A Companion to Slug #12 *
Frog Peak Newsletter
http://www.frogpeak.org
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PEAK PICKS (contents)
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* New Frog Peak Artists: Rzewski, Vierk, Kennedy, Goldstein
* New Frog Peak Items and Rounds Unbound
* Frog Peak Mills Prize Winners
* Frog Speak: David Mahler, Jody Diamond and Larry Polansky
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NEW FROG PEAK ARTISTS: Rzewski, Vierk, Kennedy, Goldstein
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Frog Peak welcomes four important experimental and visionary
composers and performers: Frederic Rzewski, Lois Vierk, John Kennedy, and
Malcolm Goldstein. For listings of their new Frog Peak materials, please visit
the individual artist web pages at http://www.frogpeak.org.
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SPECIAL FEATURES: New Items and Rounds Unbound
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New items from Michael Byron, Cold Blue Music, Philip Corner, Kyle
Gann, Peter Garland, Malcolm Goldstein, Daniel Goode, John Kennedy, Lou
Harrison, David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Wendy Reid, Frederic Rzewski, Paul
Schick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Shere, Lois Vierk and Gayle Young. For a
complete list of new frog peak items, please visit our designated web page at
http://www.frogpeak.org/newitems.html
Rounds Unbound is a collection of rounds by Frog Peak and other
composers, including an anti-war round by Frederic Rzewski. The round
collection is curated by Larry Polansky, and is part of the Frog Peak UNBOUND
on-line editions at http://www.frogpeak.org/unbound.
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FROG PEAK MILLS PRIZE WINNER
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The Frog Peak Music Award at Mills College for community-building
in music went to Seth Warren and Sean Clute. Previous winners are listed at
http://www.frogpeak.org/fpprojects/millsprize.html
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FROG SPEAK: Jody Diamond and Larry Polansky; David Mahler
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Listen to the co-directors of Frog Peak Music in an interview
recorded for New Hampshire Public Radio at http://www.nhpr.org/node/8778
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"The Peterson" by David Mahler
For years I have held all composer grant and award competitions to
a simple standard: would Tom Peterson have a chance of winning? Too frequently
Tom didn't have a ghost of a chance. Recently I decided to create an award
that, when all votes are counted, Tom should win. Worthy Composer Who Doesn't
Stand a Chance is the award's name, or, The Peterson, for short.
But don't vote for Tom Peterson. He just died.
Elections have been won by dead people before, including Mel
Carnahan, Missourian who defeated John Ashcroft, his living if not lively
opponent for a U.S. Senate seat in 2000. But as a general rule (Carnahan
excepted), electing a dead person is a bad idea.
So don't vote for Tom Peterson. Besides, you don't know enough
about him. It's no shame. Tom was a composer, not a publicist. How could you
know that Thomas Elliot Peterson was Seattle born, a trombonist in the Youth
Symphony, studied in Vienna, and obtained a doctorate at the University of
Washington, writing his dissertation on The Music of Carl Ruggles? And I'd be
surprised if you knew that Tom taught at Rocky Mountain College in Billings,
Montana, and at Seattle University, or that, aside from sporadic performances,
he lived a solitary musical existence in Seattle, not associated with any
institution for the past thirty-five years. You might not even be aware that
Tom became a Frog Peak composer a couple seasons ago. Then, on December 26,
2005, a few months shy of seventy-five round trips, Tom died.
If you promised Tom your vote he wouldn't promise anything in
return except a glass of beer. It would be good beer, most likely a double bock
from Germany. Maybe you'd meet at Bill's Off Broadway, or that raucous punk bar
on Jackson, or the solicitous Coastal Kitchen, or the Athenian Inn at the
Market, where one time Tom gazed out the window at mist darkened Post Alley
down to ferry lights on Elliott Bay and said, as though it were enough to build
a life around, "I like this view." Or perhaps you'd wait for him some
rainy night at the inexplicable Sun Ya bar where they served Optimator, and
where Tom was surely the only patron who ordered it. You'd wait for Tom, and
here he comes, as always in his useful dark raincoat covering his eternal suit
jacket, face alive at the sight of you, left hand raised toward you in
recognition, still clutching the newspaper he used as umbrella (free at any
trash receptacle or park bench), right hand clasping a ten year old University
Bookstore plastic bag, protecting his pencil score you'd soon spend some beers
looking at.
