12.8.12

what stays with me: john cage


John Cage entered into silence twenty years ago today. Allan Kozinn of The New York Times has a fine appreciation here. My own take on 4'33" is here.

The picture above is from this excellent Cage resource.

2.8.12

from the desk . . .

The works list (linked above) is a little heavier today. I've added two new pieces: Intertwining Geometries, the premiere of which went off brilliantly, with Carla Rees and Sarah Watts making as good a case for a piece as a composer could want, and Anaphoric Geometries, a very short fanfare for 12-part brass choir.

I hope to be posting the recording of IG soon.

17.7.12

across the pond

My new piece for alto flute and bass clarinet, Intertwining Geometries, is getting its first performance this Friday evening, 20 July 2012. I wrote it for Carla Rees and Sarah Watts, who will be playing it on Friday, in London. Details here.

29.5.12

Xenakis 90

Phil Freeman asked me to write something for Burning Ambulance to commemorate the 90th birthday of composer Iannis Xenakis. I was more than happy to accommodate him. Phil added a video of an interview with Xenakis and a recording of Pithoprakta.

Bonus track: Akrata

18.3.12

calling all bassoonists

I've just completed a short piece for bassoon solo called Episodes and Incidents. Please contact me if you have any interest in seeing the score, and I'll be glad to get it to you. More on the loosely conceived project that Episodes and Incidents is a part of later, maybe.

In other composing news, I finished a set of variations for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano called Macomb Variations. I wrote it for my friends Molly Paccione and Moisès Molina, of Western Illinois University. Again, the score is available to anyone who would like to see it.

13.3.12

allow me this one indulgence


A comment on a post by Ann Midgette of the Washington Post got me thinking about the frequent use of certain words in cultural criticism (both professional and amateur), what they mean, what they are meant to mean, and what it means when they are used.[1]
Commenter franklinmjohnson allows as how

. . . most of [contemporary music], with a few notable exceptions, is self-indulgent, pretentious, and atonal to an unlistenable degree.[2]

Again, I’m not here to comment on franklinmjohnson’s comment, but rather to note some of the terminology he[3] uses, because it shows up a lot in writing about culture.[4]

self-indulgence: excessive or unrestrained gratification of one's own appetites, desires, or whims

 What does it mean when we think of an artist as “self-indulgent”? I’m honestly confused here. Are we supposed to be offended/annoyed by the fact that the artist created the art they wanted to create? “Who is this [name of composer] thinking that we are interested in what [s]he thinks music is?” I genuinely don’t get it.

 I remember a number of critics and moviegoers using “self-indulgent” as a club with which to pummel Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002). Particular attention was paid to the vibrant color-fields that appeared off-and-on throughout the film. These are an instance of Anderson’s self-indulgence, in large part because they don’t advance the story.[5]

 What these critics and moviegoers seems to want is for the artists to keep anything out of the artwork that the audience member doesn’t think belongs there. That the art work should conform to exactly what the audience member think should be there; that the work of art conform to the audience member’s appetites, desires, and whims. 
pretentious: 1 making usually unjustified or excessive claims (as of value or standing); expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or stature

I think the charge of pretentious in arts criticism is closely related to that of self-indulgence, but they aren’t quite the same. I’m not sure what franklinmjohnson means here, but I suspect it has to do with the idea that composers of “atonal” music are making “unjustified or excessive claims” about the value of their music. I don’t know for sure, but at the same time how do you know what claims the composer is making for the music? Offending the sensibility by being played on the same concert as Beethoven?

Most frequently now, and especially in writing about film, “pretentious” seems be used interchangeably with “difficult”, “ambitious”, or even “serious”. It’s not always used as a negative—I read a positive review of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life that said the film was, at times “overly-pretentious”. This made absolutely no sense to me until I was looking up the definitions for this post:


2: making demands on one's skill, ability, or means

OK; Malick certainly does make these demands, as do many artists in all media, and from all periods. But I wonder if the writer (and others who use the word) knows about that second definition. If he did, hats off to him. But the word still has negative connotations, even with that meaning. In any case, I like it when artists make demands on my skill, ability, and means.

[Special Pre-Publication Update:  BREAKING! In an article published today in Slate, David Haglund notes some interesting and substantial similarities between Mr. Malick and novelist Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping [1980], one of the most hauntingly beautiful novels I have ever read). Mr. Haglund quotes Ms Robinson’s observation (from a recent essay) that the “locus of the human mystery is perception of this world”, and notes that it “would have made an apt, if somewhat pretentious, tagline”.

