Celebrating Composer Frank Brickle

–a work in progress–

We are celebrating the life and work of the wonderful composer Frank Brickle, who died two Sundays ago.

Music —

Ghost tones
Delightful irrelevancies (JK Randall)erasing — know when to do it (Also JK Randall)
Grain of the wood
Metavariations
Reference passage (see Lansky and Stravinsky)
Prolongation (Babbitt & Schenker)

We met in the 80s thanks to Robert Pollock and the Composers Guild of New Jersey. We exchanged emails about music and life for over 30 years.

—He explained that he re-reads the opening of Joseph and His Brothers to get Mann’s sense of the Gnostic Weltanschauung.

–He regularly revisited the Tolkien canon. RD Laing came up often, but Frank was a Jungian analysand. We could talk about Parsifal and bleeding lances endlessly.

–We sometimes caught up with each other’s reading.

—He was disdainful of philosophy. The pragmatists took all the wind out of the philosopher’s sails. Frank’s love for Dewey, Pierce, James simply outshined the philosophers. I came around to this, with the help of my English/philosophy major son, who introduced me to Ricoer and the hermeneutics of suspicion. My distrust of words brought me into alignment with Frank’s indifference to philosophy.

Frank sent me to his friend Jeremy Stewart for a dose of anti-idealism.

Dewey, Peirce, James: Frank once remarked that the decline of our national dialogue happened very early on, in the late 19th Century. I would have loved to dredge that up and discuss that. What about Roosevelt and the post-war Pax Americana?

Like a good Princeton man, he recommended Edmund Wilson — “everything worthy is Symboliste”. He was partial to Princetonians. William Gass wouild often come up.

I sent him William Irwin Thomson, and I learned he & Marshall McLuhan lectured at Fordham when he was there.

I asked him to set texts — Emerson and Möricke. Can’t remember who started with the troubadour poets, but those are modernist bedrock. I regret that Frank never set Merlin II.

I make timelines and Frank would sometimes have enough bandwidth to offer his gut instincts about those.

A Heroic timeline occurred to me because there were recently so many attempts to echo Homer and Vergil.

Homer — Vergil — Ossian (MacPherson) — Joyce

He told me to spend some time with Dante. I still haven’t done that.

We shared righteous indignation against toxic postmodernism, although there is postmodernism that’s benign — Lawrence Stearn, Horace Walpole.

—Frank was kind enough to tell me straight out that doing nested *pitches*, as in Wuorinen, is very *local*. Like so many, I spent years doing what Wuorinen did. Brickle nudged me out of that. Only by doing can we learn that putting into play focal & nested *collections* is more powerful and memorable because collections have longer range. We can remember a landed focal collection better than a focal pitch.

—Frank: 0167 is a signature of the octotonic; me: yes, but I won’t spin it that way; Frank: shrug.

He was right, if you don’t spin it that way, your context is nevertheless jangling with the 8tonic *nap* (as in the nap of the fabric or the animal’s fur).

He visited me in Washington Heights in the 80s.

Around that time I was interviewed by a guy from the NSA. My voucing succeeded and he began working for the NSA. This was not unusual for people working at IDA, the Center for Communications Research, the Princeton think tank where he crossed paths with the likes of the Mercers (of Cambrige Analytica).

In the heights in the early 90s Frank & I would go to a place on Broadway for cafe con leche. He told me he is concerned with working with the grain of the wood, the nap of the fabric.

It took me 25 years to see how that worked, but my seeing could only be my seeing. It came to be something like Frank’s perspective. His way is wonderful. He was interested in smooth aggregates in a phrase or section in which one harmonic color prevails, as in Webernian aggregates. I’m with Jeff Nichols, who said he just can’t do Webernian rows. I tend toward bumpy aggregates that might leave the focal harmony in the mid phrase, offering a sense of return at the end of the phrase when the focal harmony returns. However, Frank’s Webernian aggregates are fleshed out with sinew and cartilage, there’s nothing spartan about it. And to know what I mean, listen to his Farai un vers and notice how each stanza has its distinct color (interval content). A Webernian row is close to a reductio ad absurdam of that, stripping away all that quasi bourgeois sinew and cartilage.

