Postmodernism and Music

Jean Baudrillard's piece "After the Orgy", from a larger work called Transparency of Evil (!), hits hard. I agreed with the vast majority of his points, but that didn't make it any less depressing. He addresses the contemporary problem of feeling that the arts have reached a dead end. After the liberation of atonality in music and similar advances in visual art, there is no triumph, only a sense of futility and uncertainty about the future: "When things, signs, or actions are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproductions". For some reason this leads me to reflect upon a certain icon of postmodernism: the hipster.

Hipster culture is the epitome of postmodern crisis. Hipster fashion reaches back decades into the past, appropriating styles that were never really considered cool, and hipster music preferences become increasingly esoteric as fresh new bands are claimed by the mainstream. Journalist Rob Horning describes hipsters as "the embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics". Christian Lorentzen of Time Out New York says "hipsterism fetishizes the authentic" elements of all of the "fringe movements of the postwar era - Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge...and then regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity". Perhaps the most scathing comment about the movement comes from Time writer Dan Fletcher: "[It is] the dead end of Western civilization".

So what does hipsterism have to do with art music? Well, composers like myself face the unfortunate situation that all of music history lies at our fingertips, and we can draw upon literally any style from the past without major consequence. Anything goes. But like hipsters (which most of us are anyway), we can't be completely authentic about it. You can't write an oratorio in Classical style or a piano concerto that exactly imitates Rachmaninoff. Those moments are over. We can hint at them, but we have to acknowledge that the source material is buried in the past. The mixing of categories and everything-is-permissible mantra bring me back to Baudrillard's essay. He laments the watering down of sex through overexposure in the media and innuendos; everything is sexual. Similarly, everything is political, and the drive of athletic competition has found its way into the workplace.

Baudrillard even claims (and what a great quote to include in this last blog post) that "There is no longer an avant-garde, political, sexual, or artistic, embodying a capacity for anticipation; hence the possibility of any radical critique - whether in the name of desire, of revolution, or in the liberation of forms - no longer exists". Yes! Classical music from the standard practice period is great to listen to because you become familiar with the conventions of the style, and then you are stimulated by the careful subversions of your expectations. Today, where are the conventions? It's a serious problem.

OK. So William Bolcom wrote a piece called Songs of Innocence and Experience, using the complete text from the William Blake collection of the same name. It's quite intimidating to even try to write about this piece. I listened to the whole thing earlier this year, following a reduced score. It is probably the most polystylistic thing I've ever heard, with sections of angular atonality, Baroque ornamentation, jazz, funk, reggae, and a whole lot else. This makes for a rather disjointed set, but I think the variety is the point. William Blake's poems focus on many sorts of characters in society, from a chimney sweeper to a shepherd to nurse. Perhaps William Bolcom sought to respect that diversity by pulling in all the musical traditions that make up our human experience.

It is important to note that William Bolcom was instrumental (no pun intended) in the ragtime revival that happened in America around the 1970's. The film The Sting, with its soundtrack of classic Scott Joplin rags, reawakened interest in the style. Bolcom ended up contributing over twenty original rags that actually advance the genre in a meaningful way, exploring more musically adventurous territory and employing extended piano techniques. He even has two programmatic ragtime "suites": the Ghost Rags and The Garden of Eden. If anyone doubts his sincerity in writing these pieces, they only need to look at the sheer output and at the obvious large amount of work he put into them. I've played the Ghost Rags and they are fantastic.

Lukas Foss was another stylistic maverick. I listened to his Time Cycle and didn't quite know how to respond. I had hyped myself up for it because Dr. Grossmann studied with Lukas Foss, and he said that once this piece was performed and so well-received by the audience that it was performed again right there! The piece is definitely very good, and I recognize the influences: sprechstimme that recalls Pierrot Lunaire, antiphonal brass reminiscent of Renaissance cathedral music. The whole thing is a meditation on time (with text from Auden, Housman, Kafka, and Nietzsche), so the retro stylings make sense.

Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives is kind of a funny way to end the whole Avant-Garde saga, but why not. Big epic finales don't really matter anymore. Sometimes things just happen. This piece is a convincing evocation of easy-listening music, with shimmery piano runs and jazzy flourishes over a bed of synthesized strings. There's even a soothing vocal that could be a radio announcer or a friend sitting next to you in the car. Except that this voice is talking about some kind of anxiety and fear. It's a pretty weird complete product.

