyle Gann, Guest
Lecture
11:00am; Music
Building RM 202 (subject to change)

The Chamber Music
of Kyle Gann and Sam Houston State Composers (Concert 1)
Recital Hall;
4:00pm

The Chamber Music
of Kyle Gann and Sam Houston State Composers (Concert 2)
Recital Hall;
7:30pm

Saturday, April
17th

Intersection and
the Sam Houston Percussion Group: The Music of Kyle Gann (Concert 1)
Directed by Brian
Herrington and John Lane
Recital Hall;
4:30pm

Intersection and
the Sam Houston Percussion Group: The Music of Kyle Gann (Concert 2)
Directed by Brian
Herrington and John Lane
Recital Hall;
7:30pm – Pre-Concert Talk; 8:00pm – Concert

Redeeming Juvenilia

[Back from Serbia after a 24-hour door-to-door trip in which my plane made an unscheduled stop in Canada because a woman passenger had a seizure and needed medical attention. It was a classic “Is there a doctor on the plane?” situation out of a movie I don’t want to see again.]

One minor note about the video that accompaniesÂ Frank Oteri’s interview with me at New Music Box: The video is framed by passages (and even the score) of my first microtonal piece, Superparticular Woman, from 1992. This is one of those pieces I never play for anyone, won’t put on a CD, and whose cheesy MIDI version makes me wince. I don’t really believe in disowning works, or I’d disown this one. (I do think its sole virtue, though, is that its voice-leading within the tuning structure is rather elegant.) But Frank has, among other things, a genius for appreciating pieces most would scorn (years ago his favorite piece of mine was Ghost Town, which I also soft-pedal). And I have to admit, as intro/outro music, I think Superparticular Woman has finally found its niche. I wouldn’t play it on a concert, but I could hear it as an ironic, intrinsically humorous logo tune for some NPR bit like “All Things Considered.” You need more of an ear for media than I have to make a call like that.

Every 29 Years, Saturn

BELGRADE – Saturn is sextiling my Sun and ascendant from my tenth house, if you know what that means. What it means is, I’m kind of difficult to escape at the moment. The always impressive Frank Oteri has aÂ wonderful interview up with me today on New Music Box, in honor of my new book and two recent CDs. I always knew Frank was sort of ridiculously brilliant, but I didn’t realize how brilliant until he started digging into my music and making me see it from a different angle than I’d ever seen it before. In addition there’s anotherÂ interview with me by John Ruscher on BOMB magazine about my Cage book. There’s also aÂ nice review of my Cage book by Robert Birnbaum at The Morning News. I’m all over the internet today. This, too, shall pass.

Meanwhile, after my lecture about my music at the University of the Arts, the leading lights of musical Belgrade and I relaxed over traditional Serbian food. Here are Marija Masnikosa, author of a book on Serbian minimalism and perhaps the first scholar to write her doctoral dissertation on postminimalism; Vladimir Tosic, Serbian composer of wonderful postminimalist music who was born and lives within 200 meters of the University of the Arts; Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, Nancarrow scholar extraordinaire and head of musicology; myself letting what’s left of my hair down; and Nada Kolundzija, new-music pianist with several fine recordings under her belt, whom the locals describe as a visionary:

Here are two of the best tracks from Nada’s latest CD:

Vuk Kulenovic:Â VirginalÂ (he lives in Boston now; some of the best Serbian composers escaped during the ’90s)

Irena Popovic:Â Silence and Nothing

It’s a small but rich and vibrant music scene, pretty much hidden away from the rest of the world due to unfortunate political developments of the last 20 years. One told me that their devotion to this exciting little scene is what keeps them going from day to day. My growing affection for the Serbian music world has taken me by surprise. I’ve tried my darndest to learn some Serbian, which they don’t expect any Westerner to do; their startled delight when I answer “Drago mi je” (“Glad t’ meet you”) is touching. And they found it hilarious that I thought Radno Vreme must be the Donald Trump of Serbia, because his name is on practically every downtown building. “Radno vreme,” it turns out, means “Hours of operation.” (Sava River in the evening, under a full moon:)

Anyone in Serbia?

I don’t know who might be reading this blog in Belgrade, but in case anyone is, I’ll be speaking about my music (and its relation to American precedents) tonight from 6 to 8 at the University for the Arts in Belgrade.Â

Countries with Sexier Composers than Us

OK, kids, gather around, it’s time for Uncle Kyle to continue your education in Serbian music. I’ve already told you aboutÂ Ljubica Maric (1909-2003), who was the country’s leading modernist composer of the early 20th century, and the only woman to occupy that position in her country’s culture. Nor will I repeat what I said there about Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac (1856-1914), the country’s leading musical patriarch and composer of traditional choral music.

