On going paperless

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")

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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:

Stop surfing the internet and go to a park!

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

*****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

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.

More on listening--part III! later.