Roger Sessions Research Articles

Munyin Tanah Experimental Music | Musik Eksperimental Munyin Tanah

Munyin Tanah is an experimental music created to materialize the composer's ideas. This work's creation hopefully provides benefits in the form of new references for musicians and audiences. The method of creation in this work is found in a book by Brewster Ghiselin entitled The Creative Process. Roger Sessions (1952) explains that creating a musical work includes inspiration, conception, and execution. Based on this method, the composer produces experimental musical works by processing musical elements using media that combines non-musical and musical instruments. The musical idea represents sounds that arise from the ground, such as rumbling booming, and sounds produced from the contact of materials made out of soil, such as the sound of rain and earth shifting crust. This is processed through rhythmic integration that explores Balinese gamelan and drumming techniques in Western music, such as single, double, and paradiddle.

The Ineluctable Modality of Movement

ABSTRACT Present-day fixations on “embodied minds,” and “enactive” assessments of life fail to recognize alive, moving bodies, precisely as James Joyce implicitly shows in his experience-anchored descriptions of the ineluctable modality of the visual and of the audible. Joyce's experience-anchored descriptions accord with Edmund Husserl's renditions of “the kinestheses” and their integral relationship to perception and to the development of agency. They furthermore accord with John Dewey's writing on aesthetics that describe the immediacy of motion into sense and sense into motion in both nonhuman animal life and aesthetic experience. William James's connection of the stream of thinking with the stream of breathing is in further accord. Such accords show that animate forms of life are essentially mindful bodies sensuously and affectively attuned to their surrounding world. Cave art, both its creation and appreciation, is further testimony to mindful bodies as is internationally known musician Roger Sessions eloquent descriptions documenting the integrality of movement to all the arts. All such accords testify to the central and essential presence of the sense modality of movement—kinesthesia—and its bodily engaged dynamics in animate life and in art.

Bangkong: Eksplorasi Ritme dan Timbre Suara Katak secara Akustik pada Rancangan Instrumen Drumkusi

Purpose: The creation of this work is directed at producing a drumming style in another way and a drum cussion solo composition. Research method: This creation uses the roger sessions creation method, namely inspiration, conception, and execution. Results and discussion: The creative form of Bangkong's musical work is to transform the frog's voice which is formulated in the formulation of the problem into three parts in this work, where each part of the work is given the freedom to improvise but is conceptualized. Implication: Bangkong is processed in such a way as to produce three forms of Bangkong rhythms to become an original, intact, and characterized musical work that can be used by musicians, especially drummers and percussionists, to achieve a good reputation by having a new playing style.

Interview with Composer George Tsontakis

This interview for the journal ICONI, taken by Dr. Edward Green, Professor at the Manhattan School of Music, is with one of the leading composers of the United States, George Tsontakis. A professor at Bard Conservatory of Music, he is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious Grawmeyer Award for his Second Violin Concerto. Professor Tsontakis’ work — nearly all of it commissioned — is wide-ranging in terms of genre, imaginative in its orchestrations, and always strongly emotional. Included in this interview are discussions of some of the biographical background to a number of his major pieces, including The Past, The Passion. Among the subjects discussed is the meaning of “concerto.” Several of his concertos and concerto-like compositions are specifically discussed in this interview, including Man of Sorrows (piano), and Sonnets (English Horn). The interview also touches upon his relations with two important American composers of earlier generation: George Rochberg, and Roger Sessions — who had been Tsontakis’ teacher of composition at Julliard.

Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven: A Film Score Guide by Mariana Whitmer

