Daniel Stephen Johnson

Mysteries of the Poorly Explained

2011-08-06T18:44:00.006-04:00

Hooray, what a crazy summer! I no longer live in New Haven, for one thing (though I'll still be writing previews and whatnot for the New Haven Advocate). That's right! We picked up and moved to Brooklyn! I'm totally free! I need a day job! Call me! I've also been writing a bunch of exciting stuff, most of which isn't online yet, but I'll let you know. (There is this Cunning Little Vixen review, which I didn't link here yet.)

But, so, you know who ELSE has had a crazy summer? The world of New Music! (SEGUE.)

I mean there was this nonsense. Did you read this? So many problems with this, but it seems like with all the big noisy response to it (this guy's PIIIIIIIISSED), nobody's really put a finger on what's wrong. I think they're distracted by the piece's tonal misfire: a lot of people seemed to think that Swafford hated the music he was describing; I guessed instead that Swafford had simply aimed for "bitchily knowing"—in order to amuse his audience and impress them with his grasp of the subject matter—and missed.

It seems to have been the "knowing" part that he missed. We get this from the first paragraph, right away, where Swafford describes the audience at the New York premiere of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre:

The audience was largely made up of the youngish and hipish, which can't be said of the usual operatic performance. They went nuts over the opera, which they probably called the "song."

Okay. Now. CLEARLY the audience at Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre is not going to be an audience that would call an opera a "song." (I mean, nobody calls an opera a "song," anyway, they would call an aria a "song.") This is a young audience, but it's a young audience that aspires to connoisseurship. This is not a couple canoodling to Boheme in the park with a bottle of wine. (NO OFFENSE TO THOSE CANOODLERS, Puccini is great.) Ligeti fans are gonna get their shit right! They know what an "opera" is, and they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. And then there's

Around 1999, I went to a program of new semi-improvised electronic "noise music." What it sounded like was Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1960s: squawk, snort, rumble, gleep. I wouldn't be surprised if that young composer never heard of Stockhausen. (The Beatles did, however, which is why they put Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. The main piece they knew was his electronics-and-voice piece Gesang der Jünglinge.)

Honey, I would be not just surprised but flat-out ASTOUNDED if that young composer never heard of Stockhausen. If you don't think young electronic musicians don't know Stockhausen, then you don't know young electronic musicians. (And while we're on the subject, Gesang der Jünglinge is not an "electronics-and-voice" piece, it's an electronic piece that uses taped vocals. And also, the Beatles also famously knew Hymnen by Karlheinz Stockhausen quite well, since that was the inspiration for "Revolution 9," so it seems odd to refer to Gesang as the "main piece" they knew. The essay seems full of weird oversights like this.)

So while it's great that he's taking the lay reader on a brief (word-counts being what they are) tour of contemporary music, especially some really important stuff that hasn't yet filtered into the mainstream, there's this implicit promise that he's letting the reader in on the ongoing conversation about what's going on NOW in the world of new music, but since Swafford doesn't actually know what's going on now, he sorta lets the reader in on a conversation that is taking place almost entirely in his own mind. For instance, his insistence on lumping composers as different as Jennifer Higdon and Osvaldo Golijov into the "Atlanta School" of composers, which seems to be more a marketing term than any kind of useful distinction, or worse, this bit of nonsense:

Our other two current trends are nicely complementary, one aggressively noisy and the other aggressively pleasant. For the noisy sort, I propose the genre aesthetic brutalism. Since this music tends to have a certain punk sensibility, and authentic punks aren't given to explaining themselves other than with blows to the head, let's listen to a defining example, a cut from "Eight Songs," by Jefferson Friedman. These are arrangements of pieces by the noise band Crom-Tech, played here by the Yesaroun' Duo, Eric Hewitt on baritone sax and Samuel Z. Solomon on drums…

Now. You can "propose" genres all you want, but the usefulness of such an exercise can be quite limited. What Swafford is saying here is, Here is a piece of music I presume you've never heard before, in a style with which you are presumably unfamiliar as well. I propose that this single point of data represents an larger artistic movement, and I've just made up a name for it. Yes, he could call it "aesthetic brutalism," but since this generic descriptor has as yet has only been applied to a single piece of music, he could just call it Eight Songs, same as Jefferson Friedman did.

Other problems with this example: Jefferson Friedman did not, except in the very loosest sense of the word, "compose" Eight Songs. They are, as Swafford acknowledges, arrangements of songs by Crom-Tech, the avant-garde post-hardcore duo. Here are Friedman's arrangements:

And here's an actual Crom-Tech recording:

Friedman himself remarks of the pieces:

In the end, my job ended up being at varying points along the continuum of transcription-arrangement-composition, depending on the particular section at hand. As much as possible, I tried to respect the original material, but in order to do that (and in order to make it humanly possible) some tweaking was necessary. When all is said and done, though, these are Crom-Tech's songs, and I'm just happy to have played a small part in spreading the gospel.

Obviously, merely by putting his name on these songs, he's making him a part of his oeuvre in some sense, and god knows I don't mean to diminish his contribution to these thrilling arrangements. But it seems a bit odd to choose—as the "defining example" of this new classical genre that Swafford has made up—a relatively faithful arrangement of eight pieces of popular music that were actually composed over a decade ago. At any rate, it is certainly not representative of Friedman's work, which from what I've heard bears the merest vestiges of Crom-Tech's influence. Go listen to his string quartets, they're gorgeous! You'll love them! But they don't sound like this.

And then, what's that weird thing doing there about how "authentic punks aren't given to explaining themselves other than with blows to the head"? Did his idea of punk rock authenticity come from that Quincy episode? By a weird coincidence, I just interviewed Mick Barr of Crom-Tech for one of those upcoming articles, and somehow we managed to hold a lengthy conversation about his music without once banging ourselves in the head with our phones.

I mean, do you see how many mistakes Swafford makes in every single paragraph of this article? A brief selection of other boners:

Setting up a quotation from composer Joshua Fineberg, Swafford offers Stockhausen's Stimmung as an example of "the avant-garde of the'60s and '70s, and its often private, inaudible arcana"; in context, Fineberg himself is clearly suggesting nothing of the sort, since after all Stimmung is just a prolonged exploration of the overtone series. Unlike the Stockhausen works Swafford is evidently familiar with, Stimmung's construction could hardly be more exposed and audible, or its harmonies less complex. Fineberg is simply pointing out that its construction is relatively static. Which it is.

Later, Swafford cites a lecture by an "academic brutalist" that "consisted of incomprehensible mathematical jargon illustrated by slides of cigarette butts on the street"; on Facebook, the unnamed composer (Ken Ueno) pointed out that in fact his lecture contained no math whatsoever, and explained exactly what was going on with the two slides of cigarette butts he did use in the presentation.

All in all, it's really too bad! This could've been a great opportunity to introduce a broad audience to some gorgeous music. If only it hadn't been so graceless, careless, and wrong.

Now come back tomorrow, and I'll explain why everyone is wrong about that new Steve Reich album.

In Other Hip Hop–Related Cello YouTube News

2011-05-05T16:58:00.000-04:00

Wait, This Beatboxing Cellist Is Actually Pretty Incredible

2011-04-21T11:14:00.000-04:00

So when I got this link, I thought, "Oh great, another dumb YouTube stunt." Then cellist Kevin Osula started playing—elegantly, precisely, stylishly—and I said, oh great, another classical nerd trying to show off how "cool" he is by spicing his playing up with some lame beatboxing. And then he started beatboxing, and you know what? You win, YouTube. This guy's great; I'm the asshole.
Thanks, Shelley!

Tonight in New York: Go Hear Timo Andres and Gabe Kahane "Do" Ives

2011-03-05T13:32:00.000-05:00

I know I talk about Hilary Hahn way too much around here (basically it's because (1) she's awesome and (2) her publicist is just extremely good at blogging/tweeting/etc), but did you guys read this review of her recent Washington recital (helpfully tweeted by a piqued publicist)? There was were all these dumb complaints about how she played music that sounded raucous and modern, or at least did sound raucous and modern when it was written a hundred years ago, and probably does still sound raucous and modern to people who haven't listened to a lot of music written since then, and there was this especially weird line about Charles Ives and George Antheil being a "second-tier Americans." Now PEOPLE. I'm not an especially huge fan of Charles Ives, I never have been, but even when I HATED Charles Ives my one-liner was "of all the great composers, Charles Ives is easily the worst"—because no matter how smug or even ungainly his music often seemed to me, in my rash youth, there was really no denying that Charles Ives was, in addition to being one of the most influential composers of the last century, capable of great beauty. So don't go hating on performers who have a greater appreciation of his music than you have managed to cultivate, because maybe someday you'll go hear Jeremy Denk play the First Piano Sonata at the Ojai Festival and you'll realize that you've been terribly mistaken all along, and Ives is in fact a very wise and sympathetic composer.

Or you'll go to Merkin Hall tonight, when Timothy Andres and Gabriel Kahane present their own works in dialogue with those of Ives as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, and these extraordinarily ear-pleasing young composer-pianists can show you what THEY hear in his music. I've sung Andres's praises plenty—you all really need to go out and buy his record, Shy & Mighty—but even while the glossy piano-man-ism of Kahane's music is often "not my thing," I am totally at a loss to explain why everybody ELSE isn't a huge fan of his. Look, who DOESN'T want to hear this?

Like, your MOTHER should probably be a huge Gabe Kahane fan. She should hear him on NPR and ask you why the music you listen to isn't as lovely as his. Well, SHOULDN'T she? "If you're going to get me modern music for Christmas, I wish you'd get me something that sounds more like that Gabriel Lehane I heard on NPR," she'll say when she opens the Messiaen CD you got her. You ruined Christmas, AGAIN. Jesus you're a terrible son. Or daughter.

Anyways, it's going to be great tonight. Here's the setlist, an anthology of György Kurtág's Bach arrangements(!), Ives's songs, and original works by both composers. Kahane's singing and playing guitar, in addition to sharing keyboard duties with Andres:

J. S. BACH/GYÖRGY KURTÁG Göttes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit

CHARLES IVES The Things out Fathers Loved

TIMOTHY ANDRES At the River (world premiere)

GABRIEL KAHANE Durrants

IVES The Housatonic at Stockbridge

KAHANE Fall 2007 (from Piano Sonata)

ANDRES Some Connecticut Gospel

BACH/KURTÁG Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr

KAHANE Where are the arms?

ANDRES How can I live in your world of ideas?

IVES Tom Sails Away

KAHANE The Baffled King (world premiere)

KAHANE North Adams

BACH/KURTÁG Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir

IVES Serenity

This morning, Ecstatic Music organizer Judd Greenstein tweeted a discount code—IVES—which you can use to buy tickets here.

This Is A Video of Two Young Classically-Trained Sopranos Singing "Come Sail Away" by Styx While Wearing Sailor Moon–Style Japanese Schoolgirl Uniforms

2011-02-24T08:52:00.001-05:00

via Videogum.

Terrible News

2011-02-17T11:43:00.000-05:00

Even people who can't name five classical pianists have probably heard of the Five Browns, the celebrated quintet of piano-playing siblings who all studied Juilliard and then made such a splash on Oprah. But now the three Brown sisters—Deondra, Desirae, and Melody—have made the incredibly sad accusation that they were sexually abused by their own father, Keith Brown.

Not long after the charges were filed last week, Keith drove himself and his wife Lisa over a 300-foot embankment in their Porsche in an apparent accident, and remained hospitalized as of last night. His daughter's names were not released by the court, but they've chosen to come forward as the victims in their father's case.

You can read about it here.

There's not much that I can add to the awful facts in this story, except to say that I've always heard great things about the Brown siblings as people, that I admire them tremendously for coming forward unashamed, and that I wish them and their loved ones all the best in weathering such a horrible situation.

Adams' Behemoth

2011-02-16T19:57:00.010-05:00

Opera is an anachronism. It was an anachronism from the moment it was invented—wasn't it?—the last gasp of the neoclassical tendencies of the Renaissance, as an attempt to revive the musical dramas of antiquity, and it's even more of an aesthetic archaism today, now it that exists almost entirely as a repertory of 200-year-old "classics."

So, yes, that's the "joke" of Nixon in China, the opera by composer/librettist/director team John Adams, Alice Goodman and Peter Sellars, that you've got characters from the age of television, Richard and Patricia Nixon, stepping out of a flat 747 and singing rhymed couplets with vocal techniques invented to sing the music of composers born in 1813. But it's a lot more than that, too.

It was all Sellars's idea—he hand-picked Goodman, a former student of his, and had to talk Adams into it, convince him that the "joke" was not all there was to the project. Aside from his Adams collabos, his most famous (though far from only) ventures have been stagings that transplant the settings of classical operas into the present day, and the critical resistance is usually predictable, and partly justified—attempts to make opera "relevant" to a contemporary audience can seem at once redundant ("Mozart's operas are immortal; they were never irrelevant, and require no updating!") and futile ("Is a Nozze di Figaro set in Trump Tower going to win over anybody who'd otherwise be watching reality TV?"). But insofar as there is ever a distinction between concept and content in a theatrical production—and a Sellars show may be keen to narrow the gap between the two—these objections respond only to the former, in the abstract, and not to the latter. Sellars' agenda is more nuanced than updating sets and costumes.

For instance, when he decided to stage Handel's oratorio Theodora, about the persecution of early Christians, Sellars was addressing a genre of musical drama that has no obvious analogue in contemporary culture. Oratorio tells a story without sets or costumes or even action, instead being a series of monologues and choruses—it's a presentational mode of drama, of the sort that has all but disappeared from popular entertainment in recent centuries.

But in translating Theodora to the operatic stage, Sellars dramatizes the Emperor's opening arias as a Presidential press conference, at which the Chief Executive promises to hunt down and torture the infidel, and the "audience" onstage responds with a chorus choreographed to look like a TV commercial, pointing to cans of diet soda when they get to the couplet about how "sweeter than the trumpet's sound / Their groans and cries are heard around!" Absurd, yes. (Or not? That actually sounds a lot like a few press conferences from the past decade or so.) But by connecting Handel's forms to contemporary politics, he demands that we reconsider the emotional stakes of what might—without his anachronistic touch—be merely beautiful. By reinventing the action in terms of television, he illuminates not only the politics of the drama, but also the politics of our age, the politics of the musical form, and the politics hardwired into our media.

For his first opera with John Adams, Nixon in China, Sellars proposed a subject that would run his anachronistic alchemy in reverse. In the first act, instead of turning the conventions of opera into the stuff of television, Sellars, Adams, and librettist Alice Goodman took a televised event and turned it into grand opera. All the conventions of grand opera are there: choruses, pageantry, down to the the drinking song that ends the first act and the ballet in the second. The libretto itself is in rhymed tetrameter. But while opera usually treats a familiar myth or historical subject, in place of the usual heroic tableaux—the death of Dido, the damnation of Faust—Nixon draws upon a new, different sort of cultural memory. What struck critics most at its first appearance, prompting many to dismiss the opera (as they would dismiss many of Sellars' stagings) as a facile postmodern gimmick, was the contemporaneity of its subject matter. That is, Nixon's visit to China not only had taken place within living memory, but Nixon himself was actually invited to the premiere (he declined), and most of the audience had probably witnessed many of the dramatized events on television at the moment they took place. The idea of an opera about the President, specifically about President Nixon, was a novelty—a joke—even if it was a good one.

Well, about twenty years later, the novelty is gone. Nixon is dead now, a whole generation of operagoers has been born since his trip to China—but the opera remains fundamentally relevant. Not only because it's well enough put together to stand up to two decades of close listening, but because its observations on the essentially changed nature of cultural memory in the age of television will remain timely as long as there's still some kind of TV.

In Thomas May's indispensible John Adams Reader, May asks Sellars about the label "CNN Opera," as it was applied to his and Adams' Death of Klinghoffer specifically and to their history operas in general. Sellars responds:

One of the most important reasons to do these operas was to say precisely that we aren't getting the actual history of our times. We are used to the media feeding frenzy, with the rush to judgment and the rush for the scoop, and then it all gets dropped. In the Age of Information we are strangely underinformed about what is going on and what is at stake—exactly because there's a historical blank for so many Americans. The way journalism has evolved context is not reported very deeply. [As artists] we have to make a structure which is context rich. Opera is able to go inside to a place where the headlines aren't going. The classic thing with Greek theater is that it's not, say in Oedipus Rex, about what does an exploding eyeball look like, but about why someone would dig out their own eyes. Whether it's about suicide bombers or 9/11 or any of these events that have happened to America, the question that is not allowed to be asked to this day is "Why would people do this?" That's the question, of course, that drama asks. Exactly to find what was not in the news, what was missing from the news: that's why we worked in this genre.

The fact, in other words, that opera is out of step with our times is why it is absolutely essential.

Act One gives us, to a large extent, what has made it into the public record. While the President's entrance aria is an internal monologue, even that monologue is on the subject of outward appearances and public persona:

News has a kind of mystery
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the world was listening.
…Though we spoke quietly
The eyes and eyes of history
Caught every gesture…
Transforming us as we, transfixed,
Made history.

The audience at the HD broadcast I attended chuckled at these lines:

Millions more hear what we say
through satellite technology
than ever heard a public speech
before. No one is out of touch
telecommunication has
broadcast your message into space.

John Adams's opera, which he described as "a media event about a media event," had become a global satellite broadcast about a global satellite broadcast. (Note that the word "broadcast" is used precisely three times in Nixon, and only once does it refer to the act of transmitting a signal over the radio; the other two times, it uses the word's original meaning, the act of scattering seeds in every direction.)

Act Two of the opera introduces another strategy essential to all Adams' stage works: the counterbalance of the Heroic, the Public, the Yang, by an equal and opposite force. The focus of the drama turns to Mrs. Nixon, the model First Lady on her seemingly inconsequential tour of the capitol, the opera becomes something very different.

"Mrs. Nixon went to look at the Summer Palace of the imperial Manchus in the western suburbs yesterday," reported the Times (in an article headed, "All Peking's a Stage"), "and as she passed through the Gates of Longevity and Goodwill she laughed and said, 'That's prophetic.'" Goodman spins Pat's soundbite into "This is prophetic," an aria that asks the audience to reconsider the monumental in intimate terms:

Let the expression on the face
Of the Statue of Liberty
Change just a little, let her see
What lies inland: across the plain
One man is marching—the Unknown
Soldier has risen from his tomb;
Let him be recognized at home.

The aria signals a turn from the monumental to the intimate, and sure enough, the opera's heroic narrative begins to unravel. Chiang Ching—Madame Mao, the anti-Pat responsible for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, presents her ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, and the characters in the opera soon find themselves unable to distinguish between this drama and their reality, as if all of Peking really were a stage, and the story of the opera suddenly veers off from the historical record.

The exploitative imperialist letch singing and dancing in Red Detachment bears, as Mrs. Nixon notes, a striking resemblance to Henry Kissinger, and is in fact played by the same singer; unable to bear suffering of the main character—a brutalized peasant girl—the First Lady drags her husband into the drama within the drama; a storm erupting within the ballet gets the onstage Nixons "sopping." With her appearance her at the midpoint of the opera, artist-tyrant Chiang has torn through both the art of politics and the politics of art to open a wound through which historical reality bleeds out, and when the prima ballerina misses her cue, Mme. Mao finally interrupts the action of the ballet with a literally show-stopping aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung" ("When I appear," she sings, "the people hang / Upon my words") as metadramatical chaos breaks out.

It's a perplexing scene, but if you're wondering why this half-hour metadrama has been interpolated into an opera about Richard Nixon, you've got it backwards. Before he proposed Nixon, Peter Sellars wanted to put on his own staging of The Red Detachment of Women. It was only after his failure to mount this Communist propaganda ballet during the Reagan years SOMEHOW FELL THROUGH that he asked John Adams to write this opera, and it remains, in some ways, its raison d'être, in the same way that the death of Siegfried is the reason for Das Rheingold. It's this insane, beautiful moment here…

…that Nixon exists to justify.

When Act Three begins, the characters have retreated entirely into the private sphere—into dream and memory. This last act was actually written to depict the last banquet before the exhausted Nixons returned home to the States, but Sellars, in a typical move, restaged it into a literally private space, with twin beds instead of tables in order (among other things) to emphasize the scene's dreamlike qualities. The music is often hushed and sweet, rejecting the set pieces of the first two acts in favor of a through-composed score that weaves together all the characters' reflections on their respective lives and homelands.

Ultimately, this is the enterprise at the heart of Nixon—the artists were much more interested in allowing the men and women who took part in this meeting to plead their own cases lyrically and eloquently than in, say, punishing Mao for the brutality of his regime, or Nixon for the Vietnam in his past and the Watergate to come. Adams and Sellars went on to take the same strategy with all of their operas, and this is the form's greatest strength: not to document or narrate (text and photographs do that better), or even necessarily to "dramatize" in the conventional sense (don't the movies do that better?), but to allow each participant in the drama to express him/herself directly, fully and eloquently (only the operatic tradition offers arias, ensembles).

•

This means Alice Goodman has to hit a very tricky tone in her libretto, a combination of the long-lost art of high rhetoric with the sort of language a Dick Nixon might have used (astoundingly, the one F-bomb in the opera is not his), and she more than lives up to the challenge (as, I hope, you've noticed from the passages I've already quoted). But while the text is often lovely and smart in its lines and phrases and passages and particulars, what really amazed me on this listening was the overarching symbolic structures.

For instance: "The people are the heroes now," goes the piece's most famous couplet; "Behemoth pulls the peasant's plow," "Behemoth" here representing (among other things) the monstrous power of the state, and the inexorable force of history, harnessed—according to the Communist myth—in the service of the people. Think Thomas Hobbes too, of course: Behemoth and Leviathan go hand-in-hand (hoof-in-flipper?) in the Hebrew Bible.

But Behemoth (pictured) comes back—twice!—in the second act, in the form of the elephant sculptures Pat Nixon encounters on her tour. She does and doesn't recognize its significance:

This little elephant in glass
brings back so many memories.
The symbol of our party, prize
of our success, our sacred cow
surrounded by blind Brahmins, slow
Musclebound, well-dressed, half-awake,
with Liberty upon her back.
Tell me, is it one of a kind?

The audience laughs when Pat identifies the elephant with the GOP, and again when the chorus informs her proudly that the elephant is in fact just one of hundreds churned out by a factory. But this disconnect between her and her guides is Pat in a nutshell: the elephant is the Western symbol of memory (Pat's personal history), and the symbol of the GOP (Pat's personal America), she's right about that, but as she will again in "This Is Prophetic," her wishful thinking finds the personal in the monumental. To her, the individual is to be prized—to the Communists, what's great is not one handmade elephant but the ability to produce "hundreds every day." Like the "blind Brahmins" from the old parable of the elephant, the high brahmins of the Chinese and American diplomatic parties have both laid their hands on the same behemoth and mistaken it for two very different beasts.

In the opera's final act, there are several moments where the libretto obviously undermines the literal reality of Sellars's staging. Why is there a dance band in everybody's bedroom? How can Chou pass Pat a handkerchief, and give Kissinger directions to the bathroom? (DIGRESSION. How fantastic/insane is it that Peter Sellars went all Regietheater on HIS OWN OPERA, before even reached the stage? And then there were huge changes made to this act, or so I understand, between the beginning and end of its very first run—I can't say when it was added, but all kinds of crazy business was definitely inserted into this act between the 1987 broadcast from Houston and the 2011 broadcast from the Met. (In the other acts, the changes were mostly quite subtle.) A funeral procession brings the ailing Chou lilies, to foreshadow his death (the crackdown on mourning for Chou would prove to be the downfall of Chiang Ching and her Gang of Four); Mao's onstage jayo sesh with one of his secretaries was, I suspect, interpolated for recent productions, based on the scandalous 90s memoir of Mao's doctor.

(META-DIGRESSION. I've forgotten—was that Nancy T'ang (played by an appropriately funny and frightening Ginger Costa Jackson) with her hand on the Chairman's crotch? Please correct me. The scathing portrayal of T'ang (a.k.a. Tang Wensheng) in this opera sent me down quite the Google rabbit-hole. She was born in Brooklyn, apparently, became immensely powerful in Mao's last years, and not only is still alive but looks great. Much was made of the Met's decision to invite the surviving members of the American diplomatic party to come see the opera; I wonder if they invited Tang to see her opera-self jerk off the Great Teacher?))

But there are subtler hints about the team's original vision for the scene—dinner and food keep coming up in the characters' reveries. "We ate wild apricots," sings Chiang Ch'ing; "The taste is in my mouth," answers Chou. "Once we had roast / and a light film of dust" (dust being another of the opera's recurring symbols of history) "settled on each plate." Clearly, what's "supposed" to be happening here is that Chou and Ch'ing, eating a feast, are reminded fondly of much simpler meals from years ago.

