It’s not every day that I read Christopher Hitchens in Slate and he’s lambasting people I know personally. But you know Rick Warren, the rightwing homophobe who’s giving the prayer at Obama’s inaugural? It turns out that one of his “leading allies and defenders” is Dr. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, whom I knew in Sunday school as a kid. And Warren’s mentor was Wally Amos Criswell, former pastor of the same church, whose sermons I grew up hearing weekly, and who, if memory serves, may have baptized me (I was six). I would not have called Dr. Criswell a “dismal nutbag” as Hitchens did – there were those in that church who fixated on the Revelation/Apocalypse/Rapture nonsense, but I don’t recall Dr. Criswell being among them. He was ostentatious about his Greek, and if he leaned too heavily on biblical inerrancy, at least it was the inerrancy of the original languages, and not a facile adhesion to the KJV. Whatever his effect on the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention, his sermons were threaded with learning, and I held nothing against him until 1976 when he endorsed Gerald Ford from the pulpit, which I found too unseparate-churchy-staty. Still, it’s ironic that the shortest degrees of separation between myself and our president-elect seem to lead through the Southern Baptist Church. 

A couple more reviews of my Private Dances CD, one from Devin Hurd, and a trés formidable one en français. They’ve all been favorable, but so rare!

This quote from the great Morton Feldman, supplied by Jodru, deserves its own entry:

“There is something rotten here, and we don’t have to go to Denmark to look for it. It’s not the public. That was always a lie. It’s not the mass media. A bigger lie. It’s not the capitalist system – another lie. It’s my colleagues. My fellow American composers. The most pedantic, the most boring, ungenerous bunch of human beings one can meet on an earth so crowded with the last men that hop and make it smaller and smaller. This earth, I mean.

“It’s the college boys that are deciding what’s what in America. I’ll leave them with their judgement. I’ll leave America with my fame.”

The world hardly needs my voice added to the roar of acclamation attending the hundredth birthday of Olivier Messiaen. However, lest someone get the wrong idea, let me affirm:

Someone wrote to chide me for pretending that Elliott Carter has more influence in the new-music world than he currently has. And then today I got a message from a teenaged composer:
 

I’ll never forget when at a summer camp a
distinguished guest composer came in to give us
composers a lesson, and she informed me that my
music “lacked that Elliot Carter mentality” and I
ought to listen to his entire repertoire again
before writing another piece.

Statistically speaking, you probably don’t agree with a word I say. Out there in the larger world of contemporary music, Elliott Carter is king, we are smack dab in the middle of the modernist period which will never end, the purpose of serious music is to convey how terrible the world is, and art is infinitely superior to entertainment and should never be confused with it. This blog is a repository of minority opinion, a haven and beacon for those few of us who happen not to agree with those propositions. We are painfully aware how tiny our numbers are, how overwhelming and monolithic the well-educated, well-entrenched opposition. Nevertheless, we remain content to disagree with the Conventional Wisdom. 

This makes the comments feature something of a problem. The messages I get from people who understand the context of this blog vastly enliven it, and I treasure them. But for some reason, we periodically seem to attract momentary attention from the Conventional Wisdom crowd, who, horrified by a random phrase here and there, write in to portray me as some kind of trance-music Madame Mao determined to bomb classical music back to the stone age. I don’t have time or energy to re-explain my entire life story to every rubber-necking newcomer who chances by to ask the new-music equivalent of, “When are you going to stop beating your wife?!” So rather than post those comments, I’m going to try to write a meta-post explaining a few premises of this blog, a series of such posts if necessary, so in the future I can simply refer those people to this URL.

So, for the uninitiated, let me address some myths about PostClassic:

Myth No. 1: I Am Opposed to All Complex, Difficult, and Atonal Music. In the first music history course I took at Oberlin, the professor played Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I for the class with poorly concealed distaste, and it was left to me, a freshman from Texas, to defend Stockhausen to the class as a remarkable and important composer. That was 1973. The first piece I wrote at Oberlin was influenced mainly by Luciano Berio’s Circles. The Darmstadt serialist repertoire was the first brand new music I imbibed, and I did so in high school. I absorbed it on my own, to the incomprehension of my peers, uncontaminated by the pressures of mentorship, which is perhaps why my attachment to it never became dogmatic. I guess what happens with most composers, still today, is that some college professor introduces them to serialism, and learning to appreciate it becomes some kind of entrée into the professional world, from which there is no turning back. For me it was a private affair; I felt free to accept from it what I liked and reject what, after dozens of obsessive listenings and all the reading material I could find, I didn’t.

