Category: Articles

Globe Trotters and Jet Setters

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary

SoundTracksWhen I was 20 years old I, like generations of American college students before me, packed a suitcase and got on a plane for my junior year abroad in Paris. I had never been to a country where English wasn’t the primary language and I remember in my post-departure panic saying to my French professor: “If you don’t think I speak French well enough and that I’m going to be an embarrassment to my country, be honest with me and I won’t go!” Of course, when I realized that most Americans in France practice what David Sedaris calls “Easy French” (simply speaking English louder), I eased into my new culture without a problem. When the cab driver dropped me off at my apartment, I knew I was at home. I have never been as comfortable in my life as when I was in Paris. I wanted to be Parisian, whereas I am not quite sure that I want to be considered a New Yorker. I believe strongly that every person has a corresponding place that feels like home and this is not necessarily (or even usually) where they are born. I was fascinated this month to find so many artists among the stack of new recordings who have moved away from their roots and ventured into the unknown to find their mental and spiritual homes.

Across the Ocean

It makes sense that many composers and musicians would have a desire to live in Europe. After all, many of our American musical traditions come from European roots and academic ties to European institutions are plentiful. Barney Childs took a break from the American West when he was invited to attend Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and George Walker, like dozens of American composers before and after, sought the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Before this he had been studying in Fontainebleau about 45 minutes southeast of the grand French metropolis. Film and television composer extraordinaire Danny Elfman escaped from his native L.A. at age 18 to join a theater troupe in Paris with his brother and soon pushed off to Africa. Only a bout of malaria convinced him to return to the States! And bassist Andy McKee continued a long tradition of ex-patriot jazzers in the City of Lights, living in Paris in the mid-1980s.

The bustle of Rome (not to mention the American Academy there) has also attracted many American deserters throughout the past century such as Samuel Barber, Frederic Rzewski, and Alvin Singleton. Both Singleton and Rzewski extended their stays in Europe for a couple of decades!

As the Cold War came to a close, many artists started to explore the artistic resources of Eastern Europe and soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic has become a sought-after destination for young artists of all shapes and sizes, thanks to its ridiculously low prices, the legality of absinthe, and the Czech people’s deep appreciation of serious music. Conductor Paul Freeman, who is an avid champion of American composers, it currently on the podium of the Czech National Symphony, and composer/flutist/conductor Daniel Kessner honors the beautiful nation with a recording of his chamber works that were created and/or performed at the Forfest annual music festival.

Some artists have venture farther afield in search of inspiration. Larry Polansky‘s time spent in Central Java continues to inspire his output as is evident on his newest recording. And although they hail from all over the US, Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette joined forces in Tokyo for a live recording. Due to the improvisatory nature of their music, one can’t deny the impact of location on the performance.

Road Trip!

Because the United States is so vast, many artists are continually inspired by the variety within their homeland. Most composers seem to follow in the path of the pioneers and settlers moving from east to west. MIDI-raga composer Michael Robinson left New York City for Maui in 1989, backtracking a year later to land in Los Angeles. Jazzers Skip Heller, Mike Fahn, Terri Lyne Carrington, and contrabassoonist (whom I’ve also heard called “contra-nut”) Allen Savedoff left their northeastern abodes for the palm trees of L.A. Improv artist Adam James Wilson stopped halfway west from New York in Ohio and Illinois for university, and legendary tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd along with the funky tin hat trio both opted for the northern vibe of California. Composer Daniel Adams who specializes in percussion music took the southern corridor westward moving from Miami to Texas via Louisiana (and Illinois).

Although it appears that most movement among musicians seems to re-enact some kind of musical manifest destiny, many go against that grain. Some westerners have opted for East Coast attitude such as jazz old-timer Chico Hamilton who split time between Los Angeles (his hometown) and New York. Composer Phillip Schroeder left his northern California upbringing behind for an education in the East (he is now working in Arkansas) and classical saxophonist/Californian Jeremy Justeson slowly worked his way from West to East via his studies making stops in Chicago, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Chamber music composer Robert Baksa returned to his birthplace, New York City, after growing up in Arizona and conductor Jo-Michael Schreiber left his California home to lead the University of Miami Chorale, which is featured on a recording this month performing contemporary works for mixed chorus.

A few other folks made the trek from South to North. For example, North Carolina-native Billy Taylor arrived in New York City in 1942 at the age of 21 and soon was playing with all the big names. Meanwhile, academic composer Ezra Laderman inched his way up the East Coast from Brooklyn to New England.

