Every composer has his champions, and I’m always happy to see people leap to a favorite composer’s defense. It gives me a warm feeling inside, actually, even if I don’t much care for the composer’s music myself, because I think, “Someday that could be my music someone like that is defending.” A friend whose tastes otherwise often parallel mine recently admitted that Feldman’s music drove him up a wall, which I find amusing, rather than threatening. I have lived all my life with musicians around me putting down my favorite music. One of my professors told me that Cage was a charlatan and minimalism was bunk. Another met Cage, and said afterward, “I wouldn’t have that man at my house.” My favorite professor got denied tenure for bringing minimalism to class. I’ve listened to famous composers dismiss most of the new music I love as not being music at all. Students at Columbia spat with contempt when I brought them a rare Meredith Monk score. I’ve been told Robert Ashley isn’t a composer. I’ve eaten dinner with composers who regaled each other with Philip Glass jokes, while I took it in polite silence. I have spent my life analyzing and championing music that is despised and marginalized by the classical music world. 

I live 50 miles from Tanglewood, but I’ve never been there until today. Not my kind of crowd – too much Mozart and Carter, not nearly enough Glenn Branca and Eliane Radigue. But I’ve also never heard Leonard Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety” Symphony live until today, and the temptation smashed my resistance. “Age of Anxiety” is kind of a piano concerto, and I worked on the piano solo part in high school because I loved it so much. My old friend, former student (from 20 years ago), and sometime employer Tony DeRitis got me a ticket for the Boston Symphony concert conducted by David Robertson with his pianist-wife Orli Shaham, and as soon as Tony read me the program I canceled my previous engagements and went. Also on the concert was Roy Harris’s Third Symphony, one of the most important works in my life, which I had only heard live once in a desultory performance, as well as Virgil Thomson’s quirky but dignified Five Blake Songs and three Barber songs. The Bernstein performance was splendid, especially the pianist; the Harris was a little fast and not savored sufficiently for my taste, but it had a propulsive sweep.

I’ve long wanted to blog about “Age of Anxiety.” Not a perfect piece by any means, and the sentimental ending degrades into ersatz Copland, but the first half is both scintillatingly clever and moving, with a theme and variations that exemplifies Schoenberg’s concept of “developing variations” better than any other piece I know, especially by Schoenberg. In its day it was dismissed by musical intellectuals on account of its stylistic heterogeneity: its splashes of Brahmsian romanticism and brainy jazz in an otherwise diatonically modernist idiom. For years I listened to it in private, score in hand, as a guilty pleasure. But then in the ’80s that kind of pastiche became the orchestral establishment’s new hip trend, and “Age of Anxiety” is way overdue its rehibilitation. After the concert I talked to many musicians, and found only one, composer and BSO program annotator Robert Kirzinger, who shared my enthusiasm for the Harris. I guess my relation to that piece is atypical for my generation (what else is new?), but I discovered it at 13, and it became my most fervently envied formal model. There are some low-profile themes in that piece that run through it unobtrusively, and score study helps you understand why it sounds so ineffably unified.

As I’ve said before, I leaped into Cage with both feet at 15, but before that I had already been indelibly imprinted by Gershwin, Ives, Copland, Bernstein, and Schuman, so while the Downtown repertoire left a thick veneer, the undercoating was pure American symphony. So sue me.

I’ve been thinking, all this year, about teaching a course on the American Symphony, and perhaps even writing a book. Last fall a friend bought me a score to Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune, one of my favorite pieces in the entire world. About that time I was also writing a review of Joseph Polisi’s new biography of William Schuman for Symphony magazine, which (the review) got bumped twice, but came out a month or so ago. The Thomson score made me realize that I could probably start finding scores I wanted on the internet, rather than buying merely what I happened to come across at now-defunct Patelson’s in New York. So I started looking around, mostly at The Sheet Music Store, and ended up ordering the following symphonies: Harris 9, Schuman 3 and 6, Cowell 4, Piston 7, Persichetti 4, Hanson 2, and Glass “Low.” I also found Thomson’s Third and the St. Joan Symphony of Norman Dello Joio in a used book store in Hudson. (This was all back in October when it looked like my personal finances were going to be happily bypassed by the economic Fall of Civilization.) All of them arrived except the Hanson, which I’m still waiting for (and Hanson expert Carson Cooman tells me I should have gotten the First or Third instead). They weren’t necessarily the symphonies I would have dreamed of, but they were ones I could find by composers who interest me.

