"THE FUTURE OF MUSIC"

Robert Ashley

Edited by Karen Reynolds

Copyright © 2000 Robert Ashley and the Composition Area, Department of Music, the University of California, San
DiegoPublished by Permission

The following TEXT was commissioned by the Composition Area, Department of Music,
University of California, San Diego for its SEARCH initiative. The TEXT is copyrighted and
appears in its original publication here. While links TO this TEXT from other sites are
welcome, the TEXT itself may not be reprinted for any reason without express agreement in
writing from the copyright holders [Please contact Roger Reynolds: info@rogerreynolds.com
to facilitate this.].

SEARCH EVENT I, 15 April 2000, University of California, San Diego

PART I

When I started writing this lecture I had the idea that I would
interrupt it now and then for a musical example. That was a bad
idea, as we all know. I don't know what made me forget. Talk and
music don't mix. Different parts of the brain or something.
Except in two very special conditions, which we all have
experienced, the attention to the details of the voice ---
whether or not anything interesting is being said --- makes us
impatient with the music, which is the last thing the lecture
needs. The two conditions (just to remind you of what I mean)
are: first, the very casual NPR-type introduction to a long
piece of music, which sort of eases you into the Vivaldi or
whatever; and second, the full-speed ahead DJ on format-pop
radio, who tries not to say anything except the ID, the time and
the advertisement.

I can't do either of those, because the talk is too long and the
examples are too short. When I rehearsed this with the examples
for the first time, I could hardly bear the examples, which are
actually very short and which I love as music. I was shocked.
Then I came to my senses.

So first I will talk, for about two hours, and then I will play
about 30 minutes of nine examples, with reference to what they
were supposed to illustrate in the lecture and with
discographical information, in case you should want to pursue
them in full.

Most of the lecture is academic, in the real --- not bad, I hope
--- sense of the term. That is, these ideas have been said many
times already by people more qualified than I. But, obviously,
they are only academic if you have already heard them. For some
people some of the ideas will be new. So I will say them anyway,
just in case.

Most of the lecture, too, is not about the future, as such. It

is not about computers will get faster, and we will DNA-away all
disease, and we will eat food made out of chemicals and so
nobody will starve, and you can make any sound imaginable with
this set of knobs and so forth. We all know that stuff.
Everything they told me in the rotogravure when I was a kid has
come true. And I am still looking at old movies and the same
file footage but with different words on TV. And I don't feel
like I have aged a bit. Strange, huh?

So, I am not going to tell you that loudspeakers will be

implanted in your brain and that you will be able to listen to
any piece of music that was ever made anywhere, at any time you
want --- though that is part of the problem. I would guess that
those of you who are too young to have known the Beatles will
have grand-children listening to the Beatles, and you will be as
cranky as I am about listening to "She's got a ticket to ride."

Most the lecture will be about the present, and how we got to it
from the past. I think that if we could understand the present,
the future would be obvious.

The future of music.

The future of music is too big for me to deal with. Only a few
decades ago I thought I knew, or knew of, most of the composers
in Europe and America. That is, I knew something of their music,
I knew what ideas were being attempted.
Today, of course, that is out of the question. The world of
music has come to include more and more of the composers in the
larger world. They live in places I have never been and will
never be. I have no idea what is going on. I don't have a world-
view, and it would be impossible for me to have a world view
unless I devoted every waking minute to listening to every
recording I could get my hands on (or, on a more practical
level, every recording that I have now and that I have not
listened to). And probably even then I wouldn't have a world-
view. The world is too big for me.

Having said all of this, to protect me from criticism, I will

make a few remarks about music as I know it, which will lead us
to thoughts about the future of music.

Music is a commodity, like hamburgers, automobiles, oil, grain,

currency and under-paid labor. (REPEAT)

Music is a commodity, like hamburgers, automobiles, oil, grain,

currency and under-paid labor.

It can be bought and sold. Every musician, now, wants his or her
music to be a valuable commodity, so that the musician can make
some amount of money to, as we say, live on. We have no choice.

I can't see that anything will change in the next few years.
Then I will not be around. And so, as far as I am concerned,
there is not much of a future, if we are talking about change or
no change. I think I have worked this out, finally, for myself.
If I'm not there, there is nothing. I realize that this position
or attitude of mine represents one side of an enormous
philosophical problem, which I am unqualified to speak about,
but I have come down on the side of "If I'm not there, there is
nothing," because it speaks to my beliefs about my activities in
music for the past fifty years. I became a musician as an
alternative to scientist, civil servant, businessman, criminal
--- my qualifications for all of which I can document ---
because I wanted to make music, because music meant, when I was
a child, an irrational sensual pleasure that I could not resist
and, later, when I got into music as an adult, an irrational
pleasure in making music with other musicians. No one who is not
a musician can understand this pleasure.

I can say with honesty that, when I started, I did not intend to
be a composer. When I first realized I wanted to be a musician,
I did not know what a composer was. I'm not sure now that the
term was in my vocabulary. Maybe it's no different for lots of
you. Music is a present-tense activity that has an irresistible
attraction, like, say, sex. Certain people are drawn to it.

There must have been a time when music was not a commodity. Or
there might be a place even now where music is not a commodity.
I can't imagine what that idea about music could be. Maybe a
kind of "dharmic" --- if you will pardon the expression ---
assignment. My father was a musician and so I am a musician. I
am provided for. I don't know how the world began or how it will
end, but I am a musician and I am provided for.

But that's gone. Now, anyone can be a musician and a composer,

and that is why we are having this discussion.

It is in the nature of a commodity to destroy the resources that

produced the commodity in the first place. (REPEAT)

It is in the nature of a commodity to destroy the resources that

produced the commodity in the first place.

Who would have imagined that the humble hamburger, which was
brought into commercial existence only a mere fifty years ago,
would destroy the resources of the Great Plains of the United
States, which some nutritionists only thirty years ago said
could grow enough food of the right sort to feed the whole
planet. (Francis Moore Lappé, in her book, "Diet for a Small
Planet," maintained that the buffalo, which had adapted to the
indigenous grasses of the Great Plains, could provide more meat
over an indefinite period of time than could cattle even in the
present. But the buffalo-burger is apparently out of the
question.) The hamburger needed cattle. The cattle needed corn
(in the final force-feeding stage), because the indigenous
grasses of the Great Plains did not produce cattle with enough
meat fat to make a good hamburger. (And it did not produce
enough cattle.) The corn needed water. And so the wells got
deeper and deeper. And now, according to Ian Frazier, author of
a presumably well-researched book, "The Great Plains" (Ferrar,
Strauss, Giroux, 1990), the enormous aquifer that lies beneath
the Great Plains from northern Texas up into Canada and from the
Mississippi to the Rockies is only one-fifth full and will take
a long time to fill up again, even if we stop eating hamburgers
tomorrow. So the hamburger has moved on, in its powerful drive
to exist as a commodity, to the rain forests of the Amazon,
which are being cut down to make a place for cattle and corn in
the presence of new water.
There is some question about whether cutting down the rain
forests, apart from ethical considerations, is going to help us
in our immediate goal of continuing to exist and to enjoy music.
And so, as of now, the hamburger as a commodity, is almost as
dangerous as the possibility of a nuclear accident. Not on the
same time scale, of course. But if there is no nuclear accident
in the next fifty years, hamburgers will probably do it for us.

Who would have imagined that the internal combustion engine and
its toy, the automobile, a way to go from one place to another
faster than one could walk, would distort the economies of half
the world and apparently destroy the protective layer of the
planet.

Who would have imagined that Coca Cola, a simple mixture of

water, sugar, a couple of fruit flavors and cocaine would
destroy the tribal nations of Central America, where previously
people lived on yams, meditation and a few leaves of something
that made them feel good in an atmosphere almost without oxygen?

Footnote: For a brilliant article on the question of why we kill

each other I refer you to "Always Time to Kill" by Jason Epstein
in the New York Review of Books, Vol XLVI, Number 17, Nov 4,
1999. Mr. Epstein's article is about the "why" of mass warfare,
but its observations could, I think, be applied as well to the
"why" of large numbers of humans acting with total disregard for
consequences in matters such as ecology. There is obviously
something wrong with us. We are practically unique among
species.

I will skip a discussion of petroleum, grain, currency, under-

paid labor and other commodities, which would only use up
valuable time.

Music has become a commodity. Every composer and musician I know

wants his music or her music to be a salable commodity in the
whole world. Maybe there are some exceptions, but soon they will
be converted.