Good beer lost out to good tea in Tom's last years. Preferred
venue was a block down and a steep hill up from Tom's Bush Hotel one roomer, at
The Tea House, Panama Hotel in Seattle's International District.
(The International District is known as the I.D. When my wife
Julie first met Tom he required a ride home. I asked Julie to drive him.
"Where?" "ID." Several days later Julie told me that when
they got into her car and Tom told her he lived on Jackson Street she was
relieved. She thought I wanted her to drive Tom to Idaho.)
Tom was a time waster. Surely you don't want to give away your
vote to one of those. He spent hours walking to no place in particular. If
asked, Tom named walking as one of his hobbies. His other hobby, he responded
to an inquisitor one night at dinner, was eating exotic meats. This is partly
explained by his years in Montana, where most of Tom's faculty colleagues were
hunters. Too, living in the I.D. for his last twenty years, Tom frequented
Asian cafes that served stewed chicken feet, eel with garlic, shark fin soup,
and sea cucumber. "How about fish head soup," Tom might ask at
dinner, "say, with scallions, tomato and ginger? Or what about, let's say,
fish lips in broth. Hmm?"
Tom and I wasted time together. Did we ever! Sustaining beverages
accompanied us as we kept time waiting with our talk of counterpoint, Aas Bock,
J.S. Bach, brass playing, bus service, Ruggles, Ives, Hans Leo Hassler, Seattle
history, Brahms, notation, Ibsen, and choucroute garnie. Our conversations,
like Tom's walking, went everywhere, nowhere. What shameless, wasted time we
shared, fearless in the face of silences that would have left any goal driven
conversation wrecked.
Have I said that Tom would not have wanted your vote, anyway? At
least he wouldn't court it through his music. He bristled at the word
"accessible." Two words he loved were "substance" and
"effective." A worthy composer was one who "had something to
say." After hearing a new work that was all show and no go, Tom would growl
quietly to himself and then, gently: "I don't think he had much to
say."
When Tom headed to his daily appointment with the muse, his mind
took the stairs two at a time. He composed with clear, energetic intent. What
he once said of a little speech I heard him give in Anne Focke's honor could
apply to his music: "I said what I wanted to say."
Have you ever knowingly cast a vote for a quarter-tonist? Here's
how Tom arrived at twenty-four to the octave. Like Schoenberg, Tom's old world
antecedent, and like Ruggles, his U.S. reflection, Tom developed his own
approach to dissonant harmony, and applied it consummately. In his early
forties Tom came up short trying to express himself with his old pitch
vocabulary. He purchased two battery powered mini Casio keyboards, cheap, but
just what he wanted because they were tunable. In his hotel room, with the door
locked and the volume low, he tuned one keyboard a quarter tone higher than the
other, then physically placed it above the lower pitched instrument so his
thick fingers could touch any combination of the tiny black and white keys. In
such a way, hunched over runt synthesizers, Tom taught himself to recognize the
quality of any two intervals sounded between the two keyboards, and gradually
worked his way into three and four pitch harmonies. Vishnegradsky, Haba, Ives
and Carrillo enriched his listening repertoire. He read extensively on his new
found subject, purchased a scientific calculator for figuring ratios, puzzled
over the best way of notating twenty-four to the octave, and began composing afresh.
Tom's interest was not in quarter tones as gimmick; he built a
whole harmonic and contrapuntal theory around them. Aware of a recent
resurgence in just intonation at the same time he started thinking in quarter
tones, he was not bothered by the well temperedness of his new palate. For Tom,
all systems of tuning had creative legitimacy. Twenty-four fed his imagination
for the rest of his life.
Though a mere twitch of commotion, and not enough to disqualify
him for The Peterson, Tom's closest brush with success came in the late 1970s.
He received an NEA composer fellowship, and shortly after that a commission
through King County Arts Commission, enough approbation to keep him going. His
inclusion in the Frog Peak catalog was the next most cheering, ennobling event
in a long, unknown life.