Still others longed for the warmth of the South like pianist/composer and Doors fan George Winston, who made homes in Mississippi and Florida after his childhood in eastern Montana and, from what I can tell, Camelot composer and creator of musical soul portraits Richard Shulman headed to Asheville, North Carolina, after doing his university work in Western New York. And probably one of the most fascinating recordings for fans of folk music is one called I’m On My Journey Home, a collection of field recordings made by ethnomusicologists (mostly from the North!) of vocal traditions and techniques of southern Appalachia. My favorite has to be the recording of the tobacco auction!

And finally, winner of the Continental United States Jetsetter Award has to be Colorado-born, neo-romantic orchestral composer Frank Graham Stewart who has made homes in New York
City, upstate New York, California, and Michigan!

Destination: U.S.A.

Now let’s turn the tables for a moment and recognize the fact that the United States is also a prime destination for musicians and composers from all over the world. Composer Michael Gordon was born into an Eastern European community in Nicaragua before attending Yale University where he met the other two founders (David Lang and Julia Wolfe) of Bang On A Can, the new music ensemble whose most recent recording is a greatest hits compilation. The late Leo Ornstein was brought to the U.S. from the Ukraine by his family and then moved around the country elusively during his later years (including a stint in a trailer in Texas!) and MacArthur award-winning composer Bright Sheng, who lived through the cultural revolution in the People’s Republic of China, came to New York City in 1982, and started teaching at the University of Michigan in 1995. On the newest recording from the Society of Composers, Inc., two of the featured composers, Maria Niederberger and Emily Doolittle, left their native countries (Switzerland and Canada respectively) to work and study in the U.S.

In addition to the ex-patriot composers that now call the United States home, many performers have done the same. New Age, multi-cultural violinist Farzad, who is originally from Iran, came to study in Indiana and Texas before becoming an orchestral musician in Ecuador. Pianist Sahan Arzruni, born in Istanbul to Armenian parents, is currently a resident of the U.S. and a key member of the ethnomusicological community. A recording of vocal music released this month is an ode to another ex-pat, the poet W.H. Auden, who left England for the United States in 1939 and subsequently split his time between New York City and Vienna.

I Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

Ironically, some of the most adventurous music being made is by people who are relatively uninspired by the lure of a new setting. It seems that many native New Yorkers have no desire to reach past their own urban safe haven for more than a vacation here and there, but they make the most of their lush multi-cultural surroundings. Latin jazzers Bobby Sanabria and Steven Kroon have gleaned their inspiration from the outer boroughs while jazz maverick Dom Minasi proudly proclaims New York as his home. Avant-garde pop artist David First has the New York Metropolitan area running through his blood and the improvising quintet of Jimmy Williams, Michael Jefry Stevens, Joe Fonda, Herb Robertson, and Harvey Sorgen uses New York as their base. Meredith Monk and Leonard Bernstein are the face of the New York musical sensibility for me. Despite the Grove Dictionary‘s claim that she was born in Lima, Peru, Monk was born and raised in the NY metro area, but Bernstein is actually from Massachusetts. Although tell me—who is more New York than Leonard Bernstein??? This perhaps supports my point that where your spirit belongs isn’t necessarily where you were born! Some Californians also seem pretty content with their setting such as “swamp rocker” Lisa Haley and improv-oriented trumpeter Jeff Kaiser, who has two new albums out this month, one with Brad Dutz and the other with his ockodektet. At the same time violinist (a simplification, I know) Mat Maneri continues to rock the New England improv scene.

All this talk of exploration, new places, and new sounds has inspired me. So I am going to leave you now, as I am catching a flight to Istanbul tomorrow to get some perspective. Happy travels and happy listening.

Is There Really No Place Like Home?: American Composers Abroad

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Analysis, Articles



Guy Livingston

Writing from Paris, in the beginning of the new millennium, the city of light seems pretty tame compared to its awesome role a century ago. From about 1880 until World War II, Paris was the rarely-contested center for new and avant-garde music, painting, and writing. This cultural hub attracted vast numbers of foreigners, most particularly Americans. The story of Americans abroad in the 20th century is thus primarily one of Paris, but also one of London, Morocco, Rome, and more recently Amsterdam and Berlin.

What is it that has so strongly attracted Americans to Europe? What was so intriguing about European culture (particularly in the 1920s) that made Americans eager to pack their bags and rush to board the next ocean liner? Was it the food, the music, the poetry, the modernism, or the tradition?

America invented her politics and economy first, and culture much, much later. ‘American’ music existed before 1910, but those who performed it (except for religious music) were minstrels, bandleaders, folk musicians, and other performers relegated to the fringes of society. ‘Cultured’ music in America was defined solely by its relevance and closeness to European models. Pre-1900, the European education was the only choice for any serious composer, and the grand tour of Europe the only possibility of developing a refined musical background for American romantics Gottschalk, MacDowell and their fellow artists.

