New Musical Resources

Why I Love Musicology

2011-10-18T10:56:00.001-05:00

Last week, I went to Leuven, Belgium (Flanders, I suppose) for the third international conference on music and minimalism. More on that later, except to say it was a wonderful week, almost compulsively informative and consistently stimulative to my musicological orientations. It was also (shhh, don't tell anyone) my first trip off of the ol' North American continent; my first trip out of the States except for Southern Ontario and Baja California.

So, because of my airfare rate, I got hustled into buying a student ID card. Long story, but Sunday night, before I left, I opened the student ID card (which no airline official or hostel host ever had the least inkling to check) and found that I had been issued the wrong person's card. The student from Denton, Texas actually had the same name as a famous television character. Anyway, I call the organization (STATravel) that had given me said card, and they asked if I could drive from Antioch, where I was before I flew out from O'Hare, to their Evanston office.

The thesis of my paper in Leuven was that a couple of Albert M. Fine's best pieces--two piano works for David Tudor, Three Movements for Piano and Symphonic Sketch--were accidentally minimalist, in a sense, a result of Fine's channeling of his neo-classical French tastes through a Cagean experimental aesthetic (with a heaping helping of humorous camp). Remarkably late within my development of this paper, which has been lurching forward in several iterations for the last few years, I discovered Nadine Hubbs's The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. Fine (who was openly gay, and throughout the sixties began to construct his own self-conscious ideology for what this meant to his music and art) came of age writing like his one-time teacher Nadia Boulanger and listening to David Diamond, Virgil Thomson, and his correspondent Ned Rorem, even funneling many of these scores into Russia during the Khruschev thaw. But increasingly throughout the mid sixties, he tried (successfully) to personally ingratiate himself to John Cage and (unsuccessfully) to parlay that friendship into a viable experimental music career. He is a figure who even in failure really embodies a move Hubbs identifies, a network of neo-tonal modernists becoming displaced by a more "cerebral" network of experimentalists with consequences (that I probably overstate) for our reading of tonal Americana.

dot dot dot...

Here I was on Monday, about to leave for Belgium to argue that Fine was an anomalous, Cagean neo-classicist (or neo-classical Cagean, if you prefer), and forced by pesky circumstances to go to Evanston, when I remembered there were a few Fine items in the John Cage Notations collection at Northwestern, including several postcard pieces and an undated Scale Piece for John Cage. On short notice, a couple hours in advance, I phoned the librarian, who kindly obliged to allow me permission on such short notice, since I knew what I was looking for, and on the drive, I began to get excited. Conversations with librarians tend to do that.

Scales! For John Cage! Perhaps this was like Fine's dissonant counterpoint/aleatoric Play-Piece from 1964 and 1965 that suggests rotations and rhythmic variations based on quirks of spatial notation. Perhaps it relates to a question Fine wrote to Cage in 1966:

Dear Mister Cage: have you ever thought about setting up ‘a Guilded Estate” which could be called something like “Hut on Hudson” so that Nadia Boulanger and the Europeans might all come to study with you?

Evidence, evidence, coming together on all sides. So, I read the finding aid, which describes the piece as:

Scale piece for John Cage

1 scale in box; 14x17 cm.

[1] leaf; type and ink on paper; 11x16 cm

Hmm, a scale, in a box. Perhaps each note is a sort of card you can shuffle and then arrange according to your shuffling. Or, maybe it's a kind of mobile, cardboard that takes one shape or another depending on how you fold it, with similar instructions as Play-Piece.

Once I got into the archive, I dutifully examined and listed the contents each post-card piece in the first folder, taking note of the postmark (which, for figures like Fine who moved around often between New York and Cambridge, Mass., an important way of establishing a firm chronology). I looked at the box, which had an "M" logo in repetitive fashion over the tan and red box. Among the writing on the box, was--in what looked like Cage's hand in magic marker--"Fine Scale (northwestern)" Finally, I opened the scale piece box. And it was a...

disassembled postage scale, like this but smaller, or perhaps a pharmacist's scale, or a, um, underground small businessman's scale. I don't know, I'm not a scale excerpt. In a box. With a small postcard coated in wax, on which was typed:

Directions: drop the ENTERED or a similar suitable weight onto the assembled scale.
You may consider the piece finished:
(a) before you have dropped the weight.
(b) after you have dropped the weight
( c ) after the scale has stopped moving altogether
after the weight has been dropped
(d ) before or after any of the above directions are performed or read.
( e ) any other.

I was juked hard by a readymade, and reminded of why archival research matters. I looked at a mention of this "piece," fitting it into what I knew and trying to imagine writing it into my paper, falling in love with my own argument. But sometimes a scale is just a scale. And, for the first time in my archival research career, I sat inside of Northwestern's august, wood-paneled music library, not ten feet from walls and walls of musicological monuments, collections of Renaissance and Medieval polyphony, and sniffed deep into the box, trying to figure out what the residue of the ENTERED really was, feeling worlds away from ficta.

Jackson Mac Low, in the wake of the news

2011-08-26T09:16:00.001-05:00

anyone want to perform this piece?

Social Project 1 (29 April 1963)

Find a way to end unemployment or

Find a way for people to live without employment

Make whichever one you find work.

Notes on digital culture

2011-03-09T07:47:00.009-06:00

I'm probably not the first to notice this, but I'm too lazy to google who has. (Or maybe I am "original" after all): *

As facebook's vindicated for its "social utility," I've noticed there's a continuum between how much fun it is and how much work it creates. Case in point: several messages await me. Some are quite important, and would have, 70, 80 years ago, merited telegrams. Others, letters. Some are professionally related in one sense or another.

Now, in the meantime, I'm clearly doing other things. I'm pithily observing the world. I'm commenting on youtube clips of animals gone wild, posting Jon Stewart clips as if I discovered the daily show, and doing all manner of frivolous things.

It's as if you've gone to the DMV and I'm behind the counter. You might be my family, you might be my boss, you might be my best friend, and I hold up the proverbial "it'll be a sec" index finger. You're waiting in line, but I'm clearly blowing you off. Then you drift on to chat, and I slink off, poking my head in to see if you've left.

Why haven't you RSVPd? You RSVPd, why didn't you go? You were clearly up at 11:30; why did you go to sleep without writing me back? Inquiring minds want to know.

(/musicology)

In 1935, Hanns Eisler (Brechtian, composer) upheld Schoenberg's twelve-tone style as progressive and potentially revolutionary because it "mirrored the confusion" of late capitalism, running every which way with no sense of what's going on and breaking the connections with a surfeit of data, data, data. The irony is that serialism is all about connections, as any word-search of a (RIP) Babbitt-Square will show you. I'm tinkering with my Berio paper, where he criticizes as falsely utopian the notion by Babbitt-via-Westergaard that serialized rhythm that mirrors pitch serialization "unifies" music. Rather, he argues (applying Eisler/Adorno's idea but reevaluating it), the sense of dislocation does not enable some sort of transformation. It drives us crazy, lulls us, makes us bow down in front of abstractions.

(\musicology)

Social media too is revolutionary, and starts to jump the shark when it becomes an entire medium for experiencing life. Integration on a single platform should by all accounts unify things and ideas--lo and behold, it does. We have our same busy rat-race lives, sometimes miserable, joyful, and mostly mundane, but with a blue and white border.

And here I am blogging when I haven't written back to you.

*One of my personal goal is to reclaim the parenthetical followed by a colon from the emoticon

Why, Hello There

2011-02-24T22:33:00.005-06:00

I think it's fair to say this has become a vacant blog. I've been doing more reading than writing for the past year or so, and, for the past six months or so, almost as much running as reading, a healthful pasttime. I've also kicked the ol' fast-food addiction (my nadir was a double-down, just as I started running) and am actually fancying myself a vegetarian these days. And wonders never cease.

I've fallen back in thrall with musicological work again, which I wonderful. I've become a more voracious reader, stopped blogging and learned a whole bunch of repertoire, and I'm beginning to understand how to write about it all, and how not to. I'm also a big fan of teaching, which is great: teaching is great. Writing is great. Learning is great.

I have a spate of conference presentations coming up--five in three weeks, it's shaping up to be, from Madison to Iowa City, to Oakland, Michigan, to two in Central Missouri. It'll be a somewhat exhausting gamut, but also invigorating to road-test my research, much of which I've been sitting on for quite some time. What I've enjoyed, making this all presentable (material on Berio's O King and a style study of Albert M. Fine's proto-minimalist keyboard works), is the joy of rediscovery, not just from my archival material but from myself. I will rack my brain over a particular phrasing, only to discover a moment of clarity scrawled illegibly in the margins of a book or photo-copy from 2, 3, even 5 or 6 years ago. Sometimes I'll have recognized an idea but not really have the tools to see what it really means, or--like a dog out on a walk near a smelly hydrant--I'll draw the wrong conclusion from it and chase it down.

Another joy is to be around a new crew. The life cycle of a grad-school crew is about 2 or 3 years. I had a great crew of colleagues, saw them go, and now it seems everything's reloaded, and I'm surrounded by fresh approaches, sympathetic and challenging at the same time, and a group of interesting new faculty who read my mind and point me in the right direction. People share my interests, round out my knowledge, and 20-minute hallway conversations can suggest whole new fields I never imagined existed.

My favorite "new" colleagues are hardly new at all to me, but old buddies from Lawrence who have managed to settle here in nowheresville: Andy and Meg have some of the most interesting musical minds I know. You'll like their blogs. They're both fixtures at Jared Fowler's terrific ihearic concert series, which has filled a great void.

I attend much too infrequently: being a morning person (wonders never cease) doesn't always support being a new music fan. I'll only hear the Feldman string quartet if I can go during the early bird special.

Ctrl-F

2010-04-07T08:52:00.003-05:00

I actually have been blogging quite regularly--sort of. I've been reading quite a bit, researching steadily if not on anything earth-shattering, but whenever I make a blogpost, I just save it as a draft. Then I realize I'm just journaling, and that nobody should care about what book I just read or what youtube video I just watched. For example, Walter Benjamin wrote that because of letters to the editor, people would no longer be content to be readers, but would want a share in the author function. Then again, he never had to suffer through a facebook note about 17 things I didn't know about someone I once sat behind in chemistry. Would this warrant a blog post?

I had the strangest experience last night. I was reading an august, overpriced, east-coast based magazine that Conde Nast target-markets to all of my demographic. Am I ironic and vaguely liberal, yet pragmatic? Check. Am I a self-consciously critical consumer who's hopelessly susceptible to Elektra/Nonesuch's marketing practices? Check.

By the way, Nonesuch, EVERYBODY THROWS AWAY YOUR STUPID CARDBOARD SLEEVES THE SECOND THEY BUY THE CD. Or am I the only one who still buys CDs?

My assignment for the night was to read three articles by Christopher Waterman on Yoruban identity and pop music, of course via PDF. My weary eyes had to take a break, and lo and behold, found myself flipping through the New Yorker.

By the way, David Remnick, YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE WITH THOSE 90 PAGE SUMMER DOUBLE ISSUES. Or am I the only one who still buys magazines?

Anyway, I was in a vaguely African frame of mind, so picked up the magazine and turned to a mammoth Jeffrey Goldberg article (good job, Jeffrey Goldberg--now that's content!) on Mark and Delia Owens, who ended up settling in a giant game park in Zambia, away from modern conveniences save for, you know, a Cessna. After early experiments in infrastructural investment (proto-micro-lending), Mark Owens started to go all Colonel Kurtz on suspected poachers.

I was reading along in a special room I reserve for magazine reading, and ran into this passage:

We received a radio message that Bernard Mutondo [one of the commercial poachers] was coming to camp to shoot elephants, to kill them. . . . That evening I went to the airstrip with Kasokola, my most trusted assistant. And I took the door off the airplane and turned the right-hand seat around and strapped him in, with a shotgun across his lap. No, this wasn’t loaded with conventional ammunition. It was loaded with a special shell that shoots firecrackers. . . . It shoots cherry bombs, honestly. And it projects these to one hundred yards, and they go off with a tremendous roar and a flash of light and smoke and everything. And they’re perfectly harmless—farmers use these things to scare marauding animals away from their crops . . . but of course poachers wouldn’t know that.

Except, I think that in the print edition, it just said "Mutondo was coming to camp..." Whatever, if you write hard-hitting, time-sensitive long-form journalism, I'll forgive a referent error (it was Mutondo's first mention in the story). But, without even thinking about it, instinct kicked in, and my left hand (which was holding the bottom of the magazine) moved to the corner and made the Ctrl-F keystroke.

Yes, even in my most revealing, media-as-extensions-of-man moment, I'm a budget PC user.

The point stuck with me, though: maybe the iKindlePad's time has come. Now, if only Acer would come out with a competing product with all the same features, a lower price, more memory, a propensity to overheat, and a much clunkier interface, I too could get an e-Reader.

Wait: I'm in a coffeeshop, my headphones have stopped working, and two undergraduates are comparing third person voice in Tolkien and Hemingway's Farewell to Arms.

For a minute, I'm going to quote their conversation: "I guess he's known for his short sentences, but some of these go on for a long time. And it's not annoying like James Joyce. Sometimes Jane Austen is good, but she's a bit aristocratic...I like Old Man and the Sea because it's simple, but it's epic. It's like the human struggle. I like that...Fitzgerald is a lot like this. I honestly haven't read a lot, though."

I guess there still are readers. I guess.

Free Philip Glass!

2010-02-02T00:02:00.006-06:00

No, that's not a peroration, exhortation, or rallying cry; he's not in jail or otherwise oppressed (in fact, it seems he's doing quite well).

If you've been wanting to check out any of Philip Glass's work on the Orange Mountain label (I highly recommend the Wendy Sutter album) but don't like spending money, you're in luck: a free sampler at the Amazon MP3 store. Listening to the sampler all the way through, sure, you'll hear your fair share of minor arpeggios, but variety really starts to emerge favorably. [I'm too tired to erect, and then knock down, the familiar, too-easy knocks on Glass. Suffice it to say, go listen to the Violin Concerto 25 times if you need convincing. You'll be a believer sooner or later.]

If you think you're not a fan, well... What have you got to lose but some hard drive space?

I'm too tired to expand on this, but more's coming later. Lots of news, ruminations, information, links bubbling in my mind, if I can keep my "projects" on hold long enough to type in this silly little box.

Could it be, that I...

2009-11-23T08:06:00.002-06:00

...have a dormant blog?