About Tom's music there are a few things I'll say. Tom's pieces
hit the ground running and impress with their sustained ideas. His counterpoint
is impeccable. I listen to his String Quartet with admiration, caught up in his
extended thoughts. The first work of his I heard, the Trio Sonata for Flute,
Clarinet and Bassoon, introduced me to his trademark conversational rhythmic
phrases, instinctively formed to blot out bar lines. Tension builds smartly in
what few quarter- tone pieces of his I heard; he manipulates his expanded pitch
arsenal to gain maximum dramatic effect. "Cannon Beach," the brief
song Tom wrote for Ann Obery (who performed it tirelessly and with affection),
is pure Tom-knotty, dissonant, lyrical, long wearing. The demanding monophonic
counterpoint of "Design on B-A-C-H," written as part of Tom's
treatise, Playing Trumpet in our Time, has been neatly tackled in its trombone
version by, among others, Stuart Dempster and Peter Tomita.
Tom's music challenged performers. Because he had been a player,
and apparently a good one, he expected much of anyone who took on one of his
pieces. Technical challenges were the spinach of a growing musician. To
overcome obstacles of a rhythmic, fingering, phrasing, and breathing nature was
the mark of dedication to art as far as Tom was concerned. Difficult passages,
when confronted with hard work, possessed curative powers. Yet I would never
say Tom tried to write abstruse pieces on purpose. It's just that his music
required concentration and dexterity to compose, and he assumed as much from
the mind and body of the performer.
In all Tom's pieces he balanced careful planning with an
explorer's sense of curiosity. The painter Kenneth Callahan said about his own
paintings that his best work occurred when he stopped trying to illustrate what
he already saw in his head. Tom composed like that. I remember him describing
surprise, even awe at how a composition took on a life of its own. Following
the lead of a piece once he started writing it brought out a bubbling
excitement in Tom, as though he were a researcher on the brink of a
breakthrough.
If it affects how you vote, there are aspects of Tom's music I
don't warm up to. His pieces veer toward the fiercely dramatic. Tom's sense of
form draws on oxford shoe classical style. There's no dismissing an
old-fashioned heft to his tensions and releases. Too, he couldn't begin to
understand Cage, and what Cage posited as Satie's
form-driven-by-factors-other-than-harmony legacy, which seems to me vital to
understanding much new composition. Tom was a Western culture chauvinist, and
to the best of my knowledge harbored no interest in music from other
traditions.
Personality? Character? Tom was brilliant, charming, witty, a
conversational regaler. For a dinner guest there's never been a surer ticket.
He was also stubborn, private to his own lasting disadvantage, mechanically
incapable in a comic way (he never mastered how to put a cassette tape back in
its plastic case, or how to attach or release a seat belt in a car), and not
good at any composerly task besides putting mind to music and pencil to paper.
So what. Those traits fade in the genuine light of Tom's
enthusiastic, lonely perseverance, his bid to apply rigor to quarter-tone
writing, and his titanic, detailed understanding of Western music through the
first decades of the twentieth century. For thirty years he was my deep source
of history.
In my reminiscing about Tom I realize that, if you're a composer,
you might be tempted to give your vote for The Peterson to yourself. That's
okay. I understand. If, like Tom, you write and make music for pleasure and for
the exploratory intrigue of the task, and in the process don't get much notice,
you qualify. We all hold hands with our varied forebears, the intrepids and the
joyful tryer-outers who warbled and woofed in differing states of anonymity.
Like most of us who can't not compose, can't not make music, Tom collected,
weighed, studied, and reconciled the musical pebbles within his reach, enfranchised
them with his touch, then tossed them into the big pool. The ripples are small,
but they spread a long way, last a long time.
Here's to Tom! Here's to us all!
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* The current title of the frog peak newsletter is taken from the
text of a Shaker song; "Slug" is one of many Shaker monikers for the
Devil.
--
We apologize if this message is an intrusion or a duplication.
Email us with REMOVE in the subject to be taken off this list.
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Frog Peak Music (a composers' collective)
http://www.frogpeak.org
Box 1052, Lebanon, NH 03766 USA
phone/fax: 603 643 9037