Category: Articles

Courtesy Peer Music

I am a self-taught composer, assuming the definition is merely that one has had no formal lessons with a teacher of composition. I’m certainly not a self-taught musician.

I attended the Manhattan School of Music as a pianist. I studied with Seymour Lipkin, a marvelous musician, and soon after, I met Paul Jacobs, who was a great help and inspiration to me. I had the requisite harmony and counterpoint classes at school, but I really learned to write music by playing it. Lots of it.

The very act of learning to play a piece of music is to re-think it with the composer, retrace his footsteps (finger-steps) and then in the best performances, re-compose it onstage. In this sense, I will always be studying composition. The obvious advantage for a composer in being a performer is that you can champion your music yourself. But it also makes networking easier: I find myself on stage with many wonderful musicians who are looking for new repertoire.

After he’d miserably flunked a high school exam, Yogi Berra’s disheartened teacher asked him:

“Yogi, didn’t you learn anything?”

The future baseball Hall-of-Famer replied: “Ma’m, I didn’t even suspect anything.”

Like Yogi, no one could ever teach me much of anything. As a young man I figured that the few things I didn’t already know I could either do without or learn on my own. So I usually learned things the hard way. Fortunately I had some special teachers along the way who understood that the best approach was to let me make my own mistakes and occasionally point me in the right direction.

This isn’t the most efficient approach to learning, but along with the labor of reinventing the wheel comes the joy of discovery, and a deep sense that the wheel belongs to you. And to this day I persist in my belief that in a very real sense we’re all self-taught. Still, we all need teachers and mentors.

Over the years I’ve learned a great deal about music from other composers (older, younger, and my own age), and from many gifted and generous performing musicians. I also count among my teachers fellow artists working in other disciplines, Alaska Native elders, as well as mathematicians and scientists – who are some of the most creative people I know.

Composing, learning and teaching are all processes of asking questions. Asking the right question at the right moment can be far more important than any answer. My own best teachers and mentors – James Tenney, Lou Harrison, Morton Feldman and Dane Rudhyar – all afforded me courtesy and respect as a younger colleague. They never offered definitive answers, only pertinent observations and timely questions, sometimes gentle, sometimes provocative. (As Morty put it: “Love the questions.”) I’ve tried to carry this approach into my own work as a teacher.

Not too long ago I found myself beginning a composition lesson with a particularly gifted but unfocused student by saying: “You’re very talented, Joshua. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

Talent is a gift. But it can also be a handicap. The challenge is to not settle for what comes easily. No matter what our natural gifts, our work as students and as artists is to go deeper and deeper into the strange, the new, the obscure.

Deep learning requires discipline. It requires learning about learning. And there are as many ways of learning and teaching as there are students and teachers.

As teachers, we learn about the different ways our students learn. We do our best to give the student what she needs, in a way that invites her to accept the gift.

As students and as artists, what we learn about how we learn gives us the practical tools that eventually become our personal disciplines for learning and for practicing our art.

It’s clear that we can teach and learn about music. The technical devices – the “chops” – can be codified, ingested and digested. But technique alone doesn’t make art any more than a recipe makes a great meal.

What have you learned about the art of music? How have you learned it?

Are there particular mentors or teachers who have changed your life, your practice or your understanding of music?

How do you teach?

And what do you think: Can the art of music really be taught? Can it really be learned?

Or, like Yogi, do we never even suspect it?

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

The first orchestral music recording I ever bought was a used flea market LP of the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra, a great American classic by an émigré who believed that musical composition could not be taught. But I, like many others, have learned so much from that piece.

I largely consider myself a self-taught composer. While I studied music theory and performance on various instruments from when I was nine years old, I only studied musical composition “officially” for one semester as an undergraduate at Columbia University and those sessions were pretty informal – I never wrote anything I was “assigned”. Yet my musical perceptions and tastes have been deeply influenced by many of my teachers, the non-musical ones as much as the musical ones. I still fondly remember my high school music teacher Lee Chernoff who suggested that I watch a PBS documentary about Philip Glass and track down recordings of music by Harry Partch. And it was my high school math teacher, Jim Murphy, who initially got me interested in ethnomusicology which has had the most profound and lasting influence on me musically.

In 2002, there is no general consensus about what constitutes the study of musical composition. We’ve decided to celebrate our third anniversary of NewMusicBox by exploring some of the possibilities. Breaking with our traditional conversation format for “In The First Person,” we offer instead a series of conversations between former and current composition students and their teachers spanning four generations, beginning with twelve-tone tonality pioneer George Perle talking with his former student, post-minimalist electronic composer Paul Lansky, followed by Lansky talking with his former student, progressive rock drummer/composer Virgil Moorefield at Princeton, and concluding with video excerpts from Moorefield’s own composition class at Northwestern University. Accompanying this chain of conversations is a HyperHistory about composition study in America by Bowling Green University professor Marilyn Shrude and a series of “Hymn & Fuguing Tune” comments about the pro and woes of being self-taught by a group six self-taught composers including Pulitzer finalist John Musto and Elizabeth Brown. And we ask you to describe the influence your teachers have had on your musical personality.