Pat and Dick, on the other hand, are finding that Chinese food might not agree with them quite so well. Reminiscing about his service in the Pacific Theatre, he describes the nauseating jungle scene in terms of food:

I began to take in all the sights.
Picture a thousand coconuts
like mandrills' heads or native masks,
milk oozing from their broken husks,
the flooded rib of a palm frond
where several centipedes had drowned,
unsanded wood that smelled like meat…
Jesus, it grabbed you by the throat.

Not too hard to imagine Nixon pushing away a bowl of half-eaten Chinese beef and a coconut-milk dessert as he sings these lines. As if to say, I'd kill for a Quarter Pounder right about now, he goes on to reminisce about the little bit of home he managed to build, stationed in the Pacific:

I swapped
spam for hamburger meat and roped
in a few men to rig a stand.
They called it "Nick’s Snack Shack". I found
the smell of burgers on the grill
made strong men cry.…
Done to a turn, medium-rare,
Rare, medium, well-done, anything
you say. The Customer is King.

And this line, the Capitalist lie, finishes the arch stretching over the opera to that opening chorus and the corresponding lie of Communism: "the Customer is King," says America; say the Chinese, "the People are the Heroes."

•

Oh, right, and there's music in this opera, too. I don't feel any need to defend John Adams's work, though maybe I'm projecting a bit, since I'm basically his biggest fan in the world. The first time I heard his orchestral piece The Chairman Dances, drawn from the music in the last act, I was overwhelmed by the way it combined the layered rhythmic vitality of the music I listened to for pleasure (Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails) with the symphonic grandeur and harmonic sophistication of the classical composers whose music meant the most to me as an orchestral player. My brother bought me the disc of highlights for Christmas, and that's how I learned to love the setpieces from Acts One & Two, but the three-CD set went out of print for a few years around that time, so when I finally found the TWO-AUDIOCASSETTE box for sale at a Tower Records had to to buy it on AUDIOCASSETTE and got to know Act Three from popping the cassette into the tapedeck of our Honda Civic and driving around with it on a constant loop.

But it wasn't until this latest encounter with the piece, actually seeing it onstage (live at the first Saturday of the run, and then onscreen at the HD one week later) that I gained a real appreciation for Adams as a musical dramatist. It's difficult to verbalize—I'm not talking about the word-painting he does, like making the orchestra skip a beat when Dick says that "the nation's heartland skips a beat," but the subtle increase and release of tension that illuminates the subtext of, for instance, the otherwise arid first meeting between Nixon and Mao.

Adams was not quite as virtuosic at the helm of the Met Orchestra as he was at his desk. He wasn't bad either—he certainly brought out moments of great emotional intensity in the score—but if you saw Alan Gilbert conduct Doctor Atomic you know how much more dazzling and detailed that band's performance could've been.

With a single exception—James Maddalena, the terrific singer and actor who, a bit hoarse at the live performance I saw, found himself in truly dreadful voice at the HD—the cast was uniformly superb. Richard Paul Fink was not only funny as Kissinger, but offered moments of loveliness the role has probably never seen before. Russell Braun was exquisite as Chou En-Lai, the work's agonized conscience, and Robert Brubaker was superhuman as Mao, just HANGIN' OUT in the treble clef while sitting in the stooped posture of a decrepit old man.

Now I TOLD you people that Kathleen Kim was going to rock your world as the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung, and sure enough, she was a perfect terror of demonic intensity, but still flawlessly in tune on every high D. But my favorite was Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon. Her two performances actually seemed (to me) quite different in terms of the little emphases and rubati, really thinking about each word and each note coming out of her mouth right in the moment, digging ever deeper, intellectually, into the score to arrive at new emotional depths. Between the two of them, I was on the verge of tears for most of the second act.

•

And at the end of the third, I left the theater in a daze. I was stupefied. I could hardly speak, let alone articulate a reaction. This is, of course, the effect that a form like Nixon's is designed to produce—it supplanted my modern, quotidian experience with reflection, meditation, introspection. When I left the opera house, I stumbled to the next train out of town and fell immediately asleep; when I left the afternoon broadcast, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and discovered that the sun had set while I'd been in the dark, watching. The sky'd gone all orange and blue and was seemingly cloudless, but a thin flurry of huge white flakes snowed down as if from nowhere and then, after a moment, it stopped.

Local Boys Make Good (OR, "Sashay; Chanter")

2011-02-14T19:29:00.003-05:00

Hey look! Yale School o' Music alum Paul Jacobs is apparently the first artist ever to win a Grammy™ for a solo performance on the organ! JoJo fondly remembers Jacobs's recital of Messiaen and Hindemith on the Holtkamp organ at Battell Chapel, and the obsessed fan who sat in the front row, "conducted" from his seat, cheered loudly after every piece, and tried to talk to Jacobs during his pre-concert remarks. Ah, organ-lovers! Yikes! Anyway, he certainly deserves his little golden horn for that Messiaen double-disc, Livre du Saint Sacrement, which incidentally was JoJo's birthday present last year, because I am very selfish and only buy people gifts that I secretly want for myself.

But also, listen to this!

That's from the score Timo Andres will be playing at Frank Tell's Fall '11 show tomorrow night. Nice, right?? Wouldn't you buy the living shit out of some post-apocalyptic outfits if that was playing in the background?? You'll recall that Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld used some Andres on the runway not too long ago—

—but this is an actual commission for actual new music to be actually performed live at the show. Should be very cool.

First, the Bad News

2011-02-09T16:26:00.002-05:00

Alex Ross points to this terrific summary of the situation regarding the Hungarian government, media and arts, by Iowa-based commentator Bernard Sherman. András Schiff, one of the finest musicians on this earth, has been singled out by anti-Semitic demagogues over there, and of course he has! What better way to protect your nation's cultural heritage, after all, than by shitting all over the human treasures it has produced? And if someone's going around saying he's troubled by political developments in his home country, you should DEFINITELY call him a dirty Jew, because that'll get him to change his tune real fast.

Ahem.

In much happier news, Ross also has some brief but excellent commentary on the recently unveiled New York Phil season. (Here's the season; here's the full press conference.) A few stories here: this year's can't-miss new-music bonanza is a performance of Stockhausen's Gruppen at the Park Avenue Armory; there's a new amazing digital archive of Philharmonic materials and lore; the season has no female composers on it at all.

I'm really not dismayed, should I admit this?, by the orchestra's ongoing championing of living European composers. Who in the heck else is playing European new music in this country? How else are we going to hear it? But I do think Amanda Ameer is right that the brilliant German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann was maybe not the most exciting choice for NY Phil artist in residence—he's replacing Anne-Sophie Mutter, after all, a German violinist of the very same generation, and it would appear that his programming choices are pretty dull: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Berg, and somehow a D (Dvorak) slipped in there by accident. Now, I love all these pieces, I love Zimmermann's playing, and these concerts are going to be fantastic, but he's playing NO new works?

And now, here is a picture of Alan Gilbert that I have doctored so that it looks like he took it with an iPhone.

Thank you.

The L.A. Phil's new season is up, too, and the big news there is (for me anyway) the premiere of a new sacred oratorio by John Adams, entitled The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Maybe he gave it that title to distinguish it from a forthcoming work by Mark Adamo.

What? No, I meant because Mark Adamo's writing The Gospel of Mary Magdalene for the San Francisco Opera! Why, what "mary" did YOU think I was referring to?

Speaking of whom, is there anyone else who really, really misses Mark Adamo's blog? Because I sure do. I spotted him before the premiere of Bernstein's Quiet Place last year, and afterwards I was DYING to know what he thought of it. And now Nixon in China's up at the Met, and I'm dying to know what he thinks of that! Somebody lean on him, would you?? I'll put up my own take on Nixon soon (spoiler: it's a fucking awesome piece), but the operatic blogosphere ain't the same without his POV.

Alright, I'm outta here—now all y'all get on that train and go see Nixon in China, tonight.

Okay Okay Here Is One More Bitchin' Viral Video

2011-02-07T09:43:00.000-05:00

Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin perform Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Video by George Manak and Peter van der Ham (via @amandaameer).

Classical Music Reaches New Audiences

2011-02-04T21:48:00.001-05:00

Here are two EXCITING NEW FRONTIERS in classical crossover!

Via @werttrew, this one is already a VIRAL SENSATION, combining a beloved internet meme with an immortal work of classical genius:

Via loyal reader Greg, this SOON-TO-BE VIRAL clip is a "mashup" of classical technique with a couple of those songs the kids love so much:

Get Pierced Tonight

2011-02-03T16:37:00.002-05:00

Hey, but so, New Havenites, I'm gonna go to this New Music New Haven concert at Sprague tonight, and you probably should too! I stupidly failed to mention Daniel Wohl's excellent Aorta for piano & electronics in my writeup of the Ecstatic Music Festival, even though it was one of the marathon's most successful uses of electronics, and he's got a piece on tonight's program, too (Pixelated for piano, toy piano, and glockenspiel—sounds cool); the headliner is David Lang, whose Pierced I don't know but am very much looking forward to. Other composers: Paul Kerekes, Garth Neustadter, Loren Loiacono, and the always reliable Jordan Kuspa. 8pm tonight, free.

Oh, and if you're NOT in New Haven, you can get watch high-quality streaming video here, also free! Hooray!

Two Turntables and a Microphone Two Pianos, Four Hands

2011-02-03T14:35:00.000-05:00

New Yorkers, and I know you're reading this, after work tonight you should probably all go to LPR and check out this crazy thing! Bruce Brubaker, whose records you really need to hear (I have listened to his Glass/Cage CD, Glass Cage, MANY MANY TIMES, and he also has a very cool CD of himself playing the music of Philip Glass and William Duckworth, Time Curve Preludes, and really just check out everything he's recorded, I don't think there's a dud out there and you'll get to know some great composers you never heard of before such as Duckworth and Alvin Currin) is putting on a very unusual sort of recital, which is that he and his student Francesco Tristano are both going to play solo piano pieces by different composers AT THE SAME TIME. Here's them doing the same thing at a different show, so that you can hear Philip Glass's Mad Rush with an atonal melody on top of it: It kind of makes sense, right?? It's a little like the Rambler's Bloggariddims mixes, but LIVE. ANyway this is completely great, and next year everyone will be doing it. Right?

Two Pieces of Experimental Music

2011-01-27T13:26:00.001-05:00

No. 1

No. 2

both via Boing Boing.

It Seems Idiotic

2011-01-22T23:46:00.005-05:00

I have a few friends who just don't understand why I love the comic strip Mary Worth so intensely. Maybe they will understand after clicking here:

via The Comics Curmudgeon.

One More Thing

2011-01-17T09:00:00.002-05:00

I mentioned that Bang on a Can All-Star Ashley Bathgate and All-Star emerita Lisa Moore are playing at today's Ecstatic Music Festival marathon opener; I didn't mention that they'll also be playing (as "TwoSense") a set in Manhattan Friday night (when, conveniently, the Festival has nothing scheduled) at "The Little Church Around the Corner" (1 E 29th): Bresnick, Chopin, Janacek, Prokofiev, Schnittke, $25 ($15 students)(suggested!), 7:30 pm.

Take Ecstasy with Me

2011-01-16T10:27:00.005-05:00

Look I know I haven't mentioned this before and I REALLY SHOULD HAVE but you guys kind of have to go to the Ecstatic Music Festival that Judd Greenstein is curating at Merkin. It starts tomorrow, Monday afternoon, Jan. 17 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so you're off work!), and runs for freakin' MONTHS. Here's the program for tomorrow's FREE marathon, which starts at 2 and for seven hours, with lots of breaks and refreshments and whatnot so you're not being held prisoner or something:

Ne(x)tworks plays a piece by Julius Eastman (no not THAT piece, it is MLK Day, do you want to get us all in trouble)
Timo Andres plays Ives and Andres
Face the Music plays Missy Mazzoli and Christine Southworth
So Percussion plays So Percussion
Chiara String Quartet plays Jefferson Friedman
NOW Ensemble plays Greenstein
John Matthias, Adrian Corker & Andew Prior play Matthias
Julianna Barwick sings Barwick
Vicky Chow plays Daniel Wohl
Corey Dargel (w/ NOW Ensemble and Nathan Koci) sings Dargel (Other People's Love Songs, complete!)
Ashley Bathgate & Lisa Moore play Kate Moore
Ashley Bathgate plays Michael Gordon's Industry
Gabriel Kahane sings and plays Gabriel Kahane
Nadia Sirota & Nico Muhly play Muhly
and Buke & Gass collaborate with Mazzoli's Victoire on some awesome new thing.

That's just the first day! I kind of CAN'T NOT go to this.

Here's the whole page for the extended festival. I hope you'll reconize some incredibly serious names here: Dan Deacon, Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer, Doveman, Owen Pallett, Clogs, Sarah Kirkland Snider, John Medeski, AND MANY MORE.

Hilary Hahn Has Commissioned a Shitload of New Encores

2011-01-15T15:30:00.003-05:00

So over my Xmas vay kay in Cali (don't you hate people who say vaykay) (or Cali) I had a nice conversation with my violinist brother about Hilary Hahn's playing, possibly because both I AND a student of his bought him her recording of the Tchaikovsky/Higdon concerti for Xmas. I told him he has to watch this
and he talked about how he heard from a friend about how even when she was just a kid her work ethic was utterly ridiculous, like just HOURS spent in a practice room, and now that's probably how come she has some of the strongest, cleanest technique in the biz. Now I played violin for many years, but if you ever heard me drag bow across string you'd understand that I don't necessarily have a terrific grasp of the finer points of violin technique, so it was gratifying for me to hear somebody who knows more about these things than I do say that yup, she has an incredibly strong left hand ("Just as I suspected!" —Einstein over here), and it was also interesting to hear his take on the Higdon concerto, namely that he did NOT believe, as I did, that it was likely to take off as a part of the violin repertoire, just because it's so damn difficult: "There are parts of that piece I listen to," (I'm paraphrasing) "and I think to myself, I could never play that! Which isn't a feeling I get when I listen to Ysaÿe or Paganini."

BUT ALL OF THESE SPARKLING INSIGHTS ARE JUST LEADING UP TO THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT that following the awesome success of her Higdon concerto commission, Hilary Hahn has commissioned TWENTY-SIX MORE PIECES from twenty-six different composers, short works for violin and piano. There will also be a twenty-seventh commission later this year, to be awarded according to some unorthodox scheme yet to be announced; I hope that this scheme will be somehow YOUTUBE-related, because of course the one thing classical music needs right now is one more YouTube Symphony or YouTube Choir or some shit like that. Or maybe it will be Crowdsourced or Wiki'd or Tumblr'd or something similarly WEB TWO POINT OH. Hilary H: jackin' her strat.

I TEASE, but seriously, but no but seriously, what's really interesting here is not the HOW of the commissions but the WHO. I mean I don't even know who all of these people are, but LOOK:

Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
Post-Soviet, Mugham-influenced, prepared piano–playing Azerbaijani lady

David Del Tredici
Neo-Romantic American gay

Jennifer Higdon
Pulitzer-winning composer of concerti for Hilary Hahn and eighth blackbird

James Newton Howard
Bigshot Hollywood film composer dude

David Lang
Pulitzer-winning Bang on a Can person

Edgar Meyer
Bluegrass/jazz/classical bassist (you may remember him from such Yo-Yo Ma collaborations as APPALACHIA WALTZ)

Michiru Oshima
Japanese composer for cartoons, which sounds like I'm being dismissive if you're not a total nerd for these things and therefore aware that they are a REALLY BIG DEAL in the enormous parallel universe that exists right next to the world of concert music but seldom overlaps it

Krysztof Penderecki
If you're reading this you already know who Penderecki is (actually I'm sure that goes for David Lang too, but)

Einojuhani Rautavaara
If you're reading this and know who Penderecki is you should probably also go find out who Rautavaara is

Max Richter
Pianist/composer, formerly of Piano Circus, who has also put out some pretty boss solo records—think "ambient"?

Somei Satoh
Extremely awesome Zen-influenced Japanese composer guy

Elliott Sharp
Improv guitarist and experimental composer

Valentin Silvestrov
Arvo Pärt's favorite composer, one of my favorites too, you REALLY REALLY need to get into him

And the rest:

Lera Auerbach
Richard Barrett
Mason Bates
Tina Davidson
Avner Dorman
Søren Nils Eichberg
Christos Hatzis
Bun-Ching Lam
Paul Moravec
Nico Muhly
Mark-Anthony Turnage
Gillian Whitehead
Du Yun

Going down the list, that's a pretty good breakdown, right there, of "serious" vs. "popular" traditions, ladies vs. gents, "Western" vs. non-, and so forth. This is a shockingly well-rounded commissioning program for a mainstream classical artist! Even if you hate 24 of these composers with a passion, there are gonna be two on here whose music you just live for. I'M GOING TO ALLOW THIS, y'all, and I am very much looking forward to hearing what comes of it.

I Dig Her Deeply, and No Wonder

2010-11-29T10:45:00.001-05:00

Hey! It's been awhile. But let's catch up, shall we, with that gang of superpowered misfits busily engineering the New York new music scene down in the secret underground bunker of New Amsterdam Records. I talked about the new Victoire release in my print column not too long ago, but there've been a coupla discs released since then that we really need to talk about.

For one thing, even longer than we've been waiting for that Victoire disc, we've all been waiting for David T. Little's noisy Newspeak to drop their first record, so the release of their new sweet light crude means we can finally EXHALE, and so now how is it?

Well, I'm not crazy about it, but that doesn't answer the question, since after all do I not like it because it really isn't good or do I not like it because it's just not my thing? Now THAT'S a puzzler, because there's a lot here that is Not My Thing—the sound here leans often towards the heavier genres of popular music, which are most effective when they've got that Wall Of Sound density, aren't they? Those turgid fuzzed-out textures you have to dig into to make everything out? When everything is articulated clearly, demanding instead of just allowing you to hear everything that's going on, we're falling into the genres I'm not crazy about, where the word "rock" is preceded by "prog" or followed by "opera."

But—no, it's not just that. Harmonically, melodically, these pieces leave me, for the most part, unmoved. And these genres don't always gel—there's always the hazard, when crashing all these musics into each other, of coming up with something that combines not the Best of Both Worlds but instead strays into "Most Unwanted Song" territory—nor do these pieces really hang together; I didn't feel, at the end, as if they'd added up to anything bigger.

Which is too bad, because these players are so great! In the aforelinked Victoire review, remember how I complained about their fiddler? Listen to Caleb Burhans play Missy Mazzoli's In Spite of All This and hear the difference a first-rate violinist can make. In Pat Muchmore's Brennschluß, Mellissa Hughes (of The Little Death) delivers her text like a total pro. How many singers can also Talk that convincingly?

Actually, of all the pieces on this program, it's Burhans's Requiem for a General Motors in Janesville, WI that I find myself returning to the most—it's the least fussy thing on the program, and for that reason the most successful as a rock composition. (Although this is clearly reflective of my listening again, I have to say that Oscar Bettison's B&E (with aggravated assault) also holds up pretty well, as the most progg'd-out piece on the program, so, who knows.) Here, anyway, is David T. Little's title track, in a video directed by NewAm regulars Satan's Pearl Horses, which is so 90s that I think I might love it:

As always with NewAm, you can listen to all of every track before you buy the album, here.

In that same envelope, I also got a copy of the new New Amsterdam disc from janus, a trio—featuring Amanda Baker, Nuiko Wadden, and Beth Meyers on flute, harp, and viola, respectively (although they also pick up a few other instruments and speak and sing along the way)—that I really hadn't heard as much about, which is crazy, because this disc is an Incredibly good listen.

(Can I point out here that the fact that the trio is named after a two-faced god reminds me CONSTANTLY of that SNL sketch about the R&B trio called Gemini's Twin? Okay sorry, continue.)

i am not, it's called, and it was recorded by Lawson White, because Lawson White records everything, apparently. Not only did he produce sweet light crude, he recorded the Isabelle O'Connell [SP?] album (Reservoir) whose sound I was raving about that one time, and he did Katrina Ballads for Ted Hearne, which sounded so clear without seeming naked, and he did Cathedral City for Victoire, which like sweet light crude was a little too clean for my money, i am not is not just clean, it is BONE WHITE, and it's terrific. Maybe it's because the album is strung together with interstitial movements composed by White's co–So Percussionist, Jason Treuting—crunchy, savory bites of music, kind of like those little rice crackers my dad's always eating?—that the album hangs together so well despite the range of different composers' voices; at first, I wanted to credit the harp-trio format, with its limited resources, for unifying the palette, but of course with the extra instruments and electronic accompaniments they employ on this record the actual possibilities are limitless. Those resources just happen to be very, very cannily exploited.

Here's janus playing the track Keymaster by (OF COURSE) Caleb Burhans:

I know what you're thinking and yes, it's super Philip Glassy, but it has its own smarts and its own charm—I love the sound of the viola harmonics–versus–flute unison at the beginning of the piece, and the simple fact is that this kind of writing is totally native to these instruments. Cameron Britt, Anna Clyne, and Ryan Brown each turn in a lovely movement as well, and Angelica Negron of Arturo en el Barco fame contributes the especially fascinating Drawings for Meyoko. Huh? What's that you say? Arturo en el Barco does not enjoy what you'd call "fame" yet? Oh, sorry, I temporarily mistook this for a just universe ruled over by a benevolent deity! Now click here and download some free Arturo en el Barco—okay thanks—and then click here to hear & buy i am not.

And then this OTHER recent New Amsterdam release, Penelope by NewAm co-founder Sarah Kirkland Snider. I'd not only heard a lot about it, but I knew Snider was a solid composer, having heard a particularly well-crafted piece of hers during her Yale days (conducted by her future husband, Real Steven Mackey!) on one of the New Music New Haven concerts; Signal is a great band, of course; and I'd loved Shara Worden's singing with My Brightest Diamond and Clogs. Still, there's no guarantee that all these parts will add up to something awesome. Is there anything more cringe-inducing than hearing an overqualified singer struggle to wring something worthwhile out of a song earnestly overcomposed by another talented musician? All the talent in the world don't count for nothin' if you can't write a ditty.

Well GREAT NEWS, y'all: Snider can, it turns out, apply her classical chops towards the creation of an amazingly solid pop record. It's seamless! Snider's hand is incredibly well-hidden here—this could be a singer-songwriter disc that just happens to have especially savvy harmonies and arrangements. Of course, it also helps that librettist Ellen McLaughlin also knows how to write a subtle refrain. And that the album was warmly, clearly produced by, OH LOOK, Lawson White again.

So I have greatly enjoyed listening to Penelope, but more than that, I have actually turned to it for when I am feeling down. It is a balm! It is tha bomb. Now, as I said, the whole album is surprisingly solid, so I really can't single out one song as being the one that you absolutely have to listen to, but also yes I can, it's this song, "Lotus Eaters," which I've been humming to myself for the past several weeks, in a weak and quavering voice, as the autumn sun descends closer and closer to the southern horizon and the days grow dark and cold:

This video I'm actually not that crazy about, despite the often exceedingly lovely photography—it just seems a bit "on the nose." BUT THAT SONG, right?? Buy it, and/or the rest of the rest of the album, here, and be glad you did.

(And remember! Now that NewAm has Naxos distribution, all of these albums are available not just at their website and iTunes but wherever fine compact discs are sold. Jinkies!)

Music Video for "Cathedral City" by Victoire

2010-10-13T10:41:00.003-04:00

Mellissa Hughes and Victoire come up with a new answer to the old question, "How many sopranos does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"*

*The previous answer: "Three! One to climb the ladder, one to pull it out from under, and one to say, 'That was really too high for her.'"

(Via PopMatters. I review the disc here.)

China Has, Indeed, Got Talent

2010-10-12T17:46:00.000-04:00

More talent in its big toe than I've got in ten fingers!

Explanation here.

Thoughts on the HD Broadcast of Rheingold

2010-10-11T12:47:00.000-04:00

I slipped into the screening at Yale on Saturday, as the plus-one of a Yale-affiliated friend.

Happily, most of my positive impressions from the live performance were confirmed by the broadcast. The look on Eric Owens' face when he is deciding, inwardly, that he will renounce love and forge the Ring was the most moving moment of the afternoon, for me (granted, I was a little jittery from all that caffeine); Stephanie Blythe, too, was a consummate Wagnerian, modulating her emotional state in synch with the orchestra and carrying herself like a goddess.

The amplification did Bryn Terfel a lot of favors as Wotan. His singing did seem far more relaxed, but it was clear that his mic also did a bit of heavy lifting in the bassier bits. It did Richard Croft a few favors as well, apparently, which I only learned secondhand—at the Prima, his Loge had plenty of ping in the back row of Family Circle, the Met's acoustical sweet spot, but apparently he was inaudible enough at Saturday's performance to earn him a few boos. (I still, for the record, have very little sympathy for anybody who booed.) For the broadcast audience, who'd heard him plenty loud, the boos were mystifying.