At the turn of the century, the situation began to change. However obscurely, composers like Ives were defining a homegrown American music, and patrons and critics were beginning to encourage a search for idioms separate from the European tradition. Ives, Cowell, Ruggles, and a few others developed ruggedly individualistic Yankee styles without leaving home, but they were too far outside the system to get significant attention. Meanwhile, more mainstream American composers were coming back from studies in Paris and Rome, full of fresh ideas for an “American Music.”

In the late 1920s, George Antheil, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland returned from Europe with a splash, writing new and vivid music. Ragtime, early jazz, and African-American musicians were becoming popular in Europe and were being recognized for their artistry on both sides of the Atlantic. Crossover Broadway/classical artists like Gershwin began to mix jazz and European music. And by the ’30s and ’40s, mainstream U.S. composers were producing 100% ‘American Music’ for newly receptive symphonic audiences. No longer was the European model necessary to America: the U.S. had gained musical independence.

Not that composers stopped going to Europe. On the contrary: after World War II, the reasons to go abroad had changed, but the pull was still strong. In the ’50s there was the new attraction of Darmstadt, and in the ’80s the glistening underground IRCAM electronic music center. Here, composers could devote themselves entirely to new electronic and serialist idioms, without fear of a hostile or uninformed public (or sometimes without fear of any public at all).

The US-Vietnam war caused many Americans to seek anonymity or peace abroad. But it also made them extremely unpopular throughout Europe. In Rome, recounts composer Richard Trythall, the war and the changing economy “sent a lot of composers back to the States or elsewhere in Europe.” After IRCAM and Darmstadt became institutionalized and gained a reputation for bureaucratic academicism (which didn’t take long), the Dutch improvisation and new music scene exploded in the late ’80s, attracting composers from South America, Scandinavia, and the States. By the ’90s, established Dutch iconoclasts like Louis Andriessen and younger experimentalists like Richard Barrett and Ann Laberge, themselves foreigners, had turned Amsterdam into a major new music center.

Most recently, the burgeoning rave and techno scenes in London and Berlin are having a major international impact. For many young American composers and DJs, West Berlin, with its wealthy and hip audience, is now the place to be, while East Berlin still offers cheap food and accommodations. London balances a familiar language with sky-high rents and explosive growth.

Inner pages:

View From the East: A Modest Idea

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary


Greg Sandow

This past summer, I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about dinner music. I’d eaten in a fine country restaurant, where unfortunately there was one annoyance—classical music on the stereo, first some surging 19th-century romantic work, bad for the stomach, and then classical music’s greatest hits, Bolero and the like, bad for the imagination (and distracting precisely because they’re so familiar).

That got me wondering what music might have been better. I restricted myself to classical stuff, not because jazz or world music, or Sade wouldn’t have been fine, but because I know classical music best. I thought the best dinner music would be something that didn’t tug at your attention, but that rewarded you if you happened to listen. I came up with some suggestions—Stravinsky’s Apollo, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint (the multiple clarinet piece), and Haydn’s Symphony No. 63, “La Roxelane.”

But then, as I wrote, I realized something that should have been obvious—restaurants ought to commission dinner music, asking composers to write something that (in my view, anyway) should sit quietly in the background until you found yourself listening to it. And, come to think of it, would give you something delightful even if you listened for just a few seconds, never forcing you (with any kind of blatant drama) to keep listening, or else feel that you’d missed something crucial.

This should have been obvious to me because I think composers should be asked to write pieces for every occasion where music is played. A while ago I was asked to speak at the annual meeting of the New Jersey Symphony (a very happy orchestra that’s little known in New York, even though it’s recognized throughout the orchestral world as a model of imaginative management, and under its past music director, Zdenek Macal, gave some of the most satisfying concerts I’ve heard in the past few years). Of course there was music, played by members of the orchestra, but I couldn’t help thinking that one of the two pieces played should have been new. If a new bookstore opens, and there’s a party, someone should be asked to write a piece. If a band marches in a civic parade (St. Patrick’s Day, anybody?), someone should fund a new band extravaganza. (Don’t even get me started on the gala performances that open concert and opera seasons.)

Happily, one new music organization did pick up on my restaurant idea, so maybe something will happen. But already I can hear some objections. How can I ask anybody to write music people won’t listen to? Isn’t that an insult to composers? Won’t I encourage trivial music, at the expense of profound musical thought?