Reviewed by: Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven: A Film Score Guide by Mariana Whitmer Paula Musegades Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven: A Film Score Guide. By Mariana Whitmer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. [xiii, 159 p. ISBN 9781442281790 (paperback), $35; ISBN 9781442281806 (e-book), $33.] Music examples, bibliography, index. The culminating volume of the Film Score Guide series, Elmer Bernstein's "The Magnificent Seven," by Mariana Whitmer, explores one of Bernstein's most celebrated film scores. Using historical, cultural, and musical lenses, Whitmer reveals there is much more to John Sturges's well-loved 1960 Western than the classic battle of good versus evil. Indeed, Whitmer provides the reader with an understanding of the score's role in the film, its impact on the Western genre, and its influence on the American audience's understanding of national identity. Presented in a concise and accessible writing style, Whitmer's close study of the score, narrative, and surrounding historical context of The Magnificent Seven will make an engaging text for students studying film music and is a captivating read for music and film scholars alike. Chapter 1, "Elmer Bernstein and 'Authentic American Music,'" begins with Bernstein's early years. Given the scarce information on Bernstein's biography, this valuable section helps fill in the gaps, providing details about both his background and training. Whitmer reveals the early influences on Bernstein's compositional style: the music of American composer Aaron Copland; Bernstein's studies with Israel Citkowitz, Roger Sessions, and Stefan Wolpe; and his longtime fascination with American folk music. Filled with direct quotations from Bernstein, who saw American music as "part of [his] musical heritage" (p. 4) and credited Aaron Copland for having "created … a sensibility based upon American folk music" (p. 3), chapter 1 highlights the many formative people and experiences that helped shape Bernstein's career and compositional style. As Whitmer explains, however, it was Bernstein's first film scores in the Western genre, as well as his early work in television, where he fully established his own "Americana" sound. In chapter 2, "Bernstein's Westerns," Whitmer investigates the movies Battles of Chief Pontiac (1952), Drango (1957), The Tin Star (1957), and Saddle the Wind (1958), as well as the television series Riverboat (1959–60). She traces Bernstein's stylistic development from one consisting primarily of industry convention, filled with "modal sonorities for the Indians [and] triplet rhythms for galloping horses" (p. 17), to the more recognizably Bernstein "Americana," as discussed in chapter 5. With Bernstein scholarship in its early stages, chapter 2, in addition to providing background for Whitmer's close analysis of The Magnificent Seven, also delivers necessary insight into the composer's early career as he developed his now-familiar Western sound. On reaching chapter 3, "The Critical/Historical Context of The Magnificent Seven," the reader better understands how the film fits within an increasingly globalized society. The Magnificent Seven was adapted from the popular Japanese film Seven Samurai (1954) by director Akira Kurosawa. Whitmer offers a behind-the-scenes look at the adaptation process, the challenges and benefits of filming in [End Page 495] Mexico, battles with the production code, and the postproduction process. Such a background provides essential information regarding the film's place within early 1960s American culture. Whitmer carefully maps out the film's commentary on the United States' shifting relationships with other countries, which critics, too, had noticed. As one reviewer observed, Sturges "eloquently gets across the themes that man must take a strong stand against evil" (p. 54). Indeed, one of the most compelling moments within this rich chapter is Whitmer's discussion of The Magnificent Seven's critical reception both inside and outside of the United States. Noting the significant disparity between its popularity overseas and the general lack of interest in America, Whitmer explains how The Magnificent Seven fell into the category of "the new 'adult' Western, which was perceived to be too introspective and philosophical, while lacking in action" (p. 52). Despite disinterest from the critics, however, nearly everyone celebrated Bernstein's music. Drawing connections to Jerome Moross's score for The Big Country (1958) and the strength and force of Aaron Copland's music generally...

Motor intentionality and the intentionality of improvisation: a contribution to a phenomenology of musical improvisation

The intentionality of improvisation represents surely one of the most pressing and controversial issues in contemporary action theory: how do we find the way to characterize the proper intentionality of improvisation, which is an unplanned yet intentional action? This article will address this question bringing together Merleau-Ponty’s motor intentionality and Bergson’s conception of duration. My argument will unfold in three main stages. First, I will briefly describe the traditional scheme that is used to think of intentional action in contemporary action theory and discuss how the phenomenon of improvisation casts doubts on it. Second, I will outline an initial, and provisional account of improvisation by crossing the descriptions of musical improvisation provided by Jankelevitch with the testimonials of two improvisatory composers—Enrico Pieranunzi and Keith Jarrett—and reports from Charles Rosen, an American pianist and Roger Sessions, an American composer. Finally, I will refine the basic concepts and lay out a phenomenological account of improvisation, by extending and applying the phenomenological notion of motor intentionality to the examples and testimonials gathered from the observation of a specific kind of improvisatory activity—musical composition. This methodology is intended to contrast both with more standard philosophical approaches based on hypothetical examples, and with more standard laboratory-based methodologies in cognitive sciences, psychology, and experimental philosophy. Overall, this approach is intended to redress the balance of action theory—one-sided directed towards planning, as a key aspect of human agency—with an analysis of the bodily and responsive aspect of intentionality.

Reconsidering the Composer-Educator in Postwar America

By the middle of the twentieth century, American universities had evolved into powerful institutions with aggressive cultural agendas. Renewed interest in the arts provided a platform for composers employed by these universities to grow into powerful civic leaders. This article investigates the contributions of four modernist composers—Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, William Schuman, and David Diamond,—who held academic and administrative posts at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Juilliard School of Music. During this period, these four composers used their academic positions to shape American classical music culture—not through their compositions—but by overhauling music departments, authoring textbooks, and extending the reach of universities and conservatories far beyond the campus walls. This project relies on primary and secondary sources, weaving together academic records, administrative reports, and composer correspondence into a narrative of educational reform, cultural patronage, and even urban renewal. This article endeavors to widen the historiographic focus on postwar composers like the Four to reconsider their relevance as music educators, cultural authorities, and practitioners of modernism outside of the concert hall.

