Classical Pontifications with Professor Heebie McJeebie

Professor McJeebie's Guilty Pleasures

2008-05-05T01:28:00.005-04:00

Professor McJeebie has been tagged by the young whipper-snapper, Molly Sheridan, who, despite her comments in this interview, has now started her own blog.

The rules of the meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

One of my guilty pleasures as a seasoned and well-respected composer is the occasion to spend some time surreptitiously with the series of composer-oriented romance novels by the writer known as "Maestro Bater." His latest is called Ictus Firmus .

It was the most sensual choral concert she had ever experienced. And as she listened to the prepubescent vibrations of the children's orgiastic unisons, she thought back to her childhood. She remembered how she would take her clothes off at the doctor's office, thinking, "My body is changing, and I don't want anybody else to see it."

I am tagging music students who maintain blogs, since they seem so determined to ignore their studies and procrastinate:

Ben Moh
Zachary Toporek
北京女孩儿
Jason Heath
Nameless Postmodernist

McJeebie in North Korea

2008-03-08T13:59:00.001-05:00

I am pleased to announce that I will be taking my TANDY Virtual Orchestra to the needy citizens of North Korea, following in the footsteps of Maestro Loren Maazel and the New York Philharmonic. Thanks to a generous grant from the Universal Music Foundation, the communist aristocracy and corporate investors who oversee North Korea's slave trade will be exposed to the complexities of computer music. In many ways, a TANDY composer is like a communist dictator. The worker-computer submits to the will and the cultivated intellect of the composer, and the results benefit the entire human race. I will be composing a new piece entitled "Progressive Variations on a Proliferation Theme" on the special occasion of this North Korean concert.

In Memoriam - Tipsy Wonkersen

2008-02-28T13:52:00.003-05:00

Tipsy Wonksersen was the man who unwittingly started last week's three-alarm fire at the Hotel Cadillac, but he was so much more than that.

Tipsy was a man who believed that composing music should take precedence over the nonsense of everyday life. It's no secret that he never bathed. He claimed to use deodorant, but we all knew it was just that "magic stone" kind from the hippie stores.

Tipsy would search for his muse in the shadows and back-alleys of Rochester -- the occasional abandoned automobile, the dumpsters behind The Brasserie. But he did more than just study the unfortunates. He believed in taking inspiration away from them and using his music to tell their stories. Imposing the rigor and formality of classical music onto their haphazard lives, Tipsy gave them a gift that only the astute composer can give -- the gift of a masterpiece!

From this day forward, the Hotel Cadillac will provide an annual Wonkersen Scholarship to support the costs of hiring an unpaid intern for my Composer Isolation Chamber.

Thank you, Tipsy, for all you've given us. It is a blessing that your music will live far beyond your mortal flesh.

Libertarians Unite!

2008-02-27T13:49:00.003-05:00

As promised, I am posting an excerpt from the symphonic tone-poem I composed for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign. For the purposes of maintaining copyright infringement, I am using my original title, "Libertarians Unite!"

Click here to listen.

In this segment, one can hear the ominous dissonances of terrorism building to a crescendo which is then thwarted by the tip-toeing frolics of a liberal elite, represented by the flute. Fortunately, Senator McCain steps in before things get too pretty. He is represented by the percussion and the "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" theme in the brass.

As the piece progresses, Senator McCain allows Libertarians to live side by side as competitive individuals, enjoying the best of the best while leaving the rest to the rest. The Senator thanked me for the composition and recommended that I secure an Eastern European orchestra that would be willing to record the symphonic work if I can acquire $5,000 in the next five days.

That's where you come in! All you have to do is send a PayPal donation in the mail to

Prof. Heebie McJeebie
Hotel Cadillac
Room 469
45 Chestnut Street
Rochester, NY, 14604

Many thanks, dear readers!

The Professor Returns

2008-02-19T17:04:00.006-05:00

Patient Readers, I have returned to the blogosphere after a prolonged absence during which I served as Technology Consultant for John McCain's presidential campaign. Despite the protestations of my German role model -- the feminist-in-wolf's-clothing, William Osborne -- I chose to suspend my bloggership until all partisan political business subsided.

Next week, I will post the recording of McCain's presumptive, symphonic theme, composed by yours truly. The McCain campaign rejected my original title, "Libertarians Unite!," in favor of the more preemptive title, "A Symphonic Ode to the United States: We Shall Never Surrender."

In other news, I was not at the Hotel Cadillac during today's two-alarm fire, but I believe I know who was responsible. There's only one person who would run his air-conditioning unit during such inclimate weather. My colleague, Professor Tipsy Wonkersen -- most famous for his electronic composition that plays constantly near the Rochester waterfall -- sacrificed his life in order to keep his Casiophonic Water Organs in an always-frigid environment. May he rest in peace.

UNKNOWN MASTERS #2 - Knisha Vløgstøffer

2007-07-18T12:59:00.000-04:00

I first met Knisha Vløgstøffer in my Composer Isolation Chamber back in 1994. She was the cleaning lady. She still makes a living that way, but I've taken her under my wing to cultivate in her a sense of compositional astution akin to my own. Over decades of strenuous training, Knisha has finally composed her first piece, MACHINATIONS for Penny Whistle and Tape. I'm pleased to host an excerpt from that piece on Classical Pontifications:

MACHINATIONS for Penny Whistle and Tape

Professor McJeebie: Why did you write a piece for penny whistle instead of a more virtuosic, traditional instrument?
Vløgstøffer: I am simple cleaning lady. I write the simple instruments. It have desired many times for to play the penny whistle, like a dog desires to have a dog food. I make the penny whistle to express for myself.
Professor McJeebie: Why do you feel the need to express yourself?
Vløgstøffer: Only the penny whistle feels the need. The tape is no expressive.
Professor McJeebie: So, the tape part is where you find a true love for modern composition?
Vløgstøffer: Yes, sir.
Professor McJeebie: I'm sure our listeners will have a lot of questions for you after they listen to the excerpt. What would you like to say to answer their questions?
Vløgstøffer: Yes, sir, I have much so to say for the people who listen. The music for their ears and eyes is like a present from God. He gives to us a composition just like he gives unto to us a child, the baby Jesus. This composition for me is not less than the baby Jesus, the Messiah, but it is up to each and everybody to accept Jesus for themself. Just like that, they will want to accept Him and with my composition.
Professor McJeebie: Thank you, Mrs. Vløgstøffer, for the wonderful spiritual femininity you bring to modern composition. I'm sure our audience will appreciate your soft touch as much as I do.
Vløgstøffer: God bless you, Professor.

Professor McJeebie Declines White House Invitation

2007-07-05T13:35:00.001-04:00

Dear President Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the Patriotic Computer Music Festival on September 24. In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of having 85,000 people listen to my Etude for Computer #142 - Faith in the Unheard is a magnificent prospect, especially in light of my recent community-building educational efforts in the tribal regions of Africa through which I exposed the ignorant tribespeople (especially the children) to the complicated cerebrations of computer-centric composition.

As a professor at the Hotel Cadillac, I have taught in many different settings: my office, a variety of classrooms, and even a lecture hall. As a teacher, I have created a lasting influence on the young men and slightly older women who wish to carry on my legacy.

When you have witnessed an African tribesperson - someone who doesn't understand civilized music in the least - learn to accurately notate the wheezing howls of his ritualistic ceremonies for inclusion in the Norton Anthology of Historically Accurate Transcriptions -- when you have seen this kind of progress, you can't help but wonder: Would it be better if all top-down decisions on behalf of democratic citizens are made by composers of the highest scholarly repute?

A distorted musical heritage, the dismissal of compositional counterpoint, and the general acceptance of the untruths of so-called "arrangements" -- all of these lamentable hand-me-downs have been embraced by your administration, with the utmost lack of respect for academic integrity.

So many American professors who had once felt pride in our country's musical reputation - at a diverse range of elite institutions such as Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Juilliard, the Hotel Cadillac and even its sister school at Eastman - now feel anguish and shame. They are ashamed of the current regime's use of virtual orchestras at presidential inaugurations, studio musicians at white house galas, and composers who are forced to "arrange" patriotic warhorses every time there is a pyrotechnic display.

This kind of musical ignorance must end. If it is not too late for Africa, then it is not too late for the United States of America.

Respectably,
Heebie McJeebie
TANDY Professor of Electronic Music
Hotel Cadillac

Epic Symphony LEAKED!

2007-06-26T10:12:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I learned that my epic opus, "A Libertarian Symphony," had been leaked on the internet. I don't know who could have done this. Certainly it wasn't me.

This kind of irresponsible downloading is what prevents young composers from listening carefully to music. If you can download a Symphony in two minutes, then why would you spend more than two minutes listening to it? Whereas, if it takes you an hour to go to the music store, browse the displays, and wait in line, then you're more likely to spend an hour listening to the Symphony.

Naturally, it wasn't me who leaked the file on the internet, but it could be costing me millions of dollars in income, not to mention bandwidth. Since I am not guilty of leaking my own music on the internet, it must have been one of my students at the Hotel Cadillac. The administrative offices, after I informed them that I could not possibly have leaked the music myself, opened an investigation. I will keep you all informed of the progress. Please email me if you'd like to serve on the jury.

The Universal Language of Music

2007-06-19T09:33:00.001-04:00

I just got back to Rochester after a month in Third-World Africa teaching young tribespeople how to listen to complicated musical compositions. The trip of African outreach and education was made possible by an Upstate Genius Grant that was awarded to me this year.

Needless to say, Africans don't use the internet, so I was unable to post to my blog while away. I returned to the U.S.A. last week, but I was ill from some foreign-born pathogens that doctors here could not identify. Serves me right for taking off my face mask when trying to communicate with the tribespeople and get them to understand English.

The difficulty of communication, especially in Third-World Africa, has led me to the conclusion that the only universal language is the language of music. For example, every tribesperson in Africa understood the basic tone of the tune, "There's a hole in my bucket, Dear Liza." They knew from the musical inflections and melodic contradictions that it was a song about conflict and disease. Even when the tune makes an appearance in my Concerto for Folk Song and Computer, with all its complexities and inaccessibilities, the tribespeople still recognize the danger. They become cautious and suspicious, just as you would be if you were scared of catching a incurable pathogen.

I plan to address these issues further in a course I'll be teaching in the fall named "The Universal Language of Music." If I play my chords right, I just might live up to the nickname my students have for me, "the Ayn Rand of electronic music."

The Isolated Composer

2007-05-09T01:51:00.000-04:00

I thought I would take a cyber-moment and pay homage to the place where I do all of my composing – my specially designed Composer Isolation Chamber in the sub-basement below the regular basement of the Hotel Cadillac. Even when I’m supposed to be teaching courses at the Hotel Cadillac’s world-renowned School for the Natural and Inhibitive Arts, I have been known to spend weeks at a time submerged in my Composer Isolation Chamber, churning out my cerebral machinations and (yes) on occasion, my classical pontifications!

I built my Composer Isolation Chamber in 1987 and stocked it with complimentary computers from the Tandy Corporation. These computers are obsolete only in the sense that there is nothing else like them! They are extraordinary sinetone-powered devices, able to execute even my most complicated musical procedures, which are beyond human capacity. I haven’t completely shut out the hustle and bustle of recitals and concerts, but, having converted this former fallout shelter into a space for creative and mathematical thinking, I need not concern myself with the inadequacies of common performing musicians.

Occasionally I allow my students to use the Composer Isolation Chamber for a small rental fee, and a prime number of them have indicated that it is indeed a fine workspace – inspiring but not necessarily in a banal, inspirational sort of way; comforting in its constant claustrophobic sameness. It is a space where a composer feels free, in part because he is confined by so many limitations. For as the great composer, Held Projansky, once said, “Music always has the potential to be free, but first it must be notated correctly.”

Poolitzer

2007-05-03T11:30:00.000-04:00

It is amusing to me, dear readers, that so many well-meaning musical citizens get so “huffy mcpuffy” about the Pulitzer Prize being awarded to a non-composer such as Ornette Coleman and his big band orchestra. The Prize itself is only $10,000, and with a required entry fee of $50 and between 100 and 200 applicants in each category, the Pultizer makes almost as much money as it gives away!

Ten thousand dollars is not a lot of money, especially for a tenured professor such as myself. And as for “honor”... well, it remains to be seen if receiving the award gets you prestige, or if being prestigious gets you the award.

Given his gambling addiction (common among jazz “improvisers”), Mr. Coleman has probably already lost the money. The Pulitzer Prize committee has squandered its well-earned entry fees by handing them over to a drunken bum. It should come as no surprise to the committee that a drunken bum who refuses to follow the rules of music composition will certainly not follow the rules of the Pulitzer Prize application process.

An Open and Shut Letter to Jeremy Denk via My Readers*

2007-04-29T09:20:00.000-04:00

*(also submitted to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Discerning Pianist magazine)

Readers, I am very aware that the blogging pianist Jeremy Denk has taken note of Unknown Master Ariodney Hussington whom I interviewed in my previous blog entry. Unfortunately, Mr. Denk does not feel that Miss Hussington's compositions are as lovely and beautiful as she is.

It should be said that Miss Hussington is not a student of mine, as some have assumed. Rather, she is one of those young people who posts her life and work on MySpace and patiently waits for the fame to come to her. That's how I found her, and I am pleased to have done my part, after spending several hours with her in my Composer Isolation Chamber, to stretch her threshold as a lady composer. Whether Mr. Denk approves of her compositions or not is irrelevant. She will continue to make music and post it on MySpace, receiving royalties every time someone (like Mr. Denk) listens to her compositions.

It should also be said that, since I have not listened to Mr. Denk's piano-playing, he may very well be a quack himself! But I suspect that he, having performed the so-called "Fiddle Concerto" by the bloke Marc O'Connor, can relate to Miss Hussington's composition, "Simpleton Pleasures." There is no simpler instrument than the fiddle.

As he criticizes the work of a beautiful and attractive composer like Miss Hussington, Mr. Denk would do best to remain aware that his mind is limited, just as many of his piano performances are limited to only eighty-eight keys.