I’ve got many answers to that. First, look at the pieces I chose for my own ideal dinner—Bach, Stravinsky, Haydn—and substantial works, at least from the first two; not what I’d call trivial. Any dinner composer who writes anything even a tenth as good as Apollo deserves thanks from all of us. Secondly—and now I’ll extend my defense to the band piece for St. Patrick’s Day, and whatever anybody writes for the bookstore inauguration—not all music needs to be lofty. Anybody who wants to storm the heights of emotion or intellect in every composition is free to ignore my ideas. Though I do think that all grades of music are, in the end, related. Flood our lives with happy pieces for every occasion, get people used to seeing composers and hearing their work, and the market expands for everyone. Even Elliott Carter’s five string quartets will get more attention than they currently do.

But all this is a prelude to another idea. I was talking a while ago with someone in classical radio (I won’t name any names, or say which station was involved; no need to shine lights on someone who’ll do best working in private, without any pressure). This person works for a station that’s more or less typical; it broadcasts unchallenging music. My conversation partner had no thought of changing that, but wondered if, by some alchemy yet to be evolved, the station could sound a little more like the city it’s in.

I said: Commission some composers. Or, maybe, hold a competition. Ask people to write pieces that would fit with no trouble—no raised eyebrows, no shaking of heads, no turning the dial elsewhere, no angry letters to management—into the station’s playlist. And then don’t just play the winner, or, rather, don’t have just one single winner. Play everything you get that would work on the air (subject, I guess, to the laws of reality; the station would probably have to pay to get the works performed, and its bank account most likely isn’t bottomless).

My radio friend responded, a bit worried: “But wouldn’t that restrict the composers?” Or, anyway, words to that effect. Wouldn’t composers have to push down their creative urge, writing pieces for easy listening when surely they’d rather write something as searing as Mahler’s Sixth.

The answer, of course, is that anyone who didn’t want to write radio music wouldn’t have to enter the competition. And also that restrictions aren’t necessarily bad. They can even stimulate creativity. The 12-tone canons in the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21, are pretty fearsome in their rigor and complexity (not in their sound). But Webern didn’t sacrifice anything by writing them, except maybe some sleep. When Prokofiev decided he’d write the last movement of his Classical Symphony without using any minor chords, that didn’t put him in a straitjacket. It was a challenge; of all the music he might write, use only the kinds where minor chords don’t occur. Or when Tom Johnson wrote
The Four-Note Opera…does anyone remember that? Tom, a certified downtown composer (and chronicler of the downtown scene in The Village Voice, to the delight and edification of many of us who first learned about downtown music from him), wrote a sly tonal opera with just four notes, D, G, A, and E. It was a wild success early in the ‘70s, got into Time magazine; and Tom was still Tom.

A radio composer could see her work the same way. She’d be like Prokofiev: Of all the musical ideas she might have, use only the ones that would work on classical radio. There’s no limit to how cannily the ideas can be fit together. It’s true that you can’t express violent emotion in a piece like this, but if that’s an objection, then we’re forgetting all the great pieces that aren’t violently emotional. You know, like the Brandenburg Concertos or Music for 18 Musicians. We’d also rule out sounds that are in any way extreme, like Glenn Branca symphonies (extremely loud) or anything by Morton Feldman (mostly very soft), but enough already. We’re not saying all music should be like this; only the pieces written for the radio. And anyone who doesn’t like it doesn’t have to participate. The point, if you ask me, is that classical radio isn’t going to go away (or at least we hope it isn’t), so let’s turn it to our purposes.

***

On another note, I’d like to say something in defense of Dead Men Walking, the Jake Heggie opera that my critic colleagues pretty well savaged when City Opera produced it this fall.

It’s not what you’d call a sophisticated piece, though the Terrence McNally libretto bristles with commercial smarts; it’s constructed tightly enough to rival the most successful Hollywood screenplay. The music is somewhat crude and not exactly specific about crucial dramatic points. At the start, when we watch a violent murder, the music howls something translatable, more or less, as “This is horrible!” What, exactly, the horror means is something the music can’t tell us, not then or anywhere in the piece. Compare the violent music in Verdi’s Otello, after Otello degrades Desdemona in their scene in the third act. It’s utterly specific; it wouldn’t fit in any other Verdi opera, or at any other point in this one.

I never felt anything like that anywhere in Dead Men Walking. Even at the opera’s climax of redemption, when Sister Helen tells a desperate killer (on death row, awaiting execution) that God is with them, the music only says: “This is lovely and important.” It doesn’t make us feel the presence of God, or the strength of Sister Helen’s belief, or the peace the idea of God brings to the now-repentant killer. I can’t remotely tell what God means to Heggie; whether, for instance, he believes God really did descend, or simply that Sister Helen’s faith made it seem as if He did. The whole thing comes across, in the opera, simply as a dramatic device, just as McNally’s libretto comes across as an expert contrivance. (Which is not, by the way, to say that Heggie doesn’t have any feelings or ideas. It’s just that they don’t sound in his music.)