And the Rainbow Bridge was GREAT. Really spectacular effect.

Disappointments: Somebody's cellphone went off. (Couldn't tell if it was in the theater or the auditorium. "Ringtone des Nibelungen!" I whispered to my date. Yeah, I know.) Were the projections a little off-kilter at first? (The bubbles were rising not from the Rhinemaidens but a little to their right (our left), and ditto with the pebbles in that same scene.) The sound seemed a little compressed. (The opening E-flat wasn't as soft as it might have been, as some commenters here pointed out, and when the orchestra really boiled over it didn't have that hot, hot intensity of the Met's live brass.) Oh and Terfel's Wotan seemed a bit passive (which is an easy mistake to make to make, since he doesn't spend much of the opera DOING anything, but still exactly wrong—everybody's coming to him for help, after all; Terfel needs to convince us that they've got the right guy. He needs to be a King).

All in all, though, it was a happy afternoon at the opera. Movies. Operamovies. Ohmygod, and Brünnhilde tweeted at me!!!

Okay that's all. Boris tonight!

Reservoir Tip

2010-10-06T15:50:00.000-04:00

You guys, we need to start listening to more Donnacha Dennehy. Donnacha Dennehy, you need to start putting out more CDs! I keep hearing all these great pieces of his on New Sounds or in concert and then looking for CDs of them and no they haven't been released yet!

But some of his stuff is in print, and one more piece has just trickled out: Reservoir, a solo piano work he wrote for Isabelle O'Connell. O'Connell's on keys in his Dublin-based ensemble CRASH, conducted by Alan Pierson of Alarm Will Sound fame, and the focus on her latest disc (also called Reservoir) is on Irish composers, which is fantastic, because the East Coast new-music scene can get so provincial, right? Sometimes it seems like we're all just playing each other's stuff up here, and so it's quite nice to get a hot injection of fresh meat from the British Isles.

And this is a terrific array of composers. There's the title track, of course, which reminds me of the surprisingly intense effusions of sentiment that you'll hear in a Terry Riley piece, but I was also quite taken with the Ligeti-like relentlessness of Brian Irvine's three movements from The Klippel Collection. The one piece that didn't appeal to me was Jennifer Walshe's becher, a collage of musical quotations from rock and classical music, which seemed conceptually facile—each quotation seemed designed to elicit an easy "ah-ha!", like some cross between a Music Appreciation drop-the-needle quiz and the trailers for EPIC MOVIE—but it also serves as a phenomenal showcase for O'Connell's stylistic versatility, as does the disc as a whole. These composers don't have all that much in common other than a knack for virtuoso piano writing (quick namedump: Ian Wilson, Jane O'Leary, Seóirse Bodley, John Buckley, Elaine Agnew, Philip Martin, CHECK 'EM OUT, ALL OF 'EM), and O'Connell comes through in a big way.

The last time I was this pleasantly surprised by a disc was Danny Holt's A Fast Jump, another new-music solo recital by a pianist who isn't as famous as he ought to be; the other thing these two discs have in common is the quality of the recording. O'Connell's piano thunders and sings and sounds great. Reservoir's out now on Diatribe Records (you can order here), and I basically have no idea what's a "Diatribe Records," but apparently they know how to record an album there.

You can also hear Reservoir, the piece, when O'Connell plays it at the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn on November 5. I know you'll be disappointed to learn that the rest of the music is by regular old Americans, but I promise that these are totally underplayed Americans—John Luther Adams, Bunita Marcus, James Mobberley—and the other act on the bill is Flutronix, a flute duo whose recordings play automatically (you've been warned!) at the bottom of their homepage. (I highly recommend the second track, Stacked, by flutronicist Allison Loggins-Hull.) That's 7:30 p.m., admission only $10.

Get Your Hahn On

2010-10-01T17:52:00.000-04:00

Have we discussed the genius of Hilary Hahn's programming yet? Probably, right? But lately she does this thing where she puts together one household-name violin concerto with a concerto nobody ever plays: Paganini/Spohr, Sibelius/Schoenberg, and now the Tchaikovsky concerto paired with a concerto written personally for Hahn by Jennifer Higdon. This is great because it helps connoisseurs (snobs) like you and me from letting, say, yet another disc of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concerti from dropping into the vast ocean of Tchaik/Sibelius pairings, and because let's face it America's classical radio–loving grandmothers are about as likely to demand the Schoenberg/Higdon pairing they heard about on NPR as they are to pose for a knifethrower.

So depending on who you are, you're likely to consider one of these courses your Vegetables and one of them your Dessert, and if you're a regular reader of this blog, I'm going to guess that it's not the Dead White Male. But I have a very… I have a very intimate personal relationship with a specific recording (Heifetz) of this specific concerto, which I'd probably better not get into here. I'll defend this piece with knives, if I have to, is what I am saying. I really feel, without entirely rational justification, that this is one of the greatest concerti ever written for any instrument, in the history of the form. It manages not to fall into that Concerto Trap, where the first movement is a SERIOUS ESSAY that goes on about ten minutes beyond the point where it starts to become an excruciating bore, and the third movement is a kicky little bagatelle, and that or the second-movement aria is the only thing I actually want to listen to. The first movement of this Tchaik is pure musical ecstasy! The second movement is also gorgeous! The third movement is total gravy!

Anyway, the point is: there's no filler on this disc.

Hilary Hahn's Tchaikovsky is, first of all, meticulous. Maybe even too meticulous? During her entrance, each one of those little black notes is so carefully laid down you could probably transcribe them by ear. It's an arresting effect, but surely the character of those opening bars is supposed to be a bit more extemporaneous. Heifetz is unafraid to make the whole runs sound like big blurry smears of sound, rather than discreet little points, and by doing actually so makes the big picture clearer.

But Hahn's clarity is pretty awesome. It reminds me of what my viola teacher used to say, that when she was a student they would listen to Heifetz (that name again!) 78s at the wrong speed in order to hear if it was true he used vibrato on each and every 16th note. Hahn isn't an "old-fashioned" player as in "sentimental," but a quick, narrow vibrato seems to run through every note of hers as well, every line taut and electric like high-tension wire. She's got a terrifically powerful left hand, and she wants you to know it—every note's ringing and bright and full of life.

But you know who else is great here is Vassily Petrenko, who along with Hahn somehow makes the Tchaikovsky concerto sound more Tchaikovskian than any interpreter I've ever heard. The slow movement sounds like the Tchaikovsky of the operas, with a folksong's combination of heavy pathos and steady forward motion; the last movement sounds like the Tchaikovsky of the ballets, full of flying leaps and fairy magic and shit; the wind soloists of the Royal Liverpool Phil give pleasingly tart, rustic solos throughout the piece.

So while this isn't my desert island recording of the Tchaikovsky, it ought to please fans of the composer as well as fans of virtuoso fiddling in general—but even so, I would hesitate to claim that the Tchaik is the A-side here, and the Higdon the B-side, and not just because the Higdon comes first in play order.

Really, I'm not sure why I've been so disinclined to seek out the music of Jennifer Higdon in the past. I must have heard some piece of hers that didn't strike me once, and then when her name just kept coming up with regard to this prize or that commission, I said to myself, oh, she's one of THOSE composers, YOU KNOW THE ONES, who's middle-of-the-road enough to win all the prizes and get all the commissions, but, ugh, people, don't be like me. Don't take that attitude about music, ESPECIALLY music you don't actually know. That's the moral of this story, because I finally sat down and listened to this piece and I assure you that it is Quite Good.

The first movement seduced me immediately with its violin concerto-ness. (Are there enough tautologies in this review yet? Tchaikovsky that sounds like Tchaikovsky, and a violin concerto that sounds like a violin concerto…) The pitch materials, the actual music-stuff, are pretty engaging, and just as importantly, it's a fine showcase for the soloist. But it's the gestural language that hooked my ear, and that's what I want in a concerto dammit is HOOKS. In the small picture, it's the physicality of Higdon's writing for the instrument, the echoes of the Hahn's harmonics in the percussion, and the back-and-forth between Hahn and orchestral soli; in the big picture, it's the way all of the material returns just when you'd have wanted it to, if only you'd known to ask.

The second movement is called "Chaconni," which I'm pretty sure is not a word, but which I guess describes the way the piece spins out over a ground—not that my ears have enough brains between them to pick out how the technique is used in this incredibly elaborate movement. There's a real pleasure, anyway, in the way Higdon intertwines all the competing lines, and the last movement, like Tchaikovsky's, is a stomper.

I actually cannot imagine that this piece will not enter the American repertory—it's just too much fun—and Hahn's Tchaikovsky is a strong enough contender to be measured against the classic recordings. Everybody should probably check this disc out—and violin buffs, actually, must.

New Das Rheingold at the Met, You Guys

2010-09-30T15:12:00.010-04:00

…The entire proscenium
Is covered with a rippling azure scrim.
The three sopranos dart hither and yon

On invisible strings. Cold lights
Cling to bare arms, fair tresses. Flat
And natural aglitter like paillettes
Upon the great green sonorous depths float

Until with pulsing wealth the house is filled,
No one believing, everybody thrilled.

from "Matinées" by James Merrill

THE RING CYCLE. It is so hard to stage! Can we disentangle the deadly vines of poisonous German nationalism from the ash-tree of Wagner's Nordic iconography, or are they in fact joined at the root (METAPHOR!); can we interpret his narrative coherently (complete with gold-grubbing subhumans and ~~inbred~~ purebred Nordic supermen) without echoing his noxious social values; can we even realize his special effects–heavy stage directions convincingly for an audience to whom 19th-century stage technology—and indeed, to a certain extent, any stage spectacle—is something quaint and alienating?

Let's not forget, people, this is an artist who routinely symbolizes divine power with swans, doves, rainbows and flying horses. So if you think that Wagner MUST be staged "literally," that is if you really think this imagery will resonate with contemporary audiences just as it did with his contemporaries, then congrats on having managed to avoid all contact with the past half-century's most revolting kitsch. I mean,

right?

So what do you do! You can go High-Concept, and try to supplant Wagner's elaborate mythological order with another that challenges the composer's Nordic nostalgia directly, or at least to translate it into a rather less cobwebby set of cultural signifiers (e.g., make Wotan a powerful businessman instead of a king, since nowadays "king" = "tyrant" or "figurehead," never "wise but too-proud leader." And you can try and shed some of the kitschy overtones in favor of something with just a bit of a modern edge to it (e.g., make the rainbow bridge a contraption of neon or lasers or something, instead of a greeting-card rainbow).

The design of Robert LePage's production leans towards the latter of these two approaches. Aside from the much-publicized, high-tech unit set, LePage's designs are largely conservative. He's claimed to have drawn inspiration from Wagner's original costumes, but he's updated them in canny ways—three gods wear muscly breastplates reminiscent of the "dark," "edgy" Hollywood reboot of some superhero franchise ("Well, what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?"), and the special effects are interactive CGI projections.

And LePage's use of the technology is impressive. Loge, god of fire, appears surrounded by flame; when the Rhinemaidens sing, bubbles come out; the gods' movements in Valhalla stir the clouds around them. You've probably heard by now about the glitch that screwed up the rainbow bridge, so that instead of entering Valhalla like they had been spending THE ENTIRE OPERA PLANNING TO DO, AT TERRIBLE COST, AND WITH DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES YET TO COME, they all just kind of peaced out. Anybody who'd seen the pre-production photos of that scene was probably all, "Whoops," and anybody who hadn't was probably a little confused and disappointed. So it was a letdown, and one which slightly overshadowed the amazing coups de theatre the set had made possible earlier—but which, on reflection, were a good deal more interesting than anything that the Met's last production had to offer, visually speaking. Wotan and Loge's descent to Nibelheim dazzled the crowd, and when Donner did his stormclouds-and-lightning thing at the end, it was a fucking thrill. And then the little things: small, brilliant LEDs illuminating the Rhinegold, Loge's fiery fingertips, Alberich's helm, and of course his Ring conveyed Magic Power simply and effectively.

But what he didn't use the technology for was also pretty impressive. Once you've got the stage filled with video screens, you can literally do ANYTHING. "Oh, let's put the Vatican behind them, but it's made out of candy and also there's a mushroom cloud." "I can literally do that!" But if you can do anything, it's worth nothing. We might as well be watching it on TV. Another thing LePage said before this Ring debuted was that he wanted to avoid turning it into Avatar, which I wondered if it might be a subtle dig at the Ring put on by Fura dels baus, an unremitting spectacle of constantly shifting video imagery, stage contraptions and acrobatics: LePage is often content to keep the stage still during the moments when the human drama is supposed to be at the fore; the gods stomp around Valhalla and sing, and the drama is communicated with good old-fashioned blocking—at any given moment in this staging, you can read a character's relationships to everyone else in how and where they're standing—and, yes, singing. (I'll get to the singing in a bit, I promise.)

In some ways, this was the Rheingold of my dreams. In a word, the opera is "elemental": it takes place in the heavens, underwater, and underground; it's about fire and gold and rainbows, pure and intense colors of light. LePage's set emphasizes the vertical strata on which the drama unfolds—divine, human, and subhuman planes of existence—and the "sky" behind it is colored by a single horizontal band of light, glowing behind a scrim, so that (for instance) in the first scene, when the Rhinemaidens sing about their gold's awakening in the morning sun, the blue above them transforms to a golden glow.

One advantage of working from Wagner's costume designs and all of these vertical levels is that the giants didn't end up looking completely retarded, as they do in just about every other production of the Ring ever. Somebody ends up putting Fafner and Fasolt on platform boots with giant latex hands and coneheads and TA DAH, you're looking at John Travolta and Forest Whitaker in Battlefield Earth.

(THEY ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THIS. WHY DO THEY ALWAYS LOOK LIKE THIS.) Instead, LePage gave us giants in slightly chunky costumes standing above and behind the rest of the cast at every appearance, so that a sort of false perspective made them seem Huge and Looming.

I am a total snob, of giants, and this production passed the test. I was a little dismayed when the death of Fasolt earned an unintentional laugh from the crowd; this is one of the trickiest bits of business in the opera. It's so oddly timed—the brothers get the Ring, Fafner kills Fasolt for it, Wotan says "oh snap," and then life goes on. Considering that this Cain & Abel moment (or should I say Sméagol & Déagol moment?) is the greatest act of violence in the entire opera, it's strangely underplayed. It was satisfyingly brutal here: when Fafner hit him with his spear, I thought, "That wasn't hard enough to kill him! That's lousy fight choreography"; then Fasolt moved a little and I was like "Oh whoops he's not dead," and then Fafner beat him some more and finally impaled him, and it was horrifying. Great! Then, as if to reflect the way Wagner and his characters shrug off the murder, the giant robo-set moved in such a way as to unceremoniously dump the body offstage, and he slid down kind of like this. Hmm. Well, It was an ingenious gesture, and I'm sorry it didn't come off as dramatically as it should've.

There were also laughs during Alberich's transformation into a dragon, which I was a little uncomfortable with at first, even though this actually is supposed to be a funny scene. Again, the laughs come from Wagner's own timing, and I probably shouldn't have worried about it—it's not a bad dragon. (The toad is even more low-tech—it's not even a puppet; it just "hops" onstage and is captured.)

I guess part of the reason I was uncomfortable is that Alberich, in this production, is not the stupid little clown we're used to seeing; in fact, he's fucking terrifying. I didn't want to read any reviews of this performance before writing this, but I couldn't help running across this one:

and, yup. You'll recall that I last saw Eric Owens threatening to destroy the world in Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at the New York Phil; he was pretty scary then, and he was even scarier this time. He was funny when he had to be—scrambling up the pebbly CGI shoal to chase the Rhinemaidens—but his humiliation was also painful to watch, and when he promised to take his revenge upon the Earth, it was all too believable. (It helped that the boiling intensity of James Levine's brass section seethed up out of the pit straight up to the back row of the Family Circle and SCALDED MY FACE OFF at this point.) He is my new favorite Alberich, I think. He and LePage created a really terrific villain.

All of the singers were champs, really. Bryn Terfel, sharping and hollering a little in the lower register, is maybe not a born Wotan, but as my friend Maury pointed out afterwards, who is nowadays (COME BACK JAMES MORRIS), and whatever the condition of the low notes, all of the high notes were magnificent blasts from the Terfel Trombone. The Croft brothers, ~~Sid and Marty~~ Dwayne and Richard, were superb as Donner and Loge respectively—especially Richard Croft, whose voice has a far sweeter sound than the role requires. Freia's distress, as sung by Wendy Bryn Harmer, was affecting, and the star of the evening (for me) (and, from the sound of the applause, for a lot of people) was Stephanie Blythe as Fricka—her huge, well-controlled sound was all one could ask for.

What else. Anything else? I mentioned James Levine was fantastic. But he seemed so frail, going up to get his applause! I still can't think too hard about what will happen to the Met when he's gone. Somebody get him some more golden apples, STAT. We need him back in godlike health. Receiving applause mixed with a boo or two, or a few, Robert LePage—that's the way it goes, I guess, when you chuck the most beautiful set at the Metropolitan Opera and replace it with a malfunctioning wall. Well, whatever, HATERS.

I saw all your favorite movie stars in the lobby: Patrick Stewart, Anjelica Huston. That's all of your favorite celebrities, right? I think that's all you need. Just two. And of course your favorite critics—James Jorden, Alex Ross, Seth Colter Walls, Zachary Woolfe. Oh and poet/librettist J.D. McClatchy was there, with his partner, superstar book designer Chip Kidd! McClatchy's translations of Mozart libretti are actually coming out in a single volume shortly, and I sent away for a review copy, so with any luck I'll be reviewin' it for you very soon, and I promise to be BRUTAL, because that's the highest compliment, right? (The second highest compliment is that I didn't quote any more of the above Merrill poem, since I think McClatchy is Merrill's literary executor and so if I quoted the whole thing without permission he could come to the record shop where I work and slap the discs out of my mouth.)

AND FINALLY, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that I have finally acquiesced to the urgings of my friends and added a NEW T-SHIRT DESIGN, designed to piss off (a) the people who tell you you're not allowed to enjoy Wagner's music because he hated Jews and (b) the old worm-eaten bigot himself, whatever afterlife he's gazing up at us from:

That's funny, right? I'm not in trouble, right? Anyway it's also the perfect shirt to wear next time you tell this guy to KNOCK IT OFF.

Who Wants to Listen to New Music and GET BAKED (Goods)?

2010-09-24T17:20:00.000-04:00

YOU DO, that's who, and tomorrow night you will get your chance, with performances from a crazy all-star lineup including Newspeak (new-music band), Todd Reynolds (violin), Kathleen Supové (piano), and Matthew Welch (bagpipes), except that those words in parentheses are kind of like if I said "Abraham Lincoln (politician)" and oh but P.S. there's a TON of other excellent performers, there's going to be a raffle AND an auction in addition to the sweets and other merch that are going to be on sale, AND you two free drinks, AHEM, in addition to the concert, for only a $15 ticket. The doors open at 4:30, which is less than 24 hours from now, so start laying out your clothes this instant, and the show runs from 5 until 11:30 p.m.

WHAT??

Yes. You're even allowed to take a break and come back later, if you start to get new-music'd out over the course of seven hours, as the ticket price includes reëntry, but why would you leave? There's food and drink and probably clothing for sale right there, so conceivably this concert could be seven MONTHS long before you even started suffering from any health side effects. It's at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, which is a place in New York. I don't think I mentioned that people have been talking on Twitter about some of the items being auctioned and that they sound pretty incredible? So go to this thing! Go go!

More Tales from the Tank

2010-09-16T08:45:00.005-04:00

I love Mark Swed. (So do you!) When I lived out West I used to feel like he was my critic, in a way that I have never quite felt about our East Coast critics.

Also, I hate to look like I'm leaping to the defense of Nico Muhly, a composer who really couldn't need my support any less. He's got his own damn blog, for one thing, and for another, hasn't he already gotten a metric ton of love from the classical press? Also, I can't even pretend to be objective about (#1) a friend who has (#2) paid me American dollars to write about his music in the past. Still, I couldn't help but laugh, "fa fa fa," at the way Swed's review of Nico's latest CDs is basically begging to be deconstructed on Nico's own aforementioned blog. Swed uses all these Code Words! Here, let me show you what I mean.

First, read the review in full. Isn't it well written? But very negative!

OR IS IT. Let us examine, shall we, its Nico-related passages:

Here the chorus is being used to persuade a wider public than New Yorkers about Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of that town.

Muhly, who turned 29 last month, has already received two of New York's top accolades — a New Yorker profile and a Metropolitan Opera commission. Although less known elsewhere, he has L.A. champions in Gershon and also the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's Jeffrey Kahane. Plus, Muhly has also composed appropriately treacly soundtracks to "Joshua" and "The Reader."
…
Muhly can be a precious and facile composer, a showoff.
…
But Muhly also has a delicate touch, and when the sweet sounds of ethereal early music singing meets post-Minimalist rhythmic rapture, the music floats in its own special space.
…
A young composer begging attention couldn't ask for anything more.

This reminds me SO MUCH of this passage from Philip Brett's essay on Britten (which I already quoted, appropriately enough, in my liner notes for Nico's first album):

To appreciate the fact that there was considerable tension surrounding not only Britten's homosexuality, but also the success that he enjoyed despite it, one has to dig a little deeper beneath such blatant attacks as that against "bachelor composers" in the Craft/Stravinsky conversation books. What is revealed is a curious set of opposite and equally loaded critical terms. On the one hand Britten's music was characterized as "mere cleverness," "devilish smart." On the other it was accused of sentimentality. Behind both attitudes, of course, lay the unspoken fascination with Britten's homosexuality, both labels being the reverse sides of the oppositions claft/cleverness, sincerity/sentimentality, which belong among a whole plethora of binarisms that Sedgwick has claimed as "epistemologically charged pairings, condensed in the figures of 'the closet' and 'coming out.'"

Tell me I'm wrong! In fact, I was actually delighted to discover that we could easily go through this review and switch out these loaded words of faint praise for nearly exact synonyms, and by merely substituting tonally different (often, less "gay"-coded) adjectives, totally invert the apparent meaning of the review. Watch:

Here the chorus is being used to persuade a wider public than New Yorkers about Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of that town.

Sounds like a con job! How about:

Here the chorus champions Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of New York.

Same meaning, totally different connotations. But let's get to the gay-bashing:

Plus, Muhly has also composed appropriately treacly soundtracks to "Joshua" and "The Reader."

"Appropriately treacly" soundtracks to a creepy kid movie and a Holocaust picture? What could be appropriate about treacle? Well okay, I'm not arguing with his actual opinions here, it's fine, I'll let it go. But:

Muhly can be a precious and facile composer, a showoff.

Aren't "precious" and "facile" TRANSPARENTLY ways of complimenting an artist in a mean way? You could just as easily say:

Muhly is a meticulous but prolific composer, a virtuoso.

Except when you say it that way, it doesn't sound faggy enough.

Anyhow, you get the picture. How could such a positive review be so mean! Well, I sort of understand where Swed's coming from. There's this weird provincialism in New York that assumes that it's the classical music center of America, if not the Universe, and when you're working in a market that is constantly getting dismissed, you gotta represent. And there's nothing to sour one on an artist like the stink of Media Hype.

But the problem is that neither of these things is Nico's fault ("begging attention"? he doesn't even have a publicist!), and even if they were, they wouldn't be audible on the CDs under review. Please, music critics, review things that are audible!

Of course, I'm prejudiced totally oppositewise, so you're probably taking all of these opinions with a grain of salt as well. (If you ain't, you oughta be.) Thanks to Proper Discord for bringing this one to my attention—there is not enough Swed in my life. But, maybe somebody should say something to him.

Composerly Memes

2010-09-15T16:01:00.003-04:00

laskdjfals;fjals;dfjsalfkj I have been SO LAZY lately, I scarcely blogged a blog all summer. My big excuse is that I finally wrote my first article for a glossy magazine and I've been stressing over that but really it's a short article and a pretty puny excuse. Also I helped my brother move to Texas! Scroll down the right-hand column to see the bitchin' lamp we got for his new office. But that is also a puny excuse since the whole time I was in the car I was revising that article.

By the way all of my interviewees for that piece were SO GREAT, I can't believe how much amazing material they gave me. It was pretty painful to distill pages of brilliant comments from James "La Cieca" Jorden and Zachary "Z-Wolf" Woolfe into the itty bitty handful of quotes I could actually shoehorn into the article. Which brings me the other thing I've written lately, this pair of reviews for La Cieca, of discs from the James Levine 40th Met anniversary boxsets: Berg's Lulu, Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles. You'll want to click through; some great comments await. A sample:

So provocative! Clicky clicky.

