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Okay, I'm not quite done with complexity yet.  As indicated in the last post, complexity, for better or worse or (mostly) in-between, can describe a number of musical qualities or characteristics.  When used in connection with something very specific, especially countable items (notes on a page, for example), the aspect of complexity described can acquire a quantitative dimension and make comparisons within and without a piece of work possible; also, when a clear process is used in composition, one might speak usefully in terms of a measurable computational complexity (which, of course, has its own complications, indeed uncertainties, which many others online can describe much more credibly).  However, some of the most important forms of musical complexity are far less easily reducible to the quantitative, and some methods, while quantifiable, as often not particularly relevant when quantified to any actual music.  Among these forms (incomplete, I'm sure, off the top of my hea...

The ever-estimable Lisa Hirsch has two items ( here and here ) in response to a Teachout article on musical complexity.   For music criticism, use of the term complexity is something of a blunt instrument. One has to be very specific about the materials or means or relationships which are being described as complex and even when identified as complex then there are no clear or generally accepted ways of measuring relative complexity, whether within a single work or among several works.   Most critically, in the thick of a real musical event, it is not always clear — and this, in the best cases, is a matter of compositional design — whether composer, performing musician, or listener can catch or is supposed to be able to catch, some or all details or a more general gestalt, or even to move attention between levels of detail, or if the experience of whole and parts is designed to be ambiguous.  Most works of music which have the capacity to stay fresh on repeated listenings — renewable ...

One of the most vivid musical experiences in my life was hearing Gary Bertini conduct Schönberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in the Alte Oper here in Frankfurt on a concert marking the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht .  I had never before and have not since witnessed an audience so stunned and shaken by a piece of music,  indeed struck deep to the viscera by a single moment in a piece of music, which is that when the male chorus enters singing a setting of the Sh'ma Yisrael .    The match of a piece, a performance, and a setting like this is a perfect illustration of the ability of a music to reach its audience — communication in the way that an iron handle communicates heat — regardless of its supposedly forbidding complexity, construction (it's 12-tone, and rather transparently so), or style (a particularly literal and hyper- version of the composer's Wiener espressivo ). One of the odd factoids about A Survivor from Warsaw that has stuck in the back of my head for fu...

Recently, I did one of my hit and run spells of teaching "composition" (I insist on the quotation marks, as my understanding of the term is often somewhat unorthodox) to a group of young musicians. One day, one of them made some jokes about serial music (you know the kind — about music for people with 12 fingers, or asking if you take milk and sugar with your serial?, etc.) so I decided to push the issue a bit and take a quick detour through the 12-tone and serial experience. There was something of a cod liver oil taste to this proposal, but I find, sometimes, that it is useful and surprising to take a new look at a subject that would appear to have been dismissed from further exploration. For example, in one of my reading binges, I decided to re-read as much of the sci-fi and speculative fiction I had consumed in High School and College as I could get a hold of here. As might be expected, I found most of the novels awkward and very hard-going, and was, in general, disappo...

Whatever you think of soccer, or of sports in general, and even if you're ill-disposed to either country involved or think that competition between teams representing nation-states is silly, the game yesterday between the US and Algeria was a model of formal beauty: sustained activity and attention captured for 90 minutes without a score, delaying any satisfaction for the duration while aware, the entire time, of an ominous score from the parallel game, until a single goal pops elegantly in the second minute of penalty time.  Talk about delayed resolutions! Talk about saving everything for the coda!

(An encore posting from February, 2007) We've all heard the talk about the low-level of attention, support, appreciation, etc. for new, contemporary, and experimental music. After having spent too much of the past two weeks monitoring activity in the online new music blogs and fora, I've come to the conclusion that one problem is that we, as a community, are generating simply too little heat: too little new of interest in the way of sounds, scores, or ideas, and too little controversy or passion, and even too little in the way of intellectual challenges. But most of all, through the underwhelmingly small amount of material we present to the world, we're simply giving out the impression that nothing is really happening in little Newmusicville. At this point in time, a new music equivalent of the "Instapundit" could probably get by with a bi-weekly post delivered by burro. It's not so much a matter of clever promotion, it's more a matter of reporting and rec...

Here 's a prime example of why Errol Morris is the best blogger on the whole damn blogoplan. The problem of known and unknown unknowns faces every composer the moment a hen scratch or flyspeck is applied to a sheet of manuscript paper.

You won't get rich, you won't get any measure of real fame, and it's not usually a guaranteed route to love and affection, but, seriously, is there any greater pleasure than imagining a music that hasn't been made before and then making it?  I can look back now on 30 years of living like a student, countless day jobs, no paid vacations, no pension plan, and unpredictably long gaps between freelance gigs and commissions.  Wife, kids, and dog all could have lived in more luxury — having a great big fridge or going to a restaurant together more than semi-annually, for example — but they seem to support and value my music, even when they don't altogether understand it, which is a great gift, and on the whole, we're very happy. We've managed the mortgage and paid for the car and the shed full of bikes and even that supreme folly of a whole gamelan in the basement.  My music has brought me to interesting places and through music, I've met people I shall always...

I skipped the soccer game last night and instead watched a broadcast of Philip Glass's opera, Kepler . I rather like the odd and (small "b") baroque balance of stylistic forces that have come to settle into Glass's stage music: a set of harmonic patterns reminiscent of the gallant style, sometimes interrupted by moments of polytonal overlay which function here a bit like cinematic cross-fades and an orchestration style, first noticed in Glass's section of the CIVIL warS , that reminds me of Meyerbeer's, of all things, here punctuated by some startling percussion, temple blocks, IthinksIhears. Dennis Russell Davies led a well-shaped and precise orchestral performance and the choir and young soloists were all quite good. I still can't wrap myself with much affection around the solo vocal writing, but here the problem clearly begins with the German libretto, which is basically one declarative sentence after another that Glass sets as one square declara...

