Janus was formed by flutist Amanda Baker, violist Beth Meyers, and harpist Nuiko Wadden in 2002, and since then they have been rapidly expanding the flute/viola/harp trio repertoire.  Their debut album i am not drops today, and features music by Jason Treuting, Caleb Burhans, Angélica Negrón, Anna Clyne, Cameron Britt, and Ryan Brown.  It’s out on New Amsterdam Records, which as always has streaming audio for you here.  I’m listening to Caleb’s piece “Keymaster” as I type this: something is beautifully turbulent in paradise.

A few days ago I was doing some research in an archive of old periodicals, and I stumbled across a fascinating passage from a 1920 edition of the British Journal of Psychology.  The paper, written by E.M. Smith and F.C. Bartlett, is entitled “On Listening to Sounds of Weak Intensity,” and concerns an experiment in which subjects were asked to listen to sounds at very low volume.  The authors describe a phenomenon also discussed by earlier researchers which they call “Positive Silence.”  This is a silence which is “very clearly distinguished from that accompanying the mere absence of sound.”  In these experiments, positive silence was experienced by subjects when they could not hear a test sound and were confident that the reason was that no sound was playing, but not when they heard no sound but thought that it was possible that the sound was just beyond their perception.

Other researchers before Smith and Bartlett had apparently run experiments more closely related to the experience of the camp stove or refrigerator or air conditioner shutting off: “Titchener has attempted definite experiments on the positive character of silence by subjecting observers for thirty seconds or more to the noise of machinery in his laboratory workshop.  At the end of the set period, the noise was cut off as abruptly as possible.  Various organic and kinaesthetic sensations were reported, and silence was experience as ‘something else than sound or the cessation of sound.’”

And Smith and Barlett offer this quote, which appears in a book called Men in Battle by Andreas Latzko, from a solider who had returned home from the trenches of the first World War: “There is nothing but a glorious quiet that you can listen to as to a piece of music!  The first few nights I kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try to catch a tune at a distance. . . it was so delightful to listen to no sound.”

I wonder if part of what we’re seeing here is the wages of the stylistic tunnel-vision of the music higher-education system.  My college and grad-school music training was in most respects superb, but I got very little exposure to minimalism, and indeed one of the prevailing narratives in academia is that minimalism is a pretty narrow genre.  Several months ago a musicologist at a top-tier university actually asked me “Is really enough history there that one could actually make a career of studying minimalism?”  (I resisted the urge to ask if there is really enough history to Beethoven that one could make a career out of studying him.)

In most academic music programs these days Reich, Glass, and Adams are de rigeur, and you can’t escape In C (not that you would want to).  Even in “Music Since 1945″ type classes you’re lucky to go much beyond that territory. La Monte Young might make an appearance (I suspect the paucity of in-print recordings and the almost total absence of publicly available scores is part of the problem there).  David Lang or Michael Gordon probably show up more now than they did 10 years ago.  And Reich, Glass, and Adams rarely get the kind of in-depth treatment that a Stravinsky or and Schoenberg get–mostly you hear Music for 18 Musicians, Einstein on the Beach, and Nixon In China.  Maybe also Different Trains, Music in 12 Parts, and Short Ride In A Fast Machine or Shaker Loops.  Tenured composition faculty, even when they are receptive to postminimalist students, are unlikely to have much depth in minimalism and postminimalism.  That’s not necessarily their fault–today’s composition faculty skews modernist and neo-romantic because they were hired by faculties that skewed even more modernist and neo-romantic.  Overt discrimination against minimalism has given way to the subtler bias of disproportion in the aggregate taste of the academy.  As a result, today’s postminimalist composers have largely been trained by faculties who were more interested in other things.  But why the focus on Adams, given the relative prominence of Glass and Adams in the curriculum?  I would argue that because Adams is much closer to the neo-romantic tradition, he gets taken more seriously as a currently relevant composer, and is better liked and better understood by the academic mainstream.

So what’s a young composer to do?  It’s tempting to say that composers need to strike out on their own and discover composers they weren’t taught, but that’s easier said that done.  For one thing, the distribution infrastructure for minimalist and postminimalist music is very weak compared to that for other styles.  That problem is compounded by the fact that the standard narrative in academia implicitly holds that the narrow view of minimalism presented there is actually representative.  Reich, Glass, and Adams are held up not as the most famous examples of a broad and varied tradition, but as three of the very few minimalists worthy of mention.  In short, young composers don’t end up with the sense that there’s much exploration to be done, at least not during the critical period when they are defining their tastes and personal style.

