Copyright ©2011 by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
Many aspects of aging are unexpected -- particularly to one accustomed to feeling thirty and being treated that way. My voice and personality are young. Online, mature composers who don't know me think I'm younger, treating me with a certain disdain (a disdain that reveals why baby boomers seem to have become a hated generational class). Sure, there's forgetfulness. Names fade even as faces are more clearly etched into memory. The word "accustomed" above? All I could think of was "accompanied," and resorted to googling a synonym for "used to". That is the unpleasant aging, mental aches & pains.
It should have been clear that I was stepping into dodderhood a decade ago when Eric Lyon called me a 'professional composer'. It stung. I had always thought of myself as a rough-edged pioneer, not some sort of seersucker-wearing professional. But maybe I had been a pioneer. (Do you like that past perfect tense? "Had been"? Not me. Assonates with "has-been".) Okay, sure, yes, certainly I had been a pioneer, creating sample pieces by 1972 and interactive computer installations and performance works not long after -- all well outside academia and with home-made equipment, presented at street concerts, while I drove a truck or graded lawns or ran printing presses, all to stay away from academia. But am I still a pioneer, having abandoned much of the now-old-fashioned avant-garde and electroacoustic worlds, and left the streets? No. Old artists aren't pioneers, except by kind attribution from younger people standing on one foot and then the other and anxious to escape the room. Old people can't be pioneers because they're not expected to exhibit pioneering behavior. "Go West, young man" . not "Go West, old feller" (pat, pat). We old'uns stay at home, settle in, and produce Enduring Works of Art . or fade into oblivion -- a place we might have been inhabiting all along, but had not yet abandoned all hope while our fibbing friends remained alive. In the contemporary U.S., we're objects of gentle mockery and are expected to be foolish and self-effacing, alternately jolly and cranky. And thus we become objects of unwelcome deference all the while being thoroughly ignored. (Oh yeah. Young folks look right past me. When did that start?)
Life's timeline also breathes in and out. My mentors and models, those who were alive during my life and some of whom I met -- Cage, Stravinsky, Zappa, Partch, Xenakis, Stockhausen -- are every one of them dead. The eras in which I lived and in which I participated -- modernism, the avant-garde, new romanticism, minimalism, and the various 'post-'isms -- are also dead. What does that mean, other than time and art are moving and changing? It means I have neither mentors nor eras -- no surround of common ideas, no guides to a composer's Future Life. Future life for me is, alas, now much shorter than life already lived. (Is it any wonder artists who die young are so celebrated? They're not around long enough to become this tiresome.)
So let me get this over with first: Everyone is a solipsist, so don't give me any crap about needing to see the world from someone else's point of view or needing to walk in someone else's shoes. I can't. You can't. So shut up.
Few people know me now; I don't know how that happened, either. Like an infant, I've gone from being the center of my own universe to one of seven billion souls shuffling confusedly from cradle to grave. I am aging in obscurity.
Here's the summary, in the third person.
The Young Composer began work as a teenager, wrote imitative tripe, attended the pitiful Rutgers University, and departed in 1970 to found a small ensemble of friends and to perform works of the High Avant-Garde in the streets and storefronts of Trenton, New Jersey -- while maintaining a political activist's life of self-published newspapers -- and in New York at venues from tawdry lofts to Charlotte Moorman's sprawling annual Avant-Garde Festival of New York. Directing the artists' cooperative Trans/Media and later working with the New Jersey State Museum, he built avant-garde festivals in Trenton, a rusting old industrial town that had become the seat of state government. It was a sad place but he and his colleagues did not see that -- they instead worked doggedly, network-free and oblivious to experiments underway nation- and world-wide beyond the constrained New York-to-Philadelphia swath. Outside academia, they hadn't heard of Adorno -- nor, for that matter, the Scratch Orchestra.
It was within this narrow stripe of geography that his early pioneering work was done. Composition for Tape & Soloists in 1969. Dozens of small electronic studies for hand-made devices. An Exequy for large wind ensemble on the day Stravinsky died in 1971 -- the first mentor death, so powerful an effect on the 22-year-old composer that he wrote from dawn to dark and finished the fully-orchestrated piece in a single day. Soon the large-scale sample-based piece Construction 'on nix rest... in china' for two trombones and tape in 1972, finally premiered in 2003 in Amsterdam. More sample pieces. (The digital native will have skipped past the previous descriptions, having never known a time when sampling did not pervade music.) The brooding i cried in the sun aďda for extended voices created out of a dream in 1973. The beginning of frequent performance art and synthesized pieces. Network C/R, three versions for tethered dancer with body sensors and analog electronics, completed in 1975 but never performed. Large-scale music/dance works including Cy-Gît with electronics and keyboards and singers and costumes. A year-long performance composition in the form of a flowchart called Gendarme. The disturbing Stoneworld Grey for a museum exhibition on Dadaism. The three-scene Plasm over ocean, a chamber opera premiered at the World Trade Center in 1977, using uniquely designed & built instruments such as the Uncello and the Hharp (homage to Harry Partch, the second mentor death). The next year Missa da Camera, a chamber mass for hand instruments first heard in Trenton and the following day at Charlotte Moorman's last Avant-Garde Festival in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first Car Horn Symphony that trumpeted from the roof of a concrete parking garage. And finally, Rando's Poetic License for computer, electronic instruments, and audience interaction, performed at the Washington (DC) Project for the Arts in 1978.
