Come on, just 48 more.

As mentioned in the previous post, I was losing my effing mind when I got to California a week or so ago, had been on I-10 for so long that I could barely remember a part of my life that didn't involve the freeway, and so on. Part of the solution was to put on the title track from Sufjan Stevens' Illinois record, which is like a pleasure button for me, especially while driving. Diminishing returns never seem to kick in.

My brother-in-law and I were recently discussing Sufjan and we found ourselves sadly in agreement that we may not see great work from him again. All recent indications suggest that he has kind of lost it. Strange as it seems, I was always optimistic about his quixotic and ostensibly stupid 50 States project--not that he would finish it, but just that any state record he came up with was going to be a great purchase, and that at least 4 of its 172 tracks would be solid gold. He's shown no recent signs of wanting to continue on this path, and rather than cheering him for moving in no directions, I sigh. I had really hoped to one day, as an old retired snowbird, be the lone voice among my friends at the bridge table advocating the Delaware album as his true magnum opus. But alas.

At any rate, it seems a good time to suggest a few of the strengths that make the good music in his output so astoundingly good. I've not the energy to be exhaustive, but here are a couple things that spring to mind.

1) SS is a brilliant instrumental colorist.

His fast songs especially are often a buzzing counterpoint of different sounds that I sometimes feel I can literally see. Examples: in the Illinois title track, the transition from winds in the first part to strings in the second part. The insistent guitar lick throughout the second half. The transitional section in between (talk about layers). The placement of the vibes. Listen to "Casimir Pulaski Day" again and hear those high held notes in the organ later on, something I missed the first dozen times I heard the song. Or how about the lamentlike falling 1/2 step figure in the brass in "For the Widows in Paradise."

I'll come back to color more generally in a second, but first

2) SS is a really fantastic writer of ballads.

Michigan is frankly a bummer, which I didn't like at first. I wanted a record full of tracks like "Detroit" so I could drive around with it on and feel good all the time. But listen to these ballads, their carefully chosen images and anecdotes, the space: is there anyone else who can convey such emotional subtlety along with a vulnerability that is sometimes actually uncomfortable to listen to? ("I am crying in the bathroom" in CPD, &c.) Or something more restrained, like "The Upper Peninsula": "I live in America with a pair of Payless shoes." There's a nuanced character introduction for you.

3, and this is why I really wanted to write this post)

Am I the first to compare Sufjan Stevens with Thomas Hart Benton? If so, I call it. Benton's images sprung to mind as I was listening that day. Examples:

I see a certain affinity in the colors, in the way everything is bent in or out for emphasis, in the way these figures are drawn, exaggerated, mythicized.

Regionalism, eh? Hm. Peter Garland has called for a return to it. I'm always, in words at least, extolling local music scenes and cursing homogenization, so I suppose I'm about it as well. But that's not really what Michigan and Illinois are about. These are detached perspectives, postcards from someone who is not from the places. The style is the same in both cases, it's only the content, the specific people and stories, that change.

So we come to the fork in the road. Is regionalism a style in which an artist creates affectionate portraits of various places, or is regionalism a method in which an artist, steeped in a place, creates a unique style that rises organically from it? The former is easier. Anyone can take a generic camera and drive around and take pictures. It's when the camera actually changes that we learn something new.

Mojave notes

Ok,

1) National park artist residency programs are great. I've done nothing for the past week except hike, climb, read, and write music. You should really consider applying for one of these tasty things. Here is a list of parks that have programs--they're all a bit different and have their own emphases, seasons, app deadlines, and so on.

2) I become more of a desert rat all the time. First it was the bizarre geology of Southern Utah, then the bizarre people and powerful landscapes of West Texas, and now the strange and wonderful Mojave, with these whimsical Joshua trees everywhere and mountains poking up all over the place. It's never felt like home, in the same way as the dark, lush forests of the Rockies up in Colorado, because that's where I spent time as a youngster, and I've always derived so much energy from those places. But the desert is powerfully peaceful, rugged and quiet, and when I'm out here I can't help but chill out and focus on the moment. I'm not much into meditation, but when you're sitting on a rock out here you find yourself in that state. It's wonderful for creativity. The questions and challenges seem to fall away.

3) Coronado National Forest, in SE Arizona, specifically the unit just S of Chiricahua, is so fantastic, especially after a mind-numbing day of I-10. I was all alone there and it was a cool, perfect day. I couldn't believe I was in the woods again after all that desert driving. Shortly after driving past the NF borders I encountered a sign that said "smuggling and illegal immigration may be encountered in this area." Whoa.

