A follow-up to yesterday’s crankiness.

Over at aworks, Robert, talking about Miles Davis, takes mild but justified issue with my criticism of the oft-heard pronouncement that “jazz is America’s classical music.” Let me clarify: I wasn’t trying to say one was better than the other, I just think that particular metaphor does a disservice to both. (And I wonder if jazz musicians have the same suspicions—I would imagine that at least a few of them would roll their eyes at being lumped in with the sort of classical performance that Virgil Thomson called ”silk-underwear music.”) But it’s a beaut of a coincidence that he was discussing Miles. Because Miles figures in another follow-up, to the whole “uptown-downtown” thing.

The other clichés I was trying to kill off annoy me mainly because of their shallowness, but that one is different. It annoys me because it tries to create an either/or situation where there doesn’t have to be one. I never heard “downtown” music as diametrically opposed to “uptown” music—just the opposite, in fact. I first liked Feldman—the slow pace, the way he makes the decay as important as the attack, the tight focus on short, open-ended gestures—because he sounded kind of like Webern. I first liked Carter—the virtuoso floods of notes, the floating rhythm, the unexpected juxtapositions that keep the drama of the piece in tension—because he reminded me of Zorn. And I first liked Stockhausen, because he reminded me of Miles.

Back in undergrad, one of the first Stockhausen pieces I heard was his first major work, Kreuzspiel. It’s regarded as a seminal work of pointillist serialism. Three instruments—oboe, bass clarinet, and piano—jab individual notes, widely-spaced chords, and occasional melodic fragments at each other, while three percussionists accompany with tom-toms and congas, then cymbals, then both. Listening to the first section, the short, enigmatic interjections by the winds, the sparse piano, the tom-toms a background tattoo with unexpected (serially-determined) accents… we all looked at each other (we were all pretty jazz-savvy—DePaul is a big jazz school) and said, “It’s Birth of the Cool!” Which is exactly what it sounds like. Stockhausen has claimed on more than one occasion that no one had ever heard anything like Kreuzspiel before, but of course they had (and no doubt he had, too.) But by taking away the familiar tonal harmony and the regularity of rhythm, that particular sound suddenly sounded new and shocking again. It reminded me of the excitement I felt the first time I heard Miles—not a triumphalist “this is what I’ve been looking for all my life” excitement, but an excitement that here was music that didn’t behave the way I expected it to, that showed a little more of its hand each time I listened to it, that let my experience of it change over time and place.

Hence my recoil at the uptown/downtown dichotomy. It’s not even that such a manichaean view of music is telling me that I can’t like both, it’s that it’s implying that if I do like both, that there must be something wrong with the way I listen. But one of the attributes of great music is that you can listen to it in myriad different ways and still feed your soul. No part of town has a monopoly on that.

“Nobody actually enjoys listening to atonal music—they just want other people to think they’re a pretentious intellectual.” For the record, I enjoyed listening to atonal music well before I was a pretentious intellectual. Seriously, stop telling me that I don’t like what I do like, OK? Because otherwise, I’m going to have to bring up that whole Proust thing. And I know you never got through Swann’s Way.

“Jazz is America’s classical music.” The music of Adams, Babbitt, Bernstein, Billings, Brant, Cage, Carpenter, Carter, Copland, Corigliano, Crumb, Diamond, Eaton, Feldman, Fine, Flynn, Foss, Glass, Harbison, Heinrich, Imbrie, Ives, Johnston, Kirchner, Larsen, Macdowell, Moran, Nancarrow, Oliveros, Parker, Partch, Reich, Riegger, Riley, Rouse (both of ‘em), Ruggles, Seeger, Shapey, Tower, Williams, and (god help me) LaMonte Young (just to name a few) is America’s classical music. Jazz is jazz. Why is this so hard?

“Mozart and Beethoven were the popular music of their time.” Mozart and Beethoven may have been more popular than, say, Hartke and Wuorinen are today, but that hardly makes them 200-year-old equivalents of Justin Timberlake. Both relied heavily on royal patronage and a state-supported musical infrastructure. Both wrote the majority of their works for an aristocratic audience. (Want to breathe new life into this meme? Try working in John Gay.)

“The atmosphere at classical concerts is intimidating.” Too formal? Sure. Snobbish? On occasion. But if you find a bunch of well-dressed old people to be intimidating, a suggestion: maybe Mahler 6 isn’t the best entertainment choice for you in the first place.

