II and III are segue, but separate tracks on my CD, so imagine the break isn't here.

I've not heard a note of his music, which has been described as "post-modern atonality" and "a colourless gouache of synthetic sub-Birtwistle". George Loomis of the International Herald Tribune wasn't easy on his skills in the one non-negotiable of opera:

The chief fault of "Richard III" lies in its text setting. Proponents of opera in English — "Richard III" was written in English and performed with Flemish supertitles — argue that if only singers enunciate clearly and conductors keep the orchestra under control, words will come through. But Battistelli stacks the deck against them with heavy, though interesting orchestration, and angular vocal writing with long note values doesn't help.

But the real issue here is plot. This being opera, we need a concrete love interest. Perhaps Battistelli could cast the prima donna as the goddess Gaia, and the lead tenor (or countertenor!) could sacrifice himself to her by being buried alive in a huge compost pile.

The conductor, Martin Kessler, made an interesting comment to me that might be useful to any of you composer types out there: even though the piece was really too hard for them, in another sense it was perfect for the group, because everyone got to play a lot and everyone had something meaningful to do, so it was fun for an amateur orchestra to play. So if one wrote an easier piece with the same characteristics, it could find a niche. That sort of describes the Still Afro-American. I've never been a big fan of the content of that piece, but it sounds; the scoring is solid, colorful and effective, and nothing gets in the way of anything else. I just wish he'd done more with the banjo.

The Plain Dealer had a nice promo piece for the concert in yesterday's paper. My name got mentioned, but otherwise it was Eric Dina (guest conductor for the Still) and Still all the way.I wish that had had a bigger impact on the demographic of the audience.

Here's Marty Kessler, talking to an orchestra member during the post-touchup/pre-concert nosh.

I took a picture of the orchestra seated before playing, but it didn't turn out...underexposed, and no amount of dial fiddling could make it presentable. And I didn't think to outfit my wife with the camera for any "victorious composer taking his bows" shots...which probably would also have been underexposed.

In Knoxville, Marian Vogel's diction was as crisp as her tone was clear, and I got my usual weepy self with that piece. They began the 2nd half with an unannounced selection: Happy Birthday for a member of the 1st violins who had turned 90 that day.

The next logical step is to program an orchestra of robots to do an authentic performance of Wellingtons Sieg.

We've got a local composer griping because not enough other composers show up to new music events (meaning in this case the new music events he shows up to, generally performances by recently-dead European males). He's retired, and he's got the time to go. But what are the rest of us supposed to do, who are balancing career, family, non-career composition and running an arts organization? Yes, we should support each other. But if I have the right to tell other people how to apportion their time, I'm their slavemaster.

We are the real indie/alternative music, and had might as well accept it and act accordingly. Rock clubs are for others; new music is for YOU.

I don't talk much about local composers because they're mostly Guild members and politically it's risky, especially if I don't like them. But we haven't voted James in yet (that's WHY I was listening).

One thing though: I HATE HATE HATE composer websites that blare music at you when you open them up. I often listen to Naxos in the morning before we open and forget to turn my sound off, and suddenly in the library the staff needs shushing. You have been warned.

Works for violin, saxophone and piano, written expressly for this concert by members of the Cleveland Composers Guild:

O'Connell: Unfoldings
Underhill: Arugula
Quick: Trio for violin, alto saxophone and piano
Emerson: Tattoos
Rollin: The Chagall Miniatures

My contribution to the festivities is in 3 movements, running 10 minutes or so:
1. Closer Than They Appear
2. The Answered Question
3. Battlefield Dance

May 18, 2008, 3:30PM
Beachwood High School Auditorium, 25100 Fairmount Blvd, Beachwood OH

Suburban Symphony Orchestra under Martin Kessler
Premiere of Quick, Symphony in D, with works of Barber and Still.
24 minutes of boogie, conflict, angst, and serenity

The rules are part of the control of noise at work regulations, introduced by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) following a Brussels directive.