Perish the thought.

I'm a bundle of nerves this morning about the bundle of nerves that's peeking through where a shell of a wisdom tooth sits. It'll be gone in a couple of hours, I think. Blogging seems like a productive alternative to fretting, or at least--neutrally speaking--a more public venue for it.

I've been reading much more than I've been writing, and I've actually tried a novel experiment lately: drafting, outlining, redrafting, editing, re-outlining, etc. It's foreign to my thought process, but what the method lacks in "AHA, I've got it!" brilliance, it gains in cogency and slow/steady progress.

Last weekend, I went to the American Musicological Society conference in Philadelphia. This was my first AMS, and a wrap-up seems redundant--if you're interested in the AMS conference, you've probably already read Dial M or something like that on it, or you were there--because conference wrap-up blog-posts are a fairly predictable genre on the whole. I should have dealt with my dental issues beforehand, because I had a frankly miserable time for non-professional reasons. Professionally, I had a two-sided realization: 1) There are many smart people doing many smart things; and 2) I can do that. I mean, not the hardcore 13th century stuff, I definitely couldn't do that, but there were many papers where I realized, "Hey, I could have thought that up, researched it, and made a handout for it during that slow week I had in August."

The key, though, is that I didn't and they did, and so I should and I will. Even though I have three papers in the pipeline for coursework this semester--a medieval music literature review that I've mostly done, a meat-and-potatoes analysis of Mozart's C-minor fantasie, and a gendered reading of Cherubini's Medea that seems to write itself--I started putting down the gritty sourcework for a Randy Newman paper that will have many moving parts but move headlong from musical elements to the entire Superstructure. Trust me. I begin by discussing this Norman Mailer book that I bought the week it came out, because it was already an artifact, and I trusted it would be history pretty soon. When I finish this paper (Christmas, hopefully?), you will never look at George Harrison the same way again--I hope, at least. I take a side trip in the musical style of Roger Waters as well, with the literary offerings of Gore Vidal and--I'm debating, should I even touch Chomsky? that's a recipe for an exploding project--a few Marxisms du jour. I trace a particular curmudgeonly strain through the essays and musical stylings of ca. 1973- ca. 2008.

To sum up: I had been trying to be groundbreaking in seminar papers all throughout graduate school, and to churn out pro forma extra-curricular work. I've since decided to reverse my MO, and not lose too much sleep over trying to turn logic over its head when I should just be getting a clear handle on different historical periods for the purposes of teaching.

Now I have an appointment with an oral surgeon. Yikes!

Schubert's Ich Grolle Nicht and Wilco's Hummingbird

2009-09-15T14:54:00.005-05:00

Because it sure ain't Schumann's. If you're familiar with with Wilco, I find the piano style and tempo to be uncannily reminiscent of Hummingbird:

I've just started work on a performance analysis of Fischer-Dieskau's 1976 recording of Ives' Ich Grolle Nicht setting, where DFD's phrasing borrows the structure of Schumann's setting rather than Ives' score. Mistakenly searching for Schubert and Ich Grolle Nicht, I discovered this gem.

My favorite moment of this performance? At 1:05, the mid-phrase terror that slips into the tenor's voice as he gets lost on a long tone during an inconvenient page-turn, and seems to be sight-reading.

I think it has all the makings of an undiscovered kitsch classic. Let's meme this to notoriety.

Never fear! This is not an abandoned blog.

2009-09-10T00:01:00.003-05:00

This isn't a vacant or dormant blog, except that it sort of is.

For months, I've been thinking about various albums, thoughts, events, books, magazine articles, memes, blog posts, trips, cute things my dog does, what it's like to teach a college class with two weeks or two hours notice, what Mendelssohn said about the keyed trumpet*, the challenges of trying to learn two languages at once when English gives me much trouble on its own and the like. With each of these, I think, "Wow, that would make a great blog post!" I've started some, and many of those are saved as drafts so when life slows down--say, late December--and I get really bored, I can start posting them all at once and it will seem like a very exciting life that I lead. (But I'll have to excise references to the beautiful weather, all the walking I've been doing, the farmer's tan I'm getting, or my time-sensitive jig will be up.) But of late, I've started putting my research into--get this--Word documents! I've also been doing voracious reading that's really not typical of me. I'm a slow reader, seldom finish books, and have been tearing through them (relative to my normal pace, anyway). I won't say which books yet, because then I'd have to comment on them, and this would become an actual post, and I wouldn't get up in time tomorrow to do my menial job, which is to enter standardized test answers into an excel file or type up transcripts of focus groups.

Since I posted last, I've been to Boston twice (once for a musicologist friend and friend friend's wedding in Southern Maine, and again last weekend for my good friend and her husband The Cantor). I bought too many books, which I'm burdened by reading. I hate gravesite pictures--almost as much as I hate one-room house birthplace tours ("and here is where Herbert Hoover's mother kept her skillets...")--but along my theme of American music, I'll share my twitpic of a really boring William Billings plaque I found across the street from the Steinway shop next to Emerson College alongside the Boston Common on Sunday. Enjoy.

It's positively scintillating.

*"I must not forget to mention that the trumpeters, one and all, blow away at those infernal keyed trumpets, which always seem to me like a pretty woman with a beard; they are also without the chromatic tones and sound shrill and unnatural.”

Band will play on despite budget cuts :: News Sun :: News

2009-07-18T02:14:00.001-05:00

Band will play on despite budget cuts :: News Sun :: News

Shared via AddThis

Dave Douglas Brass Ecstasy, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

2009-06-30T10:13:00.004-05:00

So Dave Douglas's new album, Spirit Moves, is a real beauty. Released two weeks ago on Douglas's own Greenleaf label, Douglas's Brass Ecstasy is a compact and funky unit that mixes trumpet (Douglas), trombone (Luis Bonilla), french hornist Vincent Chaney, the inimitable tubist Marcus Rojas, and Nasheet Waits on drums. The tunes are often harmonically straightforward (compared to some of Douglas's more extended outings) and resonate on a certain New Orleans vibe, but they are never simplistic, and the New Orleans sense of counterpoint gets a compelling facelift.

Like many composers of his generation (also--what's with the jazz world's labeling of anyone who isn't 60 yet as a "young" musician?!) Douglas is exploring texture, vibe, rhythm, and groove rather than compulsively overloading his tunes with extensions and licks. I don't often get all ravey about a recording instantly (actually, that's a lie: I get all evangelical about recordings I like the second I hear them, which is part of why I started this blog), but for the last week, I've been finding small little charms in these arrangements, that can sound more intimate than--and much larger than--five men depending on the context.

Too bad I downloaded this on iTunes. These tunes are so great that a forward-thinking brass quintet/quartet might want to tackle them. I'm thinking of picking up the charts: for $40, you can download the sheet music and recordings from Greenleaf. This way, you can support great music on the one hand, learn it from the inside, and not be tempted to email Dave Douglas's manager to see if you can get a copy of the charts. (I haven't done this, but know of more than a few jazz stalkers out there...)

The album starts off with an arrangement of Rufus Wainright's This Love Affair that sounds like a most impassioned dirge version of St. James Infirmary for which Bach wrote the inner voices. Much of this has to do with Wainright's original harmonization--here's a video of it:

It's a very beautiful tune, but with Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy, it takes on a certain ritualistic quality, and--on the climactic turnaround--Rufus Wainright's beautiful melodic figures soar in Douglas's high range, which of late has sounded so easy and soaring that it's like the most moving infomercial for the Caruso method. And the voicing of the ensemble makes what was affecting in Wainright's hair-raising. Pay special attention to the french horn lines:

Here's another video with Douglas discussing how the group functions as a chamber ensemble, followed by "The View from Blue Mountain," a latin piece with a six-feel. Pay particular attention to how much harmony (and how richly the harmony) jumps out when there's no comping instrument:

My other favorites on the album? Orujo, a syncopated romp with some in-the-pocket french horn offbeats; The Brass Ring, that moves out of a lovely chorale into an impossibly slow, tight vamp midway; Great Awakening, an allusive kaleidescope of hymnody (I heard aspects of Just a Closer Walk and Silver Bells, but I'm probably missing a few obvious ones) that's Douglas's funniest tune since Elk's Club; Mister Pitiful, the Otis Redding tune; Bowie, a funky nod to the legendary Lester.

A bit before I picked up Spirit Moves, I read a Sasha Frere-Jones piece in the New Yorker on the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. A true band of brothers--sons of AACM co-founder/Sun Ra trumpeter Phil Cochran. I just picked up their label debut on iTunes and have been sorting through it. It's great groove music, almost all insistent, in minor key, very tight, and more ahead-of-the-beat than today's crop of New Orleans-style brass bands (which you shouldn't expect them to sound like). They're doing their own thing, and have a keen business sense after parlaying street success (literally--in Times Square, and on Chicago's South Side) with web word-o-mouth and now a successful European tour being chronicled in a frank, funny, and frequently updated blog.

"We could set up in a blackout, on a boat, plane, wherever." Love it. Reminds me of Green Eggs and Ham.

Don't expect jazz, per se: these are tunes to grab you, shake you, and put you down again in time for you to catch your train, but it's all very, very tight and a new direction. If you follow them on the web a bit, you'll find out that they--like Douglas, and the AACM, for that matter--are very commited to taking control of the commercial aspect of their music. I suspect we'll be seeing a whole lot of them in the future. Go to their myspace for clips.

If I had to recommend one download from their new album so far, it would probably be Jupiter, an irresistible space-age vamp that lays out a bit longer that some of their other tunes and sounds like the bridge from the theme from Shaft looped by Roy Hargrove overdubbing himself and playing against his own delay--except that it's all acoustic and tight. I'm sure a national tour is right around the corner, so stay tuned.

More later.

It's a tempting offer, but I think I'll pass (but while you're at it, si'l vous plait, pass me my tempting offer!)

2009-06-24T18:17:00.005-05:00

I woke up this morning with a very, very promising offer from amazon. Alas, I can't believe I had the willpower to turn it down:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated music by Duke Ellington, you might like to know that New York, March 1959 is now available. You can order yours for just $950.00 by following the link below.

New York, March 1959
Duke Ellington

Price:

$950.00

Other Versions and Languages

MP3 Download

Album Description
New York, March 1959 by Ellington, Duke

This product is manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.

Track Listings

1. Fat Mouth
2. Lost In The Night
3. Little John's Tune
4. Frou-Frou
5. Dankworth Castle
6. Moonstone

7. Night Stick
8. Lullaby For Dreamers
9. She Was A Twinkling Thing
10. Jamaica Tomboy
11. Still Water
12. Jet Strip

More to Explore

Sincerely,

Amazon.com
http://amazon.com

We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you'd rather not receive future e-mails of this sort from Amazon.com, please opt-out here.

Please note that product prices and availability are limited time offers and are subject to change. Prices and availability were accurate at the time this newsletter was sent; however, they may differ from those you see when you visit Amazon.com.

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Reference 12380820

Please note that this message was sent to the following e-mail address:petergillette....

In other Amazon.Com news, I didn't have the willpower to turn down the new (now 5 vol.) release of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, $127. But here's what I did:

If you buy it via amazon.co.uk, it amounts to $107 (USD) after shipping. So, unless you're in a hurry (and if you're going to read all 3,856 pages before school recommences in the fall, I understand that).

But even though the American release date still reads as June 22nd, the US site is still taking preorders and the UK site doesn't even have an option to buy it anymore. Am I still getting my books that I ordered?! GAH! WHERE ARE MY BOOKS?

Or are the Oxford Music Editors just spending some time away from their families "on the Appalachian Trail," so to speak?

UPDATE: An oh-so polite, oh-so British email from a fine customer servant from amazon.co.uk:

Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience, but "Oxford History of Western Music:: 1 (Oxford History of Western Musc)" appears to have been a surprise sellout.

When you placed your order #XXXXXXXXXXXX, we believed we had access to more copies - we then discovered that every one of our distributors had rapidly sold out.

Major distributors have thousands of copies on order from the publisher, all apparently awaiting the next print run. As soon as more copies become available, we'll be able to dispatch them to our customers.

That's good news, as long as my bargain price is still locked in. Maybe it's finally at an affordable level to be used as textbook material (though that really wasn't its intention). I wonder what an entire Taruskin ~~brand~~ curriculum, a Norton competitor, would look like. In particular, it would be interesting to see what sort of gutsy (provocative?) choices he would have in a hypothetical companion CD. The "authentistic" battle is now the stuff of history (and indeed, I was about five when "historical" went out the window), but a companion box set or--if pigs could fly--an OUP-sponsored Taruskin iMix might be a nifty bit of cross-promotion and a harmless, proverbial grenade that could liven up the discussion on the AMS-listserv. American Musicology's most prestigious mode of, uh, colloquy has somehow become even more dull and ingrown of late.

Would some senior scholar please write something shocking (or at least bracing), if only to liven up my inbox?

Middle C, Sort Of

2009-06-18T09:59:00.008-05:00

So, I was on a gameshow last night on Iowa City cable access. Uh, if you really want, you can digg it?

I remember quite some time ago talking to another TA (I don't remember who, or even if they were a music TA) about how weird it is to write on a board--how odd spelling is, or music notation, when it's giant and right in front of your face. With that caveat, music fans may want to skip to 17:50, where I get a question I (or, you know, a third-grader) should slam out of the ballpark, but I only sort of get it right.

Which begs the question of the century in music pedagogy: do they make whiteboard rostrums? Yes, I know there are whiteboards with music staves already on them, but there's just something about the thought of seeing a teacher line up five pieces of chalk, each broken in its own weird way, that gets lost in this new age of markers.

Of course, who's ever been in a classroom that had two working dry erase markers, let alone five?

What did I learn about myself? (A bulleted list)

I'm a big giant nerd
I don't know anything about beer.
I don't know anything about science.
I'm utterly reliant on a calculator for even basic arithmetic
I'm super nerdy.
I talk with my hands.
I make funny faces.
I fidget.
I talk with my hands, a whole lot.
I make funny faces, a whole lot.
I fidget, a whole lot.
I'm nerdy.
I need to brush up on the British new-wave.

Grand Celebration of Brass Bands and new Eastern Iowa Brass Band CD, Podcast

2009-06-13T16:10:00.005-05:00

I play Eb cornet in the Eastern Iowa Brass Band, a fun way to spend some time with grown-ups (most of whom act like children :)), keep up my finger technique (which has never been my strong suit), and play some listenable, "corny" music. First of all, next weekend, we are having our annual Grand Celebration of Brass Bands in the beautiful Amana Colonies. From the press release:

GRAND CELEBRATION OF BRASS BANDS!