Unknown Masters - Ariodney Hussington

2007-04-21T15:38:00.000-04:00

Readers, this is the first installment of a series entitled Unknown Masters in which I conduct a short interview with some of the most unrecognized composers of our time and provide samples of their compositions via PayPal. The first composer I’d like to feature is Ariodney Hussington, a young lady whose music I first encountered on the world wide web a few months ago. As you’ll read below in our transcribed interview, Miss Hussington is interested in the fusion of classical music with folk music and African-American jazz rhythms. Here are two excerpts of music from her compositions:

Chamber Symphony No. 6 – “Simpleton Pleasures” (mp3 )

Chamber Symphony No. 13 – “Jazz Improvisations” (mp3 )

Prof. McJeebie: Miss Hussington, tell us about the musical structures behind your Chamber Symphony No. 6.
Ariodney Hussington: First, I’d like to thank you for having me.
McJeebie: You’re welcome.
[silence]
Hussington: Well, with Simpleton Pleasures I’m successfully combining the vernacular appeal of melodic simplicity and harmonic redundancy with the complicated tonal modulations of twentieth-century music and the rhythmic abstruseness of the French Overture, an often overlooked isorhythmic technique composers use to make rhythms bouncier and more angular than they are to begin with.
McJeebie: These tonal modulations you refer to, they happen every eight bars or so. It’s a remarkable shift in the music, making the simple tune sound very modern and shocking.
Hussington: Exactly! This is to convey the tragic and dirty lives of many simpleton people.
McJeebie: What composers, besides yourself, do you pay homage to in this symphony?
Hussington: The second tonal modulation happens one measure later than the first modulation, creating a kind of phase shift in the style of composer Steve Reich. Also in the second modulation, the bassoons get into that Rite of Spring range which is an homage to Stravinksy. And the fourth and final modulation returns us to the original tonal center, creating a form of A-B-C-A first utilized by the composer Ferde Grofé.
McJeebie: The clarinet trills remind me of Richard Stoltzman.
Hussington: Absolutely.
McJeebie: Let’s move on to Chamber Symphony No. 13. Were you influenced by the African-American rhythms of jazz?
Hussington: Yes, of course, I love African-American jazz, and the compositions of Stan Kenton and Dave Brubeck in particular.
McJeebie: It seems that you’ve introduced an odd instrument into the chamber ensemble – a trapped set of drums. What made you decide to use such a non-classical instrument?
Hussington: Originally, I wanted to use a saxophone, but I thought a drum set would be more authentic to jazz. But, unlike most jazz composers, I don’t allow the players to improvise. I’ve notated all of their parts, which allows me to fine-tune the overall sound I’m looking for. For example, I’ve found that using accent marks on the offbeats really enhances the swing feel and makes for a decidedly un-classical atmosphere. What I’m going for with the drum set – and with the flutter-tongued trumpet as well – is a sound-world in which all listeners can relate to what I have to say.
McJeebie: Why is the piece called Jazz Improvisations if there's no improvisation?
Hussington: There is improvisation, but it happens in the composer's head, and, actually, it already happened. It was in the past. So what you're hearing is a sort-of simultaneous compilation of all kinds of different improvisations that the composer was able to transcribe quickly.
McJeebie: There is also a French Horn part, hardly a common instrument at, say, the Blue Note Café or Spanish Harlem.
Hussington: I included a French horn part, but I’m not using the French Overture technique. As a matter of fact, in concert performances of Jazz Improvisations, the horn player is asked to tap his feet in a shuffle rhythm. When the audience sees the French horn player dancing, they usually get the hint that they’re not listening to classical music.
McJeebie: These two excerpts have fascinated me for minutes on end. Thank you so much for sharing your musical talents with us. I'm sure I speak for myself when I say that my readers and I wish you the best of luck with your compositions.
Hussington: Thank you, Professor. I’ve been a long-time admirer of yours and am honored to be the first composer featured in this series.
McJeebie: Which of my compositions do you find the most interesting?
Hussington: I think my favorite is Etude for Computer No. 17 Version D. There are so many wonderful etudes, though, it’s hard to choose a favorite.
McJeebie: Well then, why don’t you tell me what several of your favorite compositions are?
Hussington: I really like them all.
McJeebie: I understand. Thank you, Miss Hussington.
Hussington: You’re welcome, Professor.

Upstate Genius Grant

2007-04-05T13:25:00.000-04:00

Readers, I am pleased to notify you that I have once again been nominated for the Upstate Genius Grant in Music Composition. Once every so often, on a regular basis, a panel of distinguished colleagues meets to select possible recipients of the award from among their distinguished colleagues. Generally, a few months pass before the final winner is selected through a delicate and rigorous process known as intellectually osmosified matriculationism.

I have received this grant many times and look forward to the possibility of receiving it again. Awards like these make it possible for me to continue earning a Professor’s salary while simultaneously taking a sabbatical during which I commission myself to compose a new magnum opus. I may also use the award to travel to impoversished nations such as Africa where modern composers are seen as gods by the locals. I often make a good deal of money selling CDs of my computer compositions to the African people.

I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate the panel on its continuing reliability and pleasantly predictable recommendations.

Catchy Mantras with Belinda Reynolds

2007-04-03T13:26:00.000-04:00

Thank you, readers, for your patience during this very difficult hiatus. I am happy to return to the blogosphere with more regular posts now that my legal battle with SoftBunnies&HardNannies VideoProductions has ended.*

Let me begin by saying that I have been thoroughly inspired by the woman-composer Belinda Reynolds, who blogs about music and education over at New Music Box. Reynolds believes that young people will learn to appreciate modern music by having mantras hurled repeatedly at them preceded by the words “Remember, children.”

Examples of some Reynolds mantras are “Remember, children: Dissonance is just consonance taken out of context,” and “Remember, children: If Popular Music is to be noteworthy, it must first be notated.”

These mantras are not only true, they are catchy! Surely children can appreciate the depth of these statements after they are entertained by their catchiness. Best wishes to Miss Reynolds as she continues the kind of music-education work best handled by women composers like herself.

*The court ruled in my favor, concluding that the company used computer-generated noises that sounded a lot like my music as its theme song. As some of you may know, SoftBunnies&HardNannies VideoProductions distributes snuff films, and I do not wish my music to be associated with the objectification of women! As part of the ruling in my favor, I will receive backroyalties from their sales.

Launching into the Counterstream

2007-03-14T12:39:00.000-04:00

This morning I was contemplating whether to wait until XFM and Sirius merge before listening to any radio broadcasts. Just as I was about to swear off all radio until the arrival of TANDYStream, I received an announcement from the folks at American Music Center (along with a reminder to renew my membership) promoting the official launch of its new radio station, Counterstream Radio, this Friday, March 16, at 3pm EST.

The launch is paraded along various modems and wiretapping devices with a "conversation" involving the nonsense-syllables of singer Meredith Monk and the star-power of Icelandic seductress Bj§rk whose musical noodlings and unpronounceable instruments have attracted quite a following in certain circles.

The AMC announcement claims that this is the first time Monk and Bj§rk will meet in person – a boldfaced lie! Granted, Bj§rk’s Hollywood career is based on lies and deception, and Monk’s words (or nonwords) have to be taken with a grain of salt, but I find it difficult to imagine that Monk is mistaken in this interview when she claims that she and Bj§rk first met in May of 2005. Nevertheless, Bj§rk has been known to use a look-alike when required to attend more highbrow functions, and Ms. Monk may have been unaware that the person she was speaking to was actually Misako Uno (see photo).

But radio has always been about misinformation and soundbytes, and what better way to introduce so-called “eclectic” programming than to prance about without concern for the truth! After all, when a composer writes a piece of music, he does not consider whether or not his music is true. Perhaps “writes” is too strong a word for some of the Counterstream regulars like DJ Spooky and Kid 606, not to mention two hours of “jazz improvisation” every day. At any rate, truth is for accountants and statisticians, not composerly artists!

Well, I attempted to listen to Counterstream Radio’s programming this morning (which I suppose is “unofficial” until March 16 at 3pm), and let me tell you: I have never been barraged with so much unfamiliar music in my entire career as a Professor of Composition. I caught the last two minutes of Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organs, which was plenty of time for me to “get it," but after that piece, the playlist was comprised of music that I had never heard before! The single exception was the flittering cashmere-scarf-like music of the elegant elitist, Richard Danielpour. It was nice to see his sensibly named Urban Dances among such sophomoric titles as Journey Cake and Molto Moderato.

I’m not sure what Counterstream Radio’s policy is regarding submissions, but I’m planning to submit my entire oeuvre for their consideration and I’d encourage all fair and balanced composers to do the same!

NOTE: The first ten minutes of Counterstream Radio are free, but after that you must disable all virus software and firewalls and send an email to AMC@databases.biz with your Social Security Number and last name. Pending approval, you will then be able to listen indefinitely, so long as you don’t shut down your computer in which case you have to repeat the procedure.

Prof. McJeebie Quoted in Recent News Story

2007-02-26T15:01:00.000-05:00

From a recent article reprinted today in the Hotel Cadillac’s student newspaper, The Weekly Rate:

IS THE F.B.I. TARGETTING YOUNG COMPOSERS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC?

Despite accumulating circumstantial evidence to the contrary, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has consistently denied allegations that it cooperates with Hotel Cadillac and Eastman School of Music security officers in Rochester, NY, to keep tabs on young composers of electronic music. "We have detectives who monitor musicians in general and report all incidents regarding the music industry,” says Agent Rudy Rubato, a spokesperson for the Bureau, “but we do not single out individual composers, and even if we did, I’m sure we would not focus on electronic music composers."

Heebie McJeebie, the well-endowed TANDY Professor of Electronic Music at the Hotel Cadillac, is an outspoken critic of both the F.B.I. and young composers. He says the police need to be more aware of the “very serious issues facing composers of very serious music. If they’re only watching musicians, they’re watching the wrong people. Performing musicians almost always obey the laws because they’ve been taught since a very young age to respect the way things are. But composers – especially the younger ones – it’s as if they’ve just moved here from a foreign country like Amsterdam. They’re smoking marijuana and riding their bicycles on the wrong side of the street at all hours of the night.”

Most young composers don’t see it that way. They believe the F.B.I. is spying on composers, and that the surveillance creates a false paranoia. They cite the recent circus that erupted around teen-idol composer Missy Mazzoli who recently shaved her head and locked herself in an insulated soundproof booth at a recording studio in Beverly Hills, CA. She returned to public life just a few days later, and then announced a performance on March 20th of her conspicuously titled composition Shy Girl Shouting Music for soprano and chamber ensemble.

Some young composers are visibly hostile toward the F.B.I. The irate and disheveled composer Tristan Perich recently organized an all-night “Log-In,” during which he blogged, "A very dangerous precedent is being set, and composers of electronic music don’t believe in precedents!” As I challenged him on this blanket statement, Perich lost patience with my questions and yelled incomprehensibly over his one-bit cell phone. Later, he explained on his social networking site, “Composers must avoid making strong commitments and setting precedents. That’s why we stopped using tape, and now we use only digital playback.” (It turns out that digital playback is often still referred to as “tape” in order to foil authorities.)

Pilate Palmer is an attorney representing two Rochester composers who allege police harassment in connection with their recent arrests. Palmer questions the effectiveness of collecting data on electronic music composers since their technology usually goes out of date before pieces are premiered. "How many people have the police arrested at this point based on yesterday’s emails and last week’s software updates?" asks Palmer.

"The police department is primarily set up to protect and serve,” says Agent Lance Latency. “I was there to help investigators go out and capture people," says Latency, "but our long term goal, as we build up to a crescendo, is to prevent crimes... because when you start talking to younger composers and you know they have hits on their websites and you’re on to them, people won’t go out and shoot at them or rob them if they know the police are around. Most of the time, it's not the composers; it's the musicians stealing their music who cause the problems."

-James Handy-Ictus reporting

Hiatus

2007-02-02T06:55:00.000-05:00

Dear Faithful Readers,

I've been taking a much-needed hiatus to work on my new book about computer music in the 20th century, The Rests Are Noisy. My pet creature Mulatto certainly likes to read, doesn't she?

I'll be back soon, O Commanders of the Faithful!

Respectably Yours,
Prof. Heebie McJeebie

Pre-Emptive Review: Robert Ashley's CONCRETE

2007-01-16T23:43:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again. Robert Ashley has completed a new opera, or rather, he has recycled his "maverick" ideas for the twenty-fourth time in as many years. I plan to attend the opera Wednesday, January 17th, at LaMaMa theater in New York City. Meanwhile, here is a pre-emptive review unbiased by the experience of having already seen the production.

I will forego discussing the libretto as its author (Mr. Ashley himself) is a composer, not a writer. Suffice it to say, I have not read the libretto nor could I understand most of the words as they were delivered in a VERY non-operatic fashion. Mr. Ashley does not believe in super-titles, or subtitles, but for those composers who are very hard of hearing, like me, a lack of visible text is just about as anti-libretto as any opera can be!

Musically, Mr. Ashley has been exploring the hip-hop computer program called "Live." Ironically, the computer program does not generate sounds in real time, but rather allows the operator to decide when to "press go," as it were, for each new section. Mr. Ashley claims to be the oldest person using "Live," but my colleague, Dr. Held Projansky, was using the "limited edition" version of the program before his death at the age of 99. Mr. Ashley may want to read the instruction manual that comes with "Live" as it appears he is using only the "demo" track which automatically loads the first time the program is used.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Ashley can compose an opera appropriate for a position in the operatic canon. Until he does so, we will have to settle for version 24.0 of his annual dog and pony show.

The Five Worst Musical Monumentations of 2006

2006-12-20T13:04:00.000-05:00

5. Opera composer Stephen Hartke was censored by the Metropolitan Opera House when he attempted to name his opera The Tightest Whore de Suif. Subsequently, Hartke appeared on the PBS television show Feminist Operas by Male Composers and claimed that he was never censored. Rather, due to certain prosody limitations, the title was changed to The Grandest Goodliness.

