This fall in my Theory & Practice I: Global Approaches to Music class at NYU Steinhardt School I am yet again privileged to have under my supervision a spectacular group of students whose range of interests, creative intuitions, and intellectual voraciousness is almost overwhelming.

Our discussion of asymmetrical metric cycles, African rhythm, and the underlying principle of the magnifying effect of rhythmic counterpoint took on vast, humanistic proportions as we pondered the universal nature of rhythm, separated rhythmic experience from time, and realized that the purpose of creating counterpoint is, paradoxically, to reinforce the individuality of its component lines—that they become even more themselves when placed against each other, their differences highlighted, their dynamic coexistence making a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

This led to an assignment in which I had students create something, in any genre, in which they paid specific attention to and radically, intuitively experimented with rhythm. I then had each of them select any two of each other’s creations and, without altering them, superimpose them contrapuntally in a disposition that actually brought out each one’s individuality. The secret was difference—and rhythm. As I found my self living with and witnessing their unprecedented work, I felt compelled to participate alongside them in the experience we were having. This video combines, contrapuntally, a piano composition of my own made independently on October 22 with a rhythmically rich reading of an original text by my student Sydney Scrimpshire. Listen to how the piano enhances the power of her reading.

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​“O you people! We have been taught the speech of birds and have been given of all things: this, behold, is indeed a manifest favor!” Quran 27:16

In July I spent two weeks on an olive farm in Italy. The cycle of each day was an endlessly rich, varied, and beautiful experience for me. I rose at sunrise to hear the morning chorus of birds; I eventually identified over 20 different birds, and there were more. Their quiet, early, ethereal vapor of sound gradually dissolved, as a mist, and gave way to a more ordinary morning music, largely dominated by the Eurasian Blackcap. The sun quickly grew strong, and I began every day by reading, among other books I had packed, Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, a 12th-century monument of Persian mystical poetry—a slow read, as the language is difficult and gives quite a bit to ponder. One morning I was sitting in an unusual place, and a strange bird, about crow-sized, flew up and sat briefly in the olive tree just next to me. I watched it closely, admired it, and made a note of its features—a strange, curved beak, and a striking cap—so that I might later research what it was. It was both beautiful and frightening. It flew away with perfect certitude. I looked it up immediately: a Hoopoe…the main character in Attar’s poem. Never in my dreams did I think I’d ever see an actual hoopoe, let alone there, then. The experience was overwhelming and took me several hours to process.
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I didn’t see it again. Over the next several days I composed this piece. Like most of my concert and electroacoustic music, it is polyphonic; its stylized five-voice format refers directly to the Italian madrigal, though the non-semantic vocal material invokes an almost abstract cinematic experience. I’ve had a strong conviction for over 20 years that music can be made with this type of raw material, which charts the entire range of what is possible with the human voice, and points to experiences and expressions both primal and ordinary. This particular work is special perhaps in that it reflects the degree to which the experience I had just had shook the core of my being, and in a most delightful, affirmative, and transformative way. I highly recommend listening to it with headphones to experience the full breadth and vitality of its unusual sounds and their detailed polyphonic interaction.

​Rome, July 19, 2023—The graceful poem pictured here (note incidentally its iambic underpinning), likely quoting a song by Eddie Vedder, could not have been a more perfect encounter on a blazing morning in Rome on my way to the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi for a breathtaking—and apperceptive—day of work in preparation for my concert presentation “Re-Improvising Scelsi, Part 2” (I presented Part 1 at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in 2019), the centerpiece of which is his Piano Suite No. 8, “Bot-Ba.” Uncannily the poem is not dissimilar from Scelsi’s own, often aphoristic, poetry.

But more deeply resonant is how aptly it contextualizes my intimate, privileged encounter with the solitary, radical force of nature that Scelsi is. My convictions concerning a performance practice of his œuvre were only corroborated in hearing archival audio of his piano and ondiola improvisations. Most of what I took in is non-verbal. But in advance of what I will communicate directly in performance, I will share some observations here—none of which care for any pretense of academic expertise.

Firstly, the kinship of his work process with my own is extremely apparent to me. The problems he endured regarding engagement with musical notation to convey—and legitimize—his creative existence, and the ambivalence he certainly had therewith, are even more so.