Join Director Casey Thomas and the Eastern Iowa Brass Band (EIBB) for some good old fashioned fun at the 15^th annual Grand Celebration of Brass Bands on Saturday, June 20. This family-friendly event is filled with great music, great food and audience participation. The EIBB is thrilled to be performing at our new venue, the Amana Colonies RV Park, located at 39 38^th Avenue in Amana.

Performing at this year’s Grand Celebration are (in order of appearance) the award-winning Eastern Iowa Brass Band, the award-winning Chicago Brass Band, and the always-entertaining Madison Brass Band. Concerts begin on the hour starting at 11am and run continuously through 6 pm, allowing our audience to delight in the fun and enthusiasm of brass music all day long and all from the same stage. The final performance of the day begins at 5:30 pm and is a mass band performance including all musicians from all three groups. You won’t want to miss this! Ticket prices for the day are $8 for adults and $3 for students.

The Eastern Iowa Brass Band is also celebrating the release of their new compact disc recording. Entitled “Sweet Cornets”, this entertaining CD features such favorites as: “ABBA Goes Brass”, “MacArthur Park”, “Alpine Samba”, and Leroy Anderson’s “Bugler’s Holiday.” This new CD will be available for purchase at the festival, or from their website at www.eibb.org.

I actually played three years ago at the GCOBB with the Chicago Brass Band, where my dad played baritone for awhile. I wasn't a brass-bander in '07, and last year, the Great Flood of '08 utterly destroyed the charming but dusty basin where past GCOBBs have been held.

This is such a great event, very light-hearted and entertaining--very family and senior friendly.

We're also celebrating the release of our new album, "Sweet Cornets." It's really a lovely album, with the kind of recording quality that few local bands feature. I actually came up with the title (I know, corny, right?), and it features the higher half of the band mostly, with solo features and marches intermingling with some pop tunes (an ABBA medley, Macarthur Park, and Hot Toddy). I actually have a feature on there, in an Eb/Bb cornet reworking of Herbert L. Clarke's cornet/trombone duet "Cousins" with solo cornettist Paul Waech that turned out sounding much better than I remember playing it!

To listen to selections online, as well as an interview with our director Casey Thomas, check us out on the brasscast podcast.

If you're a brass-bander, definitely consider picking it up, or buy it as a gift! (My dad's getting a copy for father's day--whoops, spoiler alert!) The cover art, conceived by cornetist Keri Speidel (who keeps up a very entertaining blog here) is especially lovely, and was featured on a CD design website a little while back.

All in all, the strength and growth of the brass band movement in America is a great sign for our culture. Having all of these challenging but friendly local outlets like the EIBB (as well as, for older folks, the New Horizon bands, which I think is just about the best idea ever) we strengthen the relevance of the arts and arts education, build audiences, promote the idea of music as something you do rather than something that's "just on," and build family traditions of music and music-making.

Anyway, check out the podcast, and consider an outing to the Amanas next weekend. There will be plenty of amazing food, beer (if you're into that sort of thing), music, and cameraderie. And I promise: it's sort of indoors, so you won't get rained on!

Update; Cage and the Abstract Expressionists; Art; Languages; Books in Brief

2009-06-11T10:45:00.000-05:00

Greetings, music blogosphere! Or, "Salve, blogosphere!" I've been away for some time from everyday internetting, mainly out of internet fatigue--and research fatigue--but (to paraphrase Flight of the Conchords) also mainly because of my laptop's DC jack, which has been undergoing an intermittent fail ever since Easter, and it has been enduring joint custody with lengthy, unsupervised visitation by its other putative parent--an electronics manufacturer whose name rhymes with Just Lie.

Since then, I've taken a three-week course in Contemporary Art history. It went very well, and I wrote a research paper on Cage and art the art world where I viewed his embrace of chance not as a reaction to integral serialism but as a reaction to abstract expressionism. His late 1960s performance piece Mureau (an excerpt of which is apparently available here in ringtone form? caveat emptor)--and his 1970s chance-derived prints from Thoreau--in a sense took the archetypal American Romantic and dismembered his words and images.

Cage was closely involved with figures like Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell in the early 1950s (to say nothing of Robert Rauschenberg), and--for a musician who was developing a damning critique of The Great Artist and attacking Beethoven at every turn as the fifties progressed--what, say, Clement Greenberg claimed on behalf of the Abstract Expressionists intersects compellingly with where Cage was headed, albeit in the other direction. Here's Greenberg from a 1947 essay (viewable in context via googlebooks):

What we have…is the ferocious struggle to be a genius, which involves the artists downtown even more than the others…Alas, the future of American art depends on them. That it should is fitting but sad. Their isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning. That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this situation is highly improbable. What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million?

Just as in "the Ives myth" (which has now been under deconstruction for as long as it was under construction proper, making it very nearly a straw man these days--the myth has myths and countermyths and a whole constellation of counter-countermyths), Greenberg's artists fall under the Thoreauvian paradigm of isolation; or, to use a more politically charged word with some recent musicological and critical cachet, mavericks. It's them against the world, in a romantic struggle against isolation and underappreciation. If Beethoven is the root of German romanticism, certainly Concord is the root (or a root) of America's romantic impulse and--even while spurring on a love for nature and the like--removing the transcendental content from Thoreau and leaving him as a banal collection of sounds and dismembered image is at once a celebration and critique. But then, that's the fun with Cage: to experience bits of Thoreau as if it were an environment in and of itself. That was the point of Thoreau, after all, wasn't it?

This really was my first experience writing about Cage, and everything that bothers me in Cage scholarship--or conversations about Cage--I did within the first five minutes of starting to type. All of the sudden Cage's humor vanishes into this ether of mystical paen, paradox, or resistance. Just as I've always hated, I of course started reading Cage's early writings and letters into his later, more radical aesthetic, viewing his endpoints as inevitable outgrowths of earlier ideas. (Leta Miller doesn't do this, which is why she's one of my favorite scholars to read, and I happily polished off her smaller Lou Harrison book written with Fredric Lieberman in an unadvisedly late night a couple weeks ago.)

Pitfalls and generalizations aside, I've been reading (and listening to) quite a bit about Cage lately. On the listening front, I've been checking out some of the Arditti albums, listening ever more closely to the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and have been especially fond of the ACO disc The Seasons, which includes The Seasons, Concerto for Prepared Piano, Suite for Toy Piano (also included in a stunning Lou Harrison orchestration that, at times, blurs the line between Cage and populist Copland), and a brooding, contemplative realization of 74, one of the "number" pieces.

I've been sampling everything from the excellent Cambridge companion, to this absolutely stunning Walker Art Center book of interviews with Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, and Bill T. Jones, to the recent Tony Conrad history, and--most of all, lately--Martin Duberman's wonderful, compelling, readable, thorough history of Black Mountain College, published in 1972 but reprinted a couple of months ago. It's interesting--every summer, I place a handful of books into Darwinian conflict, and one wins out--in this case, Duberman's. It's a very compelling, self-conscious attempt to assess the impact and structure of one of America's most unorthodox, defunct, and influential academic communities.

I did quite a bit of extracurricular reading while taking art history, although I did have to study hard for the slide exams, but all of the sudden this week, I'm having to face my fears, academically speaking: language.

Foreign language has oddly never come easily to me. I have a great ear, and a fantastic memory, but not for forms. I have some background in Latin, but I did a really awful job as a Latin student in undergrad. Now, I'm taking a French reading course each morning (which is so concise and unfussy that I'm wondering why undergraduates don't learn that way) and redoing intensive Latin in daily three-hour sessions. Yes, it's confusing, but I'm very relaxed in the summer, and so far have been able to stay on task much more easily. My high school guidance counselor actually recommended Cornell College to me eight years ago during my college search, because there are block classes, and she identified that that's how I learn best. You know what? She was right. I'll be halfway done with two languages this summer, and--having never traveled abroad--am planning on applying for a DAAD language study grant for summer 2010, hopefully allowing me to get back in time to take the second half of the French reading course. It feels good to confront these weaker areas of my mind, jump into it, and see that I could feasibly complete coursework by June 2011, and then launch into a genius dissertation that will change the music world forever, about--[message truncated]--

Dane Rudhyar Archival Project

2009-05-10T21:48:00.006-05:00

So, it's 9:30 PM on a Sunday night, and I'm writing a paper for my History of Music Theory class. After batting around many Charles Seeger-related topics (since I bought "Tradition and Experiment in the New Music" earlier this semester), I found I didn't really have a focus.

So, I decided to broaden my scope and focus my point all at once. So, I'm writing on the compositional treatises of Seeger, Henry Cowell (this blog's namesake), and Dane Rudhyar to show how "oriental" ideas were used to undercut Germanic ideals. It's not a very striking, original idea, but it is interesting to see how American composers felt a colonial burden (even as America was becoming "colonialist" in its own right).

I could go to the library, but I already did tonight, and it's too crowded. Luckily I found, of all things, a fully digitized book from 1921, The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music by a Skryiabinite, Katharine Ruth Heyman (courtesy of Stanford), and this compelling, brand-new study of Chinese music in ultramodern New York by Nancy Rao that appears in the current issue of The Journal of Asian American Studies.

But what of Rudhyar? He's a curious fellow who, to quote Tony Asher, just wasn't made for these times. Like many fans and students of "ultra-modern" American music (roughly put, the kind of experimental music that was popular and cutting-edge in New York and San Francisco during the late-1910s to the early-1930s), I first encountered Rudhyar from his cogent and thoughtful treatment in Carol Oja's prize-winning Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, some of the finest cultural history written during the last decade. In Oja's footnotes, I learn of a spat Rudhyar and Seeger had in the pages of Eolian Review in 1923, a publication my university's library doesn't have.

Never fear--the Dane Rudhyar Archival Project is here! As an early American exponent of astrology, Rudhyar has amassed an, er, "cult following." Need an article from the Eolian Review? Here we go: "What is an octave?"

There's something for you astrological folks as well. If you're the type of person who can ask the question "Does Uranus Rule Astrology?" with a straight face, eat up!

But seriously: Rudhyar is a fascinating figure, and presents an alternate path for American music, a spiritualized path that proceeds not from form but from intuition. The idea that "intuition" provides a governing logic (but wait--here I am talking about logic) grates against our musical containers and academic jargon. Rudhyar's idea about music is that every second has you in its grips in ways that you can't quite understand, in ways that overcome attempts to intellectualize, in dissonant waves that shape and alter consciousness. In short, it's pretty heavy.

Anyway, my point is, because I own too many books (including Oja's, Seeger's, Cowell's, and--I don't even remember where I found it--a 1923 Paul Rosenfeld collection), I can continue to research in my PJs without going to a crowded library--through the magic of obscure digitization.

And what does this blog post prove? It proves that even though I don't have to leave the house, I can still distract myself from research.

Albert Fine's fluxfilms (from 1966)

2009-05-09T16:39:00.005-05:00

I'm determined to make this the web's Albert Fine hub.

Fluxfilm No. 30, Dance. (I'm not sure, but the figure in the film is probably James Waring, for whom Fine wrote at least two chamber pieces as accompaniment. One in particular--for oboe and two flutes--is quite lengthy and blends free cadenzas with free counterpoint, and might be worth editing some day.)

Albert Fine - "Dance"· (1963)
Uploaded by arginati22 - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

I really enjoy Fluxfilm 24 ("Readymade"). What I like about it is that in Fine's composition notebook (er, stave notebook), even in his most experimental period between 1964-1966, he experimented with minimalism, dissonance, rhythmic freedom and the like almost invariably through the lens of more-or-less formalized 2-voice counterpoint. (Here, Philip Glass recalls how exacting Fine was as a teacher, in the strict vein of Boulanger.)

Here, on film, this readymade--is it an upside-down image of a two-legged table?--functions against itself in two voice counterpoint, as if it were a single pitch sampled and set against itself.

Albert Fine - "Readymade"
Uploaded by arginati22 - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Sheet Music on the Web: Trends and Trials

2009-05-07T13:33:00.008-05:00

First, there's a strange "flame war" going on in the musicological discipline--sort of--following this molotov cocktail of an article that used the AMS's year-old resolution against the use of music in torture as a pretense to--ironically? who knows--bemoan the state of music in the academy, and occasionally--ironically? who knows--equating petty intermural politics with torture--ironically? who knows. The resolution itself provoked some fierce debate on blogs and list-servs way back when. The whole thing is rather silly--except that it's not, except that it is--and I took a break from my Finale transcriptions to comment here, if anyone cares to read my two cents.

Speaking of Finale transcriptions...

As I'm in a Music Editing course right now, I'll pass along web notice of some very hip things going on in the Society for Seventeenth Century Music. From their pathbreaking online, refereed scholarly journal for well over a decade, the Society has now turned its sights (OR, WAIT FOR IT..."SITES") to editions. The Web Library of 17th Century Music has amassed a fairly impressive repertoire to date, and these editions are--would you believe it?--supervised by professional scholars and carefully screened, just like a real publishing house. What's more, you've got to love notices like this on a website:

CONDITIONS FOR USERS: Users may download editions, reproduce them for personal use, and perform them in non-profit settings, provided proper acknowledgement is given to both the editor and to the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music. Permission for performance in professional (for profit) settings must be negotiated directly between the performers or their agents and the editor. The editor remains the owner of all rights to the edition.Some works are licensed under a Creative Commons

How many works of obscure seventeenth-century music are ever performed for profit, anyway? The WLSCM fulfills a need for scholars as well. How many credible editions by overlooked (justly or not) composers never see the light of day because of the capital required to launch such a project? Kudos, 17th-Century nerds! If you're interested, check out the Guidelines for Contributors.

Even happier e-news of the music-printing variety: G. Schirmer publishing has launched a nifty new app that is, surprisingly, not being marketed (to the best of my knowledge) as an institutional subscription service: Schirmer on-demand. Downloading a reader, secure scores can be accessed for perusal and printed for a limited number of times. I haven't downloaded the reader yet (because my computer's still in the shop), but received prompt, personal replies from their friendly tech-support folk reminding me to.