This class has been a real trip. Maybe it's OK to not have built-in conventions and expectations for music anymore, so that we can approach each new-music experience as a blank slate, tabula rasa, and construct meaning from the ground up.

Where do we go from here? Seriously? I don't know. Composition seems like more and more of a fragile pursuit, too risky and unrewarding, but there are moments when I'm sitting in a concert hall and hear a new piece of music that manages to achieve an original and sincere beauty, despite being written in this miserable postmodern world, and it takes my breath away and I want desperately to hold onto it. It's like a little bright spark in a fire that seems to be slowly dying. If I can create that same experience for someone who needs it to feel less alone and scared, then maybe this whole long road of music school was worth it.

OK. Here's the real finale (start at 8:20).

Totalism

The first thing I listened to...er...watched...er...encountered, was a so-called "talk show opera" called Dennis Cleveland by Mikel Rouse. From the brief series of clips I saw, this opera is about a talk show host and emulates a talk-show setting, down to people walking around with APPLAUSE signs and an in-house band. The audience seemed unusually enthusiastic about this whole thing, either because they were being forced to clap and smile or because they somehow knew what they were getting into. There were moments of artistic craft in this piece, namely a high wordless soprano line during an audience member's heart-outpouring to the host, and some neat rhythms in the ensemble. But most of what I heard was dorky early-90's grooving. It's OK to imitate the slick, tacky facade of a talk show, but at the end of the day you're still making the audience sit through a lot of tackiness. To enhance the cringe factor, the composer himself apparently played the talk show host, thus presenting himself to the world in the slick, eager-to-please, semi-desperate persona that most composers try to avoid. Maybe that's supposed to add another level of poignancy to the piece.

As if talk shows weren't operatic enough.

Seriously.

I listened to the Soul Train movement from this opera in its completion. It was more artistically satisfying than some of the other bits I heard. It gets at some deeper, darker content and has a weird psychological effect of suspending the host's inner thoughts for an interminable amount of time. Seventeen minutes to be exact. But the musical elements are variations on basically the same material for the entirety of the seventeen minutes. It tested my patience.

Then I listened to Michael Gordon's Four Kings Fight Five. This is a pretty textbook example of musical totalism, the style we're exploring tonight. Despite deceptively simple surface elements - static harmony, repetitive pitch content and rhythms - it soon develops into something extremely complex. According Michael Gordon's program note on this piece, each measure contains divisions all the way up to 13.5 and 27. This produces a neat effect, especially when the drums are playing a straight-ahead rock beat. All the rhythms float jaggedly but it still grooves pretty hard.

Next on the list: John Luther Adams' Dream In White On White. Poor John Luther Adams. Not only does he have the same name as a U.S. president, but he also has to share it with another contemporary composer. Who's arguably better. Ouch.

John Luther Adams draws a lot of his inspiration from the scenery of Alaska, and subsequently a lot of his pieces are about whiteness and silence. It's relaxing and soul-healing stuff, for sure, but it fades into the background pretty easily for me. I heard In The White Silence recently, and Dream In White On White sounds almost exactly the same. I heard the same heaving, going-nowhere string lines, delicate harp plucks, and monochrome clusters of white notes.

Finally, Larry Polansky's Lonesome Road. I wish I hadn't waited till the last minute to listen to this. First of all, it's a HUGE piece, but secondly it's a huge piano variation set that I didn't know about before! I found this article quite informative. It also cites some other modern variation sets besides The People United. That's all going on my summer listening list...

So this is totalism to the nth degree. Polansky's source material is Ruth Crawford Seeger's arrangement of a folk song, he studied composition with James Tenney, was friends with Lou Harrison, and wrote this piece over the course of a year in Indonesia. WHAT? That's well-rounded. This is a composer who has significant connections to folk, minimalism, and world music. Somehow they all find their way into this piece. I listened to a handful of excerpts and heard everything from colossal Ivesian banging to waltzes to jazzy split-third harmonies to some quirky and fascinating sections that are quite unique. The review I linked to seems to find fault with the sheer diversity of the piece, and the fact that "the music operates on the same emotional level for large stretches". That recording even omitted some of the variations, but still clocks in at over an hour.

I don't know why I'm having such a cynical response (with the exception of Polansky) to all this music tonight. Just a few hours ago I was listening to the Distractfold Ensemble play really extreme stuff, where often bow scrapings and weird glissandi took the place of actual musical pitches. I should have been relieved to hear some more conventional music, but maybe I'm just frustrated because I feel like I don't quite belong in either camp. Hmm.

