tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22011185952227554182024-03-18T15:32:01.680-04:00Seated Ovationcritic, scholar, performer
(not necessarily in that order)Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.comBlogger238125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-26148414025065091702015-04-30T08:27:00.000-04:002016-08-27T23:28:22.575-04:00Hello!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have pretty much stopped updating Seated Ovation! And that is a shame.<br />
<br />
So if you're visiting this from Twitter or somewhere else on the Internet,<br />
<br />
1) my name is Will Robin;<br />
<br />
2) As of fall 2016, I am an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland (read about that <a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_549759961"></span>here<span id="goog_549759962"></span></a>!);<br />
<br />
3) I live in Washington, D.C.;<br />
<br />
4) My academic research is on contemporary classical music in the United States since the 1980s, although I work on other things too. You can read my dissertation, about indie classical, <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/m2y0owapictpkwi/William%20Robin%2C%20PhD%20dissertation.pdf?dl=0">here</a>. You can read an article about turn of the nineteenth-century hymnody reform <a href="http://jm.ucpress.edu/content/32/2/246">here</a>;<br />
<br />
5) I tweet way too frequently as <a href="http://twitter.com/seatedovation">@seatedovation</a>;<br />
<br />
6) I write somewhat frequently for the <i><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&contentCollection&region=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=Homepage#/%22william+robin%22/since1851/allresults/1/allauthors/newest/">New York Times</a></i>, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/william-robin"><i>The </i><i>New Yorker</i> (online)</a>,<i> </i>and <i><a href="http://blog.bandcamp.com/author/williamlrobin/">Bandcamp</a></i>, on all kinds of topics, but mostly contemporary classical music;<br />
<i><br /></i>
7) I am a classical saxophonist though I don't play all that much these days;<br />
<br />
8) You can read a bio and almost up-to-date list of publications <a href="http://music.unc.edu/graduate/students/bios/william-robin">over at my UNC page</a>;<br />
<br />
9) You can reach me at william l robin @gmail.com (that's an L, not a 1);<br />
<br />
10) Have a great day!<br />
<br /></div>
Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-82049083423237726532015-02-10T11:33:00.002-05:002015-02-10T17:27:33.162-05:00For Andrew Patner and the city of Chicago<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<a href="http://csosoundsandstories.org/farewell-to-andrew-patner-a-great-champion-of-the-arts/">Andrew Patner </a>was The Man. <br />
<br />
When I first started blogging in late 2009, he seemed to represent exactly what I stood against: a music critic cozy with the establishment, extolling the Chicago Symphony week after week in the <i>Sun-Times</i>, seemingly oblivious to its doldrum programming and lack of vision. Or—as a self-styled firebrand hoping to stir something up in the classical blogosphere—I so naively believed. <br />
<br />
And thus my first outreach to Chicago's greatest cultural critic was a volley, aimed squarely at his review of a Civic Orchestra performance we both attended. <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/01/boulezapalooza-pt-1.html">I reviewed the review</a>. Please don't read what I wrote; it is embarrassing. But do read <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/01/boulezapalooza-pt-1.html?showComment=1264051516113#c2354635799243277133">Andrew's comments</a>, which are at once cutting and gracious. "I'm afraid that I have to respond to a number of your points": the perfect sentiment. It was my first introduction to the Andrew that so many have mourned over the past week, someone who knew how to cultivate and correct, always guiding youthful passions in the right directions.<br />
<br />
And despite the fact that I opened our dialogue with a clear sign of disrespect, from there Andrew shepherded me into a world that I had only hoped I would one day make my way into.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Over the past week, I have pored over dozens (hundreds?) of Facebook group messages exchanged between Andrew, <a href="http://www.therestisnoise.com/2015/02/for-andrew-patner.html">Alex Ross</a>, <a href="http://csosoundsandstories.org/my-friend-andrew-patner/">Marc Geelhoed</a>, <a href="http://csosoundsandstories.org/andrew-patner-lasting-impressions/">Bryant Manning</a>, and myself in 2010 alone. Andrew graciously launched this group-message initiative not long after I had publicly excoriated him on my blog, and it immediately made me feel part of a critical community that I had no idea actually existed. I remember my palpable excitement, checking Facebook every half-hour or so to see a new message from three of my music-critic idols (and yes, Andrew quickly became an idol). Marc and Bryant were models as bloggers (and Andrew nurtured both of them), Alex was of course on a pedestal, but Andrew was the senior figure by age and, seemingly, endless worldly knowledge. It felt <i>amazing </i>to join in-depth conversations about orchestral performances of the Second Viennese School and drink in Andrew's preposterously well-informed insider knowledge. I typed ridiculously lengthy responses, and was giddy to see them validated in that company<i>. </i>There was a cool-kids'-club appeal, but it also felt deeply communal; Andrew's wise generosity with us, even if he was catty about others, steered the conversation. He immediately granted me a voice and sense of authority despite my having demonstrated ignorance from the outset of our relationship.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And he took me to events—most memorably, an all-day, experimental reading of Wagner's <i>Ring </i>librettos, where we ate sandwiches together on-stage during intermission—and introduced me to members of the Chicago cultural elite. He never failed to point people to my blog and always asked my opinion during conversations with those who were far, far more qualified than me to offer one. It was an extroverted kind of generosity that I have never seen matched. He took me to the CSO's press conference announcing Muti's first season, and was bemused by my silly attempt to <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/02/cso-press-conference.html">live-blog the entire thing</a>. He continued to comment on my blog, his responses always kind, always thoughtful, always nudging me in the direction of truth. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
That was what Andrew first meant to me; but I left the Chicago area only six months after that introduction. Thank god that Andrew was among the most prolific corresponders the Internet has seen. My inbox lists 184 email threads with his AOL address since 2010, and I'm sure I deleted many more (an obvious mistake). And I was by no means a close friend; others have thousands of his emails lining their inboxes.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Much of what I learned from Andrew, in fact, came from observing how he wrote about the world on Facebook. I cannot think of another music critic, of any genre, so singularly concerned with the health and future of his city. Reading his relentless stream of Facebook updates made me constantly energized by the idea of Chicago. My relationship to the city since I left has been entirely mediated by what I learned of it through Andrew's Facebook posts on politics, architecture, dining, music, art—everything imaginable that was interesting to discuss—and which probably accounted for at least 5% of my Internet reading as a whole. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how I would look at the city of Chicago if not through Andrew's eyes. The endless debates that erupted on his Facebook were like town hall meetings, gracefully shepherded by Andrew in the role of both moderator and firebrand.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Andrew made me powerfully conscious of the critic's role to act as a local advocate, as a pillar of the city as central as the fire department or burger joint. He seemed to almost physically embody the idea that classical music was a central part of Chicago's identity. In that foolish blog critique, I had misunderstood as cozy what was in fact essential: Andrew's dedication to keeping the flames of Chicago's important cultural institutions burning. He certainly knew exactly how dull the CSO's programming was, but he also knew that snark is not the critic's primary duty. In remaining a part of the community, in reporting on its activities thoughtfully and fairly, he could push the institutions in a better direction in a manner that was natural and effective. (Yes, I'm sure that the New York Philharmonic pays close attention to what <i>Times</i> critics say about them; but I get the feeling that the Chicago Symphony would act directly on what Andrew Patner recommended.) I think of his <a href="http://blogs.wfmt.com/andrewpatner/2010/02/06/cso-with-oundjian-wosner-and-clevenger-three-careers-at-contrasting-moments-on-their-arcs/">deeply sympathetic response</a> to Dale Clevenger's fading horn playing as an emblematic example of a critic who could criticize while supporting the ecosystem that created his job–to push the exact right amount.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Andrew's generosity spilled far beyond his criticism and enthusiastic correspondence; he had an inexhaustible appetite for helping a friend, no matter how trivial the need. He was connected to everyone in the world. I planned to spend a weekend in Dresden: Andrew knew a curator who gave me an incredible one-on-one tour of a state museum. My girlfriend and I needed a place to crash in London: Andrew set us up with a wonderful family whose patriarch spent the weekend on the phone solving the Euro crisis. These far-flung VIPs, one imagined, would certainly help out any acquaintance of Andrew, because Andrew likely did the same for them.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div>
