Category: Articles

Neil Haverstick

Ever since I was a young boy, stylistic classifications in music have meant absolutely nothing to me. At a young age, some of my favorite pieces were Ravel‘s Bolero, “Peggy Sue” (Buddy Holly), “El Paso” (Marty Robbins), “In The Mood” (Glenn Miller), “Charley Brown” (The Coasters), and Air On A G String (Bach). That about covers the whole spectrum of Western music right there. Later in life, I became familiar with Indian, Turkish, Arabic and Chinese music as well… these styles just made my enjoyment of music that much deeper. And, as my studies increased on the guitar in my mid twenties, I often found myself playing Charlie Parker, Sabicas, Merle Travis, Albert King, and Tarrega in one day’s span. Today, as a busy freelance guitarist, I move from plays to concerts with Japanese koto players to Brazilian jazz to classic rock bands to my own microtonal compositions in 19 or 34 tones per octave…to me, there is no difference.

And, the reason there is no difference is simple: all music (all ART, period) has, at it’s core, one common denominator…self expression, telling a story. Differences in musical expression are cultural, and within a culture, regional. Béla Bartók may sound different than Hank Williams, but the end result is the same…getting a message across; one artist uses an orchestra, one uses a guitar and voice. And, it is impossible for me to say one is “better” than the other. If an Arabic musician feels sad, and a blues musician feels sad, the same emotion is being expressed; only the OUTER form is different. Therefore, in my art today, I feel quite at ease drawing on all of my life’s experiences when I express my own inner landscape. If I need to write a blues, I will…if I write for acoustic guitar and flute, that’s not an issue for me. If I am able to express myself in a true and moving way, that’s all I care about. To paraphrase Duke Ellington, there’s only two kinds of music, good and bad.

Listen to Neil Haverstick’s Microtonal Guitar Music

Erik Hoversten Photo courtesy Erik Hoversten

Despite the “classical” training we may have, all of us in Threnody Ensemble spent our formative years playing in bands. The music we make now is inextricably linked to popular music. But because we record for a “new music” label and write pieces that surpass a certain threshold of complexity, we are often viewed as “serious” musicians. Ultimately, these distinctions between “popular” and “classical” music all come down to issues of marketing and class. My goal with Threnody Ensemble is to try to complicate these categories — to force people to question the relationship between sound and its cultural signification. The most innovative music, after all, does not fit into any pre-designated categories.

I see the blurring of the boundaries between pop and classical resulting from an attempt by people such as myself to integrate disparate cultural influences into a cohesive expression of the surrounding environment. In the same way that Bhangra resulted from the children of Punjabi immigrants in the U.K. combining their cultural influences (as manifested in Brighton’s techno and their parents’ Punjabi melodies), the hybridity we are experiencing with rock and classical is fuelled by a need to express the full range of a composer’s musical experience, from the music in the concert hall to the music on the street. When I studied at Berkeley, most of the music I really cared about wasn’t even considered music by the majority of my professors, so I think this trend is a great step forward.

Listen to New Albion’s new CD of Erik Hoversten’s Threnody Ensemble

John Shiurba Photo courtesy John Shiurba

Ahh, the great divide, oh to be forever clumsily straddling the great divide. My music not only exists precisely on that divide, but seems to be more or less about being there. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard comments like your stuff is too rock for the weird music crowd, or too weird for the rock music crowd, too jazz for the…

There has never been much point for me in making a big distinction between types of music. My Stockhausen records are filed right where they belong between John Stevens and Sly & the Family Stone. I think if we have to classify music, we should refer to its cultural origin, it’s principal process (composed or improvised), and perhaps it’s time period, and characteristics (vocal, instrumental). And yet, even with sensible categories, most music of this time period, mine included, straddles the boundaries. When I write or improvise music, it all comes from the same basic musical impulses, and whether it is popular (i.e. people like it) or not, seems fairly inconsequential, and ultimately unrelated to the content of the music.

Listen to John Shiurba’s band Ebola Soup

Like many composers of my generation, I grew up playing rock ‘n roll.

As a kid, I took piano lessons, sang in choirs, and played trumpet in school bands and orchestras. But it was playing drums and singing in a series of garage bands that really got me excited about music.

My first bands covered tunes by the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Beach Boys and other big groups of the day. As time went on, we got tired of just rehashing other people’s songs and started writing a few of our own.

