Category: Articles

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Molly Sheridan

Years ago, when I was even more optimistic and starry-eyed than I am now, I received a notice in the mail that I had been selected for inclusion in a “Who’s Who”-type directory. Now, I no longer remember which one it was, but at the time I was convinced that it was a harbinger of an extremely successful career. I bragged about it ceaselessly to everyone until people started laughing about how naïve I was and asking how much money they soaked from me to buy my own copy of the directory.

It is basic human nature to want to be recognized and almost everyone who creates something artistic is doing it for an audience. I have heard estimates that there are over 10,000 living composers in the United States today, which is ironically a number larger than most audiences for the majority of new music concerts and recordings. So, how to stand out from the crowd and be noticed?

A good start is to be included in a book. It’s a tangible form of historic validation. And while I now know that nobody looks to most “Who’s Who”-type directories to find out who the most important composers are, there are other books that serve as major stamps of historical approval. None probably more than The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is the de facto source for music in the English language.

But, while Grove is a fantastic resource, it does not include everything and there’s no way that it ever could. And the fact that no other publication comes anywhere close to Grove, while a credit to Grove, is actually a source of shame to our field as a whole. Imagine if there were only one all-inclusive guide to baseball or only one really decent medical encyclopedia.

Beyond that, Grove isn’t even the product of an American publisher; it’s British. That said, amazingly, Grove once published a huge four-volume Dictionary of American Music, and its American born and bred co-editor H. Wiley Hitchcock is one of the world’s leading scholars on American music. But those volumes were published almost a generation ago and there are no plans to revise it. Many composers who came to prominence in this country since then, unless they have been visible enough internationally to make it into the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (published in 2000 in book and Web form) are just out of luck.

But, on some levels we only have ourselves to blame. Would France, Russia, or China (just to name the other members of the U.N. Security Council) let another country publish their own history for them? Of course, an undertaking such as a comprehensive, up-to-date, all-inclusive encyclopedia of American composers and their music is no small task and would require a huge budget. James Reel, in his assessment of scholarly research materials on American music, which would be the basis for any such endeavor, shows that we still have a long way to go in the development of truly meaningful texts. And, even then, what would the criteria be for inclusion. Comments from a group of composers containing an equal number of Grove-ins and Grove-outs about what the standards for Grove inclusion should be, reveals a plethora of response that are not even consistent among the Grove-ins and Grove-outs!

Maintaining a starry-eyed more-is-more optimism, I like to think that every composer should be included without judgment, just as membership in the American Music Center has always been open to every composer regardless of stature or degree of recognition. But of course, members have to find us and join us, so it still doesn’t cover everybody.

Tempering that optimism, I also realize that nothing can possibly include everybody, not even the “Who’s Who” directory I was listed in many years ago. And, even more than that, I’m well aware that such an undertaking would be a Herculean task requiring thousands of contributors and that no publisher with any economic sense would ever embark on such an endeavor because it could never possibly pay for itself much less make a profit. And therein lies the problem.

Until new economic models are set up to nurture this kind of scholarship, it will never exist. NewMusicBox exists because it is supported by the American Music Center, a non-profit service organization. It could never exist in the commercial marketplace nor should it. Recently, the American Music Center launched another Web site, NewMusicJukebox, to address the symbiotic need for people to find out about composers and for those composers to have people find out about their music. Once again, though, this is not based on the standard economic model. NewMusicJukebox serves as a conduit for composers to connect to potential performers, venues, listeners, etc., and any potential economic connections will be made through connections beyond the site. Of course, money was needed to create both NewMusicBox and NewMusicJukebox, but that money was raised through development within the framework of a non-profit entity rather than through generating revenue through merchandizing product.

Of course, in NewMusicJukebox, the composers themselves (or their publishers) are responsible for the content about themselves, and NewMusicBox admittedly comes with a very strong pro-new American music bias, which perhaps is in direct opposition to the kind of objective scholarship that some quarters believe is what criticism aspires to. But these models are viable, whereas, we can see from the lack of a really reliable source that is completely without bias (as if such a thing could exist anyway), the other model is not.

