I’m traveling this week, so I’m a day late on a couple links. Over at NewMusicBox this week, I consider the composer’s relationship with musical material from the vantage point of an early out.

Also, Ethan Iverson, a fellow Charles Rosen fan, asked for some reflections on his passing, which I was more than happy to attempt. If there’s a more entertaining way to expand one’s mind than a “Do the Math” post, I haven’t found it; to be part of one is flattery indeed.

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, November 20, 2012.

I have a couple of First-Four-Notes-related articles up this weekend:

On Beethoven’s Fifth and other warhorses.
Boston Globe, November 18, 2012.

Five Books Inspired by Beethoven’s Fifth.
Publisher’s Weekly, November 16, 2012.

Also, this, which I forgot to link to earlier this week:

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage.
Musical America, November 13, 2012.

I will once again, and with pleasure, acknowledge this blog’s debt to Tippett’s opera.

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 12, 2012.

The American Music of Elliott Carter. A composer of the American experience.
Boston Globe, November 11, 2012.

The image is from Carter’s business card, given to me by Helen Frost-Jones, Carter’s wife, following a question-and-answer session at Orchestra Hall in Chicago for the 1994 premiere of Partita. I had asked a question, probably impertinent and almost certainly dull, but, in retrospect, it was a supreme encouragement to have passed some small sort of muster with Carter’s most devotedly fierce protector.

I’ve spent a lot of agreeable time writing about Carter and his music, including interviewing him back in 2008 (outtakes here), and spilling many words over the Tanglewood celebration of his centenary:

1. Punctuality
2: Genealogy
3: The stuff that dreams are made of
4: Identity politics
5: Role modeling
6: This Is Your Life
7: Either/Or
8: You’ve got a head start

Reading over those dispatches again, I find my impressions still evolving—for example, I’ve come to hear a lot of the passing neo-classical references in Carter’s later music to be less an extension of a Coplandesque style and more a critique of it—but the idea of Carter as a composer profoundly concerned with capturing the energy and friction of a democratic society, an idea that first fully crystallized for me in that full-immersion festival, is one that remains at the core of why I love the music so much.

For All Saints’ Day, a chance to remember past articles that I was too lazy to link to:

Reviewing Sound Icon.
Boston Globe, October 23, 2012.

On William Morris, Leonard Bernstein, and the Chichester Psalms.
Boston Globe, October 20, 2012.

New England’s Prospect: Reactor Corps. Reviewing the HONK! Festival.
NewMusicBox, October 15, 2012.

New England’s Prospect: Talking Cures. Collage New Music plays Nathan, Carter, and Dargel.
NewMusicBox, October 9, 2012.

Reviewing Daniil Trifonov.
Boston Globe, October 8, 2012.

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, October 1, 2012.

New England’s Prospect: “The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves.” Martin Pearlman’s Finnegans Wake.
NewMusicBox, October 1, 2012.

New England’s Prospect: Tracking Devices. The Northeastern/NEC Harry Partch Symposium.
NewMusicBox, September 27, 2012.

Reviewing Paula Robison and Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, September 19, 2012.

Also, if you missed it, The First Four Notes now has its own shiny new website, complete with book-related news and additional (and ever-growing) Beethoven miscellany.

(Oh, and in the meantime, take a moment and a bit of money and help those drying out from Hurricane Sandy.)

The best thing about a Schoenberg O’Lantern? With the lights on, it looks like a Schoenberg self-portrait:

Update (10/31): Arnold guards the premises:

PERMISSION GRANTED. BUT NOT TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.

—John Cage, “Seriously Comma” (1966)

One of the dilemmas of mental life is that people need to know of things that are untrue, and yet need to know that these things are untrue.

—Daniel T. Gilbert, Douglas S. Krull, and Patrick T. Malone,
“Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the
Rejection of False Information,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, vol. 59, No. 4 (1990)

System 1 and System 2—that’s what Daniel Kahneman calls them, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: the two tracks on which the brain operates. In simple terms: System 1 is intuitive, biased, judgmental, and nearly always on; System 2 is analytical, rational, reflective—and sluggish. When we make errors of judgment, it tends to be because System 1 has jumped to a conclusion that System 2 can’t be roused enough to correct. It’s why we have such poor intuition about statistics, about aggregate vs. anecdotal evidence, about the amount of randomness and noise in the data the world presents to us.

Randomness and noise: a wholly appropriate thing to talk about on John Cage’s 100th birthday. I’ve been thinking about the musical implications of System 1 and System 2 lately. Implication #1: musical works that are widely considered “great” play to System 1’s particular proclivities, leveraging music’s basic capacity for simple tension and release to create the illusions of causality, connections, and narrative qualities that System 1 is primed to see in whatever stimulus comes its way. Implication #2 is related: music that appeals more to System 2, more intricate and calculated, more geared toward an active investigation of what musical relationships there are in the score, rather than what relationships only seem to be on the surface—well, a lot of people aren’t going to like it. It’s easy to consider serial music in this way: completely shunting aside the mechanisms of System 1 in order to try and shake System 2 awake. In a society like ours—capitalist/post-capitalist, consumption-based, driven by appeals, both earnest and cynical, to System 1’s intuitive reflexes—that can be a hard sell.