The deeper we got into songwriting, the more adventurous and ecumenical our listening became…Yes, Jimi Hendrix. But also John Coltrane, Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart, Ornette Coleman, Frank Zappa…

On the back of his early records, Zappa used to print this defiant little epigram:

“The present-day composer refuses to die!” – Edgard Varèse

My buddies and I would read that, scratch our heads and wonder: “Hmmm. Just who is this VaREEsee guy?”

Then one day in the local record shop (this must have been about 1967), one of us discovered one of the first Varèse discs (a mono LP). We quickly wore out the grooves.

From Zappa to Varèse, it didn’t take long for us to discover Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Partch, Oliveros, Reich, Nancarrow, and a whole new world of music.

One of the defining epiphanies of my life came when I acquired a Columbia Masterworks LP titled “Morton Feldman: The Early Years”. All I really knew about Feldman was that he was a pal of John Cage’s. But when I heard the Piece for Four Pianos, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. This music took me to a place that Pink Floyd just couldn’t go. It was right about then I decided I wanted to be a composer.

Over the past several decades, many other young musicians have made defining discoveries of their lives through recordings. With easy access to virtually the entire history of musical cultures around the world, the old categories and boundaries of style have lost most of their meaning. By now, maybe it’s all rock ‘n roll. Or better yet, maybe it’s all just music.

Composer/critic Kyle Gann writes persuasively about “totalism”, a recent trend among composers who aspire to have their cake and eat it, too. Like minimalism before it, this new music combines the accessibility and vitality of rock and the intellectual substance of classical music, but with greater sonic and rhythmic complexity than either rock or minimalism.

Composers like Eve Beglarian, Glenn Branca, Peter Garland, and Lois Vierk,

may be “iconoclasts” or “mavericks” in relation to the classical music world and commercial pop culture. But their music is close to a central part of the soul of our times.

And why can’t we have it all?

Young musicians and listeners today are increasingly sophisticated and open-eared. They don’t care much about what music is called. They care about how it sounds.

This bodes well for the future of new music.

After all, as Duke Ellington put it: “If it sounds good, it is good.”

– John Luther Adams

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

I was a teenager when punk rock exploded in New York in the late 1970s. I remember showing up to high school and watching my classmates dye their hair and put safety pins in their clothes and celebrate music, that at the time seemed nothing more than the basic I IV V of Haydn and Mozart. I wasn’t interested for the same reason I wasn’t interested in Haydn and Mozart. Growing up with a family-chosen soundtrack of swing-era pop and lite-rock ballads, I stumbled upon a different musical rebellion – the music of composers like Charles Ives, John Cage and Stockhausen, thanks to columns in the Village Voice and the then adventurous programming on WNYC-FM.

When classmates told me that the Clash were revolutionaries, I told them to check out pieces like Fontana Mix or It’s Gonna Rain and hear what revolution really sounded like. Any kind of rock music just didn’t seem rebellious enough especially since loads of people bought the albums and it was big business, even punk fit that bill from my vantage point at the time…

I went to a book signing in the Village to meet Cage in my senior year, preceded on line by a punk rocker only a few years older than me in full regalia. He literally genuflected in front of Cage saying he was responsible for everything he believed in. Cage typically remained totally calmed, but I was moved. I started seeking out this music, trying to listen to it with ears uninfluenced by music teachers who derided rock as simplistic and stupid. After all, these same teachers thought I’d do better as a fledgling composer analyzing Mozart string quartets than Gesang der Jünglinge or In C and I already knew in my heart that they were wrong. Fancying myself an anarchist at heart, it was initially difficult for me to get past the assumption that anything created by a group of people rather than an individual could be radical. It seems laughable to me now but many people still carry this prejudice.

Twenty years later, the walls have definitely crumbled, some would say to the point that alternative rock music has gained the intellectual upper hand with smart young audiences for whom adventurous so-called classical music isn’t even on their radar screens. At the same time, there is still a divide between how different music is organized in record shops, online CD emporia and in print journalism. While a hip altrock publication like The Wire interviews electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick, the categories on Amazon.com are clearly delineated between Classical Music and Popular Music (which is supposed to represent every else from Britney Spears and Billy Joel to Sun Ra and Throbbing Gristle!), and the Music Critics Association of North America is only open to critics who cover classical music.

This month we talked to Gary Lucas, an extraordinarily difficult to categorize composer and guitarist who has worked with everyone from Captain Beefheart to Leonard Bernstein to Joan Osborne. In keeping with the group spirit of rock for this month’s HyperHistory, we’ve abandoned our usual single-auteur approach and offer an overview of 10 bands that challenge the notion that rock isn’t serious experimental music by the NewMusicBox band of Jason Gross and Steve Smith.