Ralph Kirkpatrick: Letters of the American Harpsichordist and Scholar by Ralph Kirkpatrick

AMERICAN MUSIC Ralph Kirkpatrick: Letters of the American Harpsichordist and Scholar. By Ralph Kirkpatrick, edited by Meredith Kirkpatrick. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 117.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014. [xv, 186 p. ISBN 9781580465014. $60.] Photographs, appendices, bibliography, discography, index.Meredith Kirkpatrick, the niece of the renowned harpsichordist and musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick, has compiled and published over one hundred and twenty letters between her uncle and numerous correspondents, including fellow musicians, patrons, instrument builders, teachers, students, and family members. Most of the letters date from between the early 1930s, when Kirkpatrick was traveling extensively in Europe, and the late 1970s, by which time Kirkpatrick had gone completely blind. These letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the personal life of a professional musician-one who, at times, enthused with pleasure about performances or particular works; and at others, demonstrated a testy impatience with builders, teachers, and collaborators. Kirkpatrick's complex relationships make this resource particularly useful for scholars interested in reconstructing the collaborative world of mid-twentieth-century classical music in the United States. While a number of issues in the book's layout, exposition, and organization hinder its ultimate utility, these flaws do not detract from its overall biographical significance.Kirkpatrick's letters provide an array of opinions, recommendations, and criticisms meant for two very different sets of eyes: his family on the one hand, and fellow musicians, patrons, and friends on the other. In the first section-selected letters to his family, most of which date from his early studies in Europe-Kirkpatrick demonstrates youthful enthusiasm, sometimes tinged with the brazenness of a man in his twenties. These letters reveal his admiration for Nadia Boulanger; his unhappiness with his primary harpsichord teacher, Wanda Landowska; and his interactions with other keyboardists such as Arnold Dolmetsch and Paul Brunold. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of these family letters is seeing how Kirkpatrick cultivated and shaped his musical tastes-regarding repertory and technique, especially-during the early part of his life. In a letter from 1931, Kirkpatrick remarks that his teacher, Paul Brunold, knows how to produce a most beautiful tone in a variety and subtlety that Landowska never dreamed of. . . . But on the other hand, he has not her clarity and precision. Oh, for the combination! (p. 18). Here, and elsewhere in his family letters, his fraught and complex relationship with Landowska comes to the fore: he often praises her interpretations of classicalperiod music (as in a letter dated 10 July 1932), and in others, expresses his frustrations with her teaching style, her preference for the Pleyel harpsichords, and her ego (see, for example, letters dated 9 February 1932 and 19 July 1932). These early letters not only reveal what or with whom Kirkpatrick was studying as a young harpsichordist, but also his learning process in developing his own style and approach to both historical and contemporary repertoire. Having been written in Paris, Berlin, and London, they also offer a snapshot of interwar Europe from the perspective of a young American abroad.As a renowned figure in America's early music revival, Ralph Kirkpatrick corresponded with many other established musicians throughout his life. The second section of the book is thus divided by correspondent, and includes letters to and from teachers (including Boulanger and Landowska), patrons (Alexander Mackay-Smith and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge), instrument builders ( John Challis, William Dowd), conductors (Serge Koussevitzky), composers (notably Roger Sessions, Elliott Carter, Vincent Persichetti, and Henry Cowell), critics (Olin Downes), fellow scholar-performers (Kenneth Gilbert), and personal friends (Thornton Wilder). …

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ERP IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY CASE STUDY: ACCELERATED SAP VS DANTES & HASIBUAN METHODOLOGY

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a concept of enterprise system that describe the integration of the whole process in the organization. Study in this field mostly about external development paradigm on information system development. So, issue in ERP is all about how to adopt it in the organization, not about the application development. This paper reviews two methodology on ERP system implementation, one is vendor perspective methodology and new generic perspective methodology. Comparation of both methodology is done in this study by using Roger Sessions’ metric. Result is the vendor perspective slightly superior than the new generic perspective methodology.