As an interesting counterpoint to our generational passing-the-torch discussion on teaching musical composition, Greg Sandow questions the very notion of progress in music, and Dean Suzuki regrets that humor has not been a more important part of our musical history. Our “In Print” section offers an extended excerpt of Curtis Roads’s exploration of MicroSound, and our SoundTracks section offers details and soundclips of 43 new recordings featuring new American music. Our News features and Hear&Now concert listings are now updated daily, so by the time you’re reading this and certainly since the time I’ve written this, there’s something new there!

Finally, to really celebrate three years of NewMusicBox, the highlight of my personal musical education, we’ve assembled a short video highlighting some of our favorite moments with Elliott Carter, Meredith Monk, Don Byron, Milton Babbitt, Tania León, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, and the late Robert J. Lurtsema, including some never-before-seen footage. I hope you enjoy it and learn as much from it as we have!

Greg Sandow

Not long ago, I was writing about serialism and made an all too common mistake.

I was trying to explain—to people who don’t know much about music—how serial writing got popular among composers in the ’50s. But which composers? “Advanced composers,” I wrote innocently enough, meaning only to say that not all composers got turned on by serialism, but only those who were writing…well, what should we call it? Adventurous music? But what I wrote was a mistake, for two reasons. First, I was saying that serial composers were advanced, which is very different from saying that they weren’t conservative, or weren’t mainstream, or weren’t ordinary, or however else I could have phrased this. “Advanced” would mean very special indeed—in fact, out in front of everybody else which could easily mean “better.” (Of course, even if I’d meant to say this I would have been wrong, since John Cage and Morton Feldman were also “advanced” and didn’t touch serialism. But I’ll return to that.)

Second, and more crucially, I was assuming that there’s such a thing as progress in music, or in other words that it’s actually possible to be ahead. That, of course, is a notion we take almost for granted. Often enough we’ll talk about “avant-garde” art. This means (quite literally, if you translate the words from French) art made by people who are leading the way. I know we can use the term loosely, to mean nothing more than stuff that’s so new it’s outside most people’s experience. But somewhere in the back of our minds most of us nourish the idea that art moves forward, and that some artists march ahead faster than others. The “avant-garde” (I’m keeping the term in quotation marks, so we don’t take it too seriously) would be just what the French words imply, the artists who move forward fastest, who move toward the future more quickly than the rest of us.

But does music (or any other art) really move forward? Yes, it changes, as time moves on. But can we really call those changes progress? What would progress be, anyway? Which aspect of art would be progressing?

One very famous composer—who certainly thought he was making progress in music—had an answer to these questions. This was Schoenberg, who in a famous essay called “Brahms the Progressive” wrote:

The language in which musical ideas are expressed in tones parallels the language which expresses feelings or thoughts in words, in that its vocabulary must be proportionate to the intellect which it addresses….

Or, to put this more simply, some people are smarter than others. To smart people, you speak with a more complex vocabulary than you do to people who aren’t so smart. And this, Schoenberg says, is just as true in music as it is in words. As he goes on to say:

It is obvious that one would not discuss the splitting of atoms with a person who does not know what an atom is. On the other hand, one cannot talk to a trained mind in Mother Goose fashion or in the style of what Hollywoodians call “lyrics.” In the sphere of art-music, the author respects his audience. He is afraid to offend it by repeating over and over what can be understood at one single hearing, even if it is new, and let alone if it is stale old trash….

To demonstrate what he means, Schoenberg quotes two musical examples, the opening bars from The Blue Danube Waltz and “Di quella pira,” the famous tenor aria with the big high Cs from Verdi‘s Il Trovatore. (Curiously, Schoenberg gets the Verdi passage wrong. He starts with the first four bars, and then, with no acknowledgement that he’s doing this, skips four bars and continues with the middle section of the aria. He wanted that middle section, I think, to show that the aria had slightly more complex harmony than the Strauss waltz, but did he remember the music incorrectly? Did he know that he’d left something out?)