“Orchestras need to do away with tuxedos because they’re stuffy and outdated.” Yeah, that James Bond—what a prudish old geezer. Besides, if all enterprises rose and fell on the aesthetic quality of their uniforms, Major League Baseball would have bit the dust years ago.

“Blah blah blah uptown composers blah blah blah downtown composers.” Look, I’m sure this particular dialectic felt terribly, vitally important at a certain place and time. But to all of us living in the vague and undifferentiated string of comical hick towns that New Yorkers regard the rest of the world to be, this is pretty much like listening to your grandparents debate the relative merits of Ovaltine and Postum. Think of how much wonderful music would result if all that wasted energy was applied to something constructive, like making fun of emo.

“In celebration of the [large number]th anniversary of the birth of [dead composer].” Why is it that all those people who reject formalist composition as too intellectual and schematic are perfectly happy to flood the world with concerts/broadcasts/recordings of old-timers for no other reason than a numerological coincidence? Just asking. (Today, for instance, is Shostakovich’s 100th birthday. Strike a blow for reason and listen to him tomorrow.)

“Composers today only write music for other composers.” Only if they’re buying.

I told Charlie Parker about the Rabbi of Ladi. I explained that during Napoleon’s siege of Moscow there was a relentless debate among the Jews on whether Napoleon’s victory would be good or bad for the Jews. Rabbi Israel of Konitz wanted Napoleon to win while the Rabbi of Ladi did not. It was decided that they both should go to the synagogue at the same time and whichever one of them was first to blow the shofar would win. The Rabbi of Konitz arrived together with the Rabbi of Ladi but was the first to start blowing the shofar and then the Rabbi of Ladi snatched the notes from the Rabbi of Konitz’s shofar and so, from a distance of nine hundred kilometers determined Napoleon’s fate at Moscow. Bird said that any jazz musician who doesn’t make a lady out of jazz like that Dave Brubeck knows how to snatch notes from a shofar. Outside everybody was playing the numbers and losing pots of money to the black professionals all dressed up to the nines in their colored suits and magnificent neckties. Bird liked to see Jimmy Slide beating Napoleon at Moscow with his tap dancing.

—Yoram Kaniuk

More (including Billie Holiday singing Mayn Yiddishe Mame) here.

The music I write hasn’t had a lot of repetition in it—I mean taking a section of music and repeating it note-for-note. I got hooked on the whole developing-variation thing fairly early on, and for whatever reason (need for control, excessive affection for ornamentation, short attention span, take your pick), it’s served my aesthetic needs rather well. Except for the small wing of my compositional library devoted to ragtime, I don’t think I’ve ever had the occasion to notate an actual repeat sign (and even the last batch of rags were pretty through-composed). There’s also the fact that repeating a section sometimes feels almost too easy (especially these days, where it’s merely a matter of doing an electronic cut-and-paste), as if I’m just filling up time, or I’ve run out of ideas.

The piece I’m working on now, though, has a fair amount of exact repetition, for a variety of reasons. The people I’m writing it for also play in a rock band, so I’ve been consciously and subconsciously using elements of pop music forms. Also, some of the passages are pretty tricky from a technical standpoint, so (although it’s never stopped me before) it seems a little churlish to make them do all that work for a fleeting few bars that never come back. But mostly, it’s because, all musical evidence to the contrary, I persist in imagining the piece as an analogue to the sort of multi-movement suites and cycles that Schumann wrote. And Schumann is a master of repetition.

Schumann’s repeats can break your heart: the end of Frauenliebe und -leben—after the singer finishes sadly admonishing her husband for dying and leaving her, the piano repeats the opening song of the cycle, where they first meet—is one of the three or four most emotionally devastating moments in all of music. (All the more amazing considering that the emotions embodied in the poetry have dated badly; the distance and loss Schumann conjures up with that simple gesture are, I’m convinced, the main reason the cycle stays in the repertoire.) In the Davidsbündlertänze for piano, the second movement magically reappears in the eighth movement, an unexpected repeat that sets up the enigmatic finale. On the other end, there’s the opening movement of Faschingsschwank aus Wien, where the lyricism is always being interrupted by a boisterous beer-hall ritornello: Florestan suddenly showing up to shake Eusebius out of his reverie and drag him back to the party.