Last May, I saw Andrew for the first time since 2010. I was giving a paper at a new-music conference at Northwestern and, for a number of reasons, it was a fairly crappy return to my alma mater. Seeing Andrew was the highlight. In a conference primarily devoted to severe modernist music, I was the odd duck in presenting a paper on what might be called pop-classical collaborations. Anticipating antagonistic<b> </b>responses, I had prepared a slew of potential defenses of the music and my scholarship. Andrew snuck into the back of the room during my talk, and of course the only pointed critiques came from him. He raised his hand and questioned the broader premise of this music, expressed sharp skepticism<b> </b>about the role of gender in the repertoire I discussed, and referenced vocalist Jan DeGaetani as a precedent I should further investigate. Andrew's inquiries provided an opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge—in response, I unleashed my salvo of defenses for the music—and an opportunity to learn. I'm sure that's why he did it: to provoke a conversation, to target and unleash a passionate rejoinder, to teach. Afterwards, a couple of musicians grumbled about that one random guy who asked such curmudgeonly questions, but I smiled and told them that it was my friend Andrew, and that I was happy that he came, and that it was fun sparring with him. </div>
<br />
<br />
As I write this tribute, I imagine the numerous Alan Gilbert-related emails from Andrew that would have arrived in my inbox by now, and probably the inboxes of a dozen others. It is wrenching to think how fun it would be to spar with him today.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-88666534701101083952014-04-03T11:26:00.000-04:002014-04-03T11:26:13.728-04:00Top Ten Music School Rankings<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
10. The school where you did your undergrad.<br />
<br />
9. The school where you got your Master's, and to which you are indebted for the gigs it helped you get to pay off the student loans for the school where you did your undergrad.<br />
<br />
8. The place where you wrote your DMA dissertation on your teacher's teacher's teacher's pedagogical methods (or lack thereof).<br />
<br />
7. Juellerd. Julleard? Julliard. Jewelyard? Whatever.<br />
<br />
6. Harvard.<br />
<br />
5. The place you wanted to go for undergrad, but you fracked one single note in one single excerpt and then you panicked and broke down and called the trumpet professor "Dad" and then Dave got in even though he couldn't play Petrushka in time and he's always been kind of a dick about it and <i>now he's subbing like every weekend in the fucking BSO.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
4. Royal Something of Great British Academy I think? I hear they never let Americans in. Or maybe that's the other one?<br />
<br />
3. The school that everybody knows isn't as good as the school where you did your undergrad, but is "up-and coming." Featuring a lauded entrepreneurship initiative that trains barista skills at one of the three coffee shops housed in its new state-of-the-art building, named for an alumnus of the university's business school currently facing indictment for fraud.<br />
<br />
2. University of Phoenix.<br />
<br />
1. The school that has paid to have this list promoted on Facebook.</div>
Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-39304808485148038072014-01-19T14:30:00.004-05:002014-01-19T14:30:55.671-05:00Beethoven Again, again<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/01/beethoven-again.html">"Beethoven Again." <i>The New Yorker</i> online, 17 January 2014.</a><br />
<br />
As promised, I'm going to try to update this somewhat-regularly with posts of my recent writing. This week's was a big one---a large piece on Beethoven, the completion-ist fetishism in classical music, and the sharp mind of Jonathan Biss. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/01/beethoven-again.html">Click and check out</a> his "Waldstein," which is great; he's got three albums of Beethoven sonatas out now, which are certainly <a href="http://www.jonathanbiss.com/projects/beethoven-sonatas">worth a listen</a>.<br />
<br />
This article was my ideal kind to thing to write -- dig into a weird strand of history on JSTOR, Google Books, and the music library, find some interesting loot, and then present it with a caveat of strong-words-towards-the-classical-music-industry. It also deals with a favorite theme of Seated Ovation, the politics of programming (see <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html">here</a> <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/02/seated-ovation-hep-cats-2011-2012.html">here</a> <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/02/mutis-vision-one-for-twentieth-century.html">here</a> <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/02/go-native.html">here</a>, and especially <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2012/01/vicious-cycle.html">here</a>).<br />
<br />
For those interested in where I got my information, I'll run down important sources: On A.B. Marx, the early Leipzig cycles, and Beethoven-motivated shifts in programming: Sanna Peterson's article <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/746354?uid=3739776&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103263733211">"A.B. Marx, Concert Life, and German National Identity"</a>; and Scott Burnham's <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/746446?uid=3739776&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103263733211">"Criticism, Faith, and the <i>Idee</i>; A.B. Marx's Early Reception of Beethoven."</a> On Bülow, see <a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780195368680.do">Alan Walker's biography</a>; on Schnabel, see his autobiography <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/My_life_and_music.html?id=1jE8AAAAMAAJ">My Life and Music</a></i>, his Chicago lectures compiled in <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=iQMjAAAAMAAJ&q=schnabel+most+resistance&dq=schnabel+most+resistance&hl=en&sa=X&ei=BCfcUqO9I6apsQSPjYCoAg&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA">Music and the Line of Most Resistance</a></i>; and Arved Ashby's <i><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520264809">Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction</a></i>. For the war stuff, Joseph Horowitz's excellent study of <a href="http://josephhorowitz.com/content.asp?elemento_id=18">Toscanini and the classical music industry</a>, and of course Annegret Fauser's <i><a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199948031.do">Sounds of War</a></i>. For those interested in this topic in general, I'd also strongly recommend Mark Evan Bonds's three excellent monographs: <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8292.html"><i>Music as Thought:</i> <i>Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven</i></a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/After-Beethoven-Imperative-Originality-Symphony/dp/0674008553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226432960&sr=1-1" style="font-style: italic;">After Beethoven: The Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony</a>; and <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wordless-Rhetoric-Musical-Metaphor-Oration/dp/0674956028/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333998614&sr=1-1">Wordless Music</a></i>.<br />
<br />
Undergirding this approach to Beethoven are two major studies, Tia DeNora's <i><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520211582">Beethoven and the Construction of Genius</a> </i>and Scott Burnham's <i><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5763.html">Beethoven Hero</a></i>, which consider Beethoven as a sociological phenomenon as much as a musical one. The fact is that most of the language we use to talk about Beethoven is very, very old, and it's not necessarily inherent to our listening experiences. We learn from a pedagogue or a book or a Charles Rosen that Beethoven is considered the greatest composer, and we tailor our expectations accordingly. I'm not saying that he isn't the greatest composer -- he's my favorite composer, and certainly has earned that status -- but we need to consider very carefully how his place in the canon was constructed (and, of course, how the canon itself came to be a thing). It's a story that's as much about the innate quality of the music as it is about the politics of his listeners in Europe from 1790 to 1840, and a construction of values around the type of music he wrote.<br />
<br />
I often find that mainstream music criticism tells the most boring stories of classical music, which are those of the composers themselves -- heroic struggles of inspiration, torrid love affairs, pat tales of working out ideas -- and then stuff that happened in the past fifty years. Beethoven ends up being a hodge-podge of deafness, universal brotherhood, maybe something about the Nazis, and the Berlin Wall. Most are based on myth, and most essentially re-write Wikipedia entries or stale program notes.<br />
<br />
For me, the most compelling stories are the ones told in the scholarly world today, but rarely make their way onto newspapers, websites, etc: how the music was granted its status as "great," and by whom: a history of how classical music was received and disseminated. It's old hat by now in musicology, but the rest of the music world seems stuck in a pre-1980 mode of thought. I'm not saying that we shouldn't still keep writing about Beethoven the man, but chances are if you're doing so, you're writing about something that's already been done better somewhere else. Why should we read an article about Beethoven's Fifth when we can easily Google a hundred others? Shifting attention towards the Beethoven Quartet Society, or the fascinating politics of Mengelberg's 1920 Mahler cycle in the wake of Versailles, or whatever other story that took place between 1827 and 2013, is probably going to be of more interest (to me, at least).<br />
<br />
Anyway, I'm going to go back to writing my dissertation proposal.</div>
Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-89799275318598185802013-12-30T17:47:00.001-05:002013-12-30T17:57:34.144-05:00new musings<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Hello, dear readers. It's been a while, I know. It occurred to me recently that those who don't regularly check my all-too-frequently-updated Twitter might be missing out on some of my recent writing. I'm going to try to periodically update this space, in the manner of the great <a href="http://nightafternight.blogs.com/">Steve Smith</a>, with links to recent articles in other publications. Perhaps this will spur me to blog again, though that's pretty unlikely. </span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By the way, I'm in Year Three of my PhD program, and am about to starting writing my dissertation proposal. It will focus on the rise of new, collaboration-based institutions in contemporary music, mostly geared around New York -- things like Bang on a Can, Bedroom Community, and yMusic. It's going to be fun, I hope.</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Without further ado, here's some of what happened this fall:</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.indyweek.com/scan/archives/2013/12/30/musiciansaudience-members-polyorchards-first-anniversary-concert">"Musicians>Audience Members: Polyorchard's first anniversary concert,"</a> <i>IndyWeek </i>blog 30 Dec 201</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(A review of <a href="http://davidmenestres.com/">David Menestres</a>'s excellent improv collective Polyorchard)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Previews: <a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/polyorchard-baby-copperhead-tegucigalpan/Event?oid=3777974">Polyorchard</a> and <a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/service-of-carols-and-lessons/Event?oid=3785990">Service of Carols and Lessons</a></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(Micro-previews of upcoming local performances in the <i>Indy</i>)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://blog.bandcamp.com/2013/12/17/chicagos-quirky-modernism/">"Chicago's Quirky Modernism,"</a> <i>Bandcamp </i>blog 17 Dec 2013</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(Examining the excellent new Chicago-based label <a href="http://www.parlourtapes.com/">Parlour Tapes+</a>, which two sharp releases: the Spektral Quartet's <i><a href="http://parlourtapes.bandcamp.com/album/chambers">CHAMBERS</a></i> and the collaborative <i><a href="http://parlourtapes.bandcamp.com/album/and">*AND</a></i>)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Note: if you know of intriguing new music being issued through Bandcamp, give me a holler.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/in-ymusic-indie-rock-meets-classical-with-satisfying-results/Content?oid=3755691">"In yMusic, indie rock meets classical, with satisfying results,"</a> <i>IndyWeek</i> 30 Oct 2013</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(A brief preview of yMusic, an ensemble I've written about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/arts/music/ymusic-to-bring-its-versatility-to-ecstatic-music-festival.html">in the past</a>.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/10/nico-muhlys-new-ideas.html">"Nico Muhly's Team Spirit,"</a> <i>The New Yorker</i>, 20 Oct 2013</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/eva-maria-houben-piano-music">Eva-Maria Houben: Piano Music</a>, liner notes for R. Andrew Lee and Irritable Hedgehog, Oct 2013</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(IH and Andy have been receiving accolades from just about everyone; this album certainly deserves them. Keep an eye out for another Wandelweiser-y release with liner notes from me shortly.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/arts/music/classical-saxophone-an-outlier-is-anointed-by-john-adams-concerto.html">"Classical Saxophone, an Outlier, Is Anointed,"</a> <i>New York Times</i>, 18 Sept 2013.<br />(You may recall that the ending provoked <a href="https://www.facebook.com/darcyjamesargue/posts/10153282247000105">some</a> <a href="http://www.alextemplemusic.com/2013/09/john-adams-rolls-his-eyes/">amount</a> of controversy; the rest is much more important, though. Classical saxophone deserves a place, as Ryan Muncy's <a href="http://ryanmuncy.com/projects/">new album </a>can attest.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/from-the-shed-to-the-stars-reflections-on-the-boston-university-tanglewood-institute/">"From the Shed to the Stars: Reflections on BUTI,"</a> <i>NewMusicBox</i>, 17 October 2013.</span><br />
(A pleasure to write about my own formative experiences as well as those of others.)<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Keep an eye out for this <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Britten-Symphony-Sonata-Zuill-Bailey/dp/B00GMH49AM">January release on Telarc </a>- cellist Zuill Bailey and the North Carolina Symphony play Britten, and I've written liner notes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Questions or comments? Contact me at william l robin@gmail.com (that's an L, not a One)</span><br />
<br /></div>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/>
<w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/>
<w:OverrideTableStyleHps/>
<w:UseFELayout/>
</w:Compatibility>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="276">
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="59" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-language:JA;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--></div>
</div>
Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-11097237843243664812013-08-09T14:45:00.002-04:002013-08-09T14:45:42.681-04:00critic's notebook<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
...and we're back. Not for long, alas: I spent a great weekend recently taking in a few performances in the Berkshires, and thus have decided to give the old fashioned review thing another go-around. Seated O will probably go dormant again afterwards; I would strongly advise checking my Twitter feed for updates regarding my writing <a href="http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/shape-notes-billings-and-american-modernisms/">in</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/arts/music/david-langs-whisper-opera-mines-truths-from-the-web.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0">other</a> <a href="http://caramoor.tumblr.com/post/56517426650/were-havin-a-party-with-beethovens-septet-in">places</a>. When the NC concert season starts up in September I'll mostly be attending without reviewing; there's a lot of <a href="http://dukeperformances.duke.edu/">excellent</a> <a href="https://www.carolinaperformingarts.org//">stuff</a> coming to town, but now I've got a dissertation to write, so it won't be much of a blogging year. And now, without ado:<br />
<br />
<b>Thursday, August 1 - Seiji Ozawa Hall</b><br />
<b>Mark Morris Dance Group and TMC Opera</b><br />
<b>Britten, <i>Curlew River</i></b><br />
<b>Purcell, <i>Dido and Aeneas</i></b><br />
<i><br /></i>
There is a weird energy to music and nature at Tanglewood; they always seem to eerily complement each other. Thus, within a warm and generally pleasant weekend, we had a bleak and wholly appropriate drizzle to introduce the world of Britten and Purcell. <i>Curlew River</i>, a work with which I was previously unfamiliar, is the composer's attempt at merging 1960s music theater with Noh practices. It belongs, I think, to a larger group of postwar/tonal European operas that demonstrate deliberate connections to other cultures and nations -- I'm thinking of Henze's <i>El Cimarròn </i>in particular -- which are better about handling exoticism than previous attempts, but still kind of bad. Mark Morris, properly, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/arts/music/mark-morris-directing-brittens-curlew-river.html?pagewanted=all">drained Britten's drama of its Orientalist symbolism</a>, bleaching exoticism and leaving behind a clever and haunting pageant. The uniformly excellent singers of the Tanglewood Music Center performed Morris's light, simple choreography. Britten's music is acutely eerie -- repeated, corkscrew horn passages, shakuhachi-like flute gestures, and flickering vocal lines that peak upwards, vaguely in the style of Noh singing -- and Morris's staging meshed well. Paper origami and a simple umbrella were transformed into powerful props, as the singer-dancers created the rocking motion of the sea, blew out a sail, and placed paper cranes at the grave of a madwoman's dead son. The TMC instrumentalists played with shocking brilliance.<br />
<br />
At one point during <i>Curlew River</i>, a descending, <i>tutti</i> scale is repeated again and again, forming an endlessly unspooling lament, over which the life and death of a young boy is discussed. It foreshadowed, of course, the teary ending of <i>Dido and Aeneas</i>, which complemented the Britten historically and musically. Mark Morris's staging has been better discussed elsewhere, and I am not a dance scholar by any means; but I've long loved his realization of <i>Dido </i>on DVD, and was excited to see it in person. After a <a href="https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/reflections-on-the-rite/">year of obsession with <i>The Rite</i></a>, I was at least somewhat prepared to think about dance. Morris's two-dimensional vision seems to connect backwards to the frieze of Nijinsky's <i>Faun</i>, which accrues further significance in both works' hyper-attention to sexuality. Morris's <i>Dido </i>exudes sex, from the drag gestures of the stomping sailor's chorus, to the loin-directed motions of Dido when she speaks of her pain, to the bawdy humor of the jealous sorceress (Morris's use of the same dancer for Dido and sorceress transforms Dido into a split-personality, a queen who seems to deliberately stymie her own attempts at love). And most importantly, as in the Britten, Morris's staging is incredibly musical -- the gestures of the dancers not only perfectly match the rhythms of the music, but seem to actually analyze it in real time, bringing out moments that one might not hear in the score. Morris acts here like an acute conductor, able to bring out new sounds in an old staple (normally, he actually conducts, though this time around it was handled with aplomb by Stefan Asbury). The TMC players, in the loft behind the stage, played with polished buoyancy; overall the singing was great, though less impressive than in the Britten. <a href="http://www.bso.org/micro-sites/tanglewood-music-center/about-us/the-festival-of-contemporary-music.aspx">Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music</a>, featuring the TMC, is this weekend, and I wish I could be there to see it -- if they can do Britten and Purcell this well, I really want to hear Lachenmann and Benjamin.<br />
<br />
<b>Saturday, August 3</b><br />
<b>Koussevitsky Music Shed</b><br />
<b>Boston Symphony Orchestra</b><br />
<b>Charles Dutoit, conductor<br /></b><br />
<b>Morning rehearsal:</b><br />
<b>-Stravinsky, <i>Le Sacre du Printemps</i></b><br />
<b>-Stravinsky, <i>Fireworks</i></b><br />
<b>-Dvorak, Cello Concerto featuring Yo-Yo Ma</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Evening performance:</b><br />