Both these passages are full of repetition. The waltz, for instance, repeats almost the same thing six times in a row. (And the aria would be even more repetitive if Schoenberg hadn’t left out the second four bars, which are nearly a literal repeat of the first four.) Schoenberg makes it clear that he doesn’t think these pieces are bad. He even grants that the waltz, apart from its repetitions, is beautiful. But the repetition does mean, he says, that neither of these pieces is music for “alert and well-trained” minds:

Repeatedly hearing things which one likes is pleasant and need not be ridiculed. There is a subconscious desire to understand better and realize more details of the beauty. But an alert and well-trained mind will demand to be told the more remote matters, the more remote consequences of the simple matters that he has already comprehended. An alert and well-trained mind refuses to listen to baby-talk and requests strongly to be spoken to in a brief and straightforward language.

Progress in music consists in the development of methods of presentation which correspond to the conditions just discussed.

Or, to put this differently, progress in music means finding ways to present more—and apparently more complex—musical ideas in any given span of time.

But here I think Schoenberg runs into trouble. He wrote this essay to show that Brahms was progressive, or in other words one of the artists who looks forward and makes art progress, rather than simply accepting things as he found them and standing still. This contradicts the old notion that Brahms was a backward-facing conservative, and that Wagner was the only true radical of that age. If this is true, then—assuming we accept Schoenberg’s idea of progress in music—Brahms found new ways to “draw remote consequences” from musical ideas. Not only that: For this to be progress, he must have found more of these ways than any composer before him and thus drawn more remote consequences than had ever before been possible.

But if that’s true, then why won’t sophisticates lose interest in anything earlier? Why won’t Mozart sound too simple, once you’ve heard Brahms? Why won’t Brahms himself sound too simple after we’ve heard Schoenberg?

Something’s wrong with Schoenberg’s logic. I suppose—trying to give him every benefit of the doubt—that I can th
ink of reasons why, even under Schoenberg’s notion of progress, earlier music might still be acceptable. At some point, let’s imagine, music began to progress. Of course this happened many centuries ago. And after progressing for a while, music finally advanced enough to satisfy even the “alert and well-trained” minds of today. Even if later styles advanced still further, the earlier ones still are good enough.

But when, exactly, did music reach that critical mass? With Bach? Further back, with Palestrina? Or still further, with Guillaume Dufay? Or even sometime around 1200 A.D., when Perotin first wrote polyphony? How can we answer this question? How, especially, can we answer it if we have any respect for the alert and educated minds of other centuries (not to mention other cultures)? One problem, I think, is that Schoenberg makes a false analogy between speech and music, or, more precisely, between verbal thought and musical thought. Suppose I read a scientific book from the 18th century. The science in it wouldn’t satisfy my educated mind. But in it, even so, might be reasoning that I’d enjoy. I’d enjoy, in other words, the way the writer thinks. Here we have two kinds of thought—ideas themselves and how they’re handled. The ideas sometimes progress in verbal thought. (They do in science, anyway, if not in ethics or philosophy.) But the process of using them changes relatively little. (Apart, perhaps, from developments in symbolic logic and other things we don’t encounter much in ordinary life.)

In music, it’s the other way around. Changes in ideas don’t matter much; a chromatic phrase from Schoenberg doesn’t in itself improve on any modal figure from a medieval chant. And while the way that these ideas have been presented (and have had further thoughts deduced from them) really has changed greatly, there’s no analogue for that in verbal thought. So the analogy between verbal thought and music doesn’t work. Progress, as we experience it when we talk about ideas, isn’t much like progress as we encounter it in music. Progress in verbal thinking really matters—while I can enjoy the thinking in 18th-century scientific books, I won’t read them very often because their ideas are just too primitive. Music from the 18th century, by contrast, sounds just fine. Its ideas are just as plausible as new ideas, and its logic works.

Schoenberg, in any case, cares about musical logic way too much. He, after all, was the composer who almost scrapped the second theme of his first chamber symphony because he couldn’t derive it from the first, and also the composer who invented the twelve-tone system because he got lost in the unmappable wilderness of free atonal music. If now I might risk a comparison with verbal language, it’s as if Schoenberg feels most comfortable with statements he can verify. He’s less at ease with connotations, with hints, emotions, body language, or with basic, simple truths. But these, I think, are even more important in art than logical ideas. And they may not change as centuries unroll, at least they won’t change much. Or in any case—this is tricky to define—some things stay recognizable. Thus, we can look at a face in a portrait from the 18th century and feel we know the person. That happens in music, too, no matter what new kinds of thematic development Brahms might invent. (Schoenberg, I should add, constantly declared that artists produce art the way apple trees grow apples, and otherwise conducted himself as an artist far more intuitively—he’d compose at white heat, for instance—than his fixation on musical logic might lead us to expect. He was human, in other words, and perfectly capable of contradicting himself.)

But even if Schoenberg’s idea of musical progress doesn’t quite make sense, he was on to something. Between the 13th century and the middle of the 20th, music really did progress, in a certain way. And—though only in this certain way—Schoenberg really did advance it further.

