Kyle Gann's ongoing John Cage project has resulted in the best "desperately seeking disc"-type post I've ever seen:
One thing I could sure use before finishing this book on 4'33" is an obscure recording on the Korm Plastics label called 45'18" (Forty-five Minutes, Eighteen Seconds). It's a CD of nine versions of 4'33" by Thurston Moore, Keith Rowe, the Deep Listening Band, Voice Crack, and others. It doesn't seem to be available anywhere at the moment. Is there someone out there who could dupe me a copy, with program info? I'd gladly pay a reasonable price for a CDR. (I mean, I am paying basically for silence, but it's really important silence.)
Please, people, if you have that disc, or know someone who does, help a brother out. And Jesus, don't make him pay for it! Who does that??
(Photo of Jim Altieri, also from Gann's blog.)
UPDATE:Found, before this post even left my queue. Hooray!
Oh my goodness, this whole Kyle Gann/David Byrne thing is out of control. If you're tuning in here before reading their blogs, which is pretty unlikely because I think I win the, like, Web Razzy for Last Music Blog Anyone Is Likely To Read, David Byrne went to see Die Soldaten and was unimpressed; Kyle Gann said amen but got stomping mad at Byrne's suggestion that the impulse to alienate or assault the audience "is not limited to academic classical composer"; defenders of the prickly avant-garde (example here) went ahead and suggested that audiences often enjoy being alienated and assaulted. (DJA continues the debate here and here.)
What makes this ragin' debate fun for me is that everybody talking is obviously silly and wrong. First Kyle Gann, who says Byrne has apparently "not closely observed the behavior of the Downtown scene for a few decades," because if he had observed said behavior as closely as Kyle Gann, he would have seen "that Downtown was first the world of Steve Reich, Charlemagne Palestine, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Elodie Lauten, William Duckworth, and a few hundred others" who were "devoted to music of great beauty, clarity, and accessibility," and only later the domain of wicked "John Zorn, Elliot Sharp and their cohorts."
This is comical because, of course, during the period in question (pre-1980, as Gann defines it), David Byrne was actually rockin' the Downtown scene his very own self, while Kyle Gann was busy rockin' the music departments at some excellent Midwestern universities. So I'm not sure why Gann thinks we should trust his measure of dominant Downtown attitude, whose temperature he was apparently taking from the other end of the time zone, over Byrne's.
It's also comical because it reveals that Kyle Gann has never actually heard David Byrne's music, which from '79 on is pretty obviously indebted to the likes of Reich and Anderson. I mean, you've all heard this song, right?
Byrne, his fellow Talking Heads, and "fifth Head" Brian Eno were crazy about minimalism and performance art, and it's all over some of their biggest hits. So if you really think that's an aesthetic Byrne is unfamiliar with, dude, you and I need to sit down and listen to some records together.
It's also a bit disingenuous for Gann to pretend that Zorn and his fellow noisemakers were some johnnies-come-lately to the Downtown scene. He should check out this great CD NO NEW YORK that Byrne's producer compiled of the noise-punk "no wave" scene at the end of the 70s. (Did you know, some music of the Downtown avant-garde was not made by classical composers!) Aren't we all familiar with the music, or at least the attitude, that Byrne is talking about? Isn't there a reverse-snob factor within many varieties of "simple" music that are also bafflingly ugly, or bafflingly loud, or just bafflingly repetitive? Hasn't Gann heard the complaint that, say, Philip Glass sold out when he stopped writing ear-battering counterpoint studies and started writing happy triads? I still hear that, in 2008!
Byrne's also a little wrong, for reasons I mention in the comments section of the above-linked Rambler. To quote my brilliant self:
Why is it that everyone talks about “sadomasochism” in music as if it were a bad thing? I say, it’s the composer’s job to be a sort of dominatrix: one of the greatest pleasures of listening to music is being subjected to something you don’t want, or at least don’t know you want.
Isn’t everyone who goes to a rock concert thrilled that the volume consistently exceeds the comfort level? Isn’t everyone teased and titillated when a pop song goes on to another wordy verse, instead of to the catchy chorus? I’m not sure why it’s socially acceptable for music to be difficult, disturbing, or even physically painful, in certain respects, as long as the harmonies, melodies and rhythms are clear. Why can’t the harmonies, melodies and rhythms be disturbing, too?
I love a spicy, spicy, spicy meal, as long as it’s thoughtfully prepared from high-quality ingredients. And I love noise, feedback, distortion, and dissonance in my music, as long as they are wielded by someone who knows what she’s doing. I can’t speak for Zimmermann—I was among the many who, as Tommasini suggests, were left out in the cold—but Byrne hasn’t convinced me that B.A.Z.’s methods here don’t match up to his aims. I’m not sure quite sure what Byrne (one of my, let me point out, all-time musical heroes) was complaining about.
In conclusion: a gut-punching hip-hop bassline? Yes, please! An hour-long disc of drilling hardcore? Sure! A nightmarish twelve-tone opera? Thank you, ma’am! May I have another!
