Category: Articles

Greg Sandow

Not long ago, I was writing about serialism and made an all too common mistake.

I was trying to explain—to people who don’t know much about music—how serial writing got popular among composers in the ’50s. But which composers? “Advanced composers,” I wrote innocently enough, meaning only to say that not all composers got turned on by serialism, but only those who were writing…well, what should we call it? Adventurous music? But what I wrote was a mistake, for two reasons. First, I was saying that serial composers were advanced, which is very different from saying that they weren’t conservative, or weren’t mainstream, or weren’t ordinary, or however else I could have phrased this. “Advanced” would mean very special indeed—in fact, out in front of everybody else which could easily mean “better.” (Of course, even if I’d meant to say this I would have been wrong, since John Cage and Morton Feldman were also “advanced” and didn’t touch serialism. But I’ll return to that.)

Second, and more crucially, I was assuming that there’s such a thing as progress in music, or in other words that it’s actually possible to be ahead. That, of course, is a notion we take almost for granted. Often enough we’ll talk about “avant-garde” art. This means (quite literally, if you translate the words from French) art made by people who are leading the way. I know we can use the term loosely, to mean nothing more than stuff that’s so new it’s outside most people’s experience. But somewhere in the back of our minds most of us nourish the idea that art moves forward, and that some artists march ahead faster than others. The “avant-garde” (I’m keeping the term in quotation marks, so we don’t take it too seriously) would be just what the French words imply, the artists who move forward fastest, who move toward the future more quickly than the rest of us.

But does music (or any other art) really move forward? Yes, it changes, as time moves on. But can we really call those changes progress? What would progress be, anyway? Which aspect of art would be progressing?

One very famous composer—who certainly thought he was making progress in music—had an answer to these questions. This was Schoenberg, who in a famous essay called “Brahms the Progressive” wrote:

The language in which musical ideas are expressed in tones parallels the language which expresses feelings or thoughts in words, in that its vocabulary must be proportionate to the intellect which it addresses….

Or, to put this more simply, some people are smarter than others. To smart people, you speak with a more complex vocabulary than you do to people who aren’t so smart. And this, Schoenberg says, is just as true in music as it is in words. As he goes on to say:

It is obvious that one would not discuss the splitting of atoms with a person who does not know what an atom is. On the other hand, one cannot talk to a trained mind in Mother Goose fashion or in the style of what Hollywoodians call “lyrics.” In the sphere of art-music, the author respects his audience. He is afraid to offend it by repeating over and over what can be understood at one single hearing, even if it is new, and let alone if it is stale old trash….

To demonstrate what he means, Schoenberg quotes two musical examples, the opening bars from The Blue Danube Waltz and “Di quella pira,” the famous tenor aria with the big high Cs from Verdi‘s Il Trovatore. (Curiously, Schoenberg gets the Verdi passage wrong. He starts with the first four bars, and then, with no acknowledgement that he’s doing this, skips four bars and continues with the middle section of the aria. He wanted that middle section, I think, to show that the aria had slightly more complex harmony than the Strauss waltz, but did he remember the music incorrectly? Did he know that he’d left something out?)

Both these passages are full of repetition. The waltz, for instance, repeats almost the same thing six times in a row. (And the aria would be even more repetitive if Schoenberg hadn’t left out the second four bars, which are nearly a literal repeat of the first four.) Schoenberg makes it clear that he doesn’t think these pieces are bad. He even grants that the waltz, apart from its repetitions, is beautiful. But the repetition does mean, he says, that neither of these pieces is music for “alert and well-trained” minds:

Repeatedly hearing things which one likes is pleasant and need not be ridiculed. There is a subconscious desire to understand better and realize more details of the beauty. But an alert and well-trained mind will demand to be told the more remote matters, the more remote consequences of the simple matters that he has already comprehended. An alert and well-trained mind refuses to listen to baby-talk and requests strongly to be spoken to in a brief and straightforward language.

Progress in music consists in the development of methods of presentation which correspond to the conditions just discussed.

Or, to put this differently, progress in music means finding ways to present more—and apparently more complex—musical ideas in any given span of time.