Just this morning I received an email update telling me that the following pieces were added to the available scores (which number around 500) :

John Adams

The Chairman Dances

Grand Pianola Music

Harmonielehre

Harmonium

Shaker Loops

Ernst Bacon

Ford's Theatre: A Few Glimpses of Easter Week, 1865

Samuel Barber

Andromache's Farewell

Antony and Cleopatra, Two Scenes

Canzonetta

Commando March

Fadograph of a Yestern Scene

A Hand of Bridge

I Hear an Army

Medea, Ballet Suite

Medea - Cave of the Heart (original ballet)

Must the Winter Come so Soon (from 'Vanessa')

Nocturne

Second Essay for Orchestra

Serenade for String Orchestra

Sure on This Shining Night

Symphony No. 2

Vanessa (vocal score)

Avner Dorman

Spices, Perfumes, Toxins!

Gian Carlo Menotti

The Boy Who Grew Too Fast

A Bride from Pluto

Chip and His Dog

The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi

The Egg

Errand Into the Maze

Fantasia

For the Death of Orpheus

Goya: Suite

The Hero

Introduction, March, and Shepherd's Dance (from 'Amahl and the Night Visitors')

Jacob's Prayer

Labyrinth

Landscapes and Remembrances

Lucy's Aria (from 'The Telephone or l'Amour a Trois')

Lullaby (from 'The Consul')

Martin's Lie

Missa O Pulchritudo

Monica's Waltz (from 'The Medium')

The Most Important Man

Muero porque no muero

Oh llama de amor viva

Shepherd's Chorus (from 'Amahl and the Night Visitors')

The Singing Child

William Schuman

Casey at the Bat

The Mighty Casey

Newsreel in Five Shots (for orchestra)

Prologue

Symphony No. 6

It's always refreshing when a company recognizes how end-users experience their product and sensibly caters to those needs, while protecting their bottom line. By letting conductors, scholars, students, Artistic Directors, and even educated connoisseurs peek in on these rental-only scores, they can more fully become "repertory pieces," they could get performed more often, and I don't that study-score sales ever were brisk for these works. (I'd like to see Ernst Bacon's Amazon.com ranking!)

[UPDATE: ERNST BACON'S AMAZON.COM SALES RANKING IS "#485,771 in Music" .]

Although A-R Editions and other specialty music printers count on libraries as revenue streams for high-end critical editions, perhaps a secure-pdf subscription service would be an even greater revenue stream, and one that is in line with academic trends of online-repositories. (To reiterate, Schirmer's service is free, but I think there would be a market for a legit-subscription service.) Music publishing has been under siege ever since the mimeograph machine was invented, and recently there have been some debates (speaking of stale musicology controversies) as to how much free content is too much free content. Works that can be posted securely to course websites, even with restrictions, in compelling and trustworthy editions will be studied more often and more steadily than those that need to be scanned by hand, or are odd ca. 1900 performance editions of the sort on the IMSLP.

On top of all that, my twitter friends all tell me, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos virtually threatens to put music-stand manufacturers out of business. (All the articles I read talked about newspapers being obsolete, but...I have a slightly different perspective.) I wouldn't be surprised if something like a backlit Kindle would catch on in places like pits on Broadway or in expensive opera houses, where capital is more comfortable (in normal years), and where cuts and transpositions often proliferate during the run of a show, in a workshop stage, or with the arrival of a new singer with a different range. Of course, for this to work in operahouses, Ricordi would almost certainly have to get on board, and this doesn't seem like their kind of project. But who would have expected Supertitles 50 years ago?

And could there be a computer program that could count my rests for me? Please?

So, while the age of paper isn't dead--there are some thoughts that can best be had in ink, by hand--someday you'll have to say goodbye to your precious sketch-studies; in thirty years, musicologists will be defragging discarded zip drives, scanning registries, and looking for any stray temporary files of the .mus variety.

Merry Christmas, Al (A Detractor)

2009-05-06T13:02:00.011-05:00

I've been blogging my research on an obscure-musician-turned-obscure-Fluxus-artist, Albert Fine, here and here.

It's difficult to talk about Fluxus historically because so many Fluxus artists (in the broad sense) made histories part of their artwork. And straightforward diaries (we-did-this-and-then-this-and-so-and-so-was-there) and letters are part of the art too, not concerned with facts per-se. The typical historical records of the time, then--The New York Times, for instance--aren't very helpful either for the who-what-where-when, because of how fringe things were.

I've been getting into Fine's papers, his music, his letters, and corresponding with whatever living associates I can find via the googles, who have been very helpful! But for some reason, while I spent quite a long time searching Boston newspapers, I never really searched the NYT. When you're really getting into something, trying to understand its dimensions and such, perspective goes out the window, something left for the end of the project. Luckily, the Times' art critic, John Canaday, left a fascinating witness statement for the prosecution.

Canaday, from what I can gather (not being an artist or art historian) was greatly distressed by the collapse of technique in art, by the rise of conceptualism and the amateurism expressed by the less adept among the abstract expressionists, the worst of whom showed "exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception." (That phrase, via wikipedia [I'll admit], comes from his very first September 1959 column.)

[PARENTHETICAL PARAGRAPH: Conceptual and performance art have become such an axiomatic feature of the sixties in the popular and critical vocabulary that it's hard to recognize just how transgressive they were. That's also a danger of being "in" criticism, to some extent, and losing perspective: I walked through a quiet library last night listening to the mash-up release of David Tudor's Rainforest II (an electronic piece that sounds like--you guessed it) and John Cage's Mureau, which takes segments of Thoreau's journals and recomposes the syllables according to chance procedures. I actually blog John Adams' reaction to hearing this piece read at Harvard here, towards the end. I bought this at the Amazon MP3 store for a dollar per track--$1.98 in all--a couple weekends ago out of curiousity. It's a very tedious release, to be sure, but I might have been the first person to download it there, because I see it's back to $13.98, and each track is "Album only." Last night, though, I was studying for a massive post-1960 listening exam in an avant-garde music class. While there's no Cage on it, this worked well as a pallette cleanser. But walking around in the quieter corners of the library, I got some funny looks as a strange voice bellowed nonsense over the sound of tropical birds drowning in sine-tones. Far-out is still far-out.]

Back to Fine: So, I found Canady's December 24, 1966 review in the Times here (Proquest subscription), and--since it's just one segment of a longer article--I think it's within the bounds of fair use to reproduce both paragraphs on Albert Fine. First of all, it's notable that this musician had a solo-show as an artist. Second of all, whatever happened to Christmas spirit? Third of all, I wonder what happened to the show--which was open through January 12th--as a result of this review? To someone who would appreciate Fine's art, Canady's scathing review might be the best advertisement. The review is a run-down starting with the Paul Sachs collection of "masters" (including Rembrandt [yes, Rembrandt] and Picasso and Matisse at) at MOMA. Fine is several column inches lower, and the whole thing reminds me of one of my favorite movie scenes:

Albert Fine (Grand Central Moderns, 8 West 56th Street): Presenting itself as avant-garde, this is the stalest, dreariest little show of the year. The only interesting thing about it is the question as to how a sensible dealer could ever rationalize a reason for hanging it, and why a critic who to the best of his knowledge is still in his right mind finds himself bothering to review it. Mr. Fine, who is 34 years old and holds an M.S. degree in conducting from the Julliard School of Music, has gathered together on one wall some detritus (example, a dried banana peel) and other unexceptional objects (example, a shirt cardboard) and has mounted each one crudely within uniform dime-store frames. As a weekend assignment in a freshmen art laboratory section, this display might get a bare passing mark as a demonstration of what Dada was doing 50 years ago.

The rest of Mr. Fine’s exhibition involves a certain amount of painting and drawing (or, at least, the use of the brush, the pencil and the pen) and here he flunks miserably. He is the total amateur, totally lacking in imagination, totally devoid of any technical skill, and totally fooled, it would appear, as to what he is doing. One thing alone justifies the exhibition, and it is not an argument ordinarily proposed as a justification: Mr. Fine’s pretentious infantilism demonstrates the quality of a section of our culture that has lost all respect for itself but doesn’t know it yet. To Jan. 12

Re-shuffling History

2009-05-05T09:07:00.005-05:00

A friend of mine--a performer and conductor at the advanced graduate level, not a "historian"--conducts and teaches at a small liberal arts school and has an opportunity, soon, to maybe teach music appreciation. The school encourages "themes" to their courses rather than drive-thru seminars (Would you like fries with that quiz?), and it's gotten me to thinking about ways to free up the staid curriculum, which has been getting a bad rap since at least the 1930s, when composer and critic Virgil Thomson, spelling out the various employments of composers, identified "the music appreciation racket." The term may have been self-deprecating, in a sense; while I'm a fan of what I know (especially the Stravinsky-lite "Sonata da Chiesa," a mixed chamber quintet I was dead-set on performing but for which I have lost track of the parts post-2008-flood), the biggest dent Thomson made in musical culture was not as another Boulanger apogee, but as a taste-maker in the New York Herald Tribune, writing to a broad but generally cultivated audience.

Music Appreciation--and undergraduate surveys in general--are valuable as a ritualized practice. It's what allows educated musicians of many age levels to say things like, "The catholic church feared polyphony and tropes," "Monteverdi let the text show him new harmonies that caused a richer harmonic language to usher in the baroque era," "Palestrina looked back to Josquin," or "Haydn was able to be more experimental because he worked for the Esterhazys and didn't have to worry about commercial considerations," or "Beethoven's radical experimentation profoundly affected classicism," or"The Tristan chord freed chromaticism and caused Schoenberg to come into being," or the Tinkers-to-Evans-to-Chance American lineage of Ives-Cowell-Cage-Young-Reich.

Specialists in each area will have something to quibble with in each of those statements, but specialists in each area and era will have something to quibble with in anything, won't they? Some are over-reductive myths, some are helpful constructs; but they are stories we tell, creation myths, scriptures. And even if your Reverend doesn't agree with the Apostle Paul when he tells wives to submit to husbands, that's a matter of commentary. The lectionary reading marches on, and, with slight variations (a "one" where a "he" was) there is a comfort in learning the same story your parents learned. In my (back home) house, I think we have editions 2, 3, and 4 or 5 of the Grout, and I learned from a borrowed copy of 6 while I consult (fairly often, actually) the revamped Burkholder 7th.

The details are certainly different, as any number of studies will demonstrate. Character actors have come out of the shadows to steal a soliloquoy from the leading men; but the overarching narrative starts at the beginning and goes to the end, where it splinters out, as teachers struggle each May to somehow get from Gershwin to Shostakovich to Hindemith to Shostakovich to Webern to Boulez to Berio to Adams to Zwillich to Tan Dun in the last 2 hours of classtime.

I wonder if the story could be told backwards and still maintain some modicum of coherence for a scantily educated college student, if we could start in the year 2000 and make our way back to 800 unscathed.

Like any great creation myth, the story of Western music appeals to our sense of formal coherence and mirrored structure. The first story we tell, after thought-experiments back to the Greeks and Boethius, is the emergence of a notated monophonic repertoire and how, through sheer force of will of some bright and hip Parisians and gentle experimentation elsewhere, it becomes a notated repertoire of polyphony. We pause and go back to the Troubadors, and then it's on to Josquin (although I've always thought the Troubadours and Trouveres would be a more bracing starting place for a "History of Pop Music" course than, say, Stephen Foster).

So, monophony becomes polyphony. And what happens at the end of every music history survey? Dozens of Robert-Altmanesque crosscuts. "Eventually, Bartok moves to New York, where he would soon die. Meanwhile, in Bairstow, California, Harry Partch...Which brings us to Varese's Poeme Electronique."

Could we start with an age of diversity, and move backwards into an age of (relative) coherence? Problems would abound, of course, but it seems that they would be the exact same problems as a linearally organized historical survey: how to relate Romantic lied and character pieces to absolute music contemporaneous to it? How to relate French opera and German classicism, or Italian opera and German romanticism? Teaching Turandot a couple of weeks ago, I abruptly showed my discussion sections two minutes of Wozzeck, which, sadly, we weren't covering. It may have been too big of an idea for a glib aside, and too problematizing for a non-major survey course, but would you walk out of a music history survey realizing that Turandot is a "later work" than Wozzeck?

Here's an interesting thought-experiment, an absurd idea that perhaps would catch the fancy of a Cageian: what if we centered an entire Western musical survey around one work, chosen at random, and told the entire history of music so that it would explain why that work came into being when it did? I'm going to press shuffle on my iPod and try it...

Oh my goodness! I swear I did not make this up. (And I'm very glad something like Amy Winehouse or late Dylan or world music didn't come up.) My shuffle selected Messiaen's "The Wood Thrush," from Des canyons aux etoiles. Hmm. Then, my survey would emphasize onomontopeia throughout the history of music; we might start with Josquin, go through the madrigalists, touch on the pastoral, word-painting in lied and the tone poem. We could go back in time to ars nova rhythm, and even further to the development of modes--but we would have to tell our students that these modes, and the modal formulae, were merely anticipations of an equally-divided octave.

Let me try two more, at random:

Whoa, here's a tricky one! "Variation for Violin and Piano," Uri Caine, The Goldberg Variations. Somewhere between Berg, Hindemith, and Wayne Shorter, this movement would not, in a first or even a one-thousand-and-first hearing, suggest Bach when heard out of context of the whole work. We could start with parody/imitation masses, or even cantus firmus, challenge the concept of authorship, make our way through Bach himself as transcriber, through different transcriptions of Bach spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, through Liszt and Busoni, through the downtown New York scene in the early 1990s, teach John Zorn, and then make our way to Caine.

One more:

"Candy Floss," Wilco, from the album Summer Teeth, a loving Beach Boys parody, even down to the Carl Wilson SoCal twang. Hmm... The Beach Boys could be a good gateway into vocal polyphony, but this is too hard. One more, for real this time:

Whoa! What a great one! "The Comedy (Noah and His Wife)," a terrifically strange, serial Stravinsky movement of spoken melodrama. (You can listen to most of it here at the Amazon MP3 store.) We could tell different creation stories through music--find Genesis in a noted missal, go back to Jewish chant, Haydn to Das Rheingold to Milhaud's La Creation du Monde through the first movement of Berio's Sinfonia, vaudeville, the adoption of late style by composers. This piece reminds me (uncannily, actually) of the more frightening, strangest passages from Ellington's Second Sacred Concert, "Supreme Being," that tells the story of Eden through a dense atonal haze, chanted choir, and a happy-go-lucky boy's voice who tells the story of Adam and Eve as if he were the apple.