4) Balmorhea State Park is the gateway to the West. It's amazing the way a swim in those waters regenerates my enthusiasm for everything. West Texas is full of surprises. This time it was the town of Ozona. You drive in on another nondescript ranch road, and then suddenly you're on a wide, beautiful, shady block that looks like something out of a Midwestern university town. I shouldn't have been shocked to find another perfect little town out there, I suppose, but my mouth was hanging open nonetheless.

5) It's strange to be in cities in the desert Southwest. Tucson in particular freaked me out this time. When you're from the Midwest and every city is plucked down in the middle of an endless plane of perfect farmland and you're accustomed to the land being used, supporting the communities around it, desert cities seem so illogical, the gas stations and chain restaurants so naturally at odds with the environment surrounding them. They're not wrong, it's just different. By that point in the trip I was also frankly losing my mind from solitude and insane amounts of interstate driving, and I found that sitting at Starbucks reading a book for a few minutes kept me restrained. There's nothing like a good chain coffee shop to make you feel sensible. Someone over there listening to music, looking angsty; a guy reading Madame Bovary; the new Avett Brothers record on the stereo. Phew. Despite Southern California's implicit arguments to the contrary, the world is not ending. Perhaps it already has, but it isn't in the process of doing so right at the moment, and I guess we can hang our hats on that.

6) Related note: when will America stop trying to make every place look just like every other place? I don't want to see Barnes & Noble in El Paso or Denny's in Twentynine Palms. This is an incredibly diverse country, geographically. Why aren't we okay with that? Is the spread of our commercial icons a response to these disparities? I wish different places were still allowed to be different. It's still a joy to focus in on the subtle things, the way everyone in California calls every highway "the 10" or "the 177," the way people in Milwaukee call ATMs "time machines" (actually it's "Tyme," after a major local bank, but you can't hear that in speech).

7) I don't have pictures or music to show for myself yet, but I will. I'm writing a truckload and playing a lot of guitar (this partially since my cabin's solar power system might not be able to support my keyboard--information on this front was scanty).

8) Car-trip analysis of favorite pop music to follow.

This is Water

I feel compelled to state that this is kind of appalling. I hope you were lucky enough to find David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement address online before they took it off to try and make some money on it. Now you can buy it for $12 in a nice hardcover volume that would no doubt look beguiling on a coffee table. It's a skinny little thing, and then you pick it up and realize that there are only ten or twelve words on every page, making it both a rip-off and an irritating physical task to read. Infinite Jest was a life-changer for me, but eventually I've grown to find his essays more inspiring. His piece on Roger Federer is, unequivocally, the best piece of sports writing I've ever encountered, and (for the moment) you can still read it online for free. As for "This is Water," it's well worth checking out, but I'd wait until it finds its way into some sort of compilation.

New Amsterdam

All roads of late seem to lead to www.newamsterdamrecords.com ; this new label dedicated to NY composer/performers on the classical-pop divide is filling a niche for this music that could have such wide appeal if there were only someone to distribute it, to let people know it exists. First it was Darcy James Argue who directed me there, then it was Build. And then the other day I was listening to Counterstream Radio--still my primary hope for the saving of contemporary music*--and came across the music of Dan Trueman, a composer/performer/Princeton prof whose ties to New Amsterdam include the band QQQ and a project with So Percussion. Everything makes so much sense when someone just looks at a scene, puts things together, and then promotes it, right? Now we just need to do this for all the music outside NYC.

* For me, it does this by bringing me directly to LISTENING, to the music itself, bypassing the normal channels of pretentious concerts and discourse ABOUT the music. Which is a funny thing to say on a blog, right, except there's nothing wrong with musical discourse, it's just the music should come first. And that's what Counterstream does.

