Category: Columns

• Don’t like the kind of music a particular critic is rooting for? “I recommend not listening to it,” advises Kyle Gann.
• If your readers are not so easily pacified, however, you might take a lesson from Anne in the art of the disguise.
• Feeling anxiety every time you glance over at your ever-expanding CD tower? Robert Tear feels your pain and offers a suggestion: Take five years off. [via On An Overgrown Path] Meanwhile, you might take up knitting.
• If the idea of a music hiatus leaves you shaking, you might stock up on CDs: Drastically reduced and free music is on offer today in Internetland.
• Move over Eno—Robert Fripp is apparently recording new sound cues for Vista, the upcoming Windows operating system. Sneak into the studio here. [via Disquiet.com]
• And shhh…tomorrow night it’ll be just you and Phil and 100 of your closest friends. Also, for you “Dancing with the Stars” reality T.V. freaks, we hear someone will also be leading Elliott Sharp out on the dance floor.

I would like to compliment you on the article by Belinda Reynolds, “Writing Music for Young Players.”

Ms. Reynolds opens a very large subject relevant to our age in American music education. Band, orchestra, and choral music for children to perform should be written by the best composers, and in fact most of it today is written by non-composers. One day these children will be voters and legislators and will be asked to decide how public money should be spent. Their memories of the music they performed as kids in school will too often be dismal, raising the question whether music education in the schools is worthwhile. This is happening already as we continually see cutbacks in our music education programs.

I recently wrote a piece of music commissioned by the BandQuest program of the American Composers Forum and found the project to be enlightening, challenging, and indeed exciting. I also found that I wasn’t prepared for the task, since my experience writing for amateurs was virtually nil. I learned a lot in the process that in fact applies to writing music for professionals.

We are quick to criticize music educators, but many idealistic and highly competent teachers are out there who need our help and would welcome the music we would write for them. Children deserve the very best, and they trust that the music they are given to perform is the best that is available. Let’s live up to that trust by proving them right.

Brava to Belinda Reynolds for seeing this need and responding to it.

Blogging was one of the hot topics at the conferences for both the International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) and Chamber Music America (CMA) in New York City this past week. Once a word like “blog” winds up in the title of one of the sessions at a major music industry conference, it’s probably a sure sign that the phenomenon has entered the mainstream culture. But, if something’s entered the mainstream, it’s also usually a sure sign that it’s not on the radar of most folks who operate outside the mainstream.

This time around, however, the reverse seems to be true. Our community seems very open to the idea of blogging. Every time you turn on a computer someone else seems to have their own blog. Often before people have a chance to let me know they have a blog, I stumble upon it on my own.

DIY journalism has been the way to give voice to our music in a media environment that seems only to care about what sells this week. The blog has been a way for individual composers and performers to call attention to what they do and explain it on their own terms. Plus, there’s no editor breathing down their necks telling them that their readers won’t understand terms like “metrical modulation” or even contrapuntal. But that said, there’s also no editor breathing down their necks to tell them how fugue is spelled or what year Charles Ives was born. There’s also no one writing paychecks for all of this time-consuming writing, as Jazz Journalist Association President Howard Mandel pointed out in a panel I joined him on for IAJE.

It’s the proverbial double-edged sword. Thanks to the Internet, you can now get the word out better than ever before about anything you want, but there’s no guarantee that anyone will read it, or to guarantee to readers that what they are reading will be correct information. And, for the most part, no one’s paying for it.

To this day, I’ve resisted having a personal blog even though my comments here might partially fit the bill, and I occasionally post to Sequenza21 when I feel the inspiration. After all, I sit in front of a computer every day of the work week writing and editing text about music. The last thing I want to do on my so-called “own time” is more of the same, right?

But it’s terribly addictive. To meet a musical composition deadline in December, I was waking up at 6:30 a.m. every morning to compose. Wouldn’t you know it, every morning when I turned on my computer, before opening up Sibelius, I logged into Sequenza21 and the NewMusicBox Chatter page to see if there were any new comments posted overnight. These tools have helped make us more of a community. But they are just tools, and in and of themselves, they are not the community.

• The iPod generation (quite the cringe-inducing moniker already, ain’t it?) is either saving or killing music.
• When the planned 639-year-long performance of Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible) began in the small German town of Halberstadt, we humbly suggested a little competition with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s seemingly unkillable feline Broadway hit. On the occasion of the sounding of the second Cage chord, Sir Andrew also ups the ante.
• NPR helps us figure out just what the hell the conductor is doing up there.
• Alex Ross and Google spend some quality time together, and our lust for lists is sated for another day.
• And for all us creative types who thought we were so cool flashing our titanium PowerBooks while we orchestrated on the playground…I mean, at the coffee shop, well damn. How many days till next Christmas?

