Category: Analysis

Putting the “I” back in H*story, Part Two: The Man with the Dirty Hands



Daniel Felsenfeld
Photo by Randy Nordschow

The first thing that struck me about Music Downtown, a collection of Kyle Gann’s weekly music columns for the Village Voice from the 1980s and ’90s, is how well it flows. This is remarkable considering these are pieces written for separate occasions over decades with no central point in mind. Gann’s prose is easy on the eyes (no academic doublespeak here), but manages to be, at all points, colorful and cut directly to the point. Unlike many critics, Gann knows that his secret weapon is his knowledge crossed with his entrenched enthusiasms and not just the loveliness of his prose—the fact that he can spin a sentence is a happy accident, one more arrow in his quiver, not the touchstone of his career.

But what makes Gann’s take on this scene so significant is that he did not just fortuitously witness an unfolding; he lived it, was part of it, and continues his contributions to this day. He was, in the most vivid sense, there. Not as an impartial observer who does not “do” but thinks and writes and judges and condemns—the so-called “enlightened other” pose so favored by the more mainstream critics—but as a steeped, way-down-in-the-thick-of-it composer. His hands are dirty. From this perspective, and without a shred of arrogance or self-aggrandizement, he is able to see things more clearly, to respect those who he deems (through his education and vast knowledge of all musics) most worthy. He does write himself into history, and while today one might bristle at his partiality—we live in a world where the appearance of objectivity trumps intimate knowledge in our music critics—his place, even the place he assigns himself, is well earned. If he writes articles about his friends and co-conspirators, I say more power to him: His friends are worth the ink and were certainly not getting much play elsewhere. Some may scream “conflict of interest,” but that notion has been unjustly enlarged to the point where participation in the music world excludes critics from their capacity to judge a priori. Gann poses the counterargument: Deep interest, in the right hands, is the opposite of a conflict.

If Virgil Thomson—a formidable “experimental” composer and longtime critic for the Herald Tribune—serves as both patron saint and cautionary tale to would-be composer-critics, the best and worst example of how one could behave in that situation—best because he wrote so honestly; worst because he famously peddled his influence as a critic to serve his “other” career—Gann stands in contradistinction as an honest, unblemished moral actor. In the juggernaut of his strong opinions, he fears not the wrath of the Pulitzer Prize jury, grant panels, academic job search committees, and the whole compliment of meathook realities with which contemporary artists must reckon. He writes it as he sees it, taking on whole movements, individuals, or particular pieces as he deems necessary, unafraid whose eyebrows tip heavenward. The single greatest argument leveled against composers becoming critics is that they will inevitably be biased against those who do not share their aesthetic choices—this Gann certainly is, never pretends otherwise, and is therefore able to take a very specifically-nuanced insider’s view prefiguring the bloggers by 30 or so years. Yet this does not mean that he traffics in the “thumbs up, thumbs down” notions of criticism, where stars are always stars and incapable of doing wrong. Rather, Gann is capable of honestly judging even those artists he deeply respects; and though he seldom spends precious space praising composers above 14th Street, he refrains (at least in this culled collection) from being overtly nasty—for the most part.

A Brief New Music Geography Primer

The legendary schism of Uptown-Midtown and Downtown (and please, skip these paragraphs if you’ve heard this a million times already), it boils down to venue and stance vis-à-vis tonality. Uptown, the home of the electronic music studio at Columbia University, was home to the serialists and other creators of complex post-tonal music (Babbitt, Wuorinen, Davidovsky); Midtown, Lincoln Center, that was the domain of the Neo-Romantics (Corigliano, Rorem, Del Tredici); Downtown was where indeterminacy, conceptualism, and minimalism—in the form of disparate composers like John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Julius Eastman, Laurie Anderson—was born. It meant a detachment or even conscious abstention from the “normal” classical music scene. No more tuxedoes, no more opulent halls, and no more fat ladies singing high Cs: this was hard-edged music, with rangy influences from points East (like India and Indonesia) to the burgeoning movements of conceptual art tinged with the American rebellion of rock and roll. To Downtowners then and now, America was not and never would be Europe. Performers wore jeans, played electronic keyboards in lofts, staged happenings, eschewed conventions, rocked, rolled, and even from time to time maintained a Zen-like silence, playing some of the most exciting music then available. No musical barrier was safe from this troupe; everything, to them, sang.

For those outside New York who long to be included and bristle at this cartographical assessment derived from the geography of Manhattan, Gann (with appropriate lack of mercy) makes little effort to occlude the truth: that for one shining moment, a moment that he argues is still in progress, the important goings-on below 14th Street have changed the music world. He does not exclude the West Coast—not entirely—but to say that these important musical scenes were happening outside of New York is to claim the rave scene originated elsewhere aside from Manchester, England: not un-true, but to each aesthetic its important locus. For new music, be it fin-de-siècle café society, the Théatre Champs-Elyssées or Phill Niblock’s loft, the word is (as often as not) location, location, location. Gann is unafraid, especially in the age of information where X is always supposed to equal every other X, to claim both unfettered esprit and prestige of place.

–DF

Many will argue that bias prevents Gann from being objective; that objectivity is the only trait a critic must possess—the specious argument that an impartial observer is more attuned to the audience, one of the huddled masses with the skills and desire to cut through the morass and therefore a more honest cultural presence. In this line of thinking the mere observer remains pure, while those in the muddle are inevitably corrupted by their own choices. Gann shows us how true the opposite is: it is his predisposition to accept and respect a certain breed of music that shows that composers should be critics because they have a stake—and not simply a financial stake, either—in the outcome. In fact, Gann knows his Babbitt and Rorem, his Adams and Zorn, very well, even if he doesn’t especially like it—even if he thinks it a destructive force. Know thy enemy.

What Gann’s career proves is that Virgil Thomson’s bad deeds should not be held against the subsequent generations; that those on the inside are just as (or more than) capable of honest critical parsing as those who simply watch and judge. Imagine for a moment a New York Times staffed by Gann, Ned Rorem, and Milton Babbitt. It’s a zany thought, but one that would certainly make for good solid conversation, honest collective perspective, and accountability in the form of their own creative work. “One should join in,” wrote critic (and composer) Theodor Adorno. “Whoever only thinks, removes himself, is considered weak, cowardly, virtually a traitor.”

Gann is almost preternaturally astute on music of his own time that got short shrift in the broader press—though he never does this through general anti-establishment screed, through eviscerating blowback to the critics, or through sheepish, head-bowed apologia. Rather, his means is the intelligent, crystalline, never-before-has-it-been-said-so-succinctly explanation. As one stunning example of many, take what he says about Cage in a surgically accurate 1992 obituary. Gann writes:

“Cage is a music-philosopher, important for his ideas, not as a composer.’ That lame truism is what I wish had died August 12. It’s repeated so frequently, so blithely, by so many people who couldn’t quote you a sentence of Cage, that it’s clearly not true. So congealed is the cliché that when Raphael Mostel wrote a 1990 article for the Times calling Cage “The most important and influential composer of our time,” the editors disallowed the phrase, offering “music-philosopher” instead. (I love the Times. Xenakis is a romantic, Feldman dies a minimalist-expressionist, whatever that is, and for one day Cage was officially a minimalist; a Saturday correction retracted the term. Do they consult the I Ching over there, or just toss coins?)

“On the contrary,” Gann goes on to write, “Cage’s music will live as long as civilization, but his ‘philosophy,’ formed in the ’30s, has already dated.” And later: “His human-negating, non-communicative, materialist approach to sound has never caught on, and becomes less popular each year. If only his philosophy were important, his reputational goose would be cooked.”

You might disagree, but so persuasive is his explanation and so rigorous his backup of same that you are only able to claim aesthetic difference rather than moral imperative. However, it is his cogent, gorgeous explication of how Cage’s music worked, offered with the deep probity that only the most earnest and studied of musical practitioners can summon, that is most compelling. Gann writes:

Why did Cage use chance methods to compose, anyway? Forget randomness: it was a nonidea, a way of de-emphasizing what wasn’t important. If I wanted to spell out a message for you using marbles, I’d line them up carefully in rows and curves. But if it were the marbles I were proud of and wanted you to notice, I’d toss them down randomly. Any arrangement on my part would imply that I wanted you to notice my intentions, not the marbles. Cage’s chance music is that simple. As long as you don’t expect it to be something else, it’s less arcane than the Beatles. He wanted you to notice the sounds. But notes don’t fall on the paper randomly unless you find a method to scatter them. Cage’s chance procedures weren’t the result of sloppiness, but a fanatical attention to detail.

Beautiful, magically specific, thought-out, and in enviably clear language anyone, cognoscenti or no, can understand.

I’ve chosen to quote so heftily from this Cage obit for the simple reason that I, after years of composition study, am no lover of Cage—or at least, would not have featured him until I read this book. I tried. Lord how I did try. I, too, made the error of thinking of him as a philosopher first, a composer after the fact; I found the seriousness with which many composers took him to be risible; and always thought of him as loosey-goosey, lamely stochastic, the “anything goes” composer (an attitude frequently repudiated by Gann in Music Downtown). I imagined the composer (perhaps in reaction to my having seen ten-too-many precious-beyond-description performances of 4’33”) an unwise fool errantly casting stones and cathecting with faddish glee to Eastern Mysticism because he lacked the musico-technical apparatus to do otherwise. Gann, in a single, well-reasoned paragraph, lifted these heavy scales from my eyes—probably the highest compliment I can pay to a fellow composer-critic. Just when I was comfortable being set in my ways, Gann sent me running to my records: I’ve spent the past days in an orgy of Cage listening, and I am happy to report that mine eyes have seen the glory—somewhat. I feel beautifully spun; I love to be proven this wrong in so eloquent a fashion. Not to say I’ve done an utter volte face, but I now understand this important composer with the greater depth of renewed context, and will evaluate him through a more substantial understanding of his music’s purpose and place, not simply through the lens of my own prejudices. Cage, for me, is now a complex artist, not just a partisan debate.

If there is a weakness in Gann’s perspective, it is his completely forgivable tunnel vision concerning his own allegiances. Shell-shocked and battle-weary from the endless self-glorification of the Uptowners, his bunker mentality draws sympathy (alas, not empathy: being only half a decade on the New York scene myself, these fights were and are not my own). He writes off the serialists semi-unilaterally in a way that only the axis (or, more correctly, praxis) can, and is none-too-kind to the Midtowners as well (though, a few slips aside, he does not excoriate them by name as readily). It is a convenient view to think that every serialist is out to destroy music or writes music they cannot hear but that looks good on the page for the sheer benefit of committees and the attendant fetes and glory. It is equally convenient to say that all neo-romantics got where they got by romancing board members and other trustees of culture. There’s a fantastic boolah-boolah to Gann’s rhetoric, one steeped in the fight for the home team. And while they might make us of the subsequent “everything is supposed to be equal” generation a little uncomfortable, Gann’s stance forces us to ask important questions. It is apparent that he thinks that his ilk are the only ones sincerely pushing forward the boundaries of music without guile, and he argues that his set were and are doing things as complex and progressive as any serialist, but in an audibly obvious way. I find it hard to believe that this sector of composers, Gann’s Downtowners, is the only honest bunch while the rest just scam and plot their self-serving ascent. It cannot be that simple. It is not that simple.

What this sort of extreme polemical thinking does do is not only explain the work of those present in the bunker; it also explains the bunker. These wars, as foreign to me as Vietnam, need to be explained, and rather than dismiss Gann as partisan (a fact he does not by any means deny), I accept him on his own terms and learn from his perspective, even if it is not necessarily my own. New York in the late 20th century was an important time and place, one with which classical music is still reckoning, and Gann’s Boswellian capacity as historian will help with the sorting.

Apropos of these struggles immediately preceding the turn of the century, Gann writes:

I can make one ironclad prediction for the coming century: As long as institutions and critics continue to define “composer” as “one who writes in conventional notation for conventional European-style ensembles,” the young composers who get lukewarmly lauded in the newspapers will never have the magnetism of the modernist giants. The Aaron Jay Kernises and Michael Torkes and Augusta Read Thomases of the world, doing their damnedest to integrate themselves with the little old ladies on the orchestra boards, do not offer a creative energy for intellectual discussion to crystallize around. On that we’re all agreed, right? Let’s take the next step together—quick. “The present day composer refuses to die,” said Frank Zappa, and he was right—but the 20th-century composer will be dead in nine more months. Let us not enter the 21st century looking backward.

This is a strong cup of angry hortatory coffee, from a composer-critic deep in the throes of Y2K fever. (Remember that? We all thought things would change in a single night, for better or worse). If you subscribe to Gann’s aesthetic, you might be shouting, “Testify!” If, however, you’ve found yourself sincerely drawn to his declared recherché lot, you might consider pitching the book out the window. (I personally would like to distance myself from what he said, being an admirer of some works of Kernis, Torke, and Thomas.) But this is why articles like Gann’s are called “think pieces.” His polemic is unmerciful, by no means mealy-mouthed, and if he shows enthusiasm only for those composers whom he feels have fully embraced what he considers the quintessential American path, I say fair game to him; he’s only doing his job. Agree or not, his opinions are well founded, and at least he flies his colors loudly and proudly, having proven his right to these opinions through both palpable study and personal involvement: dirty hands. The descriptions of wars are always more profound out of the mouths of veterans than from pundits, however educated, who nursed their strong opinions from afar. Ultimately Gann is accountable for everything he says in one specific way: he backs up his pronouncements with his music.

He goes to Herculean lengths to explain his particular—and it is particular—line of thinking with practical reasoning. “I’ve tried to believe,” he writes, “that Uptown has its own philosophy developing parallel to Downtown’s, but that really isn’t the case. Instead, universities all over (except for the one that was open-minded enough to hire me, I must say [which is Bard College]) are determined to freeze the state of music circa 1964 in cryonic suspension.” This, he claims, is through the analysis and understanding of music written only to be analyzed and understood, not enjoyed. “Pitch-set analysis becomes the criterion of musical analysis,” he writes.

Most impressively, he lays out one spectacular argument to back up his “frozen in 1964” statement:

If I needed a telltale sign of Uptown’s spiritual emptiness, the students handed it to me in their lack of new heroes. When I was in high school 25 years ago, my new-musicky friends and I glommed up every recording by the hot composers of the day: Babbitt, Carter, Ligeti, Boulez. Whom do twentysomething Uptown composers rave about today? Babbitt, Carter, Ligeti, Boulez. The composers they’re influenced by are all septuagenarians, at least. The midcareer Uptowners—Schwantner, Zwillich [sic], Harbison, Shulamit Ran, Wayne Petersen—who get patted on the head by classical critics inspire no enthusiasm from young composers, because they’re so obviously imitators, not originators. Why would anyone model their music after Zwillich’s bland pastiche instead of going directly to the masters on whom she modeled her work? In three decades, the only name that has tentatively joined the Uptown pantheon is Brian Ferneyhough, whose music the average music lover is hard put to distinguish from Boulez.

Again, not to say that I entirely agree with what Gann is saying. I’ve found a number of things to admire in many of the execrable “midcareer Uptowners” listed. What is admirable is the forthrightness with which he says his peace (or his war)—and, more potently, the chutzpah he has in defending what he views to be wholly American music. Since the first notes of opera were sung or the first concertos fiddled on these shores, classical music in America—pace Joseph Horowitz—has been for the most part strictly European, a genteel import from the continent. Gann does not buy this, no sir. He does not assume that the past need be any kind of yardstick for the future, and he is perhaps the only critic I’ve ever read who not only feels this but who can also articulate it clearly and credibly. His ferocity, crossed with his capacity to publicly reason out his own ire, makes him the kind of critic only a composer can (or should) be. Would that there were a dozen more of him, offering these kind of “inside the bunker” perspectives that, agree with his pronouncements or not, are so vital, so daring, so pro-art and pro-progress. Too rare indeed!

Ultimately, what Music Downtown offers is an account from inside of what is now a vanished world. Downtown is not the same as it once was: I type this at the Starbucks at Astor Place, with St. Mark’s Place off in the distance—but my view of Cooper Union is blocked by the newly opened luxury lofts. Those angry young rebels who fought the system are now older, wiser, some venerated, some still obscure, some utterly vanished from the culture industry’s radar. Inevitably, the most vibrant and rebellious spirits grow sated, having less energy and more experience, trading up raw enthusiasm for wisdom. Gann, one gets the sense, would love this not to be true, that he would like the “scene” to be as alive as the bulk of its composers are. His reaction is like that of many a respected veteran: they too-frequently miss the days of the war, terrifying as they might have been, because it was only under that constant threat that they felt most alive. If there were a word for nostalgia for a time and place through which one did not live, I would apply that word to Music Downtown, but there is no such word, at least not in English. Maybe because it is a false feeling. We cannot struggle between Up-, Mid-, and Downtown any more than we can protest the murderous actions of the Kaiser. But what we can do, somewhat through the beneficence of Gann’s generous collection of articles, is pick up where they left off, using the resources of their knowledge and the ballast of their work to forge our own paths, fight our own fights, and pass these on to whomever follows. Things change.

Not to say there is not still a vestigial Downtown—if those composers still write music, then their scene still thrives because the scene is about the newness of the music—but my generation knows that we’ve got battles of our own. Dwindling audiences, daily news of The Death of Classical Music, helpful funding sources reduced to tapped wells, collapsed labels and publishers (again, I write this gazing at what was once the Carl Fischer building) is the miasma we face now—though with no paucity of talent, integrity, or participants, this is a fight we in fact can win. Once, the great schism of tonality versus atonality—Schoenberg contra Stravinsky, the between-the-wars Scylla and Charybdis—was the most pressing matter for a young composer. For those that followed, there was the too-vaunted Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown schism. I wish it were that simple now.

These days, Gann’s presence at the Voice is negligible; he’s now in academia. Our loss is his students’ gain, because as criticism should always be a teacherly impulse, Gann has proven himself—with Music Downtown as evidence—a spectacular teacher. The rest of us can buy his book, which should be read by every composer, performer, presenting organization, music historian, board of trustees, music critic, art critic, art student, scholar, pundit, fan or foe of new music, the entire staff of The New York Times, Pierre Boulez (or willing clone of same), editor, sculptor, indie rocker, Republican, thinker, dreamer, and willing listener.

More Song, Less Art(ifice): The New Breed of Art Song

Corey Dargel Corey Dargel

I honestly can’t think of an art song concert experience that has left me feeling wholly satisfied. Traditionally an art song is defined as a setting of a (pre-existing) poem to music, performed by a classically-trained singer. This way of working involves three degrees of separation between the audience and the song’s creators. First, the composer interprets a poem—a poem that stands on its own as a self-sufficient work of art. Second, the classically trained singer interprets the composer’s music and the poet’s poem, with all the baggage of classical voice pedagogy. Third, the audience interprets the singer’s and instrumentalists’ performance of the song.

First degree—the poet. Have the composer and singer done the poet a favor by framing her or his poem with original music which the poem inspired, and by introducing the poem to an audience of music lovers who might not have discovered it on their own? Maybe…but now no one in the audience can read the poem, not for a while anyway, without remembering the music that goes with it. Every time they come across the line “I must die,” they hear a belting soprano and a muddy glissando down in the dregs of the low piano register. The poem has temporarily lost its independence. “So what,” you might say. “An artist can appropriate whatever she or he wishes.” Legal issues aside, cross-pollination of the arts can be a good thing, and I’m not suggesting that any self-sufficient work of art is sacred. Sampling, quoting, and manipulating pre-existing material is not only viable but fashionable. However, there are plenty of poets for whom the setting of poetry to music is anathema. They don’t write poems to have them set to music, and they are understandably wary of allowing another artist (with whom they have no personal relationship) to translate their work into a foreign medium. Composers who set other people’s poetry have a responsibility to consider how (much) they wish to respect or disregard its autonomy. This is not a small consideration.