But it’s the other kind of repetition, the immediate repetition of the phrase, the melody, we’ve just heard, that Schumann makes his own. Flip through the various pieces that make up the piano cycle Carnaval and you’re struck by the sheer variety of where and when repeats turn up. Sometimes it’s the opening section (“Promenade”); sometimes the closing section (“Chiarina”). Sometimes a tightly repetitive exposition will give way to a free-wheeling new structure (“Préambule”). Sometimes it’s almost as if the music can’t let go of the melody (“Aveu”). And sometimes it’s as if, by chance, we stumble upon a sudden discovery that freezes us in our tracks (“Florestan”). Schumann, more than any other composer, realized that repetition is it’s own form of expressiveness, that, in practice, there’s no such thing as an exact repetition, even if the notes are identical. The fact that we’ve already heard the material means that we’ll hear the repeat differently, whether it’s finding more meaning in the music, or feeling the meaning of the music slip away into insensibility, the way a word becomes meaningless if you say it over and over. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously declared that we never set foot in the same river twice—but he also used to argue from that proposition to the paradoxical idea that, at the same time, everything exists and nothing exists. I don’t know about you, but to me, that combination of the fullness of life and the nihilism of the abyss seems awfully Schumannesque.

This past month I found a marvelous use of repetition in music by György Kurtág, who is the closest thing to a modern Schumann that I can think of. (All my MIT keyboard harmony students started with Kurtág pieces this year; sometimes it takes extraordinary measures to get myself psyched up for the semester.) “Hommage à Schubert,” from the ongoing piano collection Játékok (Games), is a short piece in two parts. The first part starts:


The second part starts:


The notes are exactly the same. But what in the first part is an out-of-tune hymn, becomes, in the second part, a delicately awkward negotiation between the hands. With an economy of means, he shifts the focus from the disembodied nature of the sound to the physical effort of its production. Not bad for a cut-and-paste. Robert would be proud—although he’d probably repeat it a few more times, just for good measure.

Joe Glazer, R.I.P.

Scroll to the bottom of this page to see and hear the man in action at the Kennedy Center in 2002.

I feel now as if the extreme reticence of wearing a body was almost indecent. It is far more decent to go about blaring one’s loves and hates, blowing them in the faces of those we meet—as it were, being so much on the outside that we cannot be said to have an inside.

Oscar Wilde, communicating through Hester
Travers Smith via ouija board, June 20th, 1923
(as recorded by Mrs. Travers Smith in
Oscar Wilde From Purgatory, 1924)

News out of Thailand today: an attempted coup by the military. Taking advantage of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s trip to New York for the opening of the UN General Assembly, military units, under the command of Army Chief Sondhi Boonyaratkalin (and apparently acting with the approval of the king), have taken control of Bangkok.

On a television station controlled by the military, a general in civilian clothes said that a “Council of Administrative Reform,” including the military and the police, had seized power in the name of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

What’s that? This is supposed to be a music blog? Well, any junta that claims to be operating in support of a composer rates a mention here. That’s right, in addition to reigning as the (largely ceremonial but widely beloved) king of Thailand for the last half-century, Bhumibol Adulyadej is also a jazz saxophonist and songwriter. Here he is jamming with Benny Goodman.


King Bhumibol (who was born here in Massachusetts, by the way) has forty-some compositions to his name; his song “Blue Light” was featured in the Michael Todd-produced Broadway revue Peep Show in the 1950’s. Upon ascending to the throne, the king formed his own 14-piece band and started a state-run radio station to broadcast its performances. Lionel Hampton once complimented him as “the coolest king in all the land,” although, seeing as how he’s the only king in all the land, it’s possible that Hamp was hedging his bets a little.

I won’t pretend to have an informed opinion on the Thai political situation (the brief breakdown seems to be probably-corrupt-but-rurally-supported-populist-PM vs. disenfranchised-elite-and-business-backed-disgruntled-military, with the king giving at least token support to the generals and the Thai economy on the line, which gives you an idea of the gray areas involved), but I am an expert on musician day jobs, and I’d say Bhumibol takes the prize. (If anyone’s reading this in Thailand, please stay safe. Kor hai chok dee.)

Update (9/21): King Bhumibol’s support for the coup is now explicit. Here’s a good summary of what’s been going on.

This morning’s driving music (I don’t usually drive into town, so when I do, I choose my music carefully) was Brahms 3, which is slowly but surely supplanting 2 as my favorite Brahms symphony. It’s among a small group of Brahms pieces that don’t feel like they’ve been planned so meticulously; if I don’t listen too closely, there are things happening that sound like they’re in there not because they develop a motive, or set up a new theme, or make some structural point, but just because Johannes damn well felt like it.