Rock and the Avant-Garde

I feel odd writing about rock and the avant-garde in an academic way, because most of the music I listen to is avant-garde in some way.

I listen to hardcore bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan and Norma Jean, who have taken rock to the furthest extremes of dissonance and rhythmic and structural complexity.

I listen to Sufjan Stevens, who writes lengthy pop songs that employ near-orchestral instrumentation, and who has also composed a forty-minute orchestral suite about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

The premiere performance also included a trio of hula-hoopers.

I listen to Radiohead, a band that began as just another 90's grunge band and has phased through more sophisticated harmonies, electronics, and jazz fusion. Several of their songs use an ondes martenot. And Johnny Greenwood, one of the guitarists, has written concert music and film scores that recall Penderecki and Messiaen.

But I recognize that Pink Floyd holds an even higher position in the rock pantheon because it was doing really cutting-edge things way back in the 70's.

All right, enough introduction. Let's look at freakin' Dark Side of the Moon.

Track 1: Speak To Me/Breathe

This is straight-up musique concrete. We hear a heartbeat, ticking clocks, a cash register, a man speaking, and two samples of a man laughing. The final sound before the first proper chord is a woman wailing fervently. What do we make of all this? Well, after hearing the whole album, we know that each of these sounds relates to a different track. The heartbeat is the beginning and end of the album, the clocks open "Time", the cash register sounds open "Money", the speaking appears at several points, the laughing is heard later in "Brain Damage". and the wail is from "The Great Gig In the Sky". It's actually shockingly straightforward. The ensuing song is a great album opener, establishing a careful pace and making great use of basically a two-chord progression (as many album openers do).

Track 2: On The Run

Claustrophobia. Paranoia. A burbling synth straight out Einstein on the Beach, skittering hi-hat, footsteps and labored breathing.

Track 3: Time

Here are the ticking clocks again. The moment when they all begin to chime still gives me chills. There is something so portentous and imposing about it. That said, the choice of differently pitched chimes is commendable. Ligeti could have made a longer piece out of it, and John Cage probably would have had a heyday with the aleatoric possibilities.

It's fascinating to listen to this song develop, because even the musical elements are closely related to clock sounds. There's a steady ticking under the drum pattern, the guitar octaves that arrive every few seconds sound like abstract chimes, and another guitar plays sequences of three descending notes that also bring to mind a clock. From there the song kicks into gear with more of a funky groove, and a fantastic guitar solo.

Track 4: The Great Gig In The Sky

We're now four tracks into the album, and three out of four tracks have been slow. And the only fast one was really just an odd instrumental. Pretty daring.

This is a track that really lets you meditate. It opens with someone (Gerry Driscoll, the band's Irish doorman) saying "I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do: I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it — you've got to go sometime." After that little comment on mortality, that familiar wailing voice comes back, over a plodding piano (same chord progression as Breathe!), and we realize this is an extended jam. The vocal is so absolutely perfect. Every note seems perfectly judged. Some of the magic disappeared for me after I learned that it was assembled from three separate takes, but that's the case with most songs in general...

Track 5: Money

This is one of Pink Floyd's most popular songs, and the only real "single" from the album. Kind of an odd single, really. 7/4 time? Six minutes plus? Opens with cash register sounds? Whatever. I don't have much to say about this one. Too much radio play has kind of numbed its effect on me.

Track 6: Us And Them

It's all about that third chord, man. It's already a nice downtempo song, but that dismal augmented chord makes it a real rainy-day song. And then the sax comes in! I think that's one of the coolest moments on the album. We've just heard the sax on Money, all brash and bright, but here it's subdued and more modest. It helps enhance the feeling of a continuous journey. And this song builds to some great climactic choruses, where the sax comes to the fore again.

Track 7: Any Colour You Like

Same chord progression as Breathe and Great Gig In The Sky! Except this time with psychedelic synths and guitar swirling around! I don't really get the point of this one. What does the title mean? That they're going offer you this same progression in a variety of "colors", whether with the opening instrumentation or the voice or the synth or what?

Track 8: Brain Damage

Another track I have little to say about, except that it combines the drama of Us And Them with the soulful vocals of Great Gig In The Sky, and feels conclusive in both its lyrical content and the inclusion of the speech snippet "I don't know what to say anymore". The lyrics are open to interpretation, but they are most likely referencing Syd Barrett, a former member of the band who had some serious mental problems. Oh yeah, and this song has the lyric "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon".