That’s because there really was a line of musical development that began with the invention of polyphony and ended with serialism. This is usually described as if it was mainly about how harmony evolved, and in some ways that’s true. Polyphony made musicians notice chords. Chords, over centuries, were organized into the tonal system. As harmony got more chromatic, chromaticism led to atonality, which in turn got organized into serialism. And, in the normal telling of this story, what went on was more than simply change. It was progress, in the most old-fashioned moral sense. History evolved toward “the emancipation of the dissonance” (as if intervals like minor seconds had been slaves), and therefore music, at least in the serial era when people really believed this, had gotten better—freer, more flexible, and able to do more and better things.

But I’d prefer to tell the story in another way. To me, it’s about the growth of something harder to define. Maybe I can call it the density of musical information. Early polyphonic music, from this point of view, wasn’t dense at all. The chords that separate voices formed were almost random, within limits. All that mattered were the cadences, and even they were random, by later standards, because they didn’t cohere into firm tonal centers. (Because of this, theorists and musicologists have tended to think that pre-tonal music wasn’t as mature as tonal music, a misconception nicely skewered in Susan McClary‘s book Conventional Wisdom.)

When tonality emerged as a formal system, the information music carried got more dense. Every note could be explained as a member of chord (or as an accident, such as a passing note). Every chord could be explained as part of a progression; each progression took its place as an episode within a larger tonal structure.

And, especially with Beethoven, music also grew denser with motifs. More and more of what you heard in any piece turned out to be significant. Less and less was taken from the stock of standard scales, arpeggios, and cadences. By the 20th century, nearly everything could be motivic.

In Stravinsky, hardly any musical detail is innocent. Compare the openings of two pieces in C major, Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata and Stravinsky’s Symphony in C. In both (or, in the Symphony, a little after the beginning, when a perky oboe theme begins) we hear repeated C major chords. In the Waldstein, C major chords are all they are. The progression that they’re part of turns out to be thematic, but the chords themselves—even though the way they’re spaced is nicely chosen—have no special meaning. They cou
ld have come from Sammy’s Chord Shop, if we can imagine composers ordering materials from any place like that.

But Stravinsky’s chords don’t come from Sammy’s. It’s a shock, in fact, to listen carefully, or to look at the score, and discover that they’re not even C major chords, even though the oboe tune makes us hear them that way. They’re only minor thirds, E and G, repeated over a bass line that’s also E and G, popping up in a familiarly irregular Stravinsky rhythm. And thus the E and G in that accompaniment turn out to be a three-way pun. In relation to the tune, they say “C major”; by themselves they say “E minor”; while in the larger meaning of the movement they invoke the C major seventh chord, since they’re the two notes that its constituent triads (C major and E minor) have in common.

Plus the oboe’s first notes are B, C, G, and E—the C major seventh chord. And the C major seventh at the movement’s end is weighted in the bass with E and G, densely crushed together, just as they are in the beginning, but even more so. Thus the C major at the start couldn’t come from anybody’s chord shop. The chords that evoke it were created for this piece, and are dense with information about the work’s own special harmony.

Atonal music is still denser, because any musical event—a chord, a rhythm, a sonority, a pitch-class set, a single note—could be motivic. Twelve-tone music has (at least in theory) still more information in it, because every note can be explained, as part of at least one twelve-tone row. And serial pieces from the ’50s carried—at least if you believe the theory—the most information of all, because everything was organized. Play one note on the piano in a piece like Boulez‘s Structures, and you’ve invoked a multitude of meanings. The pitch-class of the note comes from its position in a pitch-class set; its rhythm is established by a rhythmic set; its place in a dynamics set tells you how loud it is…

But of course we know that total serialism didn’t work. It didn’t work for composers; Boulez, for instance, found his own Structures too rigid. Aurally, it didn’t work; you can’t hear the information theoretically encoded in it. As Ligeti pointed out even in the ’50s, pieces that are completely organized sound aleatoric. And maybe serialism didn’t even work theoretically, since its status as coherent language has been challenged, in the ’60s by no less than Claude Lévi-Strauss and later by a variety of people, the music theorist Fred Lerdahl, for instance, or the aesthetic philosopher Roger Scruton.

Mostly, though, serialism didn’t work historically. It came and went. It isn’t with us now, in any serious, widespread way. And its claims to be the culmination of music history now seem silly. When I look at what came after it, that single arc of progress I described—oops, I slipped; I should have said the single arc of musical development, the one that brought us more and more musical density, until by the time Schoenberg wrote his Violin Concerto (to name just one of his late twelve-tone works), musical events jump out, several at a time, from every corner—looks as if it’s over.