Therefore the automatic disdain of the amateur who thinks nothing good can come from 12-tone method, and the automatic reverence of the professional composer for whom 12-tone music was The Noble Experiment, I find equally shallow. My writings on complex and difficult music have been extremely nuanced. I’ve written with varying degrees of closely analyzed enthusiasm about  Roger Sessions, Ralph Shapey, Dallapiccola, twelve-tone Stravinsky, Takemitsu, Rochberg, Rochberg again, Stefan Wolpe, Vermeulen, Blomdahl, ’50s Carter and ’60s Boulez, the ultracomplex music of Mike Maguire, some fanatically complex music by Cornelis de Bondt,rhythmic complexity, complexity in general, 12-tone music again and again. If you can read all that and still claim that I have no deep affection for complex, difficult, or atonal music, maybe it’s time to admit that reading comprehension isn’t your forte. “I find it rather foolish that we would dismiss all music which simply defies even the sharpest of listeners to catch every detail the first time they hear it,” cried a commenter in anguish a few weeks ago. That someone could feel a need to say this to me, of all people, almost extinguishes all hope. 

Of course it’s probably, as Darcy James Argue says, that the Fraternity of Serious Composers defines themselves in opposition to popular taste, and if you admit to disliking even one complex, difficult piece you are immediately suspected of being an Unreliable Club Member and therefore must be rooted out and rehabilitated. Unreliable Club Member: that I’ll plead guilty to. I no more pledge allegiance to minimalism than I do to serialism: I find The Desert Music problematic, Different Trains didn’t grow on me, and I’ve written some of Glass’s most blistering opera reviews. I am no ideologue.

Myth No. 2: I Write Music for Audiences. This one is actually true, but with qualifications. Almost every composer, even the regular commenters on this blog, will cite you the Conventional Wisdom about whom one writes for: “I only write for myself, taking my own taste as representative, since there is no such thing as ‘The Audience,’ everyone listens differently.  Complexity is only a subjective perception anyway, and after all I saw Brian Ferneyhough get a standing ovation at Miller Theater once, and posterity will sort it all out, yada yada yada.” Of course, you presumably already know what’s going on in your music and a stranger listening to it doesn’t have that inside scoop, and by trivializing that perceptual asymmetry, this line of thought provides an effortless rationale to save you the trouble of clarifying your ideas to the point that no one can miss the point of your music. On this issue I am way, way, way in the minority, even among friends. But I am not alone. As one of my regulars once responded:

The “I’m writing only for myself”-line I’ve always regarded as cynical and defensive. It’s the art composer accepting his marginalisation by capitalist society, or even trying to pass it off as a great and heroic thing. Nonsense! Even Schoenberg couldn’t stomach that. Yes, our art may come out of some sort of composerly ascesis, but it’s not meant to stay there!

There is another tradition: that of Aaron Copland in the 1930s when he said, “It seemed to me that composers were in danger of working in a vacuum… I felt it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.” The tradition of Marc Blitzstein who protrayed artists in The Cradle Will Rock as the biggest corporate whores of all, of Hanns Eisler who broke away from Schoenberg to write worker’s choruses, of Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? And it is the same tradition, though we didn’t articulate it as militantly, as the populist movement that surrounded the New Music America festivals of the 1980s; without getting terribly political about it in the left/right sense, we were excited that a large group of composers had returned from the arid wastelands of the serialist avant-garde to write music that audiences could find hip and exciting again. It is even the tradition of Steve Reich, who wrote in 1967 that “Obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy.” Perhaps it’s populism’s tragedy that its two most eloquent apologists, Tolstoy and Cardew, wrote overly extreme, over-the-top books whose excesses are only too easy to refute. Nevertheless, phrases from those books stick in my head, unanswerable, forming part of my musical conscience. Despise me as you will, I compose with the audience in mind. 

But I am no extremist, in this or anything else. Put a gun to my head, and I’d say that populism and narcissism are two poles between which an artist should vacillate, satisfying now one, now the other, and that the psychologically effective strategy is not to get stuck permanently at either end. If I am a fascist for believing that there is any worthwhile alternative to narcissism, as a commenter called me, then Aaron Copland was Stalin himself. (And besides, the more historically resonant epithet to throw at me would have been “communist!,” which I would have accepted in better grace.) Just as I need not defend complex music, since only simple music comes under attack from the composing community, neither do I need to defend narcissism, which is the catholic church to which all composers subscribe except for a few of us outcast heretics. But I do defend, when the occasion arises, the opposite pole of populism. Some people take from this the uncharitable view that I am irrevocably opposed to selfishness and self-aggrandizement, when, really, it’s just that I think it’s probably not politic to wallow in them 24/7/365.

