Piano/Percussion Concert with World Premiere by "Moondog," Music of Cage, Garland, Others
July 23, 2001

On Monday July 23, 2001, Santa Fe New Music presented an evening of music by John Cage, William Duckworth, Peter Garland, John Kennedy, Moondog, and Christian Wolff. The concert took place at 8pm in the Santuario de Guadalupe in Santa Fe.

The program included the premiere performance of the short work Santa Feby composer Louis Hardin, better known as Moondog. A brilliant blind savant who lived for many years on the streets of New York, Moondog's hundreds of scores, originally composed in Braille, have been neglected, largely because of the composer's eccentricity. He composed Santa Fe when visiting this city in 1949.

The concert also included the first Santa Fe performance of Peter Garland's I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last. Garland, a composer, musicologist, and former publisher of the new music journal Soundings, lived in Santa Fe for many years, and now lives in Mexico where he is documenting Mexican musical traditions. The program also included:

Program Notes

Tonight's concert indulges some nostalgia in framing the landscape of a nascent organization. While none of the works on this program are new, properly speaking, we advocate an expansive notion of newness—combining works in new contexts for new audiences, and embracing a broad sense of time to cultivate the context for the truly contemporary.

The composers and works featured tonight have a multitude of threads running amongst them. Perhaps what is primary is an assertion that "conventional" tonality can still be used in ways that sound new. There is also a shared sensibility in music having a role in new cultural possibilities, and in the belief that music can be a form of environmental consciousness.

I believe that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind
thus making it susceptible to divine influences. — John Cage

John Cage's In a Landscape was composed using the rhythmic structure of a dance by the choreographer Louise Lippold. With its use of the sustain pedal and its foreshadowing of minimalism, In a Landscape also creates a sense of curving, circular time, and draws an arc to William Duckworth's The Time Curve Preludes.

Louis "Moondog" Hardin (1916-1999) was a counterculture hero and well-known as the blind eccentric composer who spent many years in Viking clothing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 54th Street in New York. Politically and socially outspoken, Moondog made his own clothing, and was for many years either homeless or lived in a boarding house in a room the size of a closet. He composed in Braille and produced several hundred compositions, which range from simple songs such as Santa Fe, to 81 symphonies. While no biography is yet available, one can learn more about his life at the lovingly produced website Moondogs Corner.

The story behind Santa Fe is incomplete. Moondog had moved to New York from his native Kansas in 1943, but decided in 1948 that he needed to go the Southwest to learn from the Pueblo Indians. He believed in the importance of living outdoors, and he recalled as his most powerful childhood musical experience an Arapaho Sun Dance at which he sat on Chief Yellow Calf's lap and played the drum. He recalled in later years that he felt a mystical kinship with Native Americans and that it was important for him to leave the "Coca Cola culture." His hope of living amongst the Indians proved to be a disappointment:

"I couldn't reach the old ones who were suspicious of me as a white, to say nothing of the language barrier. The young could speak English but they were looking over my shoulder at the culture I was leaving and I was looking over their shoulders at the life they wanted to leave and forget, so neither of us saw each other in the process."

Sometime in 1949, after being dumped on a highway median by some teenagers, Moondog was picked up by passersby and driven to Santa Fe, where he stayed a short time and hung out on the Plaza. Here he composed the little work heard tonight, along with some madrigals. It is possible that Santa Fe once found a hearing on the piano of someone intrigued by the blind vagabond on the Plaza. But it is also almost certain that this is its first formal performance. It is worth noting that this work is hardly representative of Moondog's mature style, which makes use of canon, sophisticated counterpoint, and the overtone series. Late in his life, Moondog believed that the parallels he found between the overtone series and other phenomena in nature led him to a tremendous revelation:

Believe it or not, I've discovered that whoever created the universe, whenever, left a message in the first nine overtones… or you can say that the first nine overtones are the message. And I discovered that, by using the principle of diminution, I could develop these nine overtones, using a series of diminished sequences of overtone series, and create a pyramidal structure. And in that pyramidal structure, I realized that the secret message was that whoever created the universe is trying to share with us the secret structure of the universe. In other words, it proves the principle of contraction and expansion. Hubble was always talking about expansion, but this system in the overtones proves that you can't have one without the other. It also has a lot of other implications, like the two-directionality of time.