After serialism (and the complex of atonal styles that flourished in its wake), the next turn of the wheel produced minimalism. And after that (though also along with it, since historical developments can overlap) we’ve returned to tonality, while we embrace all sorts of sounds from outside classical music. It’s not clear that these evolutions follow any logic. Or if they do, it’s not a purely musical logic. Maybe the arc of density told the story of the rise of western culture, which reached a peak and then degenerated, clinging to what it thought was certainty and logic. Musically, at least, it turned inward, away from the world at large.

And then, in a sense, it collapsed. Or at least it did if you think serialism was its peak. More hopefully, we could also say it came alive again, taking energy from music that wasn’t classical. Steve Reich was influenced by African music; Ravi Shankar inspired Philip Glass.

Maybe this is progress. But only in a global sense, which ultimately doesn’t have much to do with art. Art only reflects it, or maybe anticipates it. Maybe one meaning of the arc density would be that Western culture died between 1914 and 1945, as the arc reached toward its peak. The peak was self-contradictory; the arc had no way to continue. From there we fell to limbo, a period when the old hasn’t fully disappeared, and the new hasn’t yet been born. If that’s true, then we should take Schoenberg very seriously when he said that twelve-tone music would ensure the supremacy of German music for the next thousand years—though we have to turn his statement inside out. What he really told us was that the great European musical tradition couldn’t possibly be saved. Unconsciously, he sensed that. He fought to find a rescue, of course in vain. And the very scope and certainly of what he said—that he hadn’t just invented something useful, but had saved music for 1000 years—almost proves his helplessness.

From this point of view, the twelve-tone system—and, even more, the more tightly organized serialism that followed it—really would be a sign that western music had come to an end. Nor would it be coincidental that serialism arose at the same time as rock & roll, which—in bringing something straight from Africa into the western pop-music mainstream—was a gigantic portent, warning everyone that western culture soon would open to the other cultures of the world.

But here’s one final thought. If we know that history didn’t culminate in serialism, non-serial—and non-atonal—composers of the 20th century seem much more important. It’s been obvious for quite a while that John Cage and Morton Feldman were just as “advanced” as any serialist, and in fact much more so. But what’s fascinating now is to read the present back into the past. One feature of our culture now is irony and self-reference. Nothing seems certain. Everything exists on more than one level, does more than one thing. And we’re all aware of what we’re doing.

If that’s the present—the point where, for the moment, history has come to roost—then the most important composers of the past century ought to be the most ironic. I’d vote for Poulenc and Shostakovich, both of whom can easily say more to us than any serialist who ever lived. </p

John Luther Adams is the first AMC President to preside over the new NewMusicBox format where postings to his monthly columns are put right on the page along with his own column. Although editor Frank Oteri deserves credit for the innovation, it is Mr. Adams who has taken hold of the opportunity and shown himself to be a sensitive, thought-provoking, and, above all, quite readable and engaging columnist. It is a shame, as he transitions to former President, that we will lose his regularity and dependability. Good luck, John, and please stay in touch in all ways you can.

Barry Drogin

While I believe composers ought to be aware and thoughtful about their art, I must admit that I feel a measure of concern about so many composers spending so much time worrying about a musical genealogy, or the comparison of American and European music. IsnÕt it especially ironic when composers emphasize their historical links to the American maverick tradition, when historical self-awareness and obsession inhibit the maverick spirit?And because I currently live in London, IÕm mighty interested when articles such as Kyle Gann’s “Tracing the History of an American Classical Tradition” seem to imply that the most interesting American composers didnÕt go to Europe. This attitude toward Europe is unfortunately not attuned to a significant phenomenon among artists; namely, that some artists find that the further they journey from the home soil, the more deeply rooted their psyche is in the elements of home. Now, those artists who, like CapoteÕs Holly Golightly, are motivated to leave home by a brand of safe-hatred, do ruffle my feathers. But I have come far from home that my imagination might be fired. When he was about my age, young William Faulkner struck out for Paris. Surely, no one can suggest that after returning home, FaulknerÕs prose didnÕt ring with a generally American, and specifically Southern tone. I have actually found here the conditions to be all more honest. Far from fitting myself into some imagined European mold, I have found a climate in which my Southern rural upbringing is (believe it or not) exotic! My teacher, Simon Bainbridge, who is sometimes called the most ÒAmericanÓ British composer, has encouraged me, saying, ÒAt the end of the day, a composer must rely on his memory and his ear.Ó And he knows and appreciates that my memory rings with Southern rural vernacular music. So, in criticizing EuropeÕs role in the lives of some artists, the critic ought to be aware of exceptions such as my self. For here I am in London, sticking out like a sore thumb with my backwoods Texas drawl, writing music with an accent just as thick as my speaking voice, and I donÕt give a damn whether it suits Europe or not.And about the musical genealogy: a wise man once said, ÒGenealogy is most important to those who havenÕt done anything for themselves.Ó

Greg Sandow

New music concerts are often informal, especially if we compare them to more normal—or, if you like, stuffier, more ritualized, even constipated—mainstream classical events. This especially interests me because I teach a graduate course at Juilliard, called “Classical Music in an Age of Pop,” a course about the future of the field, which attracts students who wish that concerts were livelier, that they could express themselves more, and that they’d get more reaction from their audience.

