Table Of ContentThe 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