But here I think Schoenberg runs into trouble. He wrote this essay to show that Brahms was progressive, or in other words one of the artists who looks forward and makes art progress, rather than simply accepting things as he found them and standing still. This contradicts the old notion that Brahms was a backward-facing conservative, and that Wagner was the only true radical of that age. If this is true, then—assuming we accept Schoenberg’s idea of progress in music—Brahms found new ways to “draw remote consequences” from musical ideas. Not only that: For this to be progress, he must have found more of these ways than any composer before him and thus drawn more remote consequences than had ever before been possible.

But if that’s true, then why won’t sophisticates lose interest in anything earlier? Why won’t Mozart sound too simple, once you’ve heard Brahms? Why won’t Brahms himself sound too simple after we’ve heard Schoenberg?

Something’s wrong with Schoenberg’s logic. I suppose—trying to give him every benefit of the doubt—that I can th
ink of reasons why, even under Schoenberg’s notion of progress, earlier music might still be acceptable. At some point, let’s imagine, music began to progress. Of course this happened many centuries ago. And after progressing for a while, music finally advanced enough to satisfy even the “alert and well-trained” minds of today. Even if later styles advanced still further, the earlier ones still are good enough.

But when, exactly, did music reach that critical mass? With Bach? Further back, with Palestrina? Or still further, with Guillaume Dufay? Or even sometime around 1200 A.D., when Perotin first wrote polyphony? How can we answer this question? How, especially, can we answer it if we have any respect for the alert and educated minds of other centuries (not to mention other cultures)? One problem, I think, is that Schoenberg makes a false analogy between speech and music, or, more precisely, between verbal thought and musical thought. Suppose I read a scientific book from the 18th century. The science in it wouldn’t satisfy my educated mind. But in it, even so, might be reasoning that I’d enjoy. I’d enjoy, in other words, the way the writer thinks. Here we have two kinds of thought—ideas themselves and how they’re handled. The ideas sometimes progress in verbal thought. (They do in science, anyway, if not in ethics or philosophy.) But the process of using them changes relatively little. (Apart, perhaps, from developments in symbolic logic and other things we don’t encounter much in ordinary life.)

In music, it’s the other way around. Changes in ideas don’t matter much; a chromatic phrase from Schoenberg doesn’t in itself improve on any modal figure from a medieval chant. And while the way that these ideas have been presented (and have had further thoughts deduced from them) really has changed greatly, there’s no analogue for that in verbal thought. So the analogy between verbal thought and music doesn’t work. Progress, as we experience it when we talk about ideas, isn’t much like progress as we encounter it in music. Progress in verbal thinking really matters—while I can enjoy the thinking in 18th-century scientific books, I won’t read them very often because their ideas are just too primitive. Music from the 18th century, by contrast, sounds just fine. Its ideas are just as plausible as new ideas, and its logic works.

Schoenberg, in any case, cares about musical logic way too much. He, after all, was the composer who almost scrapped the second theme of his first chamber symphony because he couldn’t derive it from the first, and also the composer who invented the twelve-tone system because he got lost in the unmappable wilderness of free atonal music. If now I might risk a comparison with verbal language, it’s as if Schoenberg feels most comfortable with statements he can verify. He’s less at ease with connotations, with hints, emotions, body language, or with basic, simple truths. But these, I think, are even more important in art than logical ideas. And they may not change as centuries unroll, at least they won’t change much. Or in any case—this is tricky to define—some things stay recognizable. Thus, we can look at a face in a portrait from the 18th century and feel we know the person. That happens in music, too, no matter what new kinds of thematic development Brahms might invent. (Schoenberg, I should add, constantly declared that artists produce art the way apple trees grow apples, and otherwise conducted himself as an artist far more intuitively—he’d compose at white heat, for instance—than his fixation on musical logic might lead us to expect. He was human, in other words, and perfectly capable of contradicting himself.)

But even if Schoenberg’s idea of musical progress doesn’t quite make sense, he was on to something. Between the 13th century and the middle of the 20th, music really did progress, in a certain way. And—though only in this certain way—Schoenberg really did advance it further.

That’s because there really was a line of musical development that began with the invention of polyphony and ended with serialism. This is usually described as if it was mainly about how harmony evolved, and in some ways that’s true. Polyphony made musicians notice chords. Chords, over centuries, were organized into the tonal system. As harmony got more chromatic, chromaticism led to atonality, which in turn got organized into serialism. And, in the normal telling of this story, what went on was more than simply change. It was progress, in the most old-fashioned moral sense. History evolved toward “the emancipation of the dissonance” (as if intervals like minor seconds had been slaves), and therefore music, at least in the serial era when people really believed this, had gotten better—freer, more flexible, and able to do more and better things.