And frankly, things don’t look good for the class, let alone the book. More often than not, I was disappointed. Reading through a score usually changes my opinion of a piece a little for the better or worse, and most of these went through a negative reassessment. Most depressing was the Harris Ninth (1962), which is a terrific mess. It’s as though Harris lost sight of everything that had been wonderful about his earlier music, all the broad themes and rhyhmic energy, and just started noodling randomly in what he considered “his style.” After reading it through closely with the recording, no impression remained at all, just a morass of piquant polychords absent-mindedly distributed. Cowell’s Fourth (1946) is a significantly more coherent piece, but similarly undistinguished – it could almost have been written by any mid-century minor pedant. Of course Cowell is one of my heros, but most of his symphonies were written after his unfortunate San Quentin experience, which turned him into what most people would have to consider a more conservative composer. I wished I could have found No. 16, the “Icelandic,” which is a little more fun.

The one piece that didn’t suffer at all was Schuman’s Sixth (1948), a tough, trenchant, impressively polyphonic work that may be, as some have said it is, the peak of his output. I had always been a fan of his Third (1941), and still am, though on close inspection it struck me as a little wandering.

Persichetti’s 4th (and I hate to say it with American Symphony expert Walter Simmons possibly reading) made very little impression on me after repeated hearings: expertly written, measure for measure, as he always is, but with no discernible throughline. The most disturbing score I found, though, was Piston’s Seventh (1960): an absolutely joyless, dogged work, carefully crafted around unmemorable themes as in a grim determination to churn out another correct example of the genre. He proved that one didn’t need 12-tone technique to suck all playfulness out of orchestral writing. A more interesting venture was the Dello Joio, which had the advantage of clearly outlined ideas. Thomson’s Third, an orchestration of one of his string quartets, was also disappointingly uninspired. And while I love certain passages in Glass’s “Low,” it’s a little watery, and even the stirring parts repeat until you start muttering, “OK, OK, I get it already.”

The problem with a course or a book is that the great American symphonies, even by great American composers, are exceptions, not the rule. Symphony production swelled to emormous volume in the 1930s and ’40s (I once did a survey course on symphonies and found 1946 as the climax year), and a kind of generic, upbeat symphonic style became the order of the day. Composers like Cowell and Thomson seemed to compromise most of their principles to get a monumental work out there, while obsessive craftsmen like Persichetti and Piston seemed to have no concept of epic sweep. The American symphonies I get tired of never teaching are all of Ives’s; the Copland Third; the Harris Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh; The Thomson Hymn Tune; the Riegger Third; the “Age of Anxiety”; the Schuman Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth; the Rochberg Second; any interchangeable Sessions work, the Third would do nicely; and now I’d add Robert Carl’s Third and Fourth. (I wouldn’t be adverse to adding the Antheil “1942” and Bolcom 5; Wolpe’s Symphony is one of his weakest works, though, and the Bernstein “Kaddish” is lush music wrapped in an embarrassing text.) Perhaps those are enough for a course, but the list seems a little cherry-picked, and while it would be nice to focus more on the pre-WWII search for a Great American Symphony, I’m afraid I would end up feeling too apologetic. An analysis class around Harris, Thomson, Schuman, and Bernstein sounds both peripheral to student interest and too ambitious. So I feel like the dream isn’t ikely to come true in any forseeable future, but at least I can now say I heard Bernstein 2 and Harris 3 live, and drank in every note like nectar. <

UPDATE: Someone remonstrated with me that great pieces of music are always exceptions, never the rule. Of course, that’s a truism. But in this particular context, why is Thomson’s Hymn Tune Symphony so inspired, his Third so tepid? Why is Bernstein’s Second a piano concerto and his Third a weird, ’60s-ish theater piece? Even Ives’s symphonies are cut from diverse patterns: the first Dvorakian, the Second a playful romantic romp, the Third unconventional in form but deeply religious and originating in organ improvisations, the Fourth mystical, philosophical, and presciently modernist. Compare with the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler, who each possessed a fairly consistent concept of what a symphony is, developing it from work to work, so that if you like any one of those composers’ symphonies, you’re pretty much guaranteed to similarly appreciate at least all of its successors. In that sense, the great European symphonies are not the exceptions. Please read generously – there’s often a meaning that can be teased out with a little thought, and one can’t take the time to explain everything.

Anybody know the musicological significance of this location?:

Here’s a preliminary version of my new piece, Solitaire (14:05). It’s the piece I wrote about recently that I agonized over the tuning for for a week, 29 pitches to the octave. It’s both a solitary piece and a private game. The recording needs a little finessing. More about it later.

Draw a straight line and follow it.