Let me out myself once more: I like live music, played by warm bodies, for warm bodies, in real rooms.   I prefer live performances of music made for live performance to recordings.  I like the spontaneity and variation a live performance necessarily brings to a work and I like the way the music dissipates in a real room or out-of-doors space, as the sound waves are absorbed and reflected into both air, architecture, ear, and memory.  A live performance of music is a unique event in time, space, audition and memory for which there is no adequate substitute.  I prefer even a clumsy live performance by an amateur but spirited group of local musicians to the best-engineered recording by the most prestigious big city orchestra.  Recordings do have definite virtues, as tangible, portable, divisible comodifications and records of a part of that experience (and, though I harbor serious doubts, I don't discount the potential of such media to have some positive economic effects), but I fin...

The radical music isn't so much a way of composing, or even a repertoire of music associated with a way of composing, but rather a way of listening.  And listening not so much to music, as for the possibility of music.

Maybe it would be useful to rethink the whole topic of engagement with musical scale. I have written here previously about composers — including Ashley, Young, and Feldman — for whom issues of scale were or have been important. I suppose that obsession with larger (and evermore-larger) scales of musical production goes back really to Berlioz and Wagner (with both inspired by the example of Beethoven's Ninth, the only non-Wagner work ever programmed at Bayreuth). Thus, in music as in economics, scale became a central concern with industrialization and nationalism and remained central in the parallel developments of corporate capitalism and state socialism (still active, for example, in the military-owned enterprises in China). Attributing a thematic, ideological, or causal relationship between the lengthy works of Young or late Feldman and corporate capitalism is, of course, a ridiculous proposition and an unnecessary line of inquiry. As with Stockhausen supposedly "servin...

One of the paradoxes of the radical music is that it thrives at both extremes, at densities both close to zero and at or past the point of any perceivable order or distinction among constituent parts. A further paradox here is that, on the one hand, an ever-lower limit on materials or methods can create  ever-more mysterious and inscrutable musical objects and processes while, on the other hand, ever-more densely overlaid materials and complicated procedures can lead to sum totals which are heard as ever-more elementary surfaces or gestalts.  YET A FURTHER PARADOX is that composing under ever-more narrow restrictions or limits may yield ever-larger numbers of possible realizations while a lack of limits may force a composition into a density that is essentially ergodic in nature.   Among composers, John Cage and James Tenney were perhaps most focused on these paradoxes, composing at both limits, but the concern is widespread: much of the music of Nancarrow and Ligeti depends on it, Alv...

Composer Tim Parkinson has begun a great series of video interviews with some legendary UK experimental composers, including John White, Richard Emsley, Chris Newman and Michael Parsons, here .

The sound of those plastic stadium horns is a constant background presence in the broadcasts from the Soccer World Cup in South Africa. Although there must be considerable variation in the exact size and shape of these instruments with consequent variations in frequency, it all averages out in a massive example of the chorus effect into such a warmly modulating Bb that each time I pass through the room where my son is watching games, I annoy the hell out of him with an inability to refrain from launching into bits of South Indian solfege: sa ri ga ma pa dha ni sa ! or some rough and ready overtone singing (betraying, among other things, definite signs and symptoms of a musical youth in early 80's Santa Cruz). Bb is a comfortable tonic sa for me and after only two games the TV looks like it's going to become my tamboura-ersatz of choice, replacing our aged fridge for the rest of what looks to be a seriouslz drone-y World Cup.

One impulse for the radical music is the notion — some would say conceit — of a music built from scratch, from first principles and their consequences rather than built within the default settings of an existing tradition or practice. The turns to minimal means or algorithmic composition or free improvisation or even the use of chance or the dense overlay of so many processes that the end result is unpredictable were or are, often, chosen precisely to follow this impulse. My own conceit is that my pieces are games very much akin to the language games in late Wittgenstein, experiments in the consequences of finite sets of materials and rules for their deployment with the potential (the Oulipo has it right with their idea of a potential literature ) to emulate or even achieve the condition of music, but very much also the potential to fail to achieve that condition. The problem here, of course, is that there is an inherent conflict between the clarity of this experimental approach a...

I heard a first class Das Rheingold this evening at the Frankfurt Oper, the first production in a new Ring cycle.  Sebastian Weigle, the General Music Director of the house, began his musical career as a horn player, and the benefits of that experience were once again clear in his ability to balance local details and ensemble balance with long-term development.  As is typical for Frankfurt, the choice of singers was fortunate all around, and Kurt Streit's Loge and Meredith Arwady's Erda, in particular, were in top form both musically and dramatically.  The only reservation I have with this production is the set.  It's yet another variation in the Wieland Wagner brand of discs/rings, intended as an abstract and all-purpose set for use throughout the cycle.  In this case a huge computer-controlled stage machine with a central disk on a lift and four outer rings independently revolvable about the center, the whole perilously raked (the singers in LA have nothing to complain a...

An interesting article about John Cage and Robert Duncan, anarchy and the re-use of existing texts, here .

An Hour is an interesting series of broadcasts by Ophir Ilzetzki featuring interview/portraits of composers working in experimental directions. Recommended.