If you disagree with me, as chances are you do, I need not hear from you about it. To violently disagree with me on this issue is to be a walking cliché, a stock character: a composer who writes only to please himself. There are 40,000 of you out there at last count. I know exactly what you think, and need no reminder. You will never experience the grace with which Shakespeare could address the audience through the mouth of Prospero, who closes The Tempest by saying,

Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please.

(How cynical of Shakespeare to so pretend, since as a great artist he must have known that great artists write only for themselves.) Take comfort in the fact that opinion within the composing community is nigh unanimous on your side. Take no notice of the deplorable situation that new music composition is an art almost completely absent from the world’s enthusiasms: surely the fact that composers are trained to write only for themselves bears no responsibility for that. And consider that the attempted squelching of my populist dissent is more fascist in character than it would be to allow me my tiny minority opinion, which threatens you no harm. Which leads us to:

Myth No. 3: I Control What Happens in the New-Music World. How in hell did that one arise? What’s with the fear that I’m going to disenfranchise lovers of complex music, that I am on the verge of descending from Olympus and imposing my will on the new-music performance scene? Me?! Does James Levine never pencil a title into his conducting schedule without running it by me first? Are Dana Gioia and I are on the phone daily so I can confirm which composers are up and which are down at the NEA this month? Does the new-music programming of Michael Tilson Thomas and Esa-Pekka Salonen hinge on my suggestions? Do I wave my hand and the complexion of the upcoming concert season is altered?

The world of academic composition is tightly barricaded against people who hold views like mine. My colleagues circle the wagons to make sure my radical ideas don’t infect the students. Every year I have to argue that it’s OK for student pieces to have only one dynamic level all the way through. My suggestion that students ought to be allowed to learn composition software other than Max/MSP incited World War III. My simplest, most common-sense ideas are too radical for musical academia. Except for a few jokers at Yale who like to live dangerously by exposing students to me, the academic composition world has closed me out. (I occasionally hear that some blog entry of mine is brought into composition class to start an argument with, but it may just be Rob Deemer over and over again.) I used to sit on the occasional composer panel, but haven’t been asked in years. No one I’ve written a Guggenheim recommendation for has ever received one. And as for the world of contemporary music performance, I’m not even a hair on a gnat on an elephant’s rump. So what’s with this panic that I’m going to rearrange the furniture, and heads will roll? I am at best the Dennis Kucinich of the composing world, considered insightful by some on the crazy left but with views so far outside the acceptable mainstream that there is no chance they will ever be discussed seriously in public by anyone but myself.

The only people who do listen to me – aside from a small cadre of fans whom I like to imagine idling around Other Music in New York waiting for the next Charlemagne Palestine CD to arrive – are the musicologists. I am in possession of historical data for which they have no other current source, and my description of a 1930s populism resurfacing in 1980s Manhattan piques their curiosity, not their terror. The musicologists, realizing circa 1983 that their profession’s reputation was stale and dowdy, revolutionized their field, and are now at the apogee of their powers. Composers, by contrast, enjoyed their hour of maximum prestige in the ’60s, and are straining every ideological sinew to extend that moment into eternity, and forestall the passage of time. There exists perhaps a real danger that my account of late-20th-century American music will get accepted into the history books in some form or another, for the lack of any attempted alternative narrative. But that’s hardly my fault. I wield no weight except for whatever persuasiveness I can muster in prose. I have no institutional support, am buoyed by no prizes or awards of any note. I’m just a blogger, but for some reason a threat to Western civilization.

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

A friend who got her doctorate in the ’90s at a famous music department told me yesterday that the faculty criticized her music for having too many articulated downbeats (notes occuring on the first beat of the measure) and not enough quintuplets. From the point of view of traditional musicality that is absolutely bizarre – imagine Mozart submitted to such criteria – but from the point of view of the composing world’s Conventional Wisdom, the “Elliott Carter got it Right” mentality, it makes a certain perverse sense. Some of us find this Conventional Wisdom twisted, neurotic, cramped, dogmatic, fascistic, counterintuitive, self-defeating, and sick. We gather here at PostClassic to get away from it, as gays go into a gay bar, and we don’t need academia’s Religious Right trailing in after us in to give us the same lectures we’re trying to escape from. If you’ve bought into the Conventional Wisdom, you have the entire rest of the composing world to roam around in, and heads will nod wherever you speak. Why isn’t that enough? Why are you compelled to try to change PostClassic too? What is it about a little modicum of marginalized diversity that threatens you so much?