One can create one's own personal hell, and after that last composition of the High Avant-Garde (among work notable enough for the tweedy New York Times to praise it) came exile -- self-imposed with the idea that leaving the city would soften his work and de-urbanize it but could not possibly slash a deep, bloody rupture in the personal art-time-space continuum. But this was before the idea of career would become so significant in American compositional life; a composer composed, an artist created, and it would always continue so.
Not so. He began to bleed. The year was 1978, overlapping with that Washington DC performance, and the oblivion was to be a place called Vermont. Travel back in time if you will to the Green Mountain State -- much the same then as it is today, minus the Internet. The land is rolling green hills and narrow valleys, wooden frame buildings, steepled churches, and fabled snows. Life grew hard. That first Christmas Day was 35F (37C) degrees below zero and the home was heated with a single wood-burning sheet-metal Ashley stove. Pipes froze. Cars slid off the icy roads. The telephone was worse than childhood; six parties on a line and this one got the three-shorts. The only sanity in the brief warm season was growing a garden. Nonpop musical groups, few and far between as they were, just began to discover Charpentier. Stravinsky, much less Reich, would be a long way off. His few attempts at concerts of new music were failures, generating laughs at best and -- in the days of poisoned Tylenol -- a departing audience member saying loudly, "I'm going home to take some Tylenol." There was no work. He hung out an 'electronic repair' shingle and rebuilt old televisions coated in soot, finally landing a job as a typist. City friends fell away like coarse salt on a stale pretzel. And so his composing nearly died, with a once-yearly average of a dozen pieces shrinking to just eleven in a full five years . and weak ones most were. Skills in computer technology eventually allowed for parlaying the typing job into writing tech articles for publication, and that was just enough visibility to found Green Mountain Micro. The company built interfaces and software -- but it bet on the wrong corporation's computers for those programs and peripherals. Micro went down, hard. While paying off the debts, the composer's savings would be nil for the next twenty years.
Despite the image of an ignorant, conservative rural America, there is an open-mindedness in the backcountry, especially in Vermont with its economic and social mix. And so as Micro gasped to its end in 1985, the composer retooled his computer knowledge and created new works: The interactive Nighthawk museum installation for sound sculpture and computers, the outdoor performance work and installation Mirrorgarden, and the hour-long 'performance ritual' Echo that used sensing computer hardware. By the next year, the groundbreaking, artificially intelligent In Bocca al Lupo was installed in Montana as part of a collaboration with sculptor Fernanda D'Agostino. An entirely new approach was born out of the rural consciousness that he finally accepted and incorporated into his creations, which Bocca revealed. It explored an invented rural civilization populated by distant drums and nearby insects and animals with a sensory array that allowed the entire installation to respond to the presence of a person or people and their speed, aggression and quietude. Finally, as a parting tip of the hat to the high-tech world, he wrote a songful cabaret called Beepers, the story of a love triangle in a computer company and deep ambivalence over technology.
The next few years also brought a different twist. The composer began teaching an experimental six-year elementary school music program and conduct a church choir, and soon afterward the composers in Vermont organized to produce festivals and concerts and to collaborate with ensembles to perform their collective work. It was a circling of the wagons, to be sure, a decade of focus on work within tiny Vermont -- but it (together with the artistic humbling provided by years of exile and harsh climate) offered an inspiration to compose site- and ensemble-specific music that in a few years encompassed nearly 70 chamber pieces, choral works and arrangements. These included several major compositions: the über-high-minimalist Mantra Canon for orchestra, chorus, six percussionists, two pianos and descant soprano (1986) written in despairing response to a first hearing of Reich's dreadful The Desert Music; a minimalist-dodecaphonic commission for piano, Rough Edges (1987); the tonal four-movement Four Sharks for two quartets and piano, never performed (1989); an isorhythmic piece for two chamber orchestras, Yçuré, and the 33-section dance-chamber menu-driven A Time Machine (both 1990); and a large-scale spectral-influenced orchestral piece, Softening Cries (1991). And at long last, these were also the first performances played by other than the composer's own ensembles.