Ulysses Kay Archive: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library

African-American composer Ulysses Kay (1917-1995) wrote more than one hundred forty compositions in a wide range of forms--five operas, over twenty large orchestral works, more than thirty choral compositions, fifteen chamber works, a ballet, and numerous other compositions for voice, solo instruments, film, and television. (1) Born in Tucson, Arizona to a musical family, Kay was encouraged by both his mother and her brother, Joe King Oliver, to study piano, violin and saxophone. He entered the University of Arizona in 1934, receiving the Bachelor of Music in 1938. For the next two years he studied composition at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, with Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson, and received the Masters in Music in 1940. From 1941 to 1942 he studied with Paul Hindemith at Tanglewood and at Yale University. Compositions from this period include the Sinfonietta for Orchestra, the ballet Danse Calinda, and Three Fanfares for Four Trumpets. During World War II, Kay served in the U. S. Navy, playing with and arranging for the Navy Band, stationed at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. His most prominent composition from this period is Of New Horizons for concert band. Commissioned by Thor Johnson and performed by the New York Philharmonic, its premier took place in Lewisohn Stadium on July 29, 1944. Upon discharge from the Navy, Kay received the Alice M. Ditson Fellowship for creative work at Columbia University, where he studied with Otto Luening from 1946 to 1947. During the summers, he was a resident at the Yaddo Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he would return six times, later joined by wife Barbara, through 1971. Major works from this period include: Danse Calinda Suite; Rope for solo dancer and piano; Concerto for Orchestra; and the film music for Quiet One, a documentary film about Donald Thompson, then ten years old, by Janice Loeb, Sidney Meyers, and Helen Levitt, with commentary by James Agee and additional photography by Richard Bagley. Many honors and scholarships followed, including a Fulbright Scholarship, grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship. From 1949 to 1952, Kay received two Prix de Rome awards that allowed him to travel and study in Italy. The first African-American to receive the prize, it gave him residence in the American Academy in Rome, along with his new bride, Barbara Harrison of Chicago, whom he had married on August 20, 1949. Compositions from this period include: a piano quintet, a string quartet, a brass quartet, Sinfonia in E for orchestra, and Song of Ahab, a cantata for baritone and ten instruments. Returning to New York, Barbara taught music in Manhattan, and Ulysses accepted a position with Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) that would last from 1953 until 1968. Turning down several teaching positions, he obtained a job that gave him a regular schedule, allowing him to compose as much as possible. Compositions include: A Lincoln Letter, an a cappella work for mixed chorus and bass soloist; Six Dances for String Orchestra; Fantasy Variations for Orchestra; and two operas, Boor, and Juggler of Our Lady. In 1958, Kay was a member of the first delegation of composers to the Soviet Union, a part of the U.S. State Department's Cultural, Educational and Technical Exchange Agreement. The others in his group were Roy Harris, Peter Mennin, and Roger Sessions. During the month-long trip, Kay appreciated the interest in jazz expressed by Russian composers and he played them recordings of the music of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, and Johnny Richards, among others. He also attended performances of his own compositions, those of his fellow delegates, and the works of Russian composers. Upon his return, Hi-Fi Review published his account of the trip entitled Thirty Days in Musical Russia. …

Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher (review)

Reviewed by: Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher Jonathan Blumhofer Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher. By Robert Riggs. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010. [xi, 330 p. ISBN 9781580463430. $80.] Music examples, illustrations, chronology, catalog of works, discography, repertoire list, autobiographical essay, bibliography, index. Robert Riggs's new biography of Leon Kirchner is very much a labor of love. As he recounts in his preface, he came to know Kirchner well over what proved to be the last decade of the composer's life, first by spending hours with him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later by assisting with his move to New York City. Throughout the book, there is a spirit of respect and admiration for its subject, his multifarious interests, his teaching career, and—above all—his music. Thankfully, this reverence does not devolve into sycophancy: though at times one might wish for tighter narrative structure and livelier [End Page 589] prose, this book provides a welcome snapshot of musical modernism in twentieth-century America and brings to life the remarkably influential yet little known composer Leon Kirchner. Riggs's book can be divided into three parts: the first, comprising chapters 1 through 3, focuses on Kirchner's personal and professional development. The second, chapters 4 and 5, covers his first important academic appointments in California, as well as his burgeoning career as a conductor and pianist. The final section, chapters 6 through 8 plus an epilogue, discusses Kirchner's near-thirty-year tenure on the faculty at Harvard, his involvement with the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and his varied activities as a conductor and performer (mainly in and around Boston) over three decades. Throughout each section runs Kirchner's "artistic credo": It is my feeling that many of us, dominated by the fear of self-expression, seek the superficial security of current style and fad—worship and make a fetish of complexity, or with puerile grace denude simplicity; Idea, the precious ore of art, is lost in the jungle of graphs, prepared tapes, feedbacks, and cold stylistic minutiae. An artist must create a personal cosmos, a verdant world in continuity with tradition . . . bringing new subtilization, vision and beauty to the elements of experience. It is in this way that Idea, powered by conviction and necessity, will create its own style and the singular, momentous structure capable of realizing its intent. (p. 7) As a composer, Kirchner belonged to the modernist tradition that flourished in the years following World War II. Though he never embraced the twelve-tone method, he spent two years at UCLA studying with Schoenberg, whose teaching methods he would emulate. Indeed, Riggs's discussions of Schoenberg and Kirchner's recollections of his former teacher are among the most interesting passages of the book (pp. 13-15, 19, 35). In addition to Schoenberg, Kirchner's most important composition teachers were Ernst Toch, Ernest Bloch, and Roger Sessions. Upon moving to New York in 1948, Kirchner joined the ranks of a memorable group of composers who would define American music in the second half of the twentieth century, including Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Lukas Foss, and Earl Kim. The critical reception of his music was remarkably positive, and Riggs cites numerous reviews from the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and other print publications to demonstrate this fact. Kirchner's one critical flop, the opera Lily (which was adapted from Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King), is given a thorough discussion in chapter 7. Riggs provides specific information on several of Kirchner's compositions by separating out six important works for in-depth analysis; I will address these "interludes" shortly. One of Riggs's stated goals in this book is to demonstrate Kirchner's work as a performer; he was a formidable pianist and a conductor of note, and Riggs gives a thorough treatment of this aspect of Kirchner's career. In fact, as the biography progresses, Riggs's approach appears a bit too thorough: a fair amount of the later chapters straddles the line between useful information and monotonous lists of concert programs. Still, one comes away with...