Sigh. Why is a phrase that is a finely-stated observation about what it means to be human apposite in an essay and pretentious when part of the supporting apparatus of a serious film? Is it a genre or medium thing? Beats me.]



[1] I don’t have the answers to these questions, by the way. I’m just putting them out there, for now.
[2] If franklinmjohnson would prefer this quote not be used, I will be happy to remove it.
[3] Sorry if this assumption is wrong.
[4] I want to deal with the assertion that “most of [contemporary music] . . . is . . . atonal to an unlistenable degree”. The cold, hard, unchallengeable fact is that the vast majority of concert music written in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries was, is, and will always be, tonal in one sense or another. In the academy or outside of it. I would be very interested to know, however, what amount of atonality it takes to make music unlistenable.
[5] Note to self: Write about “gratuitous” some time.

9.3.12

st. john turned...

I've written before about the music of my good friend Paul Paccione. The first piece of his I ever heard was a piece for chorus called St. John Turned to See the Sound. I was immediately struck by the qualities that have informed his music ever since, regardless of questions of manner and materials. Paul has posted a video that a performance of St. John. Here it is:

20.1.12

American Song

Phil Freeman has generously posted a recording of John Mindeman's heroic performance of my American Song (trombone, 2008) from last year's New Music Festival at Western Illinois University.

While you are at Burning Ambulance I hope you'll read Phil's other postings on a wide range of cultural subjects.



13.12.11

Burning Ambulance 5

Just in time for Christmas!

Burning Ambulance 5 is out. In addition to the usual outstanding writing on music, film, and culture, the issue includes my "Everything at Once: A Love Story", a meditation on the experience of time in music. A taste:
In the beginning was Incident.
Incident was and is all. In the beginning, though, Incident was constricted. It had no way of playing out—no “nonspatial continuum” in which Incident could play out and have meaning. Everything was happening at once. Out of necessity, so that everything wouldn’t happen at once, as Albert Einstein would later say when there was a “later”, time was born.
Paper and e-copies of Burning Ambulance are available here.




11.12.11

EC103


Happy 103rd birthday to Elliott Carter, one of my favorite composers and an important influence on me in so many ways. My posts about Mr. Carter and his music can be found here.

15.6.11

Some Informal Research

For research purposes: What do you consider to be the most important concert music institution where you live? Define the terms any way you wish. Please provide an answer in comments, through email, on your own blog, or anywhere else you think I'll find it.

Thanks.

10.6.11

Tough Times



Tallahssee, Florida (June 19, 2011) -- The City Council of Tallahssee (FL) voted yesterday to attempt to balance the city's budget by removing the third "a" from the city's name. A council spokesperson said that there were numerous attempts to save the letter, but to no avail. Church leaders were happy, saying they had "never liked [the letter] in combination with the two letters after it". The change was effective immediately, but critics say most of the savings were spent changing of the books in local libraries.

Florda Governor Rick Scott, speaking in Tallahssee, said he was following the capital city's lead, and would ask the Legislature to return to Tallahssee for a special session to consider removing the "i" from the state's name. Citing the fact that many people don't pronounce the "i" anyway, the Governor also said that the new name would help foster the populist image the multi-millionaire former health care executive spent 70 million dollars in the campaign to build: "I'm a two-syllable kind of guy, and Florda will be a two-syllable state as long as I am Governor."


(h/t to Alex Ross)

9.6.11

Step One

I don’t know for sure that I’ve ever made it clear here what I think about public (government) sector arts funding. I might have, but like I said, I’m not sure. So, I want to make as clear a statement on the issue as I can.

I’m agnostic about public funding of the arts.

I used to be someone who would offer a full-throated defense of Public Sector Funding of the Arts (PSFA) at the slightest provocation. A powerful case can be made for PSFA, and I’ve made it before and, when confronted with certain arguments against it, I’m willing to make it again.

Back in 2007, an Op-Ed piece in the Tallahassee (FL) Democrat (for which I wrote concert music criticism at the time) railed against PSFA in terms everyone with an interest in the subject has seen innumerable times: I don’t want my tax money spent on art I find offensive; I could do some of that stuff PSFA pays for; if its any good the market will support it; we can’t afford it (more on that one later).