<b>-Ravel, <i>Pavane for a Dead Princess</i></b><br />
<b>-Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 1 featuring Lang Lang</b><br />
<b>-Ravel, <i>Daphnis et Chloe </i>(complete score)</b><br />
<br />
Ordinarily it would not be kosher to review a rehearsal, but two things drove me to basically have to talk about Saturday's morning dress for Sunday's concert (which I couldn't attend): my year-long <i>Rite of Spring </i>odyssey, and the enormously impressive performance that the BSO gave of the ballet. The overall clarity of the playing was astonishing, especially given the outdoor performance and the rehearsal setting. Dutoit crafted a laid-back interpretation, less pounding than motoric. The chug recalled Eliot's comparison of the ballet to "the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels"; the snorting bassoons of the <i>Augurs</i> evoked a factory blowing out puffs of steam. Woodwind solos were eminently lyrical; the fluttering of the <i>Spring Rounds</i> was the sonic equivalent of dancers on pointe.<br />
<br />
Philosophically, this is not the kind of <i>Rite </i>I prefer. I sympathize more with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/arts/music/rite-of-spring-cools-into-a-rite-of-passage.html?pagewanted=all">the Taruskin idea</a> of attempting to get back to the primitivist, dangerous, Nicholas Roerich-esque <i>Rite</i>; the one that Gergiev and the Mariinsky deliver on a good day<i>. </i>But I can't deny how <i>good</i> this kind of <i>Rite </i>sounds. The fact is that the shimmering landscape that orchestras like the BSO deliver at their best <i>is</i> the <i>Rite </i>of today, the result of a culture of excerpt perfection (if you graduate from any conservatory, you have probably mastered the hardest parts of <i>The Rite</i>).<br />
<br />
So why not make the most of it? Why not create the controlled frenzy that an orchestra composed of perfectionists can deliver? The downside is that this <i>Rite </i>does not accrue the same violence over its thirty-minute span that it can in a different approach; the upside is that you can hear everything, and it all sounds amazing. The former can at times be revelatory, at others dull; the latter, in this case, was thrilling.<br />
<br />
<i>Fireworks</i> acquired a strange energy following <i>The Rite</i>; it's often dismissed as post-Rimsky orchestral fluff, but its opening polyrhythms somehow sounded more uncanny than those of <i>The Rite</i> (it is, after all, much less of a classic). Yo-Yo Ma gave an impassioned, technically brilliant performance of the Dvorak, but the perfection that he has accomplished in his career often lacks illumination; I wanted to hear something new, or weird, but I didn't. And hearing <i>The Rite </i>as an opener, alas, cast a long shadow over the rest of the morning.<br />
<br />
<i>The Rite</i> actually cast a shadow over the evening, as well; after encountering the lucidity with which the BSO could play it, I was particularly looking forward to their <i>Daphnis</i>. It delivered. Dutoit's approach, again crisp and relaxed, gave the sensual music the effect of a series of waves that never quite crested. The approach felt entirely natural, as if the orchestra were simply poring forth sound. But all the musicians -- from the ecstatic singing of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus to the muscular basses of the <i>Danse guerrière</i> to the languorous flute solos throughout -- were supernaturally attuned to the feel of Ravel's music.<br />
<br />
The BSO's <i>Pavane</i> was equal to its <i>Daphnis</i>. The problem of the evening was the Beethoven -- or, rather, Lang Lang's performance. I'm not a big fan of hating on Lang Lang, though I've done it before/ Too much anti-LL criticism is couched in a smug, nationalist superiority that tilts towards racism. Lang Lang's technique is great, and I often love the bright, expansive sound that he gets out of the instrument.<br />
<br />
The problem for me is the uniformity of that tone; I want to hear more <i>kinds </i>of sounds from his playing. I kept wishing for him to puncture his uniformly rich timbre with dryness, brittleness -- something to disrupt the flow, to draw attention to particular musical ideas and make me think about Beethoven anew. After around twenty minutes -- the First Piano Concerto is a very long piece for what it is, and seems much longer when given this kind of One Size Fits All performance -- Lang Lang's tone became monotonous. Many who criticize the pianist's Beethoven and Mozart tend to harp on the idea that his playing is better suited to Chopin or Liszt, setting up this false dichotomy between the solemnity and intellectual rigor required for the former and the virtuosity for the latter. The issue for me is not that Lang Lang's Beethoven lacks some kind of German solemnity or Teutonic searching -- I really don't think that's something required for every Austrian piano concerto out there -- but that it lacks interesting ideas overall.<br />
<br />
And honestly, it is deeply upsetting when a terribly enthusiastic audience just goes nuts after a mediocre performance. Thus the name of this blog.<br />
<br />
The weekend of TMC and BSO was a reminder of the enormous faculties of orchestral musicians. These are the folks that should really be profiled by major newspapers. Their lives are interesting, and the playing remarkable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Footnote: Bang on a Can Marathon!</b><br />
Alas, I could only sample the BOAC summer marathon at Mass MOCA, sandwiched briefly between morning and evening BSO on Saturday. I heard a great performance of Julia Wolfe's<i> Fuel </i>for strings, which fuses the twitchiness of <i>Shaker Loops</i> with the acerbic sonic clouds of Xenakis; it is an entrancing work, alternating between trembling Romantic gestures and fierce extended string techniques. Bill Ryan's brassy <i>Drive </i>was also well-played, with engaging rhythmic sputters and a killer backbeat, though it lagged somewhat towards its end.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Onyx</i>, a work by the late Eleanor Hovda -- a composer with which, I admit, I was completely unfamiliar -- was startling in comparison to what came before, a respite from the relentless drive. Strings tremeloed softly, with quizzical little effects popping up in the winds. In Lachenmann, the accrual of extended techniques is deliberately alienating; here, weird slap-tongues and breathing sounds drew the listener in. A furious climax, in which the bodies of the string instruments were wildly shaking, dissolved into a spectral mist that lingered for the rest of the weekend.</div>
Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-33313868565565218272013-01-23T23:41:00.004-05:002013-01-30T20:38:34.007-05:00Late night thoughts on reading the New York TimesYes, I've decided to take to Seated Ovation tonight, and it's in the very old fashioned way that I used to use the blog -- circa 2010, senior year at Northwestern, when I was an anonymous outlaw shaking up the classical music institutions of Chicago. Tonight, yes, is a screed night. But it's for a good cause.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The only "reporting" being done on James R. Oestreich's recent announcement of his retirement is on a blog that I won't link to, because it is designed as linkbait, and does not need any more. Needless to say, its writer clearly has a thing out for Jim, and he has expanded that grudge out into a general critique of the entire New York Times as an institution. I'm guessing it has to do with this book review <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/books/30book.html">here</a>.<br />
<br />
I wanted there to be something on the Internet, not just in Twitter form, that fleshes out a bit the importance that Jim Oestreich's 24 years at <i>The Times</i> has meant to classical music. Now, I know Jim personally, and he has edited my work for <i>The Times</i>, and for that I am ever grateful. But I would not consider myself one of the "chummy" types who goes online to defend his friends, so maybe we can discount that idea up front. I also am not part of any old boys' club of any kind, that I know of.<br />
<br />
So let's talk about what 24 years at <i>The Times</i> means:<br />
<br />
It means helping shape the careers of Anthony Tommasini, Vivien Schweitzer, Steve Smith, Zachary Woolfe, Will Crutchfield, Alex Ross, Jeremy Eichler, Anne Midgette, Dan Wakin, and many others I'm forgetting. That's most of the best writers on classical music in the field.<br />
<br />
It means writing about early music -- often controversially -- in a way that had not been previously pursued in a major newspaper, and rigorously staying on top of the New York early music scene. And analyzing it in a manner that can only be called scholarly -- see <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/21/arts/the-new-sound-of-early-music.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">this</a>.<br />
<br />
It means recognizing that shifts are occurring in the classical music sphere, and that they need to be recognized. The fact is that the <i>Times</i> covers more new music now than it ever did, and is completely on board with the youngest generation of composers and following what they're doing. That did not used to be the case: you would seek out Andrew Porter in the New Yorker, or Kyle Gann or Tom Johnson in the Voice, to find out what was going on in the non-symphonic world. Jim, in cultivating writers like Alex Ross, Steve Smith, and now Zachary Woolfe, has cast a keen eye on the contemporary scene and helped nurture it. New operas, major events at Le Poisson Rouge or Issue Project Room, weird avant-gardy things are all in the mix these days -- if there's ideology, it's mostly to be found in critiques of institutions like the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/music/a-call-for-more-new-music-from-new-york-philharmonic.html">NY Phil for <i>not</i> playing enough new music</a>. I'm not saying every writer says brilliant things about new music, but the coverage is there, and it's not dogmatic, pedagogical, or close-minded in ways it was several decades ago.<br />
<br />