There is a riveting urgency and a fire in Scelsi’s execution, a delicateness yet savageness, a gentle refinement yet roughness, all rendered with unflinching, crystalline technique that is born from a total, almost erotic engagement with sound. There is no distinction whatsoever between improvisation and composition.

Notable in the recordings is his utterly conscious sensitivity to the interactivity of overtones, absolutely magical and intoxicating. Their audible life is often more the object of his preoccupation than the fundamental notes he is obsessively sounding. Obviously none of this secret interplay is reflected anywhere in the notations otherwise so meticulously carried out by his amanuenses. Yet it reveals everything concerning the temporal unfolding and evolution of what I would call his ‘sound concern.’

Also notable, initially, is an always identifiable, primordial pulse—his performances surge with dance—though this eventually proves to have less to do with such; there is no grammar, no obligatory syntax, no context even to his sound concern; it is a reality that simply, phallically asserts its existence in the moment, having no beginning and no end. All notions of movement, repetition, and agitation are but perceptual functions of the developing self-declared “am” of the sound, fanning the fire of its resonance, augmenting its dimension. I thought: what greater exhilaration and freedom is there than in such a spontaneous, godly creative experience?

I began to register moments that could be heard, classically speaking, as formal contrasts quite otherwise. Rather the unrelenting, sensual engagement with the living resonance of what came before—his singular, unwavering sound concern, maintained with searing aural precision—is what gives rise to each new sound formation that emerges, each but literally a way to love the same resonance from a new vantage point.

It became more obvious to me than ever that his written scores, though so diligently executed, ultimately do something of an injustice and obscure access to the primal essence of his creative enterprise. Therefore any representations of his music that are obtained from an academically faithful rendering of these notations—however dutifully done—are irrelevant. As Hafez beautifully declares, “Burn the book if you’re one of us.”

During these several unforgettable hours of immersive listening I surrendered my heart wholly to Scelsi’s world, an experience entirely unique and enthralling: as with any iconoclast whose commitment and vision are so total and so thoroughly carried out, for a moment theirs supersedes all other approaches…
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In such a state of wonder I emerged again into the unsettling, ferocious heat of our burning planet.

The Abandoned City was made on August 26, 2022 alongside Missive to the Sea and Odes on a Dying Rainbow, made the following day. The excerpt I share here is 14 minutes into the composition, when briefly a white-key resonance emerges—a singular moment of clarity and climax in the sound narrative—and dissolves back into a fully chromatic one. Further apposite here are my notes to Odes on a Dying Rainbow, which I quote:

Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

​Watch the full video here.

Missive to the Sea, of which I share the first three minutes here, was made on August 26, 2022. Apposite are my notes to Odes on a Dying Rainbow, which I quote:

Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

Watch the full video here.

Odes on a Dying Rainbow, an excerpt of which I share here, is one example of the way distinctions between improvisation and composition dissolve in my work in a way unlike that of any other composer.

The work was created on August 27, 2022. It consists of three prolonged gazes (18-19 minutes each) on the same thought-image. Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

The almost identical duration of the three odes points to an intuitive exactitude that Arnold Schoenberg called a “sense of form” and which he regarded as the most important aspect of a composer’s creative awareness.

In the coming weeks I will be releasing two more works that were made in the same vein the day prior.

Watch the full Odes on a Dying Rainbow video here.

This invention (like all the others) is a radical composition; it is unique in the set of 15 for a number of reasons, one of which is how clearly it demonstrates how Bach’s formal thinking appropriates that of the Franco-Flemish School, in whose polyphony the component lines exhibit such persistent independent-mindedness as to repel one another like magnets brought together at their ends of like charge.​

I have never loved the term “imitative polyphony.” A polyphonic idea is a contrapuntal combination of discrete sound components whose sense lies in the totality of their combined sound. The art of invertible counterpoint consists of varying the disposition of these components in relation to one another; it is a way of exploring the implicit potential of a basic idea so as to produce a variety of sound expressions that also fulfill different compositional/syntactic functions. Here form literally equals the unravelling of the idea’s inherent potential. 