Track 9: Eclipse

This always felt more like a continuation of Brain Damage than a separate song. Very Beatles-esque. And then the closing heartbeats.

Now, I have a confession. As much as I love the music on this album and dig the concept and respect the band, I have equal fascination about the whole Dark Side of the Rainbow phenomenon.

Basically, the album Dark Side of the Moon sync up with the film The Wizard of Oz in many startling ways.

Here are some of the most impressive ones:
-In "Time", the lyric "kickin' up dirt on a road that leads to your hometown" occurs when Toto jumps out Ms. Gulch's basket and runs back down the dirt path.
-Also during "Time", there's a closeup of a sign that says "Past, Present, and Future".
-The song "Great Gig In The Sky" plays while Dorothy is flying around in her house during the tornado (Also note the opening spoken words: "I'm not frightened of dying")
-The song "Money" starts almost EXACTLY when Dorothy opens the door of her house to enter Oz.
-The munchkins appear to dance in time to the guitar solo of "Money".
-During "Us And Them", the ballerinas also dance in time to the music.
-The lyric "'Forward' he cried" occurs when the munchkin horse driver motions for the horses to trot forward.
-"Any Colour You Like" plays during the whole "makeover" scene", when Dorothy is getting all dolled-up in the Emerald City. The title relates directly to the line: "Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?"
-In "Brain Damage", the lyric "The lunatic is on the grass" occurs when the Scarecrow is dancing crazily on the grass.
-The closing heartbeats occur when Dorothy is knocking on the Tin Man's empty chest.

The band, of course, has denied any intent in syncing the album with the film. Why would they? It would have been a bizarre, time-consuming stunt. And the synchronicities are amazing, but not always perfect. It's just one of those weird coincidental things.

The other listening for tonight was Rhys Chatham's An Angel Moves Too Fast To See. I tracked this down on YouTube. There's no standalone performance (which is telling), but there was a documentary. This section of the documentary had some good chunks of the performance.

Quite honestly, this is very cheesy, very 90's, and woefully underuses the ensemble. Can you imagine the textures you could create with 100 guitars???? All sorts of mind-altering microtones, dizzying rhythmic density, or anything. Anything but standard 90's jamming. The ensemble also looks profoundly dorky, all grooving in their white shirts and ties.

Even Glenn Branca couldn't get really satisfactory results with a huge guitar ensemble, but at least his music is distinct as an experiment in walls of sound. I just feel bad for this composer and his overblown vision, for all the guitarists lumped together, replacing individual virtuosity with mind-numbing sameness.

Uptown/Downtown

New York City is a very special place for music. Obviously. And much has been said about both the "uptown" and "downtown" contemporary music scenes. Frankly, I'm surprised there aren't more distinct categories besides those two. But they do characterize the two major poles of contemporary music today: the highbrow, academic scene (which includes Columbia University and some of its IRCAM-bound students), and the eclectic, funky downtown scene which is a continuation of the Cage-ian tradition and pulls in a lot of influence from rock and minimalism. The Bang On A Can collective dominates the downtown scene, and has been an extremely important part of my musical life. But I'll talk about that in more detail in my presentation tomorrow...er...today. Goodness gracious it's late.

Let's listen to some music.

I started with a few of William Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes. These are flowing, introspective piano pieces that bring to mind John Adams' Phrygian Gates. The idiom is consonant and built on repetitive rhythmic figures. Prelude I could even be modal. Nice stuff.

I had never heard of William Duckworth, but I did some research and found that he had written over 200 pieces! He studied composition with Ben Johnston and wrote a dissertation about the notation of John Cage. He worked on several internet-based projects like his multimedia event Cathedral. And he died just two years ago. Most significantly, Time Curve Preludes is considered by our buddy Kyle Gann to be the first work of postminimalism.

There was a long article to accompany Duckworth's Southern Harmony, but I decided to go into the listening first.

It was probably a bad idea. I understood that Duckworth was doing something revolutionary with old shape-note hymns from The Sacred Harp, but the first one was a tune I didn't know. The second was "What Wondrous Love Is This", which I DO know, so it was easier to follow. He used some sharp fourth intervals to create a Lydian feel, and some of the quartal/quintal harmonies anticipate Eric Whitacre or Morten Lauridsen. And this was written in 1981??? Wow.