It means coverage. This is a big deal. I don't know if having a Classical Editor is the only way to guarantee coverage of classical music, but Jim has (from what I've heard from many smart people) battled his entire career for serious discussions of classical music in the mainstream media -- from <i>High Fidelity</i> to <i>Opus</i> to the <i>Times</i>. There are no other resources that cover so much music in any kind of depth in comparison to the NYT; whether or not you like individual writers or pieces, the effort is there. This is essential not only for the current classical scene -- which needs more critical scrutiny, not less -- but also for historians. For a lot of these events, the Times Review can be the only historical record of its existence. If those vanish, the memory vanishes.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to the final "it means," and the most important one for the career I'm headed down. Musicology has had a place at the Times since Jim's arrival 24 years ago. A major place. That has been spearheaded by Jim's relationship to Richard Taruskin, who is not only a great musicologist but a great writer for the public, who has proven controversial in many of the best ways that controversy can be used. If you want to read the most scathing approach to academic serialism, read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/10/arts/classical-view-how-talented-composers-become-useless.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">this</a>. If you want to read a brilliant analytical takedown of <i>Carmina Burana</i>, read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/arts/music-orff-s-musical-and-moral-failings.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">this</a>. And let us not forget the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/arts/music-music-s-dangers-and-the-case-for-control.html?pagewanted=all">Great Klinghoffer Controversy</a>. These can be harsh and I don't always agree with them, especially in the case of <i>Klinghoffer</i>: but by bringing an academic into this world, Jim has allowed for discussions of important issues that remain almost entirely below the surface in the world of classical music, exposing the political realities of how great (or not so great) music is made. Taruskin's epochal <i>Text & Act</i>, perhaps the most important thing ever written on performance practice, was partially birthed from his work with Jim, and Jim gave Taruskin <i>space</i> <i>to write</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[<i>Opus</i> Magazine] offered writers space and scope such as I have never enjoyed anywhere else, and an editor more devoted to airing serious, qualified opinion than any other with whom I have had the pleasure of working. It still seems a miracle that Jim Oestreich took my big Beethoven review without asking for a single cut. That piece would have been turned down by any schoalrly journal as too topical, by any Early Music forum as too impious, and by any record magazine as too detialed (not to mention long), but for <i>Opus</i>, or for Jim, it was just right. I believe it to be perhaps the most valuable piece in the present book beause of how it immediately applies theoretical premises to the exercises of 'practical criticism.' I would like to think it exemplary in its way, but there is no magazine in the world today that would print it. (<i>Text & Act, 6-7</i>)</blockquote>
<br />
Even with less space the <i>Times</i>, as Taruskin <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=HIwucGSoxEcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=snippet&q=oestreich&f=true">continues</a>, the impetus to create vivid works of scholarship for a broad public remained.<br />
<br />
Introducing controversial music scholarship to the <i>Times</i> readership allowed for introducing all kinds of scholarship to the <i>Times </i>readership: thus excellent recent work by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/arts/music/puccini-opera-echoes-a-music-box-at-the-morris-museum.html?pagewanted=all">W. Anthony Sheppard</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/arts/music/la-rondine-at-metropolitan-opera.html?pagewanted=all">Micaela Barnello</a>, among others. And, of course, I am ever grateful to Jim for c<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/arts/music/reconsidering-stravinsky-and-the-rite-of-spring.html">overing UNC's recent <i>Rite </i>conference</a> (that's some chumminess, I suppose).<br />
<br />
This is the reality, sometimes unspoken, of a quarter-century of difficult work as a defender of the arts -- because that is, ultimately, what a great critic and editorial voice is. In treating music with the rigor and thought that it deserves, Jim has contributed, and helped sustain, the vibrant cultural community that is New York City, and has showed it to the world.<br />
<br />
Please contribute any thoughts in the comments, and, as always, you are welcome to disagree.</div>
Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-40101499513096110502012-08-29T10:06:00.001-04:002012-08-29T10:06:17.042-04:00Where have I been?Well, first, <a href="http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/moondrunk/">here</a>.<br />
And then <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/arts/music/pablo-heras-casado-with-orchestra-of-st-lukes.html?pagewanted=all">here</a>.<br />
And then, and still, <a href="https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/reflections-on-the-rite/">here</a>.<br />
<br />
So it's been almost two months since I've updated; to keep track of what's going on, I would recommend taking a look at the twitter feed on the right. For the near future, my blogging will be almost entirely devoted to <i><a href="https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/reflections-on-the-rite/">Reflections on the Rite</a></i>, the blog I'm running in conjunction with UNC and Carolina Performing Arts' <a href="https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/">The Rite of Spring at 100</a>, a project celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the premiere of <i>The Rite of Spring</i>. So apologies for all those seeking trenchant Seated Ovation words of wisdom. I'm not sure what form this blog will take over the next year but I'll try to write here occasionally. I'm in Year Two of the Ph.D. program now, which is the craziest. To be brief: seminars on music and technology, Mozart opera, and literary modernism; a <a href="https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/conference-program/">gigantic <i>Rite of Spring</i> conference</a>; qualifying exams; a paper to present at <a href="http://www.american-music.org/">SAM</a>; a master's thesis on Pleyel's influence on American hymnody in the early 19th century; and some other stuff I'm forgetting about.<br />
<br />
And if you'd like to write a guest post about <i>The Rite of Spring</i>, email me! william l robin at gmail.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com275tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-29534925946256241832012-07-02T21:46:00.000-04:002012-07-02T21:46:08.862-04:00a brief updateYes, I know, it's been five weeks. Month-plus hiatuses were not really supposed to ever be a part of this blog -- there were the good old days when I'd have three or four posts a week, and I had hoped to keep the thing going with new content on a weekly basis at the very least. However, life has conspired against me, and here we are, in early July, with nary a word since late May (devoting time to thinking of oh-so-clever Tweets hasn't helped much, either).<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you'll recall, from all those weeks ago, I was anticipating a trip to Vienna, and then another to D.C. Well, both happened, and we are happily settled, with kitties intact -- despite a few rocky moments -- in Capitol Hill. I have finished two weeks of work at the Library of Congress -- more on that in a bit -- and am looking forward to spending six more weeks here before heading back to Graduate School Year Two in August.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So, Vienna: pretty cool. I had no idea exactly how the Schoenberg Institute would work -- this is only the Arnold Schoenberg Center's second iteration of a summer academy -- but was extremely pleasantly surprised to find out that it would work out awesome. The Center were amazing hosts, and for two weeks us four UNC students took in the sights and sounds of the city, worked with composers and musicologists from China and Russia, and at the end of it presented papers based on some of the research we did in the Center's archives. If you're in Vienna, even if you're not a twelve-tone fan, I can't recommend more strongly to visit the Center -- it's an amazing facility, complete with museum, gift-shop (I am now the proud owner of a copy of a deck of playing cards painted by Schoenberg, as well as about 8 Schoenberg magnets, some buttons, and 2 t-shirts), archive, and very friendly people.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Concert-wise, we saw about the best you can see. One actual Vienna Philharmonic concert -- a sturdy though sometimes under-powered <i>Gurre-Lieder</i> under the direction of Zubin Mehta -- as well as one Vienna Phil almost-concert dress rehearsal of their <i>echt</i>-schmaltz outdoor palace summerfest, complete with every kind of kitsch you can imagine, andDudamel leading the proceedings. The orchestra didn't entrance me in either performance the way I had hoped, but I also kind of expected that; a few moments were astonishing, but I'll stick with my Berlin Phil, thank you. I also heard the Concentus Musicus Wien with Harnoncourt and Buchbinder doing some Mozart -- Buchbinder never quite clicked with the ensemble, and the Musikverein wasn't really the right venue, but the concert was enjoyable besides. The Wiener Festwochen, the giant early-summer cultural festival, was in full swing, and I was super-underwhelmed by Luca Francesconi's <i>Quartett</i>, a new, blandly-scored opera which felt like an amalgam of all the cliches of chamber-opera <i>Regietheater</i> I saw last year in Berlin. I had my hopes up for a nutso La Fura dels Baus staging, but it was fairly mundane -- a giant box suspended above the stage, with projections layered on top. I want <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSJaw2i1oSw">some 3D and crazy cranes</a>, damn it!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Fortunately, Lachenmann saved the day. Hearing the composer himself as the speaker in his <i>...Zwei Gefuhle</i> was an unforgettable experience (twice!), and there were also excellent renditions of his <i>Serynade</i> and <i>Dal niente</i>. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If this all sounds like very superficial analysis, my apologies -- I had no intentions of doing my usual reviewing business, and kind of just took things in as they were. After all, I was there on business. My business was talking about Arnold Schoenberg's <i>Theme and Variations </i>op. 43, his only work for concert band. Take a listen, if you're not familiar with it:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tO3VJSjD4lA" width="400"></iframe><br />