Apparently I’ve just broken copyright law. I can’t believe what’s holding up my Cage book: you are no longer allowed to quote texts that are entire pieces of art. This means I’ve been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young’s “This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean,” and Yoko Ono’s “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn’t responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I’ve excised the pieces from the text. 

Speaking of titular colonicity (a term that has entered my vocabulary permanently), as we were, there’s another universal constant in academic writing that sends shivers up my spine: “lies outside the scope of this paper.” (I just Googled it and got 335,000 sites.) It appears so consistently once in every academic paper that you couldn’t force me to write it with two thugs twisting my arm. And yet, when I wrote my article “La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano” for Perspectives of New Music, the editors inserted it: 

As one moves around the room, the audible overtones change markedly over the distance of a few inches, dependent on where one is among the nodes of pitches reinforced by the acoustics of the room. This aspect of the WTP is almost entirely unrepresented by the recording under average circumstances; since it is determined by room acoustics and position in space, no microphone can entirely convey the variety of audible phenomena the WTP generates. Analysis of such transient effects lies outside the scope of the present paper. (Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31 No. 1 [Winter 1993], p. 149; emphasis added)

Since my book for Yale is part of a series (first in the series: The Hamburger: A History), I didn’t think I would have any choice over the title, but it turns out they wanted me to come up with one, and so it’s going to be No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”. I’m not much of a fan of colons in titles, considering them an academic affectation, but I don’t think this one was avoidable. I had been worrying about how I was going to finesse being “the author of 4’33”,” or “the author of John Cage’s 4’33”.” Colons in titles of musicology papers are so ubiquitous that when I was in grad school, my teacher Peter Gena and I used to joke about the paper we were going to submit to the AMS: “The Colon in American Musicology: an Overview.” Someone recently told me about a grad student she overheard saying, “I’ve finished everything about my dissertation except for the part of the title that goes after the colon.” Seems to me that if it’s not bleedin’ obvious what goes after the colon, you don’t need anything. Moby Dick: The Search for a White Whale. Bleak House: The Tale of a Long Legal Case. Colons in titles: Blech.

Curtis MacDonald has made a piece with samples of Conlon Nancarrow’s player pianos, which don’t sound like normal pianos. On one of them Conlon covered the hammers with steel straps, on the other he put leather straps capped with a metal tack. Like Lou Harrison’s tack piano, they sound harsh and kind of honky-tonk, almost like harpsichords, and Conlon clearly came to rely on the extra clarity they gave his thick polyphony; I once heard Study No. 48 on a regular big Disklavier grand, and it sounded like mush. MacDonald’s piece makes me realize that someone needs to go to Basel and sample the original Nancarrow player pianos, as Mikel Rouse did for the prepared piano of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes: partly so we can make our own true realizations of Nancarrow’s pieces, and partly to compose with those wonderfully wacky tones ourselves.

Beethoven had to churn, to some extent, to make his message carry. He had to pull the ear, hard and in the same place and several times…
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata

Ah, it’s like the old days again – just when I think the blogosphere has finally resignedly inured itself to Kyle Gann, furor can again erupt. I apparently mortified a number of people by mentioning, in a brief aside, what I thought was one of the most bare-faced facts in the musical universe, that Beethoven was not a subtle composer. (You can look up the comments.) Some think I insulted Beethoven, which is a terrible thing, because I wield so much influence that now Beethoven will cease to be listened to, and the responsibility will be on my head. 

You know, I’m sitting here in my office doing creative work on Digital Performer, and I’ve had a couple of Nancarrow queries lately from people doing intensive analytical work on him, and it occurs to me that I’ve got all these Nancarrow player piano rolls as MIDI information on my computer, including more than 60 that were found in his studio that don’t correspond to the canonical studies (and I do mean canonical, not canonic). Nancarrow was hypercritical of his own music, and, I think, consigned to oblivion some pieces just as good as some of the ones everyone knows. Many of the unidentified rolls are mere fragments or tempo experiments, and some, highly restrictive in pitch, are presumably for the roll-driven percussion machine he invented that never worked right and was abandoned. But some are fully fleshed out, quite impressive pieces. These tend to be a little more abstract than Nancarrow’s usual style, and perhaps he thought the ideas didn’t come across strongly enough. So here are five of the unknown rolls to listen to, lettered the way Trimpin lettered the rolls as he found them:

Roll A
Roll MM
Roll R

Romantic roll
Roll with “hello”