I started reading the article as I listened to "Consolation", the first song of the set. This one is the most impressive, and the most clearly influenced by minimalism. The article describes how Duckworth's procedure here is creating a unison canon against the melody that grows farther and farther apart. The large amount of voice crossing that ensues produces a hypnotic, undulating texture.

There's something kind of awesome about Southern Harmony. Duckworth achieves epic effects with his material, turning these traditional tunes into something more forceful, urgent, and powerful. It serves to highlight the strength and longevity of these tunes and also meditate on our changing musical culture.

Next I read an article titled "Post-minimalism: A Valid Terminology?" It contained a lot of information and rhetoric I had heard many times before, showing how composers like Adams, Reich and Nyman can't be called minimalist because they all find unique ways to depart from the most rigorous definition of minimalism, whether through a changing melodic line, a faster harmonic rhythm, or irregular rhythmic patterns.

Om Shanti, by Janice Giteck, is long and I started listening too late in the night to get the full scope. After an opening section of chant-type singing over a drone, I skipped around and heard a more active pitched-percussion-driven section, a serene section of little scalar figures and the voice doubling a violin. The melodic and harmonic content reminded me of Let Down by Radiohead. At the end the drone and chant returned. I'll have to give this another listen later.

The Crack In The Bell by Daniel Lentz. WHAT IS THIS PIECE. It's so fascinating. It starts out seeming like a parody of an American pop ballad, and before you know it there are synths and chimes and some kind of large ensemble chugging away. Some of the lyrics were hard to understand, but I didn't really mind. This was just a profoundly unique synthesis of American music elements, and perhaps some lyrics in another language.

I did some research on this one. Apparently the text is from the e.e. cummings poem "next to of course god america i", an antiwar poem. That makes sense. The buoyant, facile surface of the piece enhances the subversive content of the poem.

The last assigned listening for tonight is Julia Wolfe's Believing. I'll save my analysis of that one for tomorrow when I present on Julia Wolfe and the rest of Bang On A Can.

Obligatory image. This is the first result I got when I searched "postminimalism" on Google.

Jazz and the Avant-Garde

It's been a long day.

My hands are sore from much piano playing, typing, and dish cleaning.

My brain is tired and unable to concentrate on reading material.

I've been drinking.

And I really don't care enough about jazz.

But I will try to write something.

A lot of my previous experience with jazz has been somewhat negative. A pizza restaurant in my hometown would constantly play jazz, either live or recorded, so I developed a weird Pavlovian connection between jazz and pizza. Maybe that was the point.

Then in high school, whenever my school orchestra did these adjudication things, the jazz bands from each participating school would perform at the very end of the day, after hours and hours of high school orchestras and wind ensembles. So I then began to associate jazz with the end of a weary day.

The pieces I listened to for tonight's assignment sounded nothing like any jazz I had heard before. First I listened to (Soul Fusion) Freewoman and O, This Freedom's Slave Cries by Charles Mingus. I knew that Charles Mingus was a big influence on Radiohead, one of my favorite bands. I admit I did hear snatches of what could have influenced songs like The National Anthem (listen to the brass that arrives in at 2:39, then goes crazy).

Freewoman opened with some absolutely beautiful piano harmonies, and soon it developed into more of a jazz piece. There was a recognizable refrain of sorts. I heard a fairly standard jazz instrumentation, with flute added. It was very enjoyable stuff, with complex grooves and some passionate, crunching harmonies. I want to hear more!

Next I listened to John Zorn's Forbidden Fruit. Is this jazz? Because it really sounds like something that should have been in the New Romanticists section. I heard a collage: Beethoven string quartets and vocal samples pitted against contemporary techniques. Seriously, though, is this jazz? It's not even jazz instrumentation. That said, it was pretty damn cool.

Then I watched a video of John Zorn and friends performing Cobra. And here I realized the common thread between this music and standard jazz: improvisation. There was a lot of communication between the performers, and new improvisatory elements like symbolic signs that made it more of a game.

That's about all I've got tonight,

One more thing, though. Tonight I went to a metal show at someone's house. I knew someone in the band, and I was also scouting out guitarists and drummers for this avant-garde rock band piece I plan to write. It was incredibly enjoyable, and it was so visceral. There were a couple dozen people crammed into a little room with no stage, and the lead singer ran around screaming into people's faces. The music was loud, dissonant, and rhythmically complex, but everyone in the room loved being there. An hour later I found myself at a composition recital on campus. The music was great, but the staid atmosphere and the ritual of sitting silently, coughing during movement breaks, and clapping felt like a major buzzkill after having my ears pummeled guitars and drums and being surrounded by people moving their bodies and grinning.