Cool Waves

An Austin band worth hearing is Balmorhea (website, myspace), who are making some really nice instrumental music and reminding us, again, that people who actually care about music, rather than just about looking good, do not care about genre demarcations. Look: a record of instrumental music with guitars and banjos and violins and cellos; and another record, "by" the same band, of remixes of their tracks (or pieces, or whatever you want to call them) done by various people. It seems to me that these musicians could definitely refer to these cuts as "pieces" and to themselves as "composers," and the only difference would be that they wouldn't have 1500 fans on Facebook or be opening for Tortoise or touring Europe or making any sort of money at all on their music, because no one wants to hear pieces by composers (except other composers... and not even all of them, actually). In a world where new "concert" music and indie "pop" music are running awfully close together (look at Nico Muhly, a Juilliard Corigliano student whose record got reviewed by Pitchfork), calling oneself a composer is becoming nothing more than a bonehead marketing decision--unless one is trying to market oneself as a candidate for an academic job, in which case I suppose it's still safest to distance oneself from any music that's ever made any money.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: classical/pop is no longer a stylistic division, it is a socioeconomic one, and people put themselves on one side of it or the other for reasons of self-interest--because it's on that side where they think they've got a shot at making good.

And yes, I admit it, I was drawn to Balmorhea partially because they named themselves after one of my favorite spots in Texas, an atmospheric little state park out in the desert with a spring-fed pool:

Inuksuit

Check out this 11-minute documentary about John Luther Adams' piece Inuksuit, which was written to be played outdoors at the Banff Centre.

14 Rivers, 14 Floods

On a lot of new-musicky sites you get information about who, among the list of ten or twelve people who win awards, is winning what awards, and who, among the same list, has been signed by which publishing company. Not here. Here you get a link to some guy playing old Beck songs on a cello that he holds like a guitar. His performer info on CDBaby actually describes what his music sounds like and why he likes it, rather than providing a properly capitalized listing of organizations who have given him money.

Enjoy!

Roots

Two recommendations.

1) Sparrow Quartet - "Captain"

Singing and clawhammer banjo by Abigail Washburn; three-finger banjo by Béla Fleck; and some ridiculously clean string playing by Casey Driessen and Ben Sollee. Beautiful.

2) Bill Landford and the Landfordaires - "Run on for a Long Time"

I finally looked up this original recording, which I know, and you probably do too, as the source for Moby's "Run On." This group has some killer good-sounding vocals going on, and it's interesting to hear the harmonic choices as they were. The Moby version focuses around a 1 -> b7 bass motion that is totally absent in the original. The Landfordaires are not afraid to stick on the tonic all the way through the verse.

Whispers

This is what I saw when I first crossed into the Centennial State for the summer in late May.

That sign does, like the others, say "Welcome to Colorful Colorado." A bit of a stretch for that particular spot on the Kansas/Colorado border of Highway 36, but also strangely perfect. Colorado presented itself as a blank slate on which to scribble the events of the summer. I like that idea. A wide open space. Colorado, colorful because you draw it that way.

Not to say that I came here without preconceived notions. I have my version of this part of the world; I know what I look for from it. I've always loved the American West, ever since childhood road trips to the Black Hills or Estes Park where I'd first step out of the car in Big Thompson Canyon and feel that crisp mountain air and climb around on the rocks. It has an atmosphere. The Midwest is really more like an empty canvas that we write on; the land itself is everywhere in the Midwest, at least for city Midwesterners, throughly and consistently ignored. Here the land has its own presence, not just that of the roads and the structures we build on it.

But it's not just the contours of the earth. In the last few years I've come to recognize that I love the American West for its fusion of powerful natural beauty and manifest human quirkiness. Look at the Black Hills up in South Dakota. Even as a kid I think it struck me strange, on some level, that I had to reconcile the mysterious energy of those dark pine-covered hills with the Western kitsch of Wall Drug, buffalo burgers and moccasins, the gift shops in Keystone, the parking lot at Mt. Rushmore. And oh, lord, I love Grand Lake CO for this same unexpected marriage. The mornings and the twilight hours here are music. And then add the people who live here. "Colorful Colorado" is damn right.

I get so sulky when I have to leave Colorado. I stomp my feet halfheartedly and whine. I get embarrassingly touched by John Denver songs. This period of my life has been teeming with incessant beginnings and endings. I've chosen this and regret nothing, but nonetheless it makes for an awful lot of these three-day spans where I walk around a place and feel like it's whispering to me, asking why I'm leaving and where I'm going. I've learned so much from these places, and as I kick the asphalt in Grand Lake I feel the presence of this town and the people with whom I've shared it, and it presents itself to me like the opposite of that empty field on Highway 36: it is full, saturated with experience, an inscrutable lesson that I've somehow internalized.

