Microtonal guitarist John Schneider of KPFK conducted an interview with me and pianist Aron Kallay today, who’s been playing some of my microtonal keyboard pieces. You can still hear it. My portion doesn’t start until almost halfway through. For the interview to work, John has to pretend he doesn’t understand microtonality as well as I do. I remember that hazard of doing interviews. I used to feign ignorance so well that an interviewee once mentioned bar lines and then asked, “Do you know what a bar line is?” I replied, “I have a doctorate in music, you may speak freely.”

Among other rites of April I’m heavily involved in faculty evaluations, part of my obligatory committee work – which I grumble about like everyone else, but secretly find rather refreshing. My fellow music faculty are thoroughly predictable, but the contact with faculty from other fields has a bracing effect. While music’s fit within academia is inevitably uneasy, some of these people in religion, classics, literature, biology, et al, are the soul of institutional life, and I find their ethic inspiring. In the course of this work (to change the subject somewhat) I ran across a brilliant teaching statement by my jazz colleague John Esposito, and since it is in the public part of his file, I think I break no rules by quoting it. John talks about his education in the 1970s:

The prevailing wisdom among working jazz artists at that
time was that jazz was an art form that could only be learned on the bandstand
and in the community from which it grew. These musicians held the opinion that
a college education could only give the bare technical bones that form the
structure of the music, and that the expressive qualities in the music could
never be successfully taught in the classroom. At one time I thought that this
argument had some merit….

I don’t think the same environment exists today. It is no
longer possible to play, as Monk did at the Five Spot in NYC, six nights a week
for six months. It is no longer possible to tour for ten months a year. It is
no longer a requirement that we play six fifty-minute sets a night. The typical
gig in any of the New York clubs lasts for two one-hour shows, or may entail
traveling to a European venue for twelve hours, playing for an hour and twenty
minutes, and returning. Therefore the opportunity to train oneself methodically
and thoughtfully on the  bandstand
no longer exists. Young players therefore seldom have the opportunity to play
consistently with older, more experienced musicians for extended periods.

This is enlightening on its own, and could, I think, be generalized beyond jazz. As opportunities have diminished for musicians, the role of college becomes more crucial. We have to compensate for the wider performance world in which composers could have once gained more experience. I myself spend only a tiny fraction of my professional life in rehearsals and performance, and sometimes wish I had gained a more comprehensive education in orchestration and performance practice. I have to assume that many of my students will find themselves in similar situations. And so while forty years ago I might have left them to learn from real-life experiences, I have to explain to them much about performer psychology, audience psychology, rehearsal techniques, that long ago they might have learned on their own. I am moved by John’s words to take my own role a little more seriously.

If you’re in the Bard area, tomorrow afternoon I’m sponsoring a talk on Serbian music by my musicologist friend Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic, who’s in the States researching Cage’s early music for one of her many projects. She’s a fantastic scholar, obsessed with detail, and has taught me a lot about Nancarrow from his correspondence – I’m trying to convince her she’s the perfect person to write a biography. Here she’ll be going through the variety of 20th-century Serbian music, talking most importantly about Ljubica Maric (1909-2003), Serbia’s national innovative modernist. The talk’s Thursday, April 16, at 4, Room 217 in the Blum music building at Bard College.

“Brackett’s first move is to loosen Zorn from the moorings of postmodernism and that most critical assessments of his work attach him to. For Brackett, Zorn is as much modernist as postmodernist…Rather than rehash the postmodern critical blather about ‘channel surfing’ and borrowed materials from high and low culture that is so often used to describe Zorn’s techniques, Brackett emphasises the unity that Zorn strives for in his pieces between seemingly opposing elements, carefully crafting a proper flow and balance. He sees Zorn as a composer who is pushing the boundaries rather than defining them, which is where the transgression of the title comes in.”-Alan Licht, The Wire, March 2009 

I feel bad that an upcoming minimalism conference co-directed by myself, of all people, has been criticized for its absence of attention to woman composers. I don’t quite know how to go about addressing the collective guilt of the musicological field. As I said in the comments, I don’t know why Meredith Monk, not to mention Pauline Oliveros and Elodie Lauten, get so little attention in the nascent scholarly attention paid to minimalism. Monk’s scores, when she uses them at all, don’t really circulate; I managed to coax one of her opera Atlas from her, and I occasionally teach it. Still, there are a lot of scholars less score-oriented than myself who could put together a good paper on Monk’s distinct and original performance practice. (In Atlas, the instrumental accompaniments and some vocal lines are written out, but much of the vocal writing, including choral material, is developed in rehearsal, depending on the attributes of the singers available. Meredith prefers to teach her parts vocally, without the dehumanization of paper mediation.) Talking about the subject, composer Bernadette Speach once told me that in New York women composers come to men composers’ concerts, but that men rarely showed up to hear women; I started taking count, and found she had pretty much hit the nail on the head.