Second degree—the singer. It is no secret that plenty of people find classical vocal technique artificial and outdated. Many classically-trained singers fear that navigating multiple singing styles will result in damaged vocal chords and they have the x-rays to prove it! The more versatile vocalists say bel canto training allows students to adjust to various styles, yet it is extremely difficult to find trained singers who are willing to move from pop to jazz to opera to musical theater and elsewhere. The demand for a variety of singing styles exceeds the supply of versatile singers, and most conservatory voice instructors aren’t changing their approach accordingly.


 Monika Heidemann

Monika Heidemann‘s multiplicity as a performer includes singing and playing with ethno nu-jazz group The Animal Channel, electro-pop band The Bunkbeds, Afro-beat band FemmNameless; as well as presenting and performing the music of her mentor, the late composer Steve Lacy. The Monika H. Band’s debut CD, Bright, features her original music and two works by Lacy.

Heidemann often writes her own song lyrics—stream-of-consciousness poems like games of Exquisite Corpse. The album has a similarly evasive quality, confidently traversing a wide range of musical textures, from aggressive rock to phase-shifting postminimalism to sparse waltz to phusion. The remarkable thing is how organically each new idea arrives, and how smoothly and fluently Heidemann and her band navigate those changes. The whole album has a compelling transient quality, like the new beginnings, elusive dreams, and unanticipated comings and goings in Heidemann’s poetry.

Heidemann sometimes sets the words of other poets (including Allen Ginsberg and Mark Riordon on Bright), but she doesn’t take the customary approach of illustrating the text (a one-way street). Instead, she allows the music and the poem to coexist so that each equally influences the other. Her settings allow for the music to bring out what’s missing (or only implied) in the poem and vice versa. When I asked Heidemann how her work is related to art song, she cut right to the point: “My songs were written for no purpose other than creative expression, and that’s true of a lot of popular songs as well. If you take the [formal] definition of art song as chanson or lieder, then most popular vocal music of today could be considered art song.”

Next up for Heidemann is a March 19th Monika H. Band performance at Galapagos in Brooklyn, and the world premiere of a new work commissioned by Capital M on March 21 at The Cutting Room in Manhattan.


Intelligibility of text is an important component of art song, and many classically trained singers are simply unintelligible. The communication of words ironically takes a backseat to tone and musical expressivity, and consequently some singers are more interested in impressing the audience than connecting with them. Supra titles in opera performance and text handouts in art song recitals offer relief from the symptoms without addressing the real problem. The most recent (traditional) art song recital I attended was comprised wholly of songs in English, yet the majority of the audience buried their faces in the program as soon as the concert began; it seemed like a reflex response. Unnatural text setting by the composer is sometimes the culprit, but when vocal delivery is clear and crisp, composers are free to be more experimental with prosody, as in many of Stravinsky’s songs or music by the band Stereolab. Composers’ choices shouldn’t be limited by the constraints of a singular style of singing.

Third degree—the audience. The three-degrees-of-separation method of creating and performing art song obfuscates the intimacy that art song strives to achieve. There is a difference between drama and intimacy. Drama can exist when the audience feels a personal connection to the character portrayed, when the audience is moved, engaged, or surprised by the character’s story. Intimacy requires an additional connection, a personal connection to the performer, even if the performer is portraying a character or telling a story. One hundred percent drama (like bad opera) and one hundred percent intimacy (like self-confessional open mic night at a particular Austin coffee shop) are equally boring in performance. Traditional art song, with all its trappings challenging true intimacy, is moving more and more toward one hundred percent drama. It’s being presented with supra titles or text handouts in formal concert settings; the composer and poet are listening impotently in the audience (if they are even present) while the singer is attempting to embody their intentions, keeping her or his own interpretation either absent or subordinate.

Enter the artsongwriters! They are doing away with the intimacy-defeating three-degrees-of-separation method. Instead, they’re writing their own lyrics and singing their own songs. They’re creating and performing songs that achieve a kind of intimacy so unattainable in traditional art song recitals. They are merging the benefits of their classical training—the ability to read and notate music, audiences that are practiced at careful and thoughtful listening, an appreciation of subtle formal and structural techniques—with the tools and frameworks of pop music—studio production, amplification, performances in bars and clubs rather than concert halls. But don’t mistake what they’re doing as “breaking down barriers between genres,” the much-ballyhooed practice of using inconsequential references to pop, jazz, and folk in classical music (or vice versa). These composers are developing a new and unique style of creative songwriting that does not fit comfortably into any pre-existing genre.


David Garland

Photo courtesy of the composer

David Garland is constantly re-imagining what a song can be. He has always been an active pursuer of the widest possible range of music to listen to, a curiosity that manifests itself in his current position as host and producer of WNYC’s Spinning on Air and Evening Music. “Growing up in the sixties,” he says, “I was already exposed, through folks like Joni Mitchell and Soft Machine, to songs that combined words and music in creative and meaningful ways. When I heard art songs by Ned Rorem, they made me aware of further ways of doing that. With songs like Rorem’s, Tim Buckley’s, Charles Ives’s, and Frank Zappa’s in my ears, I think I was well prepared to wipe the slate clean of songwriting conventions and presumptions.”

Well maybe not completely clean. Conventional formulas do inhabit Garland’s songs, often long enough to establish the illusion of predictability. He provides the recognizable signposts but maneuvers through them in surprising ways, so that your expectations are alternately affirmed and challenged. It’s a consistent and poignant technique that serves his disposition well. “Just as some people write love songs,” Garland explains on his website, “I write control songs—songs about our need, avoidance, and manipulation of that sense of control that we all use to help us function.” Listening to Garland’s control songs, you may have an idea of where you’re going, but you never know how you’ll get there.

Inspired by several of his Spinning on Air guests, Garland has recently been presenting his unconventional songs conventionally, in an “innovative performance format” he impishly calls “guy with guitar.” His new album, Reveal, contains arrangements of his songs for himself and a 12-string guitar he bought for $99. Reveal is available for purchase in a signed-and-numbered limited edition package with artwork by David (a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design), his wife Anne, and their son Kenji. You can find out more at Garland’s website, where you can also download a generous assortment of mp3s from other albums.


There is no excuse for an ignorance of history. The artsongwriters are well aware of the European art song tradition; some of them happen to be classically trained singers who cut their teeth on the music of Ned Rorem and company. They understand and appreciate the tradition, but they haven’t internalized it. The way in which they assemble and disseminate their songs is drastically different from the customary way of creating and presenting an art song. Kamala Sankaram, David Garland, Amy X. Neuburg, and Monika Heidemann are some of these rejuvenators who are removing the degrees of separation between composer, poet, and singer. They are classically- and differently-trained singers who write their own words and perform their own songs, often in non-traditional venues. They are finding new ways to develop the personal, intimate connections with listeners that art song has always strived to achieve.

The artsongwriters are moving away from the operatic influences that have too heavily affected the development of traditional art song. Opera, as I implied before, is a genre in which the vocalist has lost her or his individual performer-identity to overly dramatic expressivity. Individual opera singers are praised not so much for what makes their voices unique but for how closely they approach some universal pinnacle of (European) esthetic purity. To an unseasoned listener, opera singers all sound pretty much the same, as indistinguishable and incomprehensible as an assortment of twelve-tone masterpieces. The artsongwriters take a refreshingly different approach. For them, the essence of the individual voice is more important than the artifice of proper operatic singing. Not that they’re unprofessional and not that they’re incapable of vocal variety (quite the contrary), but they sing clearly and transparently, their own vocal identities never in question. Neuburg, for example, runs the gamut from grandiose diva to electro-folk singer over her astounding four-octave range, and that’s part of what makes her voice so recognizable and unique. For the artsongwriters, the development of vocal technique is linked inextricably to the individual vocalist in a much more obvious, and much more comprehensive, relationship than classical voice pedagogy would typically allow.

The singer-songwriter approach to art song composition is a natural and refreshing alternative to the hegemony of traditional art song and operatic performance. The drama of character development and story/narrative and the abstruseness of poetry masquerading as song lyrics are sometimes present, but intimacy is never sacrificed. If you’re listening to David Garland perform, you’re not only hearing the music of David Garland; you’re also hearing David Garland the person. Whether it’s true or not, when we hear someone singing her or his own words and music, we can’t help but relate the song’s content to its writer. The most remarkable singer-songwriters in the pop music world are those who have cultivated a personality (or, more accurately, a persona) that compliments their songwriting.


 Kamala Sankaram

Photo courtesy of the composer

Classically-trained singer and composer Kamala Sankaram‘s Noir is a piece she wrote for her ensemble/band Squeezebox. It’s a collection of through-composed cabaret songs performed with original “film noir” video. Sankaram and Squeezebox premiered Noir at Pete’s Candy Store on December 22—the last day of the local Transit Workers Union strike. The cozy neighborhood bar was packed with people who had stayed home all day, or people who had walked for hours in the cold to get to and from their workplaces. Sankaram was thrilled with the turnout and hoped that Noir could provide solace for the stir-crazy and the weary. (One of her songs happens to be titled “Show Me the Way Home.”)

“Art songs were typically performed in a salon setting, a much more informal venue than the recital hall,” she explains. “With Noir, I wanted to create something that would be equally at home in bars and rock clubs as in classical music concert halls. I wanted to erase those artificial distinctions between genres and return to a state where music is simply music, as it was in the days of the salon.”

Squeezebox plays tricks with style. Sankaram’s deliberately skewed appropriations of recognizable styles give the songs an elusive quality while the video is a consistent palette of identifiable “film noir” formulas. Sankaram’s original lyrics pay equal homage to pop song clichés and obscure literary references, and her accordion-heavy accompaniments (Sankaram plays the squeezebox) suggest a lounge music for speakeasies of the future. There’s a constant back and forth between ambience and anxiety, framed skillfully by the instrumentalists who perform with the vitality and rawness of a garage band. Sankaram harnesses their deliberately messy energy with her precise and relaxed singing.

Sankaram and Squeezebox will perform at Barbes in Brooklyn on March 20, 2006.


Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, Chocolate Genius, and Sufjan Stevens are a few examples. The artsongwriters are using this approach because it lends itself to a more intimate connection with the average listener. If you’re writing a song for you yourself to sing, clarity of presentation is greatly enhanced.

Speaking of clarity of presentation, the artsongwriters like to use vocal microphones. The microphone is part of their instrument; it amplifies vocal timbres and techniques that would otherwise be inaudible. The qualities of singing that are often inaudible in classical voice performance—the delicious and subtle sounds of “the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose” to quote Barthes’s The Grain of the Voice—can be heard with amplification. There is a technique involved in singing with a microphone, and that technique is rarely taught (or even acknowledged) in conservatories, which is why amplified operatic singing often sounds so ridiculous, and (still) unintelligible.

The artsongwriters use amplification partly for practical reasons, but also (and more significantly) for timbral reasons. The majority of music that the average listener hears is amplified. Every recording of every piece of music is amplified and most people listen to music on CD or on the radio more often than they go to concerts. Even in live performance, more and more composers are requiring amplification. The artsongwriters embrace the paradox that amplification, when done properly, is a natural way of presenting music in our society. Crisp, clear, and sometimes (but not necessarily) loud, amplified instruments and vocals enhance the immediacy, clarity, and (yes) intimacy of their music.

Composers who use commercial-music tools and pop-derived frameworks to create and perform their songs are regularly dismissed and mislabeled by other composers as pop-star wannabes. It’s difficult to disabuse some people of these notions, but it’s worth a shot. The main distinction is between presentation and content: the content of mainstream pop music is usually bland and derivative, but in presentation it sounds fresh and gorgeous because it’s been so intensely polished in the recording studio. The artsongwriters are utilizing the same tools that make commercial music sound great, but the content of their music is hundreds of times more overtly creative than your average Top 40 record.


 Amy X. Neuburg

Photo by Yolanda Accinelli

In solo performances of her songs, Amy X. Neuburg accompanies herself on electric drum set, triggering samples (only a few of which are actually drum sounds) and building textures with overdubbed looping vocals and synthesizers. Her songs are elegantly crafted and overtly clever. The product of an impish, playful intellect with double degrees in linguistics and voice from Oberlin College and Conservatory, her lyrics suggest a perpetual conflict between the person you think is Amy X. Neuburg and the actual Amy X. Neuburg. Is this Neuburg a human being or a humanist? Surely it’s impossible that she’s both!

Her music flirts with the boundaries of convention and experimentation. Just when you think she’s about to cross the line into mundane commercialism, Neuburg shifts to abstruse soundscape; and just as she approaches the threshold of pretentious abstraction, she brings back the vocal refrain that will be stuck in your head for days. “My music has a noticeable relationship to art song in the traditional sense of the term,” Neuburg explains. “As a classically trained musician I often observe a sort of classical formality in my work, and I am concerned with lyrical melodies, vocal drama, dynamic range, texture, emotion, and poetry, and, of course, sexy evening gowns and a lot of curtseying. Where it departs is in my heavy use of technology and my post-modern-ish tendency to juxtapose popular and ‘high art’ styles. But in the context of the twenty-first century, assuming an updated and a broader definition of the term, I’d say these qualities make my music about as ‘art song’ as it gets.”

Lately Neuburg is performing her songs with chamber ensembles. Five Distractions and The Metaphor were recently commissioned and premiered respectively by New Music Works in Santa Cruz, and Present Music in Milwaukee. On March 16, the San Francisco Jewish Music Festival will present the premiere of her piece Beliebig Füllen (Fill as Desired), a song cycle for seven female voices and looping electronics, based very loosely on recipes collected by the women of the Terezin concentration camp. In 2007, she begins work on a full-blown musical with playwright Tanya Shaffer.


On her most recent studio album, Residue, you can listen to Amy X. Neuburg’s polymetric textures in “My Fuzzy Muse” and “Every Little Stain,” her unpredictable harmonic excursions in “Atten-tion,” and her postmodern re-contextualization of a seventeenth-century psalm in “My God.” On her debut CD, Bright, Monika Heidemann gracefully and clearly delivers her deliciously off-kilter prosody. She has cultivated her own unique style with such conviction that more than one jazz writer has proclaimed the discovery of a new genre. Kamala Sankaram’s songs from Noir are perhaps the most radio-friendly of the four, but the tangling, dissonant accompaniments in “Valentine” and the not-quite-unison vocal duet (with herself) in the hyper-strophic “Waiting (the pop song)” command too much attention to accompany your traffic-heavy commute. In “I Am With You,” an early gem from 1982’s Control Songs, David Garland uses intricate tape splicing to “sing” a virtuosic (and beautiful) melody that would otherwise be humanly impossible.

The artsongwriters will be brushed off for some of the same reasons as the most influential minimalist composers were brushed off thirty-five years ago. The clarity and immediacy of their songs are the envy of many a composer struggling to reach beyond existing new music audiences. The artsongwriters’ songs are complex without being complicated. Layers of formal intricacy are present, but they’re not always evident on the surface. The artsongwriters don’t justify the value of their music by pointing to its structural and formal devices, though they could if they were forced to. Their songs are listenable, pure and simple, and they’re listened to by a much wider range of audiences than traditional art song.

Admittedly, the distinctions between pop and art music can be fuzzy. Unlike classical music, pop music celebrates a person’s (or band’s) individual progress without the need to place it in some larger historical context. Today’s classical musicians are beginning to acknowledge the existence of multiple, disparate influences and multiple histories, accepting that living composers are influenced by both Music History and their own individual musical histories. The artsongwriters exemplify this newfound openness; their way of creating and performing music embodies an indebtedness to the art song tradition, but their individual voices are entirely their own, and entirely new.

***

Corey Dargel is a composer, lyricist, and singer whose debut album Less Famous Than You is scheduled for release in April on the London label Use Your Teeth Records.

Dargel will be performing at Bucknell University in March, writing music at the MacDowell Colony in April, and performing in New York City and London in May. He is a participant in the 2006-2007 HERE Artist Residency Program at HERE Arts Center and has received commissions from Dance Theater Workshop (for choreographer Scott Heron), the ensemble Sequitur, pianist Kathleen Supové, flutist Margaret Lancaster, the art song duo Two Sides Sounding, and the Maine Gay Men’s Chorus, among others.

Dargel’s music is published by Automatic Heartbreak (ASCAP). He received his bachelor’s in composition from Oberlin Conservatory where he studied with John Luther Adams, Pauline Oliveros, and Lewis Nielson.

The Friday Informer: Crawling Out From Under the Confetti to Greet 2006

And…..we’re back. 2006 is getting off to a slow, hung-over start it seems, with a few more Best Of and The Year That Was re-caps trickling in.

  • Music writers—including NMBx columnist Andrew Druckenbrod (yay, Andy!)—get some year-end accolades as Jason Gross rounds up the Best Music Scribing Awards, 2005, without prejudice (which is to say, classical music gets to play with the rockers, and no one gets hurt).
  • Also in last year’s news, not sure how I missed this guy, who is taking minimalism to new levels, including only owning CDs of music by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young. [via aworks]
  • The big DRM music news this holiday was the tray card insert in all those new Coldplay discs (a favorite band among the conductor set, it seems—both Salonen and Slatkin have confessed to NMBx that they’re fans). BoingBoing highlights the new rules that greeted those who found the disc in their stockings.
  • In the “hey, wish I had thought of that!” category: Someone, please grab your favorite AM radio DJ and start making audio concert calendars for the new music community in your area.
  • $25 and a video camera sure did do amazing things for the career of this Chicago quartet in 2005. For the truly adventurous, take a crack at a low-budget new music-music video and send ’em our way so we can usher you into similar Internet fame.

Charles Ives’s Approach to Intonation

© 2005 Johnny Reinhard
Published by NewMusicBox


Johnny Reinhard outside Ives’s former New York residence
© 2005 Jeffrey Herman

It is generally thought that, except for a few pieces with specifically notated quartertones, such as the Three Quarter-tone Pieces for Two Pianos and the Symphony No. 4, the remainder of Charles Ives’s music was conceived for conventional twelve-tone equal temperament. But after reviewing Ives’s writings on the subject in letters, essays, and marginalia, I think differently. I believe there is a general tuning for Ives’s music that can best be described as Extended Pythagorean tuning.

Pythagorean tuning is the most widely-used term used for deriving a twelve-note scale from a spiral of pure perfect fifths (the relationship of the third harmonic to the second harmonic: 3/2). Music in Mediaeval Europe was replete with explanations of this tuning which was common practice for most instrumental music until the rise of keyboard temperaments. It is named after the ancient Greek mathematician and musician Pythagoras though its usage in other parts of the world predates him. The Babylonians left tablets to explain how spiraling fifths were used for making musical scales.

Spiraling untempered fifths, one upon another through 12 fifths, leaves an intervallic remainder. There is an excess of nearly an eighth-tone. Conventional equal temperament essentially chops this eighth-tone “comma” into 12 equal parts, and then subtracts each 1/12th of this comma from each of the spiraled perfect fifths in order to close the circle.

(If we use cents to measure the differences between musical intervals, with 1200 cents to the octave, the piano’s “not quite perfect” equal-tempered fifth measures 700 cents. The ideal perfect fifth—which is the basis of Pythagorean tuning—rounds out in whole numbers to 702 cents. Within Pythagorean tuning, the interval of a major third is interpreted as the result of a chain of four 3/2 perfect fifths A-E-B-F#-C# or 81/64 which rounds out to 408 cents. It is somewhat sharper than the equal tempered major third of 400 cents and also nearly an eighth tone sharper than the pure major third of just intonation, 5/4 [80/64], which is 386 cents.)