Having dealt with some of the ways in which academia influences the development of composers, let’s turn our attention to some ways in which selection processes might be effecting outcomes.   One possible hypothesis, of course, is that composers model their work after Adams because they see Adams’s commercial success and think that writing in a similar style is a recipe for their own success. I find it a bit hard to believe that many of the kinds of composers who would choose a style on the basis of economic strategizing would end up in classical music to begin with, so let’s look at some other factors.

I suspect that most classical composers major or try to major in music in college, and the way they get treated by the faculty has a powerful influence on the opportunities they receive in college, their likelihood of continuing on to graduate school, and even their likelihood of remaining in classical music or committed to composing at all.  The composers who get the most faculty support and encouragement will frequently be the ones who are writing in styles that the faculty appreciates, understands, and respects.  If you’re an undergraduate composer you’re best off as a modernist, and at many institutions can do well as a neo-romantic as long as you build in enough dissonance to stay respectable.  A postminimalist is better off staying in the respectable territory that John Adams has staked out at the borders of neo-romanticism.  The filtering effects at the undergraduate level are nothing to the effects at the graduate level.  Undergrads can get by on the appearance of raw talent, but by the time you’re applying to grad schools the competition is much fiercer, and you’re expected to have settled into a respectable contemporary style.  Grad schools often get fifty or a hundred applicants for two or three places.  They are, understandably, going to select the composers whose music interests them the most and who have the strongest recommendations–in both cases the John Adams imitators are going to fare better than other postminimalists because of who is writing the recommendations and making the admissions decisions.

Now feed that population into the commissioning, awards, and recording systems.  Commissioning ensembles have an economic need to play it safe, and that’s especially true for orchestras.  Music modeled after John Adams is especially safe, especially in the orchestra ecosystem.  An orchestra commission is a particularly valuable calling card for a composer–an important milestone marking commercial “success.”  When I followed up with Kyle he clarified that he is not referring only to orchestral music in his complaint, but I suspect that a composer’s ability to succeed in the orchestral world is an advantage in cultivating the profile necessary for attracting other commissions and recording deals.  Awards committees are generally made up of the same types of people who I described in the section on the predilections of academics, and those awards are also significant career advantages.  By the time record companies are being presented with opportunities for projects, the field of postminimalists has been substantially thinned, and the commercial viability of the remaining population has been strongly skewed toward music that sounds like John Adams.  There are probably any number of other factors that I’m overlooking, but even if what I describe here is only partly or weakly true it could still account for the outcomes Kyle describes.

To be perfectly clear, the last thing I mean to be suggesting here is a conspiracy, bad faith, malicious intent, or corruption.  This is basically a systemic issue–a constellation of small factors that multiply against each other to create a larger effect.  The result reminds me of a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “The Matthew Effect,” after the Biblical passage Matthew 13:12 “For whoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whoever has not, from him shall be taken away even that he has.”  Structural inequalities give some people advantages, and those advantages set them up for more and more advantages later on.

One final thought: Some of you won’t buy this argument, for a variety of reasons.  Maybe you question the premise.  I trust Kyle’s judgment here, but maybe you don’t, and that’s fair.  Or maybe you question some of the particulars of my analysis, which is also fair.  I would love to see some empirical analysis on a number of my claims, and some of them might be wrong.  The really important thing here is the structure of the argument.  I care much more promoting this way of thinking about outcomes–about the idea that particular effects are the result of complex systemic interactions–than about persuading people about this specific outcome.  We will have much better luck changing the things that we don’t like about the industry if we approach it from a systems-oriented perspective instead of looking for single causes with silver-bullet solutions.

Coincidentally, our crack musicological research team has recently uncovered the following from Serious Composers Anonymous:

A Method Of Ensuring the Supremacy of German Music for the Next Hundred Years Using Twelve Steps Related Only To Each Other

1. We admitted we were powerless over free atonality, and that our compositions had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Method greater than our own intuition could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our music over to the care of The Twelve Tone Method as we understand it.

4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of the ways in which our music does not live up to the Great German Tradition.