Interview

WILLIAM BROOKS RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Do you remember when you were first exposed to Perspectives? What was that experience like? WILLIAM BROOKS: At Wesleyan University, where I was an undergrad, the library was dispersed in some ways. There was a music reading room in some little building, I cannot remember where. There was a rack of current periodicals—ten or twenty. I remember encountering Perspectives then, but I don’t have any memory of what I thought or what I read. I picked it up and looked at it, along with various other things I picked up and looked at from time to time. So I didn’t really have a view of it. VANDAGRIFF: Do you remember when you started to read it? Are there any articles that hold a particular place in your memory? BROOKS: First of all, the thing to say is that, until I went to graduate school in Illinois I had always been very musical, and I had always been William Brooks 137 interested in music, but I came into Wesleyan as a science and math guy. I double majored in math and music, but I didn’t decide to stay on and go to graduate school in music until I was halfway through my junior year. So I was not very responsible about studying stuff until I went to graduate school. Then I went to graduate school in Illinois because at Wesleyan the big presence while I was there was John Cage. Not that Cage was in residence—that was the year before I came—but Cage was back several times during the time I was there. His thinking and his aesthetic and all of that was present. Peter Yates came through several times—at least twice, I should say —and gave lectures on various things. This was only a few years after he had coined the phrase the “American Experimental Tradition” (he first started publicly pronouncing it in 1959), but before his book on twentieth-century music, which came out in 1967. I graduated from Wesleyan in 1965. So the aesthetic that I was coming from, when I went to Illinois, was this experimental music aesthetic. It was very much because of Yates, and because of the way he defined it (though I did not realize this until much, much later); it was very much a kind of “outsider” aesthetic . Cage was an outsider at that point—this was the sixties. He was not the grand old man of American music, or experimental music. He was still a pretty wide-eyed, wacky guy who was doing strange performances , who was the subject of controversy, and people were accusing him of being a charlatan, and all of that stuff. So I was very invested— and for other reasons, too. Already, before I went to Wesleyan, even in high school, I had come to know and like, but not really love, Charles Ives’s music. At Wesleyan I became a really devotee of Ives. I became very, very interested in Ives by my sophomore year, when I took an art song class in which we did some Ives songs. Then I was just amazed, and I got my own copy of the 114, songs and I was stuck into Ives from then on. Because of Cage I knew about Cowell. . . . So I was very into this notion that American music was an outsider art. I went to Illinois for several reasons, but probably the principal reason was that it matched this notion I had of experimental music. The second reason (but I didn’t make the connection at the time) was that I had come to know Ben Johnston’s music through Bert Turetsky, a double-bass player. Ben was at Illinois, and even there, I had the sense that he wasn’t Roger Sessions. He wasn’t an “in the mainstream” kind of guy. Illinois had also been doing all of the Festivals of Contemporary Music, which were wild! One thing that happened when I went to Illinois was that I almost immediately started singing with Kenneth Gaburo. Now Kenneth was wild, and weird, and wonderful, and to me he was an outsider, because 138...

Laudate Milton Babbitt

- 336 - - 337 - - 338 - - 339 - - 340 - - 341 - - 342 - - 343 - - 344 - - 345 - - 346 Rolv Yttrehus: Laudate Milton Babbitt From 1957 to 1960 I was studying privately with Roger Sessions at Princeton and teaching at The Lawrenceville School just south of Princeton. This is when I discovered Milton Babbitt. I managed to sit in on his classes in Princeton, trying to absorb as much as I could from his lectures, and using the Princeton University Library where I discovered his article “Some Aspects of Twelve-tone Composition”, large sections of which I copied out by hand. (Those were pre-Xerox days.) I have had many occasions since that time get to know his music, and to enjoy his witty observations on all manner of things. (At Tanglewood one summer when Karlheinze Stockhausen was beginning to make his mark in the world he referred to “the Schott heard ‘round the world.”) In 1997 I left the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh and began teaching at Rutgers University. My contacts with Milton were much more frequent after moving to the East Brunswick in New Jersey After attending concerts in New York I would often give Milton a ride to his Princeton home after a concert. Laudate Milton Babbitt was written for the New York New Music Ensemble and performed by them in 2006. -Rolv Yttrehus ...