Greg Sandow

Some of the best new sounds I’ve lately heard are on the soundtrack of Punch-Drunk Love, a marvelous, mostly unpredictable romantic comedy directed by P. T. Anderson, who also did Magnolia. This movie, like Magnolia, is almost an art film in pop-film guise, or maybe the reverse, a pop film in art-film disguise. I felt almost enchanted as I watched it. Adam Sandler is an inept single guy with a business that sells, absurdly, gag toilet plungers; Emily Watson is the unsure woman who grabs onto him. As their romance slides toward an ending that looks like it has to be happy (in the best Hollywood style), I began to grouse, thinking everything might be wrapped up too neatly, that the suppressed (or maybe not so suppressed) violence in the lovers would be swept under the nearest, classiest rug. But as Watson spoke the film’s final line—words that somehow sound both grounded and totally crosseyed—I saw that Anderson was way ahead of me. He’d thought of everything I groused about, and left his lovers shaking on what just might be the edge of a cliff.

Now, there’s a soundtrack album, a really nice one, released, appropriately enough, on Nonesuch, which because it’s an art label with pop leanings is a perfect match for the movie. But the sounds I loved most were on the actual film soundtrack, though the CD does give some idea of how sound can work in the movie, for instance on the first track, simply called “Overture.” For the first 40 seconds, all we hear are sonic scraps—the faintest sound of wind, then unstable soft chittering, later a click, and (among other things) some bells, and a distant empty roar.

These are layered together more or less the way the sounds are in the film, and maybe in fact they are sounds from the film; I don’t remember. What I remember best are other collage effects, among them scraps of real-world noise, like the faint chatter of a TV far in the background while something dramatic (and unhinged) unfolds onscreen. The TV voices take the place of music on the soundtrack and in fact replace any formal underscoring. As far as I could see, the TV sounds weren’t synchronized in any way with the flow of the scene. They were just there, as they often are in life. I remember a juxtaposition like that in a Czech theater production I saw decades ago. The piece was highly stylized, but was performed in a former storefront with a picture window, so alongside the formality was the random sight of people walking by on the street outside, or stopping to peer in and watch. At one point a goat was tethered on stage, walking (within the limits of the tether) at random, goatwise, while the actors made their solemn, formal moves.

My favorite sonic moment in Punch-Drunk Love comes in a supermarket, when Sandler, searching for products with a special offer on them (don’t ask), opens a freezer door to get at the frozen food. All at once we hear a tiny freezer whine, precisely layered on top of silence. This, though, really is a cinematic underscore, building just the right amount of tension into the scene, tension that’s if anything screwed even higher because you feel the sound more than you hear it.

There’s also music on the soundtrack (by Jon Brion, a songwriter with a fine ear and a deft, wry touch who also has a weird live show that plays Los Angeles clubs,) that sometimes functions very much like random sound. He’ll create, for instance, pattering light recurrent drums, heard on the second track of the CD (under the title “Tabla,”) blended with electronic beeps and what might be the sound of waves. The drums of course might be electronic as well. For an instant there’s a little scrap for flute and strings, which intrudes surprisingly, just as (reversing a more common pattern) jabs of noise would intrude in more melodic music. There’s more rhythmic patter on track four, “Hands and Feet,” this time higher-pitched, sounding like some of it might be played on a xylophone made of water. In the movie, sounds like these seem to go well with Sandler’s jitters.

And finally on the soundtrack there’s dialogue that itself has musical rhythm, when Sandler walks away from Watson’s door after their first date, cursing himself for his lame goodbye: “Bye-bye…asshole…bye-bye…stupid motherfucker…” Those aren’t the words, but they’re something like that. Here the acting itself tumbles downward into the background sounds in the film. And in fact, since these words underscore a shot of Sandler, seen distantly from behind, careening down a corridor in the building where Watson lives, they function more like an underscore than like acting. We don’t see him speak; we just hear his words, almost as we might hear a voice behind one of the apartment doors he passes.

