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(1) Contrast: Jo Kondo:   "I am interested in words more than in sentences, in sentences more than in paragraphs, in paragraphs more than in a whole page. Thus, it could be said that in music I am more concerned with each sound than with the phrases they create ." John Cage:   Empty Words . (Cage quotes N.O. Brown: "Syntax is the arrangement of the army "; removing syntax is demilitarizing language.) with Gertrude Stein: a sentence is not emotional a paragraph is (2)  Charles Seeger's Dilemma:  that thinking and discoursing in the "language mode of communication" about the "music mode of communication" dominates, directs and, above all, limits research about music. I work with sounds with the same pleasure that I take in kneading dough or riding a bike or walking early mornings with daughter and/or dog in tow.  But I wrestle with words, fool persisting in his folly , and more often than not — especially when the words should have something to...

The results of research into the physics, psychophysics and neuroscience of music are often fascinating, but also, as a practicing musician, often frustrating.  This frustration is due, in part, to an inherent pessimism, in that the subject of research is typically constrained by existing musical repertoire and its material qualities and existing conditions for performance and audition. Far more interesting, for a composer like me, would be exploration of the potential and means for musicians and listeners to go beyond those constraints.   It is one thing, for example, to determine limits for pitch perception under conventional listening contexts, but it is quite another thing to investigate ways and contexts through which these limits may be expanded.  Further, there is a real frustration that much research — research in audio recording somewhat excepted — does not focus on issues of urgent compositional interest.  For example, I would really like to know more about how fast a listene...

I am an owner and user of umbrellas.  No, more than that: I am fond of umbrellas.  A well-made umbrella is light but sturdy, mechanically stable and smooth in operation.  It is capable of protecting against rain, hail, sun, or — within reasonable limits of strength and velocity — wind. It may be used to hide from unwanted gazes or to disguise a private conversation. A umbrella can make both an excellent improvised directional sound reflector or a mute — this was a particular specialty of my days as a young trombonist — or, in a snap, it may be used as a foil to fend off attackers or to defend ones honor.  Erik Satie was said to have owned dozens of them. At one point in time, I owned more than twenty of them, and took great pride in keeping them all in good maintenance, cleaning them, lightly oiling the mechanism, straightening ribs gone askew and patiently sewing loose ends back onto their assigned ribeyes.  [Warning! Some umbrellas come with sharped tips and rib-ends; others may be s...

The fifth volume, Music in the Late Twentieth Century , of Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music .   (A long version of this item will follow, but for now, let's get on with this alphabet.)

I may well be missing some activity, but judging from the blogs I follow, there has recently been a aggregatel decline in the frequency and volume of independent classical music blogging, with the number of institutional music blogs increasing.   The pace on this blog has slowed due to some large projects elsewhere and a share of some serious self-doubts about writing.  I'm not altogether certain that the slowdown here won't be more permanent, perhaps by way of transition to some other format.   I've often thought that sharing a magazine-like format with some mix of like- and contrarily-minded colleagues might be interesting, but that starts to smack more of conventional column journalism than of the free-form made possible by the blog medium and composition, mostly a solitary activity, tends to attract folk like me who did not necessarily get good marks for "plays well with others" in elementary school.  Your ideas about this would be welcome.   In any case, how ...

Charles Shere writes about Copland's The Tender Land , here .  I think Shere's characterization of the piece as "hokey and pretentious" is right on the money: the opera's music is thin and both libretto and score are unable, dramatically, to make anything particularly engaging out of its most potent theme, forbidden sexuality (which ought to work and which Copland handles so astonishingly well in Appalachian Spring , showing that the problem is compositional and not a direct function of either the materials or the style.)  Shere also writes that: I've always thought of Copland, Britten, and Shostakovich as an interesting triad. Each was immensely gifted and intelligent; caught in an uneasy relationship to the prevailing Modernism-Reactionism duality of the early 20th century; apparently self-assigned to a position of National Spokesman for his art. Each composed masterpieces, particularly early masterpieces, then went on to an uneven output often troubled by i...

That a cloud of ashes from an Icelandic volcano can cause air traffic in most of Europe to shut down is a nice reminder that redundancy can be useful and valuable when the unexpected happens.  Where rail lines and ferries can take up the slack, most travelers are inconvenienced but not stuck, but wherever airplanes have a monopoly, tough luck.   The present bootleneck is costly to the air carriers and big trouble not only for passengers but for the increasing share of post and freight that is flown.  The time advantage of jet travel is real, but shouldn't there be more travel alternatives available?  Fast and affordable passenger ships, for sure, and isn't this a good argument for a more thorough revival of dirigible airships as a more gentle mode of air travel?   Here's the reminder: a bit of redundancy in musical performance practice is also useful. Conducting cues, for example, can often avert difficulties or rescue a performance when caution was insufficient.  Doublings...