For a long time, Cage’s music was an even harder sell than even the most hardcore modernist serialism. And more and more, I think this is because, paradoxically, Cage was a much better composer than he has customarily been given credit for. Cage the thinker is lauded, but Cage the craftsman was just as formidable. He knew how music was put together. He knew the techniques and the forms, the tension and release. He knew, in other words, how to make music appeal to System 1—which is why his music is so shocking. Serialism, at least harmonically, is selectively constructive, bypassing System 1 in order to attempt to power up System 2. But Cage’s music is destructive: it fully engages System 1, only to fully undermine it. It presents, on a carefully-constructed platter, an opportunity to imagine a musical narrative, then drops the platter on the floor, smashing it to bits.

It’s the pattern that Gilbert, Krull and Malone talked about in the paper quoted up at the top there. Through a elegantly tricky experiment—presenting subjects with nonsense sentences, arbitrarily assigning them as true or false, then interrupting the subjects’ comprehension with an unrelated task before testing them on their recall—they demonstrated that, in order to disbelieve something, we actually believe it first: the mind doesn’t immediately decide whether things are true or false, it automatically assumes everything is true at first, and only (very briefly) later sorts out those things that aren’t. As Kahneman sums it up: “System 1 is gullible and biased to believe. System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy.” We believe in order to disbelieve.

It strikes me that Cage’s music is playing with this gullibility more often than not. His use of chance and indeterminacy, for example: parameters of musical events are turned over to chance, by design, with the audience’s full knowledge, and yet we still try and make an illusory musical story out of it. Presented with randomness, we infer causality; presented with the unrepeatable, we infer purpose and statement. Cage doesn’t just leverage System 1’s capacity for musical myth-making, he gets in our face with it, dissects it in front of us. Listening to Cage, we make all the assumptions that we make about music while, at the same time, being forced to confront the fact that they’re just assumptions, and largely unsupported ones at that.

No wonder it makes people uncomfortable. The leading image of Cage during his centennial year has been a combination of inventor and ringmaster, whimsically rewiring music history one roll of the dice at a time. But he was out to shake people up, no matter how much the birthday celebrations domesticate him. He was an anarchist and a radical. From the foreword to A Year from Monday:

My ideas certainly started in the field of music. And that field, so to speak, is child’s play…. Our proper work now if we love mankind and the world we live in is revolution.

“To forget that the moon is made of green cheese is to lose a precious piece of one’s childhood, but to act as though one believes this assertion is to forego the prospect of meaningful adult relationships,” Gilbert et al. note. “A ubiquitous paradox for natural thinking systems is that they must possess, but must not deploy, a wide range of false information.” For Cage, musical information was as false as any, but he figured out how to bring the paradox to the forefront in such a way that, he hoped, listeners would stop being so gullible, about music, about the world. “Once we give our attention to the practice of not-being-governed,” he wrote, “we notice that it is increasing.”

The First Four Notes, my long-awaited (by me, that’s for sure) book exploring the cultural history and misadventures of the opening gambit of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, is ever closer to being an actual thing. Proofs have been proofed, hilariously serious author photos have been taken, bound galleys are fanning out across the land in search of blurbs, all in anticipation of November 13, when the book drops. (Can a book drop like a record does when it’s released? I will drop a copy on the floor myself, if necessary.)

One thing left to do is to get a website up to promote the book, but until that happens, this space will have to suffice, which is why you can now find, over on the right, some pertinent links and information. This includes a now-tiny-but-hopefully-at-least-slightly-longer-eventually list of author appearances. That’s right, I might be coming to your town! (Unless your town is Brigadoon. No way I’m falling for that again.) As things are confirmed, I will continue to post more and more detail until the density of information reaches the Bekenstein bound and I find myself giving a reading inside a black hole. Where I bet the refreshment table is superb.

The image at the head of this post, incidentally, comes courtesy of my Boston Globe colleague Jeremy Eichler, who generously rescued it from an old Boston Symphony program book. If anybody out there actually still has one of these t-shirts, send me a photo, and you will be rewarded with all the fame that an intermittently-updated blog can provide.

As noted on Twitter this morning, The First Four Notes now has an index, which means it is pretty much finished. Beware the Ides of November! Now I just need to plan some book-release-related festivities between now and then. Party, we shall.

I was in Illinois all last week, so I ended up finishing the index in a hotel just outside of Buffalo, after which Critic-at-Large Moe and I had a beef on weck and then drove on through to Massachusetts. I have decided that my next book will be a 1970s-era noir thriller in which all the characters are named after exits on the New York State Thruway:

After his team is ignominiously bounced from the ABA playoffs, the last thing basketball journeyman Waterloo Clyde wants to do is turn his attention back to his off-season job: private investigator. But wealthy widow Auburn Weedsport insists that there’s something fishy about her husband’s death, and it’s up to Clyde and his partner, martial arts expert Akron Corfu, to get to the bottom of it. Not a simple task, not with the likes of the late Mr. Weedsport’s exotic, scheming mistress, Solvay Baldwinsville; Vernon Hamilton, Weedsport’s ex-partner—and United States Senate hopeful; “Mohawk” Herkimer, Weedsport’s old college buddy (or is he?); or even Mrs. Weedsport herself, a former Hollywood glamour queen harboring secrets of her own. And once Clyde and Corfu find themselves in the killer’s sights, it becomes clear that this case will be anything but an easy layup.

It’ll be called Waterloo Clyde and the Blindside Screen. I should totally Kickstarter this idea.