The rules cap weekly average noise exposure at 85 decibels, meaning periods of loud play need to be cancelled out by quiet periods.

Now, this might not be a problem with orchestra music, which does get quiet. And rehearsals are only part of an orchestral musician's "work week" - there's also practice. But then there are the poor devils in bagpipe bands:

“You can’t play the pipe quietly; they haven’t got a volume switch.”

I don't know how many professional pipe bands there are. Since this is explicitly a work regulation, it shouldn't apply to amateur bagpipe bands, unless they have paid leaders. Nor to Belgian hunting horn clubs, which the story doesn't mention. Regardless, anyone who would take up the Highland pipes deserves what he gets, and the Euroweenies should butt out.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dr. Ross Duffin, this story about how the new rules are playing out in the orchestra world, including the scuttling of a premiere. As a linearly-oriented composer, I have to wonder about people who write excessively and incessantly loud music. What's the point?

ME: Why did you write a symphony?

JAQ: Because it was time. It was OK again to write a symphony in the ‘90s; it represented a conscious identification with the musical values of the past. I was about to turn 40, and figured it would be a nice birthday present for myself. I thought up this theme in Dec. 95 and waited for the Solstice to write it down ..because it seemed auspicious to do so.

ME: It took you awhile

JAQ: Yeah. It was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to get done by June of ’96. But then I got divorced, which was traumatic, made it hard to focus on composition, and put me behind. But that wasn’t all. I had a specific musical problem that I had to solve before moving past the exposition. That heartbeat rhythm in the 2nd theme group...”Lub dub [pause] lub dub”...came in fairly late in the process. Plus I was writing other pieces that had a better chance of being performed. So it ended up being more of a 50th birthday present.

ME: What are your influences, in this piece at least?

JAQ: You know composers hate that question! We’re all supposed to be totally original, you know. But I’d say it’s a piece in the Mahler tradition...if you can think of a Mahler who knew his Brahms well and lived in the US. That trad goes through Shostakovich, Pettersson, Chris Rouse, but it darkened up in the process. My symphony is not a dark piece, though it certainly has dark and ironic elements. The use of quotation is part of that. Most people associate that with Ives, but it’s present in Mahler 1 and Shosty 15. And for Ives, it’s mostly about scene-setting, but here the quotations are integrated into the thematic development.

ME: What do they mean?

JAQ: That’s another connection to the Mahler tradition: the disavowed program! I definitely had an extramusical idea when I began the piece, which I got away from a bit in the actual composition. If you want to see the piece as being about “the individual vs. the forces of oppression”, that’s OK. If you want to see it as about “fifths and 7ths in D vs. repeated notes and turns in Eb minor”, that’s even better.

ME: You dodged my question.

JAQ: I’m not going there, because to do it, I’d have to do the sort of program notes I absolutely hate: “Theme 2b appears in the relative minor of the Neapolitan, in a rhythm suggesting the march of ants in jackboots.” I’m not much of one for descriptive program notes anyway. The music either makes sense as music, or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, all the notes will do is provide distracting reading matter while the listener sits through nonsense. All I will say is that there are symbolic elements that aren’t particularly subtle. Listeners will probably get them, and if they don’t, in 50 years some not-too-bright musicology grad student can do his dissertation on it, if anyone cares by then,

ME: OK, no blow-by blow...but what about form? Anything general you can say?

JAQ: It’s a 24 minute sonata-allegro, another link with the Mahler trad. I actually had somebody suggest I should write 3 more movements. Yeah, like anyone is going to play an hour-long symphony by an unknown composer; I’m surprised and pleased that I got 24 minutes. More to the point, there is a vast array of different musics in the form, to the point that I felt no need for contrasts outside of the form. I said what I had to say.

ME: Since this is an avowedly tonal symphony, can we expect any big tunes?

JAQ: I’m not afraid of writing tunes. And since I’m primarily a linear thinker, there should be adequate melodic interest. But tunes, in the sense of Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninoff, whistle it leaving the auditorium, convert it into a pop song type tunes? Probably not. Though if I do hear anyone whistling it, I’ll be pleased.

