Remember how last year’s music Pulitzer was awarded to Ornette Coleman’s “Sound Grammar” even though the album wasn’t entered into the competition?  I argued at the time that by awarding the prize to a composer who hadn’t entered, the Pulitzer committee had essentially voided the requested $50 “handling fee.”  This is significant because the number of people who apply for the prize each year is quite small–last year there were only 129 entries for the music prize.  Presumably what happens is that only people who think that they write in the right style and have the right connections and national profile bother to enter–why throw away 50 bucks unless you think you have a shot, right?  Wouldn’t it be nice if the slate of entries were a more accurate representation of the totality of contemporary American composition?

This year’s deadline is January 15, for “works that receive their American premiere between January 16, 2007 and January 15, 2008.”  (How you’re supposed to make that deadline if your premiere is on January 15, I’m not sure.)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pick your best piece from 2007 and submit it, following all the guidelines except for the entry fee.  Include a note indicating that the reason that you aren’t sending an entry fee is that since Coleman was awarded the prize without having entered, the competition is clearly open to anyone, whether they officially enter and pay the handling fee or not.  I’ll be submitting my piece “Waiting in the Tall Grass,” which was premiered by Relâche at the end of November.

Last week, Democrats gave up their fight to block $70 billion in unrestricted war funding and on December 19, Congress sent the $556 billion omnibus spending bill to President Bush, who is expected to sign it.

Included in this bill is a historic increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.  Funding for the NEA will be increased by $20.144 million, or about 16%, to $144.706 million for FY08.  This is less than the $160 million appropriation proposed in the House version of the bill, but more than the Senate proposal of $133.412 million and more than the President’s requested $128.412 million, and it represents the largest increase in NEA funding since 1979, when funding was increased by $25.735 million (which itself followed an increase of $23.978 million in 1978).  The $144.706 million was actually $147 million before an across-the-board cut of 1.56%.  NEA funding still has not recovered from the massive $62.8 million cut to the 1996 budget, but has increased every year starting with the 2001 appropriations.

Within the NEA appropriation, the biggest funding increase is to the “American Masterpieces” initiative, which the NEA website says “is a major initiative to acquaint Americans with the best of their cultural and artistic legacy. Through American Masterpieces, the National Endowment for the Arts sponsors performances, exhibitions, tours, and educational programs across different art forms that reach large and small communities in all 50 states.”  The 2007 budget for this program was $5.911 million and it stands to nearly double to $13.289 million in 2008.

The League of American Orchestras is reporting that “Congressional Arts Caucus co-chairs Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Chris Shays (R-CT) rallied House colleagues in support of the NEA, and Interior Appropriations Committee Chairman Norm Dicks (D-WA) championed NEA funding as a priority issue.”  Special thanks to LAO’s Heather Noonan for help in finding the details of the bill, which you can see here and here.

National Endowment for the Humanities funding will increase by just $3.602 million, in spite of an $18.895 million request in the House version of the bill.

The great American Musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock died early on Wednesday morning (December 5, 2007) after a long illness.  Hitchcock started his career in musicology studying French and Italian Baroque music, and then transitioned into American music, editing the New Grove Dictionary of American Music and a series of 11 textbooks (writing the volume on American music himself), and publishing extensively on Charles Ives.  He served as director of the American Musicological Society from 1990 to 1992, and spent most of his career teaching at Brooklyn College.

Frank Oteri interviewed him for NewMusicBox in 2002, and at the end of the interview he said:

Any music, if one gets interested in it, is worth taking very seriously, not only emotionally but intellectually and significantly as a part of life. It’s a matter of being interested in sound and music, and in the experiencing of sound as something other than a signal for action (like a siren, for instance). For me, no music that I can imagine is unworthy of attention. Whether it mandates attention by everyone is another matter.

I lovely sentiment.

Update: Kyle Gann eulogizes his friend Wiley here.

Don’t miss this piece in last Sunday’s LA Times about recording engineers for classical music.  As the author, Constance Meyer, says, popular music engineers and producers are often famous in their own right, but most people can’t name a single classical music engineer or producer.   “Yet just as in rock ‘n’ roll or hip-hop, the engineer for such music — who is often, though not always, the producer as well — is the person who makes or breaks an audio performance.”  Meyer goes on to profile Max Wilcox, Da-Hong Seetoo, Fred Vogler, and Armin Steiner, and to describe a bit of how the recording process works.