But, as Galileo muttered even after he was forced to recant, “Eppur si muove”…”Still the earth moves.” (In the astronomical, not the Hemingway sense.) No matter what fault I find with it, this opera, too, moves—it slams along with real force, and captures the audience, earning strong applause. Compare that to The Great Gatsby, John Harbison’s waste of an evening at the Met, infinitely better written than Dead Man, heavy with sobriety and high aspirations, which unfortunately weigh it down until it can’t move, instead of giving it fuel for a climb to the heights. Judged purely as opera, it’s flattened—whipped, completely eclipsed—by Dead Man Walking, a piece otherwise so inartistic that too many people make the mistake of not taking it seriously.

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer? Charlemagne Palestine

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary



Photo by Petkov

I think of myself as a New York composer. Not especially American. Since I was born in Brooklyn of parents born in Russia I had a very strong connection with Europe already. Many people I met during my childhood came from Europe. My grandfather spoke nearly ten broken languages in our home and in our neighborhood people spoke Russian, Polish, Hebrew, German, and other European languages mixed in with English. I feel an identification with other artists from Brooklyn like Gershwin, Copland, Man Ray, Henry Miller, and Morty Feldman. When I finally moved to Manhattan on the Upper West Side as a teenager going to Music and Art high school, then Juilliard, then Mannes and NYU in that neighborhood too I met lots of musicians, writers, and intellectuals who either came from Europe for war related reasons or their parents had come from Europe sometime earlier. That was normal in NYC after the war. When my career started in NYC as an electronic music composer, then composer-performer, then artist/composer/performer, my sonic principles were aided by the experiments of the German physicist Hermann Helmholtz, my piano of preference the Bosendorfer of Vienna, my favorite early loves in classical and avant-garde music were Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Mahler, and then Varèse, Messiaen, and Xenakis. I even got to meet Stravinsky and Varèse with Lukas Foss in NYC as a student, so I already had Europe in daily doses in my blood and as people used to say, NYC, in those days, was a lot like a European city.

When I moved for several years to L.A. to work and teach at Cal Arts, Californians distinguished between West coasters and East coasters. I found southern California very American, another country than NYC. I liked it a lot though Californians seemed very foreign to me and the values and mentality of people who were third, fourth, or fifth generation Americans or more, and I think they saw me also as foreign, perhaps more European already even though we had a very nice cross fertilizing period together and many people say they can hear that in my California period music. By the early ’70s I had moved back to NYC into the newly created SoHo and began to commute regularly between NYC and Europe, sometimes already living for short periods of time in Paris, Rome, Geneva, Amsterdam, Cologne but always coming back to my studios in NY. As the years went on and my career spanned several different mediums I found a constantly receptive audience in Europe though diverse and ever changing. Even now my works and history are known differently from country to country and city to city. Europe is a very diverse place and it’s not just the languages that change every few hundred miles but artistic taste and philosophy also. Europe has had an inspiring effect on my career, my survival, and my personal attitude as a human being on this planet. Imagine my being Russian Polish Persian Jew born with the name Palestine in Brooklyn living between different countries and peoples. Not a very unilateral life story.

America took in my parents and grandparents during terrible times before the Russian Revolution and I had a magnificent storybook childhood meeting important eccentric artists in NYC as a kid from Pollock, Rothko, Dali, Kerouac, Johns, Stravinsky, Varèse, Cage, Warhol, and on and on and on. But when you asked me this question the first person to pop into my head was Arnold Schoenberg. I have a book about his life and works with many pictures of him in it. He never smiles in any those pictures all taken in Europe, another Europe than today’s Europe. Then at the end of the book there is a series of pictures taken of him when he was living in Los Angeles playing tennis and smiling and joking. Those pictures delight me. I had had several dark smile-less periods in my life, too. But things can change even in ones later years. Now I am in Bruxelles and I smile and I joke too. I’m happy here. I am appreciated and respected and life even in our difficult times seems worth living. I still love my hometown though I miss lox and bagels and the great bars where I got to know many legendary artists and first blahblahed my own chaotic and personal views on the nature of the cosmos. I also love Europe, the Europe of great music, literature, philosophy from the old days and the new European community just breaking out of its eggshell. I was born a hop, skip, and a jump from the Atlantic Ocean in Brooklyn and I’m always ready to hop, skip, and jump to either side of the Atlantic when there’s something delicious for me to do there. Maybe soon again you’ll see me in a new bar somewhere in NY blahblahing in the great tradition of artist in bar blahblahing.