Back row (L to R): Fred Koch, Bain Murray, Howard Whitaker, Julius Drossin, Klaus George Roy

Front Row: Rudolph Bubalo, Jane Corner Young, Starling Cumberworth, Susan Krausz, Donald Erb

UPDATE:
I'd also sent this via email to the Guild, with the impish suggestion that the blank square in the lower left was to cover Fred Koch dropping his trousers. I got this response via email:

Glad you found some use for the picture! The date is pretty close. Maybe early 60s as Bain didn't come to Cleveland until 1959. And, sorry, the reason for the blank spot is not nearly that interesting.....I just had a label on it in the album!

Best D and L Erb

Even today, I manage to survive trendy dinner parties by keeping my mouth shut, nodding at the received wisdom of the bien-pensant, and avoiding nasty and surprising arguments. Anything for a quiet life. But the political education I received from old Catholics like my grandfather and even from old Marxists I met at Communist party meetings in the 1970s has made me contemptuous of the simplistic banalities of the modern progressive élites. They lack intellectual rigour and ethical integrity, their politics are bland and sentimental, their hatred of Christianity is fundamentalist.

Or this:

What passes in Britain for an intelligentsia has appropriated the Arts for their own designs — a recent debate at the South Bank proclaimed ‘All Modern Art Is Left Wing’. No dissent from the party line goes unpunished. What we are seeing here is a cultural regime which adjudicates artists and their work on the basis of how they contribute to the remodelling, indeed the overthrow of society’s core institutions and ethics

Before the performance of one of my orchestral works in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I gave a short introductory talk and quoted the philosopher Roger Scruton. The Guardian review denounced this as ‘perilous’. What or who was perilous? Were Scruton’s ideas perilous? Was my public association with him perilous? And, if so, for whom? For me? Was this a threat?

We've known that print music has been ailing for some time. There has been consolidation in the industry, with companies merging with those companies whose order fulfillment is quick, accurate, and high-discount (in short, as much like online as possible). We've been told that the photocopier is the culprit. But to photocopy an item, somebody somewhere has to buy it sometime.

Now, I've been doing a sort of public service librarian gig at Yahoo Answers. And one of the most frequently-asked questions is, "Where can I download [piece of usually-copyright print music] for free?" Some of us have answered, "You can't; it's under copyright".

That's just not true.

I was a bit horrified when I started exploring some of these sites. I knew somebody once whose computer crashed while they were in an AOL chat room, and when they logged back on, their screen name was stuck in a kiddie porn trading room. It wasn't quite that horrifying; I don't go all moralistic on people about illegal downloads. But I could see where the economics were going. You can get just about anything in popular music, for free. Some sites are members-only trading, but at some of them, a pdf download was just a click away. I tried one download, of an item I used to sell (and no, I have no use for this except for research, and will be deleting the file). No, it wasn't a copy of the original. Rather, the original had been imported into a notation program. It appeared to be relatively accurate and literate, but nothing fancy (no dynamics, for instance).

Here's the problem: consider that RIAA has been suing the pants off anyone they can, and have accomplished little except to make themselves unpopular. MPA doesn't have those kind of deep pockets. And there is no more that can be done about print music downloads than audio downloads. Even in a secure online sales system like Sunhawk, there is nothing to keep the end-user from scanning the print, changing the format, and putting it up as a .pdf somewhere.

What this means is that the price of popular print music will tend towards zero. All published print can add is nicer paper and better accuracy, vs. a price and massive inconvenience in getting it. Legal downloads won't even have the nice paper. Classical print will end up like classical music, with the big players exiting the scene, to be taken over by niche marketers. I don't know if Subito will be the Naxos of classical print, but parallels could be drawn.

Where does that leave me? I'd planned on a big push this year to make as much of my music as possible available in print. I'm still going to do that, but even niche publishers have a limited future. I've been resistant to doing the self-publish thing, but ultimately, it may be my only choice.