Brion’s music (especially as orchestrated by Thomas Pasatieri) is pretty wonderful. He gave—I assume it was him—the soundtrack CD its own continuity, more or less in the style of the film, but of course with a life and sound all its own. “Overture” sets the tone, and establishes the sense of collage that informs the whole CD. First, as I’ve said, we hear noises. Then a gentle waltz-time oom-pah, with a wistful three-note melody cloaking it, repeating like waves breaking on a beach. Then an oboe tune, in two waves, with electronic shudders rising beneath the second one. And then strings, rising to a certified Big Tune, a kind of goofy love waltz, though very tender, which melts away without ever finishing. It melts into low-key singing, more background noises, and finally the sound of an orchestra tuning up.

Then of course comes “Tabla,” with its rhythmic patter and its ocean waves (which might be there because a key stretch of the film is shot on and near the beach in Hawaii, a prosaic thought).

And then track three (“Punch-Drunk Melody”) takes us back to the waltz, though now the music sprouts new ideas, nothing forceful, but still new. Soon it rises once more into the sweet, goofy tune, again with fine, rich strings, and again melting away, this time into almost boneless oom-pahs that mark time quietly, swinging back and forth, finally joined by echoes from one of the melodic wisps at the start of the track. I love the way these are mixed, so they sound like tiny ghosts of violins, making me wonder why classical composers don’t use recording studios this way. Why do we almost always write acoustic music, or else music meant to be amplified or altered electronically, but still heard live, and then recorded naturalistically? Why don’t we use the art of the studio (available for hardly any money on our own computers), to create pieces directly for recording?

What emerges, as the CD takes shape, is a pattern: alternate tracks of waltz and of other kinds of music and sound, these last being much less structured, and—speaking conventionally, now—much less “musical.” Each time the w
altz pops up, it evolves, hanging around just a little longer before it melts away. It visits on a tack piano, and way down on track 13, with a Latin beat, and grows to a very peaceful climax, of sorts, on track 14, “Third Floor Hallway” (site of the lovers’ first kiss), where the love tune returns in its pristine orchestral dress, and finally plays to a conclusion.

Though the conclusion (typically wistful) comes barely one minute into a track that’s three and half minutes long. So what happens in the rest of that time? Oom-pahs, in their now-familiar holding pattern, plus reminiscences of waltz scraps from previous tracks, and then finally another stab at the tune, but this time varied in a way that makes it sound more like a memory than a restatement. The CD never delivers any conventional payoff; it never surges to the kind of full-blooded climax the love tune could easily suggest. For three tracks, in fact, it wanders off into oddball songs, borrowed from elsewhere, in styles ranging from Hawaiian to rockabilly. There’s also a song on the next to last track, an almost Beatle-esque Jon Brion tune specially written for the film, which uses some of the waltz wisps. The final track gives us an instrumental remix of one of the borrowed songs, which does finally bring the CD to a full stop on a stable tonic chord—except that this track is full of things that don’t quite add up, including (and I really love this) just one quick foreshortened single note of singing, which was sampled from the vocals of the original song, and in fact is all that’s left of them. It’s also interesting that, early on the CD, the pattern tracks are a lot longer than the melodic ones. Taken as a whole, the CD is a collage (as many individual tracks also are), which again makes it, in spirit at least, a lot like the movie’s real soundtrack.

So, why couldn’t Punch-Drunk Love be an opera? Or, to put it another way, why aren’t new operas as fresh, fun, and contemporary as Punch-Drunk Love? This is a paradox. Here we have a movie that might not be runaway smash-hit, but still has been a success, staying for weeks on the list of top-ten movie grosses. Obviously, lots of people like it, surely more people than go to new operas. But then on the other hand we have new operas, which seem cautious and conventional next to this movie, as if they were afraid of displeasing an audience—even though the movie has a bigger audience than they do.