5. Admitted to our professors, to ourselves, and to another Serious Composer the exact nature of our compositional failings.

6. Were entirely ready to have The Method remove all these defects of aesthetic.

7. Humbly asked The Method to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all twelve pitches in the octave, and became willing to treat them all as equals.

9. Made direct amends to dissonant intervals which we had heretofore enslaved with outdated rules of resolution to consonance.

10. Continued to strive to write music that is technically complex and antithetical to popularity, and when we discovered that we had written something pretty promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through practice and analysis to improve our appreciation of and facility with The Method as we understand it, praying only for knowledge of combinatoriality and the power to employ it effectively.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to those useless composers who have not yet come to feel the necessity of the dodecaphonic language, and to practice these principles in all our musical affairs whether the audience likes it or not.

2. Swedish electronic rock duo The Knife was commissioned by a Danish performance company called Hotel Pro Forma to write an opera about Charles Darwin. The result, which was premiered in Copenhagen in September 2009, is called Tomorrow in a Year, and based on the material available on the web it looks extraordinary. Here’s The Knife’s Olof Dreijer talking about the project on the band’s website: “At first it was very difficult as we really didn’t know anything about opera. We’d never been to one. I didn’t even know what the word libretto meant. But after some studying, and just getting used to opera’s essence of pretentious and dramatic gestures, I found that there is a lot to learn and play with. In fact, our ignorance gave us a positive respectless approach to making opera. It took me about a year to become emotionally moved by an opera singer and now I really do. I really like the basic theatrical values of opera and the easy way it brings forward a narrative. We’ve approached this before in The Knife but never in such a clear way.”

Here’s “The Coloring of Pigeons:”

Colouring of Pigeons by The Knife

An album of music from the opera is slated for release on March 1st, 2010. I don’t see anything about plans to bring the production to the United States, but a guy can hope.

It’s clearly a spoof of Einstein on the Beach–or “Einstein on the Beeyotch,” as Colbert says at the end of the show when he thanks Glass and mentions the recently released recording of Glass’s A Toltec Symphony.  Colbert is one of the most knowledgeable television hosts on the air when it comes to contemporary classical music–and he expects his audience to get the joke.  (He’s also on the advisory board for New York’s Symphony Space, although not necessarily for music, since they also present film, theatre, dance, and literature.)  Yet one question remains: How can Colbert present Downtown music from a studio in Midtown?  Pick a side, Colbert–we’re at war!

Founded by Jessica Salzinski and Danielle Schwob, two composers who recently graduated from NYU, Syzygy is dedicating itself to the presentation of music by young and emerging composers, and indeed most of the music on the concert was by composers I hadn’t heard of.  After the concert I overheard them encouraging some composers from the audience to send them scores and recordings, and their website includes detailed information on sending submissions.

The concert was very enjoyable.  All of the performances were solid, and I liked most of the pieces.  The reverberant acoustics of the church served some pieces better than others, but that’s a pretty common problem. The acoustics were especially well suited for Angelica Negron‘s meditative “Technicolor” for harp and electronics.  Conrad Winslow‘s chilled-out (or did it only seem that way because of the space?) “Slippery Music” did a remarkably good job of integration live acoustic instruments and an electronic tape part.  Noam Feingold‘s violin/cello duet “A Knife in the Water” meandered attractively across its modernist landscape.  Jessica Salzinski‘s impressive “Piano Sonata No. 1″ was a bit muddied by the acoustics, but it came across well anyway.  The usually sweet sound of flute, harp, and vibraphone was somehow given a satisfyingly dark or even slightly ominous edge in Danielle Schwob‘s “Shiver.”  And Syzygy cunningly programmed a lovely Nico Muhly piece at the end of the concert.

I say “cunningly” because they attracted an impressively large audience for a first ever performance by a new-music group.  Part of that may have been the appeal of the Muhly name.  But I don’t want to diminish the other strategies they employed.  First, to fund the concert they raised money through kickstarter.  They then leveraged all of the other social media tools at their disposal, and it all worked.  This marketing savvy is in some ways the most promising thing about the group.  It’s one thing to put together a good ensemble and program and deliver a strong concert, but to stand out requires a business savvy that evidence suggests Syzygy posesses.

Syzygy’s next performance will be April 22nd, at the Nabi Gallery on West 25th street.