Cieca's comments also got me to thinking again about the ways in which composers are and aren't oppressed by mainstream classical institutions. Apparently Caleb Burhans' string quartet for JACK was actually Boo'd, at Darmstadt? Which is on the one hand distressing (were they booing it on the grounds of style alone? or was the piece actually bad?? neither of those is a very happy possibility!) and on the other hand, forget it, JACK, it's Darmstadt-town. Somebody told me that the Kronos Quartet was boo'd there before they even sat down; after the performance, they shook the dirt off their tevas and never looked back. If that story's true, MORE POWER TO KRONOS. Y'all don't need those bitches. (I mean, can you IMAGINE booing someone BEFORE THEY PLAYED?)

In some respects, what seems like systematic institutional discrimination is really just built in to the institutions—the perennial complaint, for instance, that only "academic" composers are recognized by academia; well, duh!—and there's no way around that tautology except to wait for that battleship, whether it's The University or The Symphony or The Festival Scene, to slowly turn your way. (Okay actually there is one way, and fortunately a lot of people are doing it nowadays, which is to get your friends together and pilot your own sleek little dinghy into those uncharted waters you've got your eye on.) And sometimes you will actually, personally be kept down by composers who find your music ideologically unacceptable, such as in (PDF) this article John Halle wrote about what a jerk Mario Davidovsky was to him. He makes a pretty convincing case! Mario Davidovsky: jerk.

A combination of the above factors has produced a surprising number of bitter, bitter boomers and post-boomers. What's great though is that those people's students, having been told that there are no stylistic Wrong Answers, are increasingly setting out in fleets of those metaphorical dinghies. Look at Corey Dargel! I know I keep harping on him, but that's just because he's one of my super duper favoritest composers in the world right now. Or in other words, if he would like a pull-quote for his press materials: Each new song from Corey Dargel only reinforces my sense that he is one of the most compelling and important composers emerging from the New York scene. I'm still kicking myself for having missed the reading from his new opera (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), The Three Christs, this past Monday, and someone should probably kick ME for having totally failed to review his new record yet despite its having come out like last year or something. (I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL REVIEW IT, I'VE JUST BEEN… BUSY.)

But one interesting thing about his success is how few of the conventional trappings have surrounded it. Yes, he has written for starry new-music institutions like the American Composers Orchestra and the newer but no less starry International ICE Ensemble, but mostly he's been putting on concerts in nightclubs, by himself or with a handful of friends, and putting out largely D.I.Y. records on independent labels. He basically embodies the notion that you young composers don't need to chase the DMA, the prizes, and the professorship in order to be able to make the music they want to make.

(Lest we romanticize the situation over here, let us also note that for many composers, while "making the music they want to make" might be very important, things like "comprehensive dental insurance" might also be very important, and it's pretty nasty to have to trade that stability for the opportunity to make meaningful art.)

And so while I am totally OVER hearing established, middle-aged composers with tenure or glamorous commissions or whatever complain about what victims they are because they got one bad review someplace (I'm not even going to name names here; you can fill in the blank), I do have to cringe whenever I hear America's most Dargelicious composer picking up their old refrain, with tweets like this about the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's open commissioning thingie, Project 440:

Because FIRST of all, isn't that kind of a mean thing to say about the composers who made the finals? Actually, now that I look at it, the rhetoric he's using borrows a lot from the old modernist bullies—the finalists are "mundane," not "innovative" enough.

On the face of it, this would seem to be the "tautological" complaint. Why isn't Orpheus (most famous for recording, like, Handel's Water Music and the Mozart wind concerti) commissioning more out-there music? Well, they're not a new-music ensemble; they really don't hang out on the cutting edge. But have they really chosen such boring composers? If I could pick four winners out of the final 12, here's who I'd probably go with. This decision is totally subjective and shockingly non-binding:

1. Timothy Andres, composer/pianist, bright young star on Nonesuch Records.
Facile comparison: John Adams.
I'll admit I've never been shocked by Andres's music, but it seems like a good fit for Orpheus, and frankly, it's incredibly well put-together. Listen to this stuff, both of these pieces are really kinda moving:

2. Tyondai Braxton, rock star, plays with BATTLES on Warp Records.
Facile comparison: Frank Zappa.
I was never a huge fan of the BATTLES LP, but I have to admit Braxton's style meshes incredibly well with the sound of a chamber orchestra in these clips. Exuberant to the brink of kitsch; maybe even (dare I say!) subversive?

3. Alexandre Lunsqui, Brazilian awesome person.
Facile comparison: Dude, I don't know. Somebody from Europe?
Okay now HERE are some unfamiliar orchestral effects. This is crazy! What's even going on here! This is very exciting! Alexandre Lunsqui should be famous!

4. Andrew Norman, Modestonian pianist/composer.
Facile comparison: STOP IT, LEAVE ME ALONE, I DON'T KNOW
I am IN THE TANK for Norman, having admired his music immensely since I was a young 'un (btw I'm sorry this list is All Male and includes not one but Two pianists from Yale), and he's such an intensely self-critical and publicity-shy composer that it causes me a spasm of physical pain to hear someone gripe that he isn't enough of an "innovator" to deserve his little bit of success, but all the same, I hope you'll agree that it's not just me, that his music is quite well-wrought, lively, and satisfying to the ear:

I mean, right?? These are all good composers! Everyone one the list whom I DIDN'T name is a really good composer! They would all write something awesome for Orpheus! Let's just relax, everybody. Young composers, I want to see a little bit less of this

and a whole lot more of this:

Right?

Discuss.

NICE

2010-08-21T16:30:00.004-04:00

So I went Monday night to hear the International Contemporary Ensemble, or as they're sometimes known, "ICE," or "the ICE ensemble," or as I like to call them, "the international ICE ensemble." The international ICE ensemble are actually not, as their name might lead you to believe, from Iceland, but rather from Chicago or New York or something. [Note to self: look up where ICE is from before clicking PUBLISH. Actually, eh, don't bother.]

BUT ENOUGH WITH THE JOKING, I'm just a little punchy, the point is that they were pretty fantastically great. It's such a cliché, and a fallacy, to say that an ensemble can (or should) play so well that they present a given piece umediated by of interpretation, but that was certainly the illusion Monday night—I kept having to remind myself to pay attention to the performers, not just the score, so that I could tell y'all about them.

The program was part of a Mostly Mozart series curated by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, your favorite pianist (I mean seriously, am I the only one who watches this video frame by frame to make sure he hasn't cheated and grown a third hand?), looking at the music of Bach in the context of a giant survey of polyphony, spanning cultures and æons. This concert specifically was about juxtaposing the European/British avant-garde with their interpretations of baroque counterpoint, so the first piece was a Purcell arrangement by George Benjamin, featuring Aimard on celeste, accompanied by just a few ICEpeople who kept sneaking in to realize and resolve the long lines the celeste couldn't sustain. It was eerie and sweet and unsettling, and I wish I had a CD of it. SOMEBODY SEND ME A CD OF IT.

Next was Benjamin's Antara, featuring Aimard on sampler—dueling ICE's Corey Smythe—and Claire Chase and Eric Lamb played (the fuck out of their) flute soli. The piece is an elaborate exploration of a sampled pan-pipe—flutes imitating its breathy sound, violin harmonics imitating its overtones, and the keyboards, of course, supplying the "actual" pipes. It draws the listener into a dense and shadowy thicket of sound, only to be BOMBARDED BY AN AMBUSH OF BRASS BRASS AND PERCUSSION. The samplers controlled their attacks with pedals and noodled through microtonal scales, but still Benjamin was unable to fully liberate the sound of a sampled pan-pipe from the cultural context of somebody scoring a TV show and wanting a naïve Andean sound (TV scores are racist) but being too cheap to hire actual Incas. The flutes aped the pipes, the band aped the pipes, the samplers aped the pipes—I wonder if the piece would have felt more satisfying if there had just been an actual set of pipes onstage. Why not? Maybe that was the point? At any rate, odd, and beautiful.

Next, from Harrison Birtwistle's Bach Measures, two arrangements of Bach's Li'l Organ Book chorales, which were pretty zesty and sparkly and cute. "I think that one's from Birtwistle's Christmas album," said somebody next to me, which has prompted me to do another mockup for you guys in the classical record industry:

YOU'RE WELCOME, again.

It occurs to me that there's something perhaps inherently campy about Bach arrangements for new-music ensemble. It's drag, basically: they put on those shoes and those tights and that big curly wig and they get a little zany about doing those things they aren't supposed to do (Perfect Authentic Cadences, NAUGHTY) while ostensibly underlining those things that are most 20th/21st-century about Bach's own music. You can read about this in my forthcoming dissertation, "SWITCHED ON: Performing Bach and Gender in the 20th Century." I think part of this lurid effect stems from the chamber orchestra's lack of a firm sonic foundation in the form of a large string section: the colors are constantly shifting, every line is broken up amongst the different sections, and we get a lot of coloristic frosting, not a lot of actual cake.

That's fine! It's fun! Just something to be aware of. Another thing that is fine and fun, but be aware: usually with a project like Aimard's "Bach & Polyphonies," the comparison/contrast between old and new is a little skewed towards the contrast. What usually happens is that the tonal stuff ends up sounding a little dry and old-fashioned and the crazy bleep bloop music sounds crazier than ever. Birtwistle, though, a composer I don't know well (not that I know Benjamin well, or Lachenmann), really did open up a bit when his Slow Frieze was paired with his Bach arrangements. Those same contrapuntal voices, chugging along steadily through their material, except that they were all chugging along at different speeds in the Birtwistle, and without a tonal center. But the point is, the piece spoke, and all the more clearly thanks to Bach's intervention.

After intermission it was Berio's Contrapunctus XIX, one of Berio's many "completions" of unfinished works (in this case, the end of Bach's Art of Fugue) and the only piece on the program I'd heard before. The Gimmick is, see, that Berio ends the piece not by completing the fugue but by allowing each voice to trail off and then resolve to a ghostly cluster on the notes B-A-C-H (that's German for B-flat, A, C, B-natural), which Bach had used as a musical signature within the piece. It's a beautiful dedication, and heavily dependent on the ensemble's ability to summon up the appropriate musical color, which they did throughout the piece, keenly and sensitively. I did wish that they'd gotten a little sentimental—it would've been exciting to hear them let loose a bit more passionately on the B-A-C-H section, for instance, when that motif first came up.

But the real meat of the program was the final piece, Lachenmann's Mouvement, an astonishing work that I'm grateful to have heard in person—it's impossible to imagine such a piece having anything close to the same effect when emitted, disembodied, from a pair of speakers. The ensemble was divided spatially into three sections—winds, strings, percussion—which then traded and developed musical material, which was to my delight not, for the most part, pitch or rhythmic material, but pure timbre, created mostly through an incredible array of extended techniques. I never even knew, e.g., that bowing the pegs of a fiddle would even MAKE a sound. But the whole thing cohered, which I suspect is a testament to the band's exceptional musicianship.

Okay, a cranky little voice inside me asks the question of, if you're not going to let the performers play their instruments properly, why write for conventional instruments at all—that is, if you're going to treat the instruments like pieces of wood and lengths of tubing, why not just have them bow pieces of wood and strike lengths of tubing, since you're not really using the performers' training or their instruments' sound-generating properties—but yknow SHUT UP, cranky little voice, for there are plenty of practical and conceptual reasons why you might write unconventional techniques for conventional instruments, and so if you're going to do it this well, I'm not going to complain about it. The piece had basically everything I demand from a piece of avant-garde music—a clear, dramatic form, and arresting new sounds—and I could scarcely have been more satisfied by such an adventurous piece of music. The piece ended; the audience went nuts; ICE deserved it. Thank you, ICE! I shall endeavor to attend more of your concerts in the very near future.

I Think that You Will Be Amused by Our Collection of Musical Clocks

2010-08-08T15:29:00.002-04:00

So I've been very busy lately, but I really wanted to start blogging regularly again, now that I have a lot of free time, but I haven't really got anything to say this morning, so I thought that instead of saying anything I would just share with you some videos from the website of Utrecht's Museum Speelklok, "The most cheerful museum in the Netherlands," which it very well may be!

Here is a link to all of their videos; I suggest that you employ a friend to press Play on each video, and that you then listen to each tune whilst dancing around the room holding a small, patient housecat (e.g.). Then you can go back and watch the individual mechanisms at work. The mechanical ingenuity is the most remarkable part of most of these devices, although some really great music has been written for mechanical instruments. Think of Mozart writing tiny masterpieces for musical clocks, or Ligeti (inspired by Nancarrow's example) arranging his music for the barrel organ. I believe Swatch once commissioned a chime from Philip Glass. What tune is this thing playing, though? It's lovely:

Here's a most charming little organ playing the old-timey French tune, "Est-ce Mars":

Here's one where robot fingers play a wheel of violins:

Wow! Still sounds better than the strings on Renee Fleming's last record. Ooh and here's a REALLY fancy one. Who wouldn't want to hear THIS every hour?
And here's one where AUGHHHHH

Okay Utrecht WHAT THE FUCK.

That's all for now! Stay tuned for more tomorrow, maybe.

Full of Shit: or, 'Poo Poo Poo Poo Poopageno'

2010-06-26T14:23:00.001-04:00

You know, I keep saying THAT IS THE STUPIDEST THING I HAVE EVER HEARD more and more often these days, and yet it's true every time. The cottage industry that has sprung up around the thoroughly debunked Mozart Effect keeps reaching lower and lower lows; it has finally, literally, reached the sewer. Reports BBC Music,

A pioneering German sewage plant is piping Mozart opera to waste-eating microbes in a bid to increase their efficiency and lower costs. Initial tests at the centre in Treuenbrietzen, south-west of Berlin, suggest that the music stimulates the microbes, encouraging a faster breakdown of biomass.

Right! No, sure! Of course! This is totally real science. They probably had control groups of shit-eating microbes listening to Soler and Cimarosa before they came to the conclusion that Mozart was the most effective at optimizing the breakdown of shit.

But why do the microbes respond so well? Stucki believes the answer is simple: ‘Mozart managed to transpose universal laws of nature into his music. It has an effect on people of every age and background. So why not on microbes? After all, they’re living organisms just like us’.

Yup! Universal laws of nature. In the music. That is completely, scientifically true. Microbes, living in water, eating shit, with no ears, respond to Mozart the same way you and I do.

Hey, classical record labels, are you gonna cash in on this, or what??? Here, I even designed the cover for you:

YOU'RE WELCOME. This one's free.

Love,
Daniel Stephen Johnson
Head Marketing Consultant

Lives of the Great Composers: John Adams' Librettist Calls Him a Dickhead

2010-06-21T14:26:00.003-04:00

There is an interesting and somewhat problematic interview with John Adams up at the Guardian. It's one of those articles that tells you a lot more about the author than its subject. Just f'rinstance, here is the part that really gets me:

During the Vietnam war, he dodged the draft, dosing himself with caffeine and over-the-counter drugs to ensure that he failed the medical. Yet 30 years later, when asked by the New York Philharmonic to compose a 9/11 elegy, he succumbed to what he acknowledged was his "civic duty". Has the coyote been collared and tethered?

Because I guess going off to kill and/or die in a distant jungle is basically the same as accepting a commission from the New York Phil? In terms of doing your civic duty?

So weird. The article is full of stuff like that! This passage is also kind of confusing—

Alice Goodman, who wrote the text for of [sic] Nixon in China, is now an ordained minister of the Church of England, dispensing piety to her flock in the shires; holy orders did not restrain her from denouncing Adams as a "dickhead" when their opera was performed in Brussels.

I guess this is technically true? But kind of misleading. "Holy orders did not restrain" Alice Goodman (litotes?) because she was not an ordained minister at the time—in fact, I think she was Jewish. Also, he says "their opera," but the opera in question wasn't Nixon in China, as this passage seems to imply, but The Death of Klinghoffer, their second collaboration. Also, she didn't actually "denounce" him as a dickhead, since "denounce" implies a public statement, and actually it went something like this, according to Goodman at least (quoted by Rupert Christiansen in Thomas May's indispensable John Adams Reader, p. 253):

Anyway I'm very happy I read this article because it reminds me that I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky, Adams' foray into… light opera? popular song?… is coming to London! And the cast sounds great! Even if this production flops, it should be fascinating; the candid dissection of the original Ceiling/Sky productions was one of my favorite parts of Adams' memoirs. But maybe it will be a smashing success! History will judge! Here is some video to whet y'alls appetites: and there are more videos + info here. I would like a FULL REPORT, please, from anybody in London.

And While We're on the Subject

2010-06-06T19:53:00.001-04:00

of late–20th century coloratura arias sung by totalitarian sopranos caught on videotape, here's a clip of Barbara Hannigan singing Gepopo's first aria from Le Grand Macabre at the NY Phil the other day:(If you haven't read my review yet, you should! It's here.) Note that this video is kind of really well shot? I wonder if it will be broadcast! Or even, maybe, just maybe, just possibly, released commercially…? Okay okay maybe not. [UPDATE: Alas no.] Anyway, you can hear it on the radio or online this Thursday, and it's gonna be available for purchase on iTunes soon. Oh hey and here's a pdf of the whole libretto, courtesy of the NY Times (thank you, manou!).

Here's another video of that performance, from the same NY Phil page.

Is It Okay if I Write a Post About Nixon in China–Related News that Doesn't Make a Joke about How "News Has a Kind of Mystery"? Okay Cool

2010-06-05T20:51:00.001-04:00

So one reason a lot of us were really excited when we heard that Nixon in China was going to play the Met, because that meant the possibility of an HD broadcast, because that meant the possibility of a video recording, and Peter Sellarses production of Nixon in China is one of the best things he ever did! But then we found out that it was not on the HD schedule and we all cried, softly, into our signed copies of the I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky libretto. BUT NOW IT IS ON THE HD SCHEDULE, HOORAY, THAT IS SO AMAZING!!! Even if there is no recording, it means that anybody who hasn't sent away for a bootleg DVD of the old Great Performances broadcast (complete with Walter Cronkite commentary) will finally get to see what the opera is supposed to look like, on the BIG SCREEN, deliciously filmed and amplified. Did I mention I AM SO EXCITEDDDDDD

Two Reviews

2010-06-02T02:57:00.000-04:00

I tweeted these links, but didn't blog them:

Here's my review of the new Timo Andres CD. I made some really odd choices in formatting this review, which understandably got taken out in editing, but which would've changed the tone or even the sense just slightly: for one thing, I hate short, one-sentence paragraphs, so the last paragraph originally read,

Fortunately, now that we’re all jaded citizens of the 21st century, we’ve all heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony enough and never need to hear it again. Just kidding, no we haven’t. Hear the New Haven Symphony play it (right after the Eighth Symphony) on May 13 at Woolsey Hall or May 15 at Fairfield University—it’s why we’re alive.

And this sentence became slightly different when the Mark Trail–like weirdness of my italics was corrected:

A generation (or two) has passed, the battle is over and the Andres/Adams camp has won — and is there anything more tiresome than the pose of rebellion?

Emphasis on POSE. I love rebellion! It's the pose that's tiresome.

And then, here's my review of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at the New York Phil. I should have mentioned in the first paragraph, when I mentioned how "self-righteous" I was at twenty, "dropping the…Grand Macabre I’d just bought at Tower Records into my CD player," I would not have dreamed that ten years later I'd be reviewing a production for Parterre Box. I was planning to review this for my own blog, but then I scored a pair of press tickets and decided that I therefore ought to review it for a publication that people actually read. If you're a Ligeti fan, I hope you'll click through—I tried to make the review as thorough and meaty as I could.

Redefining "NSFW"

2010-05-26T15:22:00.000-04:00

Hardcore gay porn director Joe Gage has blogged about Gustavo Dudamel on his hardcore gay porn blog. If you click on the link I'm about to give you, it will show you—after a clip of some hardcore amateur porn—a few pictures, a link to the L.A. Times coverage of Dudamel, and a short video of Gustavo Dudamel. I give you this link not because the Dudamel content is especially interesting, and certainly not because I think you should click on this link at work, around children, or really anywhere in public (NO TO ALL OF THOSE THINGS), but rather because, if you are not offended by hardcore porn, you may find the juxtaposition amusing. That is all.

SAD UPDATE

2010-05-25T16:44:00.001-04:00

Alex Ross points out that this pic of Igor Stravinsky is NOT as rad as it appears to be—it may be a photo of Igor Stravinsky taken by the Boston PD, but it's not actually a mugshot, just a snapshot they took for his visa renewal. Stravinsky wasn't actually arrested; he got off with a warning.

In happier news, this picture of Stravinsky's penis is still totally real.

Cross Purposes

2010-05-24T12:01:00.002-04:00

At first I wondered whether I disliked Matt Marks's new New Amsterdam Records record The Little Death: Vol. 1 because some of its most prominent features scored direct hits on my NOT MY THING button: conventional pop/musical theater vocals? NOT MY THING. Proggily rapid changes in musical texture? NOT MY THING. Put it together, and the record has this vibe of The Glee Kids Sing Fiery Furnaces, which = NOT MY THING squared.

But. Repeated listenings convinced me that the problem wasn't (entirely) me; it was the record. It's not just a song cycle, it's a concept album/rock opera—a form that's capable of some very exciting things, but which (like all opera) requires a delicate balance between forward narrative movement of a traditional drama and the lyrical suspension of time that we get in a pop song (or operatic setpiece). Actually, Marks's ability to create a convincing pop-music moment is pretty solid—the "Penetration Overture" is satisfying, Avalanches-style sample-driven chillout—but it's constantly being undermined by a half-baked dramatic sense.

Most obviously, the libretto is a problem. The story is pretty straightforward: boy meets girl; girl prefers Jesus; boy does something they'll all regret. They're even named "Boy" and "Girl," as if suggesting that these characters are archetypes, and their story, in some sense, fabulous or universal—but instead the characters seem flat and uninvolving, and the story sketched-in.

Pull in for a close-up, and the picture doesn't get much better; line-for-line, there's not much going on here. Here are the lyrics for the song "I Don't Have Any Fun," pasted in their entirety:

BOY: I don’t have any fun on my own
I don’t have any fun on my own
If you want to have fun fall in love with me
If you want to have fun fall in love with me

GIRL: I don’t want
I don’t want
I don’t want you (repeat)

BOY: I don’t have any fun on my own
I don’t have any fun on my own
If you want to have fun fall in love with me
If you want to have fun fall in love with me (repeat)

GIRL: I’m afraid
I’m afraid, Boy
I’m afraid I’d laugh in your face
I’m afraid, Boy
I’m afraid I’d laugh in your face, Boy
I’d laugh in your face, Boy

BOY: You’re like God
You’re like God
You’re like God to me
You’re like God
You’re like God to me (repeat)

What we learn from this song is that Boy doesn't have any fun on his own, but Girl doesn't want him—she's afraid she'd laugh in his face!—even though Girl is like God to Boy.

(Repeat.)

Now, repetition is great! Repetition is practically what makes music music! Repetition is even more necessary in a critique of Christian kitsch, as anyone who has ever heard a [shudder] "praise song" will attest. But this seems like repetition for lack of something to say. Why is she like God to him? How did he go from just wanting to have fun to literally idolizing her? There's no transition, no connection, and it makes it impossible for us to sympathize with Boy or with his change of heart. It's a problem within the more formally ambitious songs, and from song to song (and here I'm torn between wanting to cite more of my least favorite moments and feeling like I'm harping on it already, and I don't want to harp on it).

Perhaps inevitably, the structural failures of the libretto are reflected in the music. Marks incorporates a cover of the Gaithers classic "He Touched Me" on the album, seemingly because of the opportunities for innuendo at the expense of a naïve and corny tune. So why is "He Touched Me," with its embarrassing lyrics and wobbly old melody, the album's most compelling moment of songcraft? Marks and costar Mellissa Hughes are highly competent pop/show singers; if only his own compositions had gone deeper than aping the bombast of Christian pop, and dug into what it is about this stuff that can make it so touching in spite of itself, he might have created a far more satisfying piece of work. But the album never finds a happy compromise between narrative and lyrical, or between its two ironical poses of happy-face pop and breast-beating histrionics.

But don't take MY word for it! Stream this thang over at the New Amsterdam site (it's just two songs now, but I imagine that after tomorrow's release they'll let you hear the whole thing before you buy), and if you like it you can purchase your very own copy and then argue about this with me in the comment section.