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PAUL LANSKY RACHEL VANDAGRIFF: Before you were involved with the magazine, what was your relationship with it, and what did you think about it? PAUL LANSKY: Well, it started publishing in 1962; I was 18 and in college at the time. I thought it was really exciting. It was the first thing of its kind. You have to realize that that was a special period in American music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer, and the buzz was that everyone thought that this was the wave of the future (Aaron Copland even tried his hand at it), that this way of thinking about music was revolutionary, path-breaking, and Perspectives was at the cutting edge. (It’s appropriate that the Stravinsky logo is on the cover.) So I subscribed from the very beginning. It got me interested in going to Princeton. I read the early issues from cover to cover. (At the time I was also a faithful reader of Ben Boretz’s columns in The Nation.) VANDAGRIFF: How did your relation to PNM evolve? 176 History of Perspectives LANSKY: I was an associate editor from the issue after the Fromm departure (Vol. 11/1, 1972) until the Red Issue (Vol. 17/2, 1979) after which a bunch of us got lumped together in an editorial group. I continued working on the magazine but on a lower burner. It was exciting, and I enjoyed doing it. I did a lot of the grunt work. In those postFromm days we had to do everything by ourselves. I took care of getting some of the PMTs done (photo-mechanical transfers), farmed out some music copying tasks. I solicited articles. I collected the Roger Sessions tribute (PNM 1978). I worked on the Babbitt issue (PNM 1976). I have memories of sitting in Elaine Barkin’s kitchen in Manhattan, doing something with scissors and scotch tape while her sons circled around waiting for dinner. Working hand in glove with Elaine and Ben was exhilarating. I don’t remember ever having a casual conversation with either of them about anything having to do with the magazine. PNM was the center of my intellectual–musical universe until the late seventies , when I got heavily involved in computer music. We all thought of it as a composer’s magazine, for a particular breed of composer. VANDAGRIFF: You mentioned a “particular breed of composer. . . .” Does that have anything to do with the language people wanted to use to talk about music? Or that some wanted to converse about music, others didn’t? LANSKY: Language about music was the heart of the enterprise. A lot of the writing in PNM was about finding new ways to talk about music. On one side, there are Babbitt’s writings and, on another, things like Jane Coppock’s Schoenberg essay (1975). In this context Jim Randall’s “Compose Yourself” (1972–1974) came as no surprise to me. (This coincided with Fromm’s withdrawal of support but there was apparently more involved.) “Compose Yourself” was originally going to run in the issue that became the Stravinsky memorial issue. Fromm, though he had already told PNM that his Foundation would cease sponsoring the journal after that issue, staunchly objected to Randall’s piece appearing in the issue devoted to the memory of the great Igor Stravinsky. Around that time there were a complicated tangle of events. Fromm had run out of patience with the cost of producing Perspectives. It was costing so much in large part because of what Princeton University Press charged. Additionally, Fromm had also long been displeased by the great amount of “science in music,” as he put it, that appeared in the magazine, and he had never been interested in publishing such technical articles that he saw, I believe, as only being of Paul Lansky 177 interest to a very specialized readership. Fromm wanted to sponsor a magazine about contemporary music that one could find on a coffee table, pick it up, and peruse it. He wanted a magazine that was akin to Show or Commentary. Despite intervening to set it “aright” multiple times, Fromm lost patience and told Boretz that the Fromm Music Foundation would cease funding at...

The Archives of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

This article presents a brief history of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), and an overview of its archives. The Center was one of the earliest and most influential centers of electronic music in the United States, especially during the decade or so after its founding. Established in 1959, assisted by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, it was a joint venture between Columbia and Princeton Universities, directed by composers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky (representing Columbia), and Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions (representing Princeton). The Center was active in supporting the work of many domestic and international composers wishing to work in electronic media, and was the locus for the composition of many important and influential works of electronic music. The Center also housed the RCA MKII synthesizer, the first programmable music synthesizer. The archives of the Center consist of roughly 80 percent sound recordings, principally reel-to-reel tapes, including original recordings of the concerts of the Composers' Forum from 1951 to the mid-1970s. The remaining holdings include documents; manuscripts; technical manuals and blueprints, music manuscripts, sketches, and scores; bibliographies and discographies; photographs; slides; a small amount of correspondence; administrative records; and ephemera. The Center is still active today, as the Columbia University Computer Music Center. The archives have been recently deeded to the Columbia University Libraries, and some processing and preservation work has commenced.

