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Just to complete the list,
I should mention that I also write quite a lot of program notes
for symphony concerts, CDs, etc., and I am currently writing
a textbook on tonal harmony and counterpoint—nothing that
I had really planned to do, but I am dissatisfied with the way
other textbooks teach these materials, so I am doing it my way.
There is an overriding theme to all of this (beyond, obviously,
"music"), and that is postmodernism. It seems to me decidedly
postmodern that I have written articles on, e.g., Cage and Bernstein
and Beethoven, that I published two books within one month of
each other in 1988 (,
which you know, and ,
which is a series of program notes about well-known orchestral
compositions). It will seem postmodern if/when my textbook on
harmony and my book on musical postmodernism appear at the same
time. My compositions are postmodern in the way they are sometimes
minimalist, sometimes engage in the new complexity, sometimes
are jazz-oriented, sometimes are eclectic, sometimes are pure,
sometimes are tonal, sometimes are atonal. Some who are not
sympathetic to postmodernism wonder where my true self is in
all of this. The answer is this: as a postmodern human being,
I have no single, no true, no unchangeable self. And yet there
are themes in the writing and teaching and composing—a
questioning of accepted values and ways of doing things, a mixture
of tradition and innovation, an affectionate acknowledgment
of music and musical ideas very different from my own, yet at
the same time a refusal to ally myself with any one system of
thinking, listening, creating, teaching, or composing.
But you ask if my "central theme" unifies all my endeavors,
and I'd have to answer "no." In a thoroughly postmodern spirit,
I do not believe in unification as a necessary good. There are
certainly elements of unification in what I do, but there is
also a wild diversity, a refusal to unify, an embracing of the
disunified alongside the unified.
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