Extended Pythagorean tuning derives scales with a greater number of total pitches by spiraling beyond 12 perfect fifths. Extended Pythagorean tuning could allow for a different pitch frequency for each distinct spelling of a note: e.g. there would be no enharmonic equivalency of D# and Eb as there is on a conventional piano keyboard, rather they would be two distinct pitches. The chromaticism of Extended Pythagorean tuning offers benefits for both greater consonance and richer dissonance in comparison to 12-tone equal temperament. By spiraling 20 pure perfect fifths the following chromatic scale is formed:

09011418020429431838440849858861267870279281688290699610861110

ABbA#CbBCB#DbC#DEbD#FbEFE#GbF#GAbG#

Such a scale would not require the creation of any additional accidental symbols beyond those already in use in standard musical notation and thus could be easily written. Such a scale would also cover all the accidentals that Ives notated in his compositions and explain his often bizarre spellings of pitches which in standard 12-tone equal temperament would be enharmonically identical, e.g. a Db going up to an F# rather than an Gb, which occurs in a solo cello line in an Ives manuscript, etc.

Since Ives rarely experienced performances of his compositions, and heard practically none of his mature works, it was impracticable for him to demand much in the way of intonational subtlety from musicians of his time period. However, Ives had good reason to anticipate that musicians would eventually make sense of his intentions regarding intonation.

Consonance is a relative thing (just a nice name for a nice habit). It is a natural enough part of music, but not the whole, or the only one. The simplest ratios, often called perfect consonances, have been used so long and so constantly that not only music, but musicians and audiences, have become more or less soft. If they hear anything but doh-me-soh or a near-cousin, they have to be carried out on a stretcher (Ives, Memos, p. 42).

*

Charles’s father, George Ives, who imparted to his son a lifelong quest for new sounds, was experimenting in the 19th century with new tuning possibilities, easily earning himself the highest rank among American microtonalists of that era. Among his inventions were a slide cornet, filling glasses with differing degrees of liquid to get microtonal intervals (a microtonal version of a glass harmonica), and a machine involving violins stretched across a clothes press and let down with weights. While the elder Ives frequently spoke about quartertones, he also frequently explored subtler intervallic gradations and at one point tuned a piano to the overtone-based relationships of just intonation. This must have been a major effort for him, as there is great planning necessary to achieve this. Charles described being impressed that his father could master the transference of the overtone series to the piano without the aid of any contemporaneous outside tool or device such as the Acousticon, a relative of the oscilloscope.

George Ives was quite fond of Hermann Helmholtz’s book On the Sensations of Tone in its English translation by Alexander J. Ellis which had been published in 1875. Significantly, Helmholtz outlined Extended Pythagorean notation in detail. Although Helmholtz admitted that he thought it difficult to hear all the interval relations in Extended Pythagorean, he was able to depict it with clarity. Helmholtz argued for Extended Pythagorean interpretation. “[T]here is no perceptible reason in the series of fifths why they should not be carried further, after the gaps in the diatonic scale have been supplied.” In an appendix to his translation, Ellis had taken Extended Pythagorean tuning through 26 perfect fifths. Ellis also successfully made the case that musical staff notation was invented for both just-biased temperaments (like meantone), and Pythagorean interpretations, “with a distinct difference of meaning between sharps and flats, although that difference was different in each of the two cases.” These notational speculations by Ellis might have been the institutional justification, and invitation, for young Charles Ives to employ such an alternative notation for his original music.

After George Ives died, Charles turned to another mentor, Dr. John Cornelius Griggs (1865-1932), a sought-after baritone and doctoral candidate from Leipzig University nine years Charles’s senior whom Ives scholar Howard Boatwright has described as “next to Ives’s father, the earliest supporter” of Ives’s music (Boatwright Essays Before a Sonata, p. 81, footnote z). Early on in their lifelong friendship, Griggs notably wrote Ives that: “The tempered system at its best is not conducive to correct and vigorous musical thinking, as has been the violin and voice training of earlier centuries.” On a marginalia on a photostat copy of the First Piano Sonata, Ives scribbled out a little polemic. “I was asked once by Dr. G., ‘Was this E# written instead of F natural because E# and F natural are not (not always) the same note?’ ‘Yes…only in the piano machine.’ ‘But they can be [different] if they are in the thought, and in a certain imaginary way in the ears as such” (Memos, p. 255).

Ives left crucial evidence for a unified “acoustical plan” to be applied to the majority of his later music:

“[W]hen a movement, perhaps only a section or passage, is not fundamentally based on the diatonic (and chromatic) tonality system, the marked notes (natural, # or b) should not be taken as literally representing those implied resolutions, because in this case they do not exist” (Memos, p. 190).

In response to a certain “Prof. $5000,” a.k.a. “Grandma Prof.,” Ives castigated the “g—d—sap!” for objecting to “a B# and a B natural in the same chord.” In addition, Ives thought it significant to point out that B natural and B# have a harmonic relationship in a full chord. As if to personally respond to potential accusations against his use of two different Bs together, Ives explained:

Now when both the two Bs are used in chord, there is a practical, physical, acoustical difference (overtonal, vibrational beats) which make it a slightly different chord than the Bs of an exact octave—and [even] on the piano the player sees that and feels that, it goes into the general spirit of the music—though on the piano this is missed by the imaginative (Memos, p. 189).

In other writings, Ives asserted that a B# sounds an eighth-tone higher in pitch than its nearest C. An Extended Pythagorean interpretation of this notation satisfies this condition perfectly. By continuing the spiral of fifths from C from B#, after 12 perfect fifths have been stacked and octave displaced, B# is indeed nearly eighthtone higher (23.4 cents) than its nearest C. Once again, Helmholtz foretold exactly what Charles Ives would later claim for his own music in Memos. “Hence the tone B# is higher than the octave of C by the small interval 74/73” (Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, p. 312).

Ives speculated about the difficulties a composer faced in attempting to circumvent the tyranny of the perfect fifth. “But this is doubtful; the octave and fifth are such unrelenting masters in the realm of the physical nature of sounds” (“Some ‘Quarter-tone’ Impressions,” p. 112-114). His acoustical plan was based entirely on these two intervals, the perfect fifth and the octave. Typically, the ear picks out the dominant perfect fifth—”inexorably,” said Ives—as the dominant harmonic. “The fifth seems to say, ‘You can’t get away from the fact that I am boss of the overtones—the first real partial.'” But the fifth is the same in both Pythagorean (including Extended Pythagorean) and just intonation tunings.

They want to have Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry Thoreau sing Do-Me-Soh—but those men were men—they didn’t sing Doh-Me-Soh—they knew the Doh-Me-Soh, but they didn’t sell it to the ladies all the time, they used it as one of the windows, not the whole parlor, etc. etc. (Memos, p. 188).

Based on Ives’s musical notation, it could be argued that Ives eschewed the simple consonances derived from the major and minor thirds of just intonation (e.g. 5/4, 6/5), favoring the significantly larger di-tone 81/64 major third of 408 cents as his tonal norm, which offers strong melodic counterpoint. By using Extended Pythagorean tuning, Ives could elicit a just quality major chord through use of what his father had termed a First spelling, instead of the usual Second spelling, e.g. A-Db-E rather than A-C#-E. Helmholtz had stipulated that by stacking eight pure fifths, the bottom pitch would create an interval with the top pitch that was only two cents shy of the 386 cents just major third, at 384 cents. This two cents difference is as small as the difference between a pure perfect fifth and the equal-tempered fifth, and it could be effectively masked by the use of even minimal vibrato. It would need to be spelled A-Db, with Db being an eighthtone flatter than C# (C# forming a Pythagorean third of 408 cents above A) satisfying Ives’s insistence that C# is higher than Db. Ives was careful in his writings to distinguish between the overtones and his own preferred acoustical plan. Ives properly recognized the overtones as “the vibrations of all the partials as a sounding unit” (“Some ‘Quarter-tone’ Impressions,” pp. 112-114).

*

Ives struggled with many editors of his music expecting to change Ives’s “mismatched” notation spellings. In one instance, copyist George F. Roberts declared Ives a stickler on notation accidentals and related to oral historian Vivian Perlis how the composer had cautioned Roberts’s colleague, George Price, not to alter any note spellings. Most emphatically, Ives wrote a message to his editor on the front page of the score to The Fourth of July. “Mr. Price, Please don’t try to make things nice. All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have. I want it that way.” (Perlis, p. 188)

It obviously exacted quite a bit from the infirm Ives to spar with respected editors. He was surely grateful to have people accept his music for publishing. Ives apparently had to resort to rationalizing the situation in Memos, in an attempt to quell his internal inferno:

“Price never made a mistake! What mistakes he made were yours. If he thought you had put down the wrong note, he would put it right (right or wrong), and blame you when you had the audacity to say that, not every time there’s a C natural, all C sharps that happen on the same beat in the chord should be scrapped. Then he would get mad and want to charge for correcting your right notes into mistakes. In business and in politics, and in almost every department of life, I know many Prices. But his penmanship was as beautiful as a Michelangelo—to look at a page of those ‘statuettes’ made it hard to jump on him.” (Memos, p. 65)

A 1944 letter written in his wife’s hand, addressed to music editors Sol Babitz and Ingolf Dahl, was in response to potential altering of Ives’s notation in a planned publication of Violin Sonata No. 3. By 1944, Ives was unable to draw a simple straight line as a result of health frailties. It also seems that he felt rather resigned to only a minimal influence on the situation at best (Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World, p. 250), as illustrated by the letter below:

Babitz / Dahl

…He is rather sorry that some flats and sharps have been changed into each other. Mr. Ives usually had a reason technically, acoustically or otherwise, for using sharps and flats. If a D-flat is in one part and C-sharp in another on the same time beat, it was mainly due to some acoustical plan—which he had in mind or was working out or trying to in those days.

But after the first page, whatever changes there are in accidentals (which he hopes are not many, especially in the 3rd movement) do not bother to put them back as the old copy—Either way won’t ‘make or break’ the listener’s ear.

With our kindest wishes to you both
[signed Harmony T. Ives]

Like so many editors before him, John Kirkpatrick had falsely reasoned that “wherever Ives’s non-conformist spellings offer unreasonable hindrances to memorizing, they are changed to what is hoped will be helpful” (Kirkpatrick, Editor’s Notes for Ives’s 3-Page Sonata, 2nd edition, p. 14). Kirkpatrick made it crystal clear that his purpose in limiting the use of accidentals was to facilitate memorization for the performer. By 1974 Kirkpatrick had enough time to reflect on Ives’s tuning and had reported these personal revelations at the Ives Centennial symposia. Reminiscing about his turbulent experiences with the composer regarding the acceptable notation for Ives’s song, “Maple Leaves”:

At the time, I thought it was sheer nonconformism, but then, the more I got into this music generally, the more it seemed to me that he had unexpected tunings in mind, that actually the core of the passage was probably a real A-sharp reaching up toward B and a slightly low F-natural reaching down toward E—what used to be called a fourth and a comma. From then on, I had great reverence for these things (Kirkpatrick, An Ives Celebration, p. 139).

Partly as a result of increasing respect for Ives’s notation decisions, the Ives Society is reportedly restoring Ives’s original spellings in recent editions.

Scholars have certainly rallied around the importance of keeping a composer’s choice of notes as sacrosanct, even if there are no clear reasons for the original choices. Carol Baron was the first scholar to make the case for Ives in this regard. In her 1987 dissertation, Baron sheds light for the first time upon the implications of Ives’s notation choices by taking an errant Kirkpatrick to task. “[I]f standards of conformity are applied to Ives’s spelling, then distortions will result. For example, Ives’s innovative pitch organization was not based on the diatonic melodic and harmonic directions that Kirpatrick apparently assumes to be operating” (Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 1987, p. 115). Thanks to this kind of attention, to what must have seemed a petty detail to the unilluminated at the time, greater focus on intonational issues is made in the performance of Ives’s music today.

Ives’s elaborate verbal defenses—there are several in Memos—articulate his sensitivity and extraordinary concern with the direction, as well as the stasis and degrees of motion, of individual tones in complex harmonic and also microtonal contexts as they relate to the resultant overtones; rational decisions were made. The integrity of Ives’s choices, clearly tied to his compositional process, must be respected in editions of his music (Baron, Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 1987, p. 118).

*

By reading Ives’s notation as reflective of an idealized—and organic—Extended Pythagorean tuning, musical passages gain added significance. One example is the final chord of Section B of Ives’s Universe Symphony, which was written by the composer by the stacking of letter names for the intended notes:

Bb B C C# Eb D# E F F# G G# A C#

Philip Lambert, not recognizing the intended intonational consequences of Ives’s manuscript, wrote that the final chord of Section B should have all 12 tones in the chord, except that there is a D# and an Eb. Based on conventional interpretation, Lambert concluded that the D# was an error made by Ives, and that he meant to leave a plain D, but somehow added a “#” marking to a D because he was distracted:

And at the very end of the page—after a double bar—he makes a vertical list of twelve notes that are probably supposed to form an aggregate. (all pitch classes are represented except pc 2, and pc 3 occurs as both D# and Eb—perhaps Ives erroneously placed a sharp sign after the D) (Lambert, A Universe in Tones, p. 197).

I believe that Lambert is mistaken in his interpretation. In my estimation, no composer would make such a mistake on a final chord of such importance in a symphonic movement, especially when it is written out using letters rather than note heads.

The previous measure has half note Ds played by a solo flute and bassoon under a fermata, before resolving into this tutti no-D chord. When performed in Extended Pythagorean tuning, the fantastic coloring of twelve notes from a total of 21 different possibilities is formidable.

Even larger clusters of pitches occur elsewhere in the Universe Symphony. There are fully 13 distinguishable notes spelled in OU measure 106, Prelude #2 – Birth of the Oceans. Here we have the elusive D natural. Ah, but there is no A natural this time among the 13 notes given. There is no Bb, B#, Db, E#, Fb, Gb and Ab as well. The notes that gradually swell up into this 13-note chord are: B, C, C#, D, D#, E, Eb, E, F, F#, G, G#, A#. Another prominent chord appears at OU measure 27. The Earth Orchestra plays 11 differently written notes which are tied over a barline: A, A#, B, C, D, D#, Eb, E, F#, G, G#. Group I of the Heavens Orchestra adds another two pitches, Bb and F natural, on the downbeat of OU measure 27, making for 13 different notes. And Group II of the Heavens Orchestra plays on the downbeat as well, with an added Db in its top voice, making a grand total of 14 different and distinct notes heard at once.

If interpreted in Extended Pythagorean tuning, there are many other examples of clear microtonalisms in the Universe Symphony. OU measure 78 has the celli playing a Db along with an F# above it, and a B in the double bass. The outlined pure perfect fifth B-F# is averaged up to 702 cents (rather than 701.955…etc). The Db divides the perfect fifth into intervals of 180 cents and 522 cents: quite exotic intervals to hold in harmony for half an OU in duration. Even for modern ears, 522 cents is still quite a fresh interval.

If there was no semantic meaning for distinguishing the note E from a written Fb, then Ives wouldn’t choose both to be played simultaneously in a harmonic lock, like he did in OU measure 112. Similarly, if B natural and Cb were meant to be the same note, why feature a melody alternating between the two which Ives does in the final solo at the end of Section C? In an Extended Pythagorean interpretation of both examples, the interval is a Pythagorean comma, which is only one cent away from an equal-tempered eighth-tone (24 cents).

In an interesting pencil addition to the cover of a copy of the Concord Sonata, Ives rationalized that the “mind, ear, and thought don’t have to be always limited by the ‘twelve’—for a B# and a C are not the same—a B# may help the ear-mind get higher up the mountain than a C natural always” (Memos, p. 189). Here we have a non-tuning system explanation for his insistence on retaining specific choices for notation spellings. But whether reflected as a genuine tuning difference with audible distinctions to be heard, or only the mere psychological trappings of meaning, there can be no doubt that Ives was fully aware of the difference between them.

It is as if Ives walked a fine line between actually hearing the Pythagorean tuning that his writings indicate and a more psychological heightening of musical intent. Ives has made it clear he could use the symbols for notation in different ways. Sometimes the notation corresponded to equal temperament in the usual way, but more often, the signposts had a distinctive meaning to the imaginative sign maker.

On a conventionally tuned piano, where there can only be a psychological factor for an interpretation of Ives’s notation, there is no actual change of pitch to be heard. A “psychological factor” might have some impact on a pianist who imagines B# as higher in pitch than C, according to the composer. However, the piano ultimately tells a different story for it has no residual effect on listeners. We will all hear 12-tone equal temperament when Ives’s music is heard on a 12-tone equal tempered piano. It is only through the elevation of Ives’s ideas in tuning, following his acoustical plan, that the desired effect can be accomplished. If Ives could have had his way, he would have purged the piano of all its tuning limitations.

*

Based on George Ives’s mentoring (which included a thorough understanding of Helmholtz’s On the Sensation of Tone), Charles Ives’s own comments, and the corroborating evidence of “misspellings” found throughout the manuscripts of his musical compositions, Extended Pythagorean tuning is ideal for interpreting most of Charles Ives’s later music without keyboard. However, Extended Pythagorean tuning is only a part of the polymicrotonalism that Ives included in the Universe Symphony, which was Ives’s musical interpretation of the multiple possibilities found in nature.

Contained in the sketches are seven listed pitch orientations designed for inclusion in the Universe Symphony. The first listing is for “perfectly tuned correct scales.” Extended Pythagorean would fit the description for “perfectly tuned correct scales” like a glove. On one occasion Ives introduced his notational ideas to six violinists in a rehearsal of The St. Gaudens. The violinists were informed of the distinctions of Pythagorean tuning with the emphasis placed on the notated Db being lower than the notated C#. “After the players had sensed this difference in playing the passage—say B-B#-C, D-Db-C (to remember the B# and C, and the D and Db etc.)—to me they usually sounded nearer to each other than a quarter-tone, though in the upper and the lower movements I noticed very little difference. Then [I] would try to have the player think and so play the Db as it had been played in going up to D, and then play with the others in a chord—and this had its own way [of being] different to the usual” (Memos, p. 191).

The next tuning Ives refers to is “well-tempered little scales” which would best be represented by equal temperament, rather than irregular keyboard temperaments associated with the likes of Andreas Werckmeister. Third listed is “a scale of overtones with the divisions as near as determinable by Acousticon.” Just Intonation tuning fits impeccably with “a scale of overtones.” Fourth listed is a scale of smaller division than a semitone. “Scales of smaller intervals” would include the quartertones. Fifth listed are scales of uneven division greater than a whole tone, and further non-octave tuning divisions offset by eighth-tones. Listed sixth are “scales with no octave, some of them with no octave for several octaves. Finally seventh, “scales of uneven division greater than a whole tone” which are uneven compound intervals.

The Universe Symphony sketches feature specifically notated quartertones. Sometimes these quartertones appear within the context of the dominant acoustical plan of Extended Pythagorean tuning throughout the piece, at other times whole sections are quartertonal in conception, as with Prelude #3 titled And Lo, Now It Is Night. There even seems to be a special allowance for the vagary a quartertonal orchestra might generate (at least back in 1916). On sketch page Neg. = q3039/Copyflow = 1846, Ives wrote that quartertones need not be exactly pitched. “A kind of 24 scales, varying intervals and overtone vibrations, each its own tonal plan.” This may indicate some added flexibility to the exactly specific quartertones.