Sound Studies: Framing Noise

'a shower of meteors of sound'1In a 1937 lecture, John Cage issued his now commonplace statement: 'Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating' (1961: 3). Just four years earlier, Cage was studying with Henry Cowell at The New School, where German composer Hanns Eisler was also teaching. In 1928 Eisler had written: 'When you are composing and you open the window, remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise, but is made by man' (1978: 30). In a later interview Cage returned to the theme:I had the lights turned out and the windows open. I advised everybody to put on their overcoats and listen for half an hour to the sounds that came in through the window, and then to add to them - in the spirit of the sounds that are already there, rather than in their individual spirits. That is actually how I compose. I try to act in accord with the absence of my music.(1982: 176)The purpose of this exercise is not to locate the origin of a now wellcirculated idea; it is simply to hear the words of two composers describing what it means to study music within an 'entire field of sound', outside conventional distinctions between music and non-music, noise and sonority. It is not surprising that sound studies would begin in elemental studies of its rational language: music. Yet what might be surprising is that this circulation of ideas took place not in a conservatory, but at The New School, an institution founded by dissident, radical scholars, refugees from the increasingly authoritarian culture of Columbia University. At around the same time, young radical American composers called for the rejection of European musical idealism and, in the voice of Aaron Copland, instead embraced a modern music that would be 'principally the expression in terms of enriched musical language of a new spirit of objectivity, attuned to our times' (Copland 1941: 18). The New School listened.In 1927, Copland was appointed to the faculty and organised the famous Copland-Sessions series of lectures and concerts. The series brought recognition to a new American music - to Copland and Roger Sessions, and to other composers, including Roy Harris, Virgil Thompson, and Walter Piston. Copland's appointment to the faculty was followed by those of musicologist Charles Seeger and composers Henry Cowell, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Toch. Copland's jazz influences, Eisler's worker's songs and twelve-tone music and Cowell's non-Western musical influences privileged innovation and multi-disciplinarity that displaced European musical idealism. This experimental approach not only realised in praxis the radical ideals of The New School's founders, but it also modeled the interdisciplinarity that would influence curricular planning. This was not a 'music school'. It was a school where musical performance and listening collaborated with dance, film, visual art and architecture.In 1928, when The New School's townhouse headquarters on West 23rd Street in Manhattan were slated for demolition, its president Alvin Johnson sought to create a new structure that captured the institution's progressive approach to education. He commissioned modernist architect and theatrical set designer Joseph Urban to design The New School's new home at 66 West 12th Street. On the ground floor of that building, the first International Style structure in New York, was the eggshaped Tishman Auditorium - an acoustical achievement in its own right, but also a rehearsal for Urban's Radio City Music Hall. The rounded ceiling presented acoustical challenges, which designers overcame by hanging concentric plaster rings from the ceiling, a strategy later employed at Radio City (Landmarks Preservation Commission: 1997). While Tishman marked a milestone in modern acoustics, The New School's scholars were engaging in groundbreaking research on modern sounds and sound technologies. The New School Film Music Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Eisler and Theodor Adorno, sharply criticised the synthesis of music and image in Hollywood film. …

The Records of the New York Composers' Forum: The Documentary Motive and Music in the 1930s

The New York City Composers' Forum-Laboratory was created in 1935 as part of the Music Education Division of the Federal Music Project (FMP), under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), funded by Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal. The Forum was a unique phenomenon in the history of American music. For the first time in American history, the federal government played an active and enthusiastic role in sponsoring and funding the arts. The federally funded Music Project--along with the Federal Writers Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Arts Project--was initiated as part of the larger Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Works Projects Administration) in order to get artists and musicians off the streets, out of the breadlines, and into jobs. Yet many people in the musical commu-nitv fervently hoped and believed that it would develop into a permanently funded arts program. A popular venue for the performances of new music, the Composers' Forum thrived from 1935 to 1940. Weekly--and later, biweekly--concerts introduced an exceptional variety of composers to a newly developing audience. Each Forum featured one or two composers, among them Amy Marcy Beach, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Roger Sessions, and Elie Siegmeister. Admission was free. Question-and-answer sessions between composers and audience followed the conceits, prompting discussions on a range of topics: modernism, politics, gender, representations of race, Jewish music, American identity, jazz, and other art forms. A stenographer took careful and thorough transcripts of the discussions, and these survive in the National Archives II, in College Park. Maryland. The success of the New York City Composers' Forum prompted cities across the country to institute similar programs. Boston and Philadelphia established flourishing forums that met weekly. Forums in Los Angeles and Chicago were only slightly less active, while cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and San Francisco held forums from time to time. Other activities by the New York branch included a collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan to present an evening of All-American ballets--Virgil Thomson's Filling Station, Robert McBride's Showpiece, and Paul Bowles's Yankee Clipper. A special summer season of concerts, produced in conjunction with the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, was broadcast over WNYC, and a series of the regular concerts was broadcast over WQXR. Under the auspices of the Forum, Roy Harris presented a lecture series entitled Let's Make Music over WNYC, which attracted thousands of active listeners. After 1939, federal support for the Forums ceased and various organizations assumed responsibility for maintaining the Forum, which exists to this day (1) THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE The careful documenting of Composers' Forum post-concert discussions makes this series particularly valuable for musicological research today. At no other time in American musical history were the reactions and thoughts of the audience documented so extensively and systematically. This emphasis on documentation reflected a wider American phenomenon of the thirties. As William Stott observes, a documentary motive was at work throughout the culture of the time: in the rhetoric of the New Deal and the WPA arts projects; in painting, dance, fiction, and theater; in the new media of radio and picture magazines; in popular thought, education, and advertising. (2) The goal of this documentary work was to record the American experience. The America of the 1930s was engaged in a cultural revolution. Not only did America own a cultural identity, it was a culture that needed to be shared with a broad new public. The documentary motive broughtcomposers and listeners face-to-face for the first time, and recorded the result. Audience reactions, thoughts, and attitudes, usually so elusive, are represented in the Forum documents in abundance, providing a compelling testament to the power of reception and to the dynamic relationship between composer and listener. …

The Columbia—Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers

The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) in New York City was established in 1959 by founding director Vladimir Ussachevsky, along with Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Roger Sessions, as the first educational and creative institution of its kind in the United States. Its central role in training composers hailing from outside the United States is not widely known. Home countries of composers include Turkey, Japan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Spain, Iran, Ghana, and several in Latin America. Using interviews (conducted almost entirely by the author) and documentary sources (largely from the CPEMC archives), this article explores the personal narratives of these composers and their impact on the culture of the CPEMC and on their own future work, both musically and institutionally. Studio logs (see Figure 1) from the archives proved invaluable resources. Quotations without citation are drawn from interviews conducted by the author, detailed in Appendix A.