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer? Steve Lacy

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary

I am an American (New York City) composer/saxophonist/bandleader, and have lived abroad since ’65 (Rome, Paris, Berlin), with the exception of ’67 when my wife (Irene Aebi, singer and ex-cellist/violinist) and I moved back to New York, where we found the working situation worse than ever, and thereupon fled back to Europe and Rome in ’68.

Now things have vastly improved for us in America, and we have re-located in Boston, where I have a good teaching position at New England Conservatory which allows me to continue to travel, within certain limits, and pursue my performing and recording activities.

I have always felt that a musician must follow his music wherever it takes him, and I do whatever it takes to keep it going, without artistic compromise. I also believe that the music we make knows more about how it wants to be, and what it wishes to become, than we do and that it will make clear what needs to be done in order to maintain and improve its own qualities and nature.

There are advantages and disadvantages in every place and in each situation. My own music was promulgated in New York in the ’50s and early ’60s, further research was done in the Buenos Aires in ’66 and Rome in ’68-’69, but the real development and it’s early realization was accomplished from our base in Paris (’70-’02) were we also maintained a working group (quintet/ sextet/solo/duos/trio/larger ensembles), using more or less the same excellent players and traveling constantly and all over the world.

Finally, things started to dry up in Paris, and it was clearly the moment to repatriate (come home for me and move again for my Swiss wife). Boston seems like a good situation for us right now, but who knows when it will again become necessary to follow the music to somewhere else. I hope not for a few years, in order to establish a new base.

As for being an “American composer,” one’s origins are certainly interesting and perhaps significant, but destiny and fulfillment and the path and order taken by each artist is, to me, much more so. We all have our nature and its fullest possible realization must be the real goal.

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer? John McGuire

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary



In fall of 1965, during my second year in graduate school at UC Berkeley, I applied for and was awarded an Alfred E. Hertz Traveling Scholarship to go to Germany.

Why did I want to go to there? Since getting interested in new music as an undergraduate I had repeatedly encountered the music and writings of composers who had lectured and taught at the legendary International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. I felt a strong need to go and see for myself.

Once in Darmstadt I soon noticed that I had entered a musical world very different from the one I’d just left. Until then, most of the new music I had heard had been on records. Exceptions had been the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, where I had often attended performances by excellent musicians who were working for next to nothing, and occasional concerts of new works in the bay area, given mostly by idealistic student volunteers. What struck me first was the number of professional musicians making a living playing new music.

The lectures, given by Kagel, Ligeti, and Stockhausen, treated subjects that were of immediate interest to me. Kagel talked about new musical theater, Ligeti about his approach to Webern, and Stockhausen presented his ideas about the synthesis of electronic, vocal and instrumental music. To encounter this material first-hand was very exciting; until then I had only read about some of it in journals.

Before the courses started I had asked the man in charge of the Institute for New Music in Darmstadt, Wilhelm Schl¸ter, about studying composition in Germany. He generously researched the topic and informed me that Penderecki would be Guest Professor of Composition at the Folkwangschule in Essen for the next two years.

Having been very interested in the music of Penderecki while in graduate school (this interest was strictly extracurricular), I was enthusiastic. When I visited the school in September 1966 the arrangement was made for me to have two private lessons a week with Penderecki; these were to include composition, instrumentation, and counterpoint. Since I felt that the training I’d received in college and university in the states was inadequate, I soon found myself working 16-hour days.

For the summer of 1967 I had the good luck to be accepted into Stockhausen’s master class (“composition studio”) in Darmstadt. The project Stockhausen had planned for his course, called Ensemble, was a four-hour long interactive event to which each of 12 students was to contribute one layer. The institute hired musicians and equipment. Stockhausen had already worked out a number of notational strategies to deal with the many problems that came up during the development of the project. In retrospect it seems that it was far ahead of its time; it’s conceptual boldness left a lasting impression.

In 1970 I moved to Cologne, where I spent years assimilating these experiences and many others. Occasionally I was commissioned by the Department of New Music (Department of New Music?!) at the West German Radio in Cologne. In particular, the three projects that I realized in the Studio for Electronic Music at the radio were, musically, the happiest times of my life.

Did I identify myself as an American composer? The question never really concerned me. I’ve always believed Virgil Thomson‘s dictum that the best way to be an American composer is to be an American citizen and then to write whatever you want. From those who told me that my music “sounds American” (and there were quite a few) I was never able to get any clear answer as to why. Certainly I would be unable to answer this myself.