4. The intellectual folk-music composer John Dowland was besmirched by British troubadour Sting who recorded several of Dowland’s lute-and-voice songs using technologically anachronistic wah-wah pedals, reverberation machines, and “slap delays.”

3. The 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart was celebrated at least four-hundred times in 2006, in the U.S. alone. Many living composers celebrated their birthdays in 2006, but they were not honored with a multi-million dollar chocolate factory or a posthumous interview with Joan Acocella.

2. On the day he turned seventy, Steve Reich gave an odd lecture to so-called “post-minimalist” composers via NPR’s Modern Mainstream program. He told the young composers, “I’m the one who made you, and I can also destroy you. If you don’t believe that, just try me!” Reich then gave an extended account of his early (unpublished) writings and claimed that he invented stereophonic sound and that any composer who records music in stereo owes him royalties. After the radio broadcast, Reich mysteriously disappeared and was replaced with an impersonator.

1. TANDY, Inc. ceased its production of the TANDY Virtuoso-M180. For forty-five years, the M180 was the epitome of étude-enabled electronic interpreters of punch-card sonatini and concerti. Today, the only comparable machine being manufactured is TOSHIBA’s ImPRO-V5678, an inferior device that, according to the product’s instruction manual, only performs “when it wants to.”

Here's to a brighter future for the musical literati! Happy holidays to all. Young composers, do not get stoned or drunk before attending your local Messiah singalong.

La Scalandal

2006-12-13T13:21:00.000-05:00

As many of my faithful readers are aware, I am not a fan of traditional opera. Such grandstanding and ego-centric theatrics are best left to actors, choreographers, and circus performers, not high-caliber musicians. Nevertheless, my students have been asking for my thoughts on the La Scala scandal with gay porn star and full-mouthed tenor Roberto Alagna, who never misses an opportunity to pose nude or create a scene. His latest impertinence involves the Opera Chic’s production of La Scala.

After doing some research, I located a plot synopsis for La Scala. And I quote:

A composer, working in isolation on a score for a horror movie meets two women who used to know his house's former tenant. When the women disappear, he's forced to look into the film he's working on to determine what happened to them, and who's responsible.

Very few composers have been able to successfully capture the mood of a “thriller” or “horror” story in their stage works. The notable exception is Elliott Carter’s one-act opera, What Next, a frightening examination of sexual deviants who cause automobile accidents in order to become aroused.

Most young composers don’t truly understand the concept of sexual arousal. They prance about like bunny rabbits and flirt with almost any instrument (exception: instruments that require notation in tenor or alto celfs are notable turn-offs). Alagna falls into the category of sexual deviant. His stunt with the aptly named Opera Chic is merely an attempt to seduce young composers who are easily aroused by operatic egos.

But Alagna is not fooling this Professor. He is still wounded from an incident in 2003 when an illicit video tape was made of his audition for Elliott Carter’s What Next. The singer was asked to do a scene in which he was required to maintain an erection for several minutes while executing a very difficult recitative. Embarrassment ensued when Alagna simply could not stay erect. The composer became irate, and the singer withdrew from the public eye for weeks. Clearly Alagna’s recovery is not yet complete.

Prof. McJeebie’s Private Grammys

2006-12-08T16:55:00.000-05:00

Despite the shutdown of Tower Records, the Grammy Awards are still going strong with more than 500 nominees. Nevertheless, there are many artists who remain ignored. That's why, each year, I submit my own nominees in two additional categories:

Most Elaborately and Thoroughly Structured Computer Music Composition:

WigWam 40XXL by Casey Booner

Technological Retrogrades by EmmaLou Stephenson

Boolean Earthquakes by Kristov Wilhelm

Fractured Breakthroughs of Electromagnetic Frequencies by Kristin Islington

Sines of the Times by Gregory Peterson Paulson III

Most Rewarding Recording Upon Multiple Hearings:

Sonatinas of the Mind’s Ear by Fred Kohlberg

3’44” by “Funnyman” Calvin Kelvin

Concerto without a Soloist by Emily Hayes

Unanticipated Expectations by Franklin Arthur

Nebulous Enigmas by Sissy Williams

The winners will be announced by secret ballot via email.

Tower Records - Erected No More

2006-11-29T18:02:00.000-05:00

Many classical music lovers, including yours truly, are lamenting the demise of Tower Records, one of the last remaining “mom ‘n’ pop” music stores of my generation.

Founded by classical composer, Joan Tower, the corporation has always made sure that each store’s classical music section was comprised not only of newly released reissues, but also of bargain bins and box sets. Tower was one of the only places that sold one-sided blank cassette tapes, which came in handy for some of my composition lessons.

Tower employees were some of the smartest people in the retail business. For example, they could easily explain to my naive and confused young students why there existed so many different recordings of the same piece of music, and why the first recording made wasn’t necessarily the best one.

The employees convinced my students of the frivolity of “packaging” and “album art,” an attitude that, ironically, led to Tower’s demise. You see, one of the most popular genres of downloaded music today is Classical Music. That’s because consumers are convinced that packaging, artwork, and design are not important alongside the historical integrity of Great Music. Years of impeccably innocuous album art has made physical distribution unnecessary, despite the fact that liner notes have been replaced by the inferior PDF format.

The big problem, of course, is that average listeners (who are not trained composers) cannot tell the difference between CD-quality audio and mp3 files. We’ve solved one problem (unnecessary artwork) and created another (compromised sound quality).

Incidentally, for years the Rochester location of Tower Records has been a popular hangout with druglords and prostitutes, two character-types who will never appreciate classical music, even though classical music appreciates them.

Reasons Young Composers Should Be Thankful This Holiday Season:

2006-11-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

- I am about to complete the prototype for my TANDY Ring Modulator, a device that will transform simple-minded cell phone ring tones (as seen in hip-hop commercials) into unrecognizable, and quite nearly unanalyzable, contemporary études.

- My TANDY ASCII-Mate generated this list of 102 suggested musical compositions for Thanksgiving. As you can see, there's quite a lack of modern compositions in the Thanksgiving repertoire, which means this is an opportunity! Young composers, consider writing a Thanksgiving Cantata or a Thanksgiving Suite of Études combining the themes of American Indian music with European Sonata forms and/or an electronic "aural feast."

- The "trendy" and "cutting edge" internet production company YouTube Pictures will be producing a new film about the life of the reclusive, contentious composer Daphnée Kryostovnezskiy who composed only ONE piece of music which he then revised and rearranged over four hundred times throughout his short career. Due to rights issues, YouTube Pictures cannot use Kryostovnezskiy's music, so they are looking for a young composer willing to create new works in the style of Kryostovnezskiy.

Asians and Classical Music

2006-11-16T13:28:00.000-05:00

My TANDY-Tracker internet spy engine allows me to observe how web-surfers arrive at my Classical Pontifications blog. You’d be surprised at some of the Google searches people execute. It seems that our society will express ideas through Google that would be absolutely unacceptable to express in public.

For example, yesterday I discovered that one of my readers wanted to know why Asians are so slow to accept classical music. I don’t believe this is true. According to Tom Gulick, Executive Director of the Honolulu Symphony, “[T]he Asians understand what people get from the study of classical music. A training of the brain.”

If anyone is slow to accept classical music, it is the young people of the United States. They’re too busy calling in their votes to Dancing with the Stars to attune to the complexity of intellectual music. Classical music is not easy to dance to. It never has been. That’s why it’s called “classical music” and not “ballroom music” or “boudoir music.” Exercising the mind and exercising the body are two entirely different processes that must be executed separately if at all. You wouldn’t expect a scientist to base his study of global warming on what happens as his bowl of ice cream melts, would you?! For the same reason, we shouldn’t mix music and pleasure!

Young people, when you find the time to put down your text messages and pick up your books of piano etudes, remember that it’s important to analyze the etude before you attempt to play it. Your fingers need a workout, but first you need to exercise your brain.

Twenty-Five Years of Electroacoustic Ignorance

2006-11-14T13:01:00.000-05:00

The Eastman School of Music, located down the street from my office at the Hotel Cadillac, will present a festival of electroacoustic music beginning this week and lasting throughout the school year. The festival will be open to the general public and will take place in classrooms and other such venues where only students are allowed. The festival celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Eastman Computer Music Center.

The festivities include a performance of electroacoustic compositions deemed worthy by the cautiously insulated ECMC staff in a competition entitled “Electroacoustic Music Competition.” As always, the fine staff is more concerned with musical integrity than stylistic matters (as is evidenced by the fact that they’ve programmed their computers to dress them every morning using algorithms unrelated to recent fashion trends – see photo)

Interestingly, the ECMC fails to define “electroacoustic music,” leading this Professor (and potential applicant) to wonder whether he would be competing against cell-phone rings and Karaoke videos! Even after being in existence for twenty-five years, the ECMC does not know what “electroacoustic” means. Apparently, it does not refer to blending electronic and acoustic instruments since one of the award-winning works – Aubaine by Glechoma Dirk Specht and Gerriet K. Sharma – is scored only for “audio compact disc,” and another is scored only for piano with magnets!

Young composers, it is important to understand what you’re talking about, even when you’re talking about unfamiliar things. There is no excuse for the ECMC’s willful ignorance of the etymology of “electroacoustic.” For a better education, consider transferring to my classes at the Hotel Cadillac. In 2007, we will celebrate the fortieth anniversary of my Composer Isolation Chamber with a festival of acoustoelectric music, originally intended to be heard only by its creators. A competition will be announced in January, and you can be sure that the application form will include the requisite definitions.

Caché

2006-11-08T17:47:00.000-05:00

Today I performed a Google search for the phrase “Heebie McJeebie Famous Composer,” and one of the results returned to me was a website entitled “Famous Composer of Marching Band Music.” I was not aware that my back catalog of compositions has been archived on the world wide web, and this brings me to today’s pontification.

When a composer of electronic music allows his compositions to be “streamed” on the internet, not only does he compromise his file size, but he also subjects himself to endless years of cache-ing – a technique used by search engines to subvert the New York Times’ strict copyright rules. As I’ve said before, I am not one to shun technological innovations. In fact, just yesterday I was able to cast my gubernatorial vote via the internet. But there is something to be said for biodegradable music.

Take, for example, the composer Steve Reich, who celebrated his seventieth birthday last month. Mr. Reich (who is not a professor) regularly disavows much of his earlier music, but if you look on the internet, you can still find an mp3 of his teenaged composition “Jazzy Marimbas.” This is because Mr. Reich’s agent surreptitiously uploaded it to his own MySpace page with the hope of attracting underage fans. Now, thanks to Google’s cache, “Jazzy Marimbas” will be around forever, and Mr. Reich will never be able to truly disavow it.

Young composers, remember that you are never as wise today as you will be tomorrow. If you stream your compositions on YouTube, you will be reminded of your misspent youth fifty years from now as you grow old and decay.

Composers and Cultural Charity

2006-11-01T15:43:00.000-05:00

One of my colleagues at the Hotel Cadillac, Professor of International Business Relations Dr. Wilhelm Emulatto, returned a few days ago after he and his wife adopted a Chinese baby. The Emulatto family’s charity has inspired me to think of ways in which composers have helped to cultivate a kinder, gentler society by mixing and matching cultures from around the globe.

Some composers have attempted to merge the intellectual superiority of Western Classical music with music from a third-world culture. David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus is a fine example. Others like Colin McPhee have used modern technology, such as TANDY Folk-Detectors and Quicktime 8mm cameras, to capture authentic field recordings of music associated with ancient Asian rituals and witch-burnings. And a third subsection of charitable ethnomusicologists, including the esteemed George Crumb, have been working to translate sounds made by all kinds of animals, from sophisticated dolphins to simple organisms such as plankton.

As many of you probably know, for years I have been attempting to outsource some of my TANDY-composing work to India. For example, there is a fellow there named Bruce who helps me translate some of my MIDI music into the European PAL format. I do not expect that my compositions would benefit from intermingling with undernourished foreign music, but I do support foreign cultures by paying foreigners for copying assistance and technological advisement. In the end, these foreigners might learn something, and that would be my charitable contribution to a truly global culture.

In the meantime, I hope to make a TANDY digital recording of some of the strange noises coming from Prof. Emulatto’s Chinese baby.

Interviews with Young People #4: Claire Chase

2006-10-24T10:15:00.000-04:00

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) has been making a splash in the new music circles of Chicago and New York City. An ensemble comprised of a disproportionately large number of young people, ICE programs music by living composers of all career levels, some shamefully under-established and some shamelessly over-established (and doubly tenured). Recently, ICE performed a two-set marathon concert in New York City called “New Voices from Around the World,” focusing on so-called emerging composers. On October 27, ICE will respond to non-composer artist Alexandra Loewe's exhibition at the Flatfile Galleries in Chicago. On October 29, the ensemble will present a concert as part of New Music Chicago’s Sonic Impact Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Rather than travel to Chicago or New York City to see ICE’s October concerts, I thought I’d spend a few moments on the phone with the Artistic Director and flutist of ICE, Claire Chase. The following is a fair and balanced transcription of our conversation:

Prof. McJeebie: These October concerts feature music by the winners of ICE's 21st Century Young Composers Project competition. I find that young people are naturally competitive and sometimes very aggressive. What do you think these 21st-century composers are trying to prove?

Claire Chase: I should clarify and mention that it's not really a competition - at least, we don't like to think of it that way. We just put a call out there, get a bunch of material in response. This year we received well over three hundred submissions from young composers in thirty-one different countries. We pick music that interests us. We also hang on to, on average, about forty scores that aren't picked for the project, but that we really like and want to have in our library for other programming purposes.

As far as the competitiveness goes, I know what you mean, Professor. However, here at ICE we do our best to make it friendly and collegial and mutually supportive. There isn't a particular style or aesthetic niche that the composers we pick fall into. In fact, this year the six composers chosen could not be more different from each other. There's everything from pop-influenced music to neo-complexity to electronic music to serialism and back again. So we try to encourage them to be non-judgmental and open-eared about things. For the most part, I think this works. The ones who misbehave are locked up in a room and forced to listen to Satie.