We’ve asked David Borden, Diamanda Galas, Neil Haverstick, Erik Hoversten and John Shiurba, each of whom create music that is very difficult to categorize, where they see themselves on the so-called classical-popular divide. And we ask you to comment on whether there is any point on dividing music into genres in our post-Cage musical community.

Christopher Rouse Photo by Alex Irvin, courtesy Aspen Music Festival

I think the Pulitzer can have a variety of effects on a career. In my own case, I don’t believe it changed much; the number of commissions and performances of my music have remained about the same in my pre-Pulitzer and post-Pulitzer periods. However, I feel that the Prize, with its concomitant cachet, HAS opened a few doors for me outside of the strictly “classical” music world.

[Hear a sample of Christopher Rouse’s Pulitzer Prize winning piece in our Sonic Gallery of the Pulitzer Prize.]

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

Over the years, I have frequently bemoaned the fact that there is no Nobel Prize for Music. While only in my most musically zealous moments I’d claim that musical contributions are as significant as strides toward world peace, even in my soberest moments I know in my heart that musical contributions are at least as significant as literary ones and literature is my second love. The Nobel Prize has introduced me along with people from around the world to many an unfamiliar writer, often the Prize is a guarantor that the works of a foreign author whose works have not appeared in English will finally be translated. But what about music, that so-called universal language, which does not need translation in order to reach all of us…

We have made up for the lack of a Nobel Prize in Music with a variety of lesser accolades, many of which are described in Adam B. Silverman’s HyperHistory this month. Chief among American musical composition awards in renown is probably the Pulitzer Prize, an award initially established for Journalism during the First World War and later extending its domain to literature, theater, and finally music in the mid 1940s. Although the Pulitzer in Music has been awarded to many important composers and to works which have gone on to become part of the canon of American classical music (e.g. Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Ives’s Third Symphony, Barber’s Vanessa, two of Carter’s string quartets) and many of today’s most visible figures include a Pulitzer among their honors (David Del Tredici, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Christopher Rouse, Aaron Jay Kernis, Wynton Marsalis…) But there have been many Pulitzer Prize winning works that have receded into reportorial oblivion. (When’s the last time you’ve heard John La Montaine’s Piano Concerto or Douglas Moore’s opera Giants in the Earth?) And several recent prize-winning pieces, including three from the past decade, have never even been recorded (Shulamit Ran’s Symphony, George Walker’s Lilacs, Wayne Peterson’s The Face of the Night, The Heart of the Dark…), which begs the question: Does the Pulitzer Prize ultimately have any relevance?

The list of great American composers who never won the Pulitzer Prize is even more daunting than the list of those who won – Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Andrew Imbrie, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Ornette Coleman… In recent years, the Pulitzer Prize in Music has come under attack for being an “old boys’ club” impervious to music beyond its stylistic prejudices, and a quick survey of all past winners will reveal that no self-published composition has ever won the award and most award-winners have been based in the East Coast. At the same time, although it may seem obvious, it is important to note that the only pieces eligible to win are pieces that are actually submitted and if you’re self-published, no one’s going to do it for you.

What are we to make of this year’s winner, Lewis Spratlan, a composer well outside the usual circles who has been based at Amherst College for the past 30 years and whose winning work, the second act of an opera, was composed over 22 years ago? There has been some banter in the music community about there being a connection between Spratlan’s winning the award and the fact that Gunther Schuller, Spratlan’s teacher at Yale as well as the founder of Margun Music, his publisher, was the chairman of this year’s Pulitzer committee), but after several hours in the company of Lew Spratlan I am convinced that he is not an “insider” in any way. Of course the line between insider and outsider can be very blurry as he admits in the conversation we had with him at Amherst which we offer here in a complete transcription with QuickTime streaming video excerpts. How does winning the Pulitzer Prize affect your career as a composer? We asked Wayne Peterson, Christopher Rouse, Charles Wuorinen and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and received our typical “Hymn and Fuguing Tune” variety of responses. John Luther Adams would like to know what non-winning pieces of music you think should have won the Pulitzer Prize.

And if you thought this covers all there is to cover about music composition prizes, there are announcements about even more additional prizes in this month’s news including information about the 1999 Serge Koussevitzky Awards, the Ernst Von Siemens Foundation, the Philadelphia Orchestra Centennial Composition Competition, the 2000 ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, and more… Of course, there is still lots herein about great pieces of American music that haven’t been acknowledged with big, prestigious awards, such as a fascinating array of new recordings and concerts all over the map.