The music sounded sort of like this great song by The Dillinger Escape Plan. It is so wonderfully alive and angry and in your face.

Electronic Music

Tonight I started out by reading an interview with Alvin Lucier (last time we heard about him he was sitting in a room). Right off the bat, I found myself in disagreement with the interviewer. His opening comment was this: "Your music seems to me quite saliently non-discursive music...yet here we sit and talk about it. Should we be doing this at all?" This seemed like an overreaching effort to be provocative, because I think any composer, no matter what niche he or she works in, is open to talking about his or her music. Isn't that why humans are driven to make art? To communicate? I know that when I create something that people see or hear, and I don't get a chance to talk about what it means, I feel frustrated.

Of course I had no need to worry, because Alvin Lucier immediately shot the interviewer down: "The idea that some musicians have, that because music stands by itself it shouldn't be talked about, is not productive for me."

Lucier went on to talk about his identity crisis as a composer. He had spent a summer in Venice and been exposed to the music of Berio, Stockhausen, and Nono, and "it seemed to me that I was hearing native speakers speak their own musical language". This was fascinating to me. In class we've talked about how European influence looms over the American musical landscape. The serial movement in the mid-twentieth century became a trend in America, the same way that early American composers copied the Romantic styles of Europeans of the time. Alvin Lucier, like Ives, sought to reject that influence and forge ahead.

Later in the interview he elaborates on how his music is different: "Composers are thinking now of a timeless kind of depth; that is, of creating and going into a sound-space, rather than moving horizontally along it". This relates to the ideas of other composers we've studied, like John Cage (seemingly always relevant) - his HPSCHD has no set starting or ending point, and the audience members are entirely responsible for how they experience the piece.

The Lucier piece on tonight's listening, and one referenced frequently in the interview, was Music On A Long Thin Wire. It was far more eventful than I expected after hearing the first few seconds. Over the course of a six-minute clip, the piece alternately conveys serenity, tension, and dread through the most subtle changes in pitch and the pulses of sound waves. At times my ears were disoriented by conflicting pulses; it was a slight aural illusion. I would like to know more about the construction of this piece; all I know is that an eighty-foot wire and some old-school machinery were used.

Next I listened to Varese's Poem electronique, which should have been my starting point tonight anyway. I last heard this piece about four years ago in an undergrad class, and after hearing it again I have the utmost admiration for it. What a pioneer Varese was! I can only imagine what the first audience felt listening to this (especially since the venue was a huge pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair, lined with hundreds of speakers in a primitive form of surround sound). It's pretty terrifying at points, with human voices suddenly emerging from the alien soundscapes of beeps and percussive scrapes. The piece is exceptionally well-crafted, rising above what could have been a mere gimmick. 

The video above was shown along with the premiere of the piece. You know. For maximum fear and disorientation.

Morton Subotnik's Silver Apples of the Moon was an interesting contrast to Varese. It was comprised completely of musical tones, it had a sense of pulse and forward motion, and it was based around an ostinato. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was listening to a soundtrack from some bizarre space cartoon, but I did enjoy the way it happily tweeted and blurped along.

Next. Charles Dodge - Viola Elegy. This was a pretty straightforward, expressive, and conventionally beautiful solo viola piece, with an electronic backdrop that gave it a haunting ambience. The electronic element sounded vaguely like heavily processed marimba sounds.

Then I listened to Bye Bye Butterfly by Pauline Oliveros. What began as high-pitched whines and dissonant tones gave way to a huge landscape of operatic singing. The electronic palette, which had become familiar after a few minutes, became a crazy framing device for the more conventional music. It was like a great European city had been lifted from its roots and was hanging suspended in the middle of some big steampunk contraption, with an inconceivably large system of gears and pistons keeping it afloat.

Ironically, this is sort of the same premise behind Bioshock Infinite, one of the most important videogames of recent years.

Something I've realized after listening to Bye Bye Butterfly and Viola Elegy: one of the powerful applications of electronic music is creating a completely separate musical space from that of acoustic instruments. With the electronic element present, all sorts of new collage or dialogue possibilities open up.