Prof. McJeebie: ICE has taken up residence in both Chicago and New York City. How would you compare the new-music scenes in Chicago and New York City?

Claire Chase: They're very different cities, and we really like the challenges that come with these differences. In Chicago, we had to build an audience from the ground up; it took a lot of work on the grassroots level, but the plus side is that we now have a very loyal family, of sorts, and they're down to hear anything. There isn't this sense of an uptown/downtown division, and in general we can program extremely experimental stuff in Chi-town and get a consistent audience. We can also program things in very unusual spaces, and people will venture out to hear us.

This is harder to do in New York, probably because New Yorkers know what they want; they know where they like to go; they know how they want to spend the little free time they have. We run around like rats in this city, because we have to. Chicago is more laid back, more slowly paced. I can call up a bunch of friends and say hey, let's have a beer right now, and it will happen spontaneously. My closest friends in New York generally schedule a beer three weeks in advance. It's just a different pace. I think that the two audiences and the two "scenes" follow suit.

In New York, there's already such an established new-music audience; all you really have to do is put a couple listings out there and you'll get an audience in this city. We are trying, however, to do what we did in Chicago with grassroots marketing so that we can build a younger audience, and an audience full of people who aren't necessarily new-music types. We don't think you have to be an expert in the kind of music we play in order to enjoy it. And we don't even think that you have to enjoy everything that you hear.

Prof. McJeebie: As a Professor, I've found that the more expertise I acquire, the less I enjoy what I hear. I'm especially impatient when I find myself in an audience in which the new-music establishment is not represented. Aren't you worried that the established new-music audience won't get along with "people who aren't necessarily new music types?"

Claire Chase: No, not really. People need each other. In New York more than anywhere because we're all so hysterical about our space, and because there's simply so little of it. I think we really need each other, and I think we're all capable of getting along.

I mean, it's not that big of a deal to have a row of seats at a concert that goes something like this: a Professor sitting next to a carpenter sitting next to a gallery owner sitting next to a kid with pink hair sitting next to an elderly lady who goes to the opera sitting next to a member of "the established new-music audience." With a good show, a good conversation, and a relaxed vibe, the not-so-miraculous situation in which people from different walks of life can share something small and meaningful can emerge quite effortlessly. It happens in other situations all the time - at the movies, in the subway, at a bar, in a bookstore. Why not at a concert? This is also why we like to keep our concerts free or very low-cost, because we find that we get much, much more interesting audiences. Who wants to drop twenty bucks to hear a bunch of freaky bleep-blop music, anyway? What would happen if it cost twenty bucks to take a book of modern literature out of the library? No one would ever read anything. Ever! Unless they were in school. Look at the world of contemporary music. It's still pretty embedded in the academic institution.

Prof. McJeebie: Yes, well… I like to think so.

Claire Chase: I'm not sure how I get so side-tracked, Professor, with all this populist idealism. The answer to your question about co-habitation at concerts is really just this: we should all avoid shitting in the swimming pool. Especially the new music swimming pool, 'cause it's real small.

Prof. McJeebie: I would venture to say that the new-music establishment is constantly changing. It’s in a constant state of flux due to the lack of tenured Professors.

Claire Chase: The scene in Chicago has certainly changed in the past five years. There are dozens of new groups, many interesting new concert series, and a great deal of new momentum for contemporary music that didn't exist before. I also believe that New York is changing, too, even though there's such a history of contemporary music here already. There are so many kick-ass, young, innovative new-music groups sprouting up everywhere in the city. I'm optimistic that we are actually in the beginning of a major movement in this country, and that in our lifetimes we are going to find the kind of institutional support for new-music ensembles that Europe has had for the past two decades. It's time. The climate is ripe. There are so many talented young people who are willing to give up their lives for this and make it happen.

Prof. McJeebie: Many people have suggested that Rochester, NY, is the happy median between Chicago and New York City. Have you thought about setting up shop in Rochester?

Claire Chase: ICE is hoping to position ourselves in three locations, ultimately. Chicago, San Francisco and New York. Right now the two chapters, Midwest and East Coast ICE, are enough for us. But we're aiming for 2008-09 to launch West Coast ICE.

Prof. McJeebie: The October concerts are subtitled "New Voices from Around the World," and ICE is indeed performing music by a wide variety of foreigners. Which country do you think has the best music?

Claire Chase: Until we've gotten submissions from every country in the world, it's impossible to say. But if I had to say which country is most exciting to me in terms of the young composers that we've worked with, I would say that just about everything that's come out of kids in Mexico has blown my mind. There are so many phenomenally gifted young people studying and working in Mexico right now. ICE goes down to the conservatory in Morelia a couple times a year to give concerts and master classes and work with student composers, and we are always completely floored by what even the most beginning level comp students are able to do. Currently there's virtually no way of getting this music heard and performed outside of Mexico, so ICE is trying to raise money right now to get some exchange programs started.

Prof. McJeebie: Every time I go to the Mexican restaurant in Rochester, Plato Para Comer, I am subjected to Mexican music for Mariachi band. Aside from the food, I’m not particularly interested in Mexican culture.

Claire Chase: [silence]

Prof. McJeebie: As you know, many composers are interested in writing a piece of music that will challenge the ensemble and really push the players beyond their physical and intellectual capacities. In order to give hopeful young composers out there an idea of where ICE's threshold lies, can you tell us what was the most difficult piece ICE has ever played and why?

Claire Chase: Oh, golly. I have no idea. I'd have to ask the guys. I think, in terms of technical difficulty, that Lindberg's "Linea D'Ombra" was the hardest thing we've ever had to do. About a hundred hours of rehearsal went into it before we could even start to feel comfortable. Apart from the sheer technical difficulty of the playing required, we also didn't have a score (it was currently out of print) so we had to figure out the incredibly intricate rhythmic exchanges with only the parts as a guide, which felt kind of like herding cats.

As far as our threshold goes, I don't know that we have one. We're pretty willing to try anything...

Prof. McJeebie: Your open-mindedness is commendably juvenile. As you know, many composers and Professors like me have taken to having our compositions performed via MIDI realizations, which are always correct. What can ICE do that a MIDI realization cannot?

Claire Chase: Sweat! ICE can sweat. MIDI can't. I think that's the difference.

For more about ICE, visit www.iceorg.org

Inspired by a Country Singer

2006-10-18T11:17:00.000-04:00

First I should apologize for my extended absence from the blogosphere. I have been busy pontificating in my TANDY recording studio. My inspiration came from an unlikely source – the new four-album set from country-music star Vince Gill. Dr. Gill (He has an honorary doctorate from Oklahoma State University.) has wondered why his skills as a country-music composer are underappreciated by the general public. I can relate to his situation.

For many years I have struggled to get the public interested in modern computer compositions, not just as a general category of music, but with a focus on my own music in particular. As the TANDY Professor of Electronic Music at the Hotel Cadillac, I can attest that my compositions comprise the majority of the canon of historically accurate electronic music performances. Yet the average Joe (or Jane) is not interested in an education in academic electronic music.

Rather than attempt to gradually seduce the general public with one country song at a time, Dr. Gill’s four-album set commands listeners to spend almost three hours indulging his compositions. I have chosen to adopt a similar strategy of preemptive bombardment. For the last two weeks, I have been recording over six hours of my own personal canon. From my early works, “Punch Card Sonata” and “Synthetic Oscillations,” to my most recent opus, “Dialogue for Computer and Tape,” I have assembled a six-album set entitled TANDY Transcendence which will be released in limited edition in accordance with my teaching schedule.

Stay tuned for details.

Haile the Improvising Robot

2006-10-03T15:11:00.000-04:00

Leave it to the students at M.I.T. and other “technical” colleges to consider only the lowest common denominator of music composition. The latest scientific attempt to invalidate actual, live composers has resulted in “Haile,” a robot developed by students at Georgia Tech. Haile allegedly plays a drum and improvises with live musicians. An improvising robot! What will those Tod Machovers come up with next?

As you may have noticed in previous posts, I disapprove of composers who believe that the purpose of writing music is to “communicate” with audiences. We wouldn’t tell a Professor of Mathematics to alter his equations to make them more “accessible,” so why should we expect that from a composer? And yet, I find myself recoiling at the idea of a musical “robot” with no human qualities whatsoever. Then it occurred to me: the distinction is one of Artificial Intelligence versus Actual Intelligence.

My TANDY computers never question my judgment when I tell them what to do. Unlike Haile, a TANDY is not programmed to think it's smarter than a human. That's why I work so well with TANDYs. They can be controlled and contained, but there’s no telling what an improvising robot will do! Haile might transform a Stockhausen masterpiece into a men’s drumming circle at a hippie commune. It might decide that Elliott Carter’s metric modulations are nothing but “free jazz.” It might confuse Sprechstimme with the ramblings of “librettist” Robert Ashley. Haile may be smart, but it’s not so intelligent.

Now, I am not opposed to technical innovation. Just the other day, I went down to Radio Shack to have a new memory chip installed in my TANDY Dynomighticon computer. But I’ll be damned if I don’t speak out against this childish attempt to insult the intelligence of Actual composers by creating an Artificial one.

Mysterious Package

2006-10-02T20:13:00.000-04:00

I received this item in the mail today from an anonymous sender. I am afraid to use it because it may contain an octatonic or homophonic virus. If you are the sender of this item, please identify yourself and let me know what is on the disk.

Interviews with Young People #3: Molly Sheridan

2006-10-02T11:19:00.000-04:00

For a young person, Molly Sheridan has made quite a mark as an arbiter of good taste in the contemporary classical canon. She is the managing editor of NewMusicBox, and her writings have appeared in NewMusicBox, New York Press, Time Out New York, Time Out Chicago, SYMPHONY magazine, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette among others. Sheridan attended the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University, earning a degree in journalism with a specialization in violin performance and French. She has also studied the esraj and Tibetan rug weaving in Nepal. The following is a transcription of a recent phone conversation I had with Sheridan:

Prof. McJeebie: I remember back in 1996, you hosted a radio show entitled Music for Tape. I sent you some of my music, but you must not have received it. If you were allowed to curate a festival of music for tape today, which composers would you program?

Molly Sheridan: When I was 12, I was ignorant of the illegality of taping pop tunes off of the radio and broadcasting these compilations during slumber parties. In high school and college, the mix tape was a popular wooing technique employed by some of my boyfriends. I still have a huge box of said contraband, as do many of my friends, and I think it would be interesting to dig around in those treasure chests and see what composers might do with that sort of nostalgia.

Prof. McJeebie: So at these slumber parties, is that where you became interested in telling other people what music they should listen to?

Molly Sheridan: No, but it is where I developed an interest in studding my jeans with rhinestones.

Prof. McJeebie: Did anyone ever tell you what music you should listen to?

Molly Sheridan: I began studying the violin when I was seven, and I was 18 before I realized I was allowed to have my own opinions about the music I was hearing. And if they didn't play it on NPR or at the Lilith Fair, I probably hadn't heard it. My friend Michael Crogan was something of an audiophile, and the summer before I left for college he valiantly attempted to school me in what I'd missed while locked up in my practice room. It was a revelation.

Prof. McJeebie: In 1998, you wrote a negative review of my cassette tape album TANDY Etudes. If I remember correctly, which I do, you referred to my music as "deliberately confounding and elaborately mundane." Do you ever feel guilty when you write a bad review?

Molly Sheridan: I grew up Catholic in an Italian and Irish community in the Midwest, so you can say I'm something of an expert when it comes to shouldering guilt. But no, I don't feel remorseful about writing bad reviews as long as I feel I've understood my reactions to a disc, positive and negative, and clearly communicated them to my readers. But since my space is very limited, I tend to only negatively review discs if talking about what I view as its shortcomings contributes to the larger conversation about music.

Prof. McJeebie: Do you ever think that you might be just plain wrong?

Molly Sheridan: I have had second thoughts about some of the reviews I’ve written. I don't work under the delusion that I am infallibly "right." In particular, I wrote negatively about a recording of a piece I knew it took the composer decades to compose. That was hard for me personally, but not for the recording—it went on to win a Grammy that year. But what's the adage about the only bad publicity being no publicity? If you want to talk about guilt in reviewing, let's look at the shelf over my desk filled with CDs I haven't written about yet. Sometimes, when it's late and I've had too much coffee, I think I see them making moves to throw themselves off the rack in a desperate plea for attention.

Prof. McJeebie: Are you allowed to vote for the Grammy Awards? How can I get myself nominated for Best Composition?

Molly Sheridan: I am not a member of the National Academy of the Recording Arts and Sciences, nor do I know anyone who is a voting member whom I could impersonate or blackmail. I was once invited to the Grammy Awards press conference, however. The journalists who attended were bribed with large chocolate bars decorated with gold leaf gramophones. This was really small potatoes, though, since I hear that the swag bags given to the celebrity attendees at the actual ceremony included automobiles. But I might have that wrong.

Prof. McJeebie: You mention the problem of space limitation. Have you ever thought about starting your own blog, like I've done with Classical Pontifications? Blogs allow more space in which you can communicate and justify your bias.

Molly Sheridan: Personal blogs lack copy editors and firm deadlines, two things I can't function without. Some colleagues and I do take turns contributing to a blog over at NewMusicBox, however. They let me sit in the big chair and drive every Friday. My one regret is that the professional nature of the publication prevents me from posting pictures of my pet goldfish, Elizabeth. And she is very cute.

Prof. McJeebie: In 1999, you attended one of my invitation-only faculty recitals at the Hotel Cadillac. I remember you seemed to be taking notes and reading throughout the concert. How do you pay attention to the music while taking notes?

Molly Sheridan: Writing while listening makes sure my thoughts are focused on what I'm hearing, not on fantasies involving that new guy in accounting. Also, I'm a compulsive doodler, as were many of our country's presidents. When you're teaching, don't you feel the students taking notes are paying the most attention?