Lives of the Great Composers: Igor Stravinsky Poses for His Mugshot

2010-05-23T09:53:00.005-04:00

Here's the picture from when they busted Igor Stravinsky for his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner! (UPDATE: No it isn't. Click here for more info.) I guess his harmonization could be considered "irreverent"? But, C'MON. Hardly offensive:

Igor Stravinsky (arr.) - The Star-Spangled Banner

And in fact, listening to it again since I put this post up, it's not even that irreverent. That trumpet dissonance on "that our flag was still there" is, for instance, a little startling, but it serves the text—in any other arrangement, that line would swerve up to a G or down to an E to fit in with the C major chord, but instead it is STILL on that F when we get to the word STILL. Word painting! And the dominant seventh chord on "land of the free" is a surprise too, but cmon—it, and the other changes are just lovely. This recording is Stravinsky's own, available in that giant Sony boxset of Stravinsky conducting Stravinsky, which obviously all of you should buy. Buy it now. Are you buying it? Okay good.

Photo from Washington Musica Viva, via Boing Boing.

Well Can a MIDI File Do... THIS??

2010-05-17T09:00:00.001-04:00

Really, any actual lover of music should take one look at a bathroom wallpapered in piano rolls and just die inside, but still it looks pretty cool. Maybe I'll do our loo up with a Xenakis theme? Photo by Cory Doctorow.

Another NYC Concert Heads-Up

2010-05-12T13:23:00.002-04:00

Just saw that the Canticum Novum Singers and the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York are doing a concert of "Sacred Music in the Soviet Era," including the Concerto for Choir by Alfred Schnittke (plus some Pärt, some more Schnittke, some Murov, and WORLD PREMIERES by Golovanov and Reeves), this Saturday and Sunday.

Do you know the Choir Concerto? If so, then you know it is one of the greatest pieces of music from the last century. If not, then DUDE. Get there. Details here.

Everyone Must Go Hear EVERY THING MUST GO

2010-05-11T11:38:00.000-04:00

I already "tweeted" this on the "Twitter" but just in case you don't use the "Twitter," TONIGHT at (Le) Poisson Rouge you can go hear music off of Martin Bresnick's new CD, Every Thing Must Go, out today. Performers include our friend Wei-Yi Yang, and of course Prof. Bresnick's people Lisa Moore, plus Ashley Bathgate (cello), Abigail Nims (voice), and the Preludio Saxophone Quartet (duh). Buy tickets here, now.

FREE COREY

2010-05-06T09:46:00.002-04:00

To help promote his forthcoming New Amsterdam double-disc Someone Will Take Care of Me, Corey Dargel's new song cycle with Cornelius Dufallo (mentioned here) is available for FREE DOWNLOAD at NewAm's website. Go there NOW NOW NOW and download it; it's a bite-sized work of art that will get lodged in your brain for the next year. FOR FANS OF: Arthur Russell, Owen Pallett.

Oh This Must Be One of Those Post-Modern Stagings I Keep Hearing About (Possibly NSFW)

2010-04-23T17:01:00.004-04:00

So the other day I was thinking to myself, "What's Arlen Austin up to?" See, Arlen was the kid who got all the bass solos in Columbia Bach Society because of his big wonderful voice, and the fact that he was also a visual artist kind of went in one of my ears and out the other, until I finally went to check out his senior exhibition at the school gallery and OH MY GOD, it was so good! So I said "I'll bet he's up to something interesting now," and wowzers, he sure is. There he is singing the Wanderers Nachtlied by Schubert. Here's another video, this one's set to the Rosenkavalier trio, called Birdbath:

Genius, basically. Go check him out some more over here!

They Couldn't See JACK

2010-04-22T15:44:00.001-04:00

Get it??? Because the JACK Quartet played Georg Friedrich Haas's third string quartet, In iij. Noct in absolute darkness (windows blacked out, EXIT signs covered(!)) at Pasadena's Monday Evening Concert series. This photo was taken through night vision goggles for Mark Swed's LA Times review, which you must read here. Sounds incredible.

Contactular!

2010-04-22T13:12:00.000-04:00

So, CONTACT! all caps exclamation mark is the new, new-music ensemble within the New York Philharmonic, and they are doing their best to raise its profile as this hip, edgy new thing—they're putting the public in direct CONTACT! with the ensemble and its composers by holding concerts in the more informal Symphony Space, inviting red-hot, tastemaking bloggers [cough cough] to its shows for free, and even allowing liveblogging on the premises to those who might so opt.

I opted out, but I could not resist the siren call of free Phil tix. Not that tickets were terribly expensive in the first place—I bought an extra ticket for my extra date (2 arms = 2 slots for arm-candy), and the house was small enough that everybody seemed to have a pretty good seat. I'd never actual been to a show in Symphony Space before (I know, I know), and it is a very different place to hear classical music. My auxiliary date thought it looked like a repurposed discotheque, and yeah maybe it does look a little cheap and gaudy, and yeah the acoustics are a little dry (more on that later), but it achieved what the Phil was obviously after, which was to let their collective hair down a bit.

Okay, there was something a little forced about the whole setup—the Phil's chamber group playing in front of an exposed brick wall, wearing the new-music "all black" uniform rather than the symphonic "concert black" uniform, and then the MCing, sheesh the MCing between each piece. John Schaefer is, to be sure, a treasure to the world of contemporary music, but every time I see him MC something it feels like that weird moment in the game show where Alex Trebek asks June from Yuba City about the hobbies she mentioned in the pre-interview. Alan Gilbert's remarks were articulate and pleasingly blunt, and Magnus Lindberg was UTTERLY ADORABLE, cannot stress that enough. Why not just give Lindberg the mike? Did adding yet a third facilitator to introduce the composers to the audience really make us feel more at home? I dunno.

(The funniest moment of Mandatory Informality actually came after the concert, when a really nice staff photographer apologetically asked Nico Muhly, with whom we were in mid-shmooze, if she could get a picture of him holding a plastic cup of beer instead of a plastic cup of wine. We didn't ask why—these were her instructions, she said—but I assume that wine was too snooty? They wanted more of a "Facebook kegger pix" vibe? It was completely not a big deal, and I've already made too much of it, but I swear it was very funny at the time.)

I'm not sure the pre-performance chitchat was terribly helpful to the audience, either. During Sean Shepherd's piece, These Particular Circumstances I found myself listening for the correlations between the titles of each of the twelve continuous movements of the piece and the musical materials of each before I finally realized I was enjoying the piece less this way than if I'd just sat there and listened.

More important than knowing what Shepherd's scheme was, was perceiving that Shepherd had conceived of a sturdy structural scheme, and yes one could, and it was satisfying. I also thought of Boulez, whose works are often structured as similar chains of "effects" explored singly in short, attacca movements movements, and who also features, like Shepherd, a richly colored, volatile, Frenchy style. But the voice was Shepherd's own, engaging rather than confrontational, not ashamed to wink at the audience once in a while. (Date #1 caught a reference to The Planets and tittered.) Your Friend & Mine Nico Muhly characterized Shepherd's style quite well in the intro to his own piece—"like a flock of birds turning upon a single point," he said or something like that, which is right! Alive and chaotic with tiny details, centered and organized invisibly, but perceptibly. I shall keep an eye out for Shepherd's name in the future.

He also came across quite well in the little intro-interview (INTROVIEW!)—small, handsome, charming. Danny likes this.

Nico's own piece, Detailed Instructions, showcased his by-now-familiar musical obsessions—the influence of Adams and Glass, yeah, and also his orchestrational obsessions: piccolo, viola (molte viole, no violins), low brass (trombone bass trombone, tuba). The first movement was positively arid, Gilbert further baring the piece's already exposed clockworks like Boulez conducting the Rite of Spring. Were these the right choices, compositional and interpretational, for a premiere in such an acoustically unappealing space? The audience could hear everything that was going on, which was impressive, but we could also hear everything that wasn't going on.

There were also balance problems, or at least one big balance problem—the viola is such a quiet instrument, when that were playing off of the brass or the woodwinds, it wasn't much of a contest; the hapless fiddlers would've had to lay into their instruments like orchestral soloists for the whole piece, which didn't happen, and sometimes they were totally inaudible.

THAT SAID. The slow second movement was lovely—very lovely—maybe one of the most moving things Nico's ever written, and the third was like a happy speedread through early Glass, constantly shifting and moving urgently forward. I would very much like to hear this again, especially with an amplified or closely recorded ensemble.

Since we're keeping score now, Nico was a hit in the interview as well, very funny and dressed stylishly as ever—a black, I don't know, tunic I guess? very long, uneven hem, under a deceptively conventional black jacket. Nice!

Matthias Pintscher (sharply cut black suit, skinny black tie, hot) explained that he was attracted to the Hebrew original of the very familiar text he set, from the Song of Songs, by the language's density of meaning; for me, there was also a sense, listening to the music, that this cryptic score was also an untranslated utterance of some kind, an exotic code. That pedal G being passed around the ensemble, what does it mean? What's the connection between the text and the logic of this score? Dissonant and atmospheric, it was too elaborately knotted for me to untangle cerebrally, and instead I experienced it as the expression of some primitive passion—think of the way that Solomon expresses his love in terms of beasts, in terms of sweet fragrances, and so do Pintscher's songs from Solomon's garden communicate, with strange noises, with wafting clouds of sound. Also worth noting that the soundworld of the piece survived, intact, its premiere in the funky space—it contained its own resonances.

The presence of Thomas Hampson at this event was almost surreal. He was the most famous person on the stage that night, by a longshot, and with the exception of his star-aura was dressed like everybody else, all in black, plus his trademark pompadour and a pair of reading glasses for his sheet music. His out-of-placeness was at once awesome (America's most celebrated opera man sings avant-garde music in intimate venue?? YES please) and awkward. His vocal instrument is amazing, and he sang a difficult score very passionately, but was he really the best guy for the role? Mightn't a less polished artist have had a more incisive take? (One of my dates suggested that his Hebrew was less than spot-on, as well.)

Anyway: three World Premieres, three successes. Put this shit in the WIN column. And I tease, but the social atmosphere was quite congenial; there wasn't a sharp line between HERE'S WHERE YOU SIT FOR THE CONCERT and HERE'S WHERE YOU CHILL OUT AFTER, so everybody milled around and it was kind of a party right there. Your favorite people showed up! Again! Nico's librettist, playwright Craig Lucas; to my delight, Matthias Pintscher's seat was RIGHT NEXT to ours, and right behind us were Timo Andres and Ted Hearne; Zachary Woolfe was there from the Observer, and Jordan Brown from Musical America, and I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody I'll regret but hooray anyway. I was actually feeling not so hot due to some lingering flu-y crap, so I didn't get to drink anything and didn't get to stick around very long, but it was a nice vibe and everybody seemed to be having a good time and I had a nice nap on the train back to New Haven, iTunesing the Redhooker album, which I seem to be doing an awful lot lately. But they are a post for another day! And with that fair reader I bid you whatever.

About Time

2010-04-17T01:50:00.012-04:00

You're probably wondering why I haven't been blogging lately, and the reason why is pretty fascinating! I was walking past an apartment building in Chinatown when a woman on the third floor opened her window and accidentally knocked a flowerpot onto my head. I lost all memory of my previous life and was taken in by a gang of street toughs, who enlisted me in their high-stakes craps game. I won and lost a fortune, but during a raid, when a police baton duplicated exactly the cranial blow that erased my memory, my name and my love of classical music came back in a rush, and I returned home to post this entry.

Just kidding, the reason why is super boring. Let's talk about the Kronos Quartet, instead!

I.

So I went to the Kronos Quartet's tribute to Terry Riley couple weeks back and basically it was the most fun thing ever. Obviously I mean the concert was, but the whole trip down to the city was a blast, since I was reunited with a favorite Greg AND got to chat with two of the boys in Kronos AND hobnobbed with some of your FAVORITE INTERNET CELEBRITIES, such as Steven Swartz and Darcy James Argue and Sidney Chen. You love them! Also spotted, but did not dare to speak to, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and somebody who looked vaguely familiar and later turned out to be the Edge, as in the lead guitarist from U2, but as I was saying LA MONTE YOUNG AND MARIAN ZAZEELA were there, wearing their La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela outfits. Love.

Okay, now, MUSIC. The Kronos recital was part of a series at Carnegie Hall, where the quartet was playing a whole weekend's worth of concerts down in Zankel, ladling out basically every food group from their buffet of recitals: Music from Around the World, Collaborations with Western Vernacular Artists, etc. Same thing they do on their records—on the one hand you've got like Short Stories, which was one of the first classical tapes(!) I ever bought myself, during those formative years when the existence tape full of concert music for string quartet that freaked my parents out (Sharp, Zorn, etc.) came as something of a revelation—and then on the other hand you've got something like Nuevo, where every piece on the program was unified not only by nationality but by the distinctive stamps of star producer (Santaolalla) and arranger (Golijov), even though basically every piece was not only by a different composer but in a different genre (pop and folk and concert music all together).

But for all the awesomeness inherent to Kronos's project of Exploding the Recital, my favorite program of theirs is still the vastly more traditional Composer Portrait–style show. Their all-Górecki/all-Schnittke/all-Glass albums are far from the most typical records they ever put out, but for my money they're some of the best. I like my Kronos thick 'n' meaty (chawmp).

And so I was super stoked to check out this all-Riley thing, which surveyed the quartet's history with Riley from the now-classic (the words "Terry Riley" have been synonymous with Kronos even longer than the words "leather pants") to the brand-new. Or, I guess the survey ran the other way round, starting with a world premiere: Another Secret eQuation was written for string quartet plus Young People's Chorus of New York, and wow Riley did a ridiculously good job of writing for children. The very first gesture in the piece is an exploitation of that thing only kids can do with their voices, that super-high squealing noise they're always making on the playground or wherever. The sound of children at play always cuts through me like an icy dagger, so imagine the intensity of hearing an ENTIRE CHORUS of screeching children, one of those acoustical effects whose pressure you can actually feel inside your ears. The slow crescendo to full, deafening screech was like hearing a hungry mewing kitten outside my door, and then slowly opening it to see AN ARMY OF HUNGRY, MEWING KITTENS, AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD SEE, innocent supplication amplified to the point of menace.

As an effect, it was of a piece with the piece's message to the audience. The text consisted of two semi-cryptic lines, one accusing (something like, simply "they don't care about us"—dammit, why didn't I take notes? I assumed the exact words would be printed in the program and then of course forgot them long before I got around to sitting around and writing this) and one consoling, after an I guess somewhat Buddhist fashion (something like, "the universe just makes it up as it rolls along"). So, the sort of thing that would seem like hippie cliché if it weren't couched in the work of an intensely original artist. The point is that the lyrics openly preached to, chastised the audience, in the voices of these children, while the children themselves actually seemed to be having a great deal of fun, bopping along with the rhythms and really getting into all of Riley's extended techniques (the singers also, whilst squealing, scratched their nails on the outsides of their choral folders, and later the piece had them affecting a nasal sort of quasi-Oriental tone). The music was challenging, but clear; the chorus was the focus of attention, and the string quartet was playing second fiddle.

Riley had, in other words, flipped around the triangular power-dynamic of composed music: the pleasure of the performers, specifically the choir, was obviously as high a priority—if not higher—than the pleasure of the audience (we were, nevertheless, quite pleased); the audience was not just entertained but confronted by the composer and performers (we were, nevertheless, highly entertained). It was a cute piece, but not just cute, and not condescending to the young performers. Thrilling, actually.

The rest of the program feature Kronos without guests. Now, one of the things that makes the string quartet such an exciting medium is the relatively limited resources of the ensemble. You've got to flesh out each musical idea, and introduce the germ of the next, without wasting a player or leaving anything out, with just four (basically) monophonic instruments. Different composers have responded to this challenge in all different ways—you can meticulously construct the piece to respond to the demands of the form; you can smash through the classical paradigm to create a new kind of string quartet; you can "cheat" and supplement the string quartet with electronic resources (and of course, "electronic resources" run the gamut from taped accompaniment to interactive digital tech).

The Zankel concert demonstrated that, over the course of his partnership with Kronos, Riley has basically done all of these things, and done all of them well. The rest of the concert continued in reverse chronological order, ending with "Good Medicine" from the old Salome Dances for Peace, an airtight movement of interlocking loops (for acoustic string quartet), and starting with, before the intermission, the New York premiere of Transylvanian Horn Courtship (for string quartet alternating between detuned Stroh instruments, and amplified conventional instruments with digital looping). The Stroh instruments for this performance were the product of Kronos's partnership with Walter Kitundu, MacArthur Genius and Kronos luthier-in-residence. The Stroh violin, invented during the era of acoustic recording (wax cylinders and such), before microphones, was designed with a trumpetlike bell coming out of the top, to focus their sound towards the bell of the recording equipment, instead of a having a pair of F-holes carved into the wood. Riley had the instruments tuned down a fifth, for an even more uncanny sound, as if the performance were emanating from some remote place and time.

…Except for the movements where the players switched back to "modern" instruments, and played against live digital loops of themselves. Live looping is a tricky thing, since a pedal-stomp misplaced by one 32nd-note can trainwreck the whole megillah—but it has the advantage of conceptual rigor; all the music you hear has been created live for you, onstage, no "cheating."

The electronic accompaniment to the next piece—The Welcoming Baptism of Sweet Baby Grace—was taped, but also quite focused, consisting entirely of a sampled tamboura, the instrument that usually provides the drone for performances of Indian classical music. Obviously, one reason for Kronos's fruitful relationship with Terry RIley is their mutual fascination with non-Western music, and Kronos' investment in repertoire beyond the Euro-American pays off with a left-hand technique perfectly matched to Riley's Indian influences. I'm tempted to call this piece a sort of meditation or prayer, except wouldn't most of this program fit that description? That Secret eQuation is certainly some kinda sacred work (the combination of young voices and stringed consort accompaniment reminds me of those amazing choral albums Fretwork has been putting' out), and of course Salome Dances for Peace, though radically different in style and composed decades earlier, is another invocation of the same spirit, isn't it?

And then of course, "One Earth One People One Love" from Sun Rings, a piece written as a commission from NASA and originally realized as a huge multimedia spectacular for string quartet with electronics, video projections, and choir (no choir or video tonight). Befitting the cosmic scope of the commission, the electronic accompaniment pulls out all the stops—space sounds and speeches from the NASA library, prerecorded strings, and percussion with dub reggae–style echo delays (suggesting again the influence, on Riley's composition, of non-European music, and possibly also the influence of smoking big old giant splits?). Newish Kronos cellist and new-music sex symbol Jeff Zeigler's solo soared—I forgot how much of this piece is all about him. Gorgeous! His playing, I mean. We need a recording of this, ASAP.

And so after augmenting the string quartet with a choir, a tamboura, custom-made anachronistic instruments, conceptually focused and cinematically expansive electronic accompaniments, we ended up with Salome Dances for Peace, whose "Good Medicine" movement sounds more or less how you'd expect a Terry Riley string quartet to sound—which is actually pretty atypical for any piece by Terry Riley—sort of "minimalist" I guess—and everybody made it look easy. Riley wrote a meaty piece, and Kronos bopped through those elaborate, layered rhythms like they was nothin'.

II.

Their latest album, RAINBOW, is an unusual project for them, starting with the digipak (oh did I say "digipak"? I meant DOUBLE DIGIPAK). The logo says Smithsonian Folkways, not Nonesuch; and the record's subtitle is Music of Central Asia Vol. 8, which tells you right away this is not really an integral part of the Kronos oeuvre, but something else, and indeed! The artists are listed as "Kronos Quartet with Alim & Fargana Qasimov and Homayun Sakhi," but really it's the other way around—Alim & Fargana Qasimov, and Homayun Sakhi, with Kronos Quartet as backup band. Not that they don't play with plenty of personality (dude they're still Kronos how could they not), but they play modestly, letting their guests take the spotlight at every moment.

The title track (a.k.a. Rangin Kaman) by Afghani rebab player (rebabist?) Sakhi, has Kronos accompanying like the orchestra in a concerto, in a long piece that takes the listener on a musical tour to all four corners of Afghanistan; but while world-music enthusiasts will enjoy tasting the rainbow of Afghani musical culture, the disc's greatest pleasure, as far as I'm concerned, is the astounding voice of Azerbaijani singer Alim Qasimov. In this, our post–Peter Gabriel age, I think we've all grown to accept and appreciate the high, pinched sound of great Central Asian vocalists, but Qasimov's instrument—full and ringing even in its topmost registers—is really something else, striking even to big dumb Ugly American ignoramuses such as myself. Again, Kronos's accompaniment is just that (accompaniment) but it fleshes the sound out nicely.

The DVD that comes with Rainbow is not a huge deal. There's also an Interactive Glossary of the instruments played on the recording, so you can see what they look and sound like as well as what they're called, which is brilliant and terrifically useful and educational, and while the documentary about the educational initiative funding these recordings is really sort of a long commercial, it might be worth watching just for the footage of those classes of adorable kids playing their little hearts out on all kinds of different Central Azn instruments. The documentary about the recording of the album is a bit more satisfying, however—not that the interviews are so illuminating or that there's so much performance footage (nay and nay), but the cinematography is quite fine, and it's interesting to see what kind of work actually went into the making of the album. A string quartet that can't improvise and doesn't speak Azerbaijani, working with a singer who can't read music and doesn't speak English? I would ASPHYXIATE FROM SHEER FRUSTRATION, but Qasimov and Kronos, no doubt thanks largely to the highly capable arrangers and translators we see in the film, instead make beautiful music together. If you're at all a fan of music from this region, or if you enjoyed Kronos' recent foray thereinto on their disc Floodplain, you should probably check this one out; if you're looking for a disc of avant-garde string quartet repertoire, well you can keep on looking.

Next post: the NY Phil's latest CONTACT! concert.

The Great Compression

2010-03-27T15:49:00.001-04:00

WE LOVE Proper Discord, it is our NEW FAVORITE CLASSICAL BLOG; yet another post here deflating conventional wisdom. This time he's taking on the old lament about how mp3s are another sign that the kids today are forgoing quality in favor of convenience, and how if you're really serious about music you'll buy CDs instead, and how the iTunes store is rotting our nation's moral fibre. Well, maybe a little! But, here, Professor Propz handily/wittily demonstrates that the difference between uncompressed and lossily compressed audio is in fact scarcely audible at all. (Take his test, and then you can see how you fared when the answers are revealed.) The ever-belligerent A.C. Douglas, Old Faithful of classical trolls, lets loose right on schedule with his usual gaseous eruption:

If you’re using the ordinary MP3 audio system like, say, the audio system on your computer or an iPod, you probably won’t notice any difference between the clips. If, however, you’re using a high-priced, high-quality audio system (the two aren’t necessarily the same thing), you’ll notice the difference immediately. Given the ubiquitousness of the iPod and other crap audio systems, you’d be pretty stupid to pay out more bucks and give up more storage space for a CD-quality MP3.

Which—what? An iPod is a crap system? What is he talking about? In fact, the iPod is a pretty decent piece of hardware: the digital-to-analog converter in some models in fact the same as you'll find in high-end, audiophile components; there's no power cord to generate noise; the internal connections (since the device is so tiny) are extremely short and therefore less likely to make trouble than the connections inside your CD player. It has its problems, but it's far from "crap." And so our host responds:

I can’t believe that you have used an iPod to play back any of the lossless formats it supports through good-quality headphones and still think it is a “crap audio system”. I worry that if your idea of “mediocre” starts somewhere beyond this, then you’re hardly typical of even classical music purchasers – indeed it may well be that your idea of “good” surpasses the quality of the electronics used to record most classical albums in the first place.

To which, "Let me guess," ACD suggests; "You think Bose is a high-end, top quality audio system, right? I’d also guess you’re under 30." In other words, the answer is no. No, A.C. Douglas has never listened to a high-quality sound file on an iPod; he is speaking from sheer ignorance; his only response is to accuse his interlocutor of being—shock!—young.

I would actually be a little surprised to learn that Proper Discord is under 30, considering how knowledgeably and capably he writes. It would seem to me that he has some real experience listening to, writing about, and working with classical music. In ACD's spirit of enlightened debate, however, let me suggest that Douglas is over 70, monstrously obese, lonely and sad. Anybody taking wagers?

Q: What's Shy, Mighty, and Forthcoming from Nonesuch Records?

2010-03-22T16:14:00.000-04:00

A: It looks as if Timothy "Timo" Andres' album of two-piano music, Shy and Mighty, has been slated for a May 4 release on the record label that Adams and Reich and those guys call home. You're so excited! You've been hearing about his music for years, but you live out in the boonies and never get to hear it! Well it is YOUR LUCKY DAY, sweetie. (May 4 is.) ANYWAY, you can listen to some clips from the cycle here; you can find more info here, plus an album cover photo that will make you wonder how I forgot to include him in my roundup of new-music sex symbols. Rowr!