This might not be a bad, if extremely arbitrary, way to structure a liberal arts class.

Going on with my current "shuffle session," I just came upon a recording of the third movement of Boulez's second piano sonata. 'Twould be a very fine focal point for a course, and maybe throughout the semester I could play it often enough that some would even grow to like it.

Who knows? This is really half-baked, but blogs can be half-baked, right?

Clothespins and Googly Eyes

2009-05-04T12:59:00.007-05:00

So, my technology woes continue. April 24, my computer was returned from tech support, only to have the same problem--a faulty AC jack--act up again a week later; and it's less than a year old!

I'm experiencing life via longhand once again. Frustrated at having to go to a computer lab or not being able to do work (which I often do between 8 PM and midnight, when I'd much rather be at home than in a library), I decided to start collating my research and sketching a narrative longhand. I found that re: my Albert Fine project, my research is coming together. I'm still looking for Nina Meister, who knew the composer's mother and performed some of his works at Harvard in 1990, writing about them and recording a casette that are housed in his archive. It's amazing how hard it is to find someone. Maybe I'll call the Harvard alumni office, or check in the crimson. And how many researchers have been foiled by the "married name" phenomenon?

Championing composers is a laudable feature of musicology and performance. It can lead to overstated scholarship if taken too far (in the musicological realm) but keeps old works alive, and allows new audiences to rediscover unfamiliar or familiar-but-misunderstood composers. I think probably the best, most thorough example of such advocacy comes from a former teacher (of whom I'm a big fan), Robert Levy, and his tireless promotion of Alec Wilder, a figure who is--Bob says this but more eloquently--"too pop for the concert hall and too classical for the jazz club." I remember attending a University of Minnesota New Music Ensemble concert a few years back that included:

--"Raggedy Andy" for chamber orchestra by Elliott McKinley, a doctoral candidate in composition from the University Of Minnesota. The performance will be conducted by Peter Smucker.
--A tribute to composer Alec Wilder, with three of his works: "Neurotic Goldfish" for winds and percussion, "I'll be Around" for voice and guitar, and "Such a Tender Night" for winds and percussion. Jerry Luckhardt, director of the New Music Ensemble, will conduct the performances of "Neurotic Goldfish" and "Such a Tender Night."
--Part II of one of the most influential works of the early 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" for voice and six instruments. Young-Nam Kim, co-director of the NME, will conduct the performance.
--The Woodwind Quintet by Elliott Carter.
--Four Songs for soprano, baritone and chamber ensemble by Andrew Imbrie, conducted by Kim.

It was a bold programming move, one that wasn't entirely flattering to Wilder given the new music audience (and one of the most canonic works--you know what I mean by "canonic"--of the twentieth century on the second half). Still, I think it's important to challenge our musical cultures and communities. Hearing a simple pop song by Alec Wilder next to Schoenberg makes Schoenberg and Wilder seem radical next to one another.

....Speaking of radical, my search for information about Fine took me to the Harvard Crimson website, which is--thankfully--archived online back to 1873! And, as I write about Fine's compositional shift, from a neoclassical style in the vein of Persichetti to really far out, this may be the best anecdote I've ever found about any composer. And note his obscurity. No author is listed, and the piece is quite colloquial, from March 26, 1966 (emphases added):

You're walking past the Bick about 5 in the afternoon and this just incredibly
happy looking guy in the fishbowl beckons to you.
Naturally you try to cross the street.But the light won't change and you kind of peer over your shoulder and he's still there, looking at you. Really seraphically happy.
So what the hell. You go inside. And what do you know. He's not selling marijuana. Fact of the matter is, he's selling clothespins. Or rather, he wants you to go to
Woolworth's and buy a bag of clothespins and then wanders around Cambridge
clipping them on to things. Nice fella really. Says his name is Albert Fine.
He's very explicit that you shouldn't injure anything. Probably a peace creep.
He doesn't have much of an explanation to offer. "It's a happening, baby," he
says. "It's the action not the reason that matters."
So what the hell. You didn't really want to study Chem 20. And it'll be something to tell the fellas back in Q House. You go to Woolworth's. The counter lady gives you quite the fishy eyeball. Seems there've been about 50 guys in already, asking for
clothespins.

This reminds me of something my friends Brent and Luke used to do back at Lawrence, afixing googly eyes with light adhesive to lampposts, table tents, buildings, shoes, doors, fliers--anything, almost always subtly or in the dead of night. I heard someone at Lawrence recently talking about someone who puts googly eyes around, and this is years later. The idea, uh, "stuck."

For that matter, the entire concept of minor history is taking my research in unexpected directions. Letters from Phillip Glass and Peter Schickele suggest that the three were a cohort of sorts in the late 1950s at Julliard. I have fliers from shows they put on at the defunct "Cafe Lorenzaccio" on Broadway between 108th and 109th streets, including Russian folk tunes arranged by Fine, original songs and movies by Schickele and his brother, David, classical works (from Haydn and Telemann), Glass premieres before Glass was Glass, and poetry readings. Schickele even wrote a piece (typtically) entitled "Fanfare for a lost cause : in remembrance of Cafe Lorenzaccio, and its owner and operator during the apex of its history, Burrill Crohn" in 1960. (This actually helps me out: Crohn played trumpet with their chamber group at the bar).

I haven't gotten ahold of Glass or Schickele--I think it might even be annoying if I did--but I can only imagine that they'd probably shake their heads and be amazed that anyone was researching what they did on their Thursday nights during grad school. (Heaven knows how boring the article about my evenings would be if someone ventured to write it.) But it helps to get at a larger question that the program-notitization of musicology often misses: how did artists do what they did, economically, and how did they create a market for it? Here are three figures (pictured together at their Julliard graduation in a Julliard periodical) with impeccable resumes, engaging and interesting personalities, and obvious musical potential. And yet, they weren't thinking about masterworks--or maybe they were; instead, picking up a few bucks, having a good time, and landing a job after graduation from grad school.

Landing a job after grad school? My research is taking me into some scary places.

I have many friends, like my former roommate, composer, songwriter, actor, good-guy, and Brooklynite-via-Northern Wisconsin Jonathon M.T. Roberts, who do insanely creative (often strange) things in New York. Will he be history one day?

And if clothespins, why not googly eyes?

974

2009-04-16T08:50:00.004-05:00

I can never decide what I want to hear when I first wake up, so--naturally--I set it to shuffle. Unfortunately, from time to time, something comes on that is too good for shuffle. These are almost upsetting events, in a way, because whatever follows will necessarily be a let-down, a mood-killer, and trite. Excuse the end-of-Being-There close-up of still water:

I wish there were a way to capture G.G.'s sense of rubato (it is there) and touch, and just have that sense of time to draw on whenever I want it--which is to say, always.

On going paperless

2009-04-14T07:49:00.007-05:00

Maybe the prophet Isaiah is the original Luddite :

Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many

I'm back a the place that I hate most of all: a university library computer lab. My "chariot" (or rather, laptop) gave out on Easter and stopped connecting with the charger (and the charger is fine).

I just bought it in October, but I made sure to go cheap and get a 2-year service plan through Best Buy rather than getting a Mac (even though I use it as if I were a Mac person.) Now, when the chips are down, I find out that Acer's one-year warranty probably covers it too. I also picked up a nifty 250gig plug-and-play USB external hard-drive, but grew unfortunately lax with my backups the last couple weeks. And yet, I use it for everything. I decided to lug it to my classes when I realized that my car, room, basement, mother's basement, and every house where I had every lived for the last 8 years, steadily filled with JSTOR and Project Muse printouts. I'm not one to file my papers, but I do have a nifty-if-compulsively organized hard drive.

I spent five hours on Saturday diplomatically transcribing Albert Fine's Tune and Chorale. I also finished a midterm last week that I hadn't bothered to print out, written out another large sketch for an essay in another course, worked on an editorial policy for my music editing class, and--because Gil Kalish and the Walden Quartet are awesome--I downloaded a few otherwise out-of-print Ives
Folkways recordings from the Amazon Mp3 store, and took a bunch of detailed digital notes of my archival research Friday, entered attendance for my classes in a spreadsheet... Agh!

Best Buy is sending my computer away for either replacement or a motherboard repair. Because it will probably be a replacement, I had to bite the bullet and pay 100 dollars to back up my old hard-drive once and for all, and it would have been more if I hadn't brought in my own hard-drive. But then, I realized I played this entirely all wrong. What I should have done was to buy a replacement battery at 85 bucks, run the backup myself, and--when I get the computer back--I'd have a failsafe.

Sigh. I panicked and threw away money. But the way I look at it, my computer stopped working on Easter, as I came home from church to find it dead. I made 100 bucks playing my Easter gig, and I would have gone to church anyway so, really, I broke even! And yet, here's the weirdest thing: I could not fall asleep last night. I always stick on a DVD and fall asleep to its incandescent glow and white noise. Typically, it's a disc from The Office, but when I really need to fall asleep, I'll put on the best sleep-movie ever, soft enough that I can't make out the words: The Fog of War.

Once I turn out the lights and hear Bob McNamara droning on over a Phillip Glass score, I'm out--but this major part of my routine is gone! One other reason I stayed up, I think, is that my techno-fail caused me to crack open some good books once again. I re-read some oldie-but-goody Taruskin.

Sigh.

During the drive to Best Buy, I put on a calming disc of Scriabin and Griffes and told myself, "I am patient. I am patient." And yes, I was patient. But I still don't like wasting money, especially since I just splurged on a USB Turntable that came right after my fail.

Since I'm going un-paperless for at least a week, I thought I'd share an anecdote about the silliness of PC culture (no, the other "PC") in a university setting. About six years ago, I participated in a university committee, and, while I take seriously my non-disclosure agreement (there were about a half dozen lawyers on the committee), there was one delicious irony that I remember from the early on in our proceedings. As per custom at a liberal arts institution, someone brought up the idea of "going paperless." And yet, to keep everything offsite, we were meeting... in a paper company. Now, I'm all for going green, but I thought it through and realized that 1) that's funny and 2) the company's CEO, a very congenial fellow to whom I ought to drop a line, had endowed the money for my particular named scholarship. When I thought through the chain of philanthropy, I realized that his success behooved me.

I must have paper companies on my brain because I'm cut off from my regular flow of The Office. Grrr!

UPDATE: As if on cue, right after finishing this post, I finally used up my $10.00 University of Iowa printing quota for the semester. But typically, it's gone in the first month, so... Progress? And yet, a handy green-gadget tells me I've printed out, in sum, 1,500 pages at the University of Iowa.
Wait... I'm now printing out five copies of a 22-page brass quintet score. Whoops. And that's not counting my $25 Zephyr copy card. Harrumph. Someone buy me a kindle!

John Hollenbeck/Theo Bleckmann/Meredith Monk ("Listening Diary")

2009-04-08T20:28:00.005-05:00

This will amount to a meme, but I had the great pleasure of seeing composer/drummer/percussionist/wunderkind John Hollenbeck and vocal wizard Theo Bleckmann, who is one of those true artists who can be an instrument, a "voice," a percussionist, a symphony all by himself. I don't know of a male analogue to what Bleckmann does, but if you listen to his singing in Hollenbeck's large ensemble, the closest parallel is Norma Winstone's often wordless work with beloved British trumpeter/composer/bandleader Kenny Wheeler (click the Wheeler link for a vintage video! And you can see a more recent Winstone video here.) In his range and range of expression--from singing a song, beautifully, to croaking or utilizing phonetic percussion, Bleckmann recalls nothing less than Berio's one-time wife (and long-time muse), chanteuse Cathy Berberian:

Here's a video of Hollenbeck and Bleckmann together:

Of course, it would not be to everyone's tastes, and one five-minute segment can't come close to expressing their range, which often creates a kind of looped, fed-back polyphony over a strange vamp that wouldn't have been entirely out of place centuries ago (if it weren't for all the amplification). In fact, while I picked up the Hollenbeck/Bleckmann album Static Still at their gig last week, I've been chewing over Meredith Monk's 2008 Impermanence album, that Bleckmann and Hollenbeck both perform on. A song cycle of sorts, Impermanance presents, in exceedingly warm and frail fashion,

a celebratory and moving meditation on life. Each section of the work, announced cabaret-style by a spoken title (Last Song; Liminal; Seeds; Particular Dance; Disequilibrium Song, Mieke’s Melody #5), provides a non-narrative look at the different facets of impermanence and the joy and wonder of being. Accompanied by voice, piano, clarinet, breath, bicycle tire and other inventive instrumentation, the many scenes -- a montage of video portraits of extreme close-ups of diverse faces; a playful dance of energy unbound; voices rising from the dark singing a song of beginning and opening; an elegant dance of small gestures, performers balancing on chairs, seemingly floating in space -- create a collage of emotion, image, and sound that gently transport us on a journey that is haunting and mysterious, but at its core, essentially human.

I highly recommend the long, haunting, slowly developing "Liminal," that seems to be a collection of modally sung statements about people who are gone, the strange kinds of things that you remember in a person's absence, including my favorite line, one of those lines that rattles around in your brain for weeks: "She wears the same color ribbon as her dog." Lest you're afraid, there's nothing particularly "weird" about that song. It's just great music with a laudable reason for being. I was inspired, lately, by reading an interview with Monk from the early 90s where she discusses the importance of healing to her music.

Also worth checking out (my copy's on order!)--

Bleckmann's Winter and Winter album of Ives songs with avant-garde vocal ensemble kneebody, that was just released.

Packratterdom: David Tudor, Ives

2009-04-06T10:40:00.011-05:00

UPDATE: The folks at the Getty Archive are wonderful, generous, cordial, and helpful! I'm awash in really pertinent research materials thanks to them that came through late last week.

Music historians lament the disposable nature of "print culture" (or rather, manuscript culture) that caused so many early music manuscripts to have their contents scraped off and reused, or to be used to line the horse stables or whatever. Indeed, I'm taking a music editing course now and we indulge in some healthy hypothetical exercises of stematic filiation--that is, trying to relate extant manuscripts to one another. My project, piano works by Albert Fine for the legendary Cage cohort, Darmstadt house pianist, and electronic musician David Tudor, are just direct transcriptions of a polished copy. (And, in the case of one of the works, just a facsimile with editorial comments, since Fine means for the spacing of the music on the page to have bearing on the rhythmic performance of the work.)

