Music

The Score

Richard Karpen Takes on the UW School of Music

by Christopher DeLaurenti

"Are the rumors true?" The official announcement was weeks away, but when I ran into Richard Karpen at the Deep Listening Band concert in May, I had to ask. Rumors had been percolating for months that Karpen, a composer and computer-music innovator, was replacing Robin McCabe at the UW School of Music.

Karpen confirmed it with a grin; as of July 1, he succeeds McCabe as director. "We're going to bring the School of Music into the 21st century," he told me, adding that he seeks a bigger role for improvisation and technology in the music department. Karpen almost moved mountains to start the University of Washington's burgeoning DXArts program, so I have no doubt that the school will soon be transformed.

Aside from his bureaucratic chops, Karpen is a gifted composer with several classics under his belt: Il Nome and Terra Infirma remain mandatory listening for anyone passionate about electronic music. Despite showing no influence of the major movements in experimental music (Glitch, Phonography, Noise, lowercase sound), Karpen's music—rife with obsessively detailed sounds—remains compelling. Recent pieces such as Solo/Tutti probe the intersection of acoustic instruments, live electronics, and computer-generated improvisation. At a concert last October, violist Garth Knox's dazzling performance convincingly placed Solo/Tutti alongside heavyweight works by Iannis Xenakis and French spectralist Gérard Grisey.

Karpen's innovative music embraces risk. Will the UW School of Music? I suspect that Karpen knows we don't need another Juilliard to turn out yet more astonishingly talented musicians, most of whom will never land a coveted orchestra job or launch a solo career.

The UW School of Music should at least teach young classical musicians to feel at home in the recording studio as well as the recital hall. To become a visionary 21st-century institution, vital topics usually consigned to short-term artist residencies or one-shot workshops—Free Improvisation, Conduction, Instrument Invention, Deep Listening, Primitive Electronics, Field Recording, Turntablism, and Soundscape Studies—must become core curriculum.

I hope the school becomes a place that postulates everything we know about music might be utterly wrong. Every student should encounter competing versions of music history, from the brilliant reboot of Western music blazing through the first 63 pages of Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music, to alternate arcs that place pop music in diagonal decline since Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) or maybe Fear of a Black Planet (1990), to a unified history of the avant-garde that remedies the segregation of John Cage, Sun Ra, and Sonic Youth into separate sections in the record stores.

Ultimately, the School of Music—or any music school—must teach that listening and music-making are opportunities to radically change oneself, music, and perhaps the world.

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