Which suggests, of course, something we know is true—that opera lives in its own, resoundingly conventional universe. Of course there are things in the opera world that don’t fit this universe, starting with the whole range of so-called experimental music theater (Meredith Monk, and the like); plus Regietheater, the modernist (and postmodernist) restagings of familiar opera repertoire, common in Europe but mostly damned in the backward U.S.; plus all sorts of newer European works. But none of this is especially welcome in American opera houses, which is exactly my point. Opera claims to be high art, yadda yadda yadda, then gets outgunned in artistry by popular culture. Another film that teaches this lesson, and more directly than Punch-Drunk Love, is Baz Luhrmann‘s Moulin Rouge, a music-theater piece that’s far more edgy and delightful than anything I’ve seen at any opera house lately.

But then how would anyone write an opera with music that works like the soundtrack of Punch-Drunk Love? Take that moment in the supermarket, with its tiny freezer whine. You could create something like it on an opera stage. The Adam Sandler character would open the freezer door, just as he does in the movie, and the metallic freezer whine, more felt than heard, could be created electronically, played on a recording, or emulated with canny orchestration. It could come out of silence, as it does in the film, or show up as an uneasy addition to whatever music (or other sound) accompanied the Sandler character as he shopped. Opera always has allowed such things, and in fact subtle sonic shifts are a great delight in an opera score deft enough to allow them.

And certainly the language of new music, as it’s evolved in the last hundred years, allows for noise in music—electronics, recordings, anything you want. But most opera composers, with a moment like the supermarket freezer to bring alive, would evoke it with orchestral music in a recognized operatic style. That can be disappointing, as it is, for instance, at the start of Carlisle Floyd‘s Of Mice and Men. George and Lennie are running away from the cops, so as they come on stage, we hear police sirens far away, a gripping sound. And then Floyd’s music starts, and, at least to my ear, the moment dies, since the music is much more predictable than the sirens were. The sirens ought to be the music, or at least the music could take off from the sirens, or weave the sirens into itself, the way Wagner wove offstage horns into the start of the second act of Tristan.

But the supermarket moment, treated in punch-drunk style, has problems in an opera house. You write one moment like this, and surely you’ll have to write others, so your work has a consistent sound. Soon your score becomes a collage, including many non-operatic elements, and that has implications for the singing. What kind of vocal style would be appropriate? Probably a collage of vocal styles, none of them, perhaps, conventionally operatic… Or maybe there wouldn’t be any singing at all, making the piece opera only because all of it would be entirely shaped by music. So now we have an opera that might not need opera singers, and, for that matter, might not need a normal orchestra. Who’s going to stage that? Maybe the Next Wave, or the Lincoln Center Festival, but surely not an opera house!

Which makes me think (though this is a much longer story) that the classical music mainstream isn’t a good home for art.

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

The university where I teach, San Francisco State University, is like so many state universities across the nation. The mission of the university is to educate a very large portion of the college age demographic. Not an elite school, either in terms of prestige or finances, the standards for entry into the system are not as high as those of the Ivy League schools or even the University of California system, and the fiscal constraints, with threatened and sometimes imposed budget cutbacks every time the economy goes south as it has this year, can be daunting.

Even in the bountiful years, as we experienced in the late ’90s, the educational budget was not restored to anything close to the pre-Proposition 13 glory days when money flowed freely into California’s educational system, then one of the best in the country. Now with a primary and secondary educational system which ranks near the bottom in numerous categories, including spending, and the California State University system which is almost completely dependant on funding from the state for its fiscal health, new strategies have been mandated, not by the state, the university system, or even individual campus administrations, but by the harsh reality that faces each institution. Whereas the University of California is flush with grant, federal government research, and other monies, the poor California State University system must devise other means for supporting and funding areas beyond the bare educational necessities.

Still, without false modesty I think, our music program has significantly, even profoundly transcended the imposed limitations and constraints that might have held us back were it not for a very hard working, talented and dedicated faculty.

Last year, our music department merged with the dance department at San Francisco State University to create the new School of Music and Dance, in part to save dance from being eliminated altogether, but also in an attempt to generated a synergistic entity in which the total was greater than the sum of its parts. We then began a search for a new director, one who had a significant degree of visibility as an artist and scholar, success as an administrator, and a track record as a fundraiser.