I've been getting to know Tudor--a gadfly and virtuoso who is just begging to be biographed--through Cage's reminiscences of him on the surprisingly entertaining Folkways release Indeterminacy, where Cage reads 90 one-minute stories to Tudor's accompianment--vaguely speaking. Tudor has archives at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which you can search here. Particularly interesting, there are Tudor's own scores as well as his realizations of aleatoric works. While I haven't seen these (but would like to), it's interesting to remember that he in a way was the musical midwife for many of these indeterminate works: it was Tudor, who was in many cases charged with setting a set of shapes by Cage or Feldman, for instance, to tones.

Interestingly enough, Tudors archives include these minor works by Fine that I'm editing (see Box 185, 1965):

Anyone in California want to help me out and visit the Getty archive?

Seriously, though--being a packrat is good if you're famous, but who saves papers? I mean, I do, but I don't expect to be famous, and I really should unload quite a bit, but eh.

I've been thinking on packratterdom quite a bit lately for several reasons. First of all, I stand to get a fat tax refund... but my room is in serious disrepair, and I need to clean it to make sure I have all my W2s and such. Second, I've been collecting more scraps of secondary material on Bill Russell, and now (for a very cheap price) have all three published books of his (er, one is about him).

Third, I've been doing a personal research project--not really research project, just an "education" project--in Ives. If I call myself an "Americanist" I really should know Ives backwards and forwards. I just finished Gayle Sherwood Magee's Charles Ives Reconsidered, a recent, graceful, trim narrative that nonetheless fits in a number of delightful digressions that seem digressive at the time but end up emerging as major themes. My favorite is her multi-page contextualization of neurasthenia, arguing that it was almost like an upper-middle class badge of honor and weaving it slyly through the rest of the text. I've also been reading Burkholder's useful collection Charles Ives and His World, and--though it's ostensibly "out of date"--I picked up Frank Rossiter's "Charles Ives and His America" for ten bucks at a used book store. It makes a good teammate to Magee's, since her footnotes tactfully and clearly address recent researches. I'd also be remiss to miss Burkholder's All Made of Tunes, but I've got a long reading life ahead of me, hopefully.

How does this connect to packratterdom? Well, Elliot Carter fired only the first shot in a controversial examination of Ives' dissonation of his works, later spelled out by Maynard Solomon in an epochal JAMS article. Since he didn't actively have an audience--and Magee successfully demonstrates that, Emily Dickonson comparisons aside, he never stopped lobbying for performances or readings of his works save for a handful of driftless bachelor years at the turn of the century--is it possible that Ives was writing, and revising, for posterity, that he imagined his works to be of considerable quality and interest to future listeners and scholars? The notes for his conceptual Universe Symphony seem to suggest that he meant his papers to be seen. Do composers leave a trail of breadcrumbs to an imagined past? Magee demonstrates that in the example Carter shares--of Ives' most enduring orchestral work, Three Places in New England (heard here in the controversial 1930 rescoring)--there are not significant changes in harmony or additions of dissonance; rather, Ives collected existing dissonances in a single piano part, adding a strident foreground level.

I don't mean to open up any cans of worms, just to raise some thoughts from my recent readings. One more question on being a packrat: we have so many fine letters from composers of the past. Do you think, someday, composers will endow their email password to an academic institution in a sort of escrow, or zip files full of finale macros?

A note on Ives recordings: some long-out-of-print recordings from Smithsonian Folkways are now available as Mp3 downloads! This is not new, I suppose, but I've really been enjoying a few. I picked up Paul Zukofsky's and Gil Kalish's reading of the first two violin sonatas for a bargain price on iTunes (not so rare, given the relative brevity of the works), and--having heard about a much-vaunted 1951 reading of the Ives second string quartet by the U of Illinois's Walden Quartet, I moved over to amazon Mp3 to save a couple of bucks. Another relative bargain on iTunes? The four Ives Symphonies and two orchestral sets for 11.98, even if they may not be the most top-shelf readings given your own tastes. Still, those three downloads have proven helpful when reading along with discussions of Ives, in addition to a more recent disc: Pierre-Laurent Aimard's shimmering reading of the Concord Sonata and songs with Susan Graham. It's a lengthy and substantial set. The highlight? The song Ann Street, if only to hear the Frenchman gregariously announce, "Broadway!" in his inimitable accent as per the score's instructions. At 79 minutes, you get a fine product indeed.

A "Minor History" Of Early Minimalism

2009-03-29T20:01:00.007-05:00

At my Prairie Lights, I tend to pick at the remainders table for something interesting and cheap, and then check for new music books (and new-music books), but rarely if ever venture over to the small art history shelf. Luckily, Friday I did, and picked up a great recent book: Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A "Minor" History), from MIT Press's Zone Books, by Branden W. Joseph, a Columbia University professor of Art History.

Who is Tony Conrad? Well, he's a musician and filmmaker took part in LaMonte Young's Theater of Eternal Music, which I mentioned briefly in an earlier post, and has been invested in retelling the history of early minimalism. Conrad and John Cale (violist for the Theater of Eternal Music and a founding member of the Velvet Underground)--and particularly Conrad--have been engaged in an authorship dispute with LaMonte Young off and on, arguing that the sound of the Theater of Eternal Music rather than his individual compositions constitute a musical birthplace of sorts for minimalism (Peter's thumbnail sketch). Young held on to the recordings.

(For that matter, Young's recordings are so darned expensive even after all these years.)

What's so valuable to me is that I'm trying to find a way to "frame" the career of an admittedly minor figure, Albert Fine, who was in an analogous position--except that he straddled the musical "mainstream/establishment," which makes his eventual career choice--as a conceptual artist and filmmaker (like Conrad), rather than a composer--all the more striking. But Joseph has given me a good strategy for how to highlight a minor figure without making silly claims that lose all perspective, that relate the major figures of the day to them rather than keeping the minor figures in the footnotes of the major figures' biographies--which is good, but "the next step," historically, is underway.

The other interesting aspect of a "minor" history is just thinking about the career of Conrad--filmmaker, conceptual rock musician, purveyor of happenings, composer, violinist, etc... I think of so many of my friends in New York, doing "conceptual" things and working menial jobs, and wonder if some day... I don't know, will they be history? That's a loaded question, and I do appreciate that Joseph explicitly argues against of man-on-the-street-is-an-example-of-large-scale-trope cultural studies leveling of the historical playing field. He focuses on telling a compelling story.

Here are a few pertinent videos. If you want to be a true conceptualist, consider playing all at once:

That's all for now... The book is surprisingly sharp in its discussion of the music, given that it comes from a "non-musician," and the little bit I've read (the first two chapters) are quite promising. Exciting! More later.

What Is Popular Is Sometimes Right

2009-03-26T08:07:00.006-05:00

I remember a motivational poster that hung in my seventh grade Spanish classroom, although I don't remember the Spanish: it said, roughly, "What Is Popular Is Not Always Right and What Is Right Is Not Always Popular." There's a good lesson there, of course, but I think that sometimes--as musical performers--we take that to be a truth in and of itself rather than a caution.

Beethoven's ninth, Moonlight Sonata, 1812, Handel's Messiah, Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, Barber's Adagio--psssh! Those people (you know, mindless regional orchestra subscribers and the like) listen to things like that.

I'm playing two concerts next weekend of quite "familiar" music. On Palm Sunday, I'm playing the Messiah, and on Friday night April 3rd, I'm playing in Johnson County Landmark (the world's oddest name for a college jazz band) backing up clarinetist Richard Stoltzman in a Salute to Benny Goodman, at a sold-out Englert Theater in downtown Iowa City. I've been in grad school long enough that I'm beginning to cycle through repertoire: that is, we tried to put this concert on 2.1 years ago, but were foiled due to ice.

It's always an odd feeling in college big bands, because sometimes there's a hold-your-nose kind of culture that comes with "historical" big band music. Ew, vibrato. Ew, simple chord changes. Ew, old people would like this music. And so sometimes I come into a concert cycle pretending to feel that way, but--again and again--I'm convinced that this music, from the inside out, is irresistible. It teaches you how to swing, how to wait, how to hurry, how to hit it, how to hide away.

We're doing a good mix of favorites, small group stuff, cute-stuff, and burning Fletcher Henderson arrangements. I've always been a big Fletcher Henderson fan--my favorite is a ditty of his called Fidgety Feet. It's really wild stuff, inventive and irresistible. And although I'm not playing on this particular tune, "Queer Notions," archaic title and all, is just about the funkiest thing ever done with a whole tone scale:

Then, there's Sing, Sing, Sing. Talk about the cross-sectional writing. Bugle Call Rag--how about that syncopation? "Goodbye" (Gordon Jenkins' Goodman band theme) is sweeter than it is schlocky, and I can never write it off as theme music, since the first version I knew was Sinatra's Only the Lonely reading:

Anyway, I even walk down the street humming the syncopated out-chorus to "Let's Dance." Listen how in this simple--some might even say cheesy tune--the bass and saxes are so far out front of the time, the brass and drums drag it, and Benny is Benny.

What's the effect of that whole tempo game? Go ahead: don't tap your toe.

Lent n' stuff

2009-03-19T14:19:00.006-05:00

So, for Lent, I gave up hamburgers, and I have stuck to it, completely. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of beef brisket, French Dip, Italian beef, etc. But tonight, earlier, I firmly drew the line at counting Patty Melts as an exception, as if rye bread and grilled onions were an odd form of dispensation.

Why hamburgers? Well, first of all, I’m not Roman Catholic or anything like that, and I really didn’t grow up giving things up for Lent. But on Fat Tuesday, I was very hungry, and so woke up and drove to Burger King for breakfast. Then, twice more, I hit up the drive–thru. I felt kind of sick (even though, well, I’m not a very healthy eater since nobody forces me to buy lettuce these days) and guilty, and then realized it was Fat Tuesday. I’m not a big chicken fan (now, the fried batter—that’s something else entirely), don’t really like Turkey, and pulled pork is hard to come by on a daily basis. As a consequence, I’ve been cutting down on my garbage food and, finally, French fries.

But I’m thinking, maybe I should have given up scare quotes, or participating more than five times in discussions during classes, or falling asleep to TV-on-DVD (or TV-on-DVD entirely), or Freecell, or idle contemplation, or spite, or music, or discretionary spending, or unnecessary speech, or purple Vitamin Water.

The other day, in the spirit of Lenten devotional, reached for the Thomas a Kempis book from back in the day, The Imitation of Christ, I once idealistically bought and out of historical curiosity. It sets up some very ascetic ideals for monastic life such as being overly familiar with one another, or speaking unnecessarily--one that really trips me up. I don’t really read that book much.

As a consequence, I’ve noticed that blogging is good for that: paradoxically, anything I blog is stuff I don’t think my friends would want to talk about. It works in theory, but makes for a pretty dull blog.

Yes, this is a post not about esoteric music, although I have been having a tough time not downloading Golijov's La Pasion segun San Marcos

I guess I don’t really talk about my spiritual life much because it’s personal, because I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member, or discredit any church or set of beliefs by my association with it, etc. etc. But perhaps a spiritual theme lately in my thought-and-prayer life lately is to allow myself to be troubled by troubling ideas, to not grapple so much, to let difficult ideas be difficult ideas and to appreciate mysteries--whether they come in the form of people, ideologies, or events. That actually has real consequences for how one experiences music, reads books, and interacts with people--even if I am not about to avoid "idle talk" anytime soon. After all, what, then, would I talk about?!

And I'm not going to lie: Lent is the most lucrative trumpet season of the year. So, that's nice.

A new blog name, and a new little dinosaur

2009-03-17T14:14:00.004-05:00

If you are one of my friends who periodically visits this blog, you may have noticed that I've moved in a more specialized direction. A more professional blog needs a more professional title, because nobody wants to link to "Peter's Blog." And since I enjoy studying American "ultra-modern" music of the 1920s and 1930s, I thought it was appropriate to give Henry Cowell his propers.

On an unrelated note to New Music, I've found my dog's real species, via AP:

Imagine a vicious velociraptor like those in "Jurassic Park," but only as big as a modern chicken. That's what Canadian researchers say they have found, the smallest meat-eating dinosaur yet discovered in North America. This pint-sized cousin of velociraptor, weighing in at 4-to-5 pounds, "probably hunted and ate whatever it could for its size — insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs," according to Nicholas Longrich of the University of Calgary.

Given the description, I wasn't surprised at all that the artists' projection of this new, miniature carnivore looked very familiar to me:

Happy St. Patrick's Day, I think!

LaMonte Young's "Dream House"

2009-03-07T15:53:00.006-06:00

In the Albert Fine archives that I just posted about, there's a curious typescript from early "minimalist" composer and conceptualist LaMonte Young entitled, typically, "The Ballad of the Tortoise or PIERCED EARRINGS: DRONE RATIOS TRANSMITTING THE MANIFESTATION OF THE TORTOISE CENTER DRIFTING OBSIDIAN TIME MISTS THROUGH THE SYNAPTIC STEPDOWN BARRIER," from the time that future Velvet Underground-er John Cale was in Young's long-running Theater of Eternal Music collective. The typescript is as obtuse as anything coming from Young, and--not being a Young specialist beyond some basic familiarity with him--I was struck by his thorough explanation of the "Dream House" concept that has been central to his work.

Being an Iowan and not a hip New Yorker, I was not aware that Young is currently producing one of his Dream House exhibitions with Marian Zazeela at the Guggenheim through April 19, 2009 courtesy of the MELA Foundation.

Here's an excerpt from that vintage typescript. In the name of fair use, I've only reproduced 7 sentences:

And in the life of the Tortoise the drone is the first sound. It lasts forever and cannot have begun but is taken up again from time to time until it lasts forever as continuous sound in Drean Houses [sic] where many musicians and students will live and execute a musical work. Dream Houses will allow music which, after a year, ten years, a hundred years or more of constant sound, would not only be a real living organism with a life and tradition all its own but one with a capacity to propel itself by its own momentum. This music may play without stopping for thousands of years, just as the Tortoise has continued for millions of years past, and perhaps only after the Tortoise has again continued for as many million years as all of the tortoises in the past will it be able to sleep and dream of the next order of tortoises to come and of ancient tigers with black fur and omens the 189/09 whirlwind in the Ancestral Lake Region only now that our species has had this much time to hear music that has lasted so long because we have just come out of a long quiet period and we are just remembering how long sounds can last and only now becoming civilized enough again that we want to hear sounds continuously. It will become easier as we move further into this period of sound. We will become more attached to sound. We will be able to have precisely the right sounds in every dreamroom playroom and workroom, further reinforcing the integral proportions resonating through structure (re: earlier Architectural Music), Dream Houses (shrines, etc.) at which performers, students, and listeners may visit even from long distances away or at which they may spend long periods of Dreamtime weaving the ageless quotients of the Tortoise in the tapestry of Eternal Music.

