so yesterday i was creating some very poetic program notes when suddenly i decided to wash some dishes.  then this happened (with my left hand inside the glass)…

then this happened…

(yes, that’s fatty tissue).  

And then this happened…

In the panic of the moment, running around the apartment with blood seeping from my knuckle, I must have lost all my program notes because they’re not on my computer anymore.  In fact, I’m still in such a panic that a student rose from her piano bench this morning, cut me half-a-Xanax cabinet, and shoved it in my pocket.  She’s seventy-nine years old.  This, folks, is what we call mercy.  And my new favorite student.

But anyway, below you’ll find some quotes by some of the composers or their respective researchers tonight, and/or some short personal reflections of my own in italics.

MEMORY PEDALS (2011) - Anthony Porter (b.1981)

“It’s a piece about visual day-to-day imagery, and how we pass the same things over and over and they subconsciously work their way into our subliminal minds (notably, advertisements, but can reference other things as well), and show up slightly different based on habit and experience each new time we pass them.” - Anthony Porter, in an email to me.

I’ve wanted to program this piece ever since Porter sent it to me last year.  I think of it as an invention, really, with each hand playing a similar (or the same) pattern out-of-sync with the other.  Complicating matters, Porter has the pianist tucking in sustained notes here and there, which often means quick reconfigurations of hand position and fingering.  Oh, and it’s for (optional) prepared piano.  I’m honored to have it in my repertoire, and grateful that he’s cooperated with my incessant emails and questions.

1+1=3 (2000) - Ned Rorem (b.1923)

“Two people can make a third.  This little Meditation consists of a 2-voice invention of ten measure; a nine-measure Chorale Interlude; then the Invention again, now in 3 voices.” - Ned Rorem, in the piece’s inscription.

Last summer, when preparing a suite of Rorem’s complete (published) piano music that he composed for his late partner John Holmes during their 32-year partnership, I found myself learning this piece in the mornings before teaching at Little Red School House, memorizing a little bit each day with no intention of programming it in my coming concert.  It’s only one page long but, like a perfect Mozart aria, it gets a lot “done” in that one page.  I should note that 2000, its year of composition, was just one year after Mr. Holmes passed away of AIDS-related illness.  Recommended reading: LIES: A DIARY

PASSACAGLIA (1922) - Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

“The work appeared cold to some critics when it was first heard, but Mademoiselle recognized the underlying emotion in it right away.  The Passacaglia is dedicated to her.” - Aaron Copland, to Vivian Perlis.

I’ve got to say, I’ve always been more fascinated by than enamored with this piece.  Maybe it’s because once upon a time, as a student at the Adamant Music School in Vermont, a girl did a stodgy gesture and said she hated it over lunch one afternoon — a kind of marching-troll/angry king gesture I still see in my mind’s eye to this day.  Or maybe it’s because the music is so stylistically unlike Copland, a baroque-modern piece with a somehow distinctly French palette that owes to no clear French influence besides that of Nadia Boulanger, his mentor and teacher.  In a way, this is the kind of piece we might imagine her composing, guru of teaching composition that she was, though she never really composed any music of her own to speak of.  But all this said, Copland stretches the boundaries of his strict structures whenever possible to allow for more interesting music — sometimes more beautiful, sometimes more ugly.  It’s not unlike the manner in which he would treat his 12-tone music later, making the system work for him by modifying it to his (music’s) needs.  So while the Passacaglia might be a student piece that seems void of personality, play, or rhythmic inventiveness, I still see a genius on the page, the beginnings of a Composer who would always value structure, clarity, and order in his music, and I hear the first cries (sffz) of the fearless, if inevitably misunderstood, giant that Copland would become.