It is in the nature of a commodity, too, to be chosen for its

success by persons who are impartial to the "quality" of the
commodity as understood by the consumer. (REPEAT)

It is in the nature of a commodity, too, to be chosen for its

success by persons who are impartial to the "quality" of the
commodity as understood by the consumer.

No one, for a moment, believes that the well-paid hamburger

executive eating a hamburger on TV would eat a hamburger, now
that he is well-paid, except on TV. But somebody, not a
musician, will determine the commodity value of a certain kind
of music. And we will be stuck with that decision until another
comes along.

It is in the nature of a commodity, too, to try to eliminate all

competition. (REPEAT)

It is in the nature of a commodity, too, to try to eliminate all

competition.

It is not a coincidence that the commodity as the dominant

element in our lives has risen exactly in parallel with the rise
of fundamentalism, in all religions, in our belief about the
nature of God --- if you will pardon the expression.
Fundamentalism wants to exclude all other ideas. The commodity
wants to exclude all things like it.

The ultimate goal of the commodity in the eyes of the commodity

producer is to have only one of every kind of thing. (REPEAT)

The ultimate goal of the commodity in the eyes of the commodity

producer is to have only one of every kind of thing.

If we are to believe the holy books, which is questionable, and

if we are to believe science, which is, at times, equally
questionable, this would mean the end of the world. According to
the holy books and to science there has to be at least two of
anything in order for anything to be around for very long.

It is believed by some that this is not true. There are long-

standing beliefs that a woman can produce another human being
without the cooperation of a man and that this happens today
more often than we think. I made a note of research on this
possibility in the "Character Reference" anecdote for the
"Willard" section of the opera, ATALANTA (ACTS OF GOD). The note
says simply that two, British, Doctors of Medicine have done
reputable research on the subject of "virgin birth" and have
come to believe that it is more common than we think.

(Incidentally, science, it seems, often comes around to

confirming long-standing beliefs. So, in spite of what you are
thinking at this moment, I would urge you not to write off this
possibility. I mean, the possibility of virgin birth.)

The problem --- for the commodity producer: of there being only
one music; the situation where everybody in the world, listening
to the radio or watching television or whatever, is listening to
the same recording of the same piece of music at the same time;
the ultimate goal of the commodity producer --- is not that this
is necessarily bad --- who is to judge what that would mean? ---
but (the problem is) that we are not capable as human beings at
this time of being of one mind. There are too many distractions
--- from our memories, our imaginations and our immediate
physical desires and needs --- for us to be of one mind. We are
divided among ourselves and within ourselves, and that division
produces distractions that impede the dominance of the
commodity. In fact, the commodity impedes itself.

The structural paradox for the commodity producer in music, at

the moment, is that the performance of the music in every medium
--- all day, everyday, everywhere --- is supposed to sell more
recordings, but of course recordings sold will probably be
listened to and that listening time, at the moment, will
interfere with the on-going business of propagating commodities.
We are having this problem today. We all know people who have
record collections they have never listened to or have listened
to just once. That's ok. Buy it, but don't listen to it.
Especially, don't get "attached" to it.

Of course, the solution is simple. It is being discussed even as

I speak. Sell listening-for-the-first-time-only --- all day,
everyday, everywhere. Don't give them anything they can keep
around and play repeatedly. You think this is crazy? I just read
that Rupert Murdock suggested that since Americans are willing
to spend fifty dollars (with accessories) to go to a baseball
game, they should be willing to spend three or four dollars to
see it at home on TV. The people from Diet Coke and It's a Rock
must have taken him in the back for a little chat. The Diet Coke
and the Chevy are supposed to go home, Rupert, and the people
have to keep being reminded to buy them and take them home, and
if they have to pay to watch the game, they will resent being
reminded. They are perfectly happy, if they think the game
belongs to Diet Coke and Chevy and they get to watch for free.
They won't be perfectly happy if they buy the game and the game
belongs to them and Diet Coke and Chevy keep interrupting it.
Paying for cable is bad enough.
This is not to say that the commodity will not become more
powerful and efficient. I could predict, at the expense of
seeming crazy, that in the near future --- probably not in my
lifetime, but maybe --- there will be one hit record everyday,
for one day only, and that it will be played in every medium for
all of that single day. "Proprietary" technology might prevent
us from copying that record in any way. But who would want to
copy it anyway? Tomorrow is another day.

Of course, the hit record will not "change" in any perceivable

way from day to day. It is in the nature of a commodity to
resemble itself as much as possible from use to use. (REPEAT)

It is in the nature of a commodity to resemble itself as much as

possible from use to use.

For instance, a tank of gas may take you to different places

while it is being used, but the tank of gas should resemble the
prior tank of gas as much as possible. And the hamburger may
have different effects on your body chemistry from day to day,
but the hamburger should resemble the prior hamburger as much as
possible.

In the meantime --- that is, coincidentally --- every person in

the world (who is not resting for the moment in the "external"
world of the compound of commodities) will be trying to make a
piece of music that is as different from the commodity-music as
his or her imagination will allow. Just for a little variety. No
other reason is needed. The spice of life, etcetera.

It is in the nature of a commodity to create resistance to

itself. (REPEAT)

It is in the nature of a commodity to create resistance to

itself. (As opposed to the situation of creating a tradition, as
in some kinds of music we know of and admire, but don't
understand the practice of, in spite of what we say about it
among ourselves.) And so there will be a music of resistance.
Every person involved in music will be trying to create a
"different" music, created through individual exertions. (That
is, without help.)

There will be little common language among these individual

exertions. There will be, perhaps, a common recognition that "we
all do it." I'm not sure of this. There may be rumors of this or
that extraordinary accomplishment. There may be actual examples
of individual exertions being heard by persons other than the
composer. But there is no reason to believe that these rumors or
these exemplary exertions will be "scotched" by the "commodities
police," because there will be no need for them to be
"scotched." Everything will be moving too fast.

It is pointless to try to imagine what the day-to-day hit

records will sound like. The super-highways take us to where the
super-highways want us to go. They will sound like what the
commodities producers want them to sound like. They will sound,
as much as possible like the hit record of the day before.

But what will the individual, secretly imagined, non-commodity

compositions sound like? I have said that there will be little
common language. But that is wrong. There will be the common
language of the instruments, the synthesizers and the computer
software and whatever is available. But there has to be
something that is more profound than that technological
commonness, which would amount to nothing more than mere
tinkering.

So in this discussion we are basically concerned with what is

the future of music of the kind that we --- probably almost
everyone in this hall --- are devoted to and compose. We are not
concerned with the future of African music or Chinese music or
the music of the people who live 15,000 feet above sea-level in
the Andes, or even, curiously, Icelandic music. Unless we take
care of them, to use a phrase, they will take care of
themselves. We are a small group and we are concerned with
ourselves. What is the future of the sort of music that I
compose or that Roger Reynolds composes or that the rest of you
compose?

The strongest force in the music of today in America is

nostalgia. It is the basis of music as we know it.

America is approximately one-hundred years old. Approximately

one hundred years ago the European immigrants and their American
Indian employees were killing buffalo, beaver, sea otter and
every other thing that moved, as fast as they could. This
enterprise was a great success. There are no more buffalo,
beaver or sea otter --- or almost anything else, for that
matter.

Footnote: When Europeans first arrived on the North American

continent, one of the most numerous of the new animal species in
evidence was the Green Parrot, eight to ten inches long, three
to four pounds, a non-stop talker. They were everywhere from the
Atlantic to the Mississippi. They were considered to be worse
than a nuisance. They were considered to be a blight, like the
Biblical locusts. You think pigeons are bad. Imagine a world of
Green Parrots. Imagine the noise. Now there are a few Green
Parrots in parrot stores.

The European immigrants were also killing the remaining American

Indians and the American Indians were still killing each other.
All of us, European immigrants, African-Americans, Asian-
American and American Indians pretty much took it back to
basics. A continent without forests, without animals and without
anything resembling communication between the variously located
dreams of riches and the various pockets of resistance and
resentment that gathered in clumps around the river forks, the
swamps, the desert hideaways and downtown and uptown in the
cities to the ocean.

But we had brought in music from the "old country," which

persists today. For instance, Beethoven in the orchestras,
polkas in the taverns and a piano in every living room.

I am too old and tired to attack the way things are. The
Metropolitan Opera can keep on playing Italian opera until, when
they are hit by a car, they bleed spaghetti sauce. Orchestras in
strange places where the palaces are the triangular Hyatt Hotel
with external elevators can keep on playing Beethoven until they
go broke. That's okay with me.

All of this is nostalgia on a gigantic psychopathic scale.