There’s even a modicum of disagreement.  Steiner talks about recording the Bach violin sonatas and partitas in 1956, and recals that Szigeti would record a small section “10 or 15 times or more. So they had all these bits and pieces. There were at least 100 reels of 1/4 -inch tape. I spent three or four months editing those for him.”

Wilcox, on the other hand, says “While you can eliminate mechanical imperfections, you can’t make someone an artist by making 400 splices. . . You can’t give a violinist a more beautiful tone or a better conception of the music or a better idea of the tempo. You can make it sound mechanically and technically solid, but all the things that make ‘music’ can’t be fabricated.”

These statments aren’t necessarily at odds, but do seem to indicate two different approaches to the process.  In fact, the cut and splice method requires a great deal of consistency, especially of tempo, in the source recordings.  Providing modular pieces that fit together into a coherent whole is its own kind of artistry, as is making those pieces fit in the studio.  Personally, I lean toward that strategy, but aiming for the consistency of long, uninterrupted takes has value too.

There was a terrific profile of Gil Rose, Music Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and of BMOP itself in Sunday’s Boston Globe.  If you don’t know BMOP you’re missing out on one of the best forces for new orchestral music around.  There’s a lot of good stuff in the article, which is why you should read it for yourself, but it might be of particular interest to this crowd that they’re putting together their own record label “BMOP Sound” which will be launched in January “with five new releases adding to its existing catalog of 13 commercially released CDs, and 28 more albums in progress.”  Later in the piece we also learn the interesting statistic that Rose receives upward of 150 unsolicited scores every month–so if you’re wondering why James Levine and Essa-Pekka Salonen aren’t returning your calls this may give a sense of how overwhelmed with submissions a music director with a national profile and a known interest in new music must be.  (It also makes Bang On A Can’s claim that “we will listen to everything” all the more impressive.)

BMOP inaugurates its 10^th season at 8 PM tomorrow night (November 2^nd) in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall with a concert of piano concerti.  Nina Ferrigno, Anthony Davis, Joanne Kong, and Marilyn Nonken will be playing the pianos, and the program consists of pieces by Elliott Schwartz (the premiere of a new revision), Anthony Davis, Michael Colgrass (the U.S. premiere), and David Rakowski (world premiere).  I’ve heard parts of the Rakowski, and it rawks.

If you like Olivier Messiaen, you missed out on a phenomenal performance of his epic organ work Livre de Saint Sacrement on Tuesday night in New York.  The performance was by Paul Jacobs, and took place in The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, just off Times Square.  It was an impressive performance of a Messiaen’s very personal late-life (1984) magnum opus, and the cathedral was an ideal space for it.

Of course if, like me, you don’t like Messaien, you can be glad you stayed home and organized your sock drawer or whatever you did, because that piece is frickin’ interminable.  It’s about an hour and a half of pointless, pedantic noodling intercut with loud for the sake of loud, with no meaningful or satisfying dramatic structure.  There’s about a minute worth of actual good material spread through the piece, but of course it’s immediately abandoned in favor of more noodling.  And then there are the sections which sound like nothing so much as Mario collecting those gold coins.  By the time it finally ended I was ready to confess to where I hid the WMD.

Last week I went to Corey Dargel’s new postmodern cabaret show “Removable Parts,” and it was excellent.  I call it “postmodern cabaret” because I’m not sure what else to call it—it was a series of songs on the theme of voluntary amputation, and they were performed by Corey and Kathleen Supové who performed in character as a sort of dysfunctional cabaret act.