My response, which the Democrat printed, went along the usual lines of return-on-investment, enrichment, etc.:

A . . . direct argument for public funding of the arts might go something like this: A culture expresses and communicates what it really is, for itself and its posterity, through its art. In a market-driven society such as ours, the best-seller lists, box office receipts, and top 40 offer one version of our artistic output. Public financing of artistic work can offer another perspective, one that is not market-driven and wholly subject to the desires of the buyer.

My thinking on the subject started to change[1] when I read Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. From my review:


This triptych of chapters [covering 1933-1945], one each on music in Stalin’s Soviet Union, FDR’s America, and Hitler’s Germany, shows what can happen when politics becomes entwined with art. Ross doesn’t specifically make an argument against government funding of the arts, but these are, at the very least, cautionary tales. These chapters abound with villains, but there are no heroes.
I explored this area further in an interview with Mr. Ross in the same issue of The High Hat:


SDH (me): Right after I finished reading the central triptych concerning music under Stalin, FDR, and Hitler, a friend played a passage from Ottorino Respighi’s Feste Romane (to illustrate a point about cymbal technique). I could barely stand to listen to it — after what I had just finished reading, it sounded like fascism. I’ve gotten past that since then, and I was wondering if you had any similar experiences while you were working on this project.


AR: I have a difficult time listening to one recording in my collection — a performance of Richard Strauss’s Friedenstag in Vienna that Hitler actually attended. It’s one of Strauss’s least inspired works; you can  sense him trying to find his place in Nazi culture. It’s also hard to deal with the music that Shostakovich wrote for the scene “Stalin’s Garden” in The Fall of Berlin. But in general I don’t believe that music is “stained” by the events that surrounded its creation. It can always be reshaped in listeners’ minds — bent toward good or ill or back toward good again.

SDH: Another thing that struck me after reading that middle section and for the rest of the book is what seems to be an incredible irony that continues to haunt us today. The Soviets, especially, demanded that their composers produce music that was close to the people, music that was accessible. This was also the case in other totalitarian countries, in the East and the West. The irony comes with the fact that music that is produced in response to the desires of the audience, or more ominously, in response to the market, similar in style and stance to that required by totalitarian governments. Do you agree with this? If so, what, if anything, do you think it means?

AR: This is more or less true, and it’s a haunting fact, but I don’t read too much into it. Totalitarian dictatorships are those that submit to the will of one ruler, and if the ruler’s taste is that of an ordinary music-lover, then naturally the music he demands from talented composers will appeal to ordinary music-lovers everywhere. However, I think it’s a mistake to believe, as many advocates of modernist music have suggested over the years, that there is something deeply amiss with the kind of mural-like populist composition pursued by Copland, Shostakovich and others during the 30s and 40s simply because totalitarian regimes appropriated that aesthetic. Again it’s that logic of the “taint” or “stain” that I reject.[2]

At the beginning of the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) recent telecast of the Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams’ Nixon in China[3], during the recitation of the funders, the slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was read:

A great nation deserves great art.

This slogan crystallized my current thinking about PSFA. It, PSFA, is always beneficial to the nation/state/county/city doing the funding. Always. Period. In purely economic terms the return on investment is impressive—most analyses show that for every dollar spent on PSFA between 6 and 18 dollars of economic activity are generated.[4] PSFA (even on a minimal level, which is all we’ve ever done) allows TV slogan readers to say things like “A great nation”, etc., with a minimally straight face.

The problems with PSFA for the arts themselves are well-known, if not always exactly agreed upon:

  • Projects funded are too high-profile or too big or too well-known—how many regional opera companies (for example) could mount productions with the money the NEA provides the Met?
  • Projects funded are too low-profile or obscure—shouldn’t funding go to events more people will see?
  • There is too much emphasis on re-creation (performance, etc.)/dissemination of existing works, not enough on creation of new works.
  • There is too much emphasis on giving money to individual artists to create art, not enough to bringing art to audiences through performance or dissemination.
  • Too much money goes to people with connections or to prominent institutions.
  • Not enough money goes to people with connections—I voted for this so my husband could get funded.
  • The imprimatur conferred by government funding stamps the work as the art of the establishment—a tool of the Man.
  • Too much money goes to artists who question the foundations of our system.
  • The art produced isn’t worthy because it wasn’t subject to the rigors of the marketplace.[5]
  • Well, I could have done that.[6]

Again, all of these issues are problems for the art world, not for the funding entity. The funders still benefit from the funding, regardless of which of the above factors come into play. These factors can, however, be serious problems for art, calling into question, at least for me, the value to art of PSFA.[7] There are benefits to the arts in all of this, without a doubt, but are they worth it? I really don’t know.