Geography is difficult to explain; it's not the same as national feeling or being among like people or even being part of an urban neighborhood or scene. Geography is a sense of place, sometimes physical and sometimes internalized and fused with the physical space to which one returns. And so that same decade also brought several long, challenging and serene hikes in the Grand Canyon as well as a significant psychological rescue by composer Clarence Barlow. Barlow insisted that he (that 'he' being me; we're still in third person here) go to Europe. Barlow was right. Time in Germany and the Netherlands and the exploration of other countries made a change, first evident in Amsterdam's tiny Koffeehuis de Markt, where the proprietor recognized him as a composer and conversed with him about it. Imagine that happening in America? This odd, almost microscopic reassurance stabilized his compositional determination. In Europe he also met composers and artists -- Anne La Berge, David Dramm, Elise Lorraine, Alcedo Coenen, Calliope Tsoupaki, Deborah Richards, Pieter Smithuysen, Yannis Kyriakides, Zbigniew Karkowski, Robert HP Platz, Carl Beukman, Pai-Uun Hiu, Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Margriet Hoenderdos, Tan Dun, Alcedo Coenen, John Duncan, Elena Ungeheuer ... there were so many, and he would meet them again in a few years.
Europe also brought the first solid work on a long-term project: an opera about Elizabeth Bathory, the 'Blood Countess' and a distant relative on his stepfather's side. A residual relationship arose during the Micro years with computer programmer Zoltán Radái in Hungary, and together the two families drove from Budapest into (then) Czechoslovakia to find the castle of the evil woman. There was truly born the opera Erzsébetxlii, finally premiered in October 2011.
By the time he returned to America, his last supporter in New York, Charlotte Moorman, had died -- and so began a new period of quietude and melding: Super Flumina Babylonis for 12-part chorus on a flood that had swamped towns in Vermont, eventually sung in Portugal; Aurora Cagealis, played in Vermont by fellow composers on the death of his third mentor John Cage; Llama Butter for tuba, playback and dancers, premiered in Indiana; the mysterious Emerald Canticles, Below, first heard in Toronto; and a series of experiments in small instrumentation.
Another event-twist came in 1995, when a local radio station needed a summer fill-in show. Together with composer David Gunn, he began hosting the two-hour new nonpop program Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar -- which went on the nearly new World Wide Web later that year, in a time before most people could even listen to audio on their computers. Once again, digital natives may consider the time before the web to be an illusion, like tales of walking to school in five-foot-deep snow, uphill and backwards both ways. Yet there was a time when connecting to the Internet offered no audio or images or even a means of navigation beyond typing. "Kalvos & Damian" was a pioneering program, the first time there could be a world stage for composers. The program broadcast for the next ten years -- and those people met in Amsterdam? They became guests, along with nearly 300 others. The show won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, presented at Lincoln Center. Together, the pair also produced the 37-concert Ought-One Festival of NonPop in 2001, which brought 101 composers and dozens of performing groups from around the world for a wild weekend in central Vermont. After 537 shows, "Kalvos & Damian" retired from the air, maintaining an occasional online presence until 2011.
From Kalvos & Damian he learned that there is little better -- or worse? -- for a composer than speaking with other composers while pretending not to be one. As 'Kalvos', he was often intimidated by their accomplishments -- especially the academic credentials and award lists. A 1996 trek back to Europe slapped him into consciousness again, so in the next five years he returned to creating electroacoustic music along with chamber, choral and orchestral works. Electroacoustic included four pieces on the voice of Chris Mann for the Frog Peak Collaborations Project; Detritus of Mating for the sculptural work of Pavel Kraus in Vermont and recomposed with string quartet at the Mánes Museum in Prague as Zonule Glaes II; the sampling piece bellyloops for Illegal Art and No Money (Lullaby for Bill) on the voice of Bill Gates from the composer's 1980 interview with him, another heritage of the Micro days; and Snare:Wilding on an attack in New York's Central Park. Commissions came in for acoustic compositions: the subtle Into the Morning Rain that quietly overlaid contrasting rhythmic patterns in a melodic bedstraw; LowBirds, a menu-based acoustic chamber work; Sourian Slide and Mountain Dawn Fanfare, both for orchestra; Warebrook for chorus; chamber works Quince & Fog Falls and The Sub-Aether Bande; and especially RatGeyser for MalletKat and computer playback and HighBirds (Prime) for two electric guitars and fixed playback -- the latter on the death of one of the last mentors, Iannis Xenakis.