I’m determined not to shut down the comments feature, but I am going to take a heavier hand from now on in deleting comments that demonstrate ignorance of the context here, and would therefore take way too long to answer. Those commenters will be referred to this post, and any other summational ones I feel moved to write. I am not obligated to provide yet another platform for the Conventional Wisdom. If that’s all you’ve got to throw at us, the rest of the classical music world’s your oyster, bub.

My own research and study into the quote-unquote avant-garde has revealed two distinct poles. There’s the avant-garde of privilege, the avant-garde that primarily emphasizes quote-unquote art for art’s sake aesthetics above everything else. Then there’s what I would call the populist or the radical avant-garde. In America, I think those two kind of poles happened during the late ’50s, and through the ’60s and early ’70s. I think the privileged avant-garde really wanted to create this wall between social activism, political radicalism, and aesthetic radicalism, whereas there was no distinction, say, between members of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Liberation Movement. The Panthers brought Sun Ra to be a guest faculty member at the University of California in Berkeley. There was a kind of recognition that the politically and artistically radical were two heads of the same coin. I’ve always identified myself with these movements; expanding humanism requires new forms. It requires new expressions and new vehicles to express those ideas and those feelings. To me, the quote-unquote utilitarian value of the arts of any discipline really is about expanding and deepening human feeling, the human soul, and the human imagination. And that imagination is critical to any progressive political or social movement. I often say that our responsibility is to make politics a creative and artistic process, and to make the arts politically committed. So I’ve never seen a separation between the role of experimentation and the vanguard role of politics. All those things are inextricably interrelated and mutually necessary.

- Fred Ho, being interviewed by Frank Oteri

In my Analysis of Minimalism seminar – most rewarding course I’ve ever taught at Bard, at least for me – we finished with Michael Gordon’s loud, propulsive Yo Shakespeare in the same class in which we started on Peter Garland’s calm, delicate I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last. The contrast moved me to get into one of my digressions (I live to digress) about the importance of kickass qualities in music of the Downtown scene in the 1980s and ’90s. For several years there, kickass was the highest praise a Downtown composer could recieve on his or her music, and the most sought after. The word was thrown around so relentlessly that in my reviews in the Voice I started parodying it through overuse: we were in the kickass era now, everything had to be kickass, if you weren’t kickass you weren’t really trying! For months I worked it into every review, no matter how gratuitously. I hoped I could shame people out of the sophomoric notion that loud, percussive aggression automatically made a piece of music good, and the lack of it bad. I don’t think I had much conceptual effect, but it did seem to that the word’s omnipresence declined a touch.

And in class I told a story that has sufficiently retired into the mists of history that I think I can safely recycle it: There was a female accordionist who, the first time I heard her on a festival, played a rather gentle piece based on a folk song. In my review, I called her piece “charming.” Soon came a searing hot letter from a friend of hers, accusing me of sexism and chauvinistic condescension, since, surely, I would never apply the effeminite word charming to a man’s music. I wrote back that indeed I had many times referred to the music of male composers as charming, and that I hoped I had written charming music myself. However, to mollify her, in the “Voice choices” I wrote for this performer (those little advance notices in the concert listings), I started escalating the testosterone level. The climax came when I referred to her as “a two-fisted powerhouse of accordion machismo.” The performer loved the phrase enough to make it her lead press quote. That was the atmosphere of the Downtown scene in the late 1980s.

(If you don’t like the word Downtown, and know a more precise word for the south end of Manhattan, consider it inserted.)

I hope it’s obvious that it’s not I who was sexist in using the word charming – but that, somehow, the preponderance of the lower Manhattan scene had become radically sexist by renouncing every possible quality traditionally associated with femininity and treating them as insults. Quiet, gentle, receptive, nurturing, community-oriented: these are clearly not qualities unique to women, but by acculturation (if not biology) they cling to the female side of our mental male-female axis. By rejecting them, by aspiring exclusively to their opposites, both men and women were fleeing their inner feminine. Moreover, rock had become classified as masculine, classical music as feminine, and so composers were made ashamed of their classical trainings, and pressured to efface them. The result was several years of massive and transparent public pretense: composers pretending to be rockers, women pretending to be men, Ivy League-educated musicians turning their baseball caps backwards and pretending to be blue-collar. It was the opposite of identity-politics art: a scene full of artists ashamed of who they were. So publicly did they trumpet their insecurities that I was embarrassed for them.