I talked about these things in the essay that managed to score me a gig as Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park this coming October-November. I included audio excerpts from Terlingua Meditations and On the Beach at Kantishna, and I described them as "responses to powerful places, spots where the atmosphere of nature fused with my own consciousness to create a unique synthesis." My creative work has often involved attempts to explicate the subjective, expressing the universals hidden within moments of personal experience.

Tonight, this weekend, I'm going to hold it in. I'm feeling selfish.

Terlingua: literally, "earth language." The aspens are starting to turn. Happy Fall.

Estranged contexts

I've been intrigued for the past few days with the Nonsense Company, a group that "performs new and innovative works of contemporary music and theater, with an emphasis on the musical use of speech in estranged contexts and the application in theater of techniques more commonly associated with music." Their excellent website includes sound samples and more information.

House-elves

Need some creative vindication? Of course you do. We all need some creative vindication sometimes. Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk will make you feel better, I promise. And anyway you're going to have to listen to it to understand the title of this post.

New ground

So, check this out:

How about that? I've barely written anything that could be classified as poetry, but at some point about a year ago, the restlessly prolific Eric Malmquist wrote a few of us soliciting anything that might make a good art song, and I happened to have three little things sitting around. I'd practically forgotten about it by the time he sent the scores along. A new experience for me, and how cool.

Eric is also starting a concert series called SONG (Singers on New Ground) in Chicago showcasing new American art songs, so if you're in the city on 23 Sept, be there, 7pm at PianoForte. Program will include music by Eric, his teacher Stacy Garrop, Libby Larsen, and Dominick Argento (oh, yeah), as well as the latest rendition of my own Sincerity, the setting of my rejection letter from the University of Michigan (score, recording). I'll play the piano, and singing will be Ben Hjertmann, for whom I wrote the song, and who also received the same letter at about the same time. Here's the Facebook event page.

Freedom Band

I have an excuse for using my new Master's degree to not compose anything or do a very good job updating this blog. I think it's a good excuse. It's because I've been focusing on music like this:

(notice the antler chandelier)

Also,

(notice the sign about "Bury Manilow.")

I've been accused, due to wardrobe/accessory choices as demonstrated above, of pretending to be from Texas. Figures: in Texas I was the Iowan, in Colorado I'm the Texan. Not sure what to make of myself anymore.

Also, I'm pretty certain we're the only old-time folk band in the Front Range that can boast two MM Composition degrees in our ranks. If that counts for anything.

Coming in from the coasts

You know the old truism about how trends start on the east coast, or in Europe, and have to "make it" in to the Midwest or other more culturally remote regions? Well, the Dirty Projectors have made it to new music-land. I thought I was hip because I heard of them through word-of-mouth all the way back in April (always the most approved-of way to find out about something new), but now even Newmusicbox has reviewed Bitte Orca, and the band has become the most recent pop-world entity that composers like to trot out their appreciation of without really incorporating as an influence. This practice goes back into the '90s as well: the previous batch included Radiohead and Bjork, favorite groups of many composers who liked to claim they "didn't only listen to contemporary concert music" although what they wrote sounded exactly, and only, like other contemporary concert music. I'd imagine that even back in the '80s, composers whose music was still infatuated with inaudible pseudo-modernistic pitch structures would trumpet their love of the Talking Heads to try and seem more with-it. To be fair, I've spent most of my short composing career trying to make my pop influences matter in my non-pop creations, and pretty much haven't been able to. A friend recently told me that any sort of "crossover" is twice as hard to pull off, and I think he's right.

So anyway, now that everyone else is talking about Bitte Orca (and, according to a friend who works with musicians in Brooklyn, the city of New York is now tired of the band), I won't talk about it anymore, except to say that I'm envious of the young musicians who'll get to hear this at age 15. I'll bet they get the same feeling I did at the same age when I first heard The Soft Bulletin or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. This is a special intersection in music, one where whimsical experimentalism meets pop accessibility. It's a rich corner that has led to some beautiful results with replay value. To the youngsters who are inspired by this stuff, I say this: watch out with music school. They aren't going to understand your relationship to this music. So keep a hand in recorded music, because those people will.

Also: I've plugged them once, I'll plug them again, but another group/project that fits into this realm would be The Oracle Hysterical.

Nightlife

Check out Nightlife, the new album/podcast/pop opera by friend and fellow UT composer Jack Stamps and writer John Navarro. Jack is a truly original musician who is also a candidate for best composer website. Nightlife also just received a favorable review from RadioIndy.