Next on the menu was Carl Stone's Shing Kee. WOW. This is sublime stuff, and it's a great example of patient listening paying off. I initially thought this would be the same loop over and over, but then something happened. The strange, not-quite coherent sample of a singer started to reveal slightly more of itself as an echo, and then transitioned to a second section where the lyrics "find words of love" could be clearly heard. I totally understand the reason for using an electronic sample here. The repetition of of a live human voice would not be sustainable for the duration of fifteen minutes, and would not allow for the complex stutter effects and echoes that Carl Stone employs. Also, part of the appeal is that the sample always appears the exact same way, so we can admire the enduring purity of the singer's voice, the way she starts her vibrato at the same exact point, and we can meditate on the meaning of "words of love". This sample happens to be from a Schubert art song called The Linden Tree, sung in English. I must admit I didn't really want this piece to end. It was a perfect, rhapsodic moment of self-contained beauty. 

I also didn't want to listen to anything else after Shing Kee, since that seemed like such a good note to end on. But alas, I had to hear David Rosenboom's "Meaning" from Systems of Judgment. Honestly, when it started I closed my eyes and could imagine myself in a videogame (in some kind of rainy level, given the rain sound effects). The warm synth pads and ambient sound effects were straight out of a new but retro-styled game. But then a bunch of strings came in and kind of ruined the effects. I wanted to live in the electronic haze longer. The string parts (including a pipa or some other Asian stringed instrument) seemed random and not purposeful. The whole thing left a bad taste.

I'm really impressed by the scope and variety of electronic music I heard tonight, and it's got me thinking about ways I could incorporate some of these techniques into my compositions.

New Romanticists

I wish I knew how to quit you.

Ah, the New Romanticists. Rochberg. Crumb. Adams. Rzewski. These composers represent the sweet spot of my contemporary (or semi-contemporary) music preferences, and part of the core of my compositional influence. Time and again I realize how much I owe to these last strains of Romantic philosophy. I consider there to be two important aspects of my connection to this body of work: quotation and Transcendentalism. Already at this early stage in my career, I've explicitly quoted a Brahms intermezzo and a fragment of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. And my desire for grand gestures, virtuosity, and emotional catharsis is completely in line with a tradition that reaches back to Barber and earlier. I sometimes feel embarrassed about my strong identification with Beethoven and how I sometimes sneak Beethovenian rhetoric into my music. As you'll see, all the composers I will examine below have strong connections with Beethoven, so I sometimes groan at myself for being yet another composer who just can't get over Beethoven.

Enough about me though (for now). I read an article from the ever-enlightening NewMusicBox about the history of the musical "look back", of composers consciously borrowing elements from the past. The author suggests that this falls into three categories: imitation, emulation, and quotation. Numerous examples from history support each category, but I'll focus specifically on the assigned listening for today. They are all obviously from the twentieth century, which makes them all the more fascinating; the twentieth century was the most risky time to attempt either a quotation or full-on imitation of older, tonal styles. The author offers Kyle Gann's take on this phenomenon: "Quotation allowed a return to tonality hidden beneath a veneer of irony; it offered a widened emotional palette without sullying the composer’s fingers in the actual writing of tonal or pretty music." That man has such a way with words.

Each of the pieces on this listening list employs quotation or imitation for a different reason. I'm finding it hard to organize my ideas here, so I'll resort to a list format:

George Rochberg - String Quartet No. 3
Quotation/Imitation: Imitation
Composer quoted/imitated: Beethoven, Bartok
Why: Rochberg started out as a serialist (and listening to one of his Bagatelles for Piano is proof), but after the death of his son he found that an atonal musical language was not sufficient for conveying his feelings.
Description: The Third String Quartet begins with a sharp, dissonant gesture, but the first movement passes through several sections of warm consonance that recall Beethoven's own string quartets, and some folky, energetic sections that bear striking similarity to Bartok. One of the primary motives in this movement is a tentative descending whole-step gesture that conveys Rochberg's indecisiveness about which style to settle on. Then in the second movement, we are treated to a full-on, fifteen-minute Beethovenian adagio. Rochberg produces a very convincing imitation of Beethoven's style, with lots of I-6 chords and angelic high violin lines, and in the same variation form Beethoven liked to use in these movements. Is this artistic resignation or cowardice? Or is it a daring, honest personal expression? The third movement begins with more Bartok, but revisits Beethoven again before ending on a Bartokian note. This piece, taken as a whole, is both a personal emotional statement and a view of the composer grappling with the string quartet tradition itself.