Footnote: For a strange and disquieting article on nostalgia in

America I refer you to "Death of the Cowboy" by Larry McMurtry
in the New York Review of Books, Vol XLVI, Number 17, Nov 4,
1999. Mr. McMurtry points out that the "cowboy," as we know him
from the movies, novels, rodeos on television, Marlboro
advertisements and on and on, never really exited. Where did the
cowboy come from? The cowboy is a mythical figure, rooted in
nostalgia. Maybe in the case of the cowboy the nostalgia was for
the dreams of freedom that the immigrants brought with them. A
nostalgia for a dream of a better life.

A good number of the musicians at the Metropolitan Opera might

be Jews, a few of whom may have gone to Italy on their
Fulbright. But why would they play Italian opera? God, why would
they play Wagner? The commonplace answer is that music has no
political meaning. That is, the music is not meant to evoke the
time, place or political climate of when it was composed. But
this is obviously crazy, when even the relatively uninformed
listener like myself can identify by the rhythms in the Italian
operas that there must have been --- and I have read this ---
different kinds of Italian popular bands, from which the music
of the popular Italian operas was derived: Italian "standing"
bands, Italian "running" bands, Italian "horse" bands.

To say nothing of the words. It is important that all of us, I

believe, are thrilled to listen to a foreign language when we
have no obligation to respond. Foreign language overheard is
heard as music, in a way that we can never hear the language we
speak. So, it is not musically crucial that we understand the
words in operas in foreign languages. Words are important, if
you understand them (and especially if they are good), but they
are not crucial to a musical experience. Mostly, though, we
understand what's going on, without understanding every word.

I go to the opera as a Jew or as a descendant of Appalachian

hill-billies (who resent the term) or as a Mexican-American from
New Mexico or as any one of the numberless combinations that
make up America, and I am transported to some Italy, say, of the
past.

There is nothing remotely Italian about the Metropolitan Opera.

But there it is. Planted in the middle of New York City, once
catering to the left-over nostalgia of a huge number of Italian
immigrants who then "controlled" the city, and catering now to
the unfocussed nostalgia of its current audience. It continues
in its reenactment of Italy becoming a nation, arming itself,
drawing borders, trying pathetically to conquer Ethiopia,
collapsing into economic chaos and black and white movies. The
Metropolitan Opera, were it an individual, would be
hospitalized. Such is the power of nostalgia.

At the opera I am transported to a place and time where there is

no disorder. There is disorder on stage, and it is called
melodrama. We don't believe it. This is important: that we don't
believe it. We do believe, when we are young (or even
momentarily sometimes when we are older), what happens in the
movies. It is important to remember: we do not believe what
happens in opera. Therefore, opera can have no plot. It is
foolish to argue that opera --- any opera --- can have a plot;
that is, that the "characters" and their apparent "actions" and
the apparent "consequences" are related in any way. Opera can be
story-telling only. That the story-telling happens on stage and
that musicians are making music in the pit (to reinforce the
story told) is entirely coincidental. The story might as well be
told at the kitchen table with a crazy aunt and uncle as the
soprano and tenor. Opera has become "performance art," because
it has lost its meaning.

Most people in America don't know --- in the matter of their

genealogy --- much beyond where their grand-parents came from,
if they know that. So we invent where we came from in our music.
Only music, among the sensual pleasures --- for some strange
reason that I have not heard discussed in science or philosophy
--- has the ability to stop the present, to stop time and to
move us mentally to another time and place. Real or unreal, it
doesn't matter.

(Maybe the reason is simply that music uses time and so it

displaces the time of the present for a few minutes of relief
from the time of the present. I don't know.)

(Maybe, too, visual artists would protest that a painting can do

that for them. It doesn't do it for me. And visual artists spend
far more time listening to music than they spend in museums. The
question of the "why" of music, when taunted by Joyce's much-
quoted observation about the "ineluctable modality of the
visible," is answered in the simple fact that music does it. The
modality of the visible is suspended, up-staged as it were, by
the powerful nostalgia of the passage of sound. We can sit in a
concert hall, more or less untroubled by the bizarre
regimentation of the architecture and the "theater" of the
performance --- the orchestra dressed as if for a funeral ---
and be relieved of the present for a few minutes.)

PART II

Except in rare instances, we have not imagined music moving us

into the future. This is understandable, because we cannot
imagine what the ordering of everyday life in the future will be
like. And in fact we don't much care. Our experience with
everyday life suggests that things are not likely to improve.

But going backward in time has the advantage that the disorder
of everyday life is removed. And so going backward is the
ballgame. While the "stories" of the past, as in history and
anecdote, are simpler than the past was, we still have to keep
rehearsing them (the stories) to make them simpler and simpler.
But with music this effort of simplifying is not required. Music
simplifies the past for us. That we were not there, in place,
when the music was invented doesn't matter. The place and the
beautiful, unreal order surrounding the place comes with the
music.

So, we can go back to Europe or Africa or Asia or wherever

things were "easy" when the music was conceived, and for a few
minutes be relieved of the present.

Most of us go back to Europe, because that is where most of us

came from. So our music is mostly "European" in its nostalgia.
The predominance of European music is a given, so even people
who presumably came from someplace else are caught up in going
back to Europe. Why not? Why fight it? We are not going back to
a political possibility. We are not going back to reshape the
present. That is science fiction. We are going back to "rest" in
the past, to be relieved of the present for a few minutes.

Sorry. I was distracted by the myth of the cowboy, the nostalgia

for Wagner and for the triumphs of Italian nationalism and by a
definition of "performance art" as melodrama. I used the more
common definition of nostalgia. I was distracted from what I
proposed was the future of music: a continuous, barely changing
commodity always in the air and another kind of music caused by
this commodity and made by individuals in refuge from this
commodity.

The important question in this discussion is what the music of

individuals isolated for a moment-of-variety from the commodity-
music will sound like. Among the isolated individuals in retreat
from the commodity-music that will be played in every medium for
one day and for one day only there will be, in their music,
strangeness. What are the origins of this strangeness?

The origins today are, again, nostalgia, but a different kind of

nostalgia. This is a nostalgia for a past when music had a
powerful political meaning and when musical change meant a
political change of some sort, hopefully for the better. I have
changed the meaning or use of the term "nostalgia."

Except that the term, "regret," has an active sense, which I

think is not the case now, I could use "regret." We have regret
for the time when music had a powerful political meaning and
when musical change meant a political change of some sort,
hopefully for the better. I would have to say, regret the loss
of. So, I will stay with nostalgia.

Let us, for the sake of argument, set the beginning of European
modern music with Beethoven. That would make it two-hundred
years old. By modern I mean that Beethoven, sensing the power of
music in his time, thought that he could change things through
his music. He thought that by influencing the attitudes of the
ruling classes, who controlled the machinery of everyday life,
he could alleviate the suffering of everyday life in some degree
in everybody. Whether he thought that listening to his music
could for a moment alleviate the actual suffering of everyday
life in some degree in some listeners I don't know. Probably.
But I don't know.

I think he succeeded. Or maybe it is just coincidence. Maybe it

would have changed anyway. (This is the artist-as-idiot-savant
point of view.) Who cares? Things started changing and some
suffering was alleviated. Not all, but some.

Beethoven's idea about the political power of his music to

change things has continued to today in America and in Europe.
It is, apparently, originally European and now American, too. I
would think that it is spreading to other continents, but that
is probably only a guess or a wish. As little as I know, I have
not heard of the idea being an important part of any other
music. (I was once of the belief that big ideas --- for
instance, the political power of music --- happened to everybody
on the planet at more or less the same time, the result, maybe,
of a sun spot, or some virus, but I have left that idea behind,
because the more I learn, the less it seems to work.)

I will not pick on other cultures, because I am too ignorant to

withstand the attacks. But I know that the idea of music to
effect a social change is at least European, dating
(arbitrarily) from the time of Beethoven, and that we (in
America) have inherited that idea.

It must have grown with the growing power of music for two-
hundred years, because by the time I got in touch, around, say,
1950, it was very strong. It was still strong after the war ---
which was in some ways a "musical" war: that is, (1) the bad
guys apparently liked some kinds of music and didn't like other
kinds of music and they enforced their beliefs; (2) I think it
is fair to guess that our leaders couldn't have cared less; and
(3) note that after the war, when we "re-built" European
culture, at our tax-payers' expense, we re-built what was there
before the war. After the war the idea that music was embedded
in the politics of change continued unquestioned, especially in
Europe, where every composer was a politician. And it was true
in America, where every composer was disenfranchised, but still
believed. I believed. Every one of my friends believed.