A Visit From J.S. Bach

By Galen H. Brown,
(With apologies to Henry Livingston, Jr.)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the city
The critics were trying their best to be witty;
They printed their lists of the past year’s best fare,
In hopes that their trendy young readers would care;
But the readers were nestled all snug in their beds,
While vacuous pop idols danced in their heads;
And the Maestro in PJs, and I in my drawers,
Had just settled in to examine some scores,
When out on the lawn, such cacaphonous sound,
I sprang from my desk thinking Zorn was in town.
I rushed to the window, allegro con brio,
Tore open the shutters — I just had to see! Oh,
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what should my wondering eyes linger over,
But an old harpsichord and eight ghostly composers,
With an old kappelmeister conducting the flock –
I knew in a moment it had to be Bach.
More rapid than Valkyries, onward they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
“Now, Mozart! now, Lassus! now, Schoenberg and Dvorak!
On, Cage! on Beethoven! on, Haydn and Bartok!
To the dominant seven! To suspended six-four!
Now dash away! dash away! appoggiatur’!”
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So off to a new key they all modulated,
For Bach would leave no variation unstated.
A caseura, and then on the roof could be heard
A cadence resolved with a picardy third.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney old J.S. Bach came with a bound.
He was dressed up for Weimar in 1710
And his fingers were stained with the ink from his pen;
An un-finished score could be seen to protrude
From his pocket — the title said “Die Kunst der Fugue.”
His eyes—how they twinkled with genius – none finer!
He did, after all, write the Mass in B Minor.
His mouth was a droll as a tonicization,
His wig was a white as unspoiled glaciation;
He carried a record of naughty and niceness –
That list was as long as the Bach Werke Verzeichnis!
His belly looked like it could use a supporter
And shook when he laughed, like a Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte.
He was chubby and plump, a well tempered old master,
And I laughed when I saw him, then wished I’d thought faster;
A wink, and a line from a two-part invention,
Soon showed me that I should feel no apprehension;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to composing,
A Musical Offering – it looked quite imposing,
Then humming some bars from the St. Matthew Passion,
He rose up the chimney in a glorious fashion;
He sprang to the keys, raised his hands to the sky
And away they all flew, at Allegro Assai,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

Amanda Palmer (photo by Martin Foster)

Amanda Palmer is a bona fide rock star.  She first made her name as half of The Dresden Dolls, and has since struck out on her own with a solo album called “Who Killed Amanda Palmer.”  In June of 2008 she teamed up with the Boston Pops for two nights, and this December they’re doing it again for a New Year’s Eve concert.  Amanda has also been pioneering new models of how the rock music industry can work (staying in nearly constant contact with her fans via Twitter plays a key role), and I wanted to see if that ingenuity could be translated into advice for the classical scene.  I interviewed her by phone last week, and we talked about the upcoming Pops show, her musical background and training, and her impressions of the classical music industry:

Part 1:

DUMBO, for you non-New Yorkers, is one of the myriad New York City neighborhood abbreviations, like SoHo (South of Houston) or Tribeca (triangle below Canal), and it stands for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass,” which is to say it’s in Brooklyn in the area just south of the Manhattan Bridge. It was one of the first places in Brooklyn that artists moved to find illegal loft space in the 70s after they got priced out of lower Manhattan. (The name “DUMBO” is actually an interesting piece of failed culture jamming–residents hoped that by coining such an unappealing name they could stave off developers.)

Galapagos Art Space is a mixed-genre performance space which used to be in Williamsburg, but when the rent in Williamsburg got too high they worked out a deal that has landed them in a converted industrial space in DUMBO which they were able to entirely remodel to fit their needs and aesthetic. In front of the stage, suspended a few inches above a shallow black reflecting pool and connected by bridges, is a set of circular seating pods with room for several small tables and chairs each.  A balcony with additional seating rings the room and provides space for the sound booth.  The whole place is done up in red and black and chrome, set against the bare concrete walls of the building.  It’s truly a beautiful space.  Galapagos has a new booker, and I’m told that they are going to be increasing their classical fare–they’re already hosting the New Amsterdam Records concert series Archipelago (the next show in that series will be this Friday at 7:30pm with vocal group Roomful of Teeth and percussion/flute duo Due East.)  To give a sense of how diverse the offerings at Galapagos are, in just the next week they will also be presenting Argentinian music by Emilio Teubal & Fernando Otero, punk/cabaret by Barbez, some sort of music/dance extravaganza called “Out Through Her,”  the Main Squeeze accordion orchestra, a production of Hamlet, a burlesque show, Jenny Rocha and her Painted Ladies (which apparently involves music, dance, physical comedy, and theatre), a variety show, and the American Modern Ensemble.  Perhaps “diverse” is an overstatement, but that programming certainly covers a lot of the territory of the hipster art universe, and that was just one week of shows.

