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Pliable gets it exactly right : A critic writing a savage review of a concert is considered to be doing his job, not being anti-classical music. But a commentator writing critically of the BBC's output is considered to be an anti-BBC heretic. Which suggests parallels between the BBC and the established Church. Both have been flattered for decades by unquestioning believers. Both are now in terminal decline. And the loss of both will be a great tragedy. Unfortunately, it appears that this is far too subtle for the management of many of our institutions: criticism, when expressed because one finds the work or the institution so important that one wants it to be done better , simply gets heard (and used) as a vote against all such work or institutions of the sort.   This problem is far from confined to the U.K.. New music programming in German radio stations faces exactly the same problem, exacerbated by ratings competition from private broadcasters and the budget pressure put on by t...

In this Chopin year, we're going to be hearing a lot about idiomatic instrumental composition, and in particular, the ways in which the physical, tactile acts of playing interact with aural considerations.  Most of the talk will, of course, be about the keyboard, from Bach (see here ) to Chopin and on to Bartók and Ligeti (tactility is also a hot topic among the complexers).  But here is also a new article about the complex handedness of Jim Hendrix and his choice of a left-handed guitar.* _____ * Playing "wrong-handed" is a minor fascination of mine.  From time to time, one hears about pianos with inverted (right-to-left bass-to-treble) keyboards, which can be emulated with a good midi keyboard and are, at turns, frustrating and fascinating to play.  Also, there is the example of the violinist Rudolph Kolisch, a close associate of Schoenberg, who played left-handed, which offered an acoustic advantage in quartet playing and some advantage in teaching as well, as he coul...

Variety, contrast, change. The liveliness of music is bound up with dynamism. La Monte Young is fond of saying that "contrast is for those who can't compose", but with all due respect to my teacher, contrast is essential — Young's own music is full of contrast — and the critical issue for composers is management of contrast, within the scale and scope of a given musical environment. To my ears, there is more dynamic variety within much Q'in or clavichord music — instruments which can never rise above the dynamic level of piano — than is available on the best made and played Steinway. The absolute range of dynamic contrast may be smaller, but the degree of differentiation, the scaling within that range, is much greater by being much more refined.* Even the most disciplined performance of Young's Any Integer (for Henry Flynt) , a piece in which a single piano cluster is repeated as precisely as possible for a number (often a large number) of time soon bec...

Sometimes you have to just throw things away.   Notes.  Riffs.  Phrases.  Movements.  Whole pieces.  Big ideas.  Repertoires.  Let go of that impulse to save and use and reuse everything, to make everything important.  Just toss 'em.  Listen to Sinatra leave those notes out.   Or Carlos Kleiber rehearse a gesture so close to perfection that you don't have to, like, pay it any more attention.  These bits and stretches of music are more valuable — more musical — in their absence than in their presence.  Even more than that:  they are more present as music when they are unplayed, unheard, physically absent.  Every composer is uneven, not every piece is a masterpiece, and not every piece needs to be visited, let alone revisited.  Cast a cold ear.   Learn that being unsentimental, practicing unattachment, is often more musically sensitive than trying to own every last detail. 

John Cage — this is from memory, so this is a paraphrase — said that "we need an avant-garde, otherwise nothing would be invented."  His tone was urgent,  it was for him a question of human survival,  and for Cage there was no meaningful distinction between physical and aesthetic survival, concerns that are made articulate in writings from his series of Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) to the late Overpopulation and Art .   Cage well knew inventors focused on physical survival: his father and Buckminster Fuller, for example, and he cheerfully accepted his teacher, Schoenberg's, identification of Cage as an inventor in the field of music; likewise, he was always enthusiastic about the musical inventions of his colleagues.   In Houston, many years ago, I was supposed to do a radio interview with Cage about his Ryoanji ; instead, we spent an hour in his hotel room discussing the frequency response of PZM microphones and the Piano Mechanics ...

This is brilliant.*  I rather hope that Dennis Báthory-Kitsz goes on to organize a similar competition for arts administrators.  _____ * please note the ethical policy here — unfortunately not practiced by all competitions — of guaranteeing a refund of the entry fee should a prize not be awarded in a given category.