*

But, if Ives intended the music we assume to be in 12-tone equal temperament to be tuned to an Extended Pythagorean scale with a total of 21 possible pitches, what are we to make of the music in which he actually specified quartertones, which performers and musicologists have been presenting as music with a total of 24 equidistant pitches?

The common interpretation of quartertones stems from a 12-tone equal temperament model which is then perfectly divided in half, with the size of a quarter-step having the value of 50 cents in every instance. But Ives’s flexibility about the size of quartertones—”A kind of 24 scales, varying intervals and overtone vibrations, each its own tonal plan”—implies a different conception entirely.

Once, young Charles got his curiosity piqued to return to a church to play two pianos that were further apart than a quartertone from each other. When he found they were not available, his disappointment was so great that he determined to describe his experience of lost epiphany in his diary:

In the Sunday-School room of the Central Presbyterian Church, New York, there were, for a while, two pianos which happened to be just about a quarter tone apart, and I tried out a few chords then.

In this connection, and also referring to Father’s glasses tuned in different intervals larger and less than quarter tones, after hearing the two pianos out of tune in Central Church (but as near as I could tell by listening and with tuning forks, [they] were about a quarter tone apart)—a scale (to knock the octaves and fifths out by wider intervals, stretching [the] whole and half tones a little, but keeping the proportions of the scale)—it was started or suggested by these two pianos, and glasses between [the quarter tones]. But one piano was moved before I could get it well grasped in my ears (Memos, p. 108-9).

Ives is expressing something special about the sonority of two pianos tuned well enough each to itself, but somewhat more than a quartertone apart. The sound of quartertones as they sound on pianos is rather fixed in the imagination of contemporary composers. An exact quartertone tuning effectively invokes the 11th harmonic (the interval of 11/8 which is approximately 551 cents, a cent away from the interval between C and F quartertone sharp which would be 550 cents). If, however, two pianos were tuned 60 cents apart instead—as they were for duo-pianists Joshua Pierce and Dorothy Jonas performances and recording of Ives’s Three Quarter-tone Pieces for Two Pianos in the 1990s—the harmonically dreamy properties of the 13th harmonic could be effectively invoked.

*

Charles Ives envisioned a myriad of tuning approaches and the rewards of hearing the intonational distinctions that he specified make a profound difference in the resulting sound and its reception. The intonational clarity is subtle, though fine musicians are sensitive to a perception of improvement in the difference. It is a similar sensation to hearing early composers in their respective intonation-preferred models (e.g., Dietrich Buxtehude’s music in his favored Werckmeister III well-temperament, or John Dowland performed in his own personal irregular tuning, published by his son Robert). Listening to music that matches the sensibilities of the various tuning arrangements reveals a new dimension of meaning, allowing for greater intimacy with the composers through their music creations.

That is, if one can learn to like and use a consonance (so called), why not a dissonance (so called)? If the piano can be tuned out of tune to make it more practicable (that is, imperfect intervals), why can’t the ear learn a hundred other intervals if it wants to try?—and why shouldn’t it want to try? (Memos, p. 140).

***

Johnny Reinhard is the director and founder of the American Festival of Microtonal Music (established 1981). He has been responsible for premieres of major works by Lou Harrison, Harry Partch, Edgard Varèse, and Charles Ives, among many others, as well as the first modern-day performances of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, John Dowland, Gesualdo, Telemann, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn in their original tunings. As an internationally-travelled conductor, composer, publisher, and bassoon soloist, Reinhard has explored a myriad of tunings. This past year, Reinhard has also become a record producer of a new line of compact discs featuring a wide variety of microtonal music on the PITCH label.</p

In Search of Julius Eastman

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Julius Eastman at work


The first-ever commercial recording of Julius Eastman’s music, a 3-CD set titled Unjust Malaise, is now available from New World Records.

I met Julius Eastman in early 1981. We were both hired to be vocalists in a theatre piece by Jim Neu for which Hugh Levick was writing the music. At the first 10 a.m. rehearsal, Julius showed up in black leather and chains, drinking scotch! Julius, while externally outrageous and almost forbidding, was genuinely generous and warm, and not unkind. He was brutally honest, which doomed him (as well as many others) in a field which, if not dishonest, certainly is not forthcoming and can be surprisingly timid and conformist (and which has become increasingly so since that time).

In the fall of 1998, I was asked to teach a course in composition at Cal Arts for “real” instruments. I thought a really interesting approach would be to focus on music for multiples—pieces written for four or more of one instrument—and one piece for multiple cellos that I knew I wanted to include was Julius’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (Joan) for ten cellos. I had attended the premiere of it at The Kitchen in 1981, and I loved its energy and sound. Thus began an almost quixotic seven-year search for the music of Julius Eastman who died in 1990 and whose final years were a life spiraled out of control to the point where he was living in Tompkins Square Park. He’d been evicted from his apartment in the East Village—the sheriff having dumped his possessions onto the street. Julius made no effort to recover any of his music. Various friends, though, upon hearing of this, tried to salvage as much as they could. Most was probably lost.

One of the problems of writing about Julius is that it is difficult to state anything with certainty. A lot of the information out there, if not contradictory, has slightly different details. Julius Eastman was a gay African-American composer of works that were minimal in form but maximal in effect. He was also an incredible performer (vocalist and pianist), best known for singing on the 1973 Grammy-nominated Nonesuch recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King. Raised in Ithaca, New York, where from an early age he was a paid chorister, he came to the piano at fourteen and was playing Beethoven after only six months of lessons. He went to Ithaca College for a year, then transferred to Curtis as a piano major where he studied with Mieczyslaw Horzowski but soon switched to composition. Although best known as a vocalist, he never formally studied voice. In 1968 he moved to Buffalo where he was a member of the Creative Associates, which was under the leadership of Lukas Foss and later Morton Feldman. While in Buffalo, he performed and toured music by many of the most prominent contemporary composers, as well as had his own music performed. He eventually moved to New York City, where he was associated with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, then also led by Foss. Julius performed in jazz groups with his brother, Gerry, a guitarist and bass player in many jazz ensembles, including the Count Basie Orchestra. (The only work by Julius registered with the U.S. Copyright Office is as a lyricist, with his brother listed as composer.)

Looking over what has been written about him, I notice a number of misperceptions. For instance, Tom Johnson, who wrote so well about the New York Downtown scene for the Village Voice during the seventies and early eighties, wrote in 1976 that Julius was a performer discovering his voice as a composer by writing pieces that he could perform. However, Julius had been writing ensemble pieces that were widely admired before that time. Even though the pieces had quite a lot of performances, perhaps they hadn’t been performed in New York, or Tom hadn’t attended those concerts. I have a feeling that once Julius left Buffalo, he didn’t have a ready group of musicians to perform his work any more, so he started to write pieces that he could perform. Indeed, a look at his list of compositions shows that his earliest pieces were for solo piano, and then, once he got to Buffalo, he wrote compositions for ensembles and/or instruments that he didn’t play.

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A page from one of the few scores by Julius Eastman still known to exist. But who knows what else may be hidden in someone’s trunk?
Click on thumbnail for larger image

Another observation that I’ve made is that once he left Buffalo, the tone of the titles of his pieces started to change, from The Moon’s Silent Modulation (1970) to If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich (1977), Evil Nigger (1979), etc. Not only had Julius left the protective and nurturing environment of Buffalo, but in New York the divisions between Uptown and Downtown were more evident, and Julius was caught between both worlds. He had a foot in both camps. He appeared with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and performed works by Hans Werner Henze and Peter Maxwell Davies. Meanwhile, he was also performing and/or conducting with Downtown composers such as Meredith Monk, Peter Gordon, and Arthur Russell. Evan Lurie, who studied composition with Julius, told me that Julius insisted on clear penmanship when writing scores, the correct way to notate music, which materials to use, etc., while at the same time producing scores that could test the patience of a saint to figure out.

I didn’t know Julius all that well, but I did have conversations with him about composers of that time, and he was dismissive of a lot of them. I think that what it boiled down to was integrity. He had radar that could detect bullshit (and there was a lot of that going around, a lot of posing). He greatly admired Meredith Monk’s music, for instance, perhaps because it was so honest. Indeed, I just looked at the program notes for the premiere of Joan, and the first sentence is “Find presented a work of art, in your name, full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage.” That could be Julius’s manifesto, a dedication to creating works of art with integrity, and perhaps a reason why he had some difficulties when asked to perform music he didn’t respect, or in which he detected inconsistencies. These kind of exacting standards can be difficult to live with, and perhaps can at least partially explain some of his eventual problems.


Julius Eastman’s Compositions

The following list includes every known work by Julius Eastman to have received a public performance. Works for which there are known recordings are noted as are works for which a score is currently extant. If you know of any additional compositions by Eastman or have any additional materials for any of the works cited herein, please let us know.

Tripod (S) (c. 1960s)
for unspecified instruments
[?:?]

Piano Piece I (1968)*
for solo piano
[0:50]

Piano Piece II (1968)*
for solo piano
[2:50]

Piano Piece III (1968)*
for solo piano*
[0:40]

Piano Piece IV (1968)*
for solo piano
[2:20]

Thruway (1970)*
for chorus (plus other unspecified instruments)
[31:30]

The Moon’s Silent Modulation (1970)
for dancers, vocalists, and chamber ensemble
[?:?]

Touch Him When (1970)***
for piano 4 hands
[9:00]

Macle (1971)*#
for voices and electronics
[33:00]

Comp 1 (1971)*
for solo flute
[14:20]

Mumbaphilia (1972)*
for solo performer and dancers
[10:00]

Wood in Time (1972)*
for metronomes
[15:15]

Stay on It (1973)**
for voice, clarinet, 2 saxes, violin, piano, percussion
[25:00]

440 (1973)*
for voice, violin, viola, double bass
[18:40]

Femenine (1974)*
for chamber ensemble
[73:00]

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? (1977)**
for violin, 2 French horns, 4 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, piano, 2 chimes, 2 basses
[25:00]

NF (1978)
for piano (performed on the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Series)
[?:?]

Piece (1979?)**#
for 2 pianos
[55:00]
(alternate version of Crazy Nigger, see below)

Evil Nigger (1979)**#
scored for unspecified instruments but performed with Julius Eastman on 4 pianos
[22:00]

Gay Guerrilla (c. 1980)**#
scored for unspecified instruments but performed with Julius Eastman on 4 pianos
[29:00]

Crazy Nigger (c. 1980)**#
scored for unspecified instruments but performed with Julius Eastman on 4 pianos
[55:00]

The Holy Presence of Joan of Arc (1981)**
for ten cellos
[20:30]
(dance title: Geologic Moments)

Untitled [Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan of Arc] (1981?)**
for solo voice
[11:40]

His Most Qualityless Majesty (1983)
for piano and voice
[40:00]

Piano 2 (1986)*#
for solo piano
[15:45]

LEGEND:

*A private recording exists.

**A recording has been issued commercially on the 3-CD set Unjust Malaise (New World Records 80638.)

***A recording was issued commercially on the cassette-only release Tellus IV and is available on custom CD from Harvestworks.

#A score is extant.


When I started my search for Joan, I learned that composer Lois V Vierk had a recording of it. But when she went to make a dub for me, she found the cassette box empty, the cassette left in some unknown tape machine. She put me in touch with C. Bryan Rulon, who had given her the tape that she’d had. He had been given a cassette of Joan by Julius. Bryan made a dub for me, and while talking to him, waiting for the dub to be made, I began to realize that it wasn’t just Joan that was difficult to locate, but all of Julius’s music. I now had a tape of Joan, but I really wanted to have the score as well. The recording was made for radio broadcast, so it had credits at the end of the tape, and I thought that if the engineer, Steve Cellum, had the master tape, I’d have a good chance of finding the score. Steve is very conscientious, and always includes a score with the master, as well as noting other pertinent information. Well, he did have the master, but no score. And no details, other than the title and tape speed.

The performer credits were also given at the end of the Joan tape. Otherwise I never would have been able to track down who had performed on it, as everyone had slightly different memories of who had played, when (not even the year), and where it was recorded. The cellists on the tape were the only people I’d ever contacted about Julius who didn’t all have strong impressions and/or anecdotes of him. It had been a fly-by-night recording with freelance musicians, and most only had contact with him for those few hours. Ironically, they were the easiest to locate. I found all of them and heard back from nine, which is pretty amazing, since the recording was made about twenty-five years ago. But, still, no one had the score. To date I haven’t been able to find the score—all I have is a fragment of it that was printed on the cover of the program notes from its premiere at The Kitchen.

But by the time I finished the course at Cal Arts, I realized that if much more time passed, Julius’s music would be even more difficult to find than it already was. I decided that since I’d already put in a fair amount of effort to find Joan, I should try to backtrack with the people I’d already been in touch with, as well as to contact others who knew him, to see if I could find any of his other pieces. No one had anything, but they all expressed how much they wished they did, and how much they liked Julius’s music. At this point, besides not wanting to see my efforts come to naught, stubbornness took over.

I began a series of what I came to regard as a vicious circle of phone calls. One person would direct me to another, who’d direct me to another, until at some point I’d be referred back to the original person, a cycle which could take a year or more. Most didn’t have anything, except for a lot of interesting anecdotes. Eventually I became the “expert.” People would say, “You should contact Kyle Gann” (or a number of other people), who, in the meantime, would be directing people to me. It was not only frustrating, but shocking, to see how quickly the work of such a vital member of the artistic community could fall through the cracks. And sobering, as well.

People’s memories of things were shaky, too. Julius had given a concert at Experimental Intermedia Foundation in 1976, and though Phill Niblock swore that was before he started to document concerts, somehow Warren Burt had a tape of the concert. When I got the tape, though, it was very disappointing—the electronic keyboard that Julius played had a cheesy sound, and it sounded as though his voice had been miked from Newark. It was unusable. I had really hoped to have an example of Julius singing and playing the piano at the same time, but that was not to be.

Along the way, there was occasionally someone who did have something, but in most cases it was either not easily accessible and/or it took some coaxing (to say nothing of patience) to obtain. I knew tapes were out there, but getting them was another matter. However, I was fairly certain, if perhaps too optimistic, that I would be able to find enough material for a CD, so in the fall of 1999 I approached New World Records about putting out a CD of Julius’s music, and they jumped at the chance, as he was a composer that they were interested in.

Months passed, sometimes years, and some people who had tapes or scores were either unable or unwilling to look for them and send them along. Eventually I got the score and a concert tape of Piano 2, a piece for solo piano. Julius had been a member of the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo for a number of years. Negotiations with the library at SUNY went on over a period of time, complete with changing policies and decision makers. Finally, in June 2003, I received almost three hours of archival recordings from them.

At this point I had Joan, some solo piano pieces, and some ensemble pieces. What I really wanted, to complete the artistic picture, was one or all of Julius’s three major pieces for multiple pianos (Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla). Kyle Gann had promised to send me copies of two out of three them (Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla) from a concert that he’d attended that Julius had participated in. Several years passed and no tapes from Kyle. Then I read in an item about Julius in Kyle’s blog that he’d sent me the tapes, but it was another six months before I actually received them. Meanwhile, I was making contingency plans. Even if I got the tapes, what if they were unusable or we couldn’t get permission to use them? I had contacted Peter Gena in the fall of 1999 and knew that he had the scores to all three pieces. I was hoping to at least be able to record the pieces, although I really wanted the performances that Julius had not only coached but had performed in.

So I knew that there was material out there and hopefully more that I didn’t know about. At times I got tired of nagging/nudging people to co-operate, and I’m talking about years of these dialogues, not weeks or months. When I got the tapes from Kyle in June 2004, I was relieved to hear that not only were they good performances, but that they were “clean”—you couldn’t really tell that they were concert recordings. It turned out that they were from a concert at Northwestern University. New World had recently released Music from the Once Festival 1961-1966 using tapes from Northwestern, so they had a working relationship that made getting the permission to use the tapes a lot easier than it might have been.

All of the tapes I had located were old reel-to-reels and had to be baked, a process that needs to be done in order for the emulsion to be re-attached to the tape. No one was sure if the third piece was in the Northwestern archives or not. One of the technicians had started to play one of the tapes to see what was on it. This almost gave me a heart attack when I heard about it, as I had visions of the emulsion building up on the tape heads and the recording being destroyed. So it was with incredible pleasure this past December, when the tapes were duly baked and digitally transferred, to discover that all three pieces were there, that the recording quality was high, and that Crazy Nigger was 55 minutes! All of a sudden we had a well-balanced three-CD set.

I knew I was feeling anxious about all this when I dreamed that I found several brown garbage bags of Julius’s old musty clothes. After laundering them, I put one of his white shirts into my cassette deck and it played perfectly. That wasn’t the only odd occurrence. The emails in my folder of correspondence about the project (“Eastman”) could not be opened or moved. I started another folder (“Eastman #2”). Those emails could not be opened or moved. I started a third (“Julius”). Those emails could not be opened or moved. Those are the only folders in my email program that I’ve had a problem with, and I was beginning to wonder if Julius’s spirit was trying to sabotage the dissemination of his music.

Seven years have now passed since I began trying to track down Joan. Three CDs of music of one of our most gifted contemporary composers has just been released by New World Records. It’s not the final step, but hopefully the beginning of a process of rediscovering Julius’s music. I’ve now been working with his family to make sure that his pieces are registered with a performing rights organization and brainstorming to figure out the best place for his work to be archived. I would like to organize a concert of his music, but I only have Piano 2, Crazy Nigger, and half of Evil Nigger. I’m hoping that this CD release will trigger people’s memories and/or guilt, and that forgotten and/or neglected material will start to surface.

To say that this whole process has been enjoyable would be a lie, although I’ve enjoyed talking to the people involved and gotten satisfaction from finally getting to hear so much of Julius’s music and knowing that others will soon be able to as well. Even in the best of circumstances it is difficult to reassemble the music of deceased composers. Today, of course, circumstances have changed, with composers being able to print good-looking scores and to not only burn their own CDs, but to generate synthesized realized versions of their music. However, even with these advantages, it would be naïve to think that just because it’s out there, that your music will be available. Don’t rely on the kindness of strangers or well-meaning family members who probably don’t know anything about the music world—make sure you’ve arranged for your music to live on after you.

***

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Mary Jane Leach
Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Mary Jane Leach is a composer whose work reveals a fascination with the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. Her music has been performed throughout the world in a variety of settings, from the concert stage to experimental music forums, and in collaboration with dance and theatre artists. Recordings of her work are on the New World, XI, Wave/Eva, Lovely Music, and Aerial compact disc labels.

Across The Universe

© 2005 Johnny Reinhard
Published by NewMusicBox

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata


Johnny Reinhard outside Ives’s former New York residence
© 2005 Jeffrey Herman

The Birth of the Universe

Charles Edward Ives first contemplated the Universe Symphony in a cottage on a grassy meadow surrounded by pine trees, situated on a small plateau in Keene Valley in New York’s Adirondacks. It became a favorite spot for his vacations. One day while on the Dunham plateau, after admiring what must have been a particularly profound sky, he refocused on the beauty of the land. He then began to alternate between them, eventually thinking of an idea to combine both impressions in a “parallel listening” expanded to a Universe Symphony.

Ives wrote of the ear’s ability to transcend the eye through music in a paragraph intended for the Fourth Symphony but published independently of the score in the 1929 edition of the Henry Cowell publication New Music. “In the same way that an eye views the countryside, focuses on the sky, the clouds and the distant outlines and simultaneously perceives the shape and color of the objects in the foreground as well as those in the distance, the listener also has the possibility to order the rhythmical, harmonic and other components, placing them in relationship to one another in his mind. In other words, in music, the ear has the same capacity as an eye observing the countryside.”