And into this came September 11 -- just days after the joyous 'Kalvos & Damian' Ought-One Festival. Though Vermont was far away from the events of that day, the madness still resonated. Two pieces came from it and the second, Fuliginous Quadrant, was stark and moving at once with its slow pulses punctuated by intense activity. At first too difficult for Vermont performers, it was premiered in Ghent and heard at home in 2011.
After 2001, a sense of mortality seeped in from below his consciousness. The year wrapped up with a half-hour high-minimalist flute concerto, Mirrored Birds (commissioned to celebrate the 90th birthday of Louis Moyse), and moved onward over the next years with a set of algorithmic piano preludes, Tirkíinistrá; an intense string bass solo, Northsea Balletic Spicebush; an 8-channel playback piece with live vocal performer, Spammung, based on spam subject lines; a video study with Theremin and water, LiquidBirds; and the first of a series of short pieces for the '60x60 Project', The Warbler's Garden. Commissions resulted in iskajtbrz for playback, Icecut for orchestra, and Phylum Euphoria for euphonium and playback. Together with a trip to Slovakia set up by The Discovery Channel, a tentative scene for the opera Erzsébet was composed, recorded and broadcast on a segment entitled "Deadly Women". And with the ongoing news of tragedies worldwide including that at Beslan, By Still Waters (K Vodam Tixim) was composed and premiered in New York.
From 2001 through 2006, more than 85 compositions were completed in an ongoing frenzy of ideas, especially after 'Kalvos & Damian' went off the air in late 2005. Among the most intense were Memento Mori for extended voice and playback; Rose Quartz Crystal Radio for alto sax and percussion; Jameo y el Delfin Mareado for large orchestra; Elusive Parallels (in Time) for flute, bass clarinet and playback; Syrens of the Collective Unconscious for three pianos; L'Estampie du chevalier for string quartet; In Winter Not Still for eight strings; Clouds of Endless Summer for piano trio; and Eventide in eight movements for piccolo, e-flat clarinet and contrabassoon.
More followed. Mortality, or at least age, can provoke determination for, as Samuel Johnson wrote, "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." And so in 2007, it was time for a 'productivity' project long considered since the avant-garde days and its erstwhile gimmick "Music While You Wait". It was called We Are All Mozart.
I wrote an extended essay for the 'Harmonic Canon' of James Drew's Greywolf Performing Arts Institute. On the idea of relentlessly composing, it concluded:
If we could write for the symphony, on deadline, every day, with simple, insistent daily practice, and with feedback from knowledgeable co-workers and supervisors, then we could be understood for our ability to reach the hearts and souls of our listeners with the same expressive richness as our compositional forebears. . I offer no answer to the mechanics of increasing audiences and increasing the commitment of presenters and performers. But I do have one way of increasing visibility, and I ask that other musicians begin the process of creating new works for every occasion, every day, every minute. . We Are All Mozart is my project to create new works and change the perception of the music of our time. It is a project that demands that I complete the composition of a piece every day during 2007. It has all the gimmickry one can ask for a modern audience. . But realizing how many compositions were possible in the past for composers who had the chance to do it -- the insistent daily practice, demand, pressure and deadlines -- I thought the time was now. Composing is full-time work, so I intend to have each piece paid for by people who actually want the music for themselves or friends -- just as any composer of the past. No self-inspired, volunteer, for the résumé, pen-to-shelf writing allowed. No 365 pieces because I feel like writing a song or making a scrap of media art each day. No, instead, I've come up with a 'measure-part' formula that breaks out into typical low-tier commission amounts in America, which should do just fine as a starting point for restoring the composer to the role of a true cultural player. Buy low, sell high! Make me do it!
And lo there came the year and the absurdity of expecting 365 commissions. I settled for 100 -- paid for and composed during 2007 -- along with another ten created for other occasions, from electroacoustics to solo and chamber and voice through full orchestra. (The full list is exhaustive and exhausting, and can be found on the We Are All Mozart website or my "Compulsive list of the complete compositions," which I just call the Big List)
Despite 50 more compositions since -- the erotic smuttle for playback, Conjim for Ed for music box, Alien Angels for voice and Theremin, Crosscut for piano and large wind band, the automotive performance piece Contraflow Symphony, and even the Erzsébet opera score itself -- We Are All Mozart was in many ways my last singular pioneering act -- at least the last one that was noticed -- with many composers following its path. Daily composing and the productivity of earlier artists once again shed its embarrassment for the generation after the generation who idolized the spareness of Webern. Yet there came at the same time a mysterious anti-success to We Are All Mozart. Only a third of the music has been played three years later. Ironically -- if I dare use the word -- the greatest commissioning enthusiasm was shown by performers a generation younger, but most failed to follow through on the performances themselves. The cheap older guy's music is just in the way of their careers, isn't it, a line on the commissioning résumé? Then it's "Out of the way, grandpa!"