“Inscrutable” –The Buffalo News, 1998
“Distracting” –Twentieth Century Music, 1998
“Too sophisticated to be called New Age” –NRC Handelsblad, 2000
“Easily written…intelligent chill-out” –Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 2004
“Other works, by Claude Vivier and Randy Nordschow” –The New York Times, 2005
“by Randy Nordschow” –The Washington Post, 2005

This is a sampling of some of the things music critics have written about my work. Notice any patterns? While the Europeans think I’m some sort of Brain Eno figure, for the most part the American coverage these days seems to exhibit a profound lack of adjectives compared to eight years ago. I don’t regularly follow music journalism as closely as I should, but I have noticed that opinion has practically been neutered and description is now the new black, as far as the way modern composition is covered. Are the music journalists afraid of us composers, or was everything just a little bit edgier a decade ago?

New music practitioners put a lot of weight on pedigree and academic rhetoric. Funny, considering the music critics themselves don’t really need any lofty credentials from an ivory tower. If only I had a nickel for every time I heard a composer question a critic’s intelligence. As I learned last week, critics don’t always know everything about their area of expertise and besides, how is that even possible?

I don’t mind the discrepancy—I’d rather have a music critic who can string together words coherently, without knowing the proper way to scribble down a Landini cadence. Words are what they know, so give us words…

Like the rest of us, both artists and critics are fallible. That’s why I find it odd that anyone can harbor ill feelings towards this supposedly opposed faction. Sometimes critics can sermonize on an issue for too long—I love you Jerry Saltz (a man who knows his adjectives and ain’t afraid to use ’em), and I agree that women are sorely underrepresented in the art world, and love the fact that you constantly remind us of this fact, but I’m guilty of wanting to read about something else for a change—and composers can over-proselytize musically as well. That said, I want critics to clue me into their gut reactions and their subsequent ruminations about new work. I wish music critics would, yes, describe the music, but not stop there. I want to hear their assessments, their judgments, prejudices, and opinions. I wouldn’t expect anything less from any composer’s music.

We’ve argued back and forth about whether or not our music has or even should have a name so many times; far be it from me to return to the U.S. this week and start up that old hobbyhorse again. However, a similar pet peeve of mine has never quite made it to this debating stage: Namely, why do so many composers still insist on numbering their works rather than naming them?

Sure, we’re no longer living in the era of Haydn, Beethoven, and the gang where everything was either Piano Sonata No. 28 or Symphony No. 6, but this strangest of naming games has yet to completely disappear from our collective reflexes. For the record, I don’t intend to criticize folks who write piano sonatas or symphonies—I’ve even penned a couple of piano sonatas myself, though I’ve yet to attempt a symphony—but why must they be named as if they were volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica?

There are even folks around who aren’t writing in centuries-old forms who feel the need to create series of pieces and number them: Synchronisms, Extensions, etc. Why? Music seems to be the biggest offender of all the arts in this regard, perhaps because it’s the most abstract. There are abstract painters who coyly use names like Untitled No. 35—names which leave me equally cold—but when is the last time you read someone’s Novel No. 11?

Mind you, I love all this music, but I can’t quite love the names we sometimes give it, and I wonder if those names keep other people from loving it. Ironically, my favorite pieces by John Cage are the so-called “number” pieces he wrote at the end of his life. These works are simply titled after the number of people required to perform them. If there is more than one requiring the same number, Cage simply added a second number in superscript to the original number, connoting the order in which the piece was written a la the rest of the classical music tradition. But somehow these number titles, left completely by themselves, seem more elegant. Yet I still wish, especially since he was such an accomplished poet and prose stylist, he had taken the opportunity to come up with something more verbally compelling.

In Imperial China, families named their sons and daughters by number in the order in which they were born, but how many people besides George Foreman would do that to their kids these days?

During a sudden fit of procrastination, I surfed over to New York-media-gossip blog Gawker and stumbled upon the New York Sun‘s article titled “Arts Journalism Students Take Manhattan.” Hmm, could this have something to do with our brand spanking new intern? Yup. Anna Reguero, whose name you might see pop up in places all over NMBx in the near future, sent a last-minute invite to a coming out party of sorts for the inaugural class of the nation’s first masters degree program to focus solely on arts journalism. That’s cool. I wasn’t exactly dressed for evening cocktail hour—when am I ever?—but hey, let’s go anyway. Luckily I wasn’t the only awkward looking chap in the crowd.