The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland (review)

Reviewed by: The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland G. Dale Vargason The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland. Edited by Elizabeth B. Crist and Wayne Shirley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. [xv, 269 p. ISBN 0-300-11121-5. $45.] Indexes, bibliographical notes, photographs. The life of Aaron Copland (1900–1990), one of the leading musical figures of his era, has been and continues to be well documented through publications and recordings. Many of these works quote from and use his letters, but until now, a volume of his correspondence did not exist. The current work under review is the first published book dedicated to the letters of Copland. Drawing from the archives of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Yale University, Columbia University, and others, the editors pieced together the life of Copland through his correspondence, representing an exceptional letter writer who often reveals much about his life not found in his other writings. Editorial choices and the selection process are defined in the preface: The letters in this collection have been selected for their readability, their interest, and the light they cast on Copland's thoughts about his career. There has been some attempt to represent the general flow of his life from the 1920s through the 1970s, but we have preferred to let the richer periods of the correspondence (especially the early 1920s and early 1940s) take up more space rather than to seek an equal representation of all years. . . . We have not excluded letters because they are available elsewhere or have already been widely excerpted. (pp. vii–viii.) [End Page 617] Letters are published in their entirety, editing is kept to a minimum, and annotations are added only to clarify meaning, making for an easily readable text. The editors keep the original flavor of the letters intact, including Copland's slang, mistakes, and misspellings. Arranged chronologically, the letters cover Copland's life from his childhood to just before his death. Each chapter of the book represents important periods in the composer's life, beginning with the Brooklyn and Paris years (1909–24), continuing through the Depression, musical triumphs from 1937–42, the war years, post war, and a last chapter entitled "1958 and beyond." Correspondents include not only numerous colleagues and other important figures involved in twentieth century music, but also family and friends. Of course there are many letters to his famous teacher, Nadia Boulanger, which shift from a student/teacher relationship, to a colleague/ friend tone as the century progresses. Copland frequently tells Boulanger the importance she played in his life during the years he studied with her in Paris in the 1920s. Many letters show Copland's relationships with the two foremost conductors who promoted his works during their influential careers: Serge Koussevitzky and Leonard Bernstein. His letters to Bernstein are sometimes comical, with their Koussevitzkyisms, imitating Koussevitzky's Russian accent. Other notable correspondents include Carlos Chavez, Roger Sessions, William Schumann, Virgil Thomson, Irving and Verna Fine, Israel Citkowitz, Eugene Ormandy, Paul Bowels, Harold Spivacke, Arthur Berger, and Charles Ives, to name a few. It is worth noting that Copland identifies early on the different types of letters he writes. In a letter to his brother Ralph in 1922, Copland says that he writes two kinds of letters: "one like I write home, having as its main type of interest what I had for supper last night and the other like I write to Schaffer, for instance, telling of the marvels of the 'Group of Six' " (p. 25). Unfortunately, the letters to Aaron Schaffer referenced above, which today would be of great value for their specific musical content, are lost. The letters in this collection answer many questions concerning Copland's life, revealing the inner man and some of his most personal thoughts. His early relationship with artist Prentiss Taylor is clearly shown when he writes in 1929, "I wish you were here to be my sole diversion" (p. 69), and later that year in another letter says "I am most disappointed because it ruins the possibility of our being alone together for a goodly spell. Oh HELL [ink blot], and love, Aaron" (p. 71). We...

A Conversation with Roger Sessions and Terry Coatta

In the December/January 2004-2005 issue of Queue, Roger Sessions set off some fireworks with his article about objects, components, and Web services and which should be used when (“Fuzzy Boundaries,” 40-47). Sessions is on the board of directors of the International Association of Software Architects, the author of six books, writes the Architect Technology Advisory, and is CEO of ObjectWatch. He has a very object-oriented viewpoint, not necessarily shared by Queue editorial board member Terry Coatta, who disagreed with much of what Sessions had to say in his article. Coatta is an active developer who has worked extensively with component frameworks. He is vice president of products and strategy at Silicon Chalk, a startup software company in Vancouver, British Columbia. Silicon Chalk makes extensive use of Microsoft COM for building its application. Coatta previously worked at Open Text, where he architected CORBA-based infrastructures to support the company’s enterprise products.