Things have changed somewhat since. Now nobody believes. But

that doesn't mean that the idea has gone away. Maybe we are just
stunned, as after a big meal the carbo-shock leaves you
speechless. The next decade or so will tell.

Back to the question of Roger Reynolds and me. We are getting

old. After forty you can't play third base in the major leagues.
Merle Haggard says that after sixty you lose your voice. (I
think he's right.) We have lost our power. And even if you are
under forty, so have you.

The most serious criticism one can make of my music (or the
music of Roger Reynolds), which criticism I hear in various
forms more and more is: what you are doing is not going to
change anything; this piece is "self-indulgent," the term
meaning it doesn't mean anything politically. The critic, in my
imagination a younger composer, maybe doesn't know where the
root of this complaint lies, but it is on his or her lips,
because the idea that music can change things is still in force.
But unacknowledged. Muted.

Actually, what I have just said is not true. I am rarely any

longer criticized by younger composers. Now just newspaper
"critics" complain. Times have changed. Twice, about thirty
years ago, I had the experience of having a young man come up to
me after a concert (these were different young men) to tell me
that he hated my music. In one case the young man had to make a
special trip to a party given in my honor. I was flattered, of
course, and asked him why he had wasted his time to make the
trip --- when he could be home composing music. He said it was
important to him that I know. Those were the days. Now I am just
ignored in the traffic or treated very politely as an old guy
that did it. I will speak more about the current absence of
mutual criticism among composers later. For the moment I must
stay with the subject of nostalgia.

The problem for the three of us, Reynolds, you and me --- and
for all of our contemporaries --- is that we are in nostalgia
for the time, only four decades ago, when music had a political
meaning. I can remember the time (wow, nostalgia) when almost
every piece was more or less earth-shaking. Now, I must admit
--- this is like some kind of medical confession --- that few
pieces seem earth-shaking to me. They sound like strange sounds
never to be heard again. They sound isolated. Not as manic and
monomaniacal as early Stockhausen and Boulez. (These are
political, not musical, evaluations.) Not as politically
confrontational as Cage. Not as eerily unlikely as Feldman or
Nono. Just pieces of strange, isolated ideas. That I may never
hear again. And I don't mean just among the young composers. I
mean everybody.

I would like to insert here a somewhat indefensible theory of

mine in order to introduce a long and complicated complaint
about a peculiar characteristic of American music. It goes like
this. The Europeans who first arrived on the American continent
were not, we think, big-time intellectuals or artists or
musicians. They were escaping from oppression, real and
imagined. They were what we could call, euphemistically, the
working class. Their job, immediately, was to cut down trees,
build huts, plant crops and in general make what they found as
much as possible like what they had left. They didn't bring
court music or Gregorian Chant or the beginnings of Bel Canto or
anything of the sort. (Probably that's the stuff they wanted to
leave behind.) They did bring a kind of unrealized devotional
music, which became realized here. But, most important, they
brought dance music; that is, music organized around a simple
beat, which was expressed in the body. Because everybody has to
dance.

Then they brought entrepreneurs, who in turn brought indentured

servants (a wonderful term) and slaves, to cut down the trees,
clear the swamps, fight the Indians, plant cotton and tobacco
and, hopefully, make money. The devotional music became more and
more isolated in the churches. But the dance music --- the
African drum beats, the Celtic bar dances, the polka and every
other kind of dance rhythm --- was thriving.

Then every successive wave, the Germans, the Irish, the

Italians, the Slavs, the Greeks, the Russian Jews brought more.
We are inundated --- no, that's not the word --- we are
brainwashed with the notion of music as an expression of rhythm
to dance to, because that's what the mostly very poor people,
who had only that, brought with them. It is so deep in us that
we can't find it to cure it.

I am sorry to seem belligerent. I like dance music. I like

America. I like our innocent people. I am one of them. But I
have come to like, as well, another kind of music, which is in
conflict, I discover, with the idea of music as something to
dance to. I have come to like a new kind of "devotional" music,
which has moved out of the churches into some unlocated, secular
place. I say "devotional," because I don't know a better word,
but it is music to be listened to, not danced to. In the
listening it takes you to someplace you have never been. It is
mental. It doesn't require head-nodding. You just sit there and
it flows through you and changes you.

I have brought up this point of the difference between dance

music (music to be danced to) and "devotional" music (for want
of a better word), because Americans keep trying to arrive at
some sort of "compromise." Check out the term, "accessible." It
almost invariably means the music has a "beat." I don't think
there is any reason music has to have a beat, unless you are
going to dance to it. It can have a beat. That is a pleasant
aspect of some music. I do it myself. But unfamiliar music that
doesn't have a beat is discriminated against. The composer knows
this. And so the composer is always trying to compromise. This
is expressed as "give 'em what they want." This is the musical
version of "I can't think, unless I am being interrogated."
Which is, in the case of thinking, why we don't have very many
free-standing thoughts. We have answers. I catch myself doing
this. I wake up in the middle of the night in the middle of a
complicated argument, and I realize that I am answering to
something that hasn't even been asked. It's as though I am
interrogating myself. There is no kidding myself that this is a
meditation. I am on trial. Or arguing for something. And so I
have begun to notice this in a lot of writing. We don't have
meditations, thoughts. We have answers.

We have, in the same way, few examples of music that is a

meditation, free of external consequences. I don't mean
"meditational" music. I mean music free of external
consequences; that is, the consequences of who and whether
anyone will like it. I think this compromise has damaged us. It
is peculiarly American, because, as I said earlier, when our
ancestors (all of our ancestors) came to America, they brought
only what the "common" people had, because they came under
adverse circumstances --- almost all of them. They brought what
they could carry. And so we don't have the tradition of European
"thinking" music, we don't have the tradition of African or
Asian "thinking" music. We have a lop-sided culture that we have
been trying to fix for a few hundred years.

There was a brief few decades, early in the century, when the
better-off went to Europe (Germany, in particular) to catch up
with non-dance music. Charles Ives didn't go. But everybody else
went. They brought back imitation German music. It was good in
Germany, but here it was imitation.

Then, in this "serious" music there was a brief flirtation with

jazz, which mostly came to nothing, because the black people
were better at jazz. And black people could not make "serious"
music, because they were oppressed.

Then (this is a chronology) there came American-Serious-Music.

It was taught in the conservatories. Every music school had a
Resident String Quartet (the cheapest form of ensemble), a
Graduate Student String Quartet, and numberless Undergraduate
String Quartets. They played American-Serious-Music. The string
quartet was the university computer-music-studio of the 1940's
and 1950's. The string quartet was the sampler that ate
hamburgers.

It is a characteristic of the string quartet to emphasize moving

the bow back and forth. The more the better.

Insert: Mr. Arditti, of string quartet fame, complained to Alvin

Lucier, in the presence of a large number of people, that he
didn't like to play Alvin's String Quartet, because there was
very little bow movement, which lack of bow movement made his
arm tired. To which Alvin replied, "Why don't you play it with
the other arm?"

American-Serious-Music became a matter of moving the bow back

and forth as much as possible, with accents here and there. You
might call it sawing. One of its foremost practitioners called
the style, "motor-rhythmic." It is characterized by a continuous
sawing of sixteenth-notes or eighth-notes (depending on the time
signature and the tempo.) Up-bow, down-bow, Up-bow, down-bow,
endlessly. You know what I mean.

This is where I came in. I went to music school. I hated "motor

rhythms." Gradually I came to hate string quartets, when they
got into that sawing, because that relentless sawing was simply
a senseless update of the circle-dances that those innocent
people had brought with them to America. Lawrence Welk get back.
I am sensitive to poverty. Everything about "motor rhythms" was
just another version of the polka, the hora and whatever else
the dances were called wherever they came from. A circle of
mostly poor people holding hands and jumping up and down.

A long way from Morton Feldman. And I didn't even know Morton
Feldman existed.

Then there was a period, very brief, no more than two decades,
when the "motor rhythms" went away. I think they were replaced
in the music schools by something else, but I'm not sure what
that was. Whatever it was, it wasn't very important, because it
couldn't hold up to the changes happening in Europe and America.
The European composers became irrational (and contagious) with
Serialism. A lot of American composers got into --- if you will
pardon the expression --- "sound." (The pejorative term was
"drone.") Both sides were fascinated. What could be more
different and more beautiful: serialism and the drone?

Things were looking up.

Then something political happened. If I were into conspiracy

theory, I would blame it on the government, because it happened
exactly when the NEA happened. But that's impossible. Maybe.
"Motor rhythms" came back in a blitz of journalistic attacks on
the "drone," in composers attacking one another, in string
quartets sawing away, in five-finger exercises at the
synthesizer and elsewhere. This time it was called something
else. Another label. Same deal. Different name. Personally, I
think the reason for the reaction was that the drone had just
got too far out. It wasn't satisfying our need to nod our heads
in memory of the polka and the jig and the hora.