Non Compos

2010-03-10T18:13:00.004-05:00

So eighth blackbird is POSTPONING their first ever composition competition (or "comp comp" as they are calling it because they do not have a proper name for it yet; may I suggest "I WANT YOUR SEXTET") due to general public outcry. Now we love eighth blackbird, as you may recall, sometimes unwholesomely, so, IN THE TANK, but I think this whole thingie is a big kerfuffle over not much.

See, if you're not a Sequenza21.com addict like Danny, then you might not be aware that that is where the voices of dissent gathered, in the comments section of this post on the subject. The complaint: a $50 entrance fee. Their battle cry: comp the comp comp!

Some very interesting people weighed in in; Corey Dargel (whom we also love), points out that $1000 would in fact be way too low for a commission, when you consider the time and trouble that goes into fulfilling it—but of course this isn't a commission. With a commission, you sign a contract that says you will write something, and then you have to write it. This is totally voluntary, an excuse to stop that score for Pierrot Plus from rattling around in your desk drawer.

This being the Internet, of course, there are also less-than-thoughtful responses. One commenter sniffs that his music won't be of interest to 8bb because a "serial composers [sic] chances aren’t very good these days," which really makes no sense, not just because I wasn't actually planning to enter, I just showed up for the whine-tasting is something of a childish attitude, and not just because I am entitled to performances of the music I am willfully writing in what I perceive to be an outmoded style is a slightly crazy attitude, but also just because this is eighth blackbird we are talking about, and they are HUGE FANS of some serial composers, so sweetie please do your homework.

And what is this? "...8bb has never had particularly strong community interaction, having been guided early on by success-driven agendas." Dude, no. Haven't they actually been pretty good about commissioning young composers? And, now think about this, what the hell is wrong with a "success-driven agenda"? What does the word "success" mean in this sentence, and why should we be so afraid of it? Should 8bb be shooting for failure? Who has a "failure-driven agenda"? (If you are my father, do not answer that question.) If they weren't "successful" then we wouldn't even be having this conversation, now would we, because nobody would want eighth blackbird to play their music.

But what's most striking about these comments is the peculiarly adversarial relationship that some of the commenters are imagining between composers and performers, formulated by one composer as a "men-women, white-black, straight-gay" sort of power imbalance. 8bb won their Grammy "[on] the backs" of the composing class!

Wait, what? I mean, well sure, if you want to get all Marx-y about it, then yes there is an imbalance of power between performers who have dedicated their careers to performing new works and composers of new works, because such performers are so few, and DMA composers are so many. And yes there is an imbalance of power between eighth blackbird and, well, YOU (I am assuming, when I write this, that you are not a world-class composer of new music), because they have earned so many laurels doing their jobs, and you are still on your way, with much to prove.

But then let's take this economical analysis of the situation the rest of the way and you will discover that you, composer, DO NOT NEED eighth blackbird. They do not have a monopoly on musical performance. You can play your own music! Your friends can play your music! You can form a collective of likeminded composers and performers and record it yourselves, distribute it yourselves. It's the 21st century! YouTubes are everywhere! Seize the means of production! Composers of the world, unite! You have nothing to etc but your etc.

Is $50 too high of an entry fee? Okay probably yes, just because a lower entry fee would have encouraged more submissions and been less of a PR headache. I'm not against an entry fee in principle, though, just because it seems like a smart way to stem the cataract of scores that you KNOW is already gushing in their transom. And look: if you think that an entry fee is too great a gamble, then fine, don't pay it. You're free! No one can make you enter this contest.

The important message here, though, is that this adversarial attitude is Not Healthy. Not for your career, and not for Music. Performers are not the enemy—performers are, or can be, and should be, your friends! Corey Dargel, you are going to be in Chicago this weekend, right? eighth blackbird, are you going to be in Chicago? Why don't you guys check out his show, which I am pretty sure will be great, and then afterwards he can buy you some beers (because of the POWER IMBALANCE), and then you can all be friends. Sound cool? Okay now hug.

I Don't View the Prospect with Equanimity

2010-03-10T15:35:00.000-05:00

I meant to post our good friend M. Croche's entry in the Parterre Box procrastination contest sometime last week, but never quite got around to it.

OMGWTFNYCO

2010-03-09T14:31:00.002-05:00

New York City Opera just put up the new schedule for the next season, and it is INSANE. Not surprises: Stephen "Pippin" Schwartz's Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Leonard "Mass" Bernstein's A Quiet Place, and Schönberg's Erwartung, all of which were predicted by the enigmatic La Cieca, astrologer to the stars.

SURPRISES: the other two one-acts completing the Erwartung-evening are, get this, La Machine de l’être, a new work by John Zorn, and Neither by Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett; there will also be a benefit matinee performance of the brief, brilliant, savage Where the Wild Things Are by Oliver Knussen and Maurice Sendak.

People, THIS is how you make modern opera appealing to audiences. You don't apologize, you don't pander, you don't bait and switch. Zorn fans know exactly what they're getting themselves into with his music, and if they stick around for Feldman and Schönberg they're going to get even more of what they love. Expect the Miller Theatre/The Rest Is Noise crowd to turn out. Actually, can I please have three tickets for this, right now, please?

Stephen Schwartz—I don't know his Séance, but the man has demonstrated that he can write for voices and pit band, that he can tell a story with music. Surely some tiny fraction of the millions who have swarmed to Wicked will be curious to hear the guy do opera?

I was pleased, if not thrilled, by the announcement of this season's City Opera programming; this time around, color me thrilled. More here.

Oh Hey AND

2010-03-08T20:21:00.000-05:00

be sure to subscribe to my new RSS feed, at the bottom of this page. (Or here it is.)

A Nose Not to Be Sniffed At

2010-03-08T17:22:00.008-05:00

What to say about The Nose? No, really, I mean that. What to say about it? I walked out of the hall speechless, unable to articulate what I'd just seen. It is what it is, I'll say that. It demands to be taken on its own terms. While it may not be the greatest opera of the 20th-century, or even the greatest opera written by Dmitri Shostakovich, it is a thrill, an unjustly neglected work, and easily the greatest opera about an anthropomorphic, disembodied nose since Arianna a Naso.

The Met's first production of the piece, by visual artist William Kentridge, most certainly does take the piece on its own terms, answering the absurdity of the libretto with visual absurdities, and answering the flatly confrontational music with a visually flat, confrontational aesthetic. In response to Shostakovich's musical collages and abstractions, Kentridge has gleefully ransacked the genius of the early Soviet avant-garde to pack the set with found Russian texts and with geometric shapes; the moving projections constantly superimposed upon them recalled the Russian masters of animation and montage. Using a newspaper-office scene as his starting point, Kentridge adopted a color scheme that was black and white and red all over, plastered with faux newsprint and popping with sensational "headlines" (you can switch off your Met Titles: supertitles are projected onstage, incorporated seamlessly into the text-heavy visual design), and the rumor-maddened townsfolk of the chorus are constantly reading giant, stylized papers as they march across the stage.

There were a few opening-night glitches; in one scene, the a cartoon horse supposed to be pulling the set across the stage was accidentally projected a few too many feet ahead of it; at the end of Act One, the curtain fell on top of the set instead of in front, and had to be tugged down by an unseen stagehand; my post-HOC drinking buddies, all of whom (oddly enough) were apparently fluent in Russian, complained of misspellings in the Cyrillic text projected onstage, and I even caught one in an English supertitle (FIGHTEN when it should've been FRIGHTEN, if you're reading this and work for the Met). But I think that's pretty much it as far as flaws in the execution.

Am I focusing too much on the visuals? Am I making it sound as if William Kentridge, and not the beautiful, gifted, charming South Pacific baritone Paolo Szot was the star of the show? Well y'know what, he (Kentridge) was. Of course, each member of the cast received warm applause, especially Szot, and even more especially Andrei Popov, whose performance as the Police Inspector required him to sing most of his lines way up in the treble clef; living musical treasure Valery Gergiev earned the audience's general adoration (though as he ascended the podium to begin the piece, we heard, bizarrely, what sounded like a solitary boo. What the fuck happened there?? "Maybe he was saying 'bra-VOO,'" I suggested to a friend afterward; "Maybe he was saying BOO-URNS," replied friend. Or maybe he was a disgruntled emigré booing Gergiev's cozy relationship with BFF Vladimir Putin? It was hella Slavs in the house Friday night).

But the greatest applause went to Kentridge. He deserved it. Not only did the production rise to the challenges of a, let's face it, very challenging opera, it was a work of art in its own right. When I was in school, I used to look at the photographs of the old Ballets Russes and its collaborations between the most daring composers, dancers, and visual artists of their era and think, why not now? Why couldn't we have an institution today that marries the most gifted visual artists to the greatest performers and composers of classical music? At The Nose, I felt as if it were finally happening, as if I were finally seeing opera live up to its potential as a place where challenging music, classic literature and deeply satisfying visual art can appear on a single stage and add up to something even greater.

Okay, but no, let's talk about the music. The history of Russian art having been written at the barrel of a gun, it's difficult to imagine that Shostakovich might once have been responsible for some of his era's hairiest avant-gardisms, and the sound of The Nose will certainly come as a shock to anyone familiar with Shostakovich chiefly through his Greatest Hits. It does have its moments of weird beauty, however, brought to glowing life by Gergiev's band and by the cast's perplexingly vast parade of minor players, and when the score's ostentatious complexity became baffling, as it was surely designed to, it was never allowed to become totally obscure.

For me, Szot was the great unknown here, since I am a neglectful faggot and have not kept up with the world of Musical Theatre. Would he have the musical chops, or the vocal power, to get his part across from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera? Answer: YES. He rose to the opera's musical challenges as ably as its considerable dramatic challenges—he made me care about an unappealing character's progress through a series of impossible situations.

If only there were an HD broadcast this season, to record Szot's performance; if only there were plans to revive this production at the house. Everyone should get a chance to see this thing. The first unambiguous artistic triumph brought into existence by the Gelb regime and a resounding vindication of its values, the synergy of the Kentridge/Gergiev/Szot Nose represents everything the opera can be. It's enough to revive one's hope for opera as a medium, and for the Metropolitan Opera as an institution.

Liveblogging REDISCOVERED PROKOFIEV

2010-02-08T20:18:00.028-05:00

Phew what a liveblog that was! If you're wondering what the hell all that was about, there was, up in here, a live broadcast from Yale University of some extremely rare Prokofiev pieces, headed up by pianist Boris Berman, one of Prokofiev's very greatest champions.

8:21 Okay if you're just joining the concert, you missed an EXCELLENT duet between Robert Blocker and Boris Berman, playing waltzes for four hands. Boris Berman is delivering some fine commentary between pieces, which he hopes will not duplicate the information in the program, which, how often does THAT happen. Double-bravo, Berman. Okay the ballet music is starting.

8:24 The sound and picture are remarkably fine. I've got one computer streaming full screen this whilst I, thanks to the generosity of a certain someone, am blogging it on a borrowed laptop, and even in full screen there's very little distortion of the image. But the sound is what counts more than anything, and crankin' it on my stereo, I've got few complaints (although, after that raucous piano duet, my neighbors might have a few).

8:30 Berman's claims for Trapeze as a major work are pretty well born out by this performance.

8:32 Uh oh—buffering problems. I'ma pause this stream and see if that helps?

8:33 It didn't help much. The ADVANTAGE of watching this via live stream, of course, is that when the stream is less than smooth, I can have a drink of this beer instead of worrying too much about it.

8:36 Cripes those fiddles are ON FIRE. Fully committed.

8:39 1st violin is playing con sordino now—I can't believe how well orchestrated this piece is, given the funky instrumentation: 2 violins, clarinet, oboe, bass. By all rights, this should result in instruments picking up some really unidiomatic materials, or unsettling gaps in the texture, or SOMETHING, but no, the parts snap together like a jigsaw puzzle.

8:43 Wait I said two violins, that is clearly a VIOLA. Christ, I am going to VIOLA HELL for that.

8:45 Oh god, the switchboard is lighting up, the angry calls are coming in, LOOK, HE WAS PLAYING IN HIS UPPER REGISTERS, I'M WATCHING THIS ON A TINY SCREEN, ANYONE COULD HAVE MADE THAT MISTAKE.

8:49 Was totally enraptured by more excellent string writing—then alienated by more streaming problems. I think if I'm going to watch this in HD with my DSL connection I can't keep consulting the e-program. NO WASTING PRECIOUS BANDWIDTH.

8:51 The phone rang. I paused the stream to answer it. It was a pollster. Whoever paid for that poll is going to hell.

8:53 [applauding] Hey I'm gonna go get my laundry out of the dryer, brb.

9:00 Back. Hey, I can see pianist Ilya Poletaev in the fourth row! HI ILYA!

9:07 More excellent remarks from Berman—they're going to bring on LIVE DANCERS for this piece, y'all.

9:08 Hahaha those outfits are AMAZING.

9:11 I'm fully going to allow this. There is something super-Soviet about those dudes' tops.

9:13 BERMAN IS CLAPPING RHYTHMICALLY.

9:15 The stream just cut out totally. "Off Air" it says at the bottom of the screen. Attempting to refresh.

9:16 Annnnnnnnd we're back. At least it wasn't my fault this time—the number of viewers online is listed at the bottom of the screen, and it dropped from 80 to nobody and is still rising.

9:17 Connection still jittery.

9:24 I think it would be much harder to make a case for this piece as a major work—Berman remarked that the intended context of the original performance, an outdoor athletic exhibition, didn't offer much room for subtlety in the score, but even with a grain of salt, it's hard for me to get terrifically excited about this on the concert stage. It's easy to see why Berman, as he put it, didn't want to deprive the work of its physical component—it doesn't really transcend its incidental role.

9:29 Opera excerpts coming up. I am rather stoked, actually. I need a lot more Russian opera in my life.

9:31 Berman is giving a detailed synopsis of the scene; the opera is apparently a farce about students, love, and arctic exploration. I am very, very sad that it was never completed beyond the first fifteen minutes.

9:35 Actually, from that description I expected something of a throwaway work, but this is really, really lovely. These harmonies are actually, like, intoxicating—and Berman's playing is making a complex introduction sing out.

9:37 How much longer until these webcasts come with subtitles? THEN we will TRULY be living in the future.

9:47 I am now eating a delicious dinner whilst enjoying the opera scene. I have to say, the singers seem very well-suited to this repertoire, just in terms of their instruments.

9:55 Streaming jitters keep coming back, past few minutes, grr. There's also the technical matter of miking singers who won't stand still, but that's rather to be expected, ain't it.

9:59 [applauding s'more]

10:00 The End.

Unpopular New Blog!

2009-12-21T18:44:00.001-05:00

So I'm going to try something new? My editor at the New Haven Advocate has asked me to start blogging for them! There is no money in it, but there is no money in this shit either, and I have extracted explicit promises that I can be as "wonky" and "profane" as I desire.

Will this move get me more readers? Lose me all of my readers? Who can say! But anyway, here is my latest entry on the new blog. Lemme know what you think in the comments (here, or there). Oh and, here's a link for the RSS feed on the new blog.

Nothing to Say

2009-12-04T00:31:00.001-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education is giving me a 404 when I try to leave a comment on this article about David Gelernter, so I'll just spit it out here:

Depending on whom you ask, Gelernter's intellectual adventurism is the mark of a true Renaissance man or the desperate flailing of a scattershot dilettante. Around Yale, there is a curious reluctance to criticize him on the record. "Some communication at Yale is conducted in raised eyebrows and significant silences," notes Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at the university, when asked about this reticence. It may be that many of his colleagues are reluctant to speak openly about Gelernter out of sympathy for his experience with the Unabomber. Whatever the case, few want to be publicly critical.

Oh well allow me! Because I'd like to point out that this is disgusting:

The woman who yearns to be a rabbi resembles the openly practicing homosexual who wants the same thing. Both cases suggest a man who yearns to be a hazzan but lacks the ear or voice for it, or hopes to be a rosh yeshiva ... but lacks the temperament or brains, or wants to be a poet but has nothing to say.

That's from Gelernter's new manifesto, Judaism: A Way of Being. Note the flaccid rhetoric! Note the creepy use of "openly practicing homosexual"—a rabbi who practices sodomy in secret is A-OK, I guess.

Oh, yeah, and in case you're wondering, our "Renaissance man"'s paintings are pretty wretched, too. Way to go, Chronicle of Higher Ed, and way to go, Yale University Press.

Hollaback

2009-11-28T14:00:00.000-05:00

So John Hollenbeck turned up on my radar just recently, when the New Sounds podcast featured his piece The Cloud. I had mixed feelings! But you people know I have Jazz Issues, which I am still trying to rationalize and articulate. For now they remain the sort of Issues that would be better rehearsed on a therapist's couch than on a blog, but insofar as I can gripe intelligently at all about things like jazz fusion and jazz for large ensemble, I guess something strikes me as uncanny about the meticulous performance style—it seems too cautious, somehow. What I love about the jazz I love is how well hidden the precision often is. (CLASSICAL COMPOSERS AND PERFORMERS, YOU COULD LEARN SO MUCH FROM THIS.) But on the other hand, that's clearly not what Hollenbeck's trying to achieve with this stuff, so I guess it is not him, it's me. See also Argue, Darcy James.

But the point is that, like Argue, John Hollenbeck clearly deserves to be on yall's new-music radar as well. Of the two discs his publicist sent me, the one that excites me most isn't the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, whose latest release (Eternal Interlude) is excerpted in the above podcast, but last year's Rainbow Jimmies, which consists mostly of chamber works Hollenbeck has written for his own Claudia Quintet and for other small groups even further away from any kind of conventional jazz configuration.

His writing for violinist Todd Reynolds is brilliant, maybe because he's thinking about the violin as a percussion instrument, employing both hands to pluck the strings

Gray Cottage Study #3 My Deer ...

and even, later on, detuning the G string like it was a kettledrum. (That's Hollenbeck on drumset, on that track.)

Here's my favorite piece off the album, Ziggurat (Interior); it's the companion to the slightly silly Ziggurat (Exterior), a big jagged pyramid of Latin-style percussion; this one's performed by the Ethos Percussion Quartet:

Ziggurat (Interior) - John Hol...

See, that's just good writing!

Anyway, on MONDAY, at the Le Poisson Rouge, John Hollenbeck is doing a release party for the Large Ensemble record, but it's also going to be him and Theo Bleckmann and their band covering Meredith Monk (see Hollenbeck and Bleckmann jamming here), and Todd Reynolds is gonna be there too, to play the stuff from Rainbow Jimmies. So it's kind of a big deal! 8 pm, $15, info here.

Now C Here

2009-11-25T14:40:00.001-05:00

Just in case you needed something else to be thankful for (BECAUSE TOMORROW IS THANKSGIVING, GET IT?), here is a streaming mp3 of the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble playing Terry Riley's In C at their LPR release party! Via them.

I'm not totally loving the alapana (I am guessing that is Michael Lowenstern? somebody who was there correct me) that kicks it off—"the delicacy of taking liberties with scores that already offer a great deal of leeway to the performer" etc etc—but Dennis DeSantis's electronic contributions are sensitive and credible, and this offers a tantalizing glimpse of the full-length performance I wish GVSUNME had released in the first place. More like this, please, everyone!

Uh-Oh

2009-11-19T15:58:00.001-05:00

The good news is, I finally got around to interviewing New Haven new-music mainstay Jack Vees, apropos of tonight's performance of his Party Talk. The bad news is, Party Talk is canceled! The WORSE news is, I think it's because Timo Andres has swine flu!

Dammit. Ah, well: the Cerrone, Knight, Kuspa, and Wang performances are still scheduled to go on. Everybody drink lots of hot soup and get plenty of rest and let's Party Talk soon.

Your Daily Mindfuck

2009-11-18T18:30:00.002-05:00

First, via Timo Andres, Pitchfork follows up on this craziness (Fiery Furnaces guy mixes up Harry Partch, microtonal composer, with Harry Patch, the WWI vet the Radiohead song is about) with the even more bizarre announcement,

Friedberger tried to cover his fuck up with a statement that said: "Matt has not heard the Radiohead song about Harry Patch, but if he did, he is sure he wouldn't like it. No doubt Radiohead and their fans can ignore his opinion of this matter and continue with their triumphant artistic interventions. Matt would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists."

Now, Beck actually seems to be responding. He's putting up a new song called "Harry Partch" on Beck.com later today. According to a post on the site, the track "employs Partch's 43 tone scale, which expands conventional tonality into a broader variation of frequencies and resonances." It isn't clear yet if the song is directly related to Friedberger's remarks, or just one hell of a coincidence.

I have no idea whether this is even true, or Beck is just screwing with us now. Andres: "My head a splode."

UPDATE: It is true. The song is up on Beck's website.

CODA. I scrolled down that Pitchfork page, and there was a video of Renee Fleming singing "Perfect Day" with Lou Reed on Czech TV, as if to remind us, lest we forget, that Sting does not have a monopoly on Tragicomic Crossover Nightmares. A perfect day, indeed.

Have You Heard These Things?

2009-11-14T09:00:00.002-05:00

New Corey Dargel, everybody. He and violinist Cornelius Dufallo are premiering a new song-cycle at the Stone Nov. 29, and here's a taste—fiddle loops, brutal lyrics, 7/8 time. Highly recommended. It's like Owen Pallett meets Stephin Merritt meets rhythmic complexity? Yikes, okay, the previous sentence just embarrassed us all. Let's move on.

I haven't written much about our New Amsterdam friends lately, which is totally a mistake. They've been continuing this monthly ARCHIPELAGO concert series at the Galapagos Art Space, and I kicked myself when I realized I'd forgotten to tell y'all to check out the show by Roomful of Teeth, a new-music chamber choir, which based totally on YouTube clips, I'm pretty sure is going to become the new thing. Like Toby Twining and the Toby Twining Singers! Or Meredith Monk and the Funky Bunch! Look here they are singing Judd Greenstein: And here they are singing Caroline Shaw: Seriously, isn't this going to be a big deal?

Anyway. The next Archipelago concert, on Nov. 20 (there will also be a Dargel one in the spring), is all about Victoire, whom—as we have established—you totally love, and special guests Arturo en el Barco. Arturo en el Barco is one Angélica Negrón and her band, and you'd really better check it out, here. Eerie, sample-driven ambient, very good. It makes me want to wear gloves. And eyeliner. Actually, after listening to a little Arturo and a little Victoire just now, I think I am going to try to bring hats back, so this is a dangerous combination. You're warned. You're welcome.

fuori dall'abitato di Malbork

2009-11-12T16:00:00.013-05:00

Okay this was kind of crazy. But the really crazy thing about this thing HERE

Hurdy Gurdy Man - Sting

is how not-bad it is. Sting's affected and overwrought Classical Voice was a colossal drag on his Dowland album, Songs from the Labyrinth—Dowland's songs are already overwrought with (well) a labyrinth of lines, and demand a clear, simple vocal style. (Shouldn't a pop singer be capable of a clear, simple style?) Das Leiermann, on the other hand, which Sting has recorded on his new If on a Winter's Night..., is a clear and simple tune already, and it actually benefits a little from his ridiculous stage whisper, if you've a high tolerance for camp. Plus that's DANIEL HOPE playing that violin. Plus Sting's translation is LOL.

Apparently he also covers Bach, Prætorius, and Purcell up on this record? Gee, I hope he sings them all in this sickly baritone range!

The Importance of Being Kernis

2009-11-11T19:55:00.000-05:00

I really, really, really wanted to use that as the headline for my review of Aaron Jay Kernis's deeply earnest Third Symphony.

Fiery Furnaces' Matthew Friedberger Disses Radiohead, Is Dumb

2009-11-11T14:44:00.004-05:00

Or maybe he just mis-heard the interviewer? Anyway, here's the quote:

When told that Radiohead's Thom Yorke sent out a mass e-mail describing the group's tribute song to the UK's last veteran of World War I, 'Harry Patch (In Memory Of),' Friedberger adds the British rock star to his fraud alert list. "'Oh, please listen to our new song about Harry Patch,'" Friedberger says mockingly. "F--- you! You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That's a put-on. That's a branding technique and Radiohead have their brand that they're popular and intelligent. So they have a song about Harry Patch.

"How's the song?" Friedberger asks. "Is it 48 notes to the octave? What does it have to do with Harry Patch? Oh, my wife says I am being very rude. She doesn't like me insulting Radiohead. She's afraid they will send their lackeys through the computer to sabotage us. But they needn't worry -- we are a band that sabotages ourselves."

Ha ha ha. Psst! Hey dude! You might wanna...

via Stereogum.

In C Remixed: Too Much Remixed, Not Enough In C

2009-11-08T09:00:00.081-05:00

That is the short version of my review. Glib, yeah, but it's true! The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble's interpretation of Terry Riley's masterpiece (I hate people who throw around "masterpiece" but, look, it just is, let's move on) leaves me wanting more, more, more. I hope you've heard of GVSUNME before; their performance of Music for 18 Musicians got a lot of press, partly because they work that piece, and partly because GVSUNME's backstory is a reporter's dream—did you know they have avant-garde music in places that aren't New York?? in STATE schools???—but that's a little condescending, and not entirely relevant to the enjoyment of their music.