So often I’ll tell them about new music events I’ve been at. After I heard Sarah Cahill play new piano music at Galapagos, in Williamsburg, I told my class about the space, which was a large room attached to a bar. Those of us in her audience sat at tables, which felt much more friendly and comfortable than sitting in rows in a concert hall. I knew a lot of people there, and I loved sitting with some of them in a little group, or, come to think of it, two little groups, since I talked to one friend at my own table, and to another sitting right on my left at another one. I’d even placed my chair so I could do just that, something that could never happen in a concert hall. Plus, we could go out to the bar, and bring back drinks. That’s very far from classical music; it’s positively civilized.

At this point, I—or you—could say, well, so what, since drinking at tables wouldn’t exactly be surprising if we were hearing jazz, or folksingers, or singer-songwriters, or African bands. Or, for that matter, if we were hearing new music at Joe’s Pub, the cabaret room at the Public Theater, or at the BAMcafé at BAM.

They even have tables at the Boston Pops. So why make a fuss about Galapagos? First because this wasn’t the Boston Pops, or even folk music, but instead, musically speaking, a serious classical event. By that I mean that Cahill played sober music; you’d never, just for instance, call the reticence—with chords and melodic lines that moved only within narrow boundaries—of Kyle Gann‘s Time Does Not Exist a concession of any kind to informality or entertainment. Nor could you call Among Red Mountains, by John Luther Adams, in any way relaxed, since all of it was monumentally loud. It sounded, as its name might imply, like an enormous rock formation turned into sound.

So the moral here—especially for classical music purists—is that sober music, and even severe music, can work in an informal setting. (Historically, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Schubert‘s songs, to give just one example, were first performed informally.) Nothing about the room stopped us from listening, not even spills of music from the bar. Those, I found, intruded only between pieces, and stopped mattering once the music started up again.

And that, if I might digress, reminded me of a very fine concert by the New Millennium Ensemble that I heard one Saturday night not long ago at Greenwich House. The comfortably tiny Greenwich House concert hall is in the Village, not far from busy Seventh Avenue, which on a Saturday night of course was roaring. The street noise got inside the concert, but I’d swear I didn’t notice. That wasn’t a surprise during C. Bryan Rulon‘s MessMix Express, which is designed to be, among other things, a noisy romp (and had the players grinning when a gonzo dance beat jumped into the mix; I’d heard them play the piece before, at one of last year’s MATA concerts, and, quite apart from loving the piece itself, I love their delight in it).

But the way street sounds vanished (at least from my attention) during Lou Harrison‘s Concerto #1 for Flute and Percussion was pretty striking. My ears and mind were straining toward the music, like plants to sunlight, loving the dance between the percussion and the flute (the piece is just for solo players, in this case John Ferrari and Tara Helen O’Connor, both rhythmic, poised, and relaxed), the two parts locked together by sheer magic, while seeming independent. The piece wasn’t loud enough to drown out the buzzing of a fly, but I’d swear I didn’t hear a single car horn. Only when O’Connor, joined by two recorded versions of herself, played Morton Feldman‘s Trio for Flutes did I notice the street, and that was because Feldman, as he always does, brought the silence behind the sounds alive, making me alert to anything I heard, even things outside his piece.

But back to Galapagos. Sarah Cahill also talked to us. She’s not, it seemed to me, a naturally talkative performer; she wasn’t chatty or relaxed. But still she talked about the music—because, I’ll guess, she was committed to it—even if she mostly only spoke some program notes. That made her reticence real for us, and therefore made her real, too, as something more than a pianist, even if that hadn’t been her intention.

And there was one marvelous moment. Cahill played a typically engrossing Ingram Marshall piece, Authentic Presence. She also read his comments on it, which included one phrase from an eastern religious text, something mildly enigmatic, but not, I would have thought, impenetrable in a culture where eastern religion has even been trendy. It stopped Cahill dead. “What does that mean?” she asked, with utter baffled honesty, turning toward Ingram in the audience. With perfect timing he said, “It means what it says” (the simplest and most truthful of all possible answers). For that one brief moment, the concert became a conversation, a friendly gathering that drew us all together. (Though I’ll note two problems. Cahill played with the lid of her piano all the way up, which in the small space made everything loud; John’s piece, for that reason, didn’t seem as powerfully extreme as it should have. Nor did Cahill’s touch ever seem gentle, in any of the music she played; that, too, made everything seem loud.)