(And then go buy <a href="http://www.classicalarchives.com/album/099402414928.html">this recording</a>, because it's great, and Go U Northwestern)<br />
<br />
As a child and teenager growing up in Vienna, Schoenberg actually had some of his earliest important musical experiences at the Prater Park, hearing military bands which played there. The Vienna Phil wasn't cheap, and didn't play very often, and Schoenberg probably heard Wagner and Beethoven first via the conducting of band leaders like Karl Komzak and Carl Michel Ziehrer (both of whom are actually buried right near Beethoven in Vienna's <i>Zentralfriedhof</i>, pointing to their significance in Austrian musical life despite their complete absence in most discussions of it). In my paper, I drew connections between these early experiences hearing military bands and Schoenberg's return to the band form in 1942, with the <i>Theme and Variations</i> -- connections he himself acknowledged but with which scholars have not yet fully engaged. <br />
<br />
So that was Vienna, and now I'm in D.C. As a Pruett Fellow, I split my time at the Library of Congress between doing processing work for the music division and pursuing my own research. We have just finished processing the Arthur Laurents collection (you should probably know his name; in case you don't, he wrote the book for <i>West Side Story</i>, among many many other things), and we've begun sorting through the musical manuscripts of Wanda Landowska -- it's been a fascinating process. My own research involves wrapping up some aspects of my <i>Connotations</i> study, and getting more hymnals and such for my Pleyel project (read more about those <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2012/04/year-1-almost-done.html">here</a>). Concert-wise, I've heard New Lights, an interesting attempt at inventive programming by the National Orchestral Institute, as well as a spectacularly engaging showing of the 1923 silent film <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>, with excellent live accompaniment of music from the period in which the film takes place (courtesy of the <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CFkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hesperus.org%2Fhunchbacknotredame.php&ei=U03yT-mqN8P00gGK76H6Ag&usg=AFQjCNHEcGT9-mDLwsUdtT-Y9gJFppWylw">Hesperus enesmble</a>). Thus, the greatness of Machaut and Dufay, a bit of Hildegard, and a mix of popular tunes -- they used the <i>L'homme arme</i> for one of the big battle scenes, probably the only time I'll actually hear that tune outside of one of its myriad <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwMEBlBBB4">mass settings</a> (Anne has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/review-hesperus-accompanies-the-hunchback-of-notre-dame/2012/07/01/gJQALyxZGW_story.html">more</a>).<br />
<br />
That's about it for now. Unfortunately, I can't promise much more soon -- I have a number of large projects going, and you probably won't get to see any of them until late July, but keep your eyes peeled. And keep tabs on UNC/Carolina Performing Arts' <a href="https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/"><i>Rite of Spring at 100 </i>project</a>.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-71151007767267394122012-05-23T13:26:00.001-04:002012-05-24T21:50:32.165-04:00warMusic and war have a weird relationship. Our histories of art -- certainly those of art in the twentieth century -- often rotate around massive conflicts. Political events have always helped divide up our centuries into periods; art historians and musicologists like to think of the French Revolution as a nice way to tie up the short eighteenth century and begin the long nineteenth, which itself concludes with World War I. This doesn't <i>always</i> work out -- there are artistic "events" which are entirely independent from political ones, and sometimes the track of music history doesn't run on the same rails as the the track of political history.<br />
<br />
But the last hundred-plus years of music have been inextricably shaped by our two World Wars and the Cold War . We orient ourselves around pre-WWI modernism and post-WWI modernism, interwar <i>Neue Sachlichkeit</i>, post-war Zero Hour music, Cold War formalism. Rightfully so: these conflicts weighed enormously on composers, because they actually participated in them. The Second Viennese School were involved, in one form or another, in fighting World War I -- Berg's experiences gave birth to <i>Wozzeck</i>. The second World War was even more tumultuous -- we had the patriotic-ish music on this side of the ocean from the likes of Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and even John Cage, but also the scarring experiences which shaped the early lives of Zimmermann, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Takemitsu, and many others. To participate in music, before the 1970s, almost guaranteed that one had participated in war.*<br />
<br />
That is very, very far from the case today. I am not aware of any composers today who have served in the military (please let me know if you do <span style="color: red;"><i>Edit: in the comments, Arlene and Larry Dunn have kindly pointed out two musicians, Billy Bang and Lawrence Morris, who both served in Vietnam. <a href="http://www.therestisnoise.com/">Alex</a> has also smartly mentioned that Israeli composers such as Avner Dorman would have served military duty; he also points to two recent American soldiers, <a href="http://www.sagebiel-music.com/index.htm">Jason Sagebiel</a> and <a href="http://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/05/composer_in_uni.html">Daniel Todd Currie</a>, both of whom are composers</i></span>). The only way war shapes today's musical lives is in its absence -- American art which engages with the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan deals primarily with the gulf between contemporary life in the U.S. and the conflicts we are fighting overseas. In an effort to shake the public, or at least draw greater awareness to the thousands of troops we have stationed in the Middle East while we attempt to cut taxes, artists dramatize the absence of war in our lives. Unaffected by the immediacy of conflict, we focus on its absence.<br />
<br />
Thus, tonight and tomorrow night's <i><a href="http://spektralquartet.com/events/theatre-of-war/">Theatre of War</a></i>, a multimedia event organized by Chicago's Spektral Quartet.
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/41960356" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
As a friend of members of the quartet, I won't promise any journalistic objectivity in writing this preview -- it's a shout-out for a very well-deserving project. <i>Theatre of War</i> (get your tickets <a href="http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/242801">here</a>) promises to engage the eyes, ears, and mind in the wake of the NATO summit. There will be films by Richard Mosse, the staging of a short story by Virginia Konchan, poetry by Wislawa Szymborska, and George Crumb's <i>Black Angels</i> along with Drew Baker's <i>Stress Position</i>. <br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Black Angels </i>is a classic of the quartet repertoire, and certainly doesn't need any more ink spilled about it. <i>Stress Position</i>, though, is intriguing. (<a href="http://spektralquartet.com/stress-position/">Here's an informative interview</a> with Baker.) It is a piano piece which dramatizes torture in a powerful way -- the pianist is subjected to a kind of physical distress, forced to bang on the farthest ends of the piano, while the audience watches. It is a powerful, triple metaphor: a pianist subjected to the whims of an autocratic composer, commenting on the conventional performer/composer relationships of the classical tradition; an individual subjected to the aspects of musical torture, <a href="http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/a152/music-as-torture-music-as-weapon">a recent and disgusting phenomenon</a>; and a complacent public watching silently, mimicking our own removal from our government's actions abroad. Baker, powerfully, gradually transforms the work into one in which the torture is impossible to ignore -- the audience cannot escape the message, and must undergoe mild "torture" elements (the piano is gradually amplified, the lights cut out towards the end), a very literal wake-up call even if it gives only a hint of what prisoners might have experienced at places like Guantanamo Bay. The discomfort caused<b> </b>by a mere ten minutes of a mildly oppressive theatrical experience leaves one with the intense guilt and awareness that it is <i>much worse</i> elsewhere. The actual music is reminiscent of Stockhausen's <i>Klavierstuck IX</i>, completing the metaphor of the dominating composer by referencing one of history's most autocratic composers.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UGfa3PpLy54" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(An excerpt, courtesy of my former aural skills TA Jonathan Katz, with pages turned by UNC's own Lee Weisert)</span><br />
<br />
In the final moments of the 1965 premiere of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's <i>Die Soldaten -- </i>an arch-dramatization of the effects that military presence can have on civilian life -- after the main character had been raped and abandoned as a beggar in the streets, prerecorded screams blared through the Cologne State Opera house, and the house spotlights were lowered onto the stage and shined in the eyes of the audience. The screams were meant to evoke those of the victims of Hiroshima, the stage lights to imitate the effect of watching the atomic bomb explode. The message was not felt -- newspapers in following days shouted of the scandal caused by the audience's moment of blindness, but no one realized it was supposed to be an atomic explosion. An attempt at literal political commentary at the end of a mostly-allegorical opera failed. <br />
<br />