The late Heinz-Klaus Metzger like to quip that Webern was the "last composer before the advent of air conditioning", as Webern's music presupposed an acoustical background absent a layer of aero-mechanical noise, sometimes constant, other times punctuating events with turnings-on and -off. But Metzger's quip wasn't quite right, as there isn't a concert hall anywhere or of any age that doesn't emit creaks and groans that have nothing to do with climate control. Foundations are forever unsettled, wooden parquet and panelling crack, light fixtures give off whole concerts of their own, and all these noises are joined by the breathing and wheezing and coughing and sneezing and fidgeting and what-not made when real live people are present. This was brought home to me Friday night during a performance by the hr-Symphonie under Lucas Vis of George Crumb's early Variazione . As is to be expected with this pairing of orchestra and conductor, the performance w...

Beethoven read Kant, Ives read Emerson, Boulez read Mallarmé. We all know about John Cage's interests, with their varying degrees of connection to music, from anarchism to mycology. Milton Babbitt knows tin pan alley song lyrics, baseball and beer. Non-musicological "research projects" have practically become tradition among experimentalists and high complexists. (I've probably told too much around here about my musically tangential interests.) When it comes to the interpretation of the music, whether as performer or as listener, are these factoids important to know? David Tudor, as pianist, was willing to read his Mallarmé — indeed willing to learn French — as what he believed to be prerequisite to learning a Boulez Sonata, but he was unwilling to read Emerson as prereq for Ives's Concord Sonata (Cage said that Tudor didn't want to "become a transcendentalist"). There are, however, marvelous performances of either work by pianists who have ...

(Some Friday Food Blogging) In my never-ending search for the perfect condiment, a current strong contender is the Chili in Five Treasure Sauce sold under the Picklec Family brand.  The usual chili-flake-in-soybean-oil is here accompanied by roasted peanuts, sesame seeds, pine nuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, making a pumped up, crunchy base for sauces and and a usefl table condiment for those dishes that are just not hot and crunchy enough.    Even better: the manufacturer's website comes complete with a bit of pickled vegetable mythology (accompanied by cheng music):  In the transition from Ming to Qing Dynasty，An Bangyan rebelled in Shuixi County Guizhou Province.  When General Yang Wencong who’s a man of gentle blood had leading Army of Yang to put down the rebellion，he issued an order to offer delicious food to his officers and soldiers as reward.  It was cold weather that the cook in the army added local rare plant into all cuisines which made the army highly praising thos...

There's a nifty little narrated slide show about a current exhibit of West Coast minimal art at The New Yorker's web site, here .   Peter Schjeldahl's articles are one of the best things about the magazine of late, but jeez, his commentary here begins on the wrong foot by framing the west coast work as a reaction to that in the east coast.  This just can't be sustained given both the west coast origins of many working in New York (De Maria, Serra, Young) and the lack of familiarity on the west coast with much contemporary work on the east coast.  He then makes a distinction between the "finish fetishists" and the "light and space" artists that really doesn't hold, as l-&-s-ers Irwin and Turrell shared that "fetish" for a cherry-perfect surface.  (Also, the characterization of Irwin as a "minor" abstract expressionist painter is hard to sustain if you are actually familar with his hand-held, line, and dot paintings, which d...

At Wesleyan, years ago, I was a grad student member of a committee charged with designing a "core" sequence of undergraduate theory courses.  The program we began to develop still makes a lot of sense to me, having a nice overall shape and being connected to real (and really fine) repertoire.  The sequence began with a semester on musical materials and melody, with the focus on western chant, but taking advantage of the world music resources at Wesleyan and also examining aspects of melody in non-western contexts.  The second semester was about modality and counterpoint, concentrating on 15th century music — and especially Josquin — thus avoiding some issues of tonality that the usual focus on Palestrina would invite.  A third course was to be called Tonality, centered on the late 18th century Viennese style, and the fourth was to deal with Chromaticism and was the least developed of the four.   None of these courses, as we envisaged them, could come equipped with any of the ...