But I’d prefer to tell the story in another way. To me, it’s about the growth of something harder to define. Maybe I can call it the density of musical information. Early polyphonic music, from this point of view, wasn’t dense at all. The chords that separate voices formed were almost random, within limits. All that mattered were the cadences, and even they were random, by later standards, because they didn’t cohere into firm tonal centers. (Because of this, theorists and musicologists have tended to think that pre-tonal music wasn’t as mature as tonal music, a misconception nicely skewered in Susan McClary‘s book Conventional Wisdom.)

When tonality emerged as a formal system, the information music carried got more dense. Every note could be explained as a member of chord (or as an accident, such as a passing note). Every chord could be explained as part of a progression; each progression took its place as an episode within a larger tonal structure.

And, especially with Beethoven, music also grew denser with motifs. More and more of what you heard in any piece turned out to be significant. Less and less was taken from the stock of standard scales, arpeggios, and cadences. By the 20th century, nearly everything could be motivic.

In Stravinsky, hardly any musical detail is innocent. Compare the openings of two pieces in C major, Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata and Stravinsky’s Symphony in C. In both (or, in the Symphony, a little after the beginning, when a perky oboe theme begins) we hear repeated C major chords. In the Waldstein, C major chords are all they are. The progression that they’re part of turns out to be thematic, but the chords themselves—even though the way they’re spaced is nicely chosen—have no special meaning. They cou
ld have come from Sammy’s Chord Shop, if we can imagine composers ordering materials from any place like that.

But Stravinsky’s chords don’t come from Sammy’s. It’s a shock, in fact, to listen carefully, or to look at the score, and discover that they’re not even C major chords, even though the oboe tune makes us hear them that way. They’re only minor thirds, E and G, repeated over a bass line that’s also E and G, popping up in a familiarly irregular Stravinsky rhythm. And thus the E and G in that accompaniment turn out to be a three-way pun. In relation to the tune, they say “C major”; by themselves they say “E minor”; while in the larger meaning of the movement they invoke the C major seventh chord, since they’re the two notes that its constituent triads (C major and E minor) have in common.

Plus the oboe’s first notes are B, C, G, and E—the C major seventh chord. And the C major seventh at the movement’s end is weighted in the bass with E and G, densely crushed together, just as they are in the beginning, but even more so. Thus the C major at the start couldn’t come from anybody’s chord shop. The chords that evoke it were created for this piece, and are dense with information about the work’s own special harmony.

Atonal music is still denser, because any musical event—a chord, a rhythm, a sonority, a pitch-class set, a single note—could be motivic. Twelve-tone music has (at least in theory) still more information in it, because every note can be explained, as part of at least one twelve-tone row. And serial pieces from the ’50s carried—at least if you believe the theory—the most information of all, because everything was organized. Play one note on the piano in a piece like Boulez‘s Structures, and you’ve invoked a multitude of meanings. The pitch-class of the note comes from its position in a pitch-class set; its rhythm is established by a rhythmic set; its place in a dynamics set tells you how loud it is…

But of course we know that total serialism didn’t work. It didn’t work for composers; Boulez, for instance, found his own Structures too rigid. Aurally, it didn’t work; you can’t hear the information theoretically encoded in it. As Ligeti pointed out even in the ’50s, pieces that are completely organized sound aleatoric. And maybe serialism didn’t even work theoretically, since its status as coherent language has been challenged, in the ’60s by no less than Claude Lévi-Strauss and later by a variety of people, the music theorist Fred Lerdahl, for instance, or the aesthetic philosopher Roger Scruton.

Mostly, though, serialism didn’t work historically. It came and went. It isn’t with us now, in any serious, widespread way. And its claims to be the culmination of music history now seem silly. When I look at what came after it, that single arc of progress I described—oops, I slipped; I should have said the single arc of musical development, the one that brought us more and more musical density, until by the time Schoenberg wrote his Violin Concerto (to name just one of his late twelve-tone works), musical events jump out, several at a time, from every corner—looks as if it’s over.