–Not sure I am getting the words exactly right; Frank made a point of bringing to my attention something that JK Randall exalted — “delightful irrelevancies”. The context can afford delightful irrelevancies — a bit of caprice — especially if the modalities are soundly established; we can hold on tight so that at some point we can let go.

Tangentially related: Babbitt told me he cares about Rolv Yttrehus and Claudio Spies almost more than any other younger composers (they were in their 70s when he said that). Rolv Yttrehus avowed a penchant for *extraordinary events*; each piece will have one, he told me. In *Music for Winds, Percussion and Voices” the extraordinary moment is Rolf himself singing a microtonal glissando down to a low Ab. In Ytrehus’ Cygnus piece, “Plectrum Spectrum” the extraordinary event is the entrance of the tenor banjo, doubled with the entrance of the English Horn. These examples are the *delightful irrevelancies* grown a bit unruly and impolite.

–“Don’t erase” is another JK Randall mantra. Hold on to something to allow it to gain structural weight. The contrasting material and the transitions to and from will be mindful of the nap. Frank hurled that imperative at me long before I knew what the hell he might mean by it.

Pianist Marty Goldray called Frank’s *The Creation, A Towneley Mystery Play* an homage to Stravinsky. Frank did not disagree, but there’s much more to it, and I’ve said it elsewhere because it’s important. Frank acknowledged that his Creation came out of Ben Boretz’ Petroushka discussion in Metavariations. And I add that his negotiation between things — his transitions — are outside of Stravinsky’s skill set. Frank’s Creation does not leave us wishing he knew how to manage transitions. It’s all about beautifully managed transitions. I love Petroushka, and like most o Stravinsky’s work it leaves me wishing he knew how to do what Frank does.

—Reference passage
The Creation and Farai develop a reference passage. I think Frank mentioned that both Stravinsky and Paul Lansky build out from a reference passage. The reference passage might have something to do with an array or a row, but this was a way to get away from arrays into something less Platonic. Frank complained about array music that mistakes its job. The array must become a reference passage; a reference passage does what music does. The array is merely something very suggestive for one who knows what music does, but in the modernist mission creep that overwhelmed as we approached and passed Y2K, well lost a great deal. What is that musical thing that might be found in a reference passage, but not in an array? The answer came from a conversation I had with Milton Babbitt. He said he is interested in Schenker, and he liked to tell the story about Sessions sending him to Europe after the war to look for extant Schenkerians. I believe Babbitt would have been happy with what Martin Boykan told me. Boykan’s great concern was “something to do with phrases”. Brickle, Babbitt, Boykan were concerned with phrases and some rich Schenkerian insights into phrases, especially prolongation. To do prolongation, one must avoid erasing; hold onto the focal tune/harmony.

Anti-platonism and anti-idealism — Frank sent me to Jeremy Stewart and in the days since Frank died we’ve gone down that rabbit hole as we both feel that Frank’s pragmatism made him sympathetic to anti-idealism.

Here’s the last exchange. Bear in mind that Frank embraced his mother’s Jewish heritage toward the end of her life. He was conversant in the issues that Jeremy goes into here, with a decidedly Goethean/Jungian orientation that he & I came to from inevitably different perspectives.

Dear Jeremy,

Hope you are well.

I’m writing about Frank. I guess he sent me to you to get a dose of anti-idealism, and I’m seeing that as consistent with Frank’s disdain for philosophy; for Frank pragmatism rendered philosophy less interesting, almost irrelevant.

I get that and also I’m sympathetic to Ricoer and the hermeneutics of suspicion. I’ve become radically situational, wherein the pragmatic is all that’s left.

I’m guessing Frank met your position though Dewey, Pierce, James.

Since our exchange, I mentioned to Frank that I can see Jesus in action with his flock as radically situational and perhaps even pushing back against Plato’s idealism.

You don’t like Aquinas, but St. Francis and his birds seems a perfect match, (animals are situational) but maybe I’m missing something. My understanding myself and your position is not the point for the moment, however.
I am curious about how you think you intersected with Frank.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Dear Bill,

It’s great to hear from you. Thank you for these thoughtful questions.

