Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

It has been far too long since I last posted. Basically, I was working on another Tuesday feature that was slated to appear back on November 4, but got caught up following the election returns. I do not deal with missed deadlines in a healthy manner, so it's taken me quite a while to suck it up and post. I do want to keep doing something like the Tuesday feature, but with a more flexible schedule. We'll see how that goes.

Posting here is not the only long overdue thing I've done recently. In the past week or so, I've also been patching up a couple of glaring gaps in my musical knowledge. For too long, the player piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow and George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization have been on my radar, and I'm finally getting myself acquainted with them. How are those projects going? Well, I'm glad you asked.

Nancarrow's studies for player piano are one of the monolithic bodies of work in 20th-century music. Frustrated with the limitations of human performers and following a suggestion from Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources, Nancarrow purchased two player pianos and a machine for punching piano rolls and moved to Mexico City. There, he composed largely in isolation, and drew on the technical capabilities of the player piano to produce music of nearly unheard-of rhythmic and polyphonic complexity. Though Nancarrow received little recognition for his work through most of his lifetime, recordings in the 1970s brought his music to a wider audience, and other musicians realized the importance of his contributions. He was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1982, which enabled him to write new works for ensemble performance, but the player piano studies remain his most significant output.

I had known about Nancarrow's accomplishments for quite a while, and first encountered his music in 2001. I heard one of his early boogie-woogie-inspired works -- probably one of the movements of Study No. 3, but I don't remember precisely -- and I was astonished and overwhelmed by the sheer level of activity. It hit me pretty hard, but inexplicably I did not delve deeper into the studies. As my own compositional development progressed, I became more and more interested in exploring new rhythmic ideas. One of the most important ideas to come out of American classical music has been the use of rhythm, rather than harmony, as a primary organizational factor. I have gotten to be quite familiar with some of the most prominent sources of rhythmic innovation in American music -- jazz and rock and roll, minimalism, post-minimalism, and totalism -- but Nancarrow remained a glaring blind spot. So a few weeks ago, I finally acquired a recording of his music -- Other Minds' 4-CD rerelease of the 1750 Arch LP recordings from 1977.

Best Amazon gift card I ever spent. This music is nothing short of amazing. It's taken me over a week to get through all four CDs, as there's a limit to how much Nancarrow I can take in in one sitting, but that has been time well spent. His music has great appeal both viscerally and intellectually: it grabs you by the throat with torrents of scales and riffs, but while so held, you become aware of the many interrelationships between parts. At the same time, I find his music very personable: often, it sounds like something that I might pound out while noodling at the piano, if I had four extra hands and a commensurate increase in processor speed. I have to believe that Nancarrow was sometimes having a laugh as he wrote these studies; I can imagine him saying, "You think that was fast? Well, how about this!" The cartoonish absurdity of yet another tempo layer piled on top of an already turbulent maelstrom cannot have been lost on him, and he seems to have reveled in it. Just try listening to Study No. 29 without cracking a grin (or being driven crazy, I suppose):

Between the twittering sound effects and the precipitous acceleration in the last 30 seconds, it feels like the soundtrack to some bizarro Super Mario game. To me, anyway. I don't know if any of Nancarrow's ideas will insinuate themselves into my own music, but I'm grateful for his music all the same.

George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept is, for me, an exploration of a different sort. For all my years of training, my knowledge of contemporary music theory is not so great. I've never formally studied Schenker, Riemann, or Forte; I'm familiar with the basic ideas of each, but I don't think I could undertake an analysis of a composition through any of their means. Also, I don't need to know any of this theory to compose my music. Perhaps I will try to learn more about these subjects someday, but I don't feel any pressing need.