Makes Milton Babbitt seem pretty clear. Unlike the lucky tortoises, you can only go to these installations from 2PM til Midnight, so if you're in New York, go. You'll have a heavy freak-out experience, bro, until you bug out. Dig?

Via MELA, Kyle Gann has a math-nerdy explication and appreciation of the installation he wrote for the Village Voice.

From the thick of the sixties, the Albert M. Fine archives

2009-03-07T14:20:00.012-06:00

Editor's note: I meant to make some basic edits to this post, which I worked hard to create, but then ended up deleting it. Oh noes! Luckily, though, I recreated it from my Google Reader feed.

The image to the right is a composition by Albert M. Fine (linked to the UI Special Collections department).

Okay, I will just state outright that goofy, aleatory music from the 1960s is some of the most dated art ever, and it can be unapologetically, unendingly tedious. I've talked about in general in the second half of this post. Nonetheless, as a musicologist training in Iowa City, I've been spending some time in the Albert M. Fine papers in the University of Iowa Special Collection Department's Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts holdings. I first started poking around in the archives during the spring of '07, then didn't for awhile, but now revisited it looking for unpublished material to use as Music Editing exercises.

Archives are good for hording, right? But in the name of collective interest, maybe I'll put a teaser to what can be found here out here on the internet in the hopes that some researcher may have some more information on Fine, and so something musical will appear when you google "Albert M. Fine".

Fine was a clarinetist in an Armed Forces service band stationed in Paris during the early 1950s, where he befriended Ned Rorem (a few of whose letters, tame in light of his voluminous personal writings, of which Mescaline in the Poconos is the most entertaining, appear in the archive) among others. Fine trained at Julliard under Vincent Persichetti (who is a prime example of a composer who we play but seldom talk about. Philip Glass's Grove Article (and if you're still reading by now, you're probably the type who would have access to a Grove proxy log-in) by Edward Strickland lists Fine as a student of Boulanger (which makes sense, given the Rorem/Paris years in the early 1950s) as well as one of Glass's private teachers while they were fellow students under Persichetti.

Before Glass moved to Pittsburgh, he worked at the Yale Transport Company as a "pusher," a fact proved by the identification badge of a thuggish looking pretty-boy, "P. Glass," that Glass mailed to Fine, who had loaned Glass some money previously. Glass's letters are particularly funny, especially when he refers to the many "block-heads" at Aspen and "boobys" among New York's composers in the summer of 1960. A roll of four mini-photos of a goofy Glass apparently taken in an amusement park's photobooth is worth the price of a Greyhound ticket to Iowa City.

Also of musical interest: a genial Christmas card from the early 1960s reading "Peter Schikele, Hollywood Composer" where the future P.D.Q. Bach wonders aloud if he'll ever find his niche. (Hint: he did.)
Also of note:

support from budding young IBM mathemetician NY Phil assistant conductor Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg
a fascinating correspondence between a semi-famous Soviet conductor, Fine Persichetti, and the Lincoln Center's impresario Mark Schubart that I'll only tease for now (Would that I read Russian), except to say that Persichetti, through his publishing outlets, helped to funnel new-music scores into the USSR during the heyday of the Khruschev thaw. There is a wish-list (David Diamond was the talk of the town) and letters of receipt.
There are letters to Cage, and typescripts/early scores from LaMonte Young that are the subject of a separate meme.

Fine's scores, largely unpublished, align with some of my recent Taruskin reading that deftly seeks to challenge the way our "histories" are simply chronicles of firsts this, firsts that, and puts anything perceived as "regressive" off to the side. Interspersed in his dated compositions (spanning six years in the early 1960s) are:

ballet scores for David Waring in the vein of Persichetti (wherein "neo-classic" wind textures frame sonorous but non-tonal melodies)
eminently playable solo and chamber works for woodwinds that also recall Persichetti's Parables in their idiom
silly, self-referential songs
piano works that show the influence of Cage and Feldman (particularly in the way that spatial organization on the score is a device of rhythmic notation)
Silly, irreverent miniatures (including a horn quartet with a variety of pseudo-Germanic dedications)
"Game" pieces that experiment in open form according to parameters
(contains profanity) early fluxus scores, including a notated "happening" for the Longy School of Music in 1965 (that ends with a young girl exhorting the audience: "Dear Audience, Fuck You, You are Now invited to Bug Out.”
Works from 1965 for pianist David Tudor that are nothing more or less than early minimalism (not "proto-minimalism"), where two constant broken pentatonic "cells," a half-step apart repeat for 30-40 measures at a time and slowly change.

Now, is Albert Fine a missing giant of contemporary music? Probably not. But early glances at his works are helping to solidify an idea in my mind that seems to be at the heart of Taruskin's career: that our historiography of twentieth century music is written to appreciate, explicate, and--in the fashion of the Romantic Great Men--canonize the True Believers who took their art to the reductio ad absurdum places of rest. But how divorced is this from how music is actually written, performed, and, well, done? The exigencies of the modern conservatory composer are well-known to most of us. You have a labaratory of performers available to you, and no commercial audience to please. Thus, one composer can pick from--and between--any number of techniques.

Think, for a moment, on the notion of a fully-notated happening in 1965, the golden-age of happenings, at the Longy School of Music. Even by 1965, this far-out technique was just that: a commodified technique, a set of formal principles useful for generating more music. But looking at one man's unpublished output from this time period, something stands out: the same man is, in the same month, producing music that questions the nature of music and writing eminently playable, impeccably notated, downright neo-classic works by comparison to Fine's work for "24-piece Fluxorchestra."

On the one hand, the score is becoming a visual document rather than an aural schematic; on the other, his friends and colleagues want some music to play and to dance to. Playing-Music and Talking Music. What better way to prove Cage's ascendancy--not to mention the way he's become defanged--than to notice that his dictums were, and are, just another compositional technique? But if this music were to make it out of that archive in scholarly form, which do you think would attract the most notice from scholars, and which from performers?

Like the other minor American composer that I'm researching, William Russell, Albert Fine has been (and will continue to be) a minor prophet unless one makes him into a John the Baptist for a coming Jesus (John Cage, Steve Reich, etc.). Each composer's career nicely bookends Cage's main period of musical creativity (with the exception of some string quartets in the 1980s), anticipating it, perhaps, and reacting to it, perhaps. Each dabbled in the avant-garde styles of their day, even exhibiting some avant-garde predilection for "firsts," before withdrawing to greener (or, in Fine's case, more "cosmic") pastures. Each had a brief and modest compositional output and probably have, in the process of historical darwinism, died their natural deaths.

Fine went on to be more well-known as a visual/conceptual artist. Indeed, his name is listed in a "mail-art" directory from the early 1970s, so among his correspondence are several crude drawings and unexplained postcards from strangers, including a lovely drawing of an afternoon sky by poet Allen Ginsberg and, tellingly, a pornographic playing card featuring a pantsless cowboy sent mailed without enclosure or comment (just return address) from debatably pornographic photographer/right-wing Bogeyman Robert Mapplethorpe in 1970.

Fine seemed to live the boundaries of the question, "But is it art?" and seemed to relish "freaking out the squares." For a couple hours the past couple Friday afternoons, I've put myself in Cambridge during the 1960s, and, leafing through the thick of it, minimalism, flute sonatinas, and nude cowboys hardly seem so black and white as they would ever get rendered should history ever touch them. The field of twentieth century music history has, via self-consciousness, enacted the rightful process of music history: declare a few leading lights, produce their music ad nauseum, produce their editions, tell their stories, cannibalize that narrative, and move on to the second-tier. Although I should probably start researching more famous composers in order to have a more fulfiling career, I'm having fun right now spelunking through to new footnotes and shaking the mud from my boots.

It's the most beautiful day of 2009:

2009-03-05T14:11:00.001-06:00

Stop surfing the internet and go to a park!

Audio Files Part III of III--Music of Talking and Music of Playing

2009-03-04T13:26:00.003-06:00

*****LIT-CRIT NAME-DROP ALERT*****

“There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic; the same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tremendous if you play him (even badly)—such is Schumann,”

writes Roland Barthes in the (famous? the term is relative) opening to his essay "Musica Practica." Barthes is maybe a tad too glib to be of concrete use on many musical topics, but his general thesis about music and the body seems to have been borne out in the much-talked about (unread by me except in various reviews and a couple excerpts) recent book Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology . Boccherini is perhaps a better test case than Schumann, because—frankly—poor Mr. Schumann had a sad enough life without being on the business-end of a cheapshot.

(Let me pause for a moment: how is it that MS Word recognizes Schumann and Boccherini as words, but still does not believe that anyone would have reason to use the word “chromaticism”?)

I won’t get into the Boccherini book (since I only perused it once while babysitting at a professor's house), but I will propose an emendation to Barthes’ division of musics: it is not the music one listens to, perhaps, but the music one talks about. Now, an eminent Liszt scholar swung through Iowa City a couple of weeks ago and gave one of those delightfully casual British chats during which I found myself trying, in vain, searching the room for a servant to fill my empty sherry glass. He had some dismissive words for “musicology” as a discipline that ignores performance—and, frankly, he has a point. A musicology professor then came in the next week with a prepared quotation from this scholar to rib the theorists: “Music needs music theory like birds need ornithology.” That statement is, of course, silly on its face: if birds didn’t have ornithology, then how would we better protect their habitats in an age of industrialization? Clearly birds need ornithology this day and age. As for the music, I don’t know.

But is the music we don’t play really the music we “listen to”? I think, rather, it’s the music we talk about. Some music—like Kazdin’s, or the more elegant structures of Babbitt—are not exactly sounding documents as much as they are living artifacts of a practice, or animations of a pedagogy. That’s of course a very reductive way to consider Babbitt, but I don’t mean it reductively: in Babbitt’s early piano works through Philomel through his goofy, raggedy faux-jazz, a certain manic joy, contained by means of a charmingly put-on decorum, sneaks out, and that—when I listen (instead of read or write) to his music—has been creeping out in increasing measures. It is idea manifest, and it comes to life not in our puny little ears but as a memory to be subsequently taken in at deeper and deeper levels. It’s as if a special species of bird evolved, a bird with the most elegant innards one has ever seen, a bird that evolved according to our ornithological fetishes, a wondrous bird that exists as if only to give bird-watchers a peculiar pleasure, a bird eager to be dissected and reassembled according to our wishes. Perhaps Kazdin is not on the same level, as a composer, but it too seems to belong in the realm of talking-music—although, one thinks, that combination of instruments is so specific that it was probably written as a gift, to be a slight sort of playing-music. (Hmm… he did an awful lot of engineering for the Philadelphia Orchestra brass…)

Albrechtsberger and Saint-Saens: when are the last time that you have heard these discussed in an academic context, without—in Saint-Saens case, at least—a pre-emptive apology of sorts? What Perspectives of New Music issue doesn’t mention Webern, and—perhaps I’m missing something—how many “John Rutter Issues” has PNM had? Now, do some crazy math with me, new-music lovers: have you ever tried to imagine how many people, per composer, have actually performed Webern in concert in public, even badly? How about Babbitt, Boulez, other warhorses? My guesstimate is: 20,000, 600, 1,200, respectively. How many have sang Rutter works? If you count congregations, I would guess the answer would be in the multi-millions. That doesn’t make either one any more worthwhile; my hypothetical is just meant to underscore the split between music we prize for what it sounds like and music we prize for what we can say about it.

Think about the practical utility of a Voxman publication, for instance: wouldn’t it be a trip to analyze an entire book of Voxman duets—like, really analyze it with lots of silly charts and graphs that find some sort of John Nash-style “hidden tonal network” within a collection? And yet, it would be quite a fine dissertation in some ways. I remember hearing a job talk a handful of years ago where a Doctor of Trumpet presented his dissertation research while applying for a job. He was a very nice guy, and I’ve forgotten his name, so I’ll try to keep identifying information to a minimum. His dissertation was on a serialist trumpet concerto written in the eighties by a composer whose anyone still reading this blog would recognize. His thesis? “This is a masterwork that deserves a permanent spot in the trumpet repertoire.” When politely asked about his experiences playing the masterwork that deserves a permanent spot in the trumpet concerto repertoire, or a real-time sample of his favorite bit to play, the nice man politely demurred. There’s nothing wrong with those dissertations; somebody’s got to be the expert on Composer X’s trumpet concerto, and that is a useful purpose of the dissertation as a genre. And it should be added that, from what I saw of the score, I would never be able to play it, half-tempo, down an octave, or otherwise. But that’s certainly one dissertation archetype that demonstrates a split between playing-music and talking-music. (The guy who got the job didn’t have lots of charts and graphs; he just came in like he owned the place—because he did—and taught his butt, and our butts, off.)

As I’m drawn to kitsch, that sometimes takes me dangerously deep into talking-music territory. I’m thinking of a composer like the Bohemian-born American composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861). I may very well be the only person under the age of 40 in the world today who owns a copy of William Treat Upton’s definitive (er, only) biography of Heinrich. Heinrich is terrific fun to talk about. He’s a swindler, a liar, a scammer, occasionally showing an erratic streak that could possibly intersect with “genius” if one constructed a Venn diagram of the two topics side-by-side. His music is self-absorbed, amateruistic, but overblown and impossibly fussy. As kitsch, it’s a terrific listen. (I also own, I confess, the one CD release of his orchestral music. I found it on a library discard pile for a dollar.)

And as an exercise, I tried playing and singing selections from On the Dawning of Music in Kentucky, his seminal song collection. Maybe in the back of my mind, I thought it could be a Harry Partch, corporeal music kind of thing, that the music would only come alive if I tried to understand it from the point of view of a singer. Now, I’m not a great singer, and I’m a worse pianist, but this was the most awful experience I’ve ever had wading through a piece of music. I’d rather sing a Latvian phone book set to the tune of Babbitt’s Philomel than wade through Heinrich’s awkwardly-phrased, compulsively over-ornamented melodies ever again--as "the music one plays."