In 1979 I married the American soprano Beth Griffith. She had moved to Cologne a few years previously to make recordings at the radio. We have two children. In 1997 we decided to return to the United States. We missed our language. We wanted our children to get to know the families and the country in which we grew up and to attend American schools.

Since returning to the States I have done some teaching as an adjunct professor of composition at Columbia University. While I have been enormously impressed with the talent and commitment of students I’ve met there, I often wonder about their futures: after they’ve graduated, what is “out there” for them to do, i.e. commissions, performances? It looks very, very difficult, at least from a European(ized) point of view. What most of them will do, I suppose, is go right back into another university because with far too few exceptions that’s about all there is for them to do.

My wife has frequently returned to Germany for engagements—which in all cases have included travel expenses and performance fees—singing new music. There have been no comparable opportunities in the U.S.A. This is not due to lack of effort but simply to the lack of provisions for performing the music of our time in our country.

In any case, we’re glad to be back, and we’re staying. We harbor the fantasy that maybe, eventually, we can make some difference, though neither of us knows what that might be.

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer? Nancy Van de Vate

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary



American writers, composers, and artists have lived abroad for generations but have almost always continued to identify themselves as Americans. Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Gertrude Stein, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber—the list is very long. Although I have now lived outside the continental USA for more than 25 years, and in Austria since 1985, I still consider myself and my music American. Even the traits that enable me to live and work effectively in another country are American, namely practicality and adaptability.

There are now many musicians from the US in Europe—more than half of all singers in German opera houses are Americans. They are there because they are good: hardworking, well-trained, and dedicated to their art. They are also there because there is opportunity for them that they cannot find in the United States. They live where they can do their work.

I have dual citizenship and expect to stay in Vienna permanently. Although Austria is notoriously malely chauvinist (the Vienna Philharmonic is the last orchestra in the world with no women), I still have far more opportunity here as a composer than I would have in the US. In Vienna I am usually referred to as an Austrian-American composer, which recognizes not only where I come from, but also where I now live and work. Most European musicians, however, say they hear my music as “very American.”

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer? James Dashow

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary



Photo by Roberto Doati

Well, I am an American, I am a composer, and I am living in Italy, but I am not sure whether I would want to re-arrange those characteristics into a single phrase. Living abroad changes perspectives on a lot of things, of course, but I never was comfortable with the idea of “American music” as opposed to…what?—”European music” or “Asian music”… maybe “non American music”… or “un-American music”? Globalization and cross-fertilization has been going on for centuries, the difference is that now they happen almost instantaneously and quite thoroughly. Composers born in Europe are exposed to all the trends in the U.S., just as composers born in the U.S. are aware of what European composers are doing; but what if those Europeans already have some Americanisms (whatever those are), and the Americans already have some Europeanisms (whatever they are)? We really don’t have anything specifically American or specifically European to point at. We do have creative people with distinct and complex personalities making their (often unique) music within what I might hazard to call the Western tradition; and we do have characteristic institutions that tend to support certain kinds of music (and that might determine if you get hired, get a performance, or win a commission), but I fail to hear the music itself as being nationalistic or regionalistic.

Oh, of course Neapolitan songs come from one place only as does the blues and certain kinds of drinking songs. But when composers get to work on serious artistic effort (most of us know what “serious” means even if we’re not supposed to use that word—to be clear, Il Barbiere, Cosi’ Fan Tutte, and Falstaff are serious artistic efforts, too) that involves discovering or molding or transforming musical materials into something unique that is more than another version (no matter how well done) of something that’s been around for awhile, then what matters is the composer’s constantly growing sensibilities, tastes, craftsmanship, ideals, and musical values. Those aren’t national characteristics, they are (highly personal) musical characteristics. The only country composers are citizens of is called Music.

From over here, the whole business of trying to compose “American” music (and to define it in terms of being “not European”) looks rather pathetic. But there are some equally pathetic organizations over here that promote “Italian”. I think a noteworthy difference is that the promotion here is for Italian composers, not for Italian music; it’s just a matter of trying to get Italian composers performed, and the nationalistic business is what the politicians need to justify sending those organizations a few euros now and then. When colleagues here talk about “American music” they generally mean the commercial pop slop that has invaded the planet and is now the standard entertainment and background for everything from elevators to pasta sauce advertising. Otherwise they will talk about specific composers, who happen to be from New York or San Francisco or wherever.

Some composers have one kind of aesthetic; some have another. And to my mind the best thing that can happen is that each composer discovers what expresses himself best, and then becomes as accomplished as possible in that “what”. Getting better and better at ones art inevitably brings out the uniqueness of the individual, which may be strong and influential on others, or may be subtle and delicate, to be appreciated but not necessarily followed or imitated. Music is a big country; it has room for all these folks.