Careful. It's hard to speak of generations without engaging a bitter verbal war. I want to respond to the GenXY cri de coeur "Get Outta My Way!" with my own "Get Offa My Lawn!" I find myself yelling it abstractly inside my mind. My response derives in part from my affliction, the troubling "I already did that" syndrome -- this is my lawn and what are you doing on it? How did you even find it?
I had mocked Stockhausen's description of younger composers as his 'children', but now find it understandable that he failed to perceive the beat/loop formel-free sound-cult generation except from far outside it in time and place. He was, in effect, on Sirius already. Postmodernism has certainly made a wreckage of the narrative essential to his formel. Even the epitome of narrative, the short story, has become flattened out and snipped beginning- and end-free from an invented life, pasted up with faux-certainties, 'whatever' gestures and ironic references. Irony was embedded in my own life when irony was occasional; adopted by an entire generation, irony goes rancid. Like 'friending', it is a social networking flatness of friend without friendship, story without narrative, writing without an expectation of a reader's psychological investment.
So I wonder, What have I lived through? How does it color my point of view?
Once I scoffed at the idea that older pieces -- pieces from our formative years -- are comforting. What? Can it be that modernist/atonal/spiky/irregular is somehow more comforting than the friendly new postmodern/tonal/pulse/flattened works? Sure, those who grew up with the Beatles go back and hum along. For me is it Gesange der Jünglinge? Really? Do I find myself self-commenting negatively on new pieces just because they're made by fresh pretty faces developing careers albeit with ironic overlay? Or about commentary just because it's spoken by those same electrified younger composers? Do I think of, for example, NewMusicBox as a bunch of children finding their way in public? Are they really what David Nice calls "the soundbite generation"?
Oh. Maybe. They're different. They idolize beats. Despise hippies. Like the boomers' own parents. Howzabout that for irony? I don't get their stuff; it sometimes seems -- dare I say this? -- already done, like a turkey carcass picked through. But their soup's pretty good, isn't it? Have I just failed to get the flavor now that it's been glitched?
Certainly there is a difference of effort at the surface level. Effort by itself is no more than expenditure of energy; yet bound up with the Puritan Ethic, it had been assigned meaning -- or at least meaningfulness. It isn't meaningful any more than an economic rescue in a call for more jobs assumes by itself a value in jobs when the call might be instead for life with greater substance, joy and fulfillment -- the true Pursuit of Happiness that stood comfortably beside Life and Liberty at the founding of the American republic. In other words, technology has made much of the '1970 hard' the '2010 easy' -- a painful reduction in baby boomer 'value' and more than a generational split-point . instead, the feeling of being pilfered and exploited. Young composers can reach back to what was stylistically prevalent with technologies that make retrospectiveness effortless (the lack of 'pushing against' was a flashpoint for argument in a recent New York Times article). It is startling to hear a 12-year-old whose pieces appear to be as skilled as Subotnik or Dodge. Will history validate the 1960-1990 electroacoustic composers or not? Will they rot along with their analog media? Or will Crumb become Beethoven? Will the era become a kind of plugged-in Rococo, transition between a modernist past and whatever future is upon us, forgotten with the subsequent age of improvisational electroacoustics? With mass-available technology, long improvisations of structurally uninteresting sounds (many taken directly from modernist composers' developments) create a norm -- the flattened short story -- and so more generated material comes from it, genre-izes, and splits off. A thousand micro-genres tinkle down and flatten the perspective like January snow over a landscape once populated by symphonies. Younger audiences who wouldn't listen to a structural 'thing' such as a symphony for an hour will listen to long electroacoustic improvisation. How is it different? And how do I prevent myself from dismissing it as mere pilfering of art that was deeply felt and irony-free?
Yes -- "I already did that" syndrome -- that long, flat form was already the case in our mid-1970's synthesizer concert series and moreso with the mid-1990's Circular Screaming for electronics, improvisation, melting ice, lights and aromas. Circuit-bending by creation (of the circuit diagram) rather than modification (of someone else's circuit) was the norm; electroacoustic composers of every stripe were building and modifying their own equipment. Is the random circuit-bender less a creator than a circuit-builder? Where's the news? The new? It is alone in the angle of incidence, perception and reflection.
In part, my distorted perception angle is pop. Granted the early minimalists had their pop influences as well as African and Asian sources. But more influential is that our mid-career composers have grown up with guitars in their hands, not pianos under their hands -- significant in physically as well as musically informing their lives and work. On social networks they post their own music right beside bands 40 years old as if that were their own, and it is de rigueur to have the profile photo with a guitar. The cult band idolatry has returned along with it -- new and old. Was I enthused about popular music? Not much then, I'll admit. Popular music from 1930? Not on your life! I was pre-postmodernist when my hair was thick and dark, never touching a guitar -- and I wouldn't be caught dead singing pop tunes.