With some slight hesitation I post a new and rather comical work to the internet. It was supposed to be titled Triskaidekaphonia 2 because it uses the same tuning as my piece Triskaidekaphonia, but it turned out so programmatic that I couldn’t leave it with such an abstract title. So it’s The Aardvarks’ Parade (click to listen, just over ten minutes), in honor of an animal with which I had a childhood fascination. For the first time ever I’ve written a microtonal piece in a scale I’d already used before, and it’s the simplest one I’ve ever used: all the ratios of the whole numbers 1 through 13 multiplied by a fundamental, yielding 29 pitches. The form is AAAA: I was musing about a melody repeated over and over, in simple quarter-notes and 8th-notes, but so intricate in its tuning that several repetitions wouldn’t be enough to make it predictable. If I Am Sitting in a Room is the conceptualist Bolero, maybe this is microtonality’s Bolero. I tend to repeat things four times in my pieces: partly because it’s an American Indian tradition, paying homage to the East, West, North, and South, and partly because my first college composition teacher, Joseph Wood, told me that you could only get away with repeating something three times in a piece, instantly stirring my innate rebelliousness.

I have to say, this has become one of the most richly fulfilling summers I’ve ever had. On one hand I’ve done all this work on piano recordings by Harold Budd and Dennis Johnson, plus a long John Luther Adams analysis I’m finishing and my Robert Ashley biography (3000 words written today, after hours of composing); on the other, recording my piece The Planets with Relache, and then a slew of music rushing out of me lately, with a ten-minute microtonal piece written this week (of which more soon), and two other new pieces begun in the same span.

Cage wrote a mesostic for Nancarrow that reads, “oNce you / sAid / wheN you thought of / musiC, / you Always / thought of youR own / neveR / Of anybody else’s. / that’s hoW it happens.” I think I probably could have been as reclusive as Nancarrow, had not economic necessity forced me into the public life of music criticism. But I certainly am not like Nancarrow in this other respect. A life exclusively focused on my own music seems unimaginable. My musicological work feeds my composition, and vice versa. When I’ve been doing too much critical work and not composing, I get cranky; and when I’ve been composing continuously, I dry up a little, and I start to need the interaction with the music of others. It’s not that I steal so many ideas from other composers, though of course I never scruple to do that. Nothing about the other people’s music I’m working on went into the piece I just finished, though I do absorb inspiration from the brilliant things Ashley says, and Budd always reconfirms my love for the major seventh chord. I just need that rejuvenation from other artist’s ideas, the mere presence of simpatico music I didn’t write.

I seem not to be unique in this respect among my close contemporaries. Larry Polansky, a far more prolific composer than myself, has done loads of important musicological work on Ruth Crawford, Johanna Beyer, and Harry Partch, not to mention running Frog Peak Music for the publishing of other composers’ music. Peter Garland, in between writing his own wonderful pieces, published the crucial Soundings journal for many years, and made available the music of many who didn’t seem so obviously important at the time as they do now. Some of us need this close interaction with the music of our contemporaries. Nor does it seem like just an American thing. Schumann certainly spent a lot of his career inside other composers’ heads, and seems to have enjoyed having a trunkload of Schubert’s manuscripts in his apartment, from which to draw for the occasional world premiere whenever he fancied. Liszt played the piano music of every significant contemporary except Brahms (who offended him by falling asleep at the premiere of Liszt’s B minor Sonata).

Part of it is what I think Henry Cowell sensed: that there’s no such thing as a famous composer in a musical genre no one’s heard of, and so one’s personal survival depends on a rising tide raising all boats. But Morton Feldman also tells a story of an artist in the ’50s who, after seeing Jackson Pollock’s first astounding exhibition of drip paintings, remarked, “I’m so glad he did it. Now I don’t have to.” And Feldman adds, for thoughtful emphasis, “That was not an extraordinary thing to say at the time.” Some of us do have this feeling that art is a collective activity, that it’s not all about ourselves. I hear an exquisite piece like John Luther Adams’s The Light Within, and I do think, somehow, “I’m so glad he did it, now I don’t have to” – partly because I want to hear that kind of ecstatic wall-of-sound genre, and he can so it much better than I could. Mikel Rouse’s music is so much more sophisticated than my intentionally naive fare, but listening to him gets me back on track. I listen to Eve Beglarian’s music, and I hear things I might have been tempted to do, but she’s got them covered. These aesthetically close colleagues free me up to pursue what I do best, but I somehow need to participate in their achievements by analyzing them and writing about them. 

We Americans are taught to worship individuality, in art above all, but there is a strong collective aspect to creativity that many composers strenuously ignore or deny. I have no idea why I’m so attuned to it, especially being as anti-social as I am by temperament. But I do know that if anyone ever regrets that I had to write all these books and articles instead of working non-stop on my own music, they will have missed the point. It’s all the same thing.