Also, for some wonderful reason during the two decades of relief
from motor-rhythms, many composers got into using words. The
words were largely political, the Vietnam War and various other
complaints, but the important point is that music stopped being
resolutely "structural" and started being "narrative," as though
there was some kind of primitive "opera" being born in America.
(Note that at the same time the European composers were
advocating "burn down the opera houses.")

This turning to "narrative" was maybe as important as the

evolution of the "drone." And it was, apparently, in the minds
of composers, audience and middle-management, as dangerous as
the drone. So, something political happened.

We went backwards.

Thirty years and I was back to where I came in: head nodding
while the string quartet played. I stopped composing for a
while. My dream had come to an end.

Curiously, at the same time many Europeans went nuts. I'm

telling you: sun spots or a virus. "Free improvisation." Wow. I
don't want to vilify "free improvisation," because so many
musicians like it now and practice it. Obviously, I don't. Maybe
I am too old, or maybe there is another reason. I have noticed
only, in my own defense, that much of free improvisation does
not seem so free. It is a powerful method for finding new sounds
without having to wait for the neighborhood orchestra to invite
you to make new sounds, but it does seem to me to lack, in some
way, a freedom of variety. I mean a variety among styles.

A few months ago I heard a glorious concert by the Art Ensemble

of Chicago. I can't remember that they described their music as
free improvisation, though improvisation was certainly there in
force.

Just last night (March, 2000) I heard a concert of free

improvisation by nine professional musicians, some of whom
according to the program notes have reputations based in part on
free improvisation. One characteristic of the music was
indisputable: it came from jazz improvisation. In fact, it
reminded me during many moments of a concert I heard in 1970
played by Anthony Braxton, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Barry
Altschul (the era when many Europeans went nuts). It also
reminded me of many concerts I heard in 1960 played by the Bob
James Trio. It reminded me of concerts I've lost track of played
in the 1950's. In other words, it seems not to have changed much
and so it seems unlikely to lead us out of this situation of
political powerlessness. It seems unlikely to change things for
the better, if nobody is paying attention. The concert wasn't a
statement. I don't know why I should have wanted it to be, but I
did.

One aspect of free improvisation that seems important to someone

from the "outside" is that so much of it sounds like it is a
form of jazz.

I don't see why free improvisation has to sound like jazz. There
are so many other things to be free of musically. But, I have
heard few concerts of free improvisation that reminded me of
anything except jazz, except from British musicians. Maybe only
the British, after 1970, survived free improvisation free of
jazz influences. Why? Because they had a rigid caste system, a
Royal Family that spoke German at home, and, thus, a sense of
humor. I have enjoyed British free improvisation, because it was
like Monty Python does modern music.

That was a mistake. I heard a concert in Berkeley in about 1972

by George Lewis, Douglas Ewert, Rae Imamura and Jacques Bekaert
that I think was totally improvised and that did not remind me
of jazz. A spectacular concert.

Anyway, I have spoken so much about free improvisation, because

it seems so important now. Almost as if there is a contest, in
teaching music, between free improvisation and some other form
that I haven't heard much about but that I take to be a kind of
retrenchment to the incorporation of known ideas ---
rhythmically, melodically, harmonically and orchestrally known
ideas. I know I am guilty of this, I mean the retrenchment. It
is one of those ideas that spread. A sun spot or a virus. But I
don't do motor-rhythms.

And I have spoken so much about free improvisation, because I am

not much impressed. There is so little variety of style. I wish
those musicians who improvise "freely" would come up with a new
"idea," a new form of behavior to signal the world that we are
not satisfied with the way things are.

I wish free improvisation would make the audience say, "Those

people are crazy." Like audiences said about Ornette Coleman and
John Cage and Juan Hidalgo and a few of my friends. I wish free
improvisation would divide the audience into the care's and the
care-not's. I think divisiveness is necessary to accomplish
certain things.

The good thing about free improvisation is that it is generally

free of "motor-rhythms" --- not always, but enough. In that
respect it is importantly free. The retrenchment has certainly
given us "motor-rhythms" of a sort. They seem new, but they are
not. I am waiting for another change.

I think, to put my intuition in the simplest possible statement,

the future of music --- I mean both instrumental and vocal music
(about which I will say more in a minute) --- will include the
important change that music will get much faster and much
slower. We will move dramatically away from what we think of now
as the limitations of what the body can do. I think that, within
reason, limitations are self-imposed by habit. This is
illustrated in the radical changes we have seen in the last
thirty years in sports. The slam-dunk, never imagined, is now a
without-which. The triple Lutz, never imagined, is now a
without-which (and they are going for four.) The four-minute
mile. The sixty home runs. The seventy-yard pass. Etcetera.

There will be more notes played in a shorter period of time,

because we will learn from what computers can teach us that we
can actually play more notes (and understand them) in a shorter
period of time.

There will be more notes sustained over a longer period of time,

because we will learn from what electricity can teach us that we
can actually sustain our attention to notes over a longer period
of time.

The important stylistic novelties that I have noticed and

admired while so-called "serious" music in America reinvented
"motor rhythms" are two (both in popular music): one is what I
believe is called, "New Age Music," which certainly is different
and which certainly changed something (and which has remained,
curiously, anonymous; someone should look into this). The other
is: African-American "talking music." (I won't use labels here,
because I can't keep up with the label changes.) This style has
become the commodity, and has remained short; that is, modeled
on the commodity form of popular music. I don't see why it has
to be almost always short (except that African-Americans usually
need the money that a good commodity provides). Short can be
powerful. But there must be longer stories to tell from the
African-American community. There must be some way that the
composer claiming the African-American experience, and who can
afford to, can make an "epic" statement, something that lasts
longer than three minutes and still has the power of "talking
music." (Correct me, if this music exists.)

As you can see, I like African-American "talking music" and I

like its "political-ness," though sometimes not all of its
politics. I like it because it is not nostalgic. But I think it
will come to nothing except "style," and then be supplanted by
another "style," unless it gets into the musical population at
large. Its dangers --- lots of words --- must be taken up by the
musical population at large (especially older folks), must be
"assimilated" (oh, God) to do us any good. It must be
assimilated, like we assimilated serialism, like we assimilated
the drone.

You will answer that composers "assimilated" rock and roll and
that that is what I am complaining about. But that's not right.
Composers did not assimilate rock and roll until it had lost its
power. Composers assimilated "motor-rhythms," the academic music
of the 1940's. And lost it.

One more time. We are in nostalgia for the moment, not long ago,
when a musical idea could have political consequences. I don't
mean elect a new president or change the rules about telling the
consumer about what's in the toothpaste, but political in the
sense that having heard the music the world is not the same for
you anymore.

There are exceptions. There are pieces that definitely are not
likely to be a commodity. I play them whenever I have the
feeling that I have lost the vision. I will play a few examples
later.

I will say it again. We are in nostalgia for the time when music
meant something. That is what I mean by nostalgia. We are
hobbled by our inability to change our habits about what music
might sound like and might accomplish, if it were changed, if it
could shock us into paying attention.

The future of music, for us, has to include, logically, the

possibility that there may not be any music at all, except for
the commodity-music playing in the background. In spite of what
I have said about the isolated individual doing it just for
variety, just for fun, which is the most likely scenario, there
is the possibility that the variety could disappear. Books and
learning disappeared from Europe for a few hundred years during
the so-called Dark Ages. (See: "How the Irish Saved
Civilization," Thomas Cahill, Anchor Books/Doubleday, New York,
1995.) Music in all of its variety could simply disappear for a
while.

I say that this is an unlikely scenario, because certain

psychologists (see: "The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," Julian Jaynes, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, 1976) have suggested that the brain makes some
form of music for some functional purpose, whether we want it to
or not, and that, if we don't admit that message as music, we
think the gods are talking to us (and we get put away.) In other
words, the idea that there won't be any "new" music is
preposterous, not only from a common-sense point of view ("she
could sing before she could talk"), but in the opinion of
speculative science.

But, of course, that depends on what you mean by "music." There

could be mad-men and mad-women, safely locked up and singing
away, but no music schools. What would the world sound like
then?