George Crumb - Black Angels
Quotation/Imitation: Quotation
Composer quoted/imitated: Schubert
Why: Crumb inserted the variation theme from Schubert's Death and the Maiden string quartet to add a sense of timelessness to an apocalyptic piece.
Description: Black Angels is a piece about destruction, death, and religious strife, written in a primarily dissonant and abstract aesthetic. The Schubert quote has a striking effect when it arrives unannounced after five minutes of some of the darkest, most disturbing music I know of. In the score, this section bears the text "Like a solemn consort of viols". This is interesting because it makes the quotation slightly anachronistic. If Crumb really wanted to emulate fifteenth-century viols, one would think he would use music from that period. But the Schubert quote just goes to show that certain musical constructions have a timelessness to them; the mournful, desolate quality of Death and the Maiden knows no historical limits. As the Schubert is played by three of the instruments, a lone violin hovers high above, like a last bird or insect surveying the ruins of civilization. This is honestly one of my favorite moments in all music. The effect is incredibly profound.

I should also mention that the movement headings in this piece ("Departure", "Absence", and "Return") are taken from Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 26 "Les Adieux". Scholars have written in detail about the significance of using those titles to point back to Beethoven, but I think it's a bit of a stretch.

John Adams - Grand Pianola Music
Quotation/Imitation: Imitation
Composer quoted/imitated: Beethoven
Why: John Adams was trying to reflect his experiences walking through San Francisco Conservatory and hearing multiple piano students playing washes of arpeggios in pieces like Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. He also based this piece on a dream in which he was driving along Route 1 and saw two long black limousines transform into pianos playing arpeggios of E flat major and B flat major. Conveniently, E flat is Beethoven's heroic key and the key of the Emperor Concerto.
Description: This piece starts out in typical Adams fashion, with repetitive figures and static, suspended harmony. Eventually three wordless sopranos enter as a trio; they represent a group of three sirens (as seen in Greek mythology). It is not till the third movement that Adams goes full Beethoven on us (with dashes of Liszt and Liberace). This movement is titled On the Dominant Divide, and is full of bombastic progressions from I-V-I in different combinations. It ends resolutely E flat major.

Now, this piece has an interesting history. It was booed at the premiere, which, to be fair, was a concert of mostly academic, serial pieces from Princeton and Columbia. The audience probably interpreted it as some kind of lame, tacky joke. Adams did not intend this piece as a joke per se, but a parody for sure and a good-natured "Whitmanesque yawp". He was just being a little goofy, and could always fall back on the defense that he was just writing about his weird dream. I read somewhere that he deliberately tried to construct the most awful, clumsy semi-Beethovenian theme possible out of the I-V-I progressions. But the public doesn't always get highbrow musical humor, and this piece has been embraced by a lot of people who view it as a sincere Romantic statement. Isn't that wonderfully ironic? The most educated listeners may have gotten the joke, but they hated the rebelliously tonal trappings of the piece, and meanwhile the average concertgoer just gravitated toward the accessible harmonies while blissfully ignorant of Adams' intent.

Adams' own program notes from his website provide more insight into this piece, if you can put up with his usual self-aware, self-congratulatory tone.

Frederic Rzewski - The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
Quotation/Imitation: Imitation
Composer quoted/imitated: Imitation of classical variation form, especially the model of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations
Why: Somewhat open to interpretation, as I'll discuss below.
Description: I could write a long essay about this piece, but I'll try to be concise. Basically, Rzewski makes a clear Romantic statement with this piece. He writes an overwhelming set of 36 variations (on a Chilean protest song popular in the 70's) that surpasses the Diabelli Variations in complexity and duration, and, as if to acknowledge the Transcendental spirit of this endeavor, he includes an optional six-minute cadenza for the pianist to improvise. So much about this piece brings me back to Ives: the use of a popular patriotic tune for melodic content, a political element, shattering virtuosity, and extended piano techniques.

But there is more going on here than a simple appropriation of a Classical formal design. I see some kind of symbolism in the use of thirty-six short variations to portray a social struggle. In the same way that a large group of people would be heartily singing this tune, perhaps each variation is a portrait of a different individual involved in the conflict. Rzewski ends each set of six variations with a weird kind of retrospective, revisiting the textures and moods of each past variation in hasty, fragmentary fashion. What is he trying to say? That each of these people was killed or otherwise silenced by this oppressive regime? In addition to these possibilities, the improvised cadenza seems like an opportunity for the pianist to offer commentary on this political situation, or to choose which variations to revisit and meditate on. It's all very interesting.