After serialism (and the complex of atonal styles that flourished in its wake), the next turn of the wheel produced minimalism. And after that (though also along with it, since historical developments can overlap) we’ve returned to tonality, while we embrace all sorts of sounds from outside classical music. It’s not clear that these evolutions follow any logic. Or if they do, it’s not a purely musical logic. Maybe the arc of density told the story of the rise of western culture, which reached a peak and then degenerated, clinging to what it thought was certainty and logic. Musically, at least, it turned inward, away from the world at large.

And then, in a sense, it collapsed. Or at least it did if you think serialism was its peak. More hopefully, we could also say it came alive again, taking energy from music that wasn’t classical. Steve Reich was influenced by African music; Ravi Shankar inspired Philip Glass.

Maybe this is progress. But only in a global sense, which ultimately doesn’t have much to do with art. Art only reflects it, or maybe anticipates it. Maybe one meaning of the arc density would be that Western culture died between 1914 and 1945, as the arc reached toward its peak. The peak was self-contradictory; the arc had no way to continue. From there we fell to limbo, a period when the old hasn’t fully disappeared, and the new hasn’t yet been born. If that’s true, then we should take Schoenberg very seriously when he said that twelve-tone music would ensure the supremacy of German music for the next thousand years—though we have to turn his statement inside out. What he really told us was that the great European musical tradition couldn’t possibly be saved. Unconsciously, he sensed that. He fought to find a rescue, of course in vain. And the very scope and certainly of what he said—that he hadn’t just invented something useful, but had saved music for 1000 years—almost proves his helplessness.

From this point of view, the twelve-tone system—and, even more, the more tightly organized serialism that followed it—really would be a sign that western music had come to an end. Nor would it be coincidental that serialism arose at the same time as rock & roll, which—in bringing something straight from Africa into the western pop-music mainstream—was a gigantic portent, warning everyone that western culture soon would open to the other cultures of the world.

But here’s one final thought. If we know that history didn’t culminate in serialism, non-serial—and non-atonal—composers of the 20th century seem much more important. It’s been obvious for quite a while that John Cage and Morton Feldman were just as “advanced” as any serialist, and in fact much more so. But what’s fascinating now is to read the present back into the past. One feature of our culture now is irony and self-reference. Nothing seems certain. Everything exists on more than one level, does more than one thing. And we’re all aware of what we’re doing.

If that’s the present—the point where, for the moment, history has come to roost—then the most important composers of the past century ought to be the most ironic. I’d vote for Poulenc and Shostakovich, both of whom can easily say more to us than any serialist who ever lived. </p

Dean Suzuki Photo by Ryan Suzuki

Why is it that humor seems to be absent in the contemporary arts, including music? Art can be political, if not politically correct. It can wax philosophic. Art is used to make social commentary and advocate for social change. It is often self-important, if not self-inflated, whether introspective or bombastic. Art is, of course, a serious endeavor and its seriousness has been taken to the Nth degree, full of Weltschmerz and enough angst to choke a horse. Art may be about truth and beauty, grandeur and dreams, joy and ecstasy, but for some reason, we are less likely, even unlikely to accept or attempt humor in music. Solemnity, reverence, transcendence are commonplace in the arts, yet humor is often considered beneath the composer if not beneath contempt.

It has not always been so. Indeed, the literary arts often embrace humor. Where would Shakespeare be without his comedies? Of course, comic operas are a very important part of Mozart‘s oeuvre. There are other examples such as Mozart’s A Musical Joke or Haydn‘s “Surprise” Symphony and the Opus 33, Gli Scherzi string quartets.

Humor need not be of the knee slapping or gut-busting variety. A bit of levity can go a long way. The comical elements in the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty are obvious to all who see them, but I doubt that any would call them comedies.

Of all the composers of the 20th century, no one is more associated with humor than Erik Satie. From funny and absurd titles such as Dessicated Embryos to Truly Flabby Preludes, or the inscrutable and bizarre instructions for performers, such as “grow pale in the crux of your stomach,” to the seemingly mindless repetition of banal music hall style motifs in his musique d’ameublement (a.k.a. furniture music), it’s outright funny (though it is meant to be both more and different). I know, as every time I play it for my students, they laugh.