John Cage famously suggested that we could direct our attention

to the "outside" world of sounds, where every sound has a
specific meaning (the traffic, the bird, et cetera) and be just
as happy. No matter that it didn't work for him (he went back to
or never stopped composing) and that his idea followed
suspiciously on "1984" and "Brave New World," it is a big idea.
The idea that every sound (from the outside world) has a
specific meaning (is a "sign," as they say) and that the pattern
of those sounds could satisfy us as much as any pattern of
sounds we could invent, is a big idea. It suggests that we can
stop "thinking" musically. All of those musical thoughts could
be replaced by something else, I don't know what. But, for
example, I do know people, wonderfully smart people, whose
calculating thoughts have been replaced by the pocket
calculator. (She said to me as I did the budget in my head: How
do you do that? I said, the multiplication tables, of course.
She said, the multiplication tables? My heart stopped. Talk
about a generation gap. I explained the multiplication tables
and that they were simply memorized. She said, Why would I want
to know that?)

PART III

The idea that every sound in music has a particular meaning is

of interest for me, because of my obsession with opera. Words,
if they are real words, have a particular meaning and are the
essence of opera.

That is, if they are real words, with a real meaning in the real
world, like "hello," "love" and "goodbye," the words can be used
in opera.

I have veered off into opera, my obsession. Sorry.

"Hermeneutics," for instance, apart from how weird it sounds,
cannot be used in opera, because it is not a real word. It is a
label. In fact, it is not even a label from the real world, like
"chair." It is a label for an intellectual preoccupation, like
"categorization," "racialization" and, for example,
"preoccupation."

Footnote: A distinguished professor of physics at Princeton, who

had won a Nobel prize, was asked, upon his retirement, what he
looked forward to in retirement. I suppose the interviewer
expected an answer like: Buy a house in Mexico and pursue my
interest in desert gardening. The professor said, "In my
retirement I will never again have to go to the dictionary and
look up the meaning of hermeneutics." I myself have looked it up
three times. Since then I have given up. The Webster's
definition is: "the study of the methodological principles of
interpretations and explanations." "Hermeneutics: the study of
the methodological principles of interpretations and
explanations."

"Hermeneutics" is apparently a kind of intellectual model-

railroading.

Culling through all of the words to find real ones, I can't get
rid of all labels. For instance, "chair." But I get rid of as
many as I can. Otherwise, how can you tell a story?

Our nostalgia for the time when a musical composition, in its

resolute abstractness, in its defiant "differentness," could
change the world for the listener, has left us with a tool that
doesn't work any longer. This is the nostalgia that cripples
Reynolds and me --- and you. And there is nothing we can do
about it without resorting to drastic measures. (Little pun.)

Don't misunderstand, please. I like Roger Reynolds' music, as I

always have. Forty years. I listen to it. I mean, within reason.
There are just twenty-four hours in a day, some of which has to
be given over to making a living. And, of course, there is
everybody else. Like Reynolds, I have a small reputation for
liking other people's music and trying to help it be heard. I
haven't done this as much recently as in the past, when I could
do it, but in my home town, among my friends, there is a sort of
standing joke along the lines of: why is an old guy like you
still going to hear concerts? What's the payoff?
In preparation for this visit to UCSD I spent a special amount
of time listening to Reynolds' recent works. "The Paris Pieces,"
"Kokoro," "AriadneÕs Thread" and "Focus."

The music is curiously similar throughout (throughout the three

CD's) in its ability to intimidate me with its skill in
conveying the music to the page. I can't do that. I don't have
access to the scores, but I am dazzled by the very number of
notes and by the knowledge that these notes have been written
for a functionally anonymous group of players and that, as I
know to be the case with Reynolds, the composer has had to make
up a new kind of graphic language, a new set of symbols, to tell
the players what to do. This is the most brilliant music in its
style and "medium" --- that is, written --- that I have heard in
a long, long time. I could not do anything of the sort.

My music has become complicated over the past thirty-five years

by its involvement with verbal ideas. Probably nobody else can
do anything of the sort.

Roger and I and a lot of composers I know share two things. We

have extraordinary skills. We have lost our power.

My complaint about the nostalgia is that we have lost our power.

It was there and now it's gone. We have lost our power to make
music important. Now it's up to the kids. Good luck, kids.

Insert: As I am working on this essay (March, 2000) I have just

received a wonderful book from Granary Books, "Arcana: Musicians
on Music," edited by John Zorn. It is made up of essays,
remarks, technical hints, whatever, from thirty composers. In
his Preface, Zorn complains that, though these musicians have
been at it for some time --- they are all entering into or
thriving in middle age --- they have had no recognition (at
all!) in the critical press. In other words, nobody cares that
they exist, except for their fans. That is what I mean by loss
of power.

I know almost every one of the thirty composers from at least a

concert or two. Some are extraordinary musicians, as good as or
better on their instruments than anybody in the world. Their
ideas in composition could not be more varied. But the composers
are not commodities. Their music is, in most cases, not a
commodity. And I think they do not want to be commodities or to
make commodities. But, as Zorn points out, nobody cares. They
are powerless. Music has stopped meaning anything politically.
I could not have invented a more perfect example of the point I
am trying to make. This is a plug for the book
(http://www.granarybooks.com). Zorn says it right out: "...after
more than twenty years of music-making on the New York scene,
except for the occasional review in trade magazines/periodicals
(which because of the context in which they appear and the speed
with which they are written don't really count anyway), not one
single writer has ever come forward to champion or even to
intelligently analyze what it is that we have been doing.
Indeed, they hardly seem able even to describe it." Welcome to
the club, John.

What I remark about the book --- and this is not a criticism of
the music --- is how isolated each of the composers seems. In
their ideas. There is great regard for improvisation; the notion
occurs in many of the essays. Maybe I can learn something. But
even though I know these musicians play together in various
combinations --- because I have seen and heard it --- I would
not know from the book that any one of them knows any one of the
others. I think this is fair. Each of them is a private
universe. Encapsulated, as it were. Traveling throughout the
world to world-wide fan clubs, but quarantined from the world.
It seems almost worse than when I was a kid. I think it is not
their fault. I think they are trapped in the bubble of
politically meaningless music. Have mercy on their souls.

Now I will stop picking on Reynolds and everybody else ---

including now the Europeans and the younger composers --- and
just pick on myself.

For the rest of this speech, with the exception of one remark, I
will speak about opera, which is something I know little about
and care a lot about. It certainly figures into the future for
me.

The exceptional one remark is that I think "counterpoint," that

is, the musical technique of many instruments playing together,
each trying to make sense and each trying to stay away from
collisions with other instruments, is on its way to being dead
as a door nail. Maybe a couple of generations. Roger Reynolds,
Brian Ferneyhough, George Lewis, Anthony Davis --- to name a few
of the local celebrities --- and I compose in counterpoint,
because that is what we were taught; that dogs are too old to
learn new tricks, and the time is not ripe anyway. But computer
programming suggests that there is the possibility of a "whole"
music (in the sense that the liver is a "whole" human organ:
that is, without "parts") in which the causes and effects are
too complicated to be understood for a long time (i.e. requiring
eventually a new music theory), in which there are no "lines"
(as in counterpoint) and in which (unlike in counterpoint) no
element can be removed without bringing down the whole house of
cards. I am sorry I won't be around to hear this music.

PART IV

Opera. What is it? And who cares? And who cares, because what is
it has not a chance in the world of being altered in my
lifetime.

It is strange to use the word "poverty" in this audience, where

almost certainly everybody owns a car (if not a parking space),
a closet full of nice clothes, a kitchen full of food and a mind
full of big plans for the future. But, in fact, there is an
unacknowledged poverty, and it is probably more important to us
than the car, the clothes, the food and the big plans.

We are impoverished in our ability to change music. And for us,

now, change is God (to quote my own work). It is impossible for
us to imagine taking music to the divine realm of thrill that
caused us to become musicians in the first place. We are
impoverished, because the resources are so meager. If I dared,
and if, in some extraordinary change in my financial
circumstances (time and money is no problem, sir), I could make
an opera that was different from any opera ever known, that
opera would not be played.

If I made the opera for orchestra and voices --- ignoring for
the moment what the term "orchestra" might mean --- there would
be no orchestra to play it. Every opera company would refuse. Or
imagine some opera impresario in a moment of absolute madness
deciding yes we will do this, the orchestra could not play the
work on six hours of rehearsal. Imagine that I asked for and got
one-hundred hours of rehearsal with the voices to teach the old
dogs new tricks, what would benefit the singers from those new
tricks in the larger world of tomato sauce.

This is not "unduly" pessimistic, invoking the pejorative. It is

simply pessimistic, because we are talking about my life. We are
not talking about the future of music. I am talking about me. I
don't want some pieces of paper in my file cabinet that in a
century will change music. I want now. Girls just want to have
fun.