On the other hand, there is one area where PSFA is absolutely essential: Education. On every level. Students, from pre-K through (at least) undergraduate should receive meaningful training in the arts.[8] I’m not an educator, by any means, so I don’t have clear ideas about how this should be done, but there are people who do, and we should give them the resources to figure it out, test, and implement their findings.[9]

Florida State University has one of the leading, strongest set of arts programs in the United States. The problems and possibilities listed above are all in play there. Every year, the University sponsors an arts festival that, for me, embodies the problems with PSFA—the roster consists largely of middlebrow acts designed to appeal to an affluent middlebrow audience, and to meet them in their comfort zone.[10]

On a day-to-day basis during the academic year, and to a lesser extent during the summer, FSU and dozens of other institutions like it provide a thorough, ongoing festival of art in all its variety. Hundreds of performances, countless lectures and presentations, and numerous exhibitions (and, on the FSU campus at least, an impressive collection of sculpture around the campus)[11] make these institutions ready loci of arts education. Let’s find a way to use them, to systematically extend the art making into the rest of the community, region, state, and nation. This will take funding, to figure out exactly what is to be done, how to do it, and to get it done.

I was tempted to end the previous paragraph with: “And do it we must.” But we know that in today’s environment, we aren't compelled. We can’t afford it, we’re told about everything except war and upward redistribution of wealth through the tax code. We’re in a “budget crisis”. Well, that’s just a lie. It isn’t true. The money is there. In fact, the money is there for anything we as a nation want to do. It just so happens that right now we want to fight unending wars and shovel money to those with money already. On the one side we have politicians who cut arts funding during a made up budget crisis, knowing the cuts won’t make a difference in the budget (because the amount is so small), but being too cowardly to make the cuts they want to make during more clearly flush times. And on the other we have a feckless opposition, who bend to the first because they want to be seen as “serious” by an out-of-touch corporate media.

John Adams, the President, not the guy who composed an opera about a President, wrote his wife, Abigail:


I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Looking at this as a blueprint for America’s future is sad, because it’s difficult not to conclude that we are still on step one, and that we are there by choice. We’re in a struggle for what we are to be as a nation, and I’m finding that there really are no agnostics in foxholes. “A great nation deserves great art”? Maybe, but that seems inadequate at this point in history—a great nation needs great art.



[1] Though I still agree with everything I wrote in the Op-Ed piece.
[2] I think Alex dismisses the relationship between the financial/political circumstances of the creation of art and the created art a little too easily, but that’s a huge subject, best left for another post.
[3] I’m still not the world’s biggest John Adams fan, but Nixon had some terrific stuff in it. For example and off the top of my head, the characterization of Richard Nixon (both as written and as performed by James Maddalena) is rich, complex, and nuanced, and the banquet scene at the end of Act I is musically exciting and theatrically effective. Also, it was moving to me to see an American composer take the podium at the Met to conduct his own opera.
[4] Most analyses land in the upper end of this range.
[5] If you don’t laugh (or at least smile knowingly) when you read the phrase “rigors of the marketplace”, having seen the products, cultural and otherwise, of markets, you just aren’t having enough fun.
[6] No, you couldn’t. Really. You couldn’t. Just. Shut. Up.
[7] Private funding of the arts presents its own set of problems, but there’s far more room for navigation there, at least in my experience.
[8] I promised an answer to the “we can’t afford it” argument. It’s coming. Trust me on this one.
[9] I can hear it now—why just throw money at the problem? The public schools don’t do their job as it is! Well, if the Pentagon performed like the public schools we’d triple their budget, not reduce it.
[10] Even so, one recent President of FSU, who clearly saw his position as being CEO of a minor-league football team, derided the festival thusly: “My idea of an arts festival is a John Wayne double feature and a box of popcorn.” This is offered as proof of what academia is really like, in contrast to the idea of the groves of it being a haven for liberal elitists. At any rate, anybody who knows me knows how much I love The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, but with all due respect, Fuck you, sir, and the horse you watched the Duke ride in on.
[11] The same President mentioned earlier was known to have contemplated getting rid of the sculpture collection. See the end of footnote 10.