How could you send a message that would never be destructible? Only in sound waves. Waves are indestructible. Wherever there's a planet that has atmosphere, these overtones could be heard. If this is ever accepted, it's the biggest discovery that was ever made by humanity, because here's a direct message to us. "He" respects our intelligence enough to think that we should share the knowledge of the inner structure of the universe. And it's there everywhere. Scientists are looking in telescopes and microscopes, and they don't realize that this is here, right here. The secret is all around us, and nobody recognizes it.

Christian Wolff was a close colleague of Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. He is the only professor in the history of the Ivy League (he retired recently from the Dartmouth faculty) to hold chairs in three departments: music, classics, and comparative literature. Merce consists of material for a variable number of players and various selections, combinations, and overlays (much like the choreography of Merce Cunningham, Cage's longtime partner and collaborator, for whom the work was composed as tribute after Cage's death in 1992). Wolff derived the images for making the music from song and dance, some related to Pueblo Indian, some to a sense of Cunningham's work.

William Duckworth's The Time Curve Preludes is one of the major piano cycles of our time. It consists of 24 preludes lasting about an hour, and in its musical expansion of minimalist sensibilities (particularly the development of single rhythmic figures and the use of harmonic drones) the work is regarded as a forerunner of "post-minimalism."The work's title refers to the Prelude's non-linear sense of motion: the pieces seem to have a converging sense of time, curving towards their beginnings and ends. In creating his melodic and rhythmic cells, Duckworth employed the Fibonacci series (the progression in which each number is the sum of the two before it: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.) The proportions of this series are found widely in nature (particularly in plants, the petals of pinecones an example), and have been used in much art and architecture. While the use of this in the Preludes is largely as mysterious structure, sometimes it is quite audible, as when in No.8 the sustained, lowest notes divide the prelude into phrases of 8 beats, then, 13, 21, 34. Tonight, seven of the preludes from Book I will be performed: 1-4, 7, 8, and 12.

William Duckworth is the creator of a large-scale interactive work on the web, Cathedral (so named because like a renaissance cathedral, it is the product of many anonymous people, and is functional before it is finished.) Cathedral culminates in live performances throughout the world and a 72-hour webcast, November 29-December 1 2002 (John Kennedy will participate live at the Liberty Science Center in Philadelphia.) It may be visited at Cathedral.

Nostalgic Patterns was for me a first venture into conventional tonality and the sensibilities of minimalism. My previous work focused on large temporal structures in which musicians shared timespace and identical material but not pulse, and this work maintains the independence of players but asks them to share a pulse. It is scored for variable instrumentation, and each performance is quite different. In approaching the minimalist style and its rhythmic drive, I was less interested in linear transformation and more interested in cyclical possibilities and the creation of a panharmonic and kaleidoscopic music. Both In a Landscape and The Time Curve Preludes served as touchstones for me.

Peter Garland lived for many years in Santa Fe and Madrid, composing and publishing "Soundings Press," a legendary journal of experimental music. Presently, Peter lives in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he is composing and studying indigenous music. He has led a life dedicated to exile from mainstream culture, and it is very special for us to bring Peter's work home to the Santuario and give this work its first performance in Santa Fe.

I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last is the opening line of Charles Olson's "Maximus, To Himself," one of the key poems in his long cycle, "The Maximus Poems." The work was composed in homage to John Cage after his death in 1992.

...We are the first generation ever to have access to all the world's cultures. This is perhaps the single-most important fact: the entire world is open to view, our culture and its attitudes are placed in a proper perspective amidst a multitude of others.

'World music' ceases to be exotic or peripheral: it becomes the heart of a search for a re-casting of values... And this is the key: not only that we are one among many (equals), but that we are all ethnic music, ethnic, the music is rooted in the land, and in us. — Peter Garland, 1974

— John Kennedy, Artistic Director, Santa Fe New Music