When I hear American composers complaining about European this and that…hey, wait a minute, you sound just like my Italian colleagues complaining about not getting any performances in New York or London or Paris. It really hasn’t anything to do with the music being of one nationality or another, it does have a lot to do with those old tiresome problems of promotion, politics and luck. And regrettably it does have quite a bit to do also with the journalistic image of contemporary music which composers everywhere should know better than to believe. Journalists are adept at repeating banal slogans and reviving 100 year old issues, because they are fundamentally lazy, incompetent, and ignorant. And that too is a universal phenomenon. We got ’em over here, too.

Living in Italy has certainly opened my eyes to the provincialism of U.S. attitudes toward a lot of things, especially political, but cultural as well. But all countries have that kind of provincialism at the “official” level (the promotion, the Hurray For Us type of thing). Individual composers shouldn’t. There’s already enough of that provincialism in other aspects of any country’s culture and especially in its politics that can turn deadly. I think composers, musicians of all kinds, can make a real contribution to the emerging global dimension of civilization by simply ignoring the old slogans, the old nationalistic distinctions, and maybe coming up with some new one-liners for the ignorant journalists.

Like most composers, I have my way of hearing and doing musical things that reflects a lot of listening and practical performing experiences; my hearing and doing will inevitably reflect everything else I do too, including reading and seeing paintings and sculpture and dance and enjoying fine cooking and so on. I’ve engaged in these activities not only on two different continents, but with the whole world for source material (well, as long as I can find it in translation, or the art show comes to a local museum, or the performing group is invited to a Festival nearby or has made a CD which I can find on the Web). I think there is such a thing as an American politics, or rather an American kind of democracy or an American kind of capitalism; and there is certainly an American (public) attitude toward art; I wouldn’t mind if American institutions, both public and private, were a little more European (ma non troppo!). But if there is going to be an American music, it will have to evolve spontaneously, not by forcing it and certainly not by arbitrarily deciding what is “European” in order to ignore anything composed over here. But will it really make any difference, this emergence of an “American” music? Isn’t that pretty much a matter of superficial journalistic categories? Doesn’t what really count is the making of challenging, well-crafted and expressive musical experiences, no matter where they come from? And some people will like it, and a lot of others won’t, on both continents, or rather, on all of them.

So finally, what I think, feel and believe I am is a composer of Western music; but there doesn’t seem to be a Western Music Center anywhere. Maybe we can just drop the old distinctions, already obsolete, or better, just plain irrelevant, and re-name all the national Music Centers so that they become Western Music Center, New York Branch, or Rome Branch or Madrid Branch.

And I like to think I am writing this note to the Music Center located in America, not the Center of American Music. Nowadays it’s only a question of where you put the adjectives.

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer? Arnold Dreyblatt

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary



As of summer 2002, I have spent nearly 20 of my 49 years abroad, or, to put it another way, two-thirds of my professional life. While Europe has probably offered me creative opportunities that I might not have found in the States, I continue to see my work as American in style and in form, and European critics have generally agreed.

I have often found it surprising that those Europeans starting out from a similar standpoint as my own, that is, having an eclectic non-conservatory background, would most often find the doors closed to “New Music” in Europe and would end up in somewhere in “free jazz“, pop or most recently, in the electronic club scene. Furthermore, many doors were open to me as an American composer from New York, which would have been closed to a European of similar background, partly out of a keen interest in the New York musical scene from which I came in the seventies.

Even after such a long period based mostly in Berlin, there are very few composers of my generation in Europe who have influence me in my work. I find myself, even after so many years abroad, still with my ears tuned to developments in New Music in the States, with the exception of some recent activities in the European electronic scene (which however sits outside the common definitions of contemporary composition). I have not found this to be the case in the visual arts, an area which I have been intensively involved as a parallel activity to my work in music.

On the other hand, I have been strongly influenced in other ways by this long intensive exposure to European culture, and by the experience of living outside my own. It is probably ironic, that at this point in time I’m more well-known as a composer in the States, while in Europe I am more well-known as a visual and performance artist.

Do you still identify yourself as an American composer? Peter Garland

Posted on November 1, 2002 by - Articles, Commentary



Your question about whether I still consider myself an American composer made me shake my head and clear my throat… I suggest you look at a map. The country I live in is still America, and may be (these days) more authentically “American” than the one you live in.

I don’t view “America” in any kind of nationalist terms. Rather, America is a plurality: of many peoples, cultures, histories. Since the U.S. as a nation-state has more often than not been pretty evil (never more so than today!), perhaps the most “American” thing to do is: resist. That is a tradition I can identify with….