We were for fortunate enough to find all of these in the person of Roger Woodward, the renowned Australian pianist whose repertoire includes not only the standard 18th- and 19th-century literature, but also a tremendous amount of 20th-century music, ranging from Debussy and Scriabin, to recent avant-garde and experimental work. Woodward has worked extensively with the likes of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and Toru Takemitsu—several of whom have written works expressly for him.

Feldman cited Woodward as one of his three favorite pianists when it came to performing his own works. He once wrote:

… Triadic Memories has a double meaning for me. Not only does it have a lot to do with the way the piece was made … [b]ut it has to do with memories and recent memories of three very important performers in my life at the piano.

One was David Tudor, in the early years. The other is Australian pianist Roger Woodward, and of course Aki Takahashi. And more than any piece I ever wrote, many times it was as if I was just taking dictation, remembering the way David played, thinking about Roger’s playing and Aki’s playing. And to some degree, they’re part of Triadic Memories in writing a piece. The importance of a performer to a composer is just something one sees on a dedication page, and unless one is a musicologist or you really get into it, you just really don’t know the involvement, to what degrees a performer could influence the kind of music the composer might play… .

I’ve written down a thumbnail sketch about these three remarkable musicians to give you an idea in a sense what I was thinking about while writing the piece… .

Roger Woodward: more traditional, which also means more unpredictable in how he shapes and paces. I would call it a prose style. Where Tudor focused on a moment, Woodward would find the quintessential touch of the work, hold on to it and then as in one giant breath, articulate the music’s overall scale. Like Tudor, Woodward played everything as primary material. He is a long-distance runner. Tudor jumps high over the bar. Where Tudor isolates the moment, by not being influenced by what we might consider a composition’s cause and effect, and Woodward finds the right tone that savors the moment and extends it.

(Morton Feldman, “Triadic Memories” in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, edited and with an introduction by B. H. Friedman, afterward by Frank O’Hara [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Exact Change, 2000], 153-54.)

As an artist, this is the man that we hired.

As an educator, astute musical thinker, but also an outsider, a non-American, Woodward brings a fresh perspective to our very American university. He believes that as a teacher of contemporary music, his role is, in part, to pass on not only his love and passion for the music, but also first-hand knowledge from his collaborations and close working relationships with Cage, Feldman, Xenakis, Takemitsu, Boulez, and others. To this end, he is writing a collection of essays based on recollections of his work with these and other composers and musicians. Such a document will serve not only as a memoir, but also as an educational tool for students and musicians, allowing them insights into the creative minds that produced important work that helped shaped music of the 20h century.

We all know the tradition of great performers leaving behind a powerful legacy as great teachers. There are, for example, piano teachers today who trace their training back to Liszt, Rachmaninoff, or Bartók, among others. Great traditions and techniques have been passed from generation to generation in a kind of guru/disciple fashion. Indeed, Woodward was himself trained by a student of Rachmaninoff’s. While we do not usual
ly trace lineage in a similar way with composers, Woodward sees great value for training musicians using the words and coaching he received from the composers with whom he worked. It certainly makes sense that one would heed the suggestions and ideas of the composer.

Woodward also believes that getting beneath the skin of a composer and fully contextualizing him/her can provide insights into the process of music making. As an example, we are all aware of Cage’s profound influence and inspiration for Feldman. However, Woodward took a closer look at Feldman’s background which included close work with his piano teacher, a Russian ex-patriot aristocrat, whom he revered and who taught him not only a kind of Russian technique, but also a kind of Russian aesthetic. While we may not traditionally think of Feldman this way, he is, in part, from the lineage of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. We know that Feldman described some of his earliest piano pieces as being “Scriabinesque.” Feldman’s own grandfather undertook a monumental trek out of Russia to escape the pogroms. With all of this in the back of his mind, when preparing for a performance of Piano, the first work written for Woodward by Feldman, the former thought that Scriabin’s influence inhabited the piece. Woodward says, “I didn’t dare say that to Feldman at the time, but later he said to me, ‘Just think of it as late Scriabin.'” Similarly, Woodward perceives of the refined musical language of the Music of Changes as manifesting the influence of Cages’ tutelage under Schoenberg rather than his studies of Zen or Duchamp. These kinds of ideas he hopes to share with his American students.