It seems that Satie has been marginalized partly owing to his use of humor. One gets the sense that Satie appears in music history texts much to the chagrin of historical musicologists. They feel forced to include him, by dint of tradition alone; everyone else does it so they must, albeit with furrowed brow and a lack of understanding. They wonder why he is included when his music is so simple and full of absurd titles and instructions. Can anyone really take seriously a composer who says the music should sound “like a nightingale with a toothache,” or who instructs the performer “to be visible for a moment”? But more on that in a later column…

Of course, humor is not altogether absent in contemporary music. The humorous potential and the likelihood of humor being read into 4′ 33″ could not possibly have escaped Cage when he composed it and subsequently programmed it into a concert. Clearly not intended as a joke or a comical piece, whatever element of humor one might find in 4′ 33″, it is coupled with Cage’s most profound ideas about the power and meaning of music.

Fluxus, the neo-Dadaist movement of the 1960s, was built around irreverence and humor. Compositions where the keys of a piano were nailed down, a guitar kicked through the streets of Manhattan until it completely disintegrated, or a bale of hay was fed to a piano were laugh-out-loud funny and downright silly. That being said, like Satie, Fluxus remains overlooked, misunderstood, and marginalized by art and music historians and critics, even though it anticipates Conceptual art, and Minimal art and music, and gave us the likes of La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Henry Flynt, George Maciunas, George Brecht, and a host of others. No doubt, part of the reason Fluxus remains on the fringe in the minds of historians and scholars is its love of the joke and its perennial silliness.

Absolutely hilarious was the music performed by the Portsmouth Sinfonia. While they did not play contemporary music, their aim was squarely in the experimentalist camp. The orchestra was comprised of musicians, artists, students, and other non-musicians—and a rather heady group it was. Members included Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, Brian Eno, Christopher Hobbs, Michael Parsons, Steve Beresford, and others. The members of the ensemble chose instruments that they did not play or have training in. However, some chose instruments of the same family of that which they were schooled in. For example, Bryars, a double bass player, chose the cello. On the other hand, Eno played the clarinet, an instrument with which he had no experi
ence. Playing popular classics such as the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Rossini‘s William Tell Overture, the idea was for each member to play the music to the best of her or his ability and see what would happen. The music, captured on three albums, is recognizable but laden with mistakes. Eno recounts that the results were both musical and hysterical because of the commitment to the performance coupled with the lack of technique and experience. When members intentionally tried to be funny and make mistakes, they were invariably found out and subsequently thrown out of the orchestra. The most musical and hilarious moments derived from the orchestra’s best efforts. Take a listen to their rendering/de-construction of the first movement of Tchaikovsky‘s Piano Concerto No. 1 on the album Hallelujah recorded live at Royal Albert Hall and you will see what Eno means. Risk, danger, and experimentation in music may yield risky, dangerous, and experimental sounds, but it may also result in hilarity. Cannot both be viable in music?

There are many, many examples of humor and lightheartedness in contemporary music. Charles Amirkhanian‘s text-sound composition “Just,” with its incessant repetition of commonplace, yet somehow amusing words: rainbow, chug, bandit, and bomb, especially in their juxtapositions, tends to raise a smile. The humor is intensified by a related composition, “Heavy Aspirations,” in which Amirkhanian fragments, loops, and layers the voice of Nicholas Slonimsky (a joy to hear in and of itself) as he describes “Just.” Anyone who listens to Phillip Kent Bimstein‘s The Louie Louie Variations for mandolin quartet and especially Garland Hirschi’s Cows, which samples, loops, and layers fragments of speech by farmer Hirschi talking about his cows coupled with a synthesized accompaniment and samples of the cows mooing tunefully, and doesn’t crack a smile is in serious need of some therapy. Anna Homler‘s quirky invented languages in her lovely but oddball songs and her table full of toys, gizmos, and noisemakers are a joy.

These represent but a handful of works and composers who use humor in their work. Still, there can be no denying that humor is seldom found in contemporary music. With so much to say through music and so many possibilities in the multitude of musical styles and languages, should we not make a little more room for humor in music? It could be a tonic for the soul.</p

Photo by Catherine Bird

I created my first composition for piano at age four, and by eighteen I’d composed a full-length musical, but I never thought of myself as a composer, so I didn’t study composition when I went to music school.

In 1974, after graduating with a M.M. in flute performance at age 33, I began composing again. I was researching the ancient history of women musicians, and this study reintroduced me to the Greek modes and East Indian gramas. Here is where I found my musical language. Had I been trained in the academy, which at the time was stilled mired in serialism, my semi-minimalist style based on the primacy of melody would have been denigrated by my teachers. I’m sure I would have had to work much longer to find my individual compositional voice.