Galapagos Art Space

That programming potpourri brings us nicely back to Mikel Rouse, whose album Gravity Radio may at first glance seem like a straight-up rock record, but which has deep roots in the classical music and theater traditions as well.  Mikel himself is clearly comfortable in the netherworld between pop and classical, moving effortlessly more into one area and then into the other.  In 1978 his band Tirez Tirez opened for the Talking Heads in Kansas City; in New York in the 80s when postminimalism’s highly rhythmically and structurally complex offshoot Totalism was emerging, Rouse was at the center of the movement along with composers like Kyle Gann and Michael Gordon.  In 1984 he wrote a 12-tone piece called Quick Thrust for a rock quartet, which features dizzying polymeters that somehow seem tightly controlled and completely haywire at the same time.  Mikel’s rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic instincts all seem grounded in rock, but he tends to deploy those materials much more like a classical composer than like a popular song writer.

Take “Black Cracker,” which is track three on Gravity Radio.  First, almost all popular music in 4/4 time has four-bar phrases, but for Rouse’s lyric that fourth bar is unnecessary and he leaves it out.  The whole song is perfectly seamless, and yet because every cycle is one bar shorter than you expect the whole thing feels constantly off-kilter.  Then part way through he cuts the tempo of the descending hook “When I’m bored I can’t be bored with you/When I’m blown I can’t be blown in two” by half. After establishing the half-tempo version he brings back the full-tempo version over top of it, making the chorus into a prolation canon.  That half-speed hook then becomes background for the next verse.  Later an ascending scale adds yet another counterpoint to the mixture, and the whole thing fits together like a puzzle.

The danger of emphasizing these elements of complexity, of course, is the risk of sending the message that complexity is inherently virtuous, or that the complexity in this music somehow “elevates” it above other less complex popular music.  Writing in Gramophone, Ken Smith once said that Rouse’s music is evidence that “pop music can sustain serious interest with the right person at the helm”–the implication that most pop music can’t “sustain serious interest” is the kind of thing that tells me the writer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  The complexity in Gravity Radio is interesting and enjoyable, and connects the music to the classical tradition, but ultimately the music has to stand or fall on its surface qualities, and in this case it stands tall.  I’ll take a well-crafted Britney Spears tune over a tortured post-serialist brain-dump by a composer who cares more about combinatoriality than musicality any day of the week, and while I haven’t asked him I suspect Mikel Rouse would feel the same way.

If it sounds like I’m avoiding telling you what Gravity Radio is, exactly, the truth is I’m not sure what to call it.  It’s part song-cycle, part concept album, part theater piece.   It’s a series of thematically and musically related, country-inflected, infectiously memorable rock songs of ambiguous but evocative lyrical content, connected by interludes of spoken recitation of news headlines and fragments of lyrics from the songs delivered in an astonishing newscaster-kunst voice by Veanne Cox.  It has something to do with superconductors and gravity waves.  It’s abstract and catchy and deep.  It’s 52 minutes and 14 seconds long.

The beauty of the internet is that I can just tell you to go here to listen to portions of it and read Mikel Rouse’s description and the lyrics.

The performance at Galapagos was a stripped down version with just guitar,  string quartet (members of ACME), Mikel singing, Veanne reciting, and some background sound effects.   It worked well even in that format, and the absence of drums and other rock elements showcased how deeply integrated the string arrangements are into the composition.  The band fought a little against the acoustics of the space, which had a tendency to muddy up the sound, but overall the performance was tight and intense.  Rouse modestly sat among the ensemble rather than standing front and center like a rock frontman.  The headlines in the news recitations were updated with recent news, as they will be for each leg of the international tour that begins in January.

Gravity Radio ends with one last set of news reports from which I draw one final observation: Almost any statement is improved by the addition of the phrase “Chuck Norris wins.”