As an outsider in an American educational institution, Woodward may offer insight into an American musical ethic. Especially from his work with Cage and Feldman, he encountered a direct, no-nonsense approach, in terms of compositional aesthetics and also in coaching and shaping performances that he found refreshing and inspirational. He sees a similar “open quality” in the American lifestyle and ethic.

He contrasts the American approach with a more staid, circuitous, and convoluted process that he perceives as the European manner. The open quality of the American approach is in stark juxtaposition with what Woodward describes as a “more dressed” and affected method.

This more open-minded quality that Woodward perceives as part of an American ethic is made manifest in Cage’s ideals and approach to music making. Woodward notes that Cage had a “loving quality” and a sense of wonder. These combined in Cage in a way that took every artistic situation and made the best of it. Woodward says of Cage, “He always turned a negative, always, into a positive, which is the thing that I really liked about him. And that is essentially an American and not a European thing. He would use something that wasn’t satisfactory and create something beautiful from it.”

It seems that Woodward, a stranger to American culture, has much to offer to San Francisco State University’s School of Music and Dance. In addition to his musical gifts, his unique musical experiences with some of the most important composers and musicians of the second half of the 20th century, oddly enough, he provides us with a fresh perspective on American culture and arts that may provide our students and the broader musical community with new insights about the process and practice of music making in America.

Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

Well, I wasn’t in the Grove Dictionary and it didn’t bother me, and then I went to Europe and I became part of a group that is always interesting to the people who write these things, and then I was in the Grove. I knew I was in the American Grove but I didn’t realize I was in the other one until you told me.

As for your question, I would suppose that it would be based upon somebody’s body of work. Ultimately I don’t think it’s really that important. I mean it’s important for posterity and it’s important for just basic PR. Every time your name appears somebody sees it and whether they know what you actually do or how well you do it is probably less important. But at least from my political point of view, I don’t think it means that one composer is better than another. I think it’s a lot of things that come together over a period of time, like these coincidences that put one person in the limelight rather than another. Like the one I just mentioned about being in Europe. And it is a British publication, right? I think it was important that they put out the American Grove, because we are a separate entity, we are our own country. Perhaps we should do one ourselves. For instance, the Center for Black Music in Chicago put out an International Dictionary of Black Composers and that’s not exhaustive either. When I looked at it I noticed basic people who were missing, so I think in the long run it has more to do with tastes or knowledge or lack of knowledge. Anytime human beings do things, you know, it’s not perfect and I don’t think if your name is not in Grove that you should give up your career. You should just remember why you do what you do and keep on moving. People might say to me, ‘Oh, I saw you in Grove,’ but I don’t take it seriously because I’ve still got the next tune to finish.

When I received the letter from the American Music Center inviting me to participate in this discussion, two things immediately occurred to me:

1) The criteria for such decisions as to who should and who should not be included in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians will inevitably involve some form of quantification: i.e., how many recordings, how many publications, how many performances this composer has received.

2) The item concerning whether or not American composers are adequately represented in the Grove Dictionary inevitably raises several questions, one of which was dealt with in this publication recently: What is an American composer? Must one be born in the United States? Where does that leave not only the obvious examples such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Korngold, Bloch, etc., all of whom became American citizens, but also such composers as Lukas Foss, born in Berlin but everywhere regarded as an American, or Claudio Spies, born in Chile but indisputably an American composer? Must the venue for one’s current compositional activity be in the United States, and therefore must Americans who choose to live elsewhere, as was the case with more than one of the composers quoted in the previous issue of this publication, be excluded from classification as American composers? And what does “adequately represented” mean? Does it imply some sort of quota system—some specific number of composers included for every 100,000 in terms of population for each country, for example? Imagine the consternation in such a case if the next compositional “heavyweight” were to come from Monaco or Liechtenstein!