A couple of insights gleaned from recent teaching:

– In my 20th-century orchestral repertoire class I happened to start teaching the minimalists on the same day I finished up the style-mixing postmodernists, like Bolcom, Rochberg, Del Tredici, Jonathan Kramer. And it occurred to me what they have in common. Both groups place the locus of innovation (I can still write fluent academese when I need to, though the Voice trained me out of it and I have no desire to start up again) – both rely for a sense of newness on the amount and variety of information in their pieces, contrasting it with the general information rate and stylistic variety range of the typical classical piece. The minimalists pare down the information to give you less than classical listeners would expect. The postmodernists ramp up the information variety so that you’ve got Mozart quotes, country and western licks, Romantic clichés, jazz all bubbling around in the same mix. There remain, of course, many composers for whom the information rate of classical music is still an abiding paradigm, but the minimalists and postmodernists likewise rebelled against the general rhetoric of classical music – one group by narrowing the focus, the other by widening it. Diametrically opposed as the two reactions are, I sense a certain kinship there, a tiredness with the repetitiveness of the classical music experience.

– Wagner’s spinning of Tristan und Isolde out of a dramatically small group of materials – the Tristan chord, deceptive cadences, and French sixths morphing into dominant sevenths that never conclusively resolve – of course led the way to atonality, a divorce from the universal syntax of the common practice period, and 12-tone music’s tendency to derive every element from a single row. More than that, though, I think it destroyed an overall faith in a commonly shared, objective musical language and created – indeed, privileged – a paradigm by which the composer creates his or her own universe for each work. This, seems to me, is what separates the New Tonality from the old. I write a lot of tonal music, but I never plunge into the whole syntax of V-I cadences, circle-of-fifths progressions, and all that stuff one learns in school: for each piece I choose what elements, some familiar and some piquant, that will constitute my language for that work. One can certainly say this for postminimalism in general, and I imagine for other New Tonal music as well. Wagner’s stripping his Tristan music of so many of tonal music’s usual signifiers was (forgive me for putting it this way) a proto-postminimalist gesture, or perhaps we should just say minimalist: a virtuoso determination to draw as much length and variety as possible from an artificially circumscribed set of chords and voice-leadings.

In this sense I feel as a composer that I still inhabit a post-Tristan world more than I do, say, a post-Rite of Spring world. The expansion and increased systematization of materials ushered in by Le Sacre strikes me (when composing) as a little musty and superceded by this point. But Tristan seems like a forever-locked door, beyond which one could never again return to a non-contextual common language whose references could be drawn from a vocabulary not created within the piece itself.

Life has been too hectic lately (in mostly good ways) to be attentive to my own PR. I do have a performance tonight, and a local one. The Da Capo ensemble gives their “Celebrate Bard” concert tonight (I affectionately call it “Calibrate Bard,” on the rationale that it shows us how we’re doing), at 8 PM in Olin Auditorium on campus. The program is as follows:

John Boggs ’09 ~ This Estranged Land
Cameron Bossert ’06 ~ Celeritas
Brian Fennelly ~ Sock Monkeys
Kyle Gann ~ Kierkegaard, Walking
Casey Hale ’02 ~ of Another
Joan Tower ~ Amazon

I live in New York’s 20th congressional district, upon which the eyes of the nation are riveted at the moment as Democrat Scott Murphy and Republican Jim Tedisco battle it out to fill Kirsten Gillibrand’s empty seat. Many are trying to make this a referendum on the Obama administration. But the truth is, nothing Obama has done since taking office could have swayed any vote in my county one way or the other. Half the county is local rednecks descended from families who’ve lived here forever, and they despise the other half: New York cityfolk who moved up here from Manhattan, along with academics like me at the local colleges. The cops are all Republican. Get stopped for speeding, and if you can prove your area code isn’t 212, you might get let off. Recently at a political rally, a woman Democrat started arguing with a Republican man, and the Republican punched her in the nose: the police, of course, arrested the woman for disturbing the peace, and the Republican judge ruled against her. Bard students peacefully protested after the 2004 election, and police wrestled them to the ground, after which the local Republican judge threw the book at them. At a city meeting at my town, a distinguished older gay citizen (formerly from the city, of course) spoke and got called “faggot” by one of the police, who hustled the gay man off to jail for the crime of speaking his mind – and the worse crime of not having originally been from around here.