Ha, genius! I could listen to myself all day! But seriously it's true. And the same young people I know who are fans of Stockhausen and Xenakis are fans of Rhys Chatham and Alvin Lucier and the Zorn clique and Sunn O))) and so on and so on. I think it's a bit silly to call Byrne's post "dumb," as Rutherford-Johnson does, for not remembering where in 2001 we first hear the music of György Ligeti, since I for one have seen The Shining about a billion times and consider myself a Ligeti fanatic but still could not tell you what scene has Lontano in it. But Byrne's claim that atonality has earned a place in film music that it doesn't deserve on the operatic stage comes so close to being right that it hurts me to see it miss.
See, that's a phenomenon whined at by no less a champion of whining than the prophet Moses himself, Arnold Schoenberg. Why do the vulgar masses I loathe and keep at bay dislike my music, but love atonality in the movies? he asked, or something like it. The answer is: Well, genius, in the movies, there is a dramatic analogue to this music-without-center, which most of your work, composed for the concert stage, lacks. But David Byrne isn't talking about a concert work, he's talking about an opera full of insanity and degeneracy and whatnot, so the dramatic analogue is right there! This is basically what high modernism is for! So what's he complaining about?
Of course, Kyle Gann actually loves him some thorny-ass high-modern, with a fondness at which he usually only hints on his blog, but which he articulates fully in this well-reasoned if slightly overlong (hi Pot, it's me, Kettle) post. (I actually met Kyle Gann one time, but before getting up the balls to shake his hand and say OMG IT'S ME THE GUY WHO BASHES YOU ON THE INTERNET I kept a respectful stalkerish distance while watching him talk high-modern with Yale's resident 20th-century dude, and I was duly impressed by his enthusiasm for the contemporary Euro avant-garde.)
The angry mob from whom he's defending himself in that post represents the next group that is silly and wrong here, the academic avant-garde and their defenders. There's still a surprisingly large contingent that subscribes to, in some form, the notion that music of nigh-inscrutable complexity is a historical necessity and inherently demands not only our attention but our baffled awe. It ain't necessarily so. If anything, the opposite is the case: the burden of aesthetical proof is higher for difficult musics.
Why? Well, the problem with complexity is, har har, simple. If the pitch and rhythm relationships in a piece of music are too complicated to be intuited by the listener, the listener will be forced to find a handhold (earhold?) elsewhere. This means that a masterpiece of atonal harmony is that much harder to write. F'rinstance, it might be easy for an untrained listener to distinguish, at least on some gut level, between a tritone (that one makes me feel "weird"!) and a major third (that one makes me feel "happy"!), or even between a major third ("happy" again!) and a minor third ("sad"!), but maybe not so much between a tritone and a minor seventh. This is one reason why John Q. Public can distinguish between the moods of near-identical pop songs but thinks all atonal music sounds the same.
(I'm ignoring the elephant in the room right now: Culture. John Q. Public also thinks all music made in any given country outside the United States sounds the same, and that's more obviously because he is an ignoramus and can't be bothered to listen to non-American music—God, I hate John Q. Public!—and the same is true of atonal music or music with irregular pulses. But you really can't argue that all of the antipathy towards music based on complex relationships is Mr. Public's fault, for the reasons I hope I'm articulating here.)
Like, you read an article once in a while about a chef who has invented a brilliant garlic or bacon or lobster ice cream, right? And while it's true that these ices are every bit as aesthetically valid as sweet ones—heck, I'm thrilled to see something just a little out of the ordinary, a Red Bean Gelato perhaps—an ice cream parlor whose 32 flavors were 8 sweet, 8 savory, 8 spicy, and 8 bitter would probably be offering fewer flavors, not more, that I would have the urge to lick on any given day than the 31 sweet scoops of Baskin Robbins.
Again, that doesn't mean you, as a composer, have to restrict yourself to the sweet menu of diatonic melodies in 4/4 time. That just means that if you aren't going to privilege the more readily distinguishable system of signals (simple pitch relationships) over the more opaque one (complex), you are making your job—namely, giving the audience something to think about—that much harder. You will have to corral every other resource available to you, every formal or coloristic effect, to draw listeners' attention to hear what you want them to hear.
So if you open your bacon ice cream shop in Apple Valley, California and call it MOM'S OLD-FASHIONED ICE CREAM, you can't sit at the counter and wail, "Why is no one eating my delicious ice cream?" You know exactly why. What you're supposed to do is open it in downtown Manhattan, call it PUNISHMENT ICE CREAM, and watch a line form around the block. That's the lesson to learn here, kids. Now if you'll excuse me, I need something cold and delicious.