The only disadvantage to being self-taught was that I didn’t have a mentor or a network of colleagues to help me establish the contacts I may have needed to progress in the field. As it was, I had to become a businesswoman, building my audience through recordings on my own label rather than through small and infrequent live performances.

Photo by David Nichols

For me, writing music became a passion while I was still in junior high school. Being inspired by hearing a jazz version of “Whistle While You Work” on the radio, I began writing for my school jazz band. Not knowing “The Rules of the Road”, so to speak, I wrote what I heard in my head and felt in my heart.

Though my music was pleasing to the ear, it was often not so pleasing to the eye. I had stems going in the wrong directions, parts that were not as practical as they could be on certain instruments, figures on the wrong beats, etc. Fortunately, my band director, Mr. John Magruder, was there to help me out of the mire. He also inspired me to keep writing, and I did.

I would write pieces, both jazz and classical, and then rush to school to have someone play them. This was my technique for teaching myself what worked and what didn’t. I was never much of a reader. However, I did borrow Mr. Magruder’s band and orchestra director’s books, and I memorized all the fingerings and ranges of all the instruments. I also listened to the radio and records more critically; trying figure out what it was that others were doing.

By the time I reached high school, I had a writing style, something I could really work with. The good news: I could write almost anything in my style. The bad news: I had to work long and hard to write anything that was not in my style. People still find my writing very identifiable, and I think it makes breaking certain kinds of barriers a little harder than if I had a formal composition background. However, my experience allows me to create with little or no fear.

I’m highly trained as a flutist, but had no composition training. Performing all kinds of music has been an ongoing compositional education. Performer friends played my pieces beautifully and enthusiastically from the very start of my composing life, which started belatedly in my late twenties. It hadn’t occurred to me, until a friend asked if I’d write some music for his choreography, that I could be a composer, though I’ve always had private music in my head. Since then, whenever I’m asked to write a piece, it’s because my music is already known and liked.

On the other hand, I had no composition teacher or mentor to open doors for me and any recognition from the composition establishment was a long time coming. Had I studied composition early on, my natural voice might have been squelched considerably; while I’ve always admired individuality and even eccentricity in others, personally I want very much to be liked, and always tried to please my teachers. In retrospect, I feel my particular musical training and experience was just right for me.

John Luther Adams is the first AMC President to preside over the new NewMusicBox format where postings to his monthly columns are put right on the page along with his own column. Although editor Frank Oteri deserves credit for the innovation, it is Mr. Adams who has taken hold of the opportunity and shown himself to be a sensitive, thought-provoking, and, above all, quite readable and engaging columnist. It is a shame, as he transitions to former President, that we will lose his regularity and dependability. Good luck, John, and please stay in touch in all ways you can.

Barry Drogin

While I believe composers ought to be aware and thoughtful about their art, I must admit that I feel a measure of concern about so many composers spending so much time worrying about a musical genealogy, or the comparison of American and European music. IsnÕt it especially ironic when composers emphasize their historical links to the American maverick tradition, when historical self-awareness and obsession inhibit the maverick spirit?And because I currently live in London, IÕm mighty interested when articles such as Kyle Gann’s “Tracing the History of an American Classical Tradition” seem to imply that the most interesting American composers didnÕt go to Europe. This attitude toward Europe is unfortunately not attuned to a significant phenomenon among artists; namely, that some artists find that the further they journey from the home soil, the more deeply rooted their psyche is in the elements of home. Now, those artists who, like CapoteÕs Holly Golightly, are motivated to leave home by a brand of safe-hatred, do ruffle my feathers. But I have come far from home that my imagination might be fired. When he was about my age, young William Faulkner struck out for Paris. Surely, no one can suggest that after returning home, FaulknerÕs prose didnÕt ring with a generally American, and specifically Southern tone. I have actually found here the conditions to be all more honest. Far from fitting myself into some imagined European mold, I have found a climate in which my Southern rural upbringing is (believe it or not) exotic! My teacher, Simon Bainbridge, who is sometimes called the most ÒAmericanÓ British composer, has encouraged me, saying, ÒAt the end of the day, a composer must rely on his memory and his ear.Ó And he knows and appreciates that my memory rings with Southern rural vernacular music. So, in criticizing EuropeÕs role in the lives of some artists, the critic ought to be aware of exceptions such as my self. For here I am in London, sticking out like a sore thumb with my backwoods Texas drawl, writing music with an accent just as thick as my speaking voice, and I donÕt give a damn whether it suits Europe or not.And about the musical genealogy: a wise man once said, ÒGenealogy is most important to those who havenÕt done anything for themselves.Ó

Skip La Plante Photo by Leora Codor

If there is a tradition of non-conformity, then is someone a conformist who personally maintains the non-conformist tradition?