Prof. McJeebie: Not if they're just doodling! Ordinarily I ask the questions, not answer them. However, I will make an exception with the hope that you will publish a review of my CD in return. As you've read in one of my many Pontifications, I do not think that students make for good reviewers. I would hope that a critic who is writing for professional music publications does not consider herself a student. On the other hand, you still need to obtain a graduate degree, is that right? Do you think that taking notes helps you even when you're NOT enrolled in a degree-granting program?

Molly Sheridan: Without note taking, millions of people would forget to buy milk and toilet paper every day! There are so many centuries and continents of music to cover, I suspect I'll die a music student. There's no degree requirement to getting a job as a reviewer, though editors do tend to appreciate it when you own a calendar and a pen and have demonstrated an aptitude for using both. Scotch drinking and cigar smoking used to also be required, but those rules have been relaxed at the insistence of the Surgeon General.

Relying on Inspiration

2006-09-27T12:15:00.000-04:00

Many of my students have asked me where I get my inspiration. “What’s your muse?” they ask. I don’t believe the question is meant to offend me, but my students don’t realize that the best composers do not rely on “inspiration” to create music. There are already systems in place to generate material without the need for such new-age nonsense. It’s just a matter of putting oneself in a focused and clinical mindset, being a vessel for the structures and mathematical formulae of music.

For many younger composers, the word “muse” is merely a euphemism for drugs and alcohol. Even the most secluded Professors know that Rochester is the cocaine capital of Upstate New York. I’m aware that some of my students travel to Canada to drink alcohol and gamble. These vulgar activities are not of the mind but of the flesh, just as music composed by “inspiration” is not for the mind but for the ears and the sex organs.

Young people like to get “high” on drugs and alcohol. It is difficult to convince them that they can get just as “high” analyzing the cosmocentric complexity and deterministic chaos of my TANDY compositions. All Professors have a responsibility to discourage their students’ dependency on alcohol, drugs, inspiration, and muses. It may be difficult to go through life with an underdeveloped sense of structure and integrity, but drugs and alcohol are not the answer. Composition students should look to their Professors as role models, and Professors should set good examples as intellectually mature, cultivated individuals for whom drugs, alcohol, and inspiration are not substitutes for structural superiority.

Response to Prof. DeBollox

2006-09-22T12:49:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to take this opportunity to publicly address some of the comments one reader has left on Classical Pontifications. By taking readers’ comments out of the comment boxes and into the professional blogosphere, I realize I am exposing what has, up until now, been discussed privately. Nevertheless, I feel it is important to raise the curtain on what might be mistaken as interfaculty bickering.

Prof. I.O.U. DeBollox F.E.M.A. provides comments on my post, Academic Welfare. He was happy to inform me that his students would be writing dissertations on my music. I advised Prof. DeBollox that his students would not be allowed to write a dissertation on my music because that privilege is reserved for my students only. I suggested that I might be able to make an exception for a small fee. This statement must have caused Prof. DeBollox to go into a physical state much like a dog in heat, a state in which his intellect succumbed to a primal desire to “mount” another Professor. He has accused me of being unethical, and of indirectly supporting a kind of musical terrorism. I quote, at length, from his original comments:

I was quite discouraged to read your reply. Not at all because of your rejection of my student’s offer; to the contrary! I was horrified at your hint that something as pedestrian as money – or “a small fee,” as you so basely referred to it – would change your mind. Will no one in this gloomy, glutted day and age hold fast to their ethical principles? I have long considered you to be a scholar and gentleman (in that order) of irreproachable and undenigratable dignity, and then – after insisting fervently that only your students have access to cite your work – you backpedal in the most slavish and greedy of ways by indicating that you would accept…a bribe! Yes, let’s call it what it is; a bribe! So in the end, you too are ruled by the free market. I had idolized you as a purist who composed not for the vulgar pleasure of hearing your work performed, but for the beauty of the structure, the ultimate inaudibility of that which is truly musical. Now I fear you resemble the rest of the great unwashed, a pawn of the capitalist system which defaces creation even as it thrusts art forward into the glaring spotlight of the public eye, ear, nose, and throat.

Professor, I implore you: we live in a day of true musical terrorism; those out to destroy our way of life are willing to use any means – rejection, hostility, even parody – to wipe the most exquisitely complex music from the face of the Earth. We must be vigilant; we must be guarded. We must watch what we do, say, and eat. If we begin in the least to betray our principles and veer from the path of absolute certainty, we shall lose the very God-given freedom for which our predecessors fought: the freedom to adhere to a strict empirical system from which we never deviate. Such a fate would make it hardly be worth having tenure any more. Imagine Webern altering the retrograde inversion of a twelve-tone row for “a small fee.” Imagine Ferneyhough disturbing a hierarchy of perfectly nested tuplets for the sake of “a small fee.” Professor: it is a slippery slope; let us remain at the pinnacle, true to our values, blessed in our self-righteousness, a small and proud contingent, comfortably cognizant of our collective wisdom.

Before the next commentator lapses into a similar reactionary state, I should explain exactly why my request of a “fee” was necessary. If students other than my own were to dissertate about my music, they would need to engage me in what surely would amount to hours of monologues in which I explain my compositional techniques. Most dissertations are written while consulting published documents. Sadly, very few serious articles have been written (in this country) about my work. Those that have are only available in the PDF format, hardly suitable for a serious researcher. This will soon change, as The New Yorker magazine plans to publish a five-part “Profile” piece on me and my work starting in late 2007, when I use the Hotel Cadillac’s Genius Grant to travel to the impoverished drumming circles of West Africa and introduce the natives to a more expressive form of music, such as the Concerto. At any rate, even a five-installment profile piece will not be enough material to use to create an original dissertation. Therefore, my “fee” that Prof. DeBollox finds so objectionable is merely what I would be paid to teach my own students about my work. It is not a bribe; it is a salary for my willingness to educate Dr. DeBollox’s students where he cannot.

Of course, I welcome comments from all of my literate readers, including Prof. DeBollox, but I have absolutely no patience for impatience, and my TANDYtracker lets me know when comments are left hastily. Please be sure to leave only the final draft of your comments, and do not burden the regular readers of this blog with ill-considered nonsense.

Prof. McJeebie Quoted in The Times

2006-09-20T13:57:00.000-04:00

I’m pleased to announce that Classical Pontifications with Professor Heebie McJeebie has been named the fourth most important website in Classical Music by the prestigious U.K. newspaper The Times. This is quite an honor, as The Times has been in existence since before classical music was invented.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22872-2333584.html

Listening Horizontally

2006-09-20T13:35:00.000-04:00

Professor Dan Becker, who teaches composition at the all-naturally air-conditioned San Francisco Conservatory, has written an article for New Music Box on how to teach composition. Never one to shy away from the biggest possible issues, Dr. Becker calls for a restructuring of the entire higher-education-in-music system. Fortunately, he quickly realizes that he cannot revolutionize the system and still expect to receive tenure, so instead he tells us how he, as an individual Professor, approaches his duties.

What I find most remarkable about Dr. Becker’s essay is his advocacy of “horizontal” listening. His contention that students should listen simultaneously to a wide variety of disparate musics smacks of a John Cage MusiCircus [sic]. Has Dr. Becker been hanging out at Haight and Ashbury a little too often? Come on, Professor! Everyone knows that not all music is good for you, yet we are forced by political correctness and cultural sensitivity to refrain from pronouncing any one kind of music better than another. Such egalitarianism is unfair to those composers whose music has greater integrity.

Furthermore, to encourage students to listen to music “horizontally” is to ignore the very foundation of music notation. How do you expect them to learn to read an orchestral score if their ears cannot discern a vertical sonority? They can write solo melodies ‘til kingdom come, but they will never appreciate harmony and counterpoint, and they will be forced to save all their MIDI files in “format zero.”

As a composer of Electronic Music, I will concede that there is sometimes a value to generating music “horizontally” (especially when working with the TANDY programming language MONOFONIK), but we must also acknowledge the fact that much modern music is far too complicated to be fully appreciated on a single plane. It must be heard horizontally and vertically.

Mr. The Custom TRS-80

2006-09-18T12:59:00.000-04:00

This weekend, my personal teaching assistant received an email (meant for me) from the composer, blogger, and radio star Dennis Bárothy-Kitsz. Dr. Bárothy-Kitsz, who according to his email is also known as “Mr. The Custom TRS-80,” insisted that I provide a link from Classical Pontifications to his blog.

Despite Dr. Bárothy-Kitsz’s obvious inclination toward juvenile competitiveness, the truth is I’d been meaning to write about him for some time, ever since he began working on the project We Are All Mozart. The idea is that he will compose one piece per day throughout the year 2007 and secure commissions for each of those pieces.

The “free-spirited” (read: non-tenured) downtown composer Eve Beglarian (whose music I tried to make sense of in my very first podcast-mp3) has a similar project called A Book of Days. The difference is that Dr./Ms. Beglarian does not put a time frame on the completion of her Magnum Opus (because she is “free-spirited” I presume). On the other hand, Dr. Bárothy-Kitsz has committed to finishing everything as quickly as possible and no later than the end of the year 2007.

I require all of my students to compose one piece per day during the Hotel Cadillac’s finals period, and many of them are unable to do so because of their poor notation and programming skills, and their need to “wait for inspiration.” I’m certain, however, that Dr. Bárothy-Kitsz has the capacity (and the skills) to generate and/or derive at least 365 more pieces to add to his list of “454 compositions (in 731 distinct movements)... 222 [of which] have been premiered.”

If I may reciprocate with some unsolicited advice of my own, I would suggest that Dr. Bárothy-Kitsz recycle some of those unpremiered works – give them different titles and perhaps engrave some fresh copies. Since they’ve never been performed before, no one would know the difference!

Prof. McJeebie Attends the BBC Proms

2006-09-11T14:33:00.000-04:00

I apologize for my prolonged absence from the blogosphere. I have spent the last week at the BBC Proms in London. I attempted to use my TANDY computer to post to my blog, but I could not access my AOL account because it was registered in U.S. dollars, not English pounds. At any rate, I am back in the land of internet freedom and ready to blog again.

At Prince Albert Royal Hall, those strapping, scholarly London lads couldn’t get enough of the Proms, which makes sense given that they won’t be able to resume their proper academic studies until October. The nightly concerts featured a disproportionately large amount of English music; Thomas Adès’ Symphony No. 812 and Sir Michael Tippett’s Trumpet Concerto No. 57 were particularly well-received. Some Irish and Scottish audience members shouted “Bravo” in Italian as Sir Rupert Murdoch took to the stage to narrate Colin Matthews’ dramatic percussion concerto, The Fast Beating the Slow. Even the Queen herself was on hand to conduct the opening fanfare by Sir William Walton, and she presented Walton’s widow, Gütte, with a royal, golden baton in celebration of her adherence to musical celibacy following the death of her husband.

Yet throughout all the pomp and circumstance, this Professor heard not a trace of electronic music. Why, you ask, would a classical music festival ignore the significant contribution of computers and MIDI to the modern-day canon? The answer is quite simple: Electronic music does not sound very good at the British frequency of 250 Volts. In the U.S., our electricity runs at a much more reasonable 115 Volts, and my TANDY operates smoothly and produces vivid, dramatic sounds. When I attempted to use my TANDY at 250 Volts, the results were unpredictable and jarring, to say the least.

It’s nice that American composers occasionally get standing ovations in England, but this Professor knows that truly American music, such as that made on TANDY computers, will not be performed in the U.K. until the proper voltage is available.

Academic Welfare

2006-08-30T16:12:00.000-04:00

Call me responsible, but I prefer the dependability of an academic position over the unreliability of a career as a professional composer. It seems that many nomadic young people have a deep distrust of artists like me, so let me take this opportunity to defend myself and extol the virtues of my Composer Isolation Chamber.

I like to think of my full-time tenure position salary as a kind of welfare for a starving composer. You see, even though I make a good living as a Professor, I am still discriminated against in our society as a composer, so I can relate to the plight of other disenfranchised groups, such as black people and the handicapped, who also need welfare from time to time.

My income is primarily from my work as the TANDY Professor of Electronic Music (for an additional fee, I will teach acoustic music via MIDI realizations.), but I do manage to get a little composing done between classes and when I can close the door during my office hours. My compositions are performed quite often by student and faculty ensembles and by my TANDY computers. And I even get grants once in a while when committees have sense enough to reward fiscally responsible tenured Professors over freelance moocher composers.

My students arrive to study with me hoping that their music will make them rich and famous. They think that I should teach them how to expose audiences to their work, how to disseminate their music beyond Professors and students. I explain to them that their music does go beyond me and the students. For example, sometimes their parents attend recitals, and the recitals are occasionally broadcast on the Hotel Cadillac’s student-run radio station.

I don’t have the power to make the whole world listen to their music. I certainly cannot undo hundreds of years of historical oppression. As I tell my students, our society isn’t going to seek out your music, and you shouldn’t be thinking about such vulgar issues as marketing, promotion, image, and distribution! Those are the kinds of things that popular musicians think about, not serious composers. Composers should behave responsibly and accept handouts from the Universities, the Conservatories, and the Hotel Cadillacs. These institutions help keep our traditions alive, and through them, we shall overcome!

Prof. McJeebie - REJECTED!

2006-08-25T16:40:00.000-04:00

Well, dear readers, alas I have again been rejected by the Aaron Copland Fund for Recording Digital Music. I am dismayed that the list of awardees includes such troubadour vagabonds as Anti-Social Music and Pat Muchmore (Both of those names sound as though they were given by gypsies, if you ask me!); sophomoric whippersnappers like Alarm Will Sound and Derek Bermel, both of whom are more suitable for halftime shows than concert halls; and composer Ken Ueno, who trained to write beer commercials at the Berklee College of Music. But then I suppose I shouldn’t be too critical of Ueno, who also studied with Harvard Professors Mario Davidovsky and Bernard Rands. After all, Ueno’s work has been recognized by the Fromm Music Foundation with a prestigious commissioning award made by a distinguished advisory committee of Harvard Professors.