A similar thing happened when I saw John Adams' <i>Doctor Atomic</i> at the Chicago Lyric Opera in 2007. Peter Sellars had spoken about not wanting to stage the atomic explosion itself but instead, after a nearly hour-long countdown, have the audience realize that they themselves were, in fact, the bomb. We heard, as in <i>Die Soldaten</i>, a <i>musique concrete</i> assortment of noises, with a Japanese woman calling out for water -- Hiroshima re-staged. But leaving the opera house, I heard no one discussing the political ramifications of the work, the idea that "we" might be the bomb, or anything having to do with issues of nuclear disarmament today; people talked about the music, the libretto, the success of the work as theater. If there was a political intent here, it didn't seem to have any political effect.<br />
<br />
What the Spektral Quartet is offering in <i>Theatre of War</i>, and what Baker projects in <i>Stress Position</i>, is a message that cannot be ignored. It is not <i>necessarily</i> a message promoting one view over another, but it cannot help but incite debate. They invite the audience to stick around for discussion after the performance, and hopefully new ideas will be formed, or old convictions brought back to the fore. Some people complain that art shouldn't be too overtly political or literal, that we have to seek out change through universal, sometimes fuzzy ideals -- <i>Alle Menschen werden Bruder</i> and the like -- and that's fine some of the time. But I'm also happy to see that there is musical work which will directly address the times we live in, and the things we spend most of our days ignoring. Beethoven's Ninth won't remind you that there are men and women dying overseas for reasons that aren't always entirely clear, or just; <i>Theatre of War</i> will.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*Caveat: if one was male.<br />
<br />
<br />Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-23937300926621342772012-05-21T20:57:00.002-04:002012-05-21T22:12:27.629-04:00let's talk about music (part 3)Sorry for the delay! Things needed to be attended to, and thought about deeply (or so I will claim). If you will recall, last week we spoke about <i><a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2012/05/lets-talk-about-music-part-1.html">Silfra</a></i> and <i><a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2012/05/lets-talk-about-music-part-2.html">The Bright Motion</a></i> -- two new releases of almost brand-new music, one batch composed by the performers of the album, the other composed for the performer of the album. Here we're going to talk about a third release with some new music, but also old music, newly interpreted.<br />
<br />
<b>Album No. 3: <a href="http://sopercussion.com/thecagebootlegs">So Percussion - <i>The Cage Bootlegs</i></a></b><br />
<br />
Performance practice is a looming issue in all music, from your HIPster period instrument folks to your Mozart cadenza obsessors to your aria aficionados. It's less talked about with contemporary music, but it's hugely fascinating. What happens to <i>Music for 18 Musicians</i> or <i>In C</i> in the generational shift from the performers in Steve Reich & Musicians or Terry Riley and crew to Bang on a Can to Alarm Will Sound? Quantifying that shift is difficult, but it's present, and it shapes how those pieces influence later musicy. Like me, you may have "learned" <i>In C</i> via Bang on a Can and then been a bit surprised by the more hippy-dippy original recording.<br />
<br />
And those are the easy cases. The much, much more difficult ones are with composers like John Cage, and trying to figure out what the hell to do with his vast, complex musical output, not to mention reckoning with the multitudes of written and spoken words, the performances by his collaborators or himself, the Happenings, and everything else.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Warning: moderately nonsensical analogy about comic books and John Cage ahead. Feel free to skip the next three paragraphs if you want.</span><br />
<br />
I heard a paper given at a conference several months back titled "John Cage's Multiverse." It was referring specifically to Cage's relationship to the philosophy of William James, but I couldn't help but think of the multiverse with which many nerdier people are more familiar -- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(DC_Comics)">that of DC comics</a>. The multiverse is a set of parallel earths/universes which occasionally come crashing together in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_on_Infinite_Earths">massive year-long crossover "events"</a> (I'm not sure if it still exists in DC's ever-relaunching recent history). The thing is with crossovers is that DC always has to negotiate who gets thrown into its "expanded universe." Obviously Superman is going to play a role in defeating the Threat-of-the-Galaxy villain, but what about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_Central">some random Gotham-based police officer</a> who's part of an ongoing prestige comic that only rarely interacts with the big superhero guns? Does every single character that's part of DC's line of a bajillion different comics need to come together ? Does everyone need to exist in DC's "universe"?<br />
<br />
This brings us to the idea of "Cagean," one of those name-based adjectives that gets tossed around more than any other in the music world. (Did you eat ice cream while listening to Beethoven? Cagean. Did you listen to your ipod while going to the bathroom? Cagean.) The thing with Cage is that we can essentially place his entire compositional output under the label "Cagean" (which basically means, at this point, <i>anything</i>) and consider it all as part of the Cage universe, in which everything is an indetermined Happening, a chapter in <i>Silence</i>. <i>The Cage</i> <i>Bootlegs</i> is essentially a Cagean approach to Cage, subsuming a large slice of his percussion music, as well as music by other composers, within a project in which elements of production, marketing, and packaging all taken on Cage aspects as well. This wasn't necessarily the case in the past. Yes, a Cage performance was always Cagean, but all those <a href="http://www.wergo.de/shop/en_UK/artists/1/john-cage/">Wergo</a> and <a href="http://www.moderecords.com/profiles/johncage.html">Mode</a> recordings were about as prosaic-looking as any other new music release. <br />
<br />
But are all Cage pieces actually "Cagean"? Just as we might not necessarily need to see every DC character fighting the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monitor">Anti-Monitor</a>, do we need everything Cage wrote -- even the essentially conventionally-notated, normal pieces like the <i>Third Construction</i> -- thrown into Cage's multiverse? On <i>The Cage</i> <i>Bootlegs' </i>CD sampler, the So players speak from Cage's <i>Lecture</i> <i>on Something</i><b> </b>on top of the <i>Third Construction</i>, essentially transforming a "normal" piece into a "Happening" piece. There's nothing necessarily wrong or "inauthentic" about this, but I'm not sure if every Cage piece actually makes a whole lot of sense placed into what we think of as "Cagean" today. However, <i>The Cage Bootlegs</i> makes a very compelling case of creating a narrative out of this notion, and these spoken excerpts help form the idea of the album as a complete experience (more on that later).<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">For those of you who skipped those three paragraphs, congratulations! Let's move on.</span><br />
<br />
<i>The Cage Bootlegs </i>(hereafter, <i>Bootlegs</i>) contains, essentially, four things: a record sleeve with an awesome, handmade Rauschenberg-style collage, a completely blank LP (a perhaps overstated 4'33" reference), a CD "sampler" with tracks apparently chosen by the I Ching, and a download card which grants access to recordings of various live shows on So Percussion's Cage tour which included in March. <br />
<br />
Funnily enough, I initially made the mistake of what a lot of this post will be about. I listened to the sampler as an album, getting to know the recordings without realizing that they were actually random snippets and excerpts instead of full pieces. I mistook a part for the whole, granting a traditional listening experience to only one component of a very non-traditional album.<br />
<br />
I soon rectified my mistake by listening to the sampler in tandem with various downloads of live performances. My sampler recordings all came from a UC Davis concert last October (not sure if it's different for everyone), and the downloads come from various tour stops across the country. Much of the music that can be downloaded but didn't show up on the sampler -- like Cage's <i>Child of Trees</i>, performed on a cactus -- doesn't quite work with an audio-only recording. But that's part of what's so fascinating about the album; the musicians create a kind of experience where one feels like one is part of an ongoing project, only living a sliver of what is actually going on (unfortunately, coming to writing about it rather late, everything has already "happened"). <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So what of the actual music? We get a nice mix of Cage and Cage-inspired. My sampler began with five minutes of So's recording of <i>Credo in US, </i>a WW2-era work which samples radio and records, appropriating recorded elements of patriotism and classicism (Cage suggests "Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich" for sections of it). Our "classic" here is the gunmetal opening of Bon Jovi's <i>Shot Through the Heart -- </i> perhaps the best way to start a Cage album, ever -- which then launches into polyrhythmic percussion goodness. Later we get snippets of sardonic piano tango and bits of the Star Spangled Banner.<b> </b> Checking in on the online edition, the samples are even better -- The National's <i>Fake Empire</i> and Radiohead make it onto one version. Our <i>US </i>is<i> </i>very different from Cage's, and the ensemble has an interesting idea of what "Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich" might be today.><br />
<br />
As far as "real" Cage goes, the sampler also included a stunningly precise excerpt of the <i>Third Construction</i> -- pretty much the Brahms Violin Concerto of the percussion repertoire (I like to think of the conch shell towards the end as the percussionist mating call) -- as well as part of the subdued Percussion Quartet, and most of <i>Imaginary Landscape No. 1</i>. The latter is one of the earliest electro-acoustic pieces, and sounds something like an apocalyptic hearing test. Today, the mixture of phonographs, prepared piano, and cymbals has a wonderfully dated sound, with the high electronic pitches sounding particularly nostalgic.<br />