This second question brings to my mind a remark of Virgil Thomson quoted in Joan Peyser‘s book on George Gershwin: “It is very easy to write American music. All you have to be is American, and then write any kind of music you wish.” Now, I suspect that Mr. Thomson and I would have disagreed on practically everything else—but despite Ms. Peyser’s arguments to the contrary (she quotes Thomson’s remark in order to refute it), this one point is, I think, a valid one.

In my opinion, we (and not only those of us in the U.S., but in the rest of the world as well) waste entirely too much time worrying about whether or not our music reflects the country of its origin. That it will to a certain extent do so is I believe inevitable. But we need only look around us and see the unfortunate (and “unfortunate” is a euphemism) effects of nationalism in the political arena, not only in other countries but also—and particularly at this time—in our own. Furthermore, in my opinion, most composers’ attempts to write music that is self-consciously “American” seem all too often to produce music that is almost embarrassing in its naïveté.

But our Americanism also manifests itself in music in other much more troubling ways. We in the United States have become accustomed to “life in the fast lane.” We get our food in plastic or Styrofoam containers, zap it quickly in the microwave oven, and (sometimes) put it on the table or (usually) eat it in the car with plastic utensils. Unfortunately, we seem to write music this way as well. All too many of the most “successful” of current American composers are producing a musical analog to prepackaged fast food. The music is presented in neat little packages requiring very little rehearsal time and effort on the part of the performer(s) and requiring even less effort (or no effort at all) on the part of the listener—musical “TV dinners,” with all of the lack of subtlety and genuineness that this description implies. At the same time, music that challenges the performer and the listener is often ignored because neither wishes to invest the effort needed to come to grips with it. Consequently, composing such Styrofoam music seems to be the way these days to win prizes and get commissions.

The situation is only made worse by the seeming inability of Americans to do anything without first having read a book telling them how to deal with it. I think that it’s appalling to go into a bookstore in the United States and find shelf after shelf in section after section filled with so-called “self-help” books. And this goes for music, too. Rather than investigate the music for themselves, many if not most members of the concert-going public seem to require someone else in a position of “authority” to tell them what music by what composers they should and should not like. In the case of a serious composer who happens still to be breathing and who therefore has not been beatified and canonized by the musicological establishment, it’s always safer for the music critic to make patronizing critical comments about h/is/er music than about that of Beethoven.

You’re probably asking right about now, “What on earth does this have to do with the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians?” The relationship of what I have just said to the question of American representation in the Grove Dictionary has to do with both of the points I mentioned earlier. Let’s take the first one first, namely the problem of quantification. It is of course very easy to set up criteria based upon the number of prizes, the number of commissions, the number of recordings, the number of publications, and the number of prestigious performances that a composer has received. But what about this business of quantification? Where does that leave American composers with small catalogs of works, such as, for example, Carl Ruggles or Edgard Varèse? And in reference to my second point, one might ask, for that matter, “Was Varèse an American composer?” The fact that he came to the United States in 1915 and lived here for fifty years suggests to me that he probably was—indeed that it is nothing short of ridiculous to say otherwise—but a criterion that would require a composer to be a native American (not in the ethnic sense but rather dealing simply with one’s place of birth) would exclude him. And both Varèse’s list of works and that of Ruggles are relatively
small; indeed, Ruggles’ catalog contains fewer than ten completed compositions to show for the ninety-five years of his life.

Herein lies the problem. In the absence of quantification as a valid criterion for inclusion in a reference work such as the Grove Dictionary, then what do we have to fall back on? With trembling voice, might I suggest “quality?” But alas, this doesn’t solve the problem either, but instead just makes it worse—for the old saying by that prolific author and composer Anonymous that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” is surely true in this case.

So in answer to the questions posed in this issue, all I can offer is the suggestion that if more American composers were more concerned with the quality of the music they were writing and less concerned with the number of award notifications hanging on their walls, maybe the problem of adequate representation of Americans in Grove‘s and similar works would take care of itself.

But I wouldn’t bet on it!