There are a few disappointments, but I am for the most part satisfied with the list of awardees, which illustrates a noble intent to allow dead composers to keep living through new recordings of their music. A good number of the awarded living composers have already proven their music worthy of recording, with many CDs under their belts.

Speaking of what’s under their belts: to this Professor’s ears, masculine compositions have always sounded extraordinary on digital CDs, whereas feminine music is better suited for cassette tape. While a few women composers (possibly lesbians?) did manage to penetrate the list of awardees, it’s safe to say that digital recording will continue to serve those composers whose music it is most suited for.

In spite of my constant rejections, I am nevertheless determined to maintain the production of homemade recordings with my temperamental TANDYJAM - an external, slot-loading, touch-sensitive CD burner available at Radio Shack. What would the Copland Fund know about CD recordings, anyway? Certainly not as much as a Professor of Electronic Music! In fact, rumor has it that Mr. Copland himself did not particularly care for CDs. So maybe my rejection is a blessing in diguise.

E=mc2, and You Couldn't Just Make That Up

2006-08-22T08:55:00.000-04:00

After my interview with Darcy James Argue, some of my readers have asked me, "Esteemed Professor, what is your stance on improvisation?" I often respond curtly as I am very busy preparing for the fall semester, but it turns out that I needn't alter my lesson plans from the last five years, so I thought I'd use some of my spare time to briefly explain my take on musical improvisation.

My experience with improvisation includes six months of lessons from the Hotel Cadillac's Professor of Guitar Tablature, Dr. Fretler Fendless; five years as musical consultant on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" children's book series; and my ongoing development of the Predictaphone – a TANDY recording device that records an improvised melody, filters out the "accidents," and replaces them with more appropriate notes and rhythms.

Students and other young people believe that improvisation is a kind of composition. That couldn't be further from the truth. Composers don't get their ideas from making things up on the spot. We establish systems, structures, patterns, and pre-determined progressions. We do not subject ourselves to the whim of the "spirit;" that type of performance, dear readers, is for gospel choirs, not for learned professors.

Composition is an intellectual pursuit, and as such, it should not be polluted by the dangerous white-waters of improvisation. Improvisation is not done with the brain, but rather with the gut, or the pelvis.

I'm not going to stand here at my blog and disallow my readers to improvise, but I will say this: Once you start making music on the spot, you may not be able to create music on the page. Keep that in mind, dear readers. And remember, you may have a hard time earning a doctorate, since most institutions of higher learning do not allow students to just come up with their dissertations on the spot.

Interviews with Young People #2: Darcy James Argue

2006-08-18T14:08:00.000-04:00

The young composer Darcy James Argue conducts Secret Society, an ensemble of urban hippies who perform his original compositions at various underground locations. On August 26 and 27, Secret Society will perform in various outer-boroughs of New York City. I recently spoke with young person Darcy via my MIDI dictaphone.

Professor Heebie McJeebie:
After listening to a few minutes of your music, I would categorize you as a "jazz composer," yet you have studied with at least one composer of serious music, and you are very skilled at music notation. As someone who thinks carefully about writing things down, where do you draw the line between improvisation and composition?

Darcy James Argue:
Some jazz musicians feel that improvisation is just composition in real-time. I don't actually buy this. Open-ended improv is really its own thing, and it creates a very different set of expectations and reactions in the listener than a pre-structured piece does.

As for my own process, I find improvisation can be a great way to generate or mess with raw materials -- to fill up the sketchbook with ideas, to assist with the pre-compositional work, and the like. But then I have to hunker down and figure out how to structure those ideas. It's like what the faculty are always telling the kids at jazz camp: "play drunk, write sober."

Professor Heebie McJeebie:
As you know, most jazz composers compose melodies and chord changes... but they seem to have no interest in counterpoint. What are your feelings about counterpoint?

Darcy James Argue:
I agree with Jon Stewart that shows like "Counterpoint," "Hardball," "I'm Going To Kick Your Ass," etc., are hurting America.

Professor Heebie McJeebie:
I know you jazz composers love to inject heroin and smoke LSD, but let’s try to stay on topic here. You conduct your ensemble in performances... Now, I've seen many jazz conductors break into convulsive dancing fits and visceral finger-snapping while directing their big band ensembles. Will you be doing this in your performances? What is it about jazz music that awakens such primal bodily movements in conductors?

Darcy James Argue:
If I could dance like Cab Calloway, I probably would. Maria Schneider has developed this unique language of incredibly fluid and expressive gestures for conducting her band. I'm not a naturally gifted conductor by any means, so I'm generally happy if I can just cue the right people at the right time and not fuck up any of the metric modulations. I do, however, encourage the audience to get their freak on, especially when we play tunes in 13/4, the people's meter.

Professor Heebie McJeebie:
After listening to the first minute or so of your composition "Desolation Sound," I was reminded of the movie-music composer Michael Nyman. Do you ever think about movies while composing your music?

Darcy James Argue:
I appreciate the comparison to Michael Nyman as I'm a big fan of the Portsmouth Sinfonia. I think about film a lot, both in terms of the narrative techniques (especially transitions and large-scale structure) and the cinematic techniques (framing, camera movement, lighting, editing, etc). For a while, I was a little obsessed with the conversations that would take place on screenwriting blogs, all these heated debates about the merits of the three-act structure versus the sequence model.

Professor Heebie McJeebie:

Which movie would you most like to compose a new score for?

Darcy James Argue:

I think it would be great fun to write a new score for The Piano in the style of Cecil Taylor.

Professor Heebie McJeebie:
As is typical of Canadian composition students, you have also worked as an arranger of other composers' music. What have you learned from your "work" as an arranger?

Darcy James Argue:
Whenever my mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, is asked to arrange an existing tune, the disclaimer he gives is: "I cannot guarantee one recognizable note." If you've heard his versions of "My Funny Valentine" and "King Porter Stomp," you know he's not kidding. I've learned that this is not necessarily the optimal strategy for the young arranger to adopt if he ever wants to get hired again.

Professor Heebie McJeebie:
I have done some real-time analysis while listening to excerpts of your compositions. I find that your use of repetition is somewhat more practical for jazz music than serious music. As you know, serious listeners don't need to hear the same thing more than once to understand it, but jazz listeners may need a few repetitions before they can appreciate the complexity of your musical ideas. Do you think about who your audience will be, when composing a new piece? If so, how do you pander to them?

Darcy James Argue:
You seem to be aligning yourself with the Scottish-Canadian composer David Byrne, who famously advised his composition students "Say something once, why say it again?" Brookmeyer, on the other hand, always encouraged me to keep talking until I'd exhausted what I had to say about whatever the piece was about. I'm not generally a fan of music that insists on discarding or radically transforming ideas as soon as they are introduced -- that stuff usually ends up sounding like the composer could have benefited from a little Ritalin.

As for audiences, I find there's nothing they love better than walking into a club and seeing nineteen people on stage, only one of whom has a guitar, but all of whom have music stands in front of them. When they find out that I'm the conductor and not the lead singer, that's the point where I know they'll be in the palm of my hand for the rest of the evening no matter what we play.

Professor Heebie McJeebie:
If I were to point my finger at you and yell, "IMPROVISE!" what would you do?

Darcy James Argue:
That depends... If there was a TANDY Virtuoso-M1992 in the room, I'd probably reach for that first.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society performs at the Flux Factory in Long Island City on August 26, and at Union Hall in Brooklyn on August 27. You can download and listen to mp3’s of his compositions from his website. But be warned, dear readers: Jazz compositions are often unpredictable, and one performance may sound completely different than another.

Prof. McJeebie Goes Back to School

2006-08-16T10:32:00.000-04:00

I am pleased to announce that in September I will begin my new-music education initiative by visiting local Rochester elementary schools and teaching children about the joy and fun of serious music.

As a first step, I have developed a new and innovative notation system that allows schoolchildren to play music on their TANDY computer keyboards. As you can see in the illustration, staff lines and spaces correspond to different ASCII keys. Each child is given a special floppy disk that contains all kinds of sine wave oscillators and Boolean (true or false) sounds.

Once the children learn to read music, I will ask them to notate a few of their own ideas. I will then take their ideas and flesh them out into fully formed musical expressions, creating a TANDY concerto for each child. We will then have a Concerto Competition, and the most musical students will get to perform my compositions at school assemblies all over Rochester.

It is very important for us to educate schoolchildren in the virtues of classical music. As a composer and Professor, I am not only a role model but also an experienced teacher who knows how to inspire future classical musicians through educational exercises and competitions. The inspiration will encourage these future classical musicians to make a place for serious music in their lives and the lives of all their friends and family.

This, dear readers, is why we must teach schoolchildren about classical music!

American Record Guide Turns 224 Years Old!

2006-08-11T13:36:00.000-04:00

Recently I have been enjoying the publication American Record Guide, a wonderful, classical-only, insider, trade magazine with a self-selecting limited readership. After a lengthy evaluation process based on the personal information I entered requesting a sample issue, the ARG sent me an email with a link to download a PDF from the publication’s TANDY-enabled website.

The reviews in ARG are written by a variety of critics with a variety of educational backgrounds, a fact that calls into question my earlier complaint about student reviewers (more on that later). As an example of the publication’s wonderfully contemporary sense of humor and openness, I quote from a column entitled “Meet the Critic:”

Stephen Chakwin has been writing for ARG since at least 1980 and loves doing it because it makes him listen to and think about composers from Schütz to Glass and a lot of others in between. In the last few years he has written mostly about Haydn, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and Schoenberg, which doesn’t trouble him at all... His most interesting current non-ARG writing project is an article for the British Haydn Society on the nicknames of Haydn’s compositions....

What a wonderful idea to allow the readers to “Meet the Critic!” It is especially helpful for me, as a Professor, since I can advise my students, some of whom write very well in the styles of Haydn, Wagner, and Schoenberg, to send their scores and recordings to Mr. Chakwin's personal mailing address.

Most of the reviewers for ARG are trained and educated in the proper musical fashion, but some, according to their bios on ARG's website, are not active music professors. Usually those without music degrees, though, have some otherwise astute relation to music. For example, Gerald Fox is an electrical engineer, but he also serves on the board of directors of a number of orchestras; and Michael Mark is a copy editor with a degree in English and Journalism, but when he was a boy, he “was an opera expert and won a lot of money on television.”

What I’ve discovered has actually changed my opinion of music critics without doctorates in music. It turns out that such writers can still be very insightful and accurate about the music they review. For example, here are some passages of reviews from my free trial issue:

from a review of Alvin Curran’s Maritime Rites by writer Allen Gimbel: “...[The] anarchic 60s collective Musica Elettronica Viva [was] a group that embraced the Cagean ‘anything goes’ aesthetic and grafted it onto a Marxist ideological world view...”

That’s right! Some people think that John Cage’s music is steeped in discipline and control, but Gimbel gets it right – anything goes!

from a review of Steve Reich’s Different Trains (string orchestra version) by writer Ian Quinn: “...Different Trains was a turn for the worse in Reich’s output; with the piece’s notes and tempos beholden to emergent structures in its oral libretto, there is little in the way of conventional musical logic...”

Quinn eloquently observes that without conventional musical signposts, ordinary listeners are often frightened.

But my favorite review is David Moore’s take on Philip Glass’s Reflections, which I shall quote in its entirety:

Oh, my! Just under an hour of Philip Glass arranged with loving care by Arizcuren and Niko Ravenstijn for an orchestra of cellos. Oompah, oompah, doodledee doodledee, waah, waah! Sorry, couldn’t stay awake!

It takes a very smart reviewer to know when to stop listening and just write. Sometimes it’s not necessary to get through an entire album before knowing exactly how to review it. This is an excellent example of ARG’s contemporary sense of humor and wit, and I strongly recommend that all composers send their CDs along for review.

Student Reviewers

2006-08-10T10:29:00.000-04:00

Recently, I presented the world premiere of my piece, Concerto for TANDY Virtuoso-M1992 and Orchestra, as part of the Summer Break Faculty Recital here at the Hotel Cadillac. The concert featured yours truly as TANDY soloist, along with the Virtual Orchestra TIVO ORCH-77 sequencer/synthesizer. Since the composer himself was performing the piece, there was nothing whatsoever in question about interpretation or performance quality, and, until now, I had received nothing but praise.

A very negative, 350-word review was published by the Hotel Cadillac’s student-run newspaper, The Weekly Rate, written by a part-time student named Spiro Fitch. Through the Tenured Faculty Freedom of Information Act, I was able to ascertain that Fitch is enrolled in only four classes this summer. He’s also a kitchen-worker in the cafeteria. Now, I concede that even part-time students are entitled to their opinions, but they should not have the right to publish 350-word reviews in a periodical that is read by nearly all the Professors at Hotel Cadillac.

You can brand me an elitist, but I’ve always assumed that music critics, especially those who write for academic publications, were required to have some specialized understanding of what it means to be “musical,” some expertise based on valid training. We don’t regularly read program notes written by illiterates, do we?! We wouldn’t attend a higher-education seminar led by a high-school dropout! And certainly, student newspapers should not publish reviews by migrant cafeteria workers.

As they say in low-income, hip-hop culture, let’s break it down:

A music critic is supposed to be a discerning listener who knows what comprises a good performance and/or composition. He should have perfect pitch, the ability to sing any melody using solfege with movable “doe,” and the ability to understand how TANDY computers utilize their complex sound vocabularies. Only after he establishes his musical pedigree should he get into more subjective matters such as whether or not he was “moved” by the music.

Most students lack objective knowledge, especially part-time students! That’s why they’re students – they have a lot to learn, and they don’t even know it. Publishing a partly educated student's review of the work of a Professor with multiple doctorates makes a mockery of the whole music-education system. These days it seems anyone with a pair of ears can call himself a music critic. Indeed, The Weekly Rate may recruit its writers from the Salvation Army for all I know. But those of us who are reasoned, educated professionals know better. From the earliest Grove’s to the contemporary Educational Excursions for Music Connoisseurs, music criticism should be by the well-educated, about the well-educated, and in the vocabulary of the well-educated.