6.6.11

Burning Ambulance 4

The fourth issue of Burning Ambulance magazine has just been published. It includes my article on concert music in 1968. Here's a taste:

. . . the events of May had a lingering effect on life in France and throughout the West[3], in terms of attitudes towards youth, the relationship of the State to its citizens, and the very nature of cultural life in democratic society. Never again[4] would cultural values—including means and modes of expression, artistic, sexual, and otherwise—be handed down from on high.

To read the whole thing, including the thrilling footnotes, click here.


 

25.5.11

New Recordings

Phil Freeman has posted recordings of two of my pieces from the Western Illinois Festival at Burning Ambulance. Look for a new issue of Burning Ambulance soon.

18.5.11

Connection

Kenneth Woods wrote a marvelous post on certain passages in Gustav Mahler that don’t seem to “advance the plot”, giving some listeners the idea that Mahler may have needed an editor. Woods’ chief example is the march music (ca. six minutes long) that separates the two songs that make up “Der Abschied” (The Farewell), the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).

In purely musical terms, we are in the same place at the end of this march as at the beginning. It starts in a minor then quickly moves to c minor, which in Mahler’s style isn’t a distant movement. When the march has ended and the second part of the movement begins, we get the same low, soft tam-tam note we got at the beginning of the movement. We haven’t gone anywhere! But, as Woods points out so eloquently, “some profound transformations have occurred. We feel changed by what we have experienced. If I could articulate what that change is, we wouldn’t need Mahler.”

Woods discusses this kind of discursive music as just one of Mahler’s many narrative strategies, but it put me in mind of a very different kind of music, one that uses this transformative discursion/stasis as its very essence.

As an undergraduate I fell under the spell of what was then the very new and quickly developing world of minimalism. My first exposure to contemporary classical music had been the experimental music of composers like Stockhausen, Cage, and Lucas Foss (I heard his For 24 Winds at a concert in the summer of 1971 and was immediately hooked on the soundworld of the piece, which I haven’t heard since). A few years later I heard the famous first recording of Terry Riley’s In C and was immediately hooked. I loved the way it sounded and the way it moved, or didn’t move. It’s a soundworld thoroughly imagined, realized, and inhabited, and what more can we want from music?

I soon got my ears on all the minimalism I could find, which was quite a bit, and was most taken with Steve Reich, in particular his music up through Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. This music embodies the Mahlerian discursions Woods writes so tellingly about, with its delicate balance between process (the setting in motion of ideas and allowing them to play out) and discovery (the in-performance highlighting of the “resulting patterns” that occur as the phasing and other processes play out).

At the end of such pieces (as at the end of the march in “Der Abschied”) we find we haven’y gone anywhere in the strictest musical sense, but we have been moved and changed.

17.5.11

Mahler

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the death of Gustav Mahler.  

It should be no surprise to regular readers that Mahler is one of my favorite composers. In a post called “Tightrope”, I recounted a performance of the Second Symphony in which the brass section (during the chorale early in the last movement) was able to get louder and louder, with the sound quality never suffering. The post goes on to liken this thrilling aspect of performance to tightrope walking—the level of the risk/stakes involved can be an important aspect of the performance.

I’m drawn to art and artists whose work/life involves risks and high stakes. Mahler’s life and music embody the tightrope effect—the stakes are high, something is risked. As Director of the Vienna State Opera, Mahler put his stamp on all aspects of a production, ensuring he would get blamed for failures as well as being credited for successes.

His music is full of risk. Its demands on performer and audience alike are well-known, and those demands alone raise the stakes—if your more-than-hour-long symphony fails, the chances of connecting with the next one (especially if it, too, is demanding) are seriously curtailed.

But beyond the audacious length of his symphonies, Mahler’s music is risky in its content as well. He frequently juxtaposed transcendent, other-worldly passages with stretches of quotidian vulgarity, and didn’t privilege the transcendent over the vulgar. His music creates a narrative of life as it is lived, both in everyday existence, and in the life of the mind.

His risks are the same risks we take in putting ourselves out in the world. He takes these risks, our risks, leading us out onto the wire, and makes them art.

17.3.11

Asbestos

The great Barbara O'Brien has asked me to post a link to a blog she writes on asbestos litigation, which I'm haapy to do. The link is located in the "Links and Resources" section to the left. Some time soon, Barbara will post here about the relationship between these issues and the arts. I look forward to being able to share that with you.