I view inclusion in the Grove dictionary as a recognition that is, like any other award, valuable only to the extent that it paves the way for you to do your chosen work. Awards are, of course, political and geography/social class dependent. We all know that. If there is an award that could draw attention to your work (and result in more commissions or more opportunities for you to do interesting projects) then it is worth vying for that award purely for its desirable side-effect. But the moment you start thinking that an award is a validation of your work is the moment that you start mistaking the means for the ends.

In fall of 1965, during my second year in graduate school at UC Berkeley, I applied for and was awarded an Alfred E. Hertz Traveling Scholarship to go to Germany.

Why did I want to go to there? Since getting interested in new music as an undergraduate I had repeatedly encountered the music and writings of composers who had lectured and taught at the legendary International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. I felt a strong need to go and see for myself.

Once in Darmstadt I soon noticed that I had entered a musical world very different from the one I’d just left. Until then, most of the new music I had heard had been on records. Exceptions had been the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, where I had often attended performances by excellent musicians who were working for next to nothing, and occasional concerts of new works in the bay area, given mostly by idealistic student volunteers. What struck me first was the number of professional musicians making a living playing new music.

The lectures, given by Kagel, Ligeti, and Stockhausen, treated subjects that were of immediate interest to me. Kagel talked about new musical theater, Ligeti about his approach to Webern, and Stockhausen presented his ideas about the synthesis of electronic, vocal and instrumental music. To encounter this material first-hand was very exciting; until then I had only read about some of it in journals.

Before the courses started I had asked the man in charge of the Institute for New Music in Darmstadt, Wilhelm Schl¸ter, about studying composition in Germany. He generously researched the topic and informed me that Penderecki would be Guest Professor of Composition at the Folkwangschule in Essen for the next two years.

Having been very interested in the music of Penderecki while in graduate school (this interest was strictly extracurricular), I was enthusiastic. When I visited the school in September 1966 the arrangement was made for me to have two private lessons a week with Penderecki; these were to include composition, instrumentation, and counterpoint. Since I felt that the training I’d received in college and university in the states was inadequate, I soon found myself working 16-hour days.

For the summer of 1967 I had the good luck to be accepted into Stockhausen’s master class (“composition studio”) in Darmstadt. The project Stockhausen had planned for his course, called Ensemble, was a four-hour long interactive event to which each of 12 students was to contribute one layer. The institute hired musicians and equipment. Stockhausen had already worked out a number of notational strategies to deal with the many problems that came up during the development of the project. In retrospect it seems that it was far ahead of its time; it’s conceptual boldness left a lasting impression.

In 1970 I moved to Cologne, where I spent years assimilating these experiences and many others. Occasionally I was commissioned by the Department of New Music (Department of New Music?!) at the West German Radio in Cologne. In particular, the three projects that I realized in the Studio for Electronic Music at the radio were, musically, the happiest times of my life.

Did I identify myself as an American composer? The question never really concerned me. I’ve always believed Virgil Thomson‘s dictum that the best way to be an American composer is to be an American citizen and then to write whatever you want. From those who told me that my music “sounds American” (and there were quite a few) I was never able to get any clear answer as to why. Certainly I would be unable to answer this myself.

In 1979 I married the American soprano Beth Griffith. She had moved to Cologne a few years previously to make recordings at the radio. We have two children. In 1997 we decided to return to the United States. We missed our language. We wanted our children to get to know the families and the country in which we grew up and to attend American schools.

Since returning to the States I have done some teaching as an adjunct professor of composition at Columbia University. While I have been enormously impressed with the talent and commitment of students I’ve met there, I often wonder about their futures: after they’ve graduated, what is “out there” for them to do, i.e. commissions, performances? It looks very, very difficult, at least from a European(ized) point of view. What most of them will do, I suppose, is go right back into another university because with far too few exceptions that’s about all there is for them to do.

My wife has frequently returned to Germany for engagements—which in all cases have included travel expenses and performance fees—singing new music. There have been no comparable opportunities in the U.S.A. This is not due to lack of effort but simply to the lack of provisions for performing the music of our time in our country.

In any case, we’re glad to be back, and we’re staying. We harbor the fantasy that maybe, eventually, we can make some difference, though neither of us knows what that might be.