Mrs. Rodman S. Valentine (née Christine Loring), who worked as a secretary for the Ives family in their West Redding, Connecticut residence described Ives’s great enthusiasm for this colossal project (Perlis, Ives Remembered, p. 117). “Mr. Ives mentioned his Universe Symphony to me more than once. It was to be played by at least two huge orchestras across from each other on mountaintops overlooking a valley. It was to be religious (a paean of praise, I believe he said), and it was a real and continuing interest for years. Once, after he stood looking out the picture window toward the mountains, he restlessly paced about, not conversing but as if he were thinking aloud with gestures, and humming and singing bits of music. He said, ‘If only I could have done it. It’s all there—the mountains and the fields.’ When I asked him what he wanted to do, he answered, ‘the Universe Symphony. If only I could have done it.'”

Biographer Jan Swafford suggested Ives may have been influenced by T. Carl Whitmer, a composer friend, to perform the Universe Symphony out of doors (Swafford, p. 493, footnote 16). Whitmer, a former Pittsburgh organist, had bought some land—which he called “Dramamount”—along the Hudson River to present his own compositional endeavors, and encouraged composers to do the same on his property. Ives actually did visit Dramamount, but the idea of doing the Universe Symphony outdoors was no more than a dreamy expansion of his grand symphonic plan and certainly not critical to a successful concert hall performance.

In 1915 Charles Ives revisited Keene Valley for the last time. Ives poetically wrote of his inspiration on a manuscript page identified as Neg. = q3040 in the Yale archives of his papers:

The Universe Symphony is an attempt in tones, every form – position – known or unknown (to man) as the eternities are unmeasured, as the source of universal substances are unknown, the earth, the waters, the stars, the ether, yet these elements as man can touch them with hand and microscope, & labeled as chemicals & atoms as the eternal motions, life of all things & man, their destiny.

They are not single and exclusive strands, but incessant myriads for ages, ever & always changing, growing, but for ages ever & always a permanence of their humanity, of the earth for a man’s lifetime, of life & death & future life—the only known is the unknown, the only hope of humanity is the unseen spirit— that can’t be done but what reaching out to do (as we feel like trying it) is to cast eternal history the physical universe of all humanity to cast them in a ‘Universe of Tones’.

This is attempted in music covering a space of time & in three general ages & sections: Formation & Chaos, Earth & Firmament, and Spirit.

Musicologist Philip Lambert aptly designated the Universe Symphony a “cosmology” based work. He described it as part of a tradition of musical contemplations of the cosmos, one with a long history among European composers and with close parallels to unfinished cosmic works by Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Mysterium) and Arnold Schoenberg (Die Jakobsleiter). According to Lambert, Ives “had already asked the unanswered question; with the Universe Symphony he aspired to answer it.” While contemplating the cosmologies that have been produced in art, Lambert gloomily continues, “the composer who has ordained himself surrogate Creator and spiritual emissary is ultimately humbled by his own mortality. He realizes finally that his ambitious goals are in fact beyond his own comprehension” (Lambert, Ives Studies, p. 234 & p. 252).

Nevertheless, Lambert acknowledges that the “Universe Symphony provides a sharper lens for viewing the complete history of Ives’s quest for substance in music” (Lambert, The Music of Charles Ives, p. 206). The Universe Symphony represents “an ultimate usage of ideas drawn from experience exploring and developing previous ideas, and therefore—a true magnum opus.” More specifically, “The work he conceived would be the ultimate, ideal application of systematic methods: the Universe Symphony would be constructed from Ives’s best and most sophisticated principles of organization, and it would use these methods to communicate his deepest and most substantial spiritual beliefs” (Lambert, The Music of Charles Ives, p. 187).

Lambert is perplexed by a philosophical conflict between the “finishability” issues of this piece (regardless of possible missing pages), and leaving it to remain in limbo, unheard. According to Lambert, “Ives seems to contradict himself: he says that the essence of the universe, in all its vastness and complexity, cannot be captured by any human act, but then suggests that this is precisely what he aspires to do in the Universe Symphony.”

Musicologist Wolfgang Rathert believes that it was precisely Ives’s iconoclastic method to leave his works “unfinished.” Rathert argued that the Concord Sonata, composed just before Ives began contemplating the Universe Symphony, was left intentionally finished “unfinished.” According to Rathert, the multiple versions of the Concord and its sharing of material with other works “perfectly demonstrates the intentional instability of Ives’s formal conception” (Lambert, Ives Studies, p. 278). Rathert’s discussion of Ives’s use of vague or incomplete musical ideas to create an ambiguous, indefinable sense of musical “potentiality” signals something different about this composer.

Ives wrote in his published Memos that the themes and general plan for the Universe Symphony are “quite clearly indicated in the sketch.” Here he underscored that the purpose of this memo was to put a veritable life insurance policy in place for his “painting of creation” magnum opus. Ives wrote, “I am just referring to the above because, in case I don’t get to finishing this, somebody might like to try to work out the idea, and the sketch that I’ve already done would make more sense to anybody looking at it with this explanation” (Memos, p. 108).

At Ives’s own invitation as outlined in his memo, I took up this challenge to “work out the idea.” My responsibility would be to curate the great work to life.

An Incomplete Universe

In 1986, I was visiting with composer Lou Harrison and his partner, Bill Colvig, at their home in Aptos, California. While checking under some bookshelves covered with white sheets, I discovered a dusty 11″ X 17″ folded photocopy of handwritten transcriptions of Ives’s sketches for the Universe Symphony. They had been made by conductor John Mauceri who meticulously prepared them while a young music librarian at Yale University.

Harrison retained a copy of Mauceri’s effort because he was asked in 1974 by music publisher Peer—along with David Gray Porter and Larry Austin—to write about his impressions of the Universe Symphony sketches. (Early on, Peer was designated the single publisher of the Charles Ives Universe Symphony for all possible realizations, which it has recently relinquished.) Harrison was a natural choice since he had a long and illustrious involvement with the music of Ives, which included conducting and preparing the performance materials for the world premiere of Ives’s Third Symphony on March 5, 1946. (The performance would earn Ives a Pulitzer Prize in 1947.) But once his assignment was sent off to Peer, Harrison had decided to drop the Universe Symphony completely from his mind and to wash his hands of any future reconstruction projects. He wrote: “Especially now that he is dead, however, it is not possible, I think, to do imaginative reconstructions of pages or passages, or to ‘wishfulfill’ a completed piece into existence, under his name, for the simple fact that he is not here to sign or approve the results, as he used to do on occasion” (Harrison, unpublished commentary, Peer, p. 25).

Lou Harrison, a true calligraphist—a master—may have been overwhelmed by the “low” ratio of neat readable text to sloppy puzzles, but Harrison was not the first to opt out of the Universe Symphony. After Ives’s death, pianist John Kirkpatrick, the executor of the Ives estate, pooled together all possible Universe Symphony sketches, to the best of his knowledge, and then made them available to those scholars who might be interested in studying them. Since some of the sketches are on the backs of other pieces, it was impossible to have a single folder for all Universe pertaining sketches. Many of the people most familiar with Ives scoffed at any realistic intention to complete and perform it, and a legend developed that the piece was not realizable. However, a review of the commentary on the Universe Symphony demonstrates that Ives had treated this work as unfinished, but had arranged for it to be finished by a collaborator when he doubted that he would ever again have the necessary physical ability to perform the task himself. Ives copyist, George F. Roberts, commented to oral history researcher Vivian Perlis about the piece no one would touch (Ives Remembered, p.188): “The Universe Symphony, the unfinished one, he didn’t intend to finish. He told me that anybody else could add to it if they felt like it. It was going to be something. Maybe someday they’ll do it.”

Henry Cowell wrote in his Ives biography about Ives’s descriptions of the piece, “several different orchestras, with huge conclaves of singing men and women placed about in valleys, on hillsides, and on mountaintops, doomed from the beginning to silence” (Henry & Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music, 1955, p. 201). Since some sketches are supposed to have been lost, some people think that Cowell may have held on to a sketch or two. I do not think so.

Ives, no doubt frustrated by his inability to finish the piece on his own, began to inflate the legend of a gargantuan work. Cowell claimed that the Universe Symphony was intended for two orchestras on two hills, with a valley between them. Beautiful idea that this is, it relegated the composition to a legendary “idea piece” for many Americans. Even throughout his so-called non-composing years, Cowell says Ives never abandoned this composition entirely, “for on rare occasions he will add a few notes to his Universe Symphony, a work that he has planned from the beginning to leave unfinished” (Cowell, p. 26). But Cowell misinterpreted Ives’s intentions. He wrote: “This is the last large work that Charles Ives had worked on. It is unfinished and intentionally so, as it is the culminating expression of his ‘music of the Idea,’ so gigantic, so inclusive, and so exalted that he feels no one man could ever complete it; anyone else may add to it if he cares to do so, and the collaboration of more than one composer friend, the writer among them, has been invited. That such collaboration has not yet seemed possible is not a disappointment, for the full expression of the universe in sound is something sure to come about when growth and freedom have created men able to encompass it” (p. 203).

Composer Larry Austin provided a new take on the Cowell legend. Cowell’s wife, Sydney, was quoted as saying, “At one time the chief subject of conversation was the Universe Symphony, which Ives hoped my husband would collaborate on. They held energetic discussions about the advisability of adding this note or that and about the consequences each note might have as the music developed its meaning. Mr. Cowell appreciated the concept of the Universe Symphony, which Ives hoped would express aspects of the Idea so various and so lofty that no single man could ever complete it, but as for himself Henry found he simply could not compose in tandem. So he began what was to be a complete movement, as his contribution to the piece. But he was dissatisfied with it and left it unfinished. The two composers were never able to decide just how their respective contributions were to be combined, though they found it stimulating to ponder the possibilities” (Austin, Ives Studies, Lambert, ed., p. 215). In a footnote, Austin added that Cowell and his wife subsequently “perpetuated a view that the US was not meant to be completed. Nowhere did Ives write this, nor is there any record that this was the case. But with the Cowells’ published declaration, the myth was created: the US was ‘music of the Idea,’ never intended to be finished. I say that only Henry Cowell decided not to realize and complete the piece, and that he and his wife invented and held to the myth that, in any event, it could not be done” (p. 215, footnote 22).

In the 1980s, Austin made his own realizations for a completion of the Universe Symphony, which is his fourth in a series of fantasies on Ivesian materials. It was subsequently released on CD by Centaur. Austin has been at the receiving end of stinging criticism for the liberties he took and for his disregard of Ives’s specifications. Swafford spoke for many on this subject: “The surviving sketches have been fascinatingly fleshed out in various versions by composer Larry Austin, but they inevitably contain more Austin than Ives” (Swafford, p. 496).

After examining Austin’s score, I also recognized little that was Ives. Besides the poor sound quality of the CD, the transcendental quality was marred by over-indulgent use of a flex-o-tone (which Ives never mentions) and military drum patterns that interrupt the flow of the Basic Unit divisions. A powerful grand pause is used to dramatic effect in his version, but ultimately it is Mr. Austin’s effect. Even the tempo was denied by Austin, who doubled it.

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Ives Society musicologist David G. Porter is quite clear in his unpublished 1975 “Commentary” written for Peer. “As copies of the sketches were obtained over the year, a picture of an unfinished, but certainly not an intentionally unfinished, piece had been begun by Ives, and Ives originally had every intention of finishing it.” Soon after, Porter cogently stated, “The writer wishes to remind the reader that the piece described by Ives in his Memos is not the piece hinted at by Cowell, unfinishable and unknowable, and unrealizable.”

Self-publishing on the Internet newsgroup rec.music.classical on January 21, 1997, Porter sought to “dispel rumors that have built up since 1955” as a result of Cowell’s book on Ives. He wrote that Kirkpatrick had told him in 1987 that Mrs. Cowell “was withholding some pages for the Universe Symphony, and in 1990 when Sidney R. Cowell told me that she felt that Kirkpatrick had tried to diminish Henry Cowell’s contribution to Charles Ives’s music so much that it had become a Cowell ‘family joke.'” To emphasize his position in the posting, Porter used capital letters for exclamatory purposes. “[READERS!: ARE YOU GETTING THE DRIFT OF THIS NOW??? IT’S POLITICAL!!!] And there’s not so much ‘lost as was NEVER COMPOSED!” Porter wrote to the rec.music.classical newsgroup on January 15, 1997, that “many Ives pieces were left in an ‘uncoordinated’ state due to Ives’s failing health and general lack of interest in music of the ’30s & ’40s. Ives took pains when composing to leave complete instructions for eventual realization.”

Strangely, Kirkpatrick also dismissed any chance that a collaborator might have a shot at finishing the piece. “This would be true if all the sketch pages Ives wrote toward the Universe Symphony had survived. But so many are missing that what he would like to pass on to a collaborator is tragically fragmentary” (footnote, Memos, p. 108). Kirkpatrick actually stated in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: “He worked at it off and on until 1928, but never finished it; half the sketches are now missing” (“Charles Ives” entry by Kirkpatrick, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Sadie, ed., Vol. 9: p. 419). Kirkpatrick was certainly nonplussed by the state of disarray the manuscript pages were in after he offered to list and organize Ives’s scores. “In each drawer (and there were ten) was a pile of manuscripts lying flat. There was every evidence that he’d rummaged for things in an unsystematic way, pulling out a batch from below and leafing through it and then that became the top layer—and then pulling out another batch from below and then that would become the top again, and the whole thing had been shuffled and reshuffled many times, so that different leaves of manuscripts would show up at different levels of different drawers.” The latest edition of the New Grove has replaced the earlier Kirkpatrick essay on Ives with a new overview. There is no longer mention of missing material:

Around the same time [1923] he returned to his ambitious Universe Symphony (begun c1915), the capstone of his exploration of systematic methods of composition, which features over 20 wholly independent musical strands, each moving in its own subdivision of a metric unit of eight seconds in length. This too would remain unfinished, finally appearing in three separate realizations in the 1990s (Ives: Sinclair, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, p. 693).

But sadly, even Jan Swafford, in his otherwise excellent Ives biography, stirred up the old rumors of a dearth of lost material. “Some of the Universe sketches may have disappeared into the possession of Henry and Sidney Cowell. John Kirkpatrick was never able to find out what happened to them, and access to the Cowell papers has been denied” (Swafford, Charles Ives, p. 496). Swafford clearly did not have the opportunity, or inclination, to study the actual Universe Symphony sketches in depth. If he had, he might never have written, “Ives’s incompleted Universe Symphony carried the independence of musical groups to the point of visionary impossibility in a work that proposed to set multiple choruses and orchestras playing from valleys and mountaintops, a kind of transcendent camp meeting” (p. 93). Swafford later asserted the thesis that the Universe Symphony was “unfinishable in this world” for the Peer website dedicated to Ives. “Only pages of sketches remain of the Universe; more may have been lost.” He reduces the entire collection of Universe Symphony sketches to “a fascinating fragment.”

Charles Ives recognized for himself that no “mollycoddle mind” could “like it, play it, or make any sense out of it—there’s too much sense in it for that.” (Memos, p. 101).

Untangling the Universe

Lou Harrison advised me that, if I was serious about pursuing a future concert performance, I should contact Todd Vunderink, director of concert music at Peer, about receiving sketch material. After I sent an initial inquiry asking to make a score, I was referred to Ellis Freedman, Esq., the legal representative of the copyright holder of the sketches, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and someone familiar with my work. Freedman replied by letter that there was no performable edition available. I was confused since I was interested in making just such a performable score. The situation remained dormant for another two years after which I re-inquired. This time I focused on my intention to construct a performance score and to arrange for its first performance. Now approving, Peer sent me an 11″ x 17″ spiral-bound photocopy set of all the extant sketches in Mauceri’s transcription project. Photocopies of the actual manuscript sketches in Ives’s hand came still later, after a further request on my part.

Freedman admitted he could not make an artistic decision about the professional quality of my work on his own accord because, as he explained, he was not a musician. Accordingly, he asked conductor James Sinclair, now executive editor of the Ives Society, to make an artistic appraisal of my work. I presented the first third of my realization of the score for his review in a meeting at the Yale University Music Library. After three months, he authorized the green light allowing me to continue. But even before a final decision could be announced, Sinclair drove home the point that since Austin had begun 16 years earlier to complete the piece, I was to wait until after Austin’s release before announcing my own version. I halted all work at the advice of counsel. With Sinclair’s eventual approval, I wrote still again to Ellis Freedman asking for “permission to complete the project.” On March 22, 1994, he wrote back in the affirmative. “In view of James Sinclair’s endorsement, you may take this letter as permission on behalf of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to continue and complete your Universe Symphony project.”

Lou Harrison diagnosed two major problems in making a performing edition. The first problem he saw concerned the need for an accurate tempo to apply to this phantasmagoria of instrumental forces. I make the case that Ives is clear that the “Basic Unit” is correctly measurable at 16 seconds, flexible to the spirit of the music. Percussionists are assigned recurring particular divisions matched by specific instruments. The tempo is actually commensurate with the tempo of the Fourth Symphony. The second problem concerned the impossibility of confirming the alignment of the forces. But, after having now worked through the materials, including in performance, I have complete confidence that this has been successfully accomplished.

There is a curious mention in the sketches of a “2500 chorus” on a brainstorming page in the sketches (Neg. = q3021), but there is neither music nor text for anyone to sing. Harrison later called the mention of the chorus “visionary,” and added, “He asks for an absurdly large chorus of 2500, the sort of chorus that couldn’t keep its place anyway because of the line of sight and acoustic problems. And a special chorus of 500. In short, I think this page is mostly visionary and the fact that the whole page was crossed out in his manuscript gives us some clue” (unpublished commentary, Peer). Harrison’s conclusion makes sense, as does his evaluation of this phase of Ives’s thinking. That Ives crossed out this page (Neg. = q3021) attests in the long run to his ongoing, practical view of this work as able to be completed. Also, Ives’s original conception could not have included a chorus, the use of the human voice, at a time in the piece’s cosmic chronology when there were no humans in existence.

Then there is the whole question of Ives’s tuning. Ives’s sketches feature extensive use of quartertones. He also includes a part in the orchestra for an instrument he calls a “just intonation machine” and a just intonation-tuned harp. Significantly, his frequent use of different spellings for pitches that would be heard as identical in equal temperament throughout these sketches, and in many other compositions, are evidence that Ives intended subtler pitch distinctions. [Ed. Note: Johnny Reinhard’s detailed explanation of Ives’s tuning system will appear in NewMusicBox later this year.]

In September 1995, after first completing a fully notated score, I physically handled the actual original sketches for the first time, which are located in the Ives Collection room at the Yale Music Library. After examining every appropriate piece of writing during one long day, American Festival of Microtonal Music board president Ted Coons and I caught up to 45 errors in the Mauceri transcription. They were challenging to detect for all the same reasons that Lou Harrison jokingly noted in his unpublished commentary to Peer in 1974: “I cannot refrain from remarking, in view of the many congested pages of this manuscript, that to the casual observer it might seem that Mr. Ives early in his career purchased an amount of music paper and was thereafter unable to locate any more, so congested and re-used is each page.”

Each of the many other decisions I had to make to realize the score is similarly explainable in light of Ives’s clear indications. By puzzling out the composer’s directives, often late into the night, and patch by patch, I gradually steered into a final realization. (As it turns out, Ives is reputed to have worked late at night as well.)