When two varying dispositions of the same basic idea are placed in succession, it is possible to hear the recurring component material—which will appear in a different voice or register than before—as a repetition or “imitation” of what has just been stated elsewhere. But this misses the point. The attention, so far as the composer is concerned, is rather on the total sound emanation created by the new disposition, which cannot be traced to any of its components individually. It is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. 

Polyphony, and counterpoint, paradoxically, are more vertical than horizontal. The individual lines exhibit independence, but the perception of independence comes about only in relation to their context.

With equal and opposite intensity, my long form and miniature works seek a sonic effect that is fully experienced only in live performance, and realized only when the work is finished, in the silence that follows.

My summer is off in a fury of notated composition, taking the form of solo piano miniatures whose contrapuntal and harmonic technique intuitively exhibits, among other things, the nourishment I have received from the music of two composers: Galina Ustvolskaya and Olivier Messiaen. I aim to present this work later this summer.

Meanwhile, the work presented here explores miniature form with just the intensity described above. The exquisite performance was given on my Reinterpretations series as part of the presentation “Parallel Futures” in November 2016 at Spectrum. The following is from the program notes:

​“Music is perhaps most explicitly poetic in a miniature. And one could say such music, in its absolute concentration, most materially transforms the immediate silence around it, making of it a special moment, a unique time of reflection, a potent space in which divergent narratives can be awakened, each, in parallel, suggestive of meanings in the music consequential to the life of a listener.”

My program notes for a discussion-performance featuring the music of Schoenberg, Debussy, and Messiaen that I presented at Greenwich Music House on April 29, 2022:

There is scarcely a composer whose breadth of curiosity and technical command parallels that of Olivier Messiaen. His musical consciousness spanned the entire history of Western music, through Greek antiquity, extending across the musics of the Middle and Far East, into America, and no less into nature, notably in the music of birds.

Messiaen came of age within the afterglow of fin-de-siècle Europe, in whose musical environment, largely under the spell of Wagner, tonal expectation had been prolonged to such an extent that the notion of its fulfillment had been forgone, and forgotten even. Inheriting this state of generalized dissonance, both Schoenberg and Debussy forged unique sound worlds on whose surface classical tonal syntax appeared to be suspended. While Schoenberg did this by avoiding any trace of a tonal center in his compositions, Debussy, instead, focused his ear on sonority and the richness of the sound spectrum.

​The evening’s discussion-performance will begin by shedding light on the similarity between Schoenberg’s and Debussy’s approaches, in spite of their vastly different musical languages. Establishing such a unity will steer listeners’ focus to the dynamic forces supporting their music, born of the indefinite prolongation of traditional expectations, and engendering a language in which dissonance had been emancipated from the shackles of resolution. From this the presentation’s focus will shift to Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen, showing how his uniquely personal language, with all its sonic multiplicities, harnessed these very same dynamic forces in service of an expression of eternity, a reflection of his Catholic faith.

​My interest in counterpoint underlies much of my concert music. My string quintet, presented in this video along with the score, is a large-scale polyphonic conception and an unusual, multi-faceted outcome of my fascination with the music of the Franco-Flemish School. The ‘Salve Regina’ plainchant unfolds in the Viola I and II parts over the course of the work as a cantus firmus. It is the inspiration for the work’s obsessive, relentless, virtuosic polyphony. The work abounds in esoteric contrapuntal play. Its rhythmic language satisfies an urge to create new, complex, dynamic polyphonic interactions. Its pitch language notably moves fluently and at times symbolically between atonality and pure diatonicism, a primary compositional interest of mine. The work was composed for my Reinterpretations concert series as part of the performance-lecture “Polyphony, Mysticism, and the Music of Opposites,” presented at Spectrum on May 15, 2016.

​September’s Reinterpretations was an important artistic achievement for me. The work’s form unfolds wholly from the sonorous, bell-like repeated low sounds that begin the piece and whose intermingling creates a complex ether of sound that founds the harmonic life of the middle and upper registers. The blending together of opposing sound-colors creates the music’s ever-renewed, ever-deepening sense of dimension. I found the entire hour-long exploration exhilarating and intensely focused. To my delight, I felt it could have continued indefinitely.