Besides, I never did like pop the way I loved nonpop (including nonpop jazz, that hair-raising Coltrane Ascension and wrenching Ayler Ghost) -- oh, yeah, nonpop is our word, mine and David Gunn's. So here, today, now, pop is a requirement to be a 'classical' composer (albeit not vice-versa!) in more than the token way it was for Berio much less for Stockhausen and his patronizing dismissals. What is it to listen to pop but not really care, as I do? Hip-hop and scratch were interesting for a while. Some rap, the unabusive sort, no OG moi-męme. The New Wave back in its day. And before that a handful of art-rock bands. So now if you haven't worked with or opened with pop, you're classical. If you're classical, you're overshadowed by the past. So it's pop or bust? Where do I go? Start at Radiohead, slide past Pomplamoose through Lady Gaga, and dig into Ke$ha?
Certainly not. But the synergy (or anti-synergy, entropy) of postmodernism, irony, networking and technological support (including notation software and playback) has invented what is, for all intents & purposes, an entirely new world that must develop its own medium of deeper exchange after scraping away the randomness of the past they have sampled into new creations. The surface is being explored roaringly fast, relentlessly using up and discarding itself, with that detritus lapped up and digested much as a dog eats its poop. That cycle can neither nourish nor ultimately endure, just as the avant-garde ultimately exhausted itself and collapsed into self-parody.
This is visible to me, being from the first generation to Know Too Much but not know how to handle that knowledge. Having grown up before the Internet means not possessing from-birth filters that prevent one from being informationally overloaded in the way digital natives are not. Yet I can observe well, living scrap of history that I am.
So take yourself back in time again, now to my childhood home of the mid-1950's. It was multi-generational -- grandparents, mother, me -- in the lower middle-class. Relatives visited often; dinners were vast and home-cooked and shared among the aunts and uncles and cousins, who would take home heaping plates of lasagne, aglia e olio, pizzagaina, turkey, ham, venison, apple pie, struffoli... A pall of cigarette smoke hung everywhere in our home and in stores and public places, dulling walls into acrid yellow stickiness. Penny-ante poker games clinked into the night when relatives visited and talked loudly & endlessly. If the phone interrupted with one long and one short ring, we answered; three other homes heard the same ringing, picking up their respective heavy black handsets on the short-short, short-long or long-long. Speaking to relatives in California meant asking a nasal long-distance operator to place the call and ring us back (long-short) sometimes hours later and yelling into the poor connection for the few spare minutes that it lasted. Television was mostly a heavy piece of furniture with front doors finished in hand-rubbed chestnut, its tiny screen displaying ghostly blueish-white images; flipping a switch at the back of the set allowed us to see either the Philadelphia or New York stations -- all the channels 2 through 11 and 13, so richly endowed were we with television in central New Jersey. There were no remotes then, only a large thumping knob to change stations; when the set was switched off, I would watch the picture collapse to a spot and fade ever so slowly away. Everything was grey. There existed no calculators, computers, mobile phones, running shoes, air conditioning, photocopiers, microwave ovens, electric can openers, credit cards, or even side-striping on the roads. Centimeters were foreign and unpatriotic. Frozen food, polio vaccine and latex paint were new. We still used fountain pens with rubber reservoirs refilled by opening and closing a lever. Soda cans opened with church keys, and shampoo came in glass bottles. We heated with coal and ate Tip-Top white bread. For recreation we listened to the last of the dying dramas on the radio, to baseball on the fuzzy television, or to music on the neighbor's record player -- a modern thing that dropped 45RPM discs in sequence via a thick center spindle; even 8-tracks and cassettes were several years in the future. The week's highlight was a matinee of horror movies at the Strand movie house downtown: Godzilla, The H-Man, The Crawling Eye, War of the Worlds, The Blob... the whole afternoon for a dime (plus a nickel packet of pretzel rods). The house paint was all lead; you could see where I had chewed the windowsill's candy-sweet lead paint as a three-year-old. The family Chevy had a running board, and was parked in our cinder driveway; a week's worth of fuel cost a dollar, and the car stank of oil and gas and plastic seat covers. Divided highways were in the future; our travel was done slowly up & down two-lane concrete roads that thumped at their cracks. Our Kodak camera accepted only rolls of two-inch No 620 film, black-and-white, used sparingly and taking a week to process; the edges of the returned photos were pinked. Our jars were glass, our plumbing lead, our rugs wool, our lights incandescent, our foods rich, our postage stamps three cents with a purple Statue of Liberty, and our windows single-pane with tattered screens in summer and cracked storm windows in winter. The back door creaked on its spring. As I look around me now, I realize that most of what is in this room as I write this, save for the floors and walls and chairs and shelves and hardbound books, would not have existed in my childhood.