The Not So New Technique of Sampling

2006-08-08T08:15:00.000-04:00

If you are a young composer living in our world today, you most likely have asked yourself this question: What can I do that hasn’t been done before? But young people often don’t realize that their “new” ideas are less than novel. Everything seems new to them because they are young and new to this world, and they have not heard all there is to hear.

Many of my students have brought me compositions in which they use a technique known as “sampling.” They seem to think that sampling is somehow unique and fresh, but it turns out that sampling was invented in 1959, by Dr. Andreas Feryöse.

A psychiatrist by profession and a back-alley cellist by trade, Dr. Feryöse conducted a study in which his subjects were given vast amounts of audio placebos and a box of tissue paper. He discovered that, after about sixteen hours with the audio placebos, 94% of the subjects were deeply affected by the sounds they heard. The experiment proved his hypothesis – that human beings are moved the most by that which they already know.

Many of my pieces from as early as 1971 use TANDY’s QOUDLIB ET200 to sample pure sine waves that occur naturally in outer space. My reel-to-reel tape machine is also a type of sampling device. As a matter of fact, one could consider any cassette tape or CD recording a “sample.” A sample is just a recording of a sound from the past.

In this postmodern climate of making art that refers to the past, sampling might seem like a trendy device, but in fact it is merely a recapitulation – a da capo al fine.

The Professor on MySpace

2006-08-04T21:37:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers,

I am pleased to announce my new MySpace page at www.myspace.com/heebiemcjeebie. There you can listen to two of my most uploadable compositions,

"Etude for Computer" (1989, rev. 1993, rev. 1999, rev. 2004)
and
"TANDY Dances" (2004, rev. 2004).

Please do be my "friend." The more friends I have, and the more people who listen to my compositions, the more royalties I will receive.

CREDIT: Professor McJeebie's MySpace page was created by the Professor's teaching assistant, Wanky Auskezer.

ASCAP vs. BMI

2006-08-03T17:25:00.000-04:00

One of the most contentious and thoroughly regulated ongoing debates between composers and publishers is whether ASCAP is superior to BMI or BMI is superior to ASCAP. For those of you oblivious internet surfers who never bother to pay composers for downloading their excerpts from Amazon.com, I'll explain: ASCAP and BMI are organizations that advocate for the royalties and rights of their member composers, writers, and publishers. Every time a composer’s work is performed or broadcast, the composer is compensated. Or at least, that’s the idea. My students have yet to receive the royalties for their MySpace performances.

ASCAP was started by the composer John Philip Sousa, whose patriotic music was often hummed in speakeasies during the prohibition era. The mafia had paid Mr. Sousa a reasonable fee every time one of the drunken criminals would blurt out a melody or a lyric from his compositions. Mr. Sousa spent a great deal of time at the speakeasy, humming his own tunes in order to insidiously implant them in the minds of other clientele, so that they would unwittingly hum them, and he would make more money. When alcohol became legal again, Mr. Sousa realized he could start a legitimate organization to pay composers who frequented bars. (However, there are those who insist that ASCAP and BMI are still run by the mafia.)

At any rate, here are some comparisons from an objective point of view (I am a member of my own performing rights organization, THE NEW-MUSIC ARCHIVES.)

ASCAP and BMI each have their own young composers competition. In one respect, BMI is superior because its panelists judge the young composers based solely on the written score. The panelists do not bother with recordings, saving the young composers from inadequate performers spoiling an otherwise pristine piece-in-theory. On the other hand, BMI does not permit the submission of audio recordings of TANDY computer music (music that is far too technically complicated to represent in notated form; indeed, much of it is too complicated for the human ear to comprehend). ASCAP does permit TANDY recordings, but in the many years of its competition, only three electronic-music composers have been granted an award, and usually it was for an anomalous acoustic piece. This lack of recognition for young TANDY composers is due to the fact that computers are really best understood by adult minds. It is much easier for a young composer to write music in the style of Mozart than in the style of a computer.

Neither ASCAP nor BMI compensate their member composers for performances of music associated with dance or theater pieces. Both organizations score highly in that regard, encouraging their members to avoid the poisonous waters of “interdisciplinary collaborations.”

What it ultimately comes down to is the fact that ASCAP’s New York City office is located about one block closer to the Juilliard School, and every time an ASCAP composer-member visits the New York City office, he is given a coupon to see a concert of music by the Juilliard students at half the regular admission price of $65. BMI, on the other hand, offers so-called V.I.P. admission to pass-the-hat “jazz” concerts, which often take place in bars and clubs. I appreciate the fact that BMI attempts to show the jazz world that true composers are worthy of V.I.P. treatment. However, most serious composers simply do not have time for jazz, and they shouldn't be pampered while listening to it. They need to be encouraged to spend their time more wisely and educationally. You see, jazz is a music rife with inconsistencies, and it tends to affect its listeners viscerally rather than intellectually (though there are some exceptions, mostly at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall).

There are many more things to say about ASCAP vs. BMI, but if you can't make up your mind, then join them both!

Two Decisions that Every Young Composer Must Make

2006-07-31T12:27:00.000-04:00

In my multitudinous years of teaching experience, I have noticed that, when it comes to two simple career-decisions, virtually none of my students make the right choices. The purpose of this blog entry is to educate my future students in advance.

Decision #1: Graduate School

Young people, the choice is simple. No creative artist has made worthwhile art without at least one doctorate. Before you rush out with your bachelor’s degree and start expressing yourself, think about how much you don’t know about what kind of music you should write. Chances are you haven’t quite found your voice yet. Writing a couple of theses will help you tame those impulsive needs to churn out compositional drivel. You’ll learn to develop the intellectual distance needed to express your feelings formally and structurally.

You may be too young and virulent to understand this reasoning, but think about this: if you get accepted to graduate school, you will get HEALTH INSURANCE.

Decision #2: Commercial- or Self-Publish

Some of you young people believe you can wiggle and squiggle your way into the establishment by generating your scores on dot matrix printers. Well I’ve got news for you: You can’t make a squiggle with some stupid internet composition program. Just ask Morton Subotnick.

You may have a computer that can generate scores, but that doesn’t mean your music is accurately represented (especially if you're not using a TANDY computer). In the past, the purpose of a publisher was to promote and publicize your music. Even though publishers no longer function as publicists, they do keep half of your royalties for you. They invest those royalties in the publishing industry. If you keep all of your royalties to yourself, the big publishers will go bankrupt, and then there will be no establishment left, and no one to hold on to those royalties for you.

Again, the choice is simple.

I’ll have more BlogLessons for potential students in the near future. Meanwhile, you can visit this site for some lessons to keep you busy until school starts.

Composerly Soldiers

2006-07-27T10:01:00.000-04:00

Tanglewood is known as a place where young people can be exposed to exciting former trends in contemporary music. This was made evident by a performance featuring the most enlightened of living composers – John Harbison, Elliott Carter, and Milton Babbitt.

Here are three mentors who have been challenging the younger generations to write more like them for decades (except for Mr. Babbitt who evidently accepts all kinds of music, from ISCM to Broadway). At long last, the three have capitulated to the demands of their longtime patron Maestro James Levine and performed a shits-and-giggles rendition of Stravinsky’s jazzy and inconsequential work, A Soldier’s Tale.

Now, this is the kind of multi-media music that interests me. It is not necessary to be an actor to perform those speaking roles. Nor is it necessary to be experienced in theatrical performance to coach the actors as Maestro Levine does. In the current climate of “interdisciplinary art,” it is refreshing to see Stravinsky’s music highlighted by the armchair performances of three towering musical figures. Such a rendition affirms that, even when other “disciplines” are involved in a performance, the music must be the driving force behind the work.

I have suggested that some of my young students, with their addictions to YouTubes and PlayStations, attend more performances like this one – performances in which the acting, the staging, the lighting, and the choreography are incidental. As composers and musicians, we must not allow ourselves to be trivialized and marginalized by other so-called disciplines. After all, we often have concerts without dancing and acting, but let’s see them have a dance or a play without music!

Prof. McJeebie's Wedding Music

2006-07-24T12:02:00.000-04:00

The young composer Colin Holter maintains a blog at New Music Box about his experiences as a student at one of the Universities of Illinois. I should hope that he does not receive class credit for airing his dirty laundry without the approval of his professors.

In his latest post, “Prenuptial Agreement,” student Holter wonders what kind of music might be played at a composer’s wedding. There have been several responses to his query, but I thought I would publish my response on Classical Pontifications so as to not unjustly enrich the content of my competitor’s publication.

In the fall of 1968, I had just been named Temporary Professor of Composition and Arrangement at the Hotel Cadillac, and I decided it was time to settle down with the woman whom I had been teaching for almost twelve years. Her name was Piccola Sempré, and she was an avid arranger of my compositions. I’m sad to report that our marriage did not last very long. We were divorced after she deliberately spilled espresso on my TANDY Mainframe700 computer.

At any rate, for our wedding ceremony we hired the Hotel Cadillac’s contemporary music ensemble, Ictus Fictus, to play the music of my late mentor, the romantic modernist composer Dr. Prof. Held Projansky. We commissioned a new work from Dr. Prof. Projansky with the stipulation that it be incorporated into a medley of his earlier works. The medley included excerpts from his epic symphonic opus Abstractions in the Key of E Minor, his prankish yet disciplined etude Variations on an Earlier Theme of Dr. Prof. Held Projanksy, the overture from his oratorio Projansky Dreams: From the Concert Hall to the Opera House, and the newly commissioned work The Transfiguration: Sempré to McJeebie.

Dr. Prof. Projanksy’s wedding score was very modernist and abstract, and many of our guests remarked at how inaccessible and grumpy he was during the ceremony, but this grumpiness was primarily to do with indigestion from the champagne. It turned out that Dr. Prof. Projanksy was very happy with the performance, and it was a wonderful experience for me and my bride to have a medley of modern compositions performed throughout the ceremony.

The concert/ceremony made me proud to have studied with Dr. Prof. Projansky, but it did more than that: Dr. Prof. Projanksy’s music was truly educational for my bride. You see, Piccola had only arranged music. She knew virtually nothing about composition. Dr. Projansky inspired her to appreciate the effort and skill required to be a modern composer. His medley emphasized the importance of composition over arrangement.

Review: RPO with Jon Nakamatsu

2006-07-21T16:02:00.000-04:00

This Sunday, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra will present its annual New Music Concert featuring the contemporary works of George Gershwin as performed by the living pianist Jon Nakamatsu. The following is my pre-emptive review of that concert:

On Sunday, July 23, the RPO’s audience members rushed into the air-conditioned concert hall in anticipation of one of the most controversial music programs of the twentieth century – an all-Gershwin concert. Allegedly, the Executive, Administrative, Artistic, and Development Directors had all referred to this concert in board meetings as “the improvisational concert.” Now, everyone wanted to know the answer to one simple question: What will happen if the orchestra improvises?

Leave it to the renowned pianist Jon Nakamatsu to steer clear of the answer to that question. He delivered one of the finest interpretations of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue ever realized by a classical pianist. Nakamatsu was recently quoted in the Democrat & Chronicle saying “I've heard pianists try to [make Gershwin sound like jazz] with the Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F, and it distorts what the music is about... Gershwin wasn't a jazz musician.”

Here, here! It’s about time people stopped trying to improvise their way around very technically demanding notes and rhythms. Gershwin was a believer in discipline, not free-for-all. His lectures to graduate students at the Canonical Conservatory of Martha’s Vineyard emphasized the ability of classical music to restore order and civility to drunkenness, to inspire an alarmingly gluttonous zeal for moderation.

Nakamatsu played the Rhapsody with calculating exactitude and mathematical rigor. He meticulously stroked his instrument in a way that inspired the kind of transcendence this Professor has previously experienced only in front of a TANDY computer. Nakamatsu is like a MIDI machine. His performances are even more pristine than Mel Bay's notated corrections of famous improvisations.

It turns out that this concert was a preview of an RPO/Nakamatsu disc to be released on the Harmonia Mundi recording label. That disc, entitled A Good Degree of Gershwin, will be released as soon as it is recorded, mixed, mastered, and packaged. Meanwhile, let’s hope Nakamatsu returns for next year’s New Music Concert, An Evening of Jazz Etudes.

Review: Randy Nordschow at The Stone

2006-07-19T16:33:00.000-04:00

As per my professorial review policy, I now present a pre-emptive review of Randy Nordschow’s concert at New York City’s most disorganized downtown venue, The Stone, Thursday night, July 20th, at 8pm, at Avenue C and 2nd Street. No subways stop anywhere near this dangerous part of town.

You can be sure that Nordschow’s music will appeal to the heroin addicts and male prostitutes of Alphabet City. In the past, he was secretive about his musical background, and his need to refer to himself not as a composer but as a “composer/sound artist” indicated a certain lack of formal training. But now, according to the Curriculum Vitae shamelessly posted on his website instead of his publisher's website, Nordschow studied with Pauline Oliveros at Mills College. As we all know, Mills College is a women’s school, so unless Mr. Nordschow used to be a woman, it is not possible for him to have studied there. And even if he did, Pauline Oliveros doesn’t teach in person any longer; she teaches via iChat. She may have her fancy webcams and digital streaming devices, but she can’t possibly know whether or not her students are taking adequate notes in class. Then again, Ms. Oliveros has never really cared about notes, has she?

At any rate, Nordschow also claims to have studied with Alvin Curran, the most famous composer of synthesizer music for exercise videos from the 1980s. Curran’s most famous piece, Music on a Long Thin Wire, was commissioned by Richard Simmons before MIDI was invented. Everyone knows that you don’t really study with Alvin Curran so much as argue with him. The man has such a hot temper that he dismisses any student who has ever used the Windows Operating System. Curran has been known to spend an entire semester of lessons arguing with his students about how Windows has corrupted their creative spirits.