Two more concerts to tell my students about: the Bang On A Can All-Stars and eighth blackbird (their name gets written
all in small letters; too mannered, if you ask me), both at Tully Hall.

The All-Stars, of course, are wonderfully engaging, and seem completely, overwhelmingly themselves. They dissent—implicitly at least; I’d like to think they’ve never needed to discuss this—from two orthodoxies regarding dress. The first, the older one, says that classical musicians should dress formally. Well, clearly the All-Stars don’t do that. But the newer orthodoxy says that while it’s fine to be relaxed, you ought to make a good, professional impression by looking spiffy and (if you’re an ensemble) looking consistent.

Thankfully, the All-Stars don’t do that either. They come on stage, as far as I can see, looking however each member would like to look. Evan Ziporyn, the clarinetist, seemed comfortable; cellist Wendy Sutter glittered; guitarist Mark Stewart wore loud (but oddly muted) sloppy colors anybody else would have said didn’t match. None of which mattered, except, again, that all of it showed that everyone was comfortable. The group then slammed into their program with their usual drop-dead virtuoso chops, especially rhythmic chops, something not too common in the classical world.

Though I guess I should insert a disclaimer here. Do the All-Stars—or any other people in Bang On A Can—think of themselves as part of classical music? Clearly the three Bang On A Can composers began there; they were composition students at a well-known music school, and started the group because they didn’t like the way new music organized itself. But then they promoted their first concerts to a downtown arts audience that doesn’t identify itself with classical music. “That’s who we are,” a Bang On A Can administrator once said to me. And Mark Stewart, in his bio on the Bang On A Can website, says he makes his living “playing and writing popular music, semi-popular music and unpopular music.” Who cares whether any of it might be labeled, ugh, classical? Maybe the best way to resolve this taxonomical conundrum—and make it more useful than merely a word game—would be to say that Bang On A Can is everything I wish all classical music was, but doesn’t bow towards anything classical music currently is.

Ziporyn introduced the members of the group, pop-band style (something I’ve also seen the sharp new music string quartet Ethel do) and also spoke about every piece on the concert, coming off as a friendly and relaxed MC. I’ve seen a Tully All-Stars concert so excite an uptown arts type that she ran to the CD table afterwards, to snap up everything on sale. I’m not sure this concert would have done that, but then Bang On A Can’s success very happily doesn’t depend on my taste. The piece I really liked was Scott Johnson‘s The Illusion of Guidance, which, like so much of Scott’s music, dances in a fascinating world where thoughts get complex, and rock and R&B rhythms subtly jump around. There’s sometimes a contradiction there, when straight classical ensembles play these pieces, because they can’t get the rhythms right. But that’s one reason why the Bang On A Can performance was so invigorating; they’re at home on both sides of what shouldn’t be a fence.

What didn’t work so well, at least for me, was the final entry on the program, a set of Burmese-Western hybrid pieces by Kyaw Kyaw Naing, a master of the Burmese pat waing, a set of tuned drums arrayed in a half-circle behind a sculptural—almost architectural, as if the wall of the drums were on a grand but miniature building—facade. This took the All-Stars very far from classical music (assuming that matters), but also uncomfortably close to cliché.

And that, I think, was due to differences between Burmese and Western music, which I’m not qualified to analyze, or at least not in depth. But when Naing played by himself, everything seemed right, with the pitches (not quite, or so I thought, tuned for western ears) supporting the drive and sparkle of the rhythm. Add western instruments, as the All-Stars and some guests did, and the rhythms, still exhilarating, took on an added edge of challenge (because, as Ziporyn explained, they’re far from easy). But the pitches—now tuned, at least in the western instruments, to familiar western scales—now emerged as storytellers in their own right, unfortunately telling stories far too familiar from music in the west. If Naing played music that leaped upward, outlining the pitches of a triad, it sounded fun and fresh. When the All-Stars did it, they sounded gaudy, because the triad seemed to sing out more. That was especially true when guest violinist Todd Reynolds (from Ethel) played triads; not that he tried in any way to milk them, but the sound of the violin is naturally juicy, especially next to Burmese drums, and, unless the pitches bend away from western intonation, also naturally western. The effect, unintentionally, was like putting Mary Martin, doing “I’m as Corny as Kansas in August,” next to right next to folk singers from Bulgaria.

Not that the musicians weren’t completely sincere, and also excited about what they were going. eighth blackbird, by comparison, didn’t seem so agreeable. I wanted to like their concert, but I didn’t, except for the beginning, where they played pieces by the Minimum Security Composers Collective, melding four short works into a single pointed, individual (and informal) statement that reminded me of Bang On A Can, but with its own quite separate voice.