Well, the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music committee has gone through all the paper proposals, and we’ve put together a program of about 56 papers. It’s a stunner. I’m really proud of the lineup, especially because it exhibits an intelligently varied yet limited range of minimalism. Yes, there are ten papers that talk about Steve Reich, but there are no fewer than four on Phill Niblock (!), two on Julius Eastman, also two each on Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Arvo Pärt, one each on Jim Fox, David Borden, Michael Torke, Jim Tenney, and Charlemagne Palestine. (Not that Niblock doesn’t merit it, quite the contrary, he’s a vastly influential underground figure; but I’m impressed that so many academics latched on to someone so quintessentially Downtown, in all literal and metaphorical senses.) We have musicologists coming from the UK, Canada, Belgium, Australia, the Czech Republic, Serbia, and France. There are even papers on minimalist aspects of Morton Feldman and Milton Babbitt – we could have turned down the latter in good conscience, but I’m just too curious. And the performance part of the conference is geared around little-known but often historic early minimalist works: an early Terry Riley piece that’s only been played twice before, some rare Tom Johnson opuses, my own reconstructions of 1959 Dennis Johnson and 1982 Harold Budd, performances by Palestine and Mikel Rouse, and a few surprises we’re still cooking up. This is going to come very close to defining minimalism as I hear it: not a watered-down catch-all term that includes everything from Wagner’s Rheingold to Donna Summer, but a true tradition among people who knew each other and exchanged ideas during an intense historical period. It’s the most exciting thing in my immediate future. Kansas City, September 2-6: be there or be neoromantic.

Here’s a brief audio sample from Harold Budd’s Children on the Hill, the improvisatory piece I’m transcribing from a 1982 perfomance for reconstruction on our upcoming Minimalism conference. At 23 minutes in length, it’s a completely different piece than his eponymous performance on the old Obscure CD. The beginning and end were easy to transcribe, but in the middle of the piece is a wildly rhapsodic wash of arpeggios that goes on for 13 minutes. I can slow down the soundfile to catch all the notes, but slowing down also blurs the note attacks, and makes low notes in particular less distinct. So what I end up doing is transcribing the general outlines as far as I can at normal speed, slowing down to 50 or 60 percent to catch all the treble arpeggios, then slowing that down another 50 percent to decipher grace notes and disentangle rippling arppeggios, then listening to the whole thing sped up again – which often reveals mistaken rhythms as well as mis-heard bass notes. Of course, it’s not just normal piano, but piano played through an Eventide Harmonizer, which blurs the notes and makes them sound like they’re sustained or played again, which doesn’t make transcription any easier. I’d say I’ve been spending at least three hours on every minute of the recording, and I’ve got seven minutes left to go. Below is my transcription (so far) of the passage above. Of course, rhythms are kind of a humorous fiction in a rapidly improvised passage like this, so the pianist (Sarah Cahill) will have to ignore the meter, play in an unmeasured rush of excitement, and listen to the original recording to try to capture the original expression. Next to this, the transcription work I did on The Well-Tuned Piano was a piece of cake, but Harold’s music is so beautiful that it’s going to be totally worth it. 

Tomorrow night at 8, Wednesday, March 25, pianist Justin Kolb will play some of my Private Dances along with Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata at the PHCC Performing Arts Centre in New Port Richey, Florida. Also on the program are pieces by Victoria Bond and Stella Sung, as well as some Liszt arrangements of Mendelssohn songs and Bernstein’s piano-ization of Copland’s El Salon Mexico. It’s not often I find myself in such company. Justin, with whom I’ve carried on a lively correspondence, will repeat my pieces April 20 at Symphony Space in New York City; I’ll give details closer to the performance. 

I’ve been so busy surviving until spring break that I forgot to mention that I’ll be on a panel today at 5 in advance of Elodie Lauten’s Two-Cent Opera tonight at Theater for a New City in New York (1st Ave. between 9th and 10th). We needed a Beggar’s Opera for the 21st Century and this sounds like it: a mystic meditation on jobs and money. It doesn’t quite sound like anything else she’s ever written, yet it’s still infused with that same Neptunian personality that enchanted me in The Death of Don Juan 25 years ago.