Instead, I’m going to start with an unknown composer I’m totally fascinated by: Ksenija Zecevic (1956-2006). (That first name might be Xenia in English, and I’m sorry I lack the diacritical markings to get the last name right, but the C’s are both pronounced CH.) She was a child prodigy on the piano and in composition as well, finishing her master’s in music at age 21. There’s quite a bit of stuff about her onÂ YouTube, includingÂ an interview done with her when she was just 17. She was a brunette pianist then; later in life she invariably appears as a bleached blonde with bright red lipstick and well-emphasized cleavage. My friend Dragana met her once and tells me she was an incredible character who had no filter between her thoughts and her speech, and made her own career difficult by blurting out whatever came to her mind. (Composers who torpedo their own careers even more effectively than I do always intrigue me.) The music on her YouTube videos is a little New-Agey, and I gather that most of her music was for theater and film. The one recording I found in a Belgrade record store (where I bought four discs for about 1400 dinars, less than $21) is her Requiem for Nicola Tesla, the Serb who invented electricity before Thomas Edison, as the Serbs love reminding me. It’s a four-movement work in Romantic style with some minimalist touches, and I offer you as mp3s theÂ firstÂ andÂ last movements. There’s the occasional cursory web site about her, but little information, and she died at 50, apparently of heart problems. She looks like a real original.

In less colorful addition I offer youÂ Lullabies for a Better World, Op. 113Â for piano (1994) by Dejan Despic (b. 1930), who lives in Belgrade, andÂ SilenzioÂ (1996) for women’s choir, alto flute, bass clarinet, and piano by Milan Mihajlovic (b. 1945), who teaches at the University of the Arts at Belgrade. In the latter I particularly like the way a Monteverdi quotation runs into a Rachmaninoff quotation about 2/3 of the way through. This week I’ll be meeting Serbian patriarch Vladan Radovanovic – painter, poet, composer – who claims to have invented minimalism, and also be seeing my old friend Vladimir Tosic, my favorite of the Serbian postminimalists, so perhaps I’ll have more offerings later. No younger composers yet, but I’m making inquiries. Freed from Turkish dominion in the 1830s, split off from the grab-bag Yugoslavia only a few years ago, Serbia has the feel of a young nation aggressively on the rise, and one that wants to take its place at the world table. The amount of academic activity concerning new music here is astonishing, and the publishers are still idealistic enough to insist that it gets into print, like America in the 1970s. Attention must be paid.

Landmark of the Avant-Garde

The great Robert Ashley turns 80 today…

The Damage We Do

BELGRADE – Everyone here’s been very nice to me, but my first lecture happened to fall on the 11th anniversary of the onset of the NATO (mostly American) aerial bombardment of Belgrade, which a few people mentioned. 3.24 is their 9.11 – except that the bombardment lasted 78 days. The city runs sirens at noon every year to commemorate the day. Professional people – authors, musicians, scholars – have told me stories of huddling in their basements, their knees giving way from fear, making their way to the grocery store through the rubble of buildings, having to forego cancer treatments because the hospitals could only handle emergencies. I don’t know much about the politics behind the engagement, and almost don’t want to – though Noam Chomsky considered the NATO attack unconscionable, and I tend to trust him more than anyone. But there’s got to be some way to resolve international disagreements besides dropping bombs in crowded downtown areas, terrorizing civilian populations, and leaving wrecks like these behind, which I photographed down the street from the music school I’m lecturing at:

(Can’t get the second image vertical, for some reason.) My theoretical complicity in this as a citizen (and Clinton-voter!) is painful to contemplate.

Well, Damn If It Ain’t Sort of Blue After All

Ba da da da dum (bum, bum – bum, bum):

In case you didn’t get the onomatopoeia, that’s the blue, or grayish-blue, Danube. It begins at Donaueschingen (“fount of the Danube”) in Germany, and, unusually for a European river (they mostly flow north or south), flows eastward into the Black Sea. In the 1770s, ur-musicologist Charles Burney sailed down it to document musical activity in eastern Europe. Me, I’m currently lecturing at the University of the Arts of Belgrade. Half of the students I’ve met are doing projects in American music (Gershwin, Weill, Glass), and I have to assume with them a more detailed level of knowledge than I do with my American students. On the left, in front of her school, is my sponsor, Professor Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, a Nancarrow/Ligeti/Carter expert:

The school is across the street from this park:

Beograd means “white city,” and there must be some kind of zoning laws to keep it that way:

The National Museum is on the left here, the National Theater on the right, and a statue of 19th-century Serbian Prince Mihailo Obrenovic:

There’s a wonderful fortress and park where the Sava and Danube rivers flow together. Because of its strategic position, the city of Belgrade has been involved in 115 wars over the centuries, and razed to the ground 44 times, which explains to me why the drivers (I’ve been driving here) are so nervous and aggressive:

I love the way Serbians transliterate foreign names into their own language as we used to do, so that tabloids write about Dzordz Kluni (George Clooney), Sandre Bulok, and Meril Strip. (Mine would be Kajl Gen.) And it extends to scholarly publications about rock stars as well, as one can see in this biography of – can you guess the singer (name at the bottom, Dz being their letter for “J”)?:

The paprika-packed Serbian meatballs are to die for. I’ve learned to say “Zelio bih casu viskija sa ledom, molim?” (“Can I get a whiskey on the rocks, please?”), and aside from that and a couple of legal Cuban cigars, what else do I need?

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