I’m definitely your anti-idealism connection if you are looking for one. For me, it’s about ontology and epistemology. My stance is not so different from Nietzsche’s, but probably closer these days to Derrida’s. I’m anti-idealist by intuition or inclination, on a similar basis to Nietzsche’s: all our evidence of the existence of the universe comes through our senses, including mathematics, geometry, etc., but transcendent absolutes impose themselves with the force of a persuasive fiction starting with Plato. Through him, fiction sets itself up as a reality superior to reality. As a cosmic vision, I don’t buy it. Along with Derrida (as at least in Gasche’s reading), I tend to think that anti-idealism in its mode as anti-metaphysics is itself a pseudo-metaphysics; deconstruction, conversely, is the non-systematic reading of the ironies that render the project of metaphysics permanently incomplete. I approve of this. And you could harmonize that with a pragmatic position through a kind of Gilles Deleuze-like neopragmatism, averring that philosophy is for the creation of concepts which are useful or not, whatever your purpose might be, characterizing metaphysics less as a way of knowing about the world and more as a technology of domination (bringing us back to Nietzsche, really). I stop short of skepticism because revelation, the relation to God, grounds another order of knowing. Being is disclosed to being through being. Someday, perhaps with the appropriate research support, I would like to try to reappropriate Nietzsche to theology, for a more Jewish Christianity, against a more Greek (Platonist) one. Nietzsche himself would most definitely not approve. A problem I tend to have with systematic theologies is that they ask too much of scripture and too little of interpretation. The move to repose authority in a text (barely) conceals the move to transfer authority to its official interpreters. I don’t approve of this. Interpretations should multiply, in the Jewish manner, and we should add something to the opinions of the rabbis every day. The text never speaks until it resides within us. When it does, we read it in our own voices. I’m sorry if this is all a bit freewheeling. I am interested in philosophy, and I seem to have recently published a monograph on Derrida, but I am not a professional philosopher. I appear to be a musician who has written a few books (mostly poetry) and lives a life more or less dominated by his day job as the communications (mainly marketing) director for a seminary. But one sees how these things can change so quickly. I’m interested in what you say about becoming radically situational, as you put it. I am for this, as I tend to think that everything happens “at the crossroads of chance and necessity,” as Derrida writes, and pragmatism seems to have, as its horizon, desire, which is where we meet God (my wife is reading Simone Weil right now and I’m taking it on a bit). I definitely see Jesus as interacting with his flock in the real moment, in which abstractions and categories must always be totally subordinated to love of the real people. But please say more, if you will.

I don’t know that Frank was especially sympathetic to my position, but when we talked about philosophy, over a period of several years, he softened in his stance towards Derrida. Early on, he sent me William Gass’ great essay, “The Case of the Obliging Stranger,” for which I will always owe him. Frank often criticized my views as “circumscribed;” I think perhaps he regarded my hillbilly background and education as a setback. He used that word, clicking his tongue and shaking his head, one time when I said that Nietzsche’s writings more than anything made me want to grab him by his coat lapels and shake him, and another time I can remember when I said I preferred Satie to Debussy. But he was a wonderful conversation partner, and sometimes he would send me demos of pieces in progress and we would chat about them online; I sent him a series of demos over the years and solicited his comments, which he often provided with extraordinary generosity. We would chat a few times a month online, and we would go for lunch in Vancouver once or twice a year (he always bought). In March 2023, we went together to a concert of Second Viennese work performed by the Turning Point Ensemble at the Annex Theatre in Vancouver. That seemed to be a bit of a nostalgia trip for him. It’s a wonderful privilege to feel oneself understood generously, which I believe is what we all seek in friendship. And these are all ways Frank and I intersected. To back up and to sum up - philosophically, he was mostly patient with me, and when we seemed to connect most directly, it was within what I took to be a shared concern for what philosophy, life, and the world are for us, and what we can do, more than what any of these things “are” or should be.

Sending me to Jeremy was typical of Frank. He introduced me to Steve Demski beause he loved and admired him and wanted to share him with me, or me with Steve.

Frank introduced me to the work of Scott Johnson, which led to two wonderful pieces that Scott wrote for me – “Bowery Haunt” and “Last Time Told”. Frank called Scott the best composer of their generation.

Frank & I have decades of email exchanges. He claimed he held on to those emails. I hope he did. What I’ve said here is a mad dash, hoping to recall was was most significant and memorable about our discussions of music and life, all straight from my memory.