It was hardly universal: for instance, you might assume Glenn Branca’s 130-decibel guitar symphonies were the epitome of musical macho, but there’s something deeply feminine and receptive (mathematically “natural”) about his formal paradigms, which comes vividly to the surface in the gentle, meandering works he’s written for unamplified instruments. In that sense, he was more attuned to the earlier minimalists, whose music was despised as soft, lily-livered, and too pretty by the free-improv scene that arose in the early ’80s, and whose macho attitudes I always associated with Reagan era neo-John-Wayne masculinity. The rock-worshipping totalists (John Luther Adams notably excepted) extended the kickass mandate into the ’90s. Whether these sexual politics still exist in New York music I’m not around enough to say, though clearly the bad conscience that many composers carry about their classical training remains evident in the blogosphere.

As a sports-phobic male who grew up as a classical musician in Texas during the heyday of John Wayne worship, I certainly have my own gender-identification issues. They presumably account for the bulky silver jewelry, leather jackets, and biker-chic hats I wear to counter the total absence of male-identified interests that I refused to absorb from the alleged peers I grew up among. (I was even named after the 1950s star quarterback Kyle Rote – how’s that for inserting a real zinger into a musician’s psyche?) But it would never occur to me to force my music to compensate publicly for my private sexual insecurities. I’ve written loud music, fast music, occasionally loud and fast and even propulsive and goal-oriented, but more often slow, delicate, sentimental, empty, flat, pretty, even charming. Some of my music embraces chaos, but more of it cultivates a careful logic. Least of all could I imagine so squelching my natural musicianship to the point that I could rate music as bad or good based entirely on crude sexual stereotypes. I am a well-educated, inhibited, middle-class WASP male in touch with my feminine side, and my music is about what you’d expect for the type: neither I nor my recordings will ever be mistaken for Jimi Hendrix, nor would I seek that. I do believe that music can be ruined by too much evidence of one’s education, and perhaps it is my peculiar luck that I have my musicological work to channel my education into, leaving my music to be written more by ear than by brain. I highly recommend that composers acquire an intellectual hobby.

Where we come from leaves traces on our music that need not be guiltily effaced. I hope that the very essence of a Post-Classic blog – that coming from a classical-music background is A-OK, neither feminizing nor the opposite, and doesn’t commit you to writing “classical music” – helps other college-trained composers get over any undue discomfort with their speciously sissified background.

Composer-video artist Betsey Biggs, currently completing graduate work at Princeton, presented some lovely work at the Sacramento State Festival I returned from last week. Her latest piece, Ton Yam I, was based nostalgically on the idea of California, and used as sound material only slowed, looped, and altered samples from the Beach Boys’ song “God Only Knows.” (The title read backward makes the point.) More bloggable is a Morton Feldman anecdote she mentioned in her talk that I hadn’t heard before. It seems that one of his assignments was to send a student composer out with one task for the week: to come back with one perfect chord.

I am quoted in Rick Schulz’s article about the toy piano as serious instrument in last Sunday’s L.A. Times. It’s a preview piece for a toy piano concert being given by Phyllis Chen this coming Sunday. The thing that Rick and I discussed that didn’t get in the article – and having written for daily papers myself, I completely understand what limitations kept it out – was that, before Margaret Leng Tan began championing the instrument, composer Wendy Chambers had commissioned a whole repertoire of works for it in the late 1980s, including my own Paris Intermezzo. The history of the serious toy piano starts in 1948 with Cage, of course, but Wendy never gets enough credit for her galvanizing contribution.

Many of you know that in the early 1980s magnetic recording tape was made via some kind of process that facilitated quick deterioration, and that you can reclaim tapes from that era by baking them. Eric Bruskin has kindly done that for some reel-to-reel tapes of my own early music and several early postminimalist pieces by Peter Gena, my grad school composition teacher and (since he was only eight years senior) close friend. I hadn’t heard any of these in many years. Peter’s pieces – Beethoven in Soho, Unchained Melodies, Stabiles – First Clone, Modular Fantasies, and 100 Fingers for ten pianists – are now all playing on PostClassic Radio. Beethoven in Soho, based on figurations from Beethoven’s Op. 54 Sonata extended to epic length, and performed by Peter and myself at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, was written to suggest that, were Beethoven alive in 1981, he would have been playing in Soho lofts like Reich and Glass rather than at Lincoln Center. In other words, Beethoven would have chosen the Downtown route.