IN A LANDSCAPE (1948) - John Cage (1912-2012)

“…half intellectually and half sentimentally, when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds.  There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society.  But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship.  Permanent, I thought, values, independent at from LIFE, TIME, and Coca-Cola…”  - John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, 1951

COMPOSITION IN RETROSPECT (1981-88) - John Cage

“This text has twelve short parts, each made up of seven mesostics, the first of six of which make sense.  The last does not do so conventionally: it is a chance-determined mix of the preceding six.  Composition in Retrospect was written as part of an intensive international workshop for professional choreographers and composers conducted in August 1981 by Merce Cunningham and myself at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England.  What happened was that from nine to ten-thirty in the morning I spoke in an informal way on an aspect of my composition; from ten-thirty to eleven there was a tea and coffee break during which the composers received specific assignments for that evening’s performance of music and dance; from eleven to twelve-thirty I composed that part of the following text that was related to my earlier talk in the presence of those members of the workshop who chose to be with me.  This continued for two weeks, six days a week.  On the first day I found I could not write more than six mesostics.  I then took six as the number that had to be written each of the following days.” - John Cage, 1983 introduction to Composition in Retrospect 

I bought John Cage’s Composition in Retrospect as a Christmas present to myself a few months ago.  On the plane to Seattle for a performance of Sonatas and Interludes a couple months ago, I decided to finally read it.  While doing so, I realized it could sound really cool spoken, as indeed Cage would have done.  I read through it again, muttering aloud to myself.  Then I decided I would program it for tonight’s concert, with visuals of the words running through the center of Cage’s mesostics projected behind me (since I think it’s interesting for an audience to have an idea of the underlying structure and theme of a particular section).  I completed the visual slides on the plane as well.  I began pencilling in commas, periods, parentheses, and other performance notes, since there is virtually no punctuation and spacing is erratic.  Rehearsing the lecture in the weeks leading up to tonight, I started to get nervous; it ran about 25 minutes, and I could see people getting restless and annoyed, and the piece sort of “stealing the show” from the other works presented.  I considered putting it last in the program, and inviting people to leave if they thought they couldn’t “take it.”  A student of mine suggested I instead cut some of the sections, which of course I first laughed at, but then reconsidered.  Maybe, for the sake of this performance,  The cuts are mostly in the interest of time, and of course I’d love to perform the complete lecture in a venue/platform more specifically devoted to Cage.  Tonight I will perform: 
METHOD, INTENTION, DISCIPLINE, INDETERMINACY, DEVOTION, CIRCUMSTANCES, NONUNDERSTANDING, CONTINGENCY, PERFORMANCE

and omit STRUCTURE, one part of DISCIPLINE, NOTATION, IMITATION, STRUCTURE/VARIABLE, INCONSISTENCY.

4’33” (1952) - John Cage

“One of the most common effects of 4’33″ – possibly the most important and widespread effect — was to seduce people into considering as art phenomena that were normally not associated with art…. Its effect was to drive home the point that the difference between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ is merely one of perception, and that we can control how we organize our perceptions.” - Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence

In high school, I read a book about minimalism that, I have to say, changed my life.  In that book I first really learned about the work of La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and of course, John Cage.  When the author mentioned 4’33”, I remember being transfixed by the idea of it (also by the idea of La Monte Young asking a pianist to “feed” hay to a piano, but only if it’s hungry), and I saw this kind of musical theatre as a highest echelon of performance.  What’s interesting, I suppose, is that even as I delved further into modern music, and have now spoken about Cage and played his 70-minute long Sonatas and Interludes all over the country, I’ve still never ‘done’ 4’33”.  Tonight will be the first time.  I don’t know if I still felt unworthy, or if I became cynical about it, or just wanted to do it right, or simply fell victim to the same oversimplified idea purported by so many of the work’s detractors, that it’s “just too easy,” as if 4’33” is a not only a cheap way of doing a John Cage piece, but a cheap way of performing anything in general.  

Reading Kyle Gann’s magnificent NO SUCH THING AS SILENCE changed that, illuminating the process Cage went through while composing the piece (over a decade’s time) and its possible socio-political origins (a kind of taking-back-the-space from Muzak), while illustrating Cage as a composer in perhaps the most interesting and unstable period of his career.  The book also had me thinking that most people’s problem with the piece, whether they know it or not, is the fact that Cage created something that virtually anyone can perform — not just those in the performing arts field.  This throws the whole performing arts dichotomy on its head, uncomfortably lifting the spectator to a powerful role they perhaps never expected or wanted, even if that role is simply to listen (gasp), while having the inversely opposite effect on the performing artist, demystifying their role, perhaps debunking their power (though they are, after all, the ones with the stopwatch).  