Echo, the nymph, is a blank.  We do not know her.  In Ovid, she acts (speaks)  but is not noticed, as Ovid gives her no personality other than unconditional love and timidity, only to give herself to an unconditionally conceited Narcissus.  We know Narcissus too well; indeed there is nothing more empty in us than when we echo Narcissus.   But echo, the sound, need not be a blank.  It carries additional information: the time and strength of the delay, the resonances of the intervening spaces.  And that additional information is key to its musical utility, imitation being the basis of some of the most elementary techniques for creating musical complexity, with timing, strength, re-iteration and additional forms of transformation available to create a field of echo-based forms, from call and response and canon to the most elaborately and densely networked and transfigured forms of imitation. In my electronic music youth, every manner of echo (from spring reverbs and echoing acoustical cha...

Lesson of a late January snowstorm: you can't shovel the same snowdrift twice .   La Monte Young: Drift Study :  analog oscillators slowly, naturally drift out of phase from one another, calling attention to the emergence of complexity and detail in the most reduced     Phasing in early Steve Reich, first in the analog tape works, then in gradual, player-controlled phasing.  A move (drift, even) from informal to formal methods, from continuous to striated time;  a piece like Piano Phase emulates aspects of drift, but is too controlled and directional to be drift.  There's still plenty of good music to be made in the continuum between accidental and intentional drift.   ***** Paul Chihara: Driftwood (for string quartet with two violas): not a related process, but still a useful image.   ***** I heard quite a good performance of Morton Feldman's Why Patterns? Friday evening, a piece that shocked a generation ago with its asynchronous barlines (read more about them here ),...

I just had a chat with a composer colleague, someone who has sent in all his boxtops and made something of a career, with a teaching job, regular commissions and a good number of performances.  After making some snide remarks about sneaking out of concerts to avoid music from across some — to me obscure — new music-partisan divide, he went on with the ritual mantra complaint about lack of an audience for new music.   After calling the guy on his lack of consistency, I probed a bit deeper and was able to establish that although he was exclusively a composer of concert music, he didn't, actually, like concerts.   I stopped my questioning before I could figure out if he actually liked music, as that would have been too depressing even for a cynic like me, but I did suggest that concert music might not really be an optimal line of work for him.   This encounter immediately made me recall the counter-example John Cage, who, in later years with all the seniority, fame, notoriety and cert...

Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth. (Read more here .)

Music history gets told in a frustratingly elusive interplay of exceptions and the rule.  Do you point to odd and striking landmarks or do you describe more cohesive landscapes?  Take the uniform identification in the major textbooks of Pierre Boulez with the term serialism.  How much of Boulez's music is strictly serial?  The abandoned and unavailable Polyphonie X and the first half-book of Structures .   The opening of Structures 1a gets plenty of print and as much analysis as it can probably sustain, but dozens of works of the era by other composers would have been just as good, if not better, as examples (starting, AFAIC with several pieces by Goeyvaerts), yet its is Boulez who gets included, and probably on the basis of other works for which the serial turn of Structures and Polyphonie X was a necessary but non-productive cul de sac ,  abandoned immediately by the composer's self-criticism within Structures itself: and students of music history are thus given a non-ex...

Ron Kuivila's Alphabet (1982), an electronic "setting" of the title made rhythmic, harmonic, and polyphonic by a canny use of off-the-self electronics,  is a reminder of the power of arbitrary arrangements — in this case the conventional sequence of letters — and the compositional utility of balancing the logical with the arbitrary and conventional.  Letters, in English, are themselves abstractions, holding places for collections — and often inconsistent — of linguistic sounds or constituent parts thereof, making the ordering into an alphabet an abstraction once more removed.  The sampled text is played through a pair of Casio VL-tones with their outputs going through a phase locked loop that would lock at a higher partial driven by the partials of a single oscillator, which multiplies the sampled word by small whole-numbered ratio,  creating an integrated complex of pitch, rhythm and timbre  (the integration of pitch and rhythm is not unlike the proportionate Harmonium ...