The songs were delightful—intelligently composed and quirky, moving in fits and starts, building up grooves and then taking them apart, stealing from and recontextualizing various pop, rock, and classical idioms.  The lyrics and dialogue were witty, treading that fine line between sad and funny.  In the second song, “Hooked for Life,” Corey sings about wishing that he could have his arms amputated and replaced with metal hooks, in part because then you would have to hug him because you’d feel sorry for him, and in the middle of this somewhat sad and grotesque imagery he observes that “you’d be hooked for life” and promptly apologizes for the pun.  And somehow it’s these witticisms, the melancholy self-mockery and the harsh words between “Corey” and “Kathy,” (“You may be the kindest pianist, but you’re definitely not the smartest”) that end up humanizing the very real condition with which they are dealing.

For indeed, the desire for amputation is a symptom of a genuine condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID.  The condition results in a belief that one’s body configuration is incorrect—that, for instance, my correct configuration is with no left arm.  BIID is as difficult to grapple with philosophically as it is to comprehend psychologically, and the show makes no attempt to answer the questions.  Rather, we are taken on a journey from the apparently absurd—“apparently” because this is, after all, a real condition—to a sense of recognition, empathy, and a measure of understanding.  How different, after all, is it to want to remove a “superfluous” leg than to want to remove, as “Kathy” does, “excess” bodyfat?

In the end, though, a show like this lives and dies on the quality of the music, and the music did not disappoint.  Corey’s great talent is the integration of fragmented and disjointed ideas into a cohesive whole.  He writes beautiful, leaping melody lines.  His lyrics often seem more like prose than like poetry, and yet in the grand tradition of songwriters like Morrisey he makes them flow as naturally as any good lyrics do, except that in the absence of forced rhymes and rhythms their confessional nature often comes through more strongly.  The music is generally groove based, in a consistent time signature, but the rhythms push and pull against that background with disjointed piano figures clashing with disjointed kick and snare action and processed samples.  My favorite song of the evening, “Fingers,” is in a quick 7/8, and the melody integrates smoothly and cleanly with the meter, but when I try to count it out and figure out how to sing it I quickly lose track due to the subtlety of the syncopation.  These disparate elements are always tightly controlled, and while they push at the edges of the structure they never break it.

If you missed seeing the show in person, I understand that excerpts will also be featured  on WNYC’s “Spinning On Air” program at some point in the near future.  After that, you’ll just have to hope for a CD or a DVD release.

I’m delighted to announce that the fabulous Philadelphia based chamber ensemble Relâche will be premiering a new piece of mine during thier 07-08 concert season.  The piece is called “Waiting in the Tall Grass,” and it features totalistic 6 against 5 against 4 rhythms, aperiodic tiling, some rock-out drum kit work, and a face only a mother could love.  It’ll be played on November 30th at a location to be determined and on December 1st at the International House in Philly, and will share the billing with new pieces by Duncan Nielson and others.

But wait, there’s more!  The rest of the season looks pretty good too–seminal downtowners John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff (including premiere by the latter) will be featured on September 22nd and 23rd; December 17th will see the annual performance of Phil Kline’s classic “Unsilent Night;” more good stuff in January and February, and then the season ends May 23rd and 24th with Kyle Gann’s “The Planets.”  (It will presumably be a no Holst barred performance.)

David Rakowski has gone mildly YouTube crazy over the past few months, and has videos of 29 of his 80  piano etudes.  Most of the performances are by Amy Briggs Dissanayake and Marilyn Nonken.

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His etudes are true “etudes” in the sense that each is an exploration of a specific musical idea.  “Martler,” in the above video, is an etude on hand-crossing; “Taking the Fifths” is on fifths; “Schnozzage” requires the pianist to play with her nose; “Bop It” bops; “12-Step Program” is on chromatic scales and wedges.  And they kick butt.

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(The title of this post, incidentally, is more of a Bob Ceely pun than a Davy Rakowski pun, but the latter studied with the former so I figure I can get away with it.)

I’ve just finished a new piece called Elevator Music, which is intended to be performed by two people in an elevator or a similar enclosed, public space.  It consists of a set of 5 rhythmic cells which are played by slapping or knocking on the walls of the elevator.  The idea here is in the tradition of a sort of guerilla performance practice where music is brought into unexpected places, unannounced.

The premiere is up for grabs–let me know if you perform it somewhere.  Obviously, I can’t be held responsible for arrests or other legal action, and the point isn’t to be obnoxious, but rather unexpectedly interesting.  Have fun!