It’s an illusion, of course—it’s as tightly constructed as anything else he wrote—but it manages to nail that simulated spontaneity that composers are encouraged to strive for in their academic training. Sound fresh and surprising, but using material that’s developed organically. I suppose it’s natural for that to be a teaching aim; practice grows out of analysis, and to teach analysis, you need music where it’s easy and logical to demonstrate where the notes are coming from. (Over on his blog, Kyle Gann had a great post on this topic a couple of weeks ago.) A lot of composers react to this sort of training by going to the other extreme: music that refuses to develop, themes following themes with no transition, relying on the drama of juxtaposition to carry the piece forward. (I often like music like this—Feldman and Zorn spring to mind as varied examples—but I do think it’s much harder to pull off.)

But then I started to try and imagine a piece that’s an illusion in the opposite direction: a hodge-podge that fools you into thinking it’s tightly, organically constructed. My favorite example of this is Tosca. Think of the very beginning, those three big chords:


Which is immediately and suddenly followed by all this activity:


So we have a bunch of harmonies with no functional relationship to each other, and a couple of diametrically opposed tempi jammed together with a fermata. With your ear thus primed, Puccini is now free to go to any harmony or tempo he wants without the need to modulate. And in this context, paradoxically, the lack of modulation makes the piece sound more like everything’s connected. There’s no long transitions, no musical gymnastics to get from place to place; he just does a sudden bump change and your brain subconsciously says, “Aha! Just like the beginning.” Then, without any preparation, he just brings back the three big chords at the act breaks, and you’re suckered into thinking that there’s a grand structure unfolding, when in fact, the only real planning he’s doing is saving a couple of tonalities for big arias.

Please note that I don’t think this is in any way dishonest or underhanded on Puccini’s part; I actually think it’s an extremely clever way to maintain the speed and dash he wants without being tied down to musical niceties. (Charles Rosen offers a similar compliment to Mendelssohn in The Romantic Generation regarding a “fugue” with no counterpoint.) I do wonder how often one could get away with it—you get the feeling that Puccini is trying the same thing at the opening of Turandot but then realizes that it’s unsuited to the grandeur and spectacle of the story. And I can’t for the life of me imagine how to do something similar with serial music, which is (at least analytically) organic by definition: everything springs from the same sequence of intervals. Maybe Tosca really is an organically developing piece, but the generating source is just the sounds of triadic tonality, an idea so far in the background that we take it for granted.

Something I’ve been trying in my own music for a couple of years now is applying serial techniques to groups of triadic harmonies: for example, devise a tone row that divides up into triads and seventh chords, and then put those chords front and center, voicing and doubling like you normally would. I like the sound world that results—because my ears are tuned to tonal progressions, the sequences sound simultaneously familiar and surprising. The harmonies don’t go where they “should,” but they’re still moving in consistent ways (thanks to the row) and that seems to hold the piece together. I suppose you could pretty easily use something like this to set up more arbitrary progressions á la Puccini, but the effect would still be based on that tonal ground. Odd—I’m used to hearing atonal music criticized as a violation of musical grammar, but here’s an instance where it’s actually too grammatical.

Odds and ends:

A-Rod’s goal was not simply to fail at the game… but to raise deep philosophical questions about the nature of human achievement. The philosophy of “Atonal Baseball.” (But let us recognize the serialist mastery of Gary Matthews, Jr.)

One of my hometown’s classical radio stations is a proud sponsor of the Newport International Polo Series. Elitist, you say? If you know of a better way to get horses interested in classical music, I’d love to hear it.

A follow up to last week’s rant about airline carry-on restrictions and musical instruments: witness the travails of the Simon Fraser University Pipe Band, who, fresh off of a second-place finish at the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow, was forced to check their equipment with an airline who promptly lost $27,000 worth of their stuff. The items included thirteen drums, in cases, which is pretty much like misplacing a hippopotamus. Terrorist threat, my eye—I rather suspect somebody in the British Home Office is still bitter over the Battle of Bannockburn. (Thanks to Jeana and Glenn Stewart, sister and brother-in-law/master piper, for the tip.)

Last, but not least: Henry Kissinger and Len Garment, art critics. (I love the Freedom of Information Act.)

The fruits of today’s grocery run: Thelonious Monk Belgian abbey ale.


Now if only someone would brew a Sorabji IPA.