After that came the damnedest tribute to classical tradition—the world premiere of George Perle‘s Nine Movements, written for the group. I’m not going to say I don’t like Perle’s work, because it’s beautifully written, concise and elegant, without a note or gesture wasted, but it’s also constrained, without a note or gesture that speaks with any force. For me, that makes it academic music. You can understand that in the best possible sense, since Perle’s academy sounds like a refuge for solid workmanship, a place where every detail gets respect. But the protecting walls also serve to keep the music isolated, so it never steps outside itself.

What amazed me, though, was that group, intentionally or not, put Perle above the other music that they played, or at least they talked about him that way. They introduced every piece, speaking from the stage, and when they came to Perle, they told us, in tones of deep respect, how honored they were to have him write for them. Not that Perle doesn’t deserve respect, as a solid professional, and also (I mean this in the most sincere, old-fashioned way) as an older man. But do they think he stands on some great, high pinnacle of art? I couldn’t tell.
They could just as well, to judge from how they sounded, be echoing ideas that other people have.

But at least they sounded human. Elsewhere in their program, they spoke affectedly, announcing, for instance, the Collective’s four-headed works in a kind of contrapuntal singsong. For some people, that may have seemed artistic, but to me it just seemed mannered, and also a little flat, as if the members of the group, having in effect decided not to be themselves, hadn’t gone far enough toward the opposite extreme, where they’d manufacture gloriously artificial (and, of course, theatrical) personae. That would have helped them in the piece that followed Perle, a fluffy pastry by Aaron Jay Kernis, all about music, food, and attitude, which in the end added up to nothing much, even with narration by the hyperactive Food Network chef Mario Batali. The whole thing seemed pretty pointless, unless you find yourself grinning with delight when you recognize, among many other fairly obvious musical quotations, two notes from Debussy‘s Clair de lune sneaking in, very pleased with themselves at the end of one movement (which, to be fair, did seem to make many members of the audience laugh with appreciation). The eighth blackbird people really got into this piece, I have to say, singing, speaking, and even barking, as the score tells them to, with all the animation so strangely missing when they spoke at any other time.

They finished the concert with a 40-minute wasteland, a huge floppy spiritual piece by a student composer who can’t yet yoke his thoughts together. Still, it was nice to see them go to bat, in their Lincoln Center debut, for a composer with no developed reputation, simply because they evidently believed in him. That (apart from the piece itself) is something to admire, and so is the way they try, at least, to do something livelier than what normally happens in the concert hall.

Which leaves me with one last thought. What happens when this new-music informality spreads to older music? I’ve said that I have students who want classical concerts to be looser—more communicative, more like conversations, more personally expressive. But it’s important to understand that they don’t want this just for new music, or, in fact, even mainly for new music. They want it for Beethoven.

The odds would seem to be against them. You approach a new piece—written, maybe, by a composer wearing sneakers and a T-shirt, with her nails polished green—with relaxed expectations. You don’t know what it’s going to be; it reveals itself as you play it. Beethoven can never seem so innocent; he’s not just himself, but also, unavoidably, a statue of himself, because we carry statue images of him around with us. How can we learn to play him without the ritual of the concert hall?

That’s a question I’ve bumped around for years. There’s the postmodern approach, where you figure out what the music means now, and emphasize the parts of it that might convey that meaning. The late Giuseppe Sinopoli did that, when he first got famous as a conductor, with sometimes touching and sometimes odd results; he’d blast, for instance, the piccolos and basses in a Verdi opera, to recreate the edgy sound of Verdi’s orchestra. That was interesting, but didn’t register as quite spontaneous.

And then there’s the early music approach, where you try to figure out what performers in the composer’s time would do, and of course what instruments they used, which leads you into one usually unexamined contradiction—those performers, unlike you, didn’t have to learn all that stuff, and so could approach the music far more directly than you ever could. Again, this isn’t quite a recipe for the kind of spontaneous performance I find in new music (unless, perhaps, you’re René Jacobs, and, as he does on a delectable Harmonia Mundi recording, you play Mozart‘s Cosi fan tutte on period instruments but with your own kind of romantic phrasing, freely admitting that Mozart would probably object).

The only satisfying answer I’ve found goes like this: Play new music most of the time, then see what happens when you try something old. Or, to put it differently, unlearn the classical approach by putting it aside, because new music doesn’t want or need it. Then return to classical works when new music seems the norm to you—with no idea what the result will be. That, if you ask me, would give a fabulous jolt to the standard classical repertoire—a jolt, perhaps, of reality.

Which is yet another good reason why most of the classical music we play should be new.