Okay, this part is relevant: they're young, which gives them at least two advantages. One is that for classical musicians born after 1980 or so, the aesthetic code of minimalism is a first language. Not that they grew up humming Violin Phase, but they are too young to have known a world in which, say, Koyaanisqatsi had not inspired a whole world of imitators.

The other advantage is that young musicians don't take shit for granted. An ace professional ensemble could sleepwalk through a score like In C, and I'm sure many of them do. But every note counts on this recording; there are no throwaway gestures. Check out those string players! Their Bartok pizzicati, their sixteenth notes bowed heavily and close to the bridge, tell us that they are in this for keeps. (When the clarinets go for the same grit, wailin' in their high registers, it seems a little more affected, but I can deal with that.) They sound excited to dig into even the most superficially unglamorous phrase.

But it's over too soon! This is a speedy performance, just twenty minutes or so, which would make sense if they were trying to fit it on one side of a record; as part of a two disc set, it just seems ungenerous. I could listen to these guys play this for eighty minutes, easy. Why not make this a set with one disc of In C and one disc of remixes, instead of hurrying along from section to section quite so zippily?

If I thought there were two discs of absolutely essential remixes here, I'd be more forgiving, but really, two discs of remixes would be too many remixes of any one tune. Maybe I am getting all old and bitter? I used to LOVE the remix album, as a thing. Now I feel as if we can be finickier, when there's the possibility of releasing a track "download only," because while I can happily wander through the architecture of Terry Riley's funky cathedral for an hour and a half, one hour spent listening to five-minute chunks of In C with breakbeats under them is not an experience I will want to repeat very often. Crank the last track on your stereo, then feed the rest to your iPod to shuffle through at your leisure.

But I've skipped over the big question hanging over In C Remixed. Should In C even be remixed? I've kvetched in this space before about the delicacy of taking liberties with scores that already offer a great deal of leeway to the performer. In some ways, a piece with this added dimension of Conceptual beauty is that much more fragile; a bad-faith performance of John Cage is going to be yet far more unsatisfying than bad-faith Beethoven. On the other hand, one of the great things about screwing around with an open-instrumentation, open-form piece like In C is that every performance is, in a sense, a remix: you've got a page of stems, you loop them to make a groove. It's a short step from "open instrumentation" and "open form" to "open source." Was Terry Riley the first IDM artist??

No. Well, okay, maybe. Actually, one of the things that's so exciting about In C is that you can't really say what it is. I mean, yes, it's a piece of "Western concert music" in terms of context and construction, but on the other hand the cycling form and limited pitch materials push it, and so much minimalist music, into an in-between territory that could be something out of the vernacular. On a superficial level, anyway, it has a lot more in common with a rock jam than anything out of the European concert-hall tradition, and so it doesn't really come down as one thing or the other; it's content just to float there.

Which makes some of the remixes on this disc seem a little unimaginative by comparison. Yes, you could just tag a drum track onto In C, lay a bassline & synths under it, and it would become a piece of tonal pop music. But that would be pinning the butterfly down. Something is lost. Granted, something is lost in any interpretation of any piece of music, but with many of these remixes not much is added, either.

Herewith, a lumpy review of each and every remix, not quite in order.

Track 1: Jack "Meat Beat Manifesto" Dangers' "Semi-Detached" mix; I'm a fan of Jack Dangers, and this mix would be a credit to any chillout compilation, but it's hard not to suspect that he could've made essentially the same piece of music out of any source material. (Ditto, to a lesser extent, bass clarinetist Michael Lowenstern's "Bints" (Track 4) and "Foster Grant" mixes (Disc 2, Track 3), and Dangers' own "Extension" mix on track 1 of disc 2. Dennis DeSantis makes an appearance here as well (Track 10), as the world's most in-demand remixer of new music into undistinguished dance music.)

But the other 90s electronica star here, DJ Spooky, fares far worse. What's going on here? Track 8 sounds, without exaggeration, exactly like what I've described above: tag on a drum track, lay down a bassline & synths, and call it a day. Isn't this just a lazy run-through of pop clichés, slapped onto In C? And this is critical darling DJ Spooky we're talking about, here! Shouldn't he, of all people, know that the unexamined breakbeat is not worth banging?

Track 2: Mason Bates. Not an unconventional piece of electronica, but quite charming to the ear, and springing naturally from the source material. I especially like those moments of tension and release ("PONGGG!" goes the sampled chorus) that derive out of a certain self-conciousness this project could have used more of. But even better in this vain is the collage-like, sample-heavy Jad Abumrad remix (track 6), which I was poised to dislike (he's the RadioLab guy! They can be so freaking smug and simplistic) but actually it's awesome, one of the highlights of the set, for that same reason, self-consciousness generating musical drama.

Track 3: Glenn Kotche. Glenn Kotche, you are great! Why did I file you under "indie rocker with high-art pretensions"? This is formally surprising, dramatic and intense, with real rhythmic sophistication. Class, Glenn Kotche gets the gold star. Be more like Glenn Kotche.

Track 5: Zoë Keating, cellist, kicks off the performer-driven remixes on the disc, which are largely mediocre. Actually, violinist Todd Reynolds brings his remix to a nice climax (Disc 2, Track 5), but fellow fiddler DBR cannot help but drape those signature hair-metal violin stylings all over the mix on his own track (Track 11) and that's just embarrassing.

Track 7: Nico Muhly. Okay you know I'm IN THE TANK for homeboy so if you want objectivity skip to the next paragraph. I like this remix because it makes me genuinely uncomfortable—does that oboe REALLY have to do that? Why does this all sound so naked?—and then warms up so subtly.

Track 9: Phil Kline. Another one for the win column—seems simple without seeming lazy, a high-concept tribute to a high-concept piece.

Disc 2, Track 2: Mikael Karlsson and Rob Stephenson actually rock this. Glitchily delicious; disorienting and gnarly.

Disc 2, Track 4: "Is In C in F?" is the title of R Luke DuBois's remix; the short answer is "No." A pleasant sheen over it, but not much to hold onto here.

Disc 2, Track 6: Kleerup. I have no intellectual or theoretical justification for enjoying this track so immensely, I'm just a sucker for a stiff electro beat and that giddy backbeat clarinet.

Disc 2, Track 7: Leave it to David Lang to whip up a remix—of the world's shaggiest, warmest piece of new music—that is VINEGAR TO THE EAR. Fortunately, I love vinegar, I pour it on everything, and so this dissonant scraping is a treat for me. If my ear had lips, it would be licking them. It sounds a little like software, if you know what I mean, but it's so much more daring than every other remix on this compilation, and digs so close to the heart of the source material, that it stands out in a crowded field.

In conclusion: Should you buy this? If you're an audiophile, or if you collect recordings of In C you should probably pick up the disc. If you consume electronic music in large quantities, you should probably download the album. The download isn't even a bad buy even if you don't like most of the remixes, although it's frustrating that iTunes and Amazon won't let you grab the excellent title track on its own, then cherry-pick the most interesting cuts from the rest of the set.

If you prefer to insert some live music into your ears, here's going to be some kind of crazy In C Remixed party at Le Poisson Rouge tonight at 6:30; Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble will be there, as well as DeSantis, DuBois, Reynolds, Lowenstern, and most exciting of all, Jad "MC Jad" Abumrad will be MC-ing. It's $15 to get in which isn't bad and since it's LPR you can get fully drunk on Rolling Rock and ask MC Jad to sign his podcast for you. Hooray!

Not to Be Outdone

2009-11-06T16:26:00.001-05:00

So one of the big highlights, for me, of John Adams' talk in New Haven, was when he discussed the criticism his unorthodox Doctor Atomic libretto had received in the press. "Opera is bloodsport," he said, and began to quote one of his detractors—whose words I instantly recognized as Mark Adamo's! Well, Mark Adamo's blogging again, and he is again too much. I cannot wait for the day that Adamo and Adams and Marshall and Muhly all sit on a panel together at some festival and then all go home and blog about it.

Oh Goodness

2009-10-30T08:00:00.002-04:00

So you heard that John Adams has a blog, but guess who ELSE has a blog now! That's right: John Adams' BFF Ingram Marshall. This blog is, to the surprise of nobody, quite a bit more laid-back. (Via Timo Andres, who points out that there are so far two entries and both of them are about fungus.) I've talked about Marshall a couple times on here, I think, but it really is true that you should get to know his music—here's a video of his guitar piece Soe-pa, the second movement, which is the musical equivalent of stepping into a boutique selling sweet frankincense and gradually realizing that the building is on fire:

Crowdsourcing [Shudder]

2009-10-28T12:32:00.000-04:00

Attention all friends and readers, but especially composers, performers, and electronic musicians among you: a friend of mine asked me, the other day, if I had any bright ideas for an iPhone app he and his techie friends should get to work on. I know lot of you work seriously with live electronics, compose at the computer, etc. Is there anything you wish your iPhone would do?

More from the Hell Mouth

2009-10-28T11:26:00.001-04:00

Boosey's wonderful Sarah Baird points out that John Adams is going to be speaking at Yale TODAY, so all (er, both) you local readers can get on that—4:30, Whitney Humanities Center, and then again tomorrow, same bat-time. Hey look, some provincial hack did a write-up for the town rag.

This Should Be Interesting

2009-10-27T14:30:00.006-04:00

I'm told that world's greatest musicologist Richard Taruskin once sent one of his infamous postcards (goose quill dipped in venom) to John Adams, with the message: stop talking to the media.

NOT BLOODY LIKELY, the dude just published his MEMOIRS, for chrissake. Also, someone has to defend him in print from such unhinged or uncharitable critics as, say, Richard Taruskin. But I have to admit, I did not see this coming: ladies and gentlemen, the John Adams Blog.

It is called HELL MOUTH, because John Adams is a huge fan of Buffy.

Well I, for one, cannot wait to see what comes flying out of this Hell Mouth. Welcome to my blogroll, John Adams! And the URGENT folder of my RSS reader.

(UPDATE!)

Nutless Wonders

2009-10-27T10:45:00.003-04:00

Okay so here's the deal. There are a bunch of blogs with a bunch of trivia questions. The trivia questions have to do with Sacrificium, Cecilia Bartoli's crazy new album of music for written for the castrati. Type all the answers into this website, and SOMETHING AMAZING WILL HAPPEN. (Yeah, I don't know.)

Here's the blog with the first question—Parterre Box, technically an opera magazine targeted at gay men, but possibly the best (and CERTAINLY the most entertaining) classical news/gossip website of any stripe.

Here's the blog with the third question, which, if you read this blog, you're probably reading already—Sequenza21 is THE enclave of new-music wonkery online.

And HERE is Question #2:

Mozart's famous motet, “Exsultate, Jubilate K. 165”, was written for which of Nicola Porpora's students?

Okay, because I'm such a nice guy, I will give you a hint: it was a dude. A dude with no testicles. Okay here's another hint: if you broke your Google, I believe you can find the answers to all of these questions at the promotional website for the album.

So, again: First question here, third question here, enter the answers here.

Hooray!

Combination Pizza Hut and Analytical Dressing-Down

2009-10-25T21:45:00.032-04:00

In case you somehow haven't heard of them by now, here is a fanmade video for the YouTube hit "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" by Das Racist:

And here (via The Standing Room) is an essay (and 24 haiku!) in which they demolish the disingenuous racial politics of New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones. (SFJ, you'll recall, is quite unafraid to "stir up" "controversy" in his essays for the magazine, and I use those words in the sense that one might "stir up" "controversy" by farting in crowded elevators.)

It should become clear as soon as you start reading that these guys are at least as learnèd as they are clever, but I still can't help but think it must sting to get schooled in hip-hop and race by the "Combination Pizza Hut" guys. Seriously, on some level, that's gotta be like getting an intellectual beatdown from Afroman. Well done, gents! I shall listen to "Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell" with new ears.

Somewhere at the Bottom of This Post Is a CD Review

2009-10-22T16:30:00.004-04:00

The first time I heard the music of Mikel Rouse, I had the sense of an enormous door opening. I'd always had the sense that it should be possible to apply Reich-like techniques to popular music, but inexplicably I'd hardly ever seen it done. Why not? Why wasn't everybody doing this? But here was Dennis Cleveland, here was a whole opera constructed in vernacular forms—made out of pop songs, staged as a talk show—but with immense rhythmic and structural interest as well conceptual sophistication.

It was at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and as my friends (one Greg and a Chris) and I took our seats, the piece's conceptual ingenuity was already paying aesthetic dividends. The black-box theater was set up like the studio for a talk show taping; before the piece started, an audience wrangler coached us on applause, etc., the way a real studio audience is coached. Throughout the performance, the cameras passed over the audience, so that (as in a real talk show) we could watch ourselves on monitors; members of the audience turned out to be plants, standing up when the "host" (Dennis Cleveland, played by the composer) approached and asking questions of the other performers (as in a real talk show).

And as is ever the case with artworks that break down the fourth wall, all of this carefully choreographed "interaction" served to make me more awkwardly aware of the imaginary and yet very real boundary between audience and performer. The same way that holding a baby fills me with an irrational fear that I will suddenly be seized by the urge to drop it, or standing on a rooftop makes me suddenly afraid of jumping off (have I just revealed myself to be totally, dangerously insane?), I became terrified of disrupting the performance when an actor suddenly revealed himself just a few seats away, and Mikel Rouse pointed a microphone at him; the awkwardness was thrillingly heightened by the presence in the audience (only-in-(Greater)-L.A.!) of Actual Hollywood Celebrity Keanu Reeves, and my Greg wondered afterwards if "Keanu's people" had made special arrangements for him not to be caught on camera during the piece (sample refrain: "Celebrity all the time / Celebrity all the time").

But the talk-show trappings were only a jumping-off point for the drama, the way that (f'rinstance) "Puzzling Evidence" from David Byrne's True Stories
uses the rhetoric of the sermon as the framework for an aesthetic that would actually seem to owe a lot to (f'rinstance) the work of Robert Ashley.

So what I don't understand is why, ten years or so after I saw it for the first time, I don't enjoy Dennis Cleveland a lot more. After I moved to New York, I picked up the disc at ye Tower Records Outlet, back when there was such a thing, and was oddly unmoved to hear the music again, out of context.

Why? We might find a clue in the review that inspired me to buy my copy of the disc. [Now, this is a bit awkward, since that review was written by a critic who, uh, hates me, and has asked me not to mention him again, but he's easily Rouse's most important champion, so let's just call him Thinskinned Critic ("T.C.") and move on.] T.C. was responding to a review by Anthony Tommasini, who missed the point somewhat—ignoring the theatrical elements almost entirely, waving aside the complexity of the score, and complaining that "the layered elements are mostly drowned out by the blaring surface stuff. When some inner element does come through, it's often not much more than a lame rock riff"; Rouse's "rhythm tracks are intended to stimulate your medulla oblongata, which in turn provokes an involuntary tapping response in your foot. But the music bypasses the brain receptors that register auditory pleasure."

Harsh! At this point, I was as ready to dismiss Tommasini as he was to dismiss Rouse—and then I read T.C.'s response. This is how it begins:

To take one of many examples from Mikel Rouse's talk-show opera Dennis Cleveland: There is a passage in the final "Madison Square" scene in which Rouse, as Dennis, is rapping, "I've been waiting for this, a potential arcade," and so on, and the chorus enters with a chorale heard earlier in the opera, in a different meter, key, and seemingly even tempo. The effect is much as though you're sitting in the opera house listening to and watching "The Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walkure and quietly the "Magic Fire" music from a different part of the opera enters superimposed, so that you're listening to both at the same time. Through the end of the scene, the music adds layers of already-heard material, until you're listening to at least four at once.

The fact that, in Rouse's work, you can hear those layered musical passages at the same time without their getting muddy is not because Rouse has secretly crafted them to work together harmonically, the way Mozart did his three dances in different meters at the climax of Don Giovanni's Act I.

Again, that's how the column starts. In the first two paragraphs, T.C. compares Rouse to arguably the two greatest achievements in the history of Western music-drama. "Well," I said, "I loved Dennis Cleveland, but my experience of it wasn't like that at all." Because there are a few essential differences between these works, some of the greatest ever conceived by man, and Dennis Cleveland.

Let's take apart T.C.'s example. First, we have Dennis, rapping about a potential arcade. This is not a good rap—"Instead of crossing what lingers in the state of lip balm," goes one couplet, "And saluting the mentors kind of capturing calm"—and Rouse, strictly as a vocalist, does not deliver it especially well on disc. Then the chorale enters, and it is not a very good chorale. The series of pitches sounds a bit arbitrary, as if they were chosen for their contrapuntal possibilities over any kind of appeal they might hold as an independent melody—which, one imagines, they must have been.

Now, there are of course many passages in the Ring in which Wagner brings together a number of distinct leitmotifs in a lucid contrapuntal texture. The great difference is that the Magic Fire Music, to use T.C.'s example again, is exquisitely composed and orchestrated, and the Ride of the Valkyries is one of the best-loved and most distinctive melodies in the history of classical music. And as for Don Giovanni, one of the most dazzling aspects of the Ball scene is that each of those three dances—each in a different meter, all at the same time—still sounds like Mozart. Dennis Cleveland is all process, no materials. And even Steve Reich will tell you that it's really all about the materials.

And so I went back to Tommasini. Was he right? In some respects, yes! The rock riffs are, in fact, lame. And while the layers of rhythm do add up to more than the sum of the parts (they could hardly add up to less! ba da bum! ok sorry that was a cheap shot), none of them is calculated, individually, to provide auditory pleasure.

Anyhow, here is a short promotional reel with clips of the opera, so you can make up your own damn mind:It's an interesting piece! However flawed, it is a worthwhile piece of theatre. I wish it were on DVD.

So, fast forward. I'd heard a few tracks from Mikel Rouse's more recent work, and it sounded very different from the now-dated (though somehow highly appropriate) Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis sound. Now the feel is more like recent Lindsey Buckingham:which sounds like a diss, but is it really? I wouldn't buy a Lindsey Buckingham CD, but I'm not going to go around saying he's a musical idiot. And it doesn't seem valid for me to say that Mikel Rouse's music is somehow lacking because it is insufficiently voguish.

But I do feel, and this is confirmed by listening to an advance copy Rouse's new disc, Gravity Radio, that Rouse's attempts to buck a certain modernist fallacy—the one that surfaces are unimportant, that every dimension of the music must be dense with information to the point of obscurity, that re-listening is all, and that casual listening is to go unrewarded (or even punished)—have drawn him into a counterfallacy in which the opacity of the modernists is replaced with a sort of blankness. Dig just beneath the surface, and yes, Rouse's music is quite sophisticated, but a casual listen offers meager rewards: banal tunes, familiar sonorities. The vocal delivery is the Adult Contemporary singer-songwriter's knowing rasp; the lyrics try too hard to hint "casually" at hidden depths; the melody to every single song seems to be built around a stepwise descent, to the point where I begin to wonder if there's some connection to the album's title—Gravity, get it?—or if it was just another underexamined pop cliché. (Hint: if you have to wonder, the answer doesn't matter.) Process is elevated above materials and, ultimately, results.

There is a lot to like about this album. It's hard to overstate the subtle intricacies of its rhythmic construction. The song "I'm So Blue" is a standout—the tension between the 7/8 meter and passages of syncopated 4/4 is appealingly realized and richly orchestrated. And I still have that sense, listening to his music, of a great door opening—I sense that Rouse is an important artist, and one worth hearing and seriously thinking about.

(Hence this enormous, meandering review; Rouse is not a famous composer, and if I thought he wasn't an important one, I'd feel comfortable dismissing the work I didn't like.)

But his work is also profoundly flawed. While Rouse has packed the album with the sort of careful detail that distinguishes a great rock album from a good one, he's neglected to include many of the elements that separate a good rock album from a bad rock album.

Think of it as a challenge to composers interested in creating a music that owes as much to rock as to Reich: he has opened the door; he has pointed to a potential art; now's your chance to step across the threshold.

You can hear the album live at tomorrow night's release concert at Galapagos Art Space, 8 p.m., $15 admission ($20 at the door), featuring that ACME ensemble you love so much; the disc itself drops November 3.

More Player Piano Awesomeness from Austria

2009-10-20T14:22:00.001-04:00

This is 8 minutes of KLOING! by Olga Neuwirth, with the excellent Marino Formenti on the keys. High-quality clip here.

By Unpopular Demand

2009-10-15T14:42:00.001-04:00

It's probably a little unseemly to blog a love-letter to my new editor at the New Haven Advocate, but he has been VERY aggressive about ensuring adequate coverage of the local arts scene, to the extent that I have not one but TWO pieces in the latest issue. Here's a breezy new review/preview column (New Music New Haven and Yale Concert Band; Emma Kirkby with Jakob Lindberg vs. the Florilegium ensemble, respectively), and here's a preview of tonight's New Haven Symphony Orchestra concert with the music of Augusta Read Thomas and Jin Hi Kim.

I wish I could've written about ten times as much about all this stuff—probably half of the time I spent actually writing these was spent deciding what to delete. I wish I could've said more about soloist Mihai Marica, who's been a dazzling cellist since I met him at a festival like ten years ago; I wish I could've gone into greater detail about Kim's connections to Korean folk music; I wish I could've quoted more from my fascinating conversations with her and with Augusta Read Thomas, who just didn't get enough space in this piece. Also, I wish I could have discussed the works on the concerts I reviewed (including one by my Orchestration for Non-Majors teacher, Frank Ticheli, hooray!) and singled out for PUBLIC SHAMING the people who sat right in front of me at the Yale Concert Band show and took flash photos and talked loudly and then walked out during the first movement of the Hindemith. H8ED them, with a capital H8.

I'll Cut the String that Makes the Hammer Strike

2009-10-15T00:00:00.002-04:00

Update your links. It's not The Rest Is Noise anymore, it's Unquiet Thoughts. (Via Steve Smith.)

Drive-By Tosca Review

2009-10-12T22:16:00.000-04:00

Just a few words on the new, already discussed-to-death Met Tosca, as viewed at this weekend's HD broadcast.

First: the cast was superb. It was a pleasure to watch Gadnidze dart his eyes like a good old silent-movie villain, and he was in fine voice as Scarpia. Álvarez was a warm and charming Cavaradossi, and he died great too—his "Whuh-oh, REAL bullets?" moment was heartbreaking. But Mattila TORE IT UP in the title role. She's got that bit of rasp up high, but she was convincingly hot-blooded and, in the second act, desperate as the diva, with a nice bite to her tone in all the right places. I'm gonna go ahead and dismiss all this "she's not a Tosca."

At the second interval, she thanked Bondy profusely for helping her create such a natural performance. It was true that some of her business was very well-thought-out: her embrace of Cavaradossi towards the end of their first scene together was elegant and stirring; when she began Vissi d'arte it was clear from her body language that we were watching a wreck of a woman. (There were a few unintentional giggles—when La Mattila briefly fumbled the knife, her comic timing was accidentally perfect, and titters went through the audience; there was another whoopsish laugh, but I forget what it was. Tosca's "stage directions" for Cavaradossi, on the other hand, were a moment of genuine, poignant comic relief.) Throughout, the drama was smartly matched to the score.

The sets were ugly. I love a simple design, I've seen some very spare productions that are nevertheless very attractive, and I appreciate that—esp. "in this economy"—opera is an expensive proposition, but at least on camera, the whole thing looked not so much "spare" or "elegant" as "cheap." The first and last acts were shrouded in darkness, which was dramatic but didn't register well on camera and was ultimately frustrating.

I thought the presence of the hos in the second act was a missed opportunity. If they'd seemed broken or frightened, like real women who'd been pressured into white slavery (Scarpia's favored seduction technique, as he makes clear in that scene) (also, can I even say "white slavery"?), it would've fit in better with his character and the scene and made his confrontation of Tosca that much more disturbing, and it would've seemed less like a bit of gratuitous flesh. As it was, they looked like happy sexual objects, from a Hollywood movie or gangsta rap video, maybe in it for the shoes.

But I thought the criticisms of the end of the second act were definitely too harsh. Again, we were watching a woman at the end of her rope; by foreshadowing the seizing of the dagger and the final suicide leap, Bondy really did accomplish his stated goal of taking the rhythms of melodrama out of the narrative—those crazy bootleg turns the plot takes into murder and suicide—and made it into something more reflective and psychological. One thing I haven't heard anybody point out is that Tosca, after contemplating suicide, sits down on the couch the murderous Scarpia was in when she sang Vissi d'arte, and he is of course slumped in front of the couch that she was in. It's a clever director's way of pointing out that the sainted Tosca has become a killer, and the self-styled predator has become the prey. And when she fans herself—well, of course, a lady's fan is an essential prop in Act 1; that's a good callback, and (again) shows the reversal of Scarpia's movement from (again) self-styled Iago to the victim of a crime of passion.