Well, let’s say that Nordschow did in fact semi-participate in the virtual lessons with Oliveros and survive the diatribes of Curran. The music that he writes is not even really music. Rather, it’s “multi-media” music. Apparently young people are no longer satisfied with one medium. They must have their theatrics and DJs and psychedelic videos. Nordschow, never one to question young people, gives them what they want with his piece Guaranteed Answered Prayers, mocking the rituals of devout religious Americans by drowning the audience in “miracle spring water.” In addition, air guitarist Marco Cappelli converts one of Nordschow’s “multi-media” pieces into actual music; and pianist Jenny Lin performs the composer’s realizations of one of Beethoven’s unfinished moonlight sonatas.

The evening promises to entertain on many different levels at once, at least for the first one or two minutes of each piece. But don’t blame me if I walk out the door and turn to heroin and prostitution before the concert’s over.

At 10pm, you can catch the "composer" Judy Dunaway performing music on her drug balloons (see photo).

Interviews with Young People #1: NICO MUHLY

2006-07-17T07:52:00.000-04:00

Often times, younger composers attempt to create a movement of change in classical music, a field where everything is just fine the way it is. In my inaugural installment of Interviews with Young People, I spoke with composer Nico Muhly about his debut full-length CD album Speaks Volumes which comes out this month on the Bedroom Community label. According to the press release,

Speaks Volumes doesn’t sound like most classical records. It is not an idealized version of live musical performance or a substitute for the authentic live experience. It is not intended to conform to the nineteenth-century experience of classical music. Speaks Volumes was approached from a different direction. Sigurdsson’s recording and production doesn’t sit back and let the music sweep the listener away emotionally; it leans forward in exacting scrutiny and urges the listener to pay attention.

Naturally, I was skeptical and/or dismissive of these claims, but I thought it might be a good idea to give this young composer an opportunity to appear on my blog, so that the huge demographic of certain very specific types of people who follow my Pontifications might have an opportunity to decide for itself.

Prof. Heebie McJeebie: Your new album is titled Speaks Volumes. Who is responsible for this title?

Nico Muhly: I am responsible.

Prof. McJeebie: But there are no words in any of the pieces. Why on earth would you make the title so misleading?

Nico: While there are no words, most of the pieces are about words or, at least, they take their cues from my thinking about language and the way language works. I have a love affair with the English language.

Prof. McJeebie: A love affair?! Well, don't you think it would be better for you to be in love with a musical language? [coughs]

Nico: These pieces (like Honest Music) are about ways of speaking and ways of communicating.

Prof. McJeebie: There are parts of Honest Music that sound as though the performers are stopping-and-starting and making mistakes! That doesn't seem very "honest" to me. Why did you allow the performers to get away with those mistakes?

Nico: Because I wanted to see what shame they would bring to their families with their shoddy intonation.

[The professor has a coughing fit for a few minutes before continuing.]

Prof. McJeebie: Valgeir Sigurðsson is credited as the producer, mixer, and co-programmer of (I assume) TANDY electronics, on the album. How do you pronounce his name?

Nico: His first name is pronounced like [Vahl-keer] with a rolled “R.” His last name is Sigurthson. The ð is a [th] and its name is eth. There are intricacies to the Icelandic language that elude me. I have had a two-week torrid affair with the language, but certainly not a love affair.

Prof. McJeebie: What would you need from a language in order to make a commitment?

Nico: An understanding of its subjunctive.

[brief laughter]

Prof. McJeebie: It seems to me that Valgeir, having worked with some popular music stars in the past, might want to dumb down your music so he can sell it in popular music record stores like Sam Goody. How did the two of you get along?

Nico: I'm not sure that Valgeir has any interest in whether or not my album sells in Sam Goody; they don't have that [expletive deleted] on the volcano. Certainly no project he's ever worked on before has been designed for commercial success. Did you hear Medúlla?

Prof. McJeebie: No, I’m not a big fan of Meredith Monk albums.

Nico: [brief laughter, then prolonged silence]

Prof. McJeebie: The final piece on Speaks Volumes, “Keep in Touch,” is performed by the cross-dressing singer Antony. How did you get in touch with your feminine side while working on this piece?

Nico: Actually, Antony was dressed as a man when he recorded it. I was thinking about Nadia Sirota, the violist, while I wrote "Keep in Touch."

Prof. McJeebie: I see. Which lady composers most influenced you?

Nico: To my knowledge I have never been influenced by a lady composer. I have been influenced by people having been once upon a time influenced by Hildegard, of Bingen, but that's one degree removed.

Prof. McJeebie: You know, upon listening to the first two minutes of each track on the album, it occurs to me that you are influenced by cold and empty styles like minimalism and renaissance music, but also by more emotional music like that of Pulitzer Prize-winning composers such as Paul Moravec and John Corigliano. How do you justify writing music that is both empty and emotional?

Nico: I studied with Corigliano, and he thought minimalism was cold and empty, too. I think it's generational. For me, the most emotional music I've heard written since 1950 is the first few minutes of Music in Twelve Parts, followed by Shaker Loops and then The Cave. So go know.

Prof. McJeebie: Do you enjoy being emotional?

Nico: No, it's really messy (i.e. “subjunctive”).

Read more about Speaks Volumes and listen to excerpts.

Read more about Nico Muhly.

Guggenheim Professors

2006-07-14T11:28:00.000-04:00

Because I have been very busy with my academic schedule, I did not find out about the Guggenheim Fellows (and two Lasses) until yesterday. I am very pleased that the list of 2006 Guggenheim Award-winning composers includes six Professors:

Kathryn Alexander, Associate Professor of Music Composition, Yale University
Cristian Amigo, Adjunct Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University
Donald Crockett, Professor of Composition and Chair, Composition Department, Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California
Anthony Davis, Professor of Music, University of California, San Diego
Jeff Talman, Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Arts, Emerson College
Daniel Trueman, Assistant Professor of Music, Princeton University

Unfortunately, the Guggenheim committee chose to also award the following composers who do not have academic positions as far as I am aware:

Paul Dresher, Haight-Ashbury hippie
Scott Johnson, Christian Scientist
Stewart Wallace, musical theater fag
Janis Mattox, not a music composer, so much as a “multi-media” composer

Let us hope that the Guggenheim Fellowships (and Lassieships) are more wisely handed out in the future.

Local Eatery

2006-07-13T11:00:00.000-04:00

The young pianist and composer Adam Baratz has been an admirer of my work for some time. He has his own blog which occasionally contains some respectable musical ideas, though he does tend to dismiss the importance of dynamic markings. At any rate, he has often followed me around due to my status as a professor to be emulated, and he astutely observes that I can often be found at a particular restaurant very near the Hotel Cadillac.
Though I do prefer the Garbage Plate at Texas Hots (see sidebar), when I need to spend a few hours punching the cards for my TANDY Dynomighticon, I have been known to order a few slices of the pie that's named after me: The Heebie McJeebie (a white pie with hamburger, mango chutney, and blue cheese dressing).

If you are a famous composer, I invite you to post a comment below and let us know what your favorite food is.

NYC Music Snobs

2006-07-12T08:10:00.000-04:00

I'm getting sick and tired of reading about new music only in New York City. Just because NYC has more people per square foot and more concerts per evening than any other place in the USA doesn't mean it should be written about any more often than, say, Branson, MO.

My friend and colleague, Professor Floozy McBoozy (a beautiful and talented lady composer), teaches composition and music theory at the University of Our Sacred Virgin in Wichita Falls, TX. She and her students are always putting on concerts for the other students to see. Why can't the New York Times' Music section be about Wichita Falls for a change? Why won't the Times music critic Anthony Tommasini come out to Rochester for one of my weekly Faculty Recitals at the Hotel Cadillac?

It's time to put a stop to NYC Music Snobbery! NYC may be the most populous city in the country, but massive amounts of people does not a New Music Centre make. Just ask composer Robert Moran whose piece For The People of New York City, originally scored for 100,000 musicians and citizens, had to be re-orchestrated for MIDI playback due to budget limitations. NYC may be the most culturally diverse city in the USA, but cultural diversity and classical music don't always mix. Just ask Mikel Rouse whose recent album, Music For Minorities, ironically sold more copies in Portland than anywhere else in the country.

Pedophile Composers

2006-07-11T09:23:00.000-04:00

Before I received tenure I had to work hard for a living. One of my side jobs was working as a decoy for the organization Union Musicians Against Pedophile Composers. It was my job to pose as a 14-year-old boy in the new-music chat rooms and lure boy-loving composers to my Rochester apartment where Dateline NBC had installed hidden cameras for their special series, "To Catch a Predator."

I was surprised to discover that the composers you'd most expect to practice pedophilia - those who have written Alice in Wonderland Symphonies, for example - were the most considerate and responsible composers of the bunch. The true predators were those who hid behind the facade of mediocrity, those who were afraid to write extreme and emotional music. It's almost as if they were looking for the life-drama that they couldn't evoke in their compositions. Without naming any names, I'd advise all parents to talk to their kids about new music. If you don't, someone else will.

I'd also like to strongly suggest that organizations like ASCAP and BMI stop publicizing the names of their Young Composers Award winners. Since the vast majority of these young composers are adolescent boys, the list of names and contact information is just an open invitation for pedophile composers to inappropriately "mentor" the awardees.

And for those pedophile composers out there: If you're looking for someone young and innocent to educate in counterpoint and harmony, contact me at my AIM screen name DecoyBoy1991 for some help.

Unpolished Melodies and Muddy Counterpoints

2006-07-09T19:58:00.000-04:00

Some of my younger pupils have brought to my attention that it has become quite the trend for popular music composers to release collections of Outtakes as entire albums. Such rock stars as Bjork, Sufjan Stevens, Jon Bon Jovi, and The Loosey Gooseys have provided their listeners with examples of their failures as popular music stars.

Sadly, lovers of Serious Music do not often get to hear the discarded melodies and substandard orchestrations of our composerly heroes. Well, that is all about to change with the release of Outtakes collections by two of our most esteemed masters - John Corigliano's UNPOLISHED MELODIES and Steve Reich's MUDDY COUNTERPOINTS.

The Corigliano collection is comprised of melodies he imagines Bob Dylan might have written but never used. In order to maintain the purity of his ego, Corigliano has not actually listened to any of Bob Dylan's music. Instead, he has imagined the rock-and-roll circumstances of Dylan's life and written dramatic, unnerving melodies to illustrate Dylan's erratic behavior.

MUDDY COUNTERPOINTS is an album of failed attempts at Reich's "counterpoint" pieces (solo pieces for live performer and multiple pre-recorded tracks of the same performer, same instrument). According to the liner notes, there are some instruments for which Reich's "counterpoint" style was ill-suited. There are four pieces, or fragments of pieces, on the album - DIDJERIDU COUNTERPOINT, FRENCH HORN COUNTERPOINT, TABLE SAW COUNTERPOINT, and AUTOHARP COUNTERPOINT.

Let's hope other composers follow this new trend!

Review of Grendel

2006-07-07T17:21:00.000-04:00

In keeping with my reputation as a Revolutionary yet Professorial Academic, it will be my policy to publish only pre-emptive reviews on this blog - that is, reviews of music that are not tainted by the experience of having already heard it.

Elliot Goldenthal's opera, GRENDEL, will be performed at the Lincoln Center Festival next week, directed by his longtime copulator/collaborator Julie Taymor, former director of Walt Disney films such as Herbie the Love Bug.

GRENDEL is based on the ancient Greek myth of Beowulf which was recently adapted into a more obscure story by the modernist writer and sometimes conductor John Eliot Gardner. The new version is told from the point of view of the monster.

Musically, the opera ventures into territory previously off limits to even the most schizophrenic composers. There are shrill flute passages and seizure-inducing rumblings of timpani and basso profundis. Ordinary composers would have the common sense to avoid mixing such extremes of register, but Goldenthal (who has worked with bearded women and castrati in Europe) does not shy away from psychotic orchestrations.

In the end, Goldenthal's orchestrations are what prevent GRENDEL from becoming the masterpiece it should be. If only he had considered the calming timbres of TANDY computers, he may have tugged at our heartstrings a bit more. As it stands now, GRENDEL is a tour de force of ugliness and gore, and it comes across like a grainy film shot on the floor of a slaughterhouse.

While Julie "Circle of Life" Taymor's staging does provide some relief - at one point in the opera, GRENDEL quite literally releases a dove into the audience, punctuated with harp glissandi and Chinese gongs that suggest a rather pranksterish, benevolent monster - her lioness touch is not enough to save the nearly seven-hour-long opera from its own misery. With nothing beautiful to hold onto, the audience is left to fight the crowds in a state of blank emptiness. I'd suggest leaving about five minutes before the opera finishes in order to beat the crowds.

By Way of Introduction

2006-07-07T08:38:00.000-04:00

Hello readers. My name is Heebie McJeebie, and I am the TANDY Professor of Electronic Music at the Hotel Cadillac in Rochester, NY.

In addition to being a composer and professor (not necessarily in that order), I am also the host of the podcast COMPOSERS AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM.

Sadly I have been on hiatus from that project for many months now... unable to write, produce, and record new episodes due to insufficient funding. It seems potential funders have objected primarily to my hourly wage for uploading podcasts via my TANDY dial-up connection. As those of you with dial-up connections know, if you don't jiggle the phone chord just right, you risk the possibility of bandwidth corruption. So you really do need to sit and wait when uploading a large file. But the money-holders with their fancy-schmancy broadbands look down on the unsavory dial-uppers and refuse to pay us an hourly wage.

At any rate, I hope to continue with my podcast before too long. In fact, I am speaking with TANDY representatives at the local Radio Shack about upgrading their operating system to allow for dial-up webcam video so that my audio podcast can become a video podcast.

And we'll see how quickly those funders come a-knockin' once I've got video footage of composers notating their music in real time!

Meanwhile, please enjoy my new weblog, CLASSICAL PONTIFICATIONS WITH PROFESSOR HEEBIE MCJEEBIE.

Here we will discuss the trajectory of Contemporary Canonic Classical music (serious music) and occassionally trifle with the less-grounded trends of younger, vagabond composers.

I pledge to you that on this blog, there is a place for all composers and musicians, even the twelve nameless composers whom my esteemed colleague Bernard Holland recently didn't write about in the New York Times.