I do, however, feel a need to learn about the Lydian Chromatic Concept. While Schenker, Riemann, Forte, and others have certainly made important contributions to music theory, Russell's work has especial signifance, being perhaps the first codified theoretical framework to arise from the study of jazz, rather than predominantly European classical music. For that alone, the Lydian Chromatic Concept is vitally important if only for historical reasons. But it also seems to be vital for musical reasons; in a recent interview, composer and saxophonist Fred Ho called Russell the most innovative music theorist of the 20th century. With jazz being such a big influence on my own music, a theory of jazz, from jazz, and for jazz should practically be required reading. But somehow, the Lydian Chromatic Concept flew under my radar all through college and grad school; I'm pretty sure I had heard the name somewhere, but it didn't really stick. In fact, Russell's theory first really came to my attention when I was researching the musical history of the MacArthur fellowships -- I guess writing that article provided the spark for me to finally delve into both of the subjects of this current post. I had a friend check the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization out from Harvard's music library for me, and have been dipping my toe in.

I haven't gotten very far in yet. I'm sure Russell has a lot of valuable insights, but the first couple of chapters are giving me pause. Specifically, he offers a number of specious arguments in support of the idea that the Lydian mode, rather than the major scale, should be the basic mode of tonal organization. To wit:

• He cites as evidence the fact that the 11th overtone of a C fundamental is 551 cents above C, which is closer to F# (600 cents) than F (500 cents) in 12-tone equal temperament, while completely ignoring the fact that the 7th overtone, at 969 cents above C, is closest to Bb (1000 cents), which is in neither the major scale nor the Lydian mode -- and the 7th harmonic is significantly closer to Bb (31.2 cents) than the 11th harmonic is to F# (48.7 cents). But if you decide you want to hit both the 7th and 11th harmonics as closely as possible within equal temperament, you end up with the Lydian augmented scale (C-D-E-F#-G-A-Bb), which is one of my favorite modes to draw on, along with its close cousin the Mixolydian b13 (C-D-E-F-G-Ab-Bb). Later, Russell does include the Lydian augmented mode as one of the principal "chordmodes" relating to the Lydian chromatic system, but it seems disingenuous to hold up the 11th harmonic as evidence while conveniently forgetting about the 7th harmonic. But really, the 3rd harmonic (the interval of a fifth) is the important interval in establishing the importance of the Lydian mode, and I'd be happier if Russell had stuck with that.
• He provides an "Interval tonic" justification for the prominence of the Lydian mode: all 12 chromatic intervals (or enharmonic equivalents thereof) occur as intervals above or below the tonic within the Lydian mode, while the major scale lacks a tritone above or below the tonic. Aside from the fact that early music theorists would consider the absence of the diabolus in musica above the tonic a feature, not a bug, there is another mode which encompasses all the chromatic intervals with respect to its tonic: the Locrian mode. I seriously doubt that you could find any music theorist willing to promulgate the Locrian mode as the fundamental basis for much of anything.
• In discussing the duality (and therefore instability) between the vertical and horizontal aspects of the major scale, Russell writes, "The major scale is truly a diatonic scale, as "di" is the Latin prefix meaning two." But the word "diatonic" does not derive from "di-" at all; "dia-" is the prefix, meaning "across, through." Has Russell's editor not heard of a dictionary? The edition I'm reading was printing in 2001, 48 years after the Lydian Chromatic Concept's original publication; has no one in all that time pointed this inaccuracy out to Russell? Arguments based on etymology are nearly always specious to begin with, but it doesn't help one bit to get the etymology dead wrong.

But Russell's central argument for the primacy of the Lydian mode -- that the tonic of the Lydian mode lies at the bottom of the chain of fifths between its notes, while the tonic of the major scale is only the second-lowest note in the chain of fifths -- is sound, and would on its own provide sufficient justification for at least giving the theory firther consideration. More crucially, the central idea of the Lydian Chromatic Concept as a whole is not so much that the Lydian mode is the most important mode, but that jazz and other music may be analyzed as a progression of modes, rather than of chords, and that's an idea which I think is worth hearing out. I suspect it would do me some good to shake off my misgvings and read further; I have peeked at several pages later on in the book and it looks quite interesting. As with my plan to update this blog more frequently, we'll see how that goes.