It was all too easy to make fun of the New York Review of Books' shark-jumpin' articles on email and blogs, so here's Nicholson Baker with a genuinely, amiably insightful look at the Wikipedia phenomenon and its politics. It makes me weirdly happy to imagine Nicholson Baker editing him up some Wiki. Wiki warrior Kyle Gann should definitely read this article, if only for Baker's account of his attempts to save an article on post-Beat Richard Denner:
I tried to make the article less deletable by incorporating a quote from an interview in the Berkeley Daily Planet— Denner told the reporter that in the Sixties he'd tried to be a street poet, "using magic markers to write on napkins at Cafe Med for espressos, on girls' arms and feet."
I sense that it would make Gann happy, too.
Julian Bell's brattily iconoclastic take on Lucian Freud, in a previous NYRB, is mightily entertaining as well, and as long as we're talking about my favorite artists, Joan Rivers is hanging out with Robert Rauschenberg. Can I please have bloody marys with Joan Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg one of these days? Okay, thanks, bye.
My friends know I have a conflicted relationship with Kyle Gann's criticism--I think his larger music-historical conclusions can be kooky, and sometimes he'll come out with statements that are just out-and-out wrong, but I maintain that he continues to do some great services to new music, and to say the least, the Village Voice was pretty stupid to drop him. (The fantastic Robert Christgau, dropped from its pages not long thereafter, was of course the Other Shoe.) This week's postings are a case in point.
First, Kyle Gann talks about a computer font someone sent him that will let him print out scores using Ben Johnston's microtonal notation (cool!); he goes on to demonstrate the possibilities of this font by using a rather soggy piece of his own composition (not cool!), and then uses the comments section to snap at readers who prefer to use another notational system (kinda weird!).
Yes, it had all the unintentional self-aggrandizement and ideological infighting we've come to expect from Gann--but now he's posted again, and suddenly I can't hate on him because he's doing one of the things he does best, which is championing composers you've never heard of. E.g., helping to keep the torch lit for unsung genius Julius Eastman, and this time around, boosting Gloria Coates, likewise awesome and underrated.
If you haven't heard Eastman, you need to get on that--the set of his stuff on New World is priced through the roof, but it's essential, plus Gann's accompanying essay is terrifically useful--and it's the same with Coates. I picked up one of her string-quartet discs secondhand and, well, they're exactly what Gann describes in the liner note, ear-grabbing new sonorities organized with an engaging lucidity. I'm officially addicted.
Still, even here, we see the limits of Kyle Gann's resources as a critic. Quartet No. 7 ("Angels") "is a Christmas piece," says his essay, "rare within the instrumental repertoire; Schoenberg's lovely Weihnachtsmusik and John LaMontaine's fantasy on Twelve Days of Christmas are the only other examples I can think of...."
Really? Is it the repertoire of Xmas pieces that is so limited, or Gann's knowledge of the literature? Just off the top of my head, I count Barber's Die Natali, Crumb's Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979, Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur, Penderecki's Symphony No. 2 ("Christmas"), and Schnittke's Stille Nacht, and those were all written in this last, atheistic century--I'm not even getting into Christmas concerti and chorale preludes. What was Gann thinking? One can only guess that--as deep as his expertise may run within his chosen specialty--outside of it, he has just a few mile-wide blind spots.
Then something like this happens, and I'm reminded all over again of just how much we need him: I've just discovered a composer I'm dying to hear Gann comment on, a Lithuanian named Rytis Mažulis. Mažulis uses all those tricks Gann knows by heart--not only microtones, but also a Nancarrow-like exploitation of musical machines both figurative (audible canonic processes) and literal (clattering masses of MIDI piano). If you haven't already bought Paul Hillier's wonderful Baltic Voices 3 CD for the amazing pieces by Kaija Saariaho and Erkki-Sven Tüür, it's also got a short and lovely work by Mažulis on it, but to my knowledge, that's about the only exposure he's gotten from the classical mainstream. (One of the Gregs reminds me that he reviewed the disc here!) The fantastic Belgian label Megadisc is about to put out their third disc of Mažulis' work, and from what I've heard of the other two it should be a thrill. But who's going to give this stuff the serious attention it deserves? Who can write articulately and knowledgeably about Mažulis' techniques and influences?
I'll give you a hint, it's not the P.R. people at Megadisc. Actual quote from their website:
Final Chapter of THE Rytis Mazulis Trilogy. As usual the final chapter show who is Master and who is not. This one is ... Master Mazulis !
Um, thank you, Megadisc. The liner notes themselves are only a little less ridiculous, written in a rich, purple dialect of Translationese ("The composer intuitively seeks to defeat the fatality of narrative (linear) time, explore the depths of a sound, and discover new projections of musical time and space"). But when I listen to the samples of his music at RussianDVD.com (stream the whole album before you buy--love it) I hear a composer who demands our attention. Help us, Kyle Gann!
And help me, friends & readers. Have I lost it? Am I obsessed? Am I the only person who lies awake worrying about Kyle Gann? Should I just shut up? Tell me what you think.
Kyle Gann's ongoing John Cage project has resulted in the best "desperately seeking disc"-type post I've ever seen:
