The Whistling Blackbird: Essays and Talks on New Music is the long-awaited book of essays from Robert Morris, the greatly admired composer RobeRt MoRRis is professor of music “In this quietly, beautifully written book, Robert Morris’s t t h e and music theorist. In these essays, Morris pres- h composition at the Eastman School of Music, place is very often between things that are thought to be ents a new and multifaceted view of American e University of Rochester. opposed, even contradictory: composition and theory, West- music composition. His writing on music, like W ern thinking and Eastern, art and philosophy, poetry and W h i s t l i n g his many compositions, defies easy classification, h scholarship, Milton Babbitt and John Cage. His great gift—a favoring instead a holistic, creative, and critical i composer’s gift—is for finding connections and elucidating s approach. t them, and for showing them as at once surprising and part of b l a c k b i R d The Whistling Blackbird contains fourteen l what we have always, unknowingly, known.” i essays and talks, divided into three parts, preceded n Paul GRiffiths, music critic, author of by an “Overture” that portrays what it means to g The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué and The Substance of Things Heard: compose music in the United States today. Part Writings about Musics (University of Rochester Press) b 1 presents essays on American composers John l “Bob Morris’s writing collected here gives us an extraordinary a e s s ay s Cage, Milton Babbitt, Richard Swift, and Stefan c Wolpe. Part 2 comprises talks on Morris’s music diary of listening experience. Intertwining the autobiograph- k that illustrate his ideas and creative approaches ical and the technical, Bob’s essays demystify the serialism b a n d ta l k s over forty years of music composition, including of his and other music, accessing its structural richness and i R his outdoor compositions, an ongoing project inner expressivity, and convey to the grasp of any serious d o n n e W M u s i c reader that phronesis within which he composes, listens, and that began in 1999. Part 3 includes four essays in music criticism: on the relation of composi- lives his encompassingly musical life.” tion to ethnomusicology, on phenomenology benjaMin boRetz, professor emeritus of music and and attention, on music theory at the millen- integrated arts, Bard College nium, and on issues in musical time. Threaded throughout this collection of es- M o says are Morris’s diverse and seemingly disparate R interests and influences. English romantic po- 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620 -2731, USA R P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK i etry, mathematical combinatorics, group and set s www.urpress.com theory, hiking, Buddhist philosophy, Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting, jazz and non- Western music, chaos theory, linguistics, and the American transcendental movement exist R o b e Rt M o R R i s side by side in a fascinating and eclectic portrait of American musical composition at the dawn jacket iMaGe: Robert Morris. Photograph by Dora A. Hanninen. jacket desiGn: Angela Moody | amoodycover.com of the new millennium. Job Name:918065 Date:10-11-15 PDF Page:918065dj.p1.pdf Color: Cyan Magenta Yellow Black The Whistling Blackbird Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor Eastman School of Music Additional Titles of Interest Analyzing Atonal Music: Intimate Voices: The Twentieth-Century Pitch-Class Set Theory and Its Contexts String Quartet, Volumes 1 and 2 Michiel Schuijer Edited by Evan Jones CageTalk: The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola Dialogues with and about John Cage Raymond Fearn Edited by Peter Dickinson Music Theory and Mathematics: Composing for Japanese Instruments Chords, Collections, and Transformations Minoru Miki Edited by Jack Douthett, Martha M. Translated by Marty Regan Hyde, and Charles J. Smith Edited by Philip Flavin The Pleasures of Modernist Music: Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology Essays and Analytical Studies Edited by Arved Ashby Edited by Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth- Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Century American Music Thought, and Art Edited by Ray Allen and Ellie M. Deniz Ertan Hisama Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué Lectures, 1937–1995 Paul Griffiths Edited by Jonathan W. Bernard The Substance of Things Heard: Explaining Tonality: Writings about Music Schenkerian Theory and Beyond Paul Griffiths Matthew Brown Variations on the Canon: Essays on Music György Kurtág: from Bach to Boulez in Honor of Charles Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages Rosen on His Eightieth Birthday Bálint András Varga Edited by Robert Curry, David Gable, and Robert L. Marshall A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music series, in order of publication, may be found on our website, www.urpress.com. The Whistling Blackbird Essays and Talks on New Music robert morris Copyright © 2010 by Robert Morris All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2010 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-349-2 ISSN: 1071-9989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morris, Robert, 1943- The whistling blackbird : essays and talks on new music / Robert Morris. p. cm. -- (Eastman studies in music, ISSN 1071-9989 ; v. 80) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58046-349-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Music--United States-- 20th century--History and criticism. 2. Music--20th century--Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. ML200.5.M67 2010 780.973'0904--dc22 2010032030 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America. I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. —Wallace Stevens Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Overture: Some Issues Facing the Contemporary American Composer xv Part One: Essays on Composers 1 Cage Contemplating/Contemplating Cage 3 2 Some Things I Learned (Didn’t Learn) from Milton Babbitt, or Why I Am (Am Not) a Serial Composer 27 3 Not Only Rows in Richard Swift’s Roses Only 85 4 A Footnote to Hasty, Whitehead, and Plato: More Thoughts on Stefan Wolpe’s Music 112 Part Two: Talks on My Music 5 Composing Each Time 119 6 Why Not Lilacs 184 7 Cold Mountain Songs 213 8 Music as Poetry: A Talk on My Fourteen Little Piano Pieces 234 9 Nature, Music and Nature, My Music Outdoors 259 Part Three: Essays on Criticism and Aesthetics 10 Aspects of Confluence between Western Art Music and Ethnomusicology 303 11 Musical Form, Expectation, Attention, and Quality 313 12 Autocommentary: Thoughts on Music Theory at the Millennium 327 viii ❧ contents 13 Thinking about Musical Time 336 Appendixes A Some Serial Music Terms 357 B Set-Class Table 359 C Hexachordal Combinatoriality 367 D Two-Row Combinatoriality 368 Notes 369 Bibliography 395 Index 403 Preface I began composing when I was eight years old and have always thought of myself as a composer. I studied at the Eastman School (1961–65) and at the University of Michigan, where I received a DMA in composition with a cognate in eth- nomusicology in 1969. Although I received good and useful instruction in com- position from my teachers, I was almost completely self-taught—by listening to music, studying scores, reading advanced literature on music, and above all, composing almost every day. As my compositional interests evolved from writ- ing contemporary music influenced by Bartók, Stravinsky, and Hindemith to music influenced by Indian classical music—as Cowell, Cage, and Hovhaness had also attempted to compose—to absorbing the techniques and aesthetics of European serial music, and to composing scores that included optionary forms and improvisation, certain compositional problems came to my attention. My solution was to invent compositional techniques to solve them. This took me momentarily away from my scores into a more abstract world of musical thought. By the time I finished my graduate training, I had experimented with various formal compositional techniques I invented or adapted from the music of com- posers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Brown, and Cage. When I went on to teach at Yale University in 1969, I came in contact with the work of the first generation of American professional music theorists, since Allen Forte was on the faculty and had established in the graduate school one of the first PhD programs in music theory. To my surprise, I found that his set theory was more or less isomorphic to the system of classifying and relating sonorities I had come into contact with at Eastman in 1963. Thus, it was possible for me to understand and be influenced by the most up-to-date writings on twentieth- century music. This not only led me to invent and employ similar sophisticated compositional methods, but also resulted in a resurgence of my interest in non- Western music, a preoccupation that had already been stimulated by my studies of Indian and other world musics at Michigan. As a result, I found myself writ- ing technical articles that were eventually published in scholarly journals.1 My compositional work never flagged during this time; in fact it was nourished by these new researches. I also taught myself electronics and acoustics when I was appointed director of the Yale Electronic Studio in 1972. Wayne Slawson helped guide my understanding of linguistics and psychoacoustics during my Yale years, and I was influenced by my interactions with a young computer programmer