Finally, the Leap. I thought the special effect came off very well, much better (so I hear) than it did at the prima. I heard a low murmur from the crowd at my screening, so I think they were with me, although the "COME GET SOME" gesture on the way up the steps was a grossly miscalculated bit of business. Kung Fu Tosca? No.

All in all, my impression was overwhelmingly positive. I spoke to about six different people at the screening, four of them strangers, and the only one who disliked the production was my own friend, a die-hard connoisseur. The opera newbies were all crazy for it, and with good reason. The production packs a visceral punch, and the performers were a huge amount of fun to see and hear.

What else... I have to admit I wasn't paying much attention to the orchestra, though I thought the soloists nailed it. And uhhhhh get well, Jimmy!! Okay bye.

Rands Update

2009-10-08T15:11:00.000-04:00

For those of you living in the real world instead of that gothic Disneyland we call New Haven, it looks like that New Music New Haven concert is going to be streaming at the Yale website tonight? Hooray! (via @yalemusic)

Rands and the Italian Style (I just made that up)

2009-10-07T17:50:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick preview of tomorrow's New Music New Haven concert, featuring the music of Bernard Rands. Writing about a composer I don't know very well is pretty much the most fun, since it means I get to prepare for the interview by cramming hours of music into my ears. And then I got to put my editor through hell by accidentally going about a paragraph over the limit. Whoops. Hopin' the digested version of this article still makes sense.

Playa Piano

2009-10-07T16:08:00.001-04:00

It's a talker:(via @bearinetist)

R.I.P.

2009-10-04T14:15:00.001-04:00

Like New, Runs Great

2009-09-26T14:00:00.001-04:00

Loyal reader Greg has found the perfect gift for the person who has everything. I apologize for pasting all of this up in your grill, but it's impossible to pick out the best part, and this has to be immortalized before it disappears into the Craigslist æthers:

I'm not sure one can truly "buy" an opera company, particularly if it is on the "non-profit" track...but hear me out.

I founded San Francisco Opera Baroque this year and produced a "gala" concert on Saturday evening, September 19, 2009 at the Victoria Theatre. The performance featured an all-Handel program of opera arias sung by some outstanding singers from around the state of California. The small period-style orchestra was superb and the dancing was lovely. A rather small, but appreciative audience was in attendance--and we picked up a couple of new "fans". This company is finally "off the ground" but there is a great distance to go before it can produce a fully-staged opera. Instead of being SF Opera Baroque it is still SF Opera B-roke! I am an unemployed church musician who dreamed of designing and singing in a Handel opera, and my desire led me to start this company. Although I feel capable of running this company, I am not in the right position financially to do so and truthfully I think I am "past my prime" as an operatic performer.

I am seeking one or more passionate lover(s) of Baroque operatic music to take over the ownership and development of this venture. The ideal person or persons who step forward to take on this exiting new project should be financially stable, be available for hard work, possess the ability to think creatively in seeking solutions, and be in a position to offer some degree of financial support to the development of SFOB. To facilitate the transfer of ownership of this company, I am hopeful that the new owner(s) can put up the funds to compensate those professionals who performed and/or worked on last week's production (a total of $10-15k, but I'm willing to negotiate something less). I am looking only to be reimbursed for my own expenses for setting up the corporation and the gala, which I believe is less than $1,000. No personal profit would be made in this transfer. The web address is http://www.sfobaroque.org.

If interested, please contact me by Email.

"I thought one did the fund-raising before one hired the professionals," Greg suggests, "but I understand church musicians have a different relationship to funding mechanisms than the rest of us." Heh heh heh. I just hope this doesn't turn out to be one of those Nigerian Baroque Opera Company scams.

How You Can Help in Iraq

2009-09-24T15:14:00.001-04:00

Hey did you ever notice that when people complain about the difficulties facing people in the war-torn Middle East, the solution they come up with is usually "drop some more bombs on it"? Wouldn't it be nice if, instead, we could give them money and music and other things that actually improve life instead of ending it?

[If my politics are grossing any of you out right now, please keep reading, because I know the situation is complicated, I'm being tongue in cheek, and what I'm about to draw your attention to is something I think everybody can agree is a pretty good idea.]

Well guess what! Our friend, composer and activist R. Timothy Brady, has been at it for a while, and now is a perfect opportunity for you to help him.

You might know Brady as the composer of Edalat Square, a prize-winnin' opera about the execution of two gay boys in Iran; since then, he's founded the Soulbird organization to promote arts and tolerance in the places that need them the most. This summer, they put on Iraq's first ever new-music festival, featuring the Iraqi premiere of Terry Riley's In C(!!!), and now they're taking it to the next level by founding a school to serve as a haven for Iraqi artists in the relatively stable region of Kurdistan. From the website:

Concert halls, art galleries, and movie theaters have been completely destroyed. Walking to school while carrying an instrument and practicing piano at home can get you killed. This is reality for the majority of artists living in Iraq today. Hundreds have been targeted by terrorists and insurgents for torture and murder since the US-led invasion began in 2003. Some reports estimate as many as 80% of singers have fled the country....

If you thought you got picked on as an artistic type at your middle-American high school, it is time for a big fat Reality Check, or better yet a big fat Bank Check (TAX-DEDUCTIBLE). And if you don't have money, that's okay too—the Soulbird Arts Academy of Kurdistan is looking for CDs, scores, DVDs, books, electronics, or anything you can donate to help the cause.

I'm told Bang on a Can and their Cantaloupe label have already made a generous donation. Go indie classical!! How awesome would it be if the bigger labels stepped up to the plate as well?

More info here. Please give all you can, folks! This might be the most important arts-related charity I've ever heard of.

Matthew Guerrieri Wins Again

2009-09-23T18:06:00.000-04:00

A lot of people have been bitching about Luc Bondy's new Tosca at the Met, none louder than Franco Zeffirelli—the vain and silly queen whose much admired production is being (temporarily, perhaps) replaced—who was crying about it before the curtain had even gone up on the new one.

Sweetie, age gracefully. Yes, you're going to die someday. That doesn't mean the rest of us have to preserve your turds in amber. Get over it.

Anyway, of all the zingers that have consequently been zung at the Zeff's expense, the best probably belongs to our beloved Matthew Guerrieri:

Personally, I don’t think anyone who cast Mel Gibson as Hamlet should be playing the “faithful to the author” card.

Oh. Snap.

Thank you.

In Other Condiment Pun News

2009-09-17T16:57:00.000-04:00

In the new New Haven Advocate, a quick preview of the '09-'10 classical music schedule! Expect a season seasoned with spicy new musical blah blah blah [too weary to complete own hackneyed "joke"].

Kill Them with Sweetness

2009-09-17T08:57:00.004-04:00

Quick rundown of congrats for the New Amsterdam Records-and-affiliated crowd of young composers:

The WNYC podcast doesn't seem to have put out a lot of episodes lately, so it was a pleasant surprise to find in my pod-hole an episode dedicated to Missy Mazzoli's Victoire! Listen to it (mp3 here, podcast RSS feed here) and tell me what y'all think. For me, one of the most satisfying features of the music is the canny use of electronics—and one of the most troubling is the integration of the clarinet. Sometimes I think it wants to be a trumpet? At any rate I feel that the place of the woodwind section within the bandsemble lineup, as I noted so long ago in my Free Speech Zone review, is its weak spot, its Achilles heel if you will. Listen yourself, enjoy, & tell me what you think.

ALSO, let's toss a bouquet of congratulations at Ted Hearne, who won the Gaudeamus Prize for his Katrina Ballads! (Via, probably, @dja?) Here's the thing: I am not that crazy about the Katrina Ballads. Why am I so resistant to a work that is so obviously well-crafted? I enjoyed the New Haven premiere of Hearne's Eyelid Margin immensely, but his political music makes me feel more harangued than provoked. A clearer example than this might be his piece You Have AIDS. No, no, you don't actually have AIDS! (I mean, unless you do. Get tested, everybody!) No, that's just the title of the piece. It asks the listener to assume the position of a South African man being apprised of the fact that he has AIDS by what must be one of the worst HIV Counselors in the world ("So, like I said, you have AIDS. / Am I going too fast? HIV. CD4. AIDS. Any questions?"). I guess the idea is to shock the audience into an awareness of the reality of the AIDS crisis in Africa, but when I listened to this sound clips, I felt more like I had found myself at the audience at LEASE: The Musical. As if there's something smug, or presumptuous, or, it seems unfair to say, condescending going on here.

"Unfair," because, what—are Ivy League composers not allowed to comment on events affecting Black America or the developing world? That's absurd. I'm not fully able to articulate where I'm coming from with this, which may be why I've allowed my attempt to qualify my congratulations run on about ten times longer than the actual congrats. What is wrong with me?? Do I just dislike this off-Broadway sort of idiom? Maybe that's it, is that it feels in some superficial way like a Urinetown without the intentional self-parody, or an I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky without, well, okay I'm not actually going to defend I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky:

John Adams – "Leila's Song About the Wise Young Women"
from I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky

I'm sorry. I'm obsessed.

And our final CONGRATULATIONS WITH EXCESSIVE QUALIFICATIONS (should I start drafting this blog before I post, so I know where I'm going before I get there?) goes to Corey Dargel, whose "Condi songs," Con Dolcezza, earned a tweet from that very special lady who makes me fantasize about going to one of those weird ex-gay camps where they teach you how to un-limp your wrist and then make you marry a lesbian, just so that the two of us could be forced into a sexless opposite-marriage, Rachel Maddow.

I actually love these songs. Almost a year after the election of Barack Obama, now that the people in charge of representing America to the rest of the world are less prone to making them totally hate us, and we can look back on Condoleezza Rice's tenure the way we look at pictures of a kegger gone horribly wrong ("I can't believe we actually DID that, dude we were so WASTED"), I'm hearing these pieces for the first time, and they've lost little of their impact—because Condoleezza Rice has lost little of her mystery. How did an intelligent, cultured woman end up rubber-stamping such a disastrous foreign policy? How did someone whose family struggled up from slavery join an administrative team that turned its collective back on the cause of equal rights for Americans? Dargel doesn't pretend to answer these questions, but he asks them more eloquently than I've ever heard them asked before, by generously and sensitively setting to music remarks that make Rice sound more like a civil rights leader than, say, a coldblooded conniving bureaucrat with the blood of innocents pooling about her Manolos.

But since I'm being a total bitch to everyone today, I'll also point out that this performance is a bit unsatisfying—I feel as if really pulling off a number like "Gospel Song" requires a vocal instrument with more gravity than this lady is able to muster. ATTENTION ALL SINGERS, please check out this piece! I want to hear a second recording.

Jesus, WHY am I so negative. Anyway, congrats again to everybody, and if you didn't already know that Naxos is picking up the New Amsterdam catalogue, the first releases are trickling out next month—including the debut from NOW Ensemble, and Dargel's Other People's Love Songs—so if you actually still buy records in a record store nowadays, you will suddenly be able to find them there! Hooray. Okay g'bye.

Of Course.

2009-09-14T10:59:00.001-04:00

via Lindsay Robertson

LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS: Igor Stravinsky Bangs Coco Chanel

2009-09-11T10:31:00.005-04:00

Receiving its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, it's... that OTHER Coco Chanel movie, the one without Audrey Tautou ("Would that make this 'Chanel No. 2'?" —a Greg):So, you're probably wondering: did any of this shit actually happen? Yeah well you can't prove it DIDN'T happen.

Notes on Notes on Classical Style

2009-09-05T11:20:00.013-04:00

I should have noted, when it came out, this uncommonly intelligent review in the New York Times (via the Straussmonster). James Oestreich demolishes the Mostly Mozart Festival's fawning guide to the music of its namesake:

“Make of it what you will,” Mr. Vigeland writes, ending his discussion of the “great” G minor Symphony, No. 40, “there had until its composition never been anything like this symphony in the history of music.” “They had to rewrite the textbooks again after the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony,” he continues, as if textbooks had flooded out in the 16 days of 1788 between the premieres of the 40th and the 41st. “Stupendous,” he adds of the “Jupiter.” “Unbelievable. Beyond superlatives. Maybe simply: miraculous. This perfect piece,” and so on. I have no wish to denigrate the “Jupiter” Symphony. I would almost grant Mr. Vigeland “stupendous” if he hadn’t used the word so often elsewhere. But the rest of it raised the old hackles again. Now I was trapped. Feeling the need to sound a caveat, I thought it would be unfair to do so without reading the whole book.

Oestreich recognizes the Mostly Mozart book as one example of a larger problem, people who love Mozart so much that it results in spells of temporary stupidity. O Mozart, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind, hey Mozart. In case we had any doubts that this is a serious illness, here's Russell Platt in the New Yorker, suffering from a severe case of the Mozart Effect:

Why are Mozart’s symphonies more popular than Haydn’s? In a sense, the answer is simple: Mozart’s more accurately imitate the full range of human emotions; they can swerve from laughter to tears in the space of a single phrase.

Uh, are Mozart's symphonies more popular than Haydn's? I work at a record store, and nobody ever seems to ask for any Mozart symphonies before #38. On the other hand, I have ordered for more than one customer a complete set of Haydn's hundred. People want the London Symphonies, the Paris Symphonies; they want the Farewell Symphony, and all that jazz. God knows nobody's asking for Haydn's operas, and Mozart's Haydn Quartets are more in demand than Haydn's actual Haydn quartets, but I'm pretty sure symphonies is the one place he's got Mozart beat. Platt has just taken some conventional wisdom about Mozart and Haydn, plugged in the word "symphony," and then phrased his conclusion in the form of a question. The answer to his question is, of course, more received wisdom, but rarely is the genealogy of such wisdom so readily traceable. If Platt reads his own magazine, he probably ran across this nugget—

Nicholas Kenyon, in his excellent new “Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart,” writes, “Other great composers have expressed the extremes of life: affirmation, despair, sensual pleasure, bleak emptiness, but only in Mozart can all these emotions co-exist in the space of a short phrase.”

—absently dropped it in his pocket, and forgot where it came from. Platt adds, as if it meant something, "It was Beethoven, who studied with Haydn, who brought the legacy of these composers into the Romantic age"; I'm not sure that I'm willing to accept such a lazy analysis even in a capsule review. Has any New Yorker reader who ever heard of the "Romantic age" in Western concert-music know it as anything other than the age that followed Beethoven? I guess I am willing to accept lazy Beethoven-worship when it comes from non–music critics, e.g. novelist James Ellroy in the OC Register. He totally gets a signed permission slip from me, even when he plays his new girlfriend

the Adagio of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata on the stereo and tells her, "This is how I feel about you." And means it. "Why does anyone pretend that this (Adagio) is about anything other than transcendent emotion and the seeking of the divine?," he says.

I'm forgiving this sentiment mostly because I'm pretty sure that the words "this (Adagio)" were probably "this fuckin' shit" in the unexpurgated interview, but also because I saw James Ellroy on Conan one time years ago and he (Ellroy) did this indescribable gesture that means to have a penis like a forearm, which gesture I still use in conversation today. He's hilarious, is what I'm saying, and he's mastered the art of saying just a little too much in interviews, being just a little too vulgar, without actually getting arrested. In fact, I love this interview so much, I'm going to forgive the usually reliable Tim Mangan his regrettable foray into silly "noir" prose in the lede and just thank him for bringing us something so awesome. Finally, while we're on the subject of Beethoven and the novel, you have to read this Matthew Guerrieri piece about various appearances of the Beethoven's Fifth ringtone in fiction. It is the OPPOSITE of lazy, digging up citations in books that you and I might never have thought of reading:

My favorite Beethovenian cell-phone adopter is Moxy Maxwell, the stubborn 10-year-old heroine of Peggy Gifford’s series of children’s books. From Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Writing Thank-You Notes: Moxy was so quick on the draw when she picked up her cell phone that Ajax often remarked that she would have made a first-rate gunslinger in the Old West. And this time was no exception. After the second but before the third note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Moxy was saying “Yes” into the phone. “Yes” was what Moxy said instead of “Hello,” unless it was someone she didn’t know. If Beethoven’s Fifth stops after the first two notes, is it still Beethoven’s Fifth? Moxy does not have time for your trumped-up pop koans. But the joke only works if the tune is something everybody knows, once again both reinforcing and perpetuating the ubiquity of the Fifth symphony’s iconic opening.

Hooray! Well-written, well-researched, well-thought-out. More like this, please.

We're Too Busy Singin' to Put Anybody Down

2009-09-02T10:20:00.006-04:00

Scientific studies about music are ALWAYS THE WORST. Here's an experiment where they played human music for monkeys, and the sample of human music consisted of Barber's Adagio, Metallica's "Of Wolf and Man," some Nine Inch Nails (a piano instrumental off the fragile, in case you're wondering, but for some reason they don't mention the title of the song here, so I guess I have to go back and listen to both discs of the fragile to remember which tracks are piano instrumentals), and Tool's "Grudge" (or rather an excerpt from Tool's "Grudge," because even a group of caged lab monkeys don't have time for your three minute polyrhythmic drum solos). Sure, that seems like a pretty representative selection of music listened to by the human race! You've got your American post-Romantic, your American speed metal, your American post-industrial ambient, and your American progressive metal. Are we forgetting anything? Nah that's about it, I think we got our bases covered. But actually, if I do say so, I think that this specially composed "monkey music" is pretty excellent. I would definitely buy a CD of music for monkeys. (With the exception of Viva la Vida.) Via The Awl.

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Phoenix: Libretto Problems, Part IV

2009-08-31T13:30:00.001-04:00

So somewhere in there, JoJo & I ended up spending an afternoon with a total genius, a friend of a friend of ours—you know, the kind of guy you can talk to about Leoš Janáček or William Blake and you really want to hear what he has to say on either subject. At various points we talked about Così fan tutte; we talked about Cymbeline. I'd never read Cymbeline! I went right home and did that. And I noticed something weird. See—wait, have you read Cymbeline? Oh, you haven't. Well, it's the story of Princess Imogen, the daughter of King Cymbeline of Britain. (FUN FACT: the name "Imogen" was probably invented for this play. Except that it's actually supposed to be "Innogen"—"Imogen" is probably an error in the transmission of the text. So everybody named "Imogen" is actually named after a typo?) Imogen's husband, Posthumus (and in the unlikely event that you are named "Posthumus," you also have this play to thank) has been expelled from the kingdom because her parents don't approve of her marrying somebody of such modest means, apparently? Really her wicked stepmother is to blame, because she wants Imogen to marry her idiotic, hot-tempered son, Cloten. There's also a pair of long-lost princes in there somewhere, obviously, because you always need a long-lost prince or two. Oh and an invading Roman army. So what happens is, the exiled Posthumus and his friend Giacomo the ancient Roman make a bet over whether or not Giacomo can seduce Posthumus's gal. Posthumus claims that she is totally faithful, but Giacomo insists that no woman in the world is totally faithful. (Is this starting to sound familiar?) Well, Giacomo meets the lady in question, introduces himself as a friend of her husband, and, wowed by her beauty, says:

If she be furnished with a mind so rare, She is alone th'Arabian bird, and I have lost the wager.

By "the Arabian bird," he means the Phoenix, my helpful footnotes point out. But okay now is it sounding familiar? Because that's the moment at which a little bell went off in my head! This is, essentially, the same plot scenario as Da Ponte's libretto for Così fan tutte—and isn't that pretty much the same figure of speech, even, that Don Alfonso uses on the boys in that opera?

Woman's constancy Is like the Arabian Phoenix; Everyone swears it exists, But no one knows where.

Crazy! So what does it mean, this correspondence between Shakespeare and Mozart? I guessed there were a number of possibilities: OPTION #1. Da Ponte, as we know, was familiar with Shakespeare, and was quite the magpie. Did he have Cymbeline in mind when he wrote Così? OPTION #2. Shakespeare was a magpie too. Could both of them have borrowed this line from the same source? OPTION #3. Maybe "a faithful beauty is rare as the Phoenix" is just the sort of thing people used to say in olden times. Fortunately I recently found out about these things called "books," which apparently contain just this sort of information! I asked JoJo if he had any suggestions, and he did, and more about that in a minute, but first he asked me, "What exactly are you trying to find out?" Which gave me pause. I was investigating a small, specific link between the two texts—and the link was undeniably there; all I was doing now was determining whether or not it was intentional. If it were, would that help me to understand either work any more deeply? Or was I just falling into the old high-school essay trap of treating the text under consideration as if it were a mystery to be solved? (Like Oedipa Maas, mistaking clues for evidence.) JoJo quoted George Saintsbury: "I have never myself had much of a fancy for Quellenforschung, and plagiarism-hunting as a sport appears to me to rank only one higher than worrying cats"—"worrying" here meaning, like, "torturing." But I went source-hunting anyway. One of those books I checked out was the extremely helpful and well-written Cambridge Opera Guide by, as luck would have it, one of my favorite undergrad professors, Bruce Alan Brown! PLUG: If anybody out there wants to get to know Così a little better, I highly, highly recommend this book, which even by the high standards of the Cambridge Opera Guides is charmingly written and well-rounded. Brown places the piece in a Big Picture of philosophy, art and literature, while also scrutinizing the internal workings of the piece. Anyway, as it turns out, both Cymbeline and Così are probably based on a tale from the Decameron (by which I mean, Cymbeline is obviously and perhaps directly descended from the Decameron; Così is more of a variant.) But there's nothing in Boccaccio's story about the lady being like a phoenix, so that seems to scratch off the aforementioned option #2. Option #3 is far less sexy, but seemed increasingly more likely than #1, and sure enough, we find that both Da Ponte and Shakespeare returned to the phoenix as an emblem of female chastity on more than one occasion—such as Da Ponte in his earlier Una cosa rara libretto and Shakespeare in his perplexing poem, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," which is about a phoenix and a turtle who get married. Just kidding, it's about a phoenix and a turtle-DOVE who get married. The trope makes a sort of sense: a phoenix is beautiful; it burns (as with ardor) but consumes itself aone; it remains solitary (being a totally unique creature); and yeah, as implied by these passages, it's really hard to find one (see last parenthesis). So, is it reasonable to suggest that the audience might be expected to put Shakespeare in mind when we hear these lines? Well, I'm not totally ruling it out here, but I'm disinclined to say so. Not because Cymbeline was nearly as unpopular during Mozart's time as it is in ours (it was apparently a pretty hot ticket back in the 18th c., apparently?), but because there's another, very specific allusion in play here—the Don's aria is an almost exact quotation from an earlier libretto by Actually this post is already a little long. Let's continue this discussion next time in LIBRETTO PROBLEMS, PART V, a slightly deeper discussion of Da Ponte's sources for Così fan tutte, and this passage in particular.

My Cousin Risa

2009-08-29T09:42:00.003-04:00

had a dream in which her mother purchased a bag of the following snack food item at Pic 'n' Save. Upon waking, Risa mentioned her dream to a friend, who was happy to whip up the package design. I am immensely pleased (click to enlarge):Says Risa, at her flickr: "we're half way to making this a reality... I just need to get Della's people on board!"

Double Sextet Recording Sessions UPDATE

2009-08-28T08:43:00.004-04:00

I'm sorry to keep posting on this same subject but this is seriously like porn for me you guys. (It's kind of sad, in a way.) Check out this highly revealing blogpost from blackbird Tim Munro, very technical, very candid—

This first movement is all piano and percussion madness, and, as the Kap said later, “That was actually much harder than I thought it would be.” They were doing amazing work, but the Kap decided to shift the tempo up very slightly for the last third of the first movement, and this eventually sent the recording booth into a technical tail-spin, and suddenly it was taking 5 minutes to begin a take in an unusual place.

—that sort of thing. AND, they have TWITTER VIDEOS from his iPhone! (Accidentally held portrait-style instead of landscape-style, so, DISORIENTING:)

In Case You Hadn't Heard

2009-08-27T09:53:00.005-04:00

News on the official premiere recordings of new works by Reich & Pärt, two composers famous for their early, severe process-music, each of whose styles have aged over the decades like, uh, [consulting Wheel of Clichés] fine trappist cheeses, gaining bite and subtlety while still retaining the same delicious mixture of basic ingredients. Or something. NAMELY! Eighth Blackbird is in the studio with the composer, like RIGHT NOW, recording that Reich piece you people have been crying about forever, and the L.A. Phil is finally ready to put out its live recording of Pärt's Symphony #4, commissioned by the orchestra, as DG download next month. Hooray! The wait will be over soon. And I can stop listening to these dubious internet bootlegs (SH). Via 8bb and Mangan, respectively.