Information overload was born after me. There was no psychological underpinning to deal with new media. In some ways I was an accidental media pioneer (there's that word again) with early personal computer devices, exploring digital technology interactively, writing for computer magazines, founding a computer company, designing hardware & software, and working online in the dim 300-baud days of 1981. But it was discovery, not utility, experiment, not product. I had to write my own music-playing program and accompanying language to play back the simplest material, and soon discarded this traditional route as too effortful. Instead, I turned to cross-media and installations and computer controllers. Cross-media -- trans/media as we called it (before that was usurped as a storytelling term) or multimedia (before it became computerese for "I'm on YouTube") -- continues to be heralded as more significant than the 'pure' composer, yet in two generations it has failed to exit the modern museum culture.
These terms (and arguments) within my little life may themselves be useless now, impossible as it may be for me to unlearn them. This is the media culture, so much so that 'culture' alone describes it adequately; it is I who must append 'museum' to it (perhaps in describing myself). How, then, can one reflect upon pioneering in areas which, from today's perspective, have always existed? Like networks, smartphones, tablets, credit cards, and the side-striping on roads? When 'culture' must now be clarified with a fog of retronyms? -- paper book, live music, analog recording, organic farming, broadcast television, film camera, standard transmission, land line, physical world, acoustic guitar, optical zoom, and even postal mail. Or, as Bob Kasenchak says, "any radical change will involve self-definition by means of a gesture of separation, one that plays up its newness and departure from the status quo while it flails around and tries to find, or construct, its own identity." And that from a webcomic.
You can see I'm no longer grasping why I don't know what I don't know. Any questions, class? Which ones should I ask if I don't know the topic? I mean, I wanted to write that Erzsébet opera in an implied Romantic idiom -- without being associated with the Opera Community, heaven forfend, and its cult of The Tune. My earlier avant-garde/minimalist/ritualist transitional opera opened & closed decades ago. Hell, the term 'opera' itself might as well be a retronym. Now I look at the young composers and their experiments and wonder what I'm missing, what questions to ask, how to assess my own communication or lack of it, personally and with a single 'opera'. Is this language, unassociated as it is with pop or guitars, valid or viable? I seem to grasp Erling Wold, Phil Kline, Eve Beglarian -- but they're fractionally younger than I. How about the much younger Corey Dargel or Nico Muhly, speaking of solipsism? Yes, them too.
One last rabbit dropping tossed into the rice pudding: Success drives artistic language, just as art drives physics, to paraphrase Leonard Shlain. And, of course, vice-versa. Which came first, chicken or egg? That is, Iceland or icecubes? Icecubes or Sugarcubes? Sugarcubes or Björk? Björk or Guđmund? Visibility ? success ? historical/academic memory. The rest, iced. Make sense?
Attention goes to the successful and that simplified bidirectional link above. So on the face of my fading vision, sans link to the successful (emergent or otherwise), I have failed. We are full of composers. They teach and compose part-time. They get famous and need not reflect except in a kind of quiet gratitude. Others are young and angry with pop grit or young and ambitious with academic pillows. Still others -- not in the U.S., to be sure -- live by means of a (now shrinking) social system of artistic support. A few of us maintain self-directed compositional lives linked only to audiences and performers, and with extraordinary focus on the practice of composition. Focus on practice differs from focus on career or success. This is a shift. Just as the U.S. president speaks of making 'things' and stimulating 'jobs' -- neither a measure of civilization, much less culture -- educational institutions lean more toward training in order to invent 'things' and fill 'jobs'. Look at the rancid support for arts in the U.S. and one might think, why not dismantle it all? Is America the herald of cultural waning, where one is bred to do but not think? Who is responsible? Are the Generation XY and the Millennials rejecting the Baby Boomers for what has been done to them? Have they -- and by this I mean composers as well, who have hurled accusations at the boomer generation -- developed a rejectionist, ironic ethic that sees their elders' focus and driven character as a hateful manifestation of festering selfishness, all to no end but 'things' and 'jobs'?