My good friend and office-mate Stevie last year is a singer/musicologist, and I think I tried to convince her to sing them at one point, but it’s music that resists performance—and yet Heinrich published these songs in aggressively over-promoted collections available through subscription for the express purpose of domestic music-making. If Sherman’s March To The Sea torched some Heinrich songbooks along the way, it was in that respect a merciful act indeed. Denise von Glahn performed a virtuoso feat by saying something meaningful—nay, illustrative—about Heinrich’s skills as a tone-painter in her The Sounds of Place, leading me to the false hope that I too could say something meaningful about Heinrich’s music. But some obscure composers are notable more for what we can say about the fact of their existence rather than the content of their music. That's not right; but to do it justice, you need some mode of understanding (like von Glahn's spatial/landscape metaphors) that can vindicate the music, in a sense, or free it from its failings in one context or another.

Still, I feel a compulsion to unearth, edit, publish, and yes—YES!—perform Heinrich’s storied Klappenflugel (keyed bugle) Concerto, storied in that it… exists. It gets a few lines in The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments and had a modern premiere a decade or two ago in Australia. Again, great fun to hear, and so many things to talk about concerning Heinrich.

Then again, I could even talk about Glen Campbell.

Well, last weekend I saw an awesome Boulez/CSO concert from the terrace, so I might post about that in the future. Also, my dog Maddy's been begging quite a bit, and there are some funny stories about that that I might blog. And finally, I just bought one famous and fearsome musicological giant's latest collection, many of his "public writings" and occasional reviews. (I've purposely avoided putting his name in the post itself for fear that GoogleAlerts would trigger... nevermind.) It's such wonderful reading, but I don't know if I dare post about it. My one favorite so far, that caused me to excise a large section of this post and re-think it for later, was the dead-on essay "'No Ear for Music:' The Scary Purity of John Cage."

Audio Files, Part II of III: Adventures in Hi-Fi

2009-02-25T13:12:00.005-06:00

900+ words of prelude to this simple, life-changing fact: last week, I decided to go bold and buy a pair of Bose headphones. This was not an easy choice. Last December, in a fitful state of finals panic, I stepped on official Ipod earbuds and my Sony earbuds on consecutive days in the same coffeeshop each time. It was an act of anger, subconsciously, at the time: I think, deep down, I was angry that Finale was being so honest about what my medieval music transcriptions sounded like, which is to say very—um, next topic.

I’ve also been doing some recording sessions with my brass quintet for our Fischoff competition audition/pre-screening video. (Jonathan Allen, our trombonist, has been blogging pictures from our sessions here.) The recording sessions were very enjoyable and informative, especially since we (or rather, the playback was) the authority figure. I like Jonathan's description better:

It has been a fun/challenging/frustrating/rewarding experience.

All told, we put in a fair amount of time and got stacks of usable takes in the UI's Pomerantz Center, which is not a typical performance venue, but had the best acoustics and availability of any building in our campus, in which the recital halls proper have been condemned. Josh Thompson, our first trumpet player, is honing his recording chops, and also cut a very fine audio feed from the sessions we can turn into a more formal demo. During playback, I used Jonathan's Bose headphones and was sold as if Herbie Hancock himself were persuading me.

And I focused my early Bose listening on two recent “American masterworks” (by more or less general acclaim)of the young century: Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls and Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, since both were recorded live by the fine folks at Nonesuch. Under this microscope, this “really listening,” I can hear coughs, programs moving, singers breathing, pages turning, a music teeming with life. Even a recent studio disc—Ensemble InterContemporain’s 2004 DG release of Boulez’s Le Marteau has a live dimension to it, not least because it’s perhaps the most “self-consciously human” rendering of the work of the few I’ve heard; rosin hits strings, calloused hand hits bongos, finger meets key, etc. etc. etc. (More on that work—and recording—in a later post.) Far from embodying the inert, technocratic stasis Boulez is known for, giving an extra dimension to the listening process (and doing so legally, unlike Ellison's listener), a shift in the ear presents an eminently verbal process: a ball of rubber bands coming apart, perhaps, with a few snapping along the way.

I even listened to two recent budget purchases of mine, interrelated purchases of compulsively forgettable guilty pleasures: Neil Diamond and Glen Campbell doing folk-rock covers—sound like plain-faced young ladies with pretty new haircuts who, well, look almost striking in the light. [Several other metaphors were stricken from the record]. The Glen Campbell rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying" in particular is epic: I detect a bunch of suspended, high bass motion that reminds me in particular of "Let's Go Away for Awhile" among other tracks from Pet Sounds, the outro to "I'm So Young" from The Beach Boys' Today album, and even the revolutionary harmoines of "Pom Pom Play Girl" from Shut Down, Vol. II. This is probably because Campbell recorded this album in 1967, right after touring as bassist with the Beach Boys after Brian Wilson's retirement from the concert stage, and performed on the Pet Sounds sessions. But enough about them.)

At the same time, I’ve been reaching an almost evangelical fervor about the process of listening when it comes to my Music Appreeshe students. And, now that the first round of 50+ concert reports are on my desk, I see the monster I have wrought: here are students, many of whom have no musical experience save for middle school chorus or band, scared that their listening won’t be close enough. Perhaps I overplayed the point a bit. The quality of the listening is stellar, for the most part, but accounts of each piece read like a musical box-score, with a few vivid metaphors mixed in. A friend of mine saw some students at a recent piano trio concert furiously taking notes with each change in texture, key, and even dynamic.

Oh, and of course one of the other first recordings I listened to with my new headphones? Andrew Kazdin's awesome Gabrieli productions, that sonically is... Yeah. Nothing more needs to be said on that, everyone knows it's awesome.

Two notes on music blogosphere: Sequenza 21, a Mac person trapped in an overheating Acer

2009-02-23T16:37:00.005-06:00

A friend sent a facebook message alerting me to my mention on the Sequenza21 forum memeing my Babbitt parody. I'm (relatively) new to the music blogosphere, and so hadn't yet been to Sequenza21. It's a great contemporary music site, and it's found its way into my feed-reader now. Yay!

Speaking of feed-readers...

Okay, so personality-wise, and behaviorally, I'm such a Mac person.

So why do I use an overheating Acer and a clunky Palm? Seriously: I fall asleep to DVDs on my laptop, and I always burn myself turning it off.

Sigh. How can all you musicians afford those Macs?

Also, I've un-restricted my twitter feed, so stalk away. I am selective about who I friend, however, because I don't want to get too cluttered, but if you know me (on a facebook level, even) feel free to visit my feed. I should add that my tweets are often very tedious, as I walk and tweet at the same time, and sometimes it's how my brass quintet communicates, so you may not be able to follow much of the tedium. I also tweet about my dog quite a bit.

Audio Files (Part I of III)

2009-02-23T15:43:00.003-06:00

I remember one of my favorite concerts I attended about three years ago, a trumpet chamber recital during my fifth and final spring in Appleton. (Although my memories are respectful, I won't share the performers' name in case they would like to not be associated with the content of this post. It's not a big secret, but I just always feel uncomfortable creating something that will be forever cached to someone else's name via the googles.)

The program was ambitious and wide-ranging, the kind of concert that lasts for awhile, but you don’t mind. For starters, there was the stratospheric Albrechtsberger concerto. I remember at the time, as I was thinking about coming to the University of Iowa, the performer relayed a story about the Albrechtsberger from his time in Iowa City. The piece, a favorite of one of his formative mentors, seemed to be anomalous in the trumpet repertoire for its odd range and the pitches used, which didn’t seem to gibe with the available notes of the trumpet at the time. (Caveat emptor: this is a remembered anecdote three years’ removed about a remembered anecdote about 25 years removed…)

As a grad student at Iowa, hetook the piece to a musicologist on the faculty, who just happens to be an international expert on the Jew’s Harp, also known as the trouba—an easy visible doppelganger for the tromba. A couple years ago, here in Iowa City, I was aimlessly perusing the trumpet concerti in the stacks of the Rita Benton Memorial Music Library, which is soon to be renamed, I hope, post-flood, the Rita Benton Memorial Music Library Memorial Music Library.

(For that matter, any followers of Iowa’s rich musical history will take heart that, per FEMA’s apprehensions re: funding multi-million arts campus renovations with taxpayer dollars in a floodplain, the legendary Himie Voxman has all but officially outlived his namesake music building.Doctor –Voxman graced the apparently-defunct Hancher stage to play clarinet in a band rendition of Festive Overture last spring and, just this past December, he “commenced” with the class ’08, walking across the stage to receive an absurdly well-deserved honorary doctorate (link via "Tubahead"). Six generations of private-lesson teachers would have had to send their students home early if it weren’t for his voluminous duet transcriptions, and the full story of his many, dogged discoveries has yet to be written. Then again, I’m a budding musicologist in search of a specialty living right down the street from his archives. Why don’t I write that full story?!) Mr—excuse me,

Back to the stacks of the Rita Benton Memorial Music Library Memorial Music Library, trumpet concerti: written in what I believably recognize as an earlier version of the hand that admonished reams of my sheet music some couple decades later, in the margin of the first Albrechstberger trumpet score, was a small parenthetical: “originally for Jew’s harp.” It’s funny how important mentors in your life crop up in unexpected places at unexpected times, like the M261 s in the middle of a bleary weekend afternoon.

Back to Appleton. Onto the sensuous and graceful Saint-Saens Septet for Strings, Piano, and Trumpet (which avid Peter’s Blog-ophiles will remember from this post last fall that I prepared as I studied for my masters comps). Then there were a handful of casual Bach two-part inventions with the trombone professor, while the program ended with a bizarre but good-natured aleatoric theater-piece called Bravo! Encore! for trumpet and six hand-clappers.

Besides getting to hear a generous rendition of the the Saint-Saens Septet, my favorite memory from the concert comes from a piece that was performed between the Bach and Bravo! Encore!, if memory serves me right: a set of brief but compulsively organized duets composed by the legendary Columbia classical sound engineer Andrew Kazdin. I’ve “encountered” Kazdin quite often during the past few years, historically speaking, as I’ve fallen lockstep into the Glenn Gould cult. Kazdin was Gould’s producer, and in many ways his analytical alter-ego. Kazdin’s Gould book is worth picking up even for the casual Gould fan, and it is hardly as—excuse the pun—“dry” as books by soundmen tend to be.

(TANGENT: This is without a doubt the worst book EVER by a sound man, full of racially troubling sexual fantasy, star-worship, incessant self-promotion, with dozens of pages of “this-was-how-I- set-up-the-amps-for-the-Japan-tour” tedium. It’s so horrifically bad, and such a blatantly obvious cash-in, that I perversely beg you to read it. You can have my copy, even.)

Kazdin may have been encouraged by Gould’s affably dopey act of contrapuntal evangelism, So You Want to Write a Fugue , which I encountered on an otherwise revelatory disc of Gould’s compositions
I received as a thoughtful 2008 Christmas present.

So you want to write a fugue?
by nt1chk

Kazdin’s set is virtuosic in its thoroughness: canon, in inversion (“is a dangerous diversion”), retrograde, retrograde inversion, at the [insert interval here]. The performers selected a few to perform, but then, in what perhaps was my favorite onstage remark by a live performer ever, the trumpeter stopped before the exact retrograde palindrome (that’s a melody forwards and backwards, for you non-musicians—but if there are any non-musicians still reading at this point, email me, and I’ll send you a dollar) and told the audience that this movement was so academic he preferred to describe it rather than play it.

I think no less than Gould himself would be proud of the performers' insubordination. Compared to other pieces on the program, teeming as they are with “style,” the Kazdin’s composition were bracingly stripped down, unapologetically logical, and were capable of being described as well as performed, an idea unto itself, kept in a cool, dry place.

So, 900+ words of prelude to this simple, life-changing fact (that also, in a sense, relates to Kazdin): two weeks ago, I decided to go all in and buy a pair of Bose headphones.... (Stay tuned for Part II of III, already written but to be published tomorrow!)

A Meme From the Department of Compare and Contrast

2009-02-19T13:55:00.004-06:00

I was just in my car. I had stopped at Prairie Lights and bought a fine Oxford CD of Pergolesi's newly reconstructed Marian Vespers for pennies on the dollar. It's not exactly the most profound music ever written, but certainly lovely and perhaps some of it is worth adapting for the small Vespers group I play with at the Episcopal church.

Now, what disc, praetell, did I pull out of the player? Amy Winehouse's Frank.

Think about it.

Somewhere, an angel smiled.

Wherever Your Thoughts Are

2009-02-18T18:46:00.004-06:00

I've been talking lately about tuning out, and the other day, I shared a lengthy example from John Adams' autobiography about boredom in avant-garde music. It's part of a larger blog mini-project on tuning out that began with my recollection of sleeping through the New York Phil's performance of Schubert's Unfinished:

I do vaguely remember about two minutes of sumptuous, Brahmsian orchestra sound. It washed over me in waves before--just as I decided to mark signposts in the sonata form in order to stay awake--my thoughts on deciding to mark signposts in the sonata form in order to stay awake coupled with the full-blown, fully manned Brahmsian orchestra sound put me fast asleep. I was an incredibly rude waste of a student rush ticket. Something tells me, however, that if Christoph von Dohnanyi had turned around and fixated on one sleeping bum, he may have been offended, but he would not have second-guessed his tempoes on my account.

I'm also doing another small projecct in my life: to actually listen to the music I say is my favorite. To that end, I downloaded Steve Reich's "You Are" album for $5.99. It's bright, chirpy, interesting, caffeinated music. Here's a primitive video knockoff of one of its movements (wait a second while it starts up):

Doing some googling, I ran across one of Reich's many interviews after You Are's release, here. Maybe it's kind of a hippie-ish notion, but I thought his description of "You Are Wherever Your Thoughts Are" fits in with the loose theme of this blog lately:

Here I wanted to go back to Proverb and I picked four short texts. I think they are very interesting to people just because they are so short. Three of them are from the Jewish tradition, one from Wittgenstein, but a lot of people said to me they were like Zen Koans: very short aphorism that invite meditation. "You are where ever your thoughts are". That's true of people, and it's also very true about listening to music. When you are really listening your consciousness is filled with the music and where ever the music goes, that's literarily where you are. Someone taps you on the shoulder and you come back to another reality. But when you are listening your mind is filled with the music. Where ever the music goes, you go too, if you are really listening. Obviously if you are watching TV or listening to the radio this is something different. It is a truth about human beings that they can be physically somewhere but their mind can be elsewhere and that's really where they are.

Simple, right? That's all for now. I have a magnum opus in the works... In progress: a three-parter!