Or imagine that with my unlimited resources of time and money I

went into the most sophisticated recording studio in the world
--- Germany, Los Angeles, Nashville --- and spent some years
with my idea (taking time off, of course, to go to the tropics
when the imagination simply went dry), where would that
recording be heard?

But this is foolish. I don't have unlimited anything.

So what am I do to, burdened with the habit of counterpoint,

expected to produce works with voices and orchestra, expected to
keep the message alive in the underground, required to be
respectable (check out the term, "accessible") and with no
resources to speak of?

One answer is to go forward in time. Very far forward. To a time

when the poverty of our resources will have fully matured and
there will be just musical commodities and, somewhere else,
strange people doing strange musical things. To a time when
there are no orchestras, to a time when there are just stories
in song form. This evokes the image of some perhaps mythical
blind Greek, maybe strumming a few strings, but basically just
singing his heart out.(And hoping to get paid and not executed.)
I must admit that, even though this answer doesn't appeal to me
much, because it suggests "folk-singing," which in turn suggests
poverty, I am drawn to it, because it is practical. That is, I
can continue to make opera, weird as it will seem, unwelcome
(and unavailable) as it will be.

I confess that for forty years I dreamed of opera as voices with

orchestra, and I have made voices with orchestra. I have pursued
the dream against all odds of success (that is, performance) and
against all practical suggestions that I have lost my mind and
that I am, in fact, not a composer at all. I won't apologize for
this mistake. I think I have made some good pieces.

But something has happened recently that I can hardly handle. I

am beginning to imagine pure singing. Nothing as pure as just my
forlorn and aging voice, but many singers brought together in a
new technique. Forget bar-lines, forget harmonic architecture,
forget harmony, except maybe a few voices coming together to
reinforce a certain line or two. Most important, forget
orchestra.

Don't think of Welsh choral groups or church choruses. Think of

numbers of singers, or just a few singers asserting their right,
politically, to make music out of the incoherent whatever of
what is going on in their minds that they can't stop and that
they have decided not to stop. Think of just singing. Certainly
with microphones. But just singing.

What I can hardly handle is that this imagination suggests pure

speech. Or, maybe, impure speech. (It doesn't suggest to me, for
instance, "keening" or any of the other non-verbal vocal sounds
that people have made for centuries and make today.) It suggests
crazed story-telling. It suggests speech, because speech is
needed for story-telling.

In fact, many years ago I worked with a group of persons who

were brilliant speakers, but who had no musical training: that
is, specifically they had no experience in pitch inflections
outside of the range of their natural speech and no experience
with how to rehearse those special inflections and to reproduce
them and to further embellish them. This was the now legendary
ONCE Group.

And because I was just beginning and didn't know exactly what I
was doing, there was no possibility that I could "teach" them
these techniques. And so I just made operas that were
extraordinarily "spoken." But not "merely" spoken. There were
rules, as in music. Surprisingly, I did come up with
compositional techniques that did not use bar-lines, harmonic
architecture or even harmony as such, but that allowed the
speech to be in the right place at the right time. And I didn't
even know what I was doing. None of those works was recorded
(because there was no multi-track recording in those days). For
me those works were the big ones that got away. I would give
almost anything, if you know what I mean. I was very happy. I
think nobody, except me and the ONCE Group, thought that we were
making music. But I didn't care, because I thought I would live
forever and that eventually, sooner than later, something would
come along in the way of support.

I was wrong. Our expectations got bigger, naturally, and the

operas became more ambitious, but the phone never rang and so
eventually we had to give up. But I learned something that
changed me forever.
I was still into counterpoint of a more or less conventional
nature. That is, the individual lines of speech existed as
potential musical lines. If I had multi-track recordings of
those pieces now, I could take them into the studio and make of
them more or less what I am interested in right now.

If.

If I had wings, I might be a bird.

So, I gave up composing for a few years. Entirely. Almost five

years.

Then a new situation, full of promise, developed and I got back

into it.

Gradually, very gradually, too gradually to satisfy my dreams of

"if" (20 years), I learned what I wanted to do, and I found four
singers who can do more or less perfectly what I have come to
dream of. These four persons, in alphabetical order, are: Sam
Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert and Joan La Barbara.
And we are assisted in our explorations by the great sound
engineer and composer, Tom Hamilton. I would also like to give
credit here to musicians who, earlier, helped me discover how
these dreams could be made into music: in order of appearance,
"Blue" Gene Tyranny, Paul Shorr, David Rosenboom and Tom Erbe.

I would like to be technical about my ideas about opera for a

few paragraphs. What I will say is commonplace for many
composers and antithetical for others, but I'll say it.

The simple fact is that American English does not fit European,
traditional, operatic models of melody and rhythm. American
English is distinguished by an infinitely subtle variety of
melodic and rhythmic stresses on its consonants: fricatives,
sibilants, plosives, etcetera. The vowels in American English
cannot bear the weight of the kind of melodic stresses ---
durations and embellishments --- that are used in, say, Italian
opera. It makes them sound stupid. I didn't make it happen, but
it's true.

There have been some successful exceptions to this rule. The

exceptions are in Broadway musical songs from George M. Cohan to
about Richard Rodgers (when I stopped listening). Maybe it's
still happening, but I don't hear it in, for instance, Andrew
Lloyd Weber and I never heard it in Bernstein. Maybe I'm just
wrong, because I'm not paying attention, but for me it stopped
being successful technically around "South Pacific."

More importantly there have been extraordinary exceptions in

American popular music, which exceptions have continued in a
kind of avalanche since, say, Chuck Berry (in one style) and,
say, Hank Williams (in another). Or Billie Holiday and Patsy
Cline. In popular music --- let's take country music as an
example --- the treatment of the vowels --- and I don't know
where it came from --- is so special that you almost can't do it
unless you learned it before you could learn anything else. And
even then it has to be refined by studying with a master-singer.

I heard an interview with a young country singer on the radio

--- I didn't catch her name --- about her career. She said,
"Well, you spend a couple of years in the studio as a harmony
singer, learning the glides..." I think I know what the "glides"
are, but I couldn't learn them any more than I could learn North
Indian singing or Joe Turner. There are some things you cannot
learn.

Back to the technicalities. On the other hand, apart from the

glides, you could almost take out the vowels in many a popular
song and it would still be a song. I exaggerate horribly, of
course, but just to make a point. About American English. The
technicality is that in de-emphasizing the vowels, if you don't
put in the glides, everything goes faster. Consonants don't take
up much time and they can't stand embellishment. So the words
just whiz by, and if they don't whiz by they sound stupid. They
sound wrong. Consonants are beautiful in American English.

"She's got a ticket to ride" sounds wonderful in song, but it is

twice as fast as any six words in any European opera. Except for
the diphthong in the last word --- which is an awfully fast
diphthong --- the sentence is almost all consonants. Notice how
beautiful that last "d" is.

Consonants are beautiful in American English. And they make the

words whiz by.

So the composer has to use a lot of words to tell a long story

and to make an opera.

There are probably more words in any one of my operas than in

the complete works of Verdi. It's got to be that way.
So, above all I am interested in speed and how to make something
beautiful out of it. (This is so academic and confessional I am
embarrassed. But I think that's what I'm getting paid for.)

The idea of speed, quickness, as a beautiful thing --- as in

Bill Monroe, Art Tatum, Anthony Braxton and a few other
musicians I admire in popular music --- has entirely disappeared
from our notion of opera. Now we are into turgid tempos (if
there is any tempo at all), the projected vibrato and left-over
vowel embellishment, which, handed down, is now written into the
score.

I would like to explain my use of the term, "speed." I am

indebted to Jackie Humbert for giving me this way of explaining
the idea.

You can use your car in at least three, different ways: (1) to
go to the grocery store; (2) to go sight-seeing on a Sunday
afternoon; (3) for the sake of "driving."

In going to the grocery store, speed doesn't matter, except in

special circumstances, and except that you want to avoid a
getting a ticket. In sight-seeing, excessive speed can become a
negative factor; you can go too fast to really enjoy seeing.
Excessive speed focuses everybody's attention on the road and on
the traffic. Slow is good. In driving for the sake of driving,
speed is almost the sole, essential ingredient. That is, for
utmost pleasure, the car should move exactly as fast as the
speed the road was designed for. (We forget, probably more than
we forget anything in our culture, that roads are designed by
human beings, like ourselves, who have applied their skill and
education and their taste for driving to making the road as good
as possible; that is, safe, efficient and pleasurable. Not
unlike a musical composition.) We can take special pleasure in
driving too fast or in driving too slow. But in those pleasures
we are not in collaboration with the designer of the road. For
instance, in the Bay Area of California there are some of the
most beautifully designed roads I have ever driven. If one
drives those roads exactly at the speed called for, the car
seems sometimes to drive itself. It seems to float. This is the
special pleasure of "driving." There is no substitute.