There was a serious question as I graduated from college. Could I continue to be as I was (already a polished non-conformist as well as a skilled musician who didn’t fit comfortably into any pre-existing box) or would I have to get a real job, a real life, a real necktie, etc? As a Princeton graduate, it would have been absurdly easy to join a bank or a brokerage firm. Perhaps I could have found some sort of habitable Ivesian locale in corporate America. But it seemed like a last resort, the thing to do only when all else failed. It offered survival, but nothing else I wanted.

How little did I care about money? Once I found a challenging job where I could get paid a tiny amount, I chose to adjust my life to fit that amount rather than to give up the interesting work. I lived on a budget comparable to Thoreau at Walden for about three times as long.

What I got in return was artistic freedom. I got to play a lot of music, to write a lot of music, to discover a whole musical civilization in the instruments that can be built out of the stuff other people throw away.

I suppose I fit the definition of maverick as well as anybody. It mostly comes from making decisions based on what I wanted to do, such as that one and then accepting, embracing, and using the results to whatever extent is possible. My life became as much about finding wonderful things to do musically. It seems inevitable that I would turn to building musical instruments out of trash. The economics are right. The possibility of heading into uncharted artistic terrain is right. Of course this life has limits, but all lives have limits, just different ones.

The strange part is that, at some point, I realized my real job was just to keep doing what I was doing for as long as I could. My life itself was a kind of art piece. It is an example to help others evaluate their own lives. Maybe I’ve made some stuff along the way that people can think about and smile. Maybe I’ve made as much of a difference as the ant who walked all the way around the walls of the city of Ur 4286 years ago. This is really too cosmic to worry about.

It always struck me that the art facilitators—the grant givers, performance space controllers, and assorted muck-a-mucks had their own agenda (how could they not?). All I do is run a little store (even if the whole thing is inside my head the IRS thinks it is a store—you wanna argue with them?) full of musical stuff (compositions mostly but also a diverse hoard of musical instruments and the knowledge of how to both build and use these tools) that the facilitators can shop in. Occasionally they find something useful in my store but often they don’t. Some merchants would try and fill the store with stuff the facilitators would buy. But I don’t want to try to get inside somebody else’s head. I’d rather fill the store with stuff that I think is interesting and hope that other people also find it interesting. At least this way I know I can be consistent.

Since my little store never had any money, there was never an advertising budget. The only way I could let people know I even had such an enterprise was by making stuff that people would remember and talk about. That’s a little bit of a lie. I had enough money to eat as much ice cream as I wanted to and to take long backpacking trips frequently enough so that I could pretend I was only slightly insane the rest of the time. I just didn’t have enough money to do anything else. I wasn’t going to risk either of these to advertise instead.

At one point, I was offered money if I would just use the money to make the store more businesslike. What that really meant was that I would need to spend much more time making the store more like other stores. Since I already knew that the store could only succeed if it was full of interesting stuff, really different stuff, it wasn’t much of a temptation. One course of action depended on an external reference I didn’t understand (and knew I never really would), the other just depended on following my instincts about what was interesting.

It seems kind of weird that a society that teaches maxims like “know thyself!” finds it strange when someone attempts to fashion a life using that knowledge.

Thomas C. Duffy Photo by Harold Shapiro

I generally compose program music, designed to both captivate the attention and interest of the audience/musicians, and to connect music and subject matters far from music. I use the same orchestrational techniques as the great contemporary composers, but I tailor them to fit the capabilities of young musicians. This combination of simplified techniques and extra-accessible programs often places my music outside of the parameters of progressive contemporary music.

The art of Norman Rockwell may not hang in the world’s modern art museums, but it is found in many, many American homes. I would be happy if my music met with a similar fate.