Ron Silliman points to this post with the statement Why memorizing poetry is inherently right wing .   The question of memorization is, of course, sometimes an important one for musical performance as well and sometimes we musicians also make a similar distinction between rote and "by heart" memorization.  Generally speaking, the pro-memorization camp is our conservative party and it is typical for competitions and recitals on the establishment circuit to insist that musicians play without sheet music visible on stage.  (This insistence comes with that same weird macho-but-prissy swagger that only conservative pseudo-intellectuals carry.)  While there are cases  in which getting rid of the paper is unavoidable — in opera, for example, or with some percussion instruments for which visual contact with a music stand cannot be maintained —, I side decidedly with the opposition party here.  This is because when playing notated music one can too frequently discover that notation ...

A performance last fall of Le marteau sans maître left me once again astonished about an unresolved tension in the piece, a tension between structural concerns — the interlocking cycles of two, three and four movements and the systematic orchestration and scoring patterns in particular — that were made explicit, expressed at the immediate surface of the music, and the note-to-note continuity, the precise sense of which was not aurally recoverable beyond the most general and impressionistic considerations — contour, registration, and to some extent pitch complementarity.  Although Le marteau is a piece which I have listened to, intently, for more than 30 years, and has some qualities — not least its notorious coolness — which I actually find attractive, the absence of a compelling connection between local continuity and global order makes for an increasingly frustrating listening experience.  Moroever, there are some scoring pattern changes and choices of instrumental register in the p...

For a time, say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Repetition was a useful element in music which was more immediately static than dynamic, more about being somewhere, than going somewhere. Of course, no repetition was ever precisely identical to that which was being repeated, the most careful of human performances always carried traces of subtle alterations, and even in the most mechanical repetition, the context, of time delayed and experienced, altered the identity relationship in a fundamental way. For a time, say say '78 through '84, my music used a lot of literal repetitions, notated often between happy pairs of ||: :||s. Repetition in music was useful for creating contexts that well self-sustaining and self-similar. Canons were a particularly useful extension of repetitive techniques, as the music was simultaneously asserting something about where one was, where one had been, and where one m...

This is the Palatka Band from Transylvanian village of Palatca in Romania playing at the 2010 Táncháztalálkozó in Budapest.  Not the best sound quality, but a good illustration of the multi-ethnic region's string band style and technique.  The bass, three-stringed, uses a very short bow in heavy strokes and battuto.  The viola, or kontra , also three-stringed, tuned g-d'-a, plays a chordal accompaniment. The prima violinist, Lőrincz Codoba uses, in the slow sections, the typical right-hand style, in which most expression occurs in a space in which vibrato and portamento are not always distinct.   This is also a good illustration of a traditional form of music transmission in the relationship between older and younger players.

It's a standard piece of advice for composers that we ought not set our own words.  In general, I think this is true: having two pairs of ears and eyes to monitor words and music is a sensible move and there are precious few examples between Machaut and Ashley of composers who are equally gifted as poets (in Machaut's case, it is impossible decide whether the identity as poet or composer should come first) while there are — sadly — plenty of composers who have used their own texts or libretti to sinkingly bad effect. (Does anyone seriously want to go some rounds over the libretti of Wagner or Stockhausen? Seriously? )   (I think that this principle holds less for popular music, but I'm just not engaged enough in popular repertoire to venture a substantiable reason why, but it may just be that it is in popular music that a continuity to the ancient idea of poesis , in which the composition of words is inseparable from their metre, rhythm, accent, and tune, is still, to some ...

Qualms: Who wants these sounds, this music?  Is this music worth taking your time?  Is it worth breaking your silence?  What does this piece of music do that no other piece of music (or alternative activity) can do?  Quarrel: How does this music differ from other music?  Is that difference or disagreement potentially productive of more new music?  Quantity: Is there enough of this music? Is there too much of this music?  Are the internal proportions of this music right (or wrong, in an interesting way)? Quality:  Is this music well-considered, well-felt, and well-made?  Question: Have you heard something in this music that you have not heard in other music?  Have you learned something from this music?  Do you value this music, those sounds, these times?  Quiet! Does the music articulate phenomena, sounds, that are otherwise inaudible, unknown? In composing, in throwing these sounds out,  have I made it possible for you to hear something new? Is this music an opportunity for changing ou...