One might say that in speech and in singing, tempo, or speed, is

everything. That would be an exaggeration, but not much.

For my taste, as I have said, English sounds bad if it is sung

too slowly, and it is usually sung too slowly in so-called
"serious" music. The vowels are dragged out as if almost every
English vowel were not a diphthong, and so the peculiar "speed"
of the diphthong is lost. The consonants are treated as an
embarrassment. Over-attention to consonants is thought of as a
part of "extended vocal technique" (if that term still exists in
teaching voice.)

Footnote: I have read that the earliest Italian operas, say,

Monteverdi, were criticized in their time as being more spoken
than sung. What could that mean? When I hear Monteverdi now, it
always seems like it is being played at half-speed. If I say
this out loud, my friends tell me to shut up. But I can't help
it. My musical "intuition," which has not failed me yet, tells
me that I am not hearing the beautiful Italian of Monteverdi; I
am hearing some weird version of Italian fashioned by somebody
who lives where the sun comes up only a couple of months a year
and everything moves very slowly, because of the cold. Too bad,
Monteverdi. That's the breaks. If anybody is still around in a
few hundred years to perform one of my 90-minute operas, they
will probably decide I didn't know what I was doing and take it
to about four hours. To improve the intelligibility. There is a
field of scholarship that thinks that the Shakespeare we think
is interminable at three and a half hours was done in the Globe
in an hour and a half. "To be or not to be." You know what I
mean?

Now there is an interesting technical relationship between vocal

speed and the "orchestra." Namely, if you sing fast enough and
with spectacular grace and embellishment and wildness and
abandon, you might not need an orchestra. I have been trying to
do this for the past few years. I haven't accomplished anything,
because I don't have the nerve. And I don't have the technique.
But I am trying.

I would, if I could, replace the "external" orchestra

synchronized with the voices by the conductor or by time-code. I
would replace it with an electronic orchestra designed to be
synchronized with the voices. In this technique, then, the
voices could go at any speed in American English and the
orchestra would always be with them. This is currently called
"processing," or "effects" (as in, "cause and effect"), which is
ever so slightly pejorative. If I suggested that I would like to
"process" the voices at the Met, can you imagine?

The problem I have at this very moment is that I can't afford

it. It can be done, but I can't afford it. I can't afford the
equipment and I can't afford the technical assistance. I have
the voices, finally. But I can't afford the orchestra of voice-
processors. I can only hint at it.

So I will continue with the "sound" of the drone. I will

continue with counterpoint; that is, with as many tracks as I
can afford. I will continue with my fascination with speed. I
will continue to make it possible, through the combinations of
the words, for the singers to sing ever faster. I will continue
to make operas that will allow the journalists to say, "That's
not singing. That's talking." It will be a well-kept secret. I
mean, that it is singing.

I will be followed by composers who are smarter and more

experienced than I am. And better equipped. I hope.

I don't know about the future of music. As I said at the

beginning, it is too big a subject for me. But I think I know
the future of opera.

I hope I have covered the subject.

As you might have guessed, I like popular music. That means I

like some music that is designed to be a commodity. I wish there
were time for more music in my life, so that I wouldn't feel
guilty about liking Dolly Parton so much. Or George Strait or
Daniel Lanois. (I know these names only because friends have
given me the records. The African-American "talking music"
performers will have to go un-named, because I don't have the
records and I'm not going to buy them. I hear them on the
radio.) I would like to not feel guilty about liking the music
of people who probably wouldn't like me --- that is, my music
--- if they knew me.

One commodity every day, all day, everywhere.

I am short of time.

Did I say nostalgia enough times?

Ideas I didn't have time or patience for:

(1) absence of mutual criticism among composers
(2) what could an important "change of commodity" mean ---
and has this ever happened in music?
----------

The Future of Music for three hours. That is my mandate. Most

was talk. Now I will play nine examples. None is more than three
or four minutes long. Only two of the nine are complete pieces.
The rest have to be faded out. (This means I have had to take
them out of the digital domain and through my console.) Every
example is taken from the beginning of the CD or from the
beginning of the selection. The examples, of course, can't do
justice to the whole work --- the changes, sometimes extremely
dramatic --- the effect of listening for 60 minutes.

These are the kinds of things I listen to when I have the

feeling that I have lost the vision.

ONE
Steve Peters: "in memory of the four winds" (excerpt)
CD Title: "in memory of the four winds"
Label: pianissimo ppp 01 c/o nonsequitur
P.O. Box 344, Albuquerque, NM 87103 / nonseq@flash.net

I had intended to start with this composition, before speaking.

I like the slow fade-in. Later the piece becomes very loud. No
short sample could do justice to this piece.

--------------------
TWO
Tom Hamilton and Peter Zummo:
"Loudspeaker than Words" (complete)
CD Title: Slybersonic Tromosome
Label: Penumbra Music
P.O. Box 282, Grafton, WI 53024 /
http://www.execpc.com/~penumbra?

I like the seamless blend of trombone and electronics.

--------------------
THREE
David Behrman: "Canons (1959)" (complete)
CD Title: David Behrman / Wave Train
Label: alga marghen / plana-B 5NMN.020
Fax: Italy-01-70-300-689/attn:CarCano/Dept T1

A wonderful serial composition, every aspect serialized. "A

palindrome as well as a canon, with the two musicians, pianist
and percussionist, switching roles at its exact midpoint."
Performed by David Tudor and Christoph Caskel. It is very
different from David Behrman's recent music.

--------------------
FOUR
Sam Ashley: "Ear of the Beholder, Eye of the Storm,
Benefit of the Doubt"
(for Thomas Buckner) (excerpt)
copyright controlled by Sam Ashley
sam-ashley@hotmail.com

"a bank of processed sines, each of which either stays at the

same pitch, goes down a half step or up a half step" to lead the
voice, Tom Buckner's, to different song-tones.

--------------------
FIVE
Walter Marchetti: "Natura Morta" (excerpt)
CD Title: Natura Morta
Label: Cramps CRSCD 031
Artis Records, Via False 33, 36050 Monteviale,
Vicenza, Italy
Fax: (0444) 552688

I have played this recording, which continues exactly in the

manner of the excerpt for 69Õ27", many times. It heals me. I
can't explain it.

--------------------
SIX
Yasunao Tone: "Jiao Liao Fruits" (excerpt)
CD Title: Musica Iconologos
Label: Lovely Music LCD 3041
info@lovely.com

"Musica Iconologus" is an extreme example of the notion that

every sound is a "sign." The sounds come from a computer program
that scans pictures and makes the result into sounds. I can't
explain it technically, because I don't understand it
technically. But I saw a couple of the pictures. Yasunao Tone
took photographs or drawings of everyday things (feet, for
example) from magazines and made collages in which the everyday
things take the place of brush-strokes in Chinese ideograms. (In
addition to being a wonderful composer, Yasunao Tone is a
scholar of classical Chinese literature.) As he explained it to
me, a technician could take the sound samples from the recording
and translate them back into visual representations of ideograms
at a second remove: feet, not brush-strokes, but clearly
ideograms telling the story of "Jiao Liao Fruits" and "Solar
Eclipse in October," two poems from what Mr. Tone describes as
"the earliest Chinese anthology."

--------------------
SEVEN
Dolly Parton: "I Am Ready" (excerpt)
CD Title: The Grass is Blue
Label: Sugar Hill SUG-CD-3900

I use this as an example of voices without orchestra. Plus it is

beautiful. Also as an example of the question of being able to
afford it. The reverb, which breaks my heart, probably costs
more than I made last year.

--------------------
EIGHT
Robert Ashley and Jacqueline Humbert: "Au Pair" (excerpt)
copyright by Robert Ashley and Jacqueline Humbert
info@lovely.com

This is a recording of a first performance of a new composition

with a libretto by Jacqueline Humbert. I have included it,
because it is an example of the way we use a combination of
harmony and text for pitch inflections and an example of
processing as orchestra.

--------------------
NINE
Annea Lockwood: "Feldspar Brook, Mt. Marcy" (excerpt)
CD Title: A Sound Map of the Hudson River
Label: Lovely Music LCD 2081
info@lovely.com
I intended to end the talk with this excerpt. The sound map
changes continuously in time, because the river does. And it
changes in place over hundreds of miles from the source of the
Hudson River at Mt. Marcy to the Atlantic Ocean at Staten
Island.

--------------------