Among us was a rather out-of-place looking guy, press badge exposed, pen and notebook in hand, making the rounds—very thoroughly, I might add. It appeared he was actually reporting on the reporters. That stealthy guy turned out to be none other than the writer New York Sun readers know as “The Knickerbocker”. Okay, maybe he wasn’t the one out of place—after all, the entire room was crammed with editors, reporters, and journalism students—perhaps I was the odd man out here. I never thought of myself as a journalist. It’s never been a goal or passion of mine. Really, I’m just a guy who writes about music sometimes in order to feed a nasty composing habit. In any case, I’m certainly not confused or in denial about one point: I rarely pass up opportunities for free cocktails and hor d’oeuvres. Hence, I found myself adrift among the sea of art critics and budding young journalists inside Syracuse University’s swanky alumni building on 61st Street.

Between sips of my “Goldring”—a prosecco and apricot juice concoction bearing the name of the arts patron and University trustee who funded the journalism program—I was confronted by a small army of bright-eyed students more than eager to pick my brain. Here for a 10-day “immersion” program, during which they meet industry types and attend cultural events throughout the city, it appeared most of the students already possessed the graceful mannerisms required to successfully navigate a networking schmooze fest such as Tuesday night’s reception. I got to chew the fat with a neophyte architecture and design critic, which gave me the chance to recall a time when I worked with A&D curator Aaron Betsky on projects by Droog and Karim Rashid—who?—and learned the class was going to see an opera—how do you pronounce it?— Wozzeck. I thought to myself: Okay, she’s ready for all the murder and madness (thank you very much local news broadcasts everywhere) but I don’t know about all that atonal music.

After having my suspicions confirmed by a destined-to-be film critic that, indeed, Crash totally sucked, I felt a nice connection with this young pack. Further conversation with those concentrating in other areas of cultural journalistic endeavors revealed some holes in their knowledge of their chosen focus. Having never taken a journalism class, I was under the impression that critics always had a firm understanding of, at the very least, the canonical history of their area of expertise. The more names I dropped, the more blank stares I received. As we put on our coats, I brought this up to my journalistic-wise colleague. She explained, quite simply, that journalists don’t have to know everything about their subject. Really, they need to know more about their readership and the ways in which they react to the arts. They only need to know enough about something to write about it, which I posit isn’t much.

By the way, I’m sure our new intern, Anna, is probably going to learn more about modern American composition than she ever bargained for. Especially with that Oteri guy hanging around the office.

For the last week, I’ve been on vacation in Hong Kong, a city which is in many ways very similar to New York: lots of tall buildings, impossible to drive or park in, but bliss for a subway-loving non-driver and a “we’re not quite the same country as the mainland” mindset.

This trip was supposed to be about having downtime and bonding with the in-laws, but you know, you can take Oteri out of the city’s music scene but you can’t really take the city’s music scene out of Oteri. So I’ve been testing pipas (hoping to bring one home), scouring the book stores and the CD shops (no records, alas, even though I spotted a sign that announced LPs from a suspended walkway in the mazelike San Francisco-esque SoHo neighborhood and my jaw almost dropped, but it was closed), went to the opera Sunday night (albeit a Cantonese opera), and was a guest on Hong Kong Radio yesterday talking about my impressions of the HK music scene.

Fans of contemporary American music might be dismayed to learn that there is very little representation of our ranks in the classical CD department of Hong Kong Records (one of the city’s best): no Cage, Carter, or Feldman, one Glass, a couple Reich, three John C. Adams, and the new Joan Tower chamber music disc (yay, Naxos!). But the scene is far worse for Hong Kong’s own contemporary composers whom I have been desperately seeking out. One CD, in the Chinese music section; nothing in the classical section.

MTT is coming to town in a month’s time with the San Francisco Symphony and will be performing Copland and Ives, which is far more than could be said for the majority of programs by the local HK Philharmonic whose seemingly unwavering commitment to the standard repertoire makes some of the more recalcitrant American orchestras seem like bastions of the avant-garde in comparison. Ditto for the radio, where during an interview ostensibly about new music I was asked to name my favorite piece by Mozart!

Unquestionably, the real musical discovery thus far was the performance of the Cantonese opera I attended: Princess Chang Ping, a whomping 4 1/2 hour, seven-act marathon composed in the 1950s but featuring a good bit of musical material that is much older. The idea of an inviolate musical work is rather alien to this tradition. But, since it is ever morphing, it is a tradition that is very much alive. The performance was sold out. And even though there was an occasional cell phone conversation or munching on roasted yams in between arias, the audience was more attentive than many a subscription-series attender back home. Some even sang along. Try that at the Met and see what happens…