Divertimento in E-flat Major, Hob.XVI, 45, II: Andante

“I was cut off from the world; there was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.” - Josef Haydn, about living in Esterhazy 

I like to make a practice of reading through the complete music of a given composer — all of Bach’s suites and preludes and fugues, the Beethoven Sonatas, and so on.  I don’t do it by any means to prepare for a performance, but just to see how a certain composer’s language might grow into my hands and body, how I might learn to adopt their idiom, if indeed I can.  I’ve played through Haydn’s complete Sonatas a number of times, and I remember — it was probably in high school again — the first time through, stopping at this particular movement.  The spare voicing, the back-and-forth interplay between the hands, the repetition of phrases and sequencing through various keys with all the heart-wrenching suspensions one could dream of.  It was love at first sight.  I learned the whole piece this year, but only wanted to do single-movement pieces in tonight’s performance, in the interest of pacing and democracy.  Even if I program the whole work for a future concert, it’ll be mostly out of obligation and respect for the work.  Between us, I only have eyes for this little Andante.  

… and this vigilante rummages through the trash of our building to rescue uneaten food.  They don’t eat the food, but rather, they just collect it all and leave it on our stoop for others to eat, or what usually ends up happening — for others to observe.  Sometimes F’s and my discarded items are featured, like a loaf of moldy bread that we tossed last week which reappeared on the doorstep, which I then re-threw away, and which then appeared again a few hours later where it sat for days.  This person is keeping a constant patrol.  Entering my building just now, I passed a pile of crumbled boxes from a bakery containing, I can only imagine, half-eaten tarts and other outdated, icing-smeared confections.  These will remain in place at least until tomorrow when either the super of our building bags up the trash, rendering the food inaccessible, or a garbageman graciously removes the items and takes them away.

See, what this Robin Hood of the trashcans doesn’t understand is that, just like no one really wants to waste money (and I really don’t think New Yorkers wantonly throw away their food) so does nobody, not even the homeless it turns out, really like to eat moldy bread, decomposing produce, and so on.  Unlike the shoes, speakers, slippers, pants, books, dress shirts, and other paraphernalia I’ve put on that same exact stoop, which has always disappeared in seconds, the expired food just sits there.

I could incorrectly be presuming the motive here; maybe this mysterious hero doesn’t want to feed the needy, but rather just wants to present to us how much food we waste, as if we didn’t catch it the first time around.   I don’t know.  There’s no lesson here.  Just a Monday morning dispatch from West 21st Street.

[statement from the remixer, Eric Spangler, a.k.a. Dubble8]

Pianist Adam Tendler performed John Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” for prepared piano on the Mobtown Modern music series this past Valentine’s Day, 2012. I recorded the concert for my Sound Art class at MICA- my students’ assignment was to create beats or remixes based on samples from this performance. To model it for my students, I made a few tracks beforehand (using samples of another pianist’s performance) to play on my DJ set before and after the performance. This fourth beat, done about a month and a half later, is based on samples from Tendler’s performance, and is hopefully the blueprint for a future collaboration between us, to do a live remix of the “Sonatas and Interludes” in live performance.

[from an email to a friend]

I think I’m going to head to Carnegie Hall this morning to try to grab some “rush” tickets to [Harrison’s] Organ Concerto tonight.  For the most part, this American Mavericks series is making great choices.  I love the attention they’re giving Cage, Harrison, Cowell… it’s very “west coast,” and after all I suppose it should be considering the source.  THAT SAID (the inevitable “that said”), it’s all I can do not to kvetch.  The music all seems very fashionable and sexy, with even an inordinate focus on who’s fashionable now — like I’m in Stalinist Russia, I won’t name names — as opposed to who really was a “maverick.”  Or rather, to be more specific, I’m a little bemused by the near-total exclusion of any serial music (with the exception of Ruth Crawford Seeger!) a la Babbitt or Sessions, or perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, no mention of an impressionist like Griffes, who we seldom hear (especially orchestrally) but who was so recognized in his day as a pioneer in enthnomusicological experiments, and who died so early (and who was dating a closeted COP, which is hot) — this neglect was in part why I toured 50 states with his music, which was always a favorite of my audiences who largely had never heard of him — or even Ned Rorem, who clearly must have pissed someone off at the festival not to have even his NAME spake anywhere near it.  Is Rorem not a maverick for sticking to his lean, quasi-romantic, tonal guns?  If anything, this series proves that he was, in a way, “right” all along.