But there was another hitch. Before the Ives Society would agree to give final approval for a performance, they insisted on having David G. Porter, their resident musicologist, review my full score and the “codebook” I concocted to outline the score construction. I flinched when Todd Vunderink told me that Sinclair would accept no other musicologist than Porter. My concern was that Porter would be so invested in his own opinions that at best he would find it at variance with his observations. (Having had the opportunity to inspect Porter’s material, I had found him at variance with my observations.) The Pulse of the Cosmos prelude is for Porter a full 10-cycles long thickening and thinning of polyrhythms, with no other instruments but percussion, and unnamed at that. It would require an evening unto itself due its length and is, I believe, a complete misunderstanding on his part. The commencing of the full orchestra in Section A would then follow on the next evening in Porter’s perfect world.

Thankfully Porter, despite our differences, encouraged the Ives Society to endorse an eventual premiere of my realization. However, I was never provided a proper forum by the Ives Society to respond to possible controversies or simply to explain why the sketches actually do work together as a piece. As it turned out, there never seemed to be any interest in an explanation of my work, except years later by Philip Lambert. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Ives Society vice-president when I was seeking an opportunity to share my progress, explained to me by e-mail that there was no time available at Ives Society meetings to devote to this matter. Others were more focused most on how I would describe my realization (J. Peter Burkholder, Todd Vunderink). Some appear to have admired what I accomplished, at least in some regard (James Sinclair, Philip Lambert). Inscrutably, Ives editor and conductor Sinclair has insisted on the new Ives Society website that there is much missing material in Sections B and C (as with Kirkpatrick and Swafford).

J. Peter Burkholder, president of the Ives Society at the time, analyzed the score and found it to include nothing additional to the sketches themselves. My method was to sequence cut-out patches of the sketches and paste them into a loose-leaf notebook. The beginning of each sketch corresponds precisely with a particular O.U. (or orchestral unit) measure number from the orchestral score. The O.U. is equal to half the length of a B.U. (basic unit). My additions to the sketches only include some rhythmic values (often implied by the composer), instrumental appointments (usually obvious from which instruments were not playing), and the ordered patching together of the sketches.

The final hurdle was in the wording to describe my “project.” It was impressed upon me by Peer not to use the word “completion” for my realization. It had been determined by the Ives Society that the term “completion” would imply that new material was composed for lost or missing material. I have been steadfast in maintaining that there was no new material added and they advised this as best for all concerned. A year after the concert premiere, Burkholder indicated that a subvention from the Ives Society for $1,000 would be made available to me provided I use the language “realized exclusively from Ives’s Universe Symphony sketches.” I agreed. Amazingly, the final contract from the copyright holder, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, called the work a “completion.”

In the end, Peer publisher Todd Vunderink sent me the following fax: “Given the complexities, unknowns, and the sheer number of observations in this case by Porter, we don’t want anyone to claim the version of the Universe in full realization.” But in fact, this was indeed the Universe Symphony hatched inside the mind of America’s foremost composer.

Revealing the Universe

On June 6, 1996, I had the unique opportunity to conduct an orchestra that I contracted from among the best musicians in the greater New York City area. Only days before the concert, eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin placed the issues squarely on the table. He succinctly wrote in a Sunday edition feature of The New York Times, “Mr. Reinhard, the work’s most recent realizer, convinced that Ives had in fact finished the piece and that the sketches were intact but out of order, resolved to assemble a performable version that added nothing to what Ives had left behind. His success in this undertaking has been recognized by The Charles Ives Society, which has said Mr. Reinhard may describe his version as ‘realized exclusively from Ives’s Universe Symphony sketches'” (June 2, 1996).

After considerable rehearsal, the concert took place in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center thanks to contributor Stuart Pivar. The audience was robust at about 900 attendees. The 71-member orchestra was arrayed over every inch of an enlarged Alice Tully Hall stage into three large groupings: Earth, Heavens, and Pulse of the Cosmos. Ives’s regard for special seating arrangements is clear in this caution for the Fourth Symphony: “If the players are put as usual, grouped together on the same stage, the effect of the sound will not give the full meaning of the music” (Ives, Memos, p. 67).

The “Earth” orchestra sat stage right. With the principal player of each instrument on the outer edge of the stage, there were four celli, then five bassoons, followed by four horns, four trombones, and finally three double basses. In the center of the stage, just in front of the conductor, sat three clarinets and two oboes. Behind the clarinets were the remaining trumpets and tubas. Farthest back, against the wall, was the organ.

Assisting conductor Charles Zachery Bornstein periodically directed a distinct “Heavens” orchestra in its own idiosyncratic tempo. Nine flutes sat stage left, as in a first violin section. Beside them sat eight violins and five violas. Behind them sat the harps. Above them were the piano and the “just intonation machine,” which was accomplished by a sustaining electric guitar generating harmonics through an E-bow.

The “Pulse of the Cosmos” percussion ensemble eventually called for 13 players who filled the entire back area of the stage. “Signaler” Kory Grossman indicated entrances and departures to the percussionists. Complex polyrhythms gyrate in 10 major cyclings, which run the length of the piece once it begins.

Ives once arranged for a session making complex polyrhythms with eight different musicians, with encouraging results: “In the Universe Symphony I tried, for the percussion orchestra (Earth’s motion and pulse), about a dozen different kinds—as Drums (8), Snare (2), Bells (11), Gongs (4), Pipes (2), Cymbals (3), Xylophones (2), Blocks of wood—all I could think of—it sounded (with eight players) better than I thought). Various other rhythms can be held in the mind in this way, and after a while they become as natural as it is for Toscanini to beat down-left-right-up as evenly as a metronome for two hours steadily, and do it nice, with the ladies all tapping time with their feet” (Memos, p. 125).

Ives was excited by the value of his rhythmic scheme, although polyrhythms traditionally appear daunting to musical minds. He must have realized how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to direct even the most facile musicians of his day to play the demandingly complex polyrhythms. “But if the different meters are each played by groups of different sounding units, the effect is valuable, and I believe will be gradually found an important element in deepening and enriching all of the depths of music, including the emotional and spiritual” (Memos, p. 125). Ironically, the angularity of the rhythms of the Universe Symphony made for a more natural and realistic musical universe.

Though composed to his own imagined time frames, Austin had relied on click tracks through headphones to keep time in his “realization,” even though his argument for preferring a faster tempo than Ives’s stated tempo was so the players could keep more perfect time. Austin thought that Ives was wrong. Critic Alex Ross reported in The New York Times my performance tempo as “gruelingly slow” and recommended that I, too, consider using click tracks in future performances instead of conducting to assist the percussionists with regulating the polyrhythms. Ironically, this seems to me complete anathema to the Ives aesthetic, and unnecessary, certainly, once the work is permitted to enter standard repertoire. It is about time that a mammoth work of our time required professional musicians to stretch both their minds and techniques. For Ives, “Rhythm is a bigger thing than a nice little ticking watch” (Memos, p. 188).

Writing for the Village Voice, Kyle Gann recognized early on that my intention to go “human” was non-negotiable. A full year before the concert premiere he wrote, “And Reinhard plans to perform the work without click tracks, which may impart more humanity to the pulse at the expense of rhythmic accuracy” (April 5-11, 1995).

Audience members at the premiere likely heard “collapsed” sound in the sense that the hall was not big enough to fairly represent the full sound of the musical forces involved, blurring its intricacies. Ives’s details are buried in the timbres of the pitches and rhythms. I don’t suppose the players had any real chance to appreciate the work aesthetically since they were much too busy playing their parts. Besides, their instrumental groupings orbit with the others only on occasion. In the audience, the proximity of the seats to the stage actually determined whether one heard too much low end or too much high end sound. The center of the center balcony was reputed to have had the most blended and balanced sound in Alice Tully Hall that evening. The Stereo Society recording produced by Mike Thorne transcends the problems presented by the concert hall.

Unbelievably, this, the most profound and original symphony by any American, is still way ahead of its time, even 93 years after it was first put to manuscript paper. The piece may not fit easily within the expectations of some prominent self-proclaimed Charles Ives fans. Somehow, there is only a vague notion that the work fits the “classical” category, probably stemming from the fact that Ives, himself, described it as “not music as such.” It is too dissimilar from the composer’s earlier works and must be taken on its own merits, following its own rules, although there are definite connections to be made. His Universe is ever deep to our probes, yet yielding more and more of its secrets upon repetition. However, if one invests the requisite two listenings and more, allowing for maximal “parallel listenings” to set in, rewards are distinctly renewable.

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Johnny Reinhard is the director and founder of the American Festival of Microtonal Music (established 1981). He has been responsible for premieres of major works by Lou Harrison, Harry Partch, Edgard Varèse, and Charles Ives, among many others, as well as the first modern-day performances of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, John Dowland, Gesualdo, Telemann, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn in their original tunings. As an internationally-travelled conductor, composer, publisher, and bassoon soloist, Reinhard has explored a myriad of tunings. This past year, Reinhard has also become a record producer of a new line of compact discs featuring a wide variety of microtonal music on the PITCH label.

Composers in Cowtown: New Music at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition

Piano competitions are inherently heated events—something like an olympics for musicians.

As perhaps the most famous and prestigious event in the piano world, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, is an especially intense affair. Thanks to the Southwest sun and temperatures in the low 90s, the 12th annual Cliburn had a genuine pressure-cooker atmosphere. The event ran May 20 through June 5 at the five-year-old Bass Hall in the downtown district of what Texans lovingly call Cowtown.

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Ambassadors for new music: Composers Jan Krzywicki, Sebastian Currier, and Daniel Kellogg (l to r) represent at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition
Photo by Susan Nowicki

The 35 young keyboard competitors are the ones who really felt the fever. Ranging in age from 19 to 30 years old and coming from 13 countries, they had to prepare enough repertoire for a 50-minute recital in the preliminary round, another 60-minute recital plus a piano quintet for the semifinals, and yet another 50-minute recital and two concertos for the finals. No repertoire could be repeated from one round to the next.

New American music was very much a part of the mix, and for many competitors that probably just raised their temperature further since contemporary music isn’t usually part of an aspiring soloist’s training. While mainstream virtuoso works were the rule, with lots of Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, and Beethoven, every program in the semifinal round also included a piece by one of these five Americans: Sebastian Currier, Jennifer Higdon, Daniel Kellogg, Jan Krzywicki, and Ruth Schonthal.

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Composer Ruth Schonthal was also on hand to hear how the semifinalists tackled her piece.
Photo by Daniel Kellogg

Actually, the composers were competitors as well, but in a different contest: the Cliburn’s second American Composers Invitational. The composers’ works were sent to all the competitors who had to select one for performance in the semifinal round—should they be lucky and skilled enough to get that far. The composer performed by the most semifinalists would be the winner. Sebastian Currier took home the top prize of $5,000, while each of the other composers who had a work played in the semifinals received $2,500 (which this time included everyone but Krzywicki).

For the record: The big winner of the 2005 Cliburn was, of course, a pianist, not a composer. Alexander Kobrin, 25, of Russia took the gold medal, while Joyce Yang, 19, of South Korea won the silver. Each receives $20,000 and an array of concert bookings, management support, and a recording deal with the Harmonia Mundi label.

Though the American Composer Invitational brought even more competition to the Competition, its purpose is not really to pit one composer against another. Rather, its aim is to allow more new music to be heard and to allow young pianists the opportunity to match their own instincts and sensibilities to a contemporary work, instead of having a single new piece imposed upon them.

“I’ve been at other competitions [where there’s a commissioned piece] and the competitors all hated it,” says Richard Rodzinski, president of the Van Cliburn Foundation. “I’ve seen them come off stage and stomp on it.”

For most of its history, the Cliburn did commission a single new piece for each competition. The success rate of those pieces is a lot like the success rate of its gold medalists—mixed at best.

“There are no superstar composers alive now and a big name doesn’t mean a great work,” continues Rodzinski. The new system, he says, tells pianists to “pick something you like and sell it—and it signals composers to write music [that] performers want to play.”

 

COMPOSERS AT THE CLIBURN: HISTORY

One shouldn’t look to the career of 70-year-old Van Cliburn for any inspiration when it comes to contemporary music—Prokofiev is about as far as he’s gotten into the modern era. But the competition named for him and launched in 1962 has always featured new American music. Their first time out, the ambitious folks in Fort Worth commissioned Lee Hoiby’s Capriccio on Five Notes, and they made every competitor learn it.

Commissioning a new work for each competition continued as the pattern for the first ten Van Cliburn International Piano Competitions. Here’s the list of those pieces:

1962Lee Hoiby: Capriccio on Five Notes
1966Willard Straight: Structure for Piano
1969Norman Della Joio: Capriccio on the Interval of a Second
1973Aaron Copland: Night Thoughts (Homage to Ives)
1977Samuel Barber: Ballade
1981Leonard Bernstein: Touches
1985John Corigliano: Fantasia on an Ostinato
1989William Schuman: Chester – Variations for Piano
1993Morton Gould: Ghost Waltzes
1997William Bolcom: Nine Bagatelles

It’s not a bad group of names at all. The pieces usually clocked in around ten to twelve minutes; it would be neat to have a CD collection featuring all of them. Certainly there was a good run from 1973 to 1981—Copland, Barber, Bernstein—what Rodzinski probably considers “superstar composers.” And those composer’s pieces are probably the ones that have had the most life, both in concert and on disc. Two Cliburn commissions, the Barber Ballade and Bolcom’s Bagatelles, showed up again this year in Fort Worth on the programs of two different pianists.

 

OTHER CONTEMPORARY WORKS IN 2001 AND 2004

For each Cliburn Competition there’s a thick, handsome program book that lists the complete repertoire that each competitor brings to the competition. Much of the music doesn’t actually get heard due to the process of elimination—35 competitors started this year, 12 made it to the semifinals, and only 6 to the finals. But it’s fascinating to flip through the 2001 and 2005 books and spot the relatively sparse amount of newish music that was in the minds and fingers of the young pianists as they headed to Texas.

First, it’s worth acknowledging the early and mid-20th century composers that are getting played. Prokofiev and Bartók are regularly represented, and Schoenberg and Stravinsky appear now and then. Rachmaninoff and Ravel are as popular as Beethoven and Chopin.

Here’s a list of the more off beat modern and contemporary works that competitors brought to the 2001 Cliburn:

Aaron Copland: Piano Variations
Copland/Bernstein: El Salon Mexico
Samuel Barber: Sonata for Piano, Op. 26
Leonard Bernstein: Touches (1981 Van Cliburn Competition commission)
Yuri Blinov: Impromtu & Fugue (from competitor Yuri Blinov)
George Crumb: A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979
Henri Dutilleux: Sonata
Rodion Konstantinovich Schedrin: Prelude & Fugue
Olivier Messiaen: selections from Vignt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus
Frederic Rzewski: Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Toru Takemtisu: Litany II

The American pianist Andrew Russo was responsible for the Copland, Crumb, and Dutilleux, as well as some Schoenberg and Scriabin. According to Russo’s website, his performance of Crumb’s A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 marked the first time that a pianist played on the inside of the piano at the Cliburn. Though Russo didn’t make it past the preliminary round, he went on to collaborate with Crumb the following year on a retrospective concert series of Crumb’s music at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts in New York. He’s also recorded Crumb’s music on the Black Box label.

For the 2005 Cliburn, the list of newish repertoire looks like this:

Arno Babadjanian: Poem
Barber: Ballade, Op. 46 (1977 Van Cliburn Competition commission)
Samuel Barber: Sonata for piano, Op. 26
Bolcom: Nine Bagatelles (1997 Van Cliburn Competition commission)
York Bowen: Toccata, Op. 155
John Corigliano: Etude Fantasy (from four different competitors!)
David Del Tredici: Virtuoso Alice
Kenneth Leighton: Six Studies, Op. 56
Lowell Lieberman: Gargoyles, Op. 29
Gyorgy Ligeti: Etude Book 1 Nos. 1, 2, 5

The Cliburn was probably gratified that two of its past commissions were represented. It’s even more remarkable that John Corigliano’s Etude Fantasy was prepared by four different competitors. One wonders if the pianists were trying to ingratiate themselves with the competition organizers, since Corigliano serves on its advisory council (as do composers William Bolcom, Henri Dutilleux, Lukas Foss, and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski). But there was nothing cold and calculating about Joyce Yang’s performance of the piece in the final rounds. She attacked it with a ferocious zeal and went on to win the Silver Medal.

The new music specialist among the 2005 competitors was the Italian Davide Cabassi, and it’s gratifying to report that he made it all the way to the final round, though he did not take home a medal.

A burly bearded fellow, the 28-year-old Italian was easy to spot on the streets of downtown Fort Worth. “I love contemporary music,” Cabassi told me one evening outside Bass Hall. “My favorite American composer is Frank Zappa.” He went on to say that he’s premiered many works by Italian composers and that he’s also partial to Varèse, Corigliano, and Ives.

That being said, Cabassi’s programming played it rather safe. In fact, Joyce Yang played more truly contemporary music with just one Corigliano piece. Cabassi’s acknowledgements of the 20th century were Stravinsky’s Trois mouvements de Petrouchka in the prelims, and Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 and Bartók’s Out of Doors in the finals.

 

SELECTIONS FROM THE FIELD

The Van Cliburn Competition’s departure from its 40-year tradition of commissioning a single composer for each competition came at the suggestion of John Corigliano prior to the 2001 competition. The Cliburn program book explains:

“Corigliano suggested a new initiative for acquiring original works from a broader range of talented composers, while involving the young performers themselves in the selection process… Believing that outstanding artists will choose outstanding repertoire, this innovative format encourages both the composition of new works and their inclusion in future performances.”

The process begins with a nominating committee of composers, artists, administrators, and other music industry figures who recommend a slate of American composers to be invited to submit works for solo piano of between eight and twelve minutes in length. Nominees can send either a new work or a piece that has not been commercially recorded or received any major awards. This year, twenty-nine composers submitted works.

The next step is the review of the works by a professional jury, which can select up to five works for performance at the competition. This year’s jury consisted of: composer Lowell Liebermann, composer Robert Maggio, and pianist Michael Boriskin. (Liebermann was the winner of the 2001 American Composer Invitational. The other composers selected that year were Judith Lang Zaimont, James Mobberley, and C. Curtis-Smith.)

The jury was sent blind scores (no names of composers) a few weeks prior to their meeting at the ASCAP offices on January 6, 2005. Corigliano was present at the meeting and pianist Stephen Gosling was also on hand to play selected pieces as needed.

Boriskin said the process was fun and encouraging. “I thought the initial selections were very well chosen and were pretty wide ranging, which was good to see. Everything from straightforward minimalist pieces to much more complex, sort of rigorous cerebral kinds of writing, and everything in between,” he says.

“I think the first priority was coming to some kind of a consensus on quality… That was paramount concern for all of us… All other issues take a back seat to whether a piece can stand on its own,” says Boriskin.

The jury’s final selections were:

Sebastian Currier: Scarlatti Cadences + Brainstorm
Jennifer Higdon: Secret & Glass Gardens
Daniel Kellogg: scarlet thread
Jan Krzywicki: Nocturnals for solo piano
Ruth Schonthal: Sonata quasi un’improvvisazione

In late February, the five scores were sent to the 35 pianists who were selected for the 2005 Cliburn in order for them to make a selection and start practicing.

Note the subtleties of the rules. It’s possible that a piece can make the jury’s cut but not the pianists’ cut. It’s also possible that a piece can be selected by a majority of the 35 competitors but not win the final award because the 12 semifinalists had a different preference. And that’s exactly what happened at the 2005 Cliburn.

Here’s the selection of pieces by the entire slate of competitors:

Ruth Schonthal: Sonata quasi un’improvvisazione13
Sebastian Currier: Scarlatti Cadences + Brainstorm10
Jennifer Higdon: Secret & Glass Gardens7
Daniel Kellogg: scarlet thread4
Jan Krzywicki: Nocturnals for solo piano1

But here’s how the semifinalists decided it:

Sebastian Currier: Scarlatti Cadences + Brainstorm5
Ruth Schonthal: Sonata quasi un’improvvisazione3
Jennifer Higdon: Secret & Glass Gardens2
Daniel Kellogg: scarlet thread2
Jan Krzywicki: Nocturnals for solo piano0

And Sebastian Currier is the winner.

“The interesting thing is the interdependency of the composers and the performers. It’s symbolic and quiet nice,” says Currier, of the process. “I notice Joyce (Yang) is playing the piece in Aspen. Hopefully the process of doing this will help it along.”

Currier’s winning effort combines two previously existing works that had not gotten much attention prior. Scarlatti Cadences had been written for his former wife, the pianist Emma Takhmizian, who was the fourth place finisher in the 1985 Van Cliburn. Brainstorm was written for pianist John Kamitsuka.

On composing his piece, Currier says “I didn’t so much focus on virtuosity… The [Cliburn competitors] play so much stuff that’s virtuosic anyway.” Instead, Currier explained that his piece requires a more contemporary technique, especially in terms of rhythm and articulation.

 

PIANISTS AUDITION THE NEW WORKS

“I sight read through them and thought I’d have a lot of time, but [knew] Scarlatti Cadences is the piece for me,” recalled Joyce Yang, shortly after the final awards ceremony. “Then I took a couple of months off from it. [But] it was a lot harder than I thought!”

Yang, who at age 19 was the youngest competitor, was the only semifinalist to have memorized Currier’s piece. In addition to her second place medal, she also received the award for best performance of a contemporary work. She said the Currier was an obvious choice. “I read through the others and said, ‘I don’t remember anything I just read.'”

When the package of five new American works arrived, Ning An, 28 of Tennessee, got some help.

“It was a little intimidating because [there were] so many notes to read. I’d played ten concerts that month,” he said. “I asked my wife [the pianist Gloria Chen] to read them for me. She’s a fast reader. I read through them too, but she said, ‘Chose this one [the Currier] even though it’s harder to learn.'”

Jie Chen, a semifinalist from China, also chose the Currier and claims to like the idea of the Composer Invitational. But so far she’s no contemporary music advocate.

“People now use different sounds and rhythms that don’t have to be pleasing to the ear,” she said. “Modern art challenges our traditional view of beauty—what is beautiful and what is ugly.” Chen admitted that she’s only got a limited amount of experience with contemporary works but that she did premiere a new piece once. She just couldn’t remember the name of it or the composer.

It took only about 20 minutes for semifinalist Maria Mazo to pick Jennifer Higdon’s Secret & Glass Gardens.

“I find it a brilliant idea that we could find one that fit our own tastes,” say Mazo, 22, who hails from Germany and Russia. “My main concern was which fit in my program. My [semifinal recital] is very heavy, rather thick and loud. The Higdon was in a Scriabin style… a tonal piece, kind of a big, blurred sound, more chords and atmosphere which I found interesting.”

Davide Cabassi also made his selection based, at least in part, on his recital. He chose the Currier’s Scarlatti Cadences + Brainstorm because it compliments the three sonatas of Antonio Soler, which Cabassi had already prepared. Scarlatti was a teacher of Soler.

 

MIXING IT UP IN TEXAS

Hospitality has always been a big part of the Van Cliburn’s Texas ambience, so it’s no surprise that the competition invited all the composers down to hear the semifinals. Only Higdon, ensconced at an artist colony in Italy, was unable to attend.

“It was interesting for all of us, because we had not been in contact with the players,” says Daniel Kellogg. “So these people playing our pieces had to learn just from the score and in the midst of preparing other repertoire. The players were young and had not done a lot of other [contemporary] stuff.”

Though young himself, Kellogg, 29, listened to the contemporary performances with the ear of a seasoned composer.

“The variety of performances [of the new works] was wide. There were people that did excellent jobs and people that had clearly put this off and weren’t up to performing the piece. They hadn’t learned it and hadn’t understood the musical language,” says Kellogg. “It was in the second round and putting work into the second round is worthless if you hadn’t gotten past the first round.”

The public got a chance to meet the composers and hear them speak at a panel one morning in the midst of the semifinals. The forum included a performance of Jan Krzywicki’s piece, since it wasn’t represented in any semifinal recital.

The composers were also represented at the Cliburn gift shop in the sparkling marble lobby of Bass Hall. Alongside CDs of Van Cliburn and of past winners, and lots of jewelry, t-shirts, and baseball caps bearing the competition’s logo, there was an attractive display of the scores in the American Composer Invitational, plus the Bolcom and Gould scores from past years. These were the only pieces of sheet music available and about 90 copies were sold by the end of the competition. “Several people brought scores and asked us to autograph them,” recalls Kellogg.

As living composers, Currier, Kellogg, Krzywicki, and Schonthal might have been oddities in the Cliburn atmosphere where pianists are the stars and composers are mostly dead men. But ultimately they too got caught up in the excitment of watching and listening.

“There’s a lot of serious listening going on, and fabulous repertoire in a great hall,” says Kellogg.

“It’s very intense,” says Currier. “There’s like three or four concerts a day, and the amount of work these young, extremely talented pianists have to do is awesome and totally amazing.”

 

CODA: NEW MUSIC AT OTHER PIANO COMPETITIONS

Consider the pressure to succeed with new music at the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels. There are compulsory new works for both the semifinal and final rounds—which includes a concerto that’s given to the players only after their arrival at the competition.

“A commissioned concerto you have to learn in a week!,” recalls Ning An, the Van Cliburn semifinalist who placed third at the 1999 Queen Elizabeth. “That’s the test, to see how well you learn. They separate you into a big house, no newspaper, no TV—the loneliness!—no teachers, parents, wives…”

And for complete and total immersion in new music, there’s the Orleans Concours International in France, which is devoted exclusively to 20th century piano music.

Among the crowds that turned out for the dozens of concerts that make up the 2005 Van Cliburn Competition was a tall, quiet Dutch man, Gustav Alink. He’s the world’s expert on piano competitions. Alink heads the Alink-Argerich Foundation, a sort of professional association of piano competitions, which publishes a directory of the events and is building a database of pianists.

“If you look at all the piano competitions worldwide, most have quite average repertory requirements,” says Alink. He admits to having been skeptical four years ago of the Cliburn’s American Composer Invitational. “But it convinced me,” he says now. “New music and fine performances—it doesn’t happen too much.”

Perhaps the Cliburn has struck about the right balance of new music—certainly it’s not enough to please new music advocates, but it’s not beating the pianists over the head with it either.

Music Like Water



As evidenced by the May 11 announcement of Yahoo’s new music service, it looks like we are indeed heading into a “music-like-water” future (a future that is somewhat pre-outlined in my book The Future of Music). Apart from the huge growth of the “legal” music services such as Yahoo, Napster, Rhapsody, PassAlong, and iTunes, there are more people in more places around the globe tuning into music with more enthusiasm and sheer determination than ever before, and they are using a myriad of their own particular ways and means to get what they want. But it seems that to a large degree the “traditional” record industry is simply no longer invited to the party—consumer empowerment has finally reached the music business, and many consumers have now taken charge of their own entertainment. This represents a huge, “2nd wave”-opportunity for investors, documented by the most recent deals with SnoCap, AudioFeast, Mercora, and Savage Beast.

Music fans (or, in Silicon Valley speak, “Users”) tune into online radio, buy satellite radio receivers, record terrestrial radio broadcasts onto their PCs, rip CDs checked out from libraries, swap tapes, vinyl records, and CDs via the Internet, trade files on Instant Messenger, exchange entire hard-drives of music, fire-wire playlists to each other, trade loaded iPods, buy or create their own ringtones, transcode music streams provided by online radio stations, distribute or trade files on a multitude of P2P networks, topsites, and darknets, edit samples and loops with free audio software tools, buy games and videos that feature their favourite music, tune into music shows on television and record them with their TiVo, and stream music to their cell phones—among other things! And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg—we could probably continue this list for the next couple of pages, but one thing is for sure: Music is BIG again.

The trouble for the record industry is that these are mostly non-traditional ways of using and getting music that the industry can’t control nearly as well as CD sales, therefore the entire system is starting to crumble. It was a system based on total and relentless control, obscenely high margins, and an amount of customer passivity and user sacrifice that is unparalleled in any other industry, but the cat, or rather, the music, is quite literally out of the bag.

The only sensible thing left to do is to monetize the existing behaviour of the user/consumer/music fan—and there are many ways to do that once we have accepted the fact that we have indeed morphed into a customer-driven, bottom-up world that renders many widely accepted “analogue” paradigms and traditions instantly useless.

Now, once we go down this inevitable path, we will quickly realize that actually metering the use of music, as if we were still in the days of Colonel Parker and Elvis Presley, is simply becoming a mission impossible. Notwithstanding the distinct possibility of precisely tracking what is actually used, and distributing exact royalties accordingly, there is no way we can continue to ask for fixed fees on a per-track basis, when it’s no longer even clear what a copy, a download, a performance, or a mechanical actually is. On digital networks, just about any performance creates copies, somewhere along the way, and every copy is being publicly performed somewhere (witness the latest discussions about “time-shifting” and “renting” music).

The argument reverberates in the latest definition of “music purchasing” on the Napster-To-Go (U.S.) download service: the user can download as many tracks as desired, as long as the subscription is valid and the tracks are not used outside of the Napster application and the computer it is installed on. Already conclusively tilting towards the music-like-water model, these “downloads” (or shall we say “rental-loads”?) are not considered purchases—at least not until I want to burn a CD of them, and therefore own them free and clear. Clearly, we have already reached and crossed that border between performance and copy, between access and ownership, and pushed it further out to a more economically feasible and much more palatable place.

But the bottom line remains: the only way to monetize people’s actual behaviour and underlying desires on digital networks is to give them a simple, no-brainer blanket deal, an all-in offer or a flat-fee bundle, an insurance policy if you will. But make it EASY! Call it what you want, but the conclusion is that this will be a subscription model not a pay-per-download model because only that model allows the user to experiment with new music and thereby discover new artists: one payment allows me to listen to whatever I want, but in addition I have many opportunities to spend my cash on other music-related things (witness all the stuff you can now buy at Amazon.com—no longer just books!). Music-like-water is where we are going, and up-selling to additional services from there is the name of the game.

There’s plenty of precedent here: we make automatic, habitual, seemingly “thoughtless” yet fully accepted payments for water, gas, and electricity. In addition, we pay for cable television, Internet access, and wireless services; and here in Europe, we are paying a flat yearly fee for the use of any device (radios, TVs) that can receive public broadcast feeds. And most of us pay quite happily for our utilities and subscriptions! But imagine if you were asked for your ID and password every time you flushed the toilet at a public bathroom, or if the TV set measured and billed the number of hours that you spend in front of it, and charged you more if ten people watched the hockey game rather than just you alone. Economically speaking, 99 percent of us already make these kinds of payments, all the time, and the pool of cash that’s being generated is vast.

So, consider this: a much lower monthly payment, say $3, something akin to a “content fee” imposed on hardware/devices or services/transactions, and we would finally have a feels-like-free pass to do what many of us seem to already be doing, albeit with official blessings: enjoy our music where we want, when we want, and how we want, without having to worry about the MP3 police hunting us down. Of course, that $3 may end up being €3 in Europe, 3 GBP in the UK or, more importantly, the equivalent buying-power amount in other territories such as India, China, or Brazil.

If we don’t go down this road, how could we possibly expect the music industry to be successful in the future, when at this very moment the customers have to practically kill themselves to give the industry their cash, on the exceedingly narrow terms that are being enforced today?

Once we can subscribe to music just like we subscribe to water, the music business will explode and we will enter a new ecosystem that will make the previous music industry look like NYC taxicabs from the 30th floor of the BMG building. DRM will morph into CRM, copy control will become usage-control (file-tracking and monitoring), record labels will morph into 360-degree music companies, radio will down-(load)-cast, devices will truly plug-and-play, and yes, cell phones+music may kill the iPod.

There’s only one thing: we must stop asking the consumers to fill up their bath tubs with Evian or to use Pellegrino to boil pasta—they have already discovered the tap water! So let’s just give them tap water, via cheap flat-fee deals, and the Pellegrino, as well. This does not equal a flat-out, wholesale devaluation of music; quite the contrary—ubiquity is a very powerful thing and will create a nice pool of money for all involved parties, a pool which will only be the starting point for a much-increased monetization of music.

Why? Because here’s another thing that will happen when the water/music flows freely: the up-selling opportunities will be huge, diverse, and multi-channel—and this is where the ROI for investors is. We will have all of the user data we could ever dream of having: opt-in profiles and lots of user feedback, usage patterns, program preferences, personal profiles, locations and access modes. Apart from the obvious concerns over data security and privacy (now there’s another huge business opportunity!), this data will allow the content providers/rights holders to zero in on one person at a time, and offer relevant and timely upgrades to him/her, and maybe even to place very unobtrusive and friendly product messages. Imagine listening to your digital radio station while you’re driving, and seeing a message on the display informing you of an upcoming show of your favourite artist that just happens to be in a location that you will be travelling to. Simply push a button on the display, or send an SMS from your mobile phone, and within 10 seconds you have purchased a ticket for the show. Then, when you get to the show, you take up the venue management’s offer to zap the entire evening’s concert onto your memory stick on the way out, for less $ than the cab ride back to the hotel. And on from there…

Once music is unleashed and the dinosaurial fight for the simple privilege of having access to it is over for good, distribution ceases to be a barrier to entry: all music, all artists, and all writers will be in those pipelines. Then we will face the real digital economy challenge: getting anyone to pay attention to our music and surviving in this world of “digital Darwinism”, since the old marketing mantra of Exposure + Discovery = Sales (Income) will be even more pronounced in a music-like-water world. Ultimately, of course, people will consume, or shall we just say use, more media (music). All of the world’s music (and its creators) will then be competing for attention in this new ecosystem, and everyone will want a piece of your precious listening time. That will be the real challenge and the real opportunity going forward: getting exposure and being discovered—the rest is already built into the pipeline.

In other words:

“The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.”
—William Gibson

***
This essay is published under “Creative Commons” licensing provisions. Non-commercial re-distribution permitted only with reference to writer and source.

name

Gerd Leonhard is the Founder and CEO of ThinkAndLink, a Basel (Switzerland) and San Francisco -based strategic advisory firm that works with innovative companies in the converging sectors of entertainment and technology. Gerd is also a widely-published and internationally-acclaimed digital media expert and Futurist, speaker and author. His recently published book The Future of Music, co-written with Dave Kusek and published by Berklee Press, is quickly becoming a ‘must read’ for music and entertainment business professionals around the globe. During the dotcom ‘fat years’, Gerd served as Founder and CEO of LicenseMusic.com in San Francisco, and pioneered the use of technology in B2B media commerce. As a guitarist and composer, Gerd won the Quincy Jones Award (1986), and is a graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Gerd also served as Co-Founder and Executive Producer of the pan-European talent event EuroPopDays, worked as Expert Adviser On The Cultural Industries to the European Commission in Brussels, is acting Chairman and Executive Producer of www.popkommawards.com, and consults many start-ups and fast-growth companies in the music and technology sectors, both in Europe as well as in the U.S.

Waiting for Hello

Randy Nordschow
Randy Nordschow
Photo by Colin Conroy

I have to admit that I’m a little phone shy. I never liked ordering the pizza when I was a kid but did it anyway out of necessity. I really liked pizza. But pizza is just child’s play—ever apply for a mortgage over the phone? Naturally the more transactions you do the better you become at navigating those pesky interactive voice response systems. And after jumping through all the hoops, pressing the correct number sequence, or uttering the magical open-sesame phrase, what’s your reward? Usually around ten minutes of crappy MuzakTM or, if you’re lucky, maybe a recording of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to hum along to while you’re waiting to be connected to a real live human being. C’mon, we all have better things to do with our lives. Isn’t it about time something a little more interesting is offered while we patiently wait?

The Muzak Corporation is now peddling what it calls on-hold magazines, with twelve options tailored towards your particular customer base. The closest fit I could find for the American Music Center was something called Backstage, which “connects callers with inside information about the stories and people in the music industry…with a balanced look into music’s past, present, and future.” Somehow I get the feeling that Philip Glass isn’t part of the picture here. The whole thing just smacks corporate, right down to the research stats that promise higher sales figures boosted by proper on-hold programming. Yuck. Out of curiosity I decided to call Muzak in order to listen to their on-hold music. Okay, it was bouncy, up-tempo, inoffensive—a sort of spunky jazz fusion thingy. It did nothing for me. Was it supposed to?

Taking into account Muzak’s own philosophies, then yes, on-hold music is supposed to say something, and it’s all about branding. Figuring that I’ve spent a significant portion of my life listening to the various ways in which banks and airline carriers brand themselves—conformity, conformity, conformity, yawn—I wanted to hear how the artistic community was branding itself. Back to the phone, I rang every local bastion of creativity I could think of. To the delight and bemusement of those who answered, I asked to be placed on hold.

Surely I was in store for something more unique, or at any rate some bona fide well-chosen music with at least an ounce of panache or personality. I dialed the Museum of Modern Art, then the Whitney, P.S. 1, and Guggenheim museums. Dead silence. None of them even have hold music. At least the Metropolitan Museum of Art had the decency to play Hummel or whatever that stuff was. How classy. Of course all of these entities are associated with the visual arts—certainly the music-based organizations wouldn’t let me down.

A call to WNYC, New York’s public radio station, yielded some cool jazz, but I couldn’t quite identify the sax man for certain. I guess they were going for the ol’ hip, yet sophisticated profile. Figuring I knew what the legendary “music is not background” American Symphony Orchestra League had up its sleeve, I tried Meet the Composer as my last resort. When Nina Simone serenaded me with her “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” it was clear that my quest for a more engaging on-hold experience wasn’t going to unearth anything out of the ordinary. My frustration reminds me why I pay my bills online. I would sooner suffer the tyranny of a dialup connection than listen to a castrated version of Cher’s retro-anthem “If I Could Turn Back Time.”

Of course none of these tunes were specifically composed for transmission through that tiny little speaker hidden inside your telephone’s earpiece. The delivery method itself curtails the songs’ original impact. Besides, with such feeble frequency response, not even a crooning Patsy Kline could pacify that angry caller waiting to complain to a manager. On-hold music is a strange Janus-faced beast. It’s not background music per se, and it’s not exactly foreground music either, even if we are stuck phone-to-ear with nothing left to do but listen. If we don’t listen, how will we know when someone picks up on the other end? This is listening out of absolute necessity, listening to kill time, and this catch-22 netherworld sounds like a perfect spot for art to intervene.

Remember that old Maxwell House TV ad with the catchy melody perfectly synched with the coffee percolator blups? If you can, bring to mind that bubbly, yet otherworldly electronic sounding motif. As you may or may not know—now that you can’t get that damn tune out of your head—this was one of Eric Siday’s most well known “Identitones,” or as we might call them today, sound logos. You’d probably recognize Siday’s other handy work for various ABC and CBS station identifications, as well as jingles and electroacoustic signatures for Westinghouse and Ford. So why bring up Eric Siday? Well, as it turns out he might just be our on-hold savior.

Thanks to the Eric and Edith Siday Charitable Foundation, established eight years ago in memory of the composer by his wife Edith, six composers have been given a chance to compose for the American Music Center’s phone system. The first-ever AMC-Siday Music On Hold commissions are now available when you’re holding for an AMC staff member or, if you want to save on the long distance charges, try listening to the streaming media files hosted here.

When the final mixes of these commissions arrived at the Center, the office was abuzz. The first one to waft from a coworker’s cubicle featured the affable voice of Larry Polansky’s daughter reciting the AMC’s mission statement which begins to loop upon itself with various digital signal processing—think The Exorcist—before ending with mantra “thanks for waiting, thanks for waiting, thanks for waiting.” The pleasantly reassuring coda alone would have satisfied my music-while-you-wait penchant all by itself. Roddy Schrock’s Drop the Dime circulated next, a piece which takes a more introverted approach. Assembled from garbled cell phone messages (admittedly, even messages that I’ve left for him are buried in the mix), Schrock’s piece leaves the listener straining for comprehensibility as we press the receiver more and more tightly to our ear.

Raz Mesinai decided to send callers on an evocative journey over shifting sonic vistas with his piece Shaman. The disembodied chanting of Halim El-Dabh’s Signals/Connections brings to mind that Twilight Zone episode where a little boy communicates with his dead grandmother over a toy phone. A more stoic impact is created by Randall Woolf’s piece, which wouldn’t seem out of place if you were waiting for a shop owner to check their stock of metaphysical healing crystals or turquoise bolo ties. Back to earth, Ira J. Mowitz’s Answering Machine Music goes for the cute factor using circuit bending tactics to create unadulterated what-you-hear-is-what-you-get entertainment.

With no strict guidelines or restrictions other than instrumentation and length—electroacoustic, no more than two minutes—and no edict to adhere to any sort of corporate identity, the composers were free to create anything. However, the Center’s humble phone system, which isn’t able to interface with MAX/MSP, limited more than one of the composers originally interested in creating real-time interactive pieces. Perhaps the name of the commissioning program itself, Music On Hold, might have been some sort of subliminal inhibitor too. All of the commissioned composers actually delivered music. Granted, that is what composers usually do, but one of the pieces even has a notated score—an electronic music rarity to say the least.

Regardless, history has been made, six new compositions are born, and a medium which has existed for decades is finally tapped into, creatively speaking. Let this be the tip of the iceberg. Plastic pressed against ear, the transferring of calls, wrong numbers, menus of prerecorded information, wire taps, eavesdropping, call screening, etc.—all this begs for more exploration. Calling all sonic provocateurs, let’s make some hold music that breaks down proverbial walls or surreptitiously thwarts whatever branding is being sought.

Before the Siday commissions debuted, the best suited on-hold piece test driven here at the Center—although probably the most controversial, judging from all the “are the phones broken?” feedback—was James Tenney’s For Ann (rising). No matter where you enter the piece, the experience is the same: audio vertigo. Other complementary phone-mates included Tom Hamilton’s London Fix and Chris Brown’s Talking Drum CD, both of which possess that elusive sounds-good-on-the-phone gene.

Let’s hope the proprietors of high volume call centers get wind of the Music On Hold concept. Maybe they could fuel a mini-revolution. Imagine a new paradigm where callers actually enjoy holding, and even hint at disappointment when whomever they are trying to reach actually picks up. By kicking open access to a medium ordinarily the domain of elevator-music programmers, the Music On Hold model offers opportunities for unimpeded exploration, a chance to deliver new sonic byproducts to a broader and forcibly captive public.

Aside from the initial flood of curious callers, I can’t think of any reason why MoMA shouldn’t consider commissioning Janet Cardiff to create a piece for their telephone system. Imagine what artists like Kristen Oppenheim, Ceal Floyer, or Christian Marclay might concoct. Maybe Microsoft should hire Brian Eno for something more than just a sound logo, and AT&T could commandeer the talents of Bill Fontana, a sound artist they’ve supported in the past. Why squeeze into one of Muzak’s cookie cutters? It seems like corporate America is stuck in high school where conformity equals survival. Those seeking a unique identity should be hunting down composers to do some telecommunications custom tailoring. Perhaps on-hold music, the type that intrigues callers rather than lulling them to zombiehood, could become next season’s hot marketing trend. Whether or not destined to be the in-thing hyped in the pages of Fast Company, you have to admit, it’s a pretty cool idea.

Composer, Interrupted



Roger Hannay

In 1985, I received a communication from Gilbert Chase requesting an article to be published in a projected second edition of his book The American Composer Speaks. I decided that this would be an opportunity to put into print my views on art and musical composition and submitted this essay, originally titled “The Creative Arts and the Composer,” which I had written for myself a year earlier.

Many months after I delivered the manuscript to Kathryn and Gilbert Chase I discovered that they had been working under a hopeful delusion. There was to be no second edition, nor publication of any kind. Without their knowledge, the project had collapsed before it began. Thereafter my little essay became for me a source for various reincarnations like the protean sermon of Reverend Canon Chasuable, equally suitable for lectures, introductory remarks, quotable paragraphs, and finally as “Appendix No. VIII” in my collection of autobiographical essays, My Book of Life. Now I am pleased to see it in print and published in NewMusicBox.

Roger Hannay—June 1, 2005

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When writing about their work, authors have the happy advantage of doing so in their own medium. Not so composers and painters who, assuming the unfamiliar and treacherous medium of the written word, enter into the society of letters, tiptoeing about, eager for acceptance, unsure of the welcome, and at some point certain to trip over the carpet, smashing the antique glass.

Of course, the best way for composers, painters, or sculptors to comment on their work is to compose more music, and paint more paintings, or mold more sculptures. And, when creative artists are asked to write about their own work, it is naive to expect timid impartiality expressed in terms of bland objectivity. A lifetime of the assumed rigors of artistic discipline, which must be the self-imposed burden of every artist, inevitably results in strong personal convictions, prejudice, idiosyncratic attitudes, fancy imaginings, and the occasional blunt statement of fact. Objectivity in the arts is an academic myth and a critic’s phantom. Generally, the more objective an artist’s comments seem, the more prejudicial are the hidden forces behind them. Making art is an act of faith in which objective knowledge plays a very small part.

Furthermore, whatever a work of art means, the meaning is embodied in the work itself and cannot be objectively explained or defended by the pedagogue, the critic, or even by the artist who created it without varying degrees of distortion, trivialization, and irrelevancy. Being in each case uniquely part of the work, the meaning cannot be properly “translated” into another medium. If, for example, composers could express the meaning of their music in words, or in graphs, or numbered equations, vectors, percentages, and all the other non-musical language infesting the music theory world, they would not be composers at all, but arithmeticians, statisticians, and analytical technicians. The meaning of each work of art becomes apparent to the artist through the process of its creation and that meaning is non-quantifiable, not measurable, not specifically definable, but is in another realm entirely: the realm of ART. The artist wishes to experience a work of art. It does not yet exist; the artist must create in order to experience it. In doing this, the artist labors primarily for an audience of one. To paraphrase Thoreau, the artist is one who, having nothing to make, makes something.

The most striking characteristic of the creative personality is IMAGINATION. It permeates the artist’s creative life and work at every level. The exercise of imagination in the creative artist is comparable to the uses of conventional research techniques by academic scholars only in that the creative artist does his or her “research” through the exercise of imagination. Through its power, intangible spiritual values, emotional feeling, and artistic memory combine with developing technique to create the corporeal reality of an art work. There, perceived and experienced as art, a further transformation occurs as the appreciative comprehension of the work carries one back to its generative spiritual and emotional resources, thereby constituting a cyclic unity in the arts: creation—perception—comprehension, which are thus a metaphor for life. Each is inseparable from its necessary counterpart: the artist—the artwork—the audience. As the creation of an art work progresses, assuming shape and form, the artist is at once the originator, recipient, and interpreter of its non-verbal, non-quantitative, unprovable message. With imagination as the pervasive aspect of the creative process, the artist moves simultaneously throughout the complete spectrum and, creating from the original spiritual and emotional compulsion, imagines the work, brings it into being, and experiences its effect as it evolves toward completion. This constitutes a closed cycle of artist, art, and audience, all within the person of the artist.

Within the surrounding and often hostile artistic, cultural, and economic environment, the creative artist quickly develops a strong sense of individuality and artistic independence. This is an attitude of self-recognition crucial to every artistic life. It may first occur in the early years of creative insight or it may develop somewhat later, but it finally becomes a psychological continuum in which the personality of the artist takes on an added dimension as composer, painter, sculptor, playwright, poet, or novelist. As most creative artists know, the early period of self-identification is also the time when one enters into a lifelong struggle with the traditions and demands of inherited cultural values, with the artist’s own expectations and limitations, and with the expressive and technical demands of the art to which the artist has become irretrievably committed.

The sophomoric aphorism which describes a philosopher as a blind person in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there also serves as an amusing metaphor for the creative artist. Rarely is a completed artwork clearly perceived at the time of its conception. The artist, working with the conjured raw materials of art, watches as the work assumes significance in its creative evolution. Its significance is not fully apparent during the creative process, and often the work emerges in its completed form with characteristics surprising even to the artist. Thus, it is possible for an artwork to be an object of study and wonderment even to its own maker and at last may bear little resemblance to the original concept (which in retrospect may remain an idealized illusion). It has been observed that an artist never knows what a work is until it is finished, and perhaps not even then. In contrast, those whose art-objects are repetitiously manufactured, know in advance what is to be fabricated and are willing to repeat the formulated process exclusively in terms of economic reward.

As everybody knows, the mechanism by which art is brought forth is called technique. It is often spoken and written of as if it were an entity separate, independent, and removable from the work in which it is purported be found, a sort of toolbox, a collection of artistic thingamabobs which the artist, with blithe agility busily assembles and reassembles into the work at hand, working from parts cannibalized from his own previous work and that of others. This is an amusing idea, but it is rarely the case. Technique is part of the building process of a work of art, unique and inseparable from it. As the work is completed the technique therein is absorbed into its organic fabric and cannot be removed and “used” again. The beginning of each new work presents its own elusive challenge, the resolution of which emerges during its evolutionary gestation. This is the reason that one reads repeatedly of the temporary loss of direction, the formative disorientation and puzzlement through which artists struggle in their efforts to shape a new work and to cause the revelation of its secrets. Technique is that which more than any other thing separates the professional from the amateur. It is also that which most closely relates the creative artist to the academic and craftsperson, though the widely disparate results in predictability keep them fundamentally separate in other ways.

The generative resources of music find expression through three elements: sonority, momentum, and form. Each organically inter-dependent with the others, these elements combine to create, in Aaron Copland’s felicitous phrase, a sonorous image which, when in perfect synthesis with artistic inspiration and expression, assumes an abstract beauty akin to the metaphysical insight we are told is to be found in higher mathematics. As the most profound of the temporal arts, music takes us beyond areas of direct cerebral communication into the realms of philosophical speculation involving subconscious association within the experience of psychological momentum in time. The sonorous drama potentially present in each musical work has the power to convey its listeners through experiences of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual intensity within the conscious and subconscious perception of time and space. Within the dynamic forces of music, the ebb and flow of its momentum, the changes of velocities, textures, and ranging pitch spectra, we experience an auditory analogy of expectation and fulfillment in our psychic lives. It is within the complex patterns of relationships among composer, performer, and listener that one again confronts the three verities in the arts: creation (composer), presentation (performer), and perceptive interpretation (audience).

In creating new music, composers draw upon three elemental resources: imagination, conscious memory, and the psychological subconscious. With the composer’s evolving skills and insights, these combine to create a rich and complex fabric of incipient possibilities as the compositional process continues. As in the other arts, compositional technique is not a separate collection of definable instructions, but rather it is an integral part of the compositional process, inextricably mixed with and enlivened by the heat-lighting play of imagination over the shifting sands of subconscious memory and conscious intention.

We are told that novelists have an extraordinary ability to recognize and retain seemingly insignificant moments in daily life which go unnoticed by others, but which are stored away by the writer for possible imaginative use and development: a face in the crowd, a sardonic remark by a stranger, an anecdote at the dinner table; any such small event may become an instant of vision for the story teller. Composers do the same thing with events in sound.

Consciously or subconsciously, they are always listening, hearing, watching, storing away seemingly insignificant musical events which pass unnoticed by others. A pre-rehearsal clarinet phrase, an unintended percussion effect or accident, a small sound in nature; in it all goes, stored in readiness for its future possible compositional use. This aspect of chance discovery is part of the natural alliance between composers and performers whose loving and infinitely varied approach to their instruments is a source of fascination and inspiration to composers. No composer works in a vacuum, no performer performs in the abstract; each is the natural ally of the other. Besides, composers usually have been performers, and the interaction between composing and performing remains essential to the realistic production of new music.

Taking time from composing to write about composing is a questionable activity. A composer should be composing; ideally, composing and performing; pragmatically, composing, performing, and/or teaching. It is dangerous to become entangled in the snare of writing about music when writing music itself and performing it should remain the compelling issue at hand. Ideally, a composer should be perpetually engaged in composition; thinking it, imagining it, working at it, immersed in it, and not adding to the great heap of words, diagrams, and arithmetical equations which currently pass for musical commentary and theory research.

But one rarely earns a living exclusively through musical composition. Not for long, not often, can one pay the rent or buy a car or pay for a baby with it. For the most part, teaching is how one does that, as do most composers, in spite of the draconian admonitions against it, usually by those who have found other equally disruptive and exhausting ways of supporting their composing obsession. The great majority of composers, like their performing colleagues, meet the economic demands of life with the small, often precarious incomes derived from teaching.

That may not be as restrictive as it sounds; composers are usually versatile musicians, and to an astonishing degree they find ways to balance their creative, performing, and teaching lives. Even when not performers in the professional sense, they usually find that if they separate and carefully balance their composing and teaching, their music gets written, their teaching taught, and their living earned.

It has been said that composition cannot be taught; and so it cannot by those who cannot teach it; nor, if the attempt is made by one who having much else to occupy mind and heart, finds it distasteful or boring; nor, if the students have no gift, no capacity or thrust of creative imagination (something rare, indeed, but possible). However, the fact remains: nearly all composers teach and have been taught, usually by other composers, somewhere by someone. The question is not whether it can be taught, but how the teaching goes. Not by prescribed formula, certainly, no closed theoretical systems, nor stylish imitations of past musics, as useful as that might be in other contexts. And surely not by parading before the bewildered student an endless procession of intimidating musical masterpieces which serve only to demonstrate the impossibility of attaining such heights.

The important, absolutely essential ingredient in teaching composition is the cultivation of the student’s own imagination within his or her own work. Teaching composition thus becomes a collaborative venture involving the work of the student, the combined imagination of both the student and the teacher, and the others in the class. It constitutes an exciting privilege and responsibility for both the teacher and the student as they imaginatively investigate the central-core of the student work at hand, finding its potential strengths, present weaknesses, and imaginative possibilities. In momentary cooperation in the imaginative concepts of the work, teacher and student approach it as if no other existed, concentrating solely on that work in that place at that time, and thus they replicate in the early stages of the student’s creative life the birthing process whereby imagination is transformed through emerging technique. It then becomes the task of the student to accept and bring these possibilities into compositional reality in preparation for performance and interpretive response.

Rare is the academic position in which a composer has the luxury of teaching only composition. By the very nature of the composer’s art and craft, teaching and performing skills are necessarily comprehensive and eclectic. They have ranged, until recently at least, from instrumental studio teaching through the teaching and administration of an array of academic curricula involving required courses in music history and theory to performing and lecturing off-campus in the surrounding community and elsewhere. The qualifying phrase, “until recently,” is present because a new and ominous factor has arisen confronting composers teaching in their vulnerable academic havens.

Until recently, the teaching of music theory was understood and accepted as the providence of the teaching composer, for who could know more about music theory-as-musicianship than those who presumably practice in their working craft of composition? Many composition jobs were not in composition at all, but were actually teaching positions in theory, music history, or instrumental lessons with composition as a minor sideline. This is no longer so. Formerly involving the pragmatic skills of musicianship, music theory is now associated with speculative research and has become truly theoretical in a literal sense. In its new academic role of companion-to-musicology it now pursues theoretical speculation in pseudo-scientific investigations of theory itself and appears in esoteric journals filled with graphs, equations, and formula, and is expressed in basic fractured academic English, all the more appropriate to the sciences than to the arts. This new development had serious consequences by diminishing opportunities for the employment of non-theoretical composers in music schools and departments. The duality of composition-theory as a two part unity has been severed, and “theory-specialists” now fill positions formerly occupied by composers. The inherent dichotomy between abstract speculation and the practical procedures of composition and performance presents a nearly impassable chasm separating the analytical and creative temperaments. The precarious position of the composer in academia, never as secure as popular myth would have it, becomes even less secure and is each year further undermined by administrative procedures in evaluation often wildly inappropriate to the arts in general and to composers and performers in particular.

Irrelevant standards of academic merit, grantsmanship, and political success are applied to the work of teaching composers, often not on the basis of the quality of the work, but in recognition of what happens to it, which is to say, its visibility. Thus, abstract research, especially when supported by a grant resulting in a published article in abstract theoretical speculation, is more likely to be viewed as visible proof of excellence than an unperformed original composition or an unacknowledged locally performed work denied significant recognition. Composers are now being forced into patterns of professional activity often at odds with their natural artistic gifts. Merely finding time to compose is further complicated by the expectation that the composer is to research and publish research articles, spend hours filling out grant applications and dredging up letters of recommendation to go with them, because these are the things which are now recognizable achievements of the teaching composer. Some composers are rather good at this new balancing act of academic grantsmanship, theory publication, and composing. But by thus neglecting their art, composers are now often judged not on the quality of their compositions so much as on the success of their grant applications.

Administrative pressure in grantsmanship places the composer in the demeaning position of evaluation in terms of grants-application success rather than compositional merit. It is time for creative artists to re-examine the personal cost of these Faustian bargains struck daily by the few and so eagerly sought by so many. At the moment composers seem to be in a maze of diversionary activity generated by the demands of grants committees, academic evaluation procedures, and government arts councils with their attendant computerized arts bureaucracies. Struggling to maintain their individual artistic integrity, composers must now be content with a game-show atmosphere wherein the prizes are grants, awards, commissions, and possibly tenure.

Serious choices have to be made. For composers the demands of composition, performing, teaching, administration grantsmanship, and generally “keeping up” constitute a formidable burden. The criterion of who is and is not a composer must finally be determined by one’s ability to protect and proceed with the art of composing. The demands of composition, second perhaps only to personal obligatory ties to loved ones, must take precedence over all other aspects of personal and professional life. Always on guard, protecting one’s inner creativity from the daily onslaughts of destructive influences and outright attacks, the composer has a profound ethical and moral obligation to creative integrity in the arts. Whatever the means of economic survival, chosen or forced, whether in the shifting sands of academia, the impermanence of orchestral residencies, or the fleeting infusions of grant money, it is the ethical, moral choice which relentlessly confronts the composer and every creative artist.

Artists, driven as we are by the need to create, soon find ourselves in a struggle between our art and a surrounding apathetic environment. In spite of the resulting personal conflict and struggle, composers manage to communicate their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual lives to a mostly indifferent public and often doing so without the occasionally enabling mechanisms of the art world itself.

In doing so their work passes through three evolving stages: one, the original concept (often at first merely a vague and ill-defined notion); two, the difficult often prolonged task of bringing that artistic image into physically perceptible reality; and three, the presentation of the work whereby it is retranslated into the personal images and conceptions of those experiencing it. This is the great cycle of artistic creation that in music may be described as composition, performance, and listening, each interdependent upon, in, and through the other.

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Roger Hannay (b. 1930) is one of six composers commissioned by The North Carolina Symphony Orchestra for its forthcoming 75th anniversary celebrations. A member of ASCAP since 1964, he is now professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.