It is a struggle to remember the detail and the terror, but how is this different from 1960? We were rejectionist, but I might also ask what we greywolves are responsible for. Let's see. Political correctness began here. That's why composers are not so much 'young' these days as 'emerging' -- not quite as exclusionary as 'young' but nevertheless largely synonymous. Women's concerts? Ethnic concerts? Yup, we did that. We also listened to the marblemouthed paper-thin philosophy of Garrison Keillor and his imaginary world that we'd long destroyed while electing the idiot president who happened to be the worst of the boomers -- self-centered, ignorant, unable to look into the future at all. Future? We were, you realize, raised with the fear that There Is No Future and On the Beach and the Doomsday Clock and A Clockwork Orange. Our vision of the future was empty or, among the optimistic, dystopian in ways that only the children of imminent nuclear obliteration can invent. We are the Planet of the Apes, after all. Remember Johnson's man who knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight and how it concentrates his mind? That. Our whole generation ducking under their desks waiting to be hanged, great fireballs of hanging that turned us to dust as in Barefoot Gen. We would be the last of our species, we were certain. (At least you can thank us for rock'n'roll.)
The baby boomers aren't the only ones self-involved, although we are less ept at hiding it and better evolved in the art of the verbal shim-sham than the Millennials. Okay, yes, this is about my self-discovery and angst vis-ŕ-vis my aging over younger composers, but how about a story from the lower side of the generational colon-block? At least before I get back to the evening's entertainment.
In 2006, my PhD was finally completed at Stichting Paideia, one of the earliest online universities, with physical centers in Amsterdam, San Francisco and Wagga Wagga. Being a longstanding venture, Paideia had quite a few senior academic staff -- some older than me by nearly thirty years. My dissertation in the area of Border Studies explored my Erzsébet opera, its origin, characters, geography, religion, ethnicity and other aspects in both physical and virtual form, including the latter as a computer game. When the time came to defend the dissertation, there was no communication over the age gap. The idea of gaming was met with dismissal (cloaked in stiff academicism, of course). More than that, the section that described the concepts and processes of virtualization of characters and locales, digital restoration of the castle morphed from present and historical images, and real-time algorithmic recomposition of the thematic materials seemed to be written in a language with no elements in common with theirs. Concepts and even purpose seemed alien to them, and by their questions, I discovered a mutually exclusive disjointedness with every aspect of the new genres being presented (as well as, it seemed, old genres such as opera itself -- but that was more an unfamiliarity with the field vs. a kind of mental blank stare).
How to trace this failure? My immediate conclusion was, "Old people suck. Why don't they just go die?" That being unproductive, I searched myself for signs of a developing and ultimately insurmountable age barrier beyond thinning grey hair . something deeply calcifying in my human power of understanding. I thought back to all those dead mentors. They, together with my friends and colleagues, formed my matrix of understanding, offered reference points, and provided context. As those mentors died and I aged -- and I noticed some of this in political thought in my forties -- the context blurred, the reference points grew too many, and the matrix became irregular like a piece of growing rock candy, sweet and distorted. The deep-set shifts and fractures in the glistening young crystal were unchanged and unchanging, but outside was growing a field of multiple facets that covered those below. The past held the structure together, and the present could only grow upon that; there was no hollowing out of the crystal to begin again with a new flaming sun from the center in a kind of intellectual and social Dyson sphere. At an irretrievable moment that rock candy gets so large that each successive solution adds only a sheen of crystals -- like the salt on a stale pretzel -- to the surface, forming no clear shape and contributing no more to the crystal's gestalt. Especially to the unfamiliar outside, it looks frozen in both time and shape. Eventually the liquid leeches this sheen off as well and, taken out of the hypersaturated solution, it fractures and sloughs off what it has grown, returning (in endless tiresomeness) to the moment of youth when the crystal gleamed most brightly.
I feel that. There is depth but little visible growth as it is now stretched across so large a surface. One can see (and reach) inside for understanding but the outside becomes increasingly incomprehensible. Inside is where one finds depth and personal richness, while outside is where one pioneers.
You wish a conclusion and my departure post haste? Not yet, dear reader. Pioneering is over, I'd said. I lied. It was for argument's sake: Old folks can't pioneer. Yes, that is the lie. Ye Olde Grammy Pushing The Envelope doesn't look like pioneering because her unknown is not obvious, but rather drawn from deep within personal and cultural history and seeped to the surface through cracks in the crystal, imperceptible when pioneering is taken to mean little more than being first the destroy the World As It Is in an ever-present woot!
Got that? Pioneering can also be the very presence of one who has pioneered in the presence of one who is about to be pioneering -- the transfer of history without which we slide from crystal back to primordial slime. Which, in turn, encourages more artistic energy than ever. "New" melts to "mature" and transfers to "child" that is subsumed by "new". And we're back in the art bizniz, baby!
So. Retirement? Who, me? Oh, wow. Retirement? Any idea what that means? I could live a year on what's in the bank, then The End. But in the meantime, I ain't getting out of your way, not 'til you strip me clean of ideas. Know what I'm saying? It's still my damn lawn!