<br />
Then we get the Cagean Cage, and the Cage-derived. So Percussion has created a "Simultaneous Cage Pieces" work, which layers together three pieces (<i>Inlets</i>, <i>0'00"</i>, <i>Duet for Cymbal</i>) and the lecture <i>45' for a speaker </i>(which can be found in <i>Silence</i>). It's an fun conflation of sounds, with lovely little Cage aphorisms ("The best thing to do about counterpoint is what Schoenberg did: Teach it"), muted cymbal hits, and random bits of electronic-y fuzz. Jason Treuting, one of So's Percussionists, also contributes his <i>24 x 24</i>, a riff on the Third Construction, with more readings from the <i>Lecture on Something</i>. This is a particularly intriguing piece, because it introduces drones, which aren't exactly Cage's thing, and that if anything recalled Riley and Young -- a piano occasionally chimes Cs in the back. It's Cage refracted through the minimalism he helped inspire.<br />
<br />
The Cage-inspired, but not necessarily Cage-derived, new pieces come from Cenk Ergun, Dan Deacon, and Matmos. Matmos' <i>Needles</i> is a fun little series of Reichian clinking patterns which, as it turns out, were produced from an amplified cactus (unlike Cage's cactus piece, this one works pretty well without the visuals).<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ee4wCvEGZF8" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
I enjoyed Ergun's <i>Use</i>, whose score can be seen <a href="http://www.cenkergun.com/chamber_works.html">here</a>. Written for percussionists, a string player, and "1 wild card performer," it involves each performer playing a series of succeding events -- friction, pattern, pulse, solo, etc. In the sampler, this includes complicated polyrhythms produced by hollow cans or perhaps drums, whirring noises, whistling, and snatches of viola melody which float in and out. More intrigugingly, an online recording from a Stanford performance includes violist Beth Myers tuning and warming up her instrument while anarchic percussion rages beneath. Deacon's <i>Bottles</i>, a 25-minute piece from which the sampler only includes a single minute (I listened to the whole thing online)<i> </i>probably works better as a live visual experience. The So musicians play simple drumming patterns on bottles while the <i>45' For a Speaker</i> is read; we later hear a strangely jangly, electric/electronic instrument (guitar?), noise, the sound of the bottles slowly emptying and, towards the end, the keens of the conch shell from the <i>Third Construction</i>.<br />
<br />
On the sampler, at least, Cage's written word plays as important a role as the music; pretty much every piece includes a speaker (the same one on the whole album, though I'm not sure who it is) reading various lectures by the composer. It's occasionally distracting, but mostly it provides an aura of authenticity and an overarching narrative to the experience, as if Cage were watching over the performers' shoulders and approving of the absurdity.<br />
<br />
So, what are our <b>big ideas</b> about this album and what it means for new music? Here are two slightly fuzzy ones which can apply to <i>Silfra</i> and <i>The Bright Motion </i>as well:<br />
<br />
<b>The Album as Experience</b><br />
Again, nothing new here. Every album is an experience beyond the merely auditory. Back in the day, the physicality of the LP format, with its liner notes actually on the sleeve, the weight and size of the album, made it a kind of <i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i>, a fully-conceived piece of art on multiple levels. Today, we have the gamut of album experiences, from barebones digital downloads (that's not to say all downloads are barebones!) to those LP + CD + online access + bumper sticker + many-other-things deluxe editions. <br />
<br />
The <i>Bootlegs</i>, besides offering a sly commentary on the return of the LP format, is more than just the limited edition series of goodies and extras. This is an album not only to be experienced as a physical object, with its intriguing handmade cover art, but also as an ongoing and almost participatory experience -- one can continuously check the website, download new recordings from the ensemble's tour, and compare concert to concert (though this ongoing aspect is now, unfortunately, concluded). The album is a way of charting the journey of the performers, tagging along digitally on their tour. The problem here, which I'll talk about in the next section as well, is forming a narrative. The <i>Bootlegs</i> grant me access to multiple downloadable versions of each piece alongside my sampler -- there is no studio product here, no one single "thing" that the album is. It's difficult to sit down and hear So Percussion's Cage, in this state, because there are many conflicting things to pick through. <br />
<br />
If this were Beethoven, this would be a problem. We would want a single product, our performer(s) to have focused his or her energy and produced One Grand Statement. With Cage, it's actually not -- this ongoing approach matches perfectly with the master of anti-narrativity. The album as indeterminate experience isn't what we got during Cage's lifetime, but it makes sense.<br />
<br />
The album today can exist in tandem with a website -- like <i><a href="http://hahnandhauschka.com/">Silfra's</a></i> -- which hopefully goes beyond marketing to provide the listener (or perhaps I should say user?) with an interactive and potentially participatory experience . Musicians and composers are increasingly opening up their works to remixes, mashups, and visual re-interpretations (see: <a href="http://sonlux.tumblr.com/">Son Lux</a>). This is, if anything, a multimedia extension of classical music's necessity of constant reinterpretation. It's a good thing!<br />
<br />
<b>Dealing with the Archive</b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
This <i>is</i> a new problem, and problem might be the word here. There is an exhausting amount of new music being constantly released, and forming a narrative -- beyond that of this particular Cage album -- can be exhausting. I can sit down and check out various live recordings on the B<i>ootlegs</i> website, but I would honestly rather hear those concerts in person. There is now what is essentially an infinite amount of space out there for music (I guess there always was, but now it's infinite space + instant access). Pretty much every major New York concert that I'm interested in is being live-streamed and archived by WQXR or Q2 (you can experience all of Spring For Music <a href="http://www.wqxr.org/#!/series/spring-for-music/">vicariously</a>). <a href="http://medici.tv/">Medici.tv</a> and the <a href="http://digitalconcerthall.com/">Digital Concert Hall</a> offer amazing streaming concerts; every weekend Parterre <a href="http://parterre.com/2012/05/19/photo-finish-2/">compiles</a> the many operas being live webcast, often with video; every concert Ionarts <a href="http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2012/05/in-brief-missing-dfd-edition.html">mentions</a> is one I want to listen to. Without basically any effort, one can rip many of these streams and end up with lots of gigabites of concerts to listen to at some point in the future, alongside the many studio and live albums constantly being released. With Bandcamp, new releases from labels like New Amsterdam can be streamed before purchasing for free.<br />
<br />
I don't know if there is any one point in history where there is "more" or "less" music out there, and I have no idea how one would quantify such a thing. But it's a bit exhausting to have an album which isn't a fixed entity alongside all these other streaming things, alongside all these real, conventional "fixed" albums. I'm not sure if I will return to any of the online So material after this review, and that has nothing to do with quality -- there's just <i>so much</i> out there.<br />
<br />
So how does one create this kind of open album experience while negotiating with the fact that The Archive is already so vast? The release purports to be an ongoing series of bootlegs, and that's a particularly interesting metaphor for what we're talking about. With the recent wave of specifically-produced albums, as I talked about earlier, via labels like Bedroom Community, we have an instance where the album is a <i>musical work</i> and the performance is another <i>musical work</i>, or a live realization of the album. Here, there's no one musical work off of which the other is based -- you have a series of indeterminate pieces, each of which is different in every performance, brought together into -- well, bootlegs <i>is</i> the right word. <br />
<br />
It's almost an acknowledgement of (or metaphor for) the way contemporary music is increasingly produced today, as series of of performance to performance rather than single monumental work to single monumental work. So instead of spending two years writing a single piece which attempts to invent an entirely new musical language (this might be called the PhD approach), a composer will spend two years writing a ton of pieces, collaborating, doing some string arrangements for a band, performing her own music and that of others. It's scrappier, and may result in fewer Teutonically Great works, but more very, very good and well-crafted music (and more concert experiences and opportunities to hear new music). Our archive grows, and we may lose sight of the Grand Narrative, but what we've gained in immediacy for the music world today may be more important, even if we can't see the forest for the trees.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
That's it for the album series. Check back in a couple days for....WAR! And music! And the Spektral Quartet's <a href="http://spektralquartet.com/events/theatre-of-war/">promising new project</a>.<br />
</span>Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-10812533489339516452012-05-16T18:23:00.002-04:002012-05-22T09:49:18.015-04:00let's talk about music (part 2)<a href="http://michaelmizrahi.bandcamp.com/"><i>You can stream all of Michael Mizrahi's </i>The Bright Motion<i> herdane.</i></a><br />
<br />
Michael Mizrahi is the resident pianist of the NOW Ensemble, a chamber group I've been following ever since I got completely hooked on Judd Greenstein's <i>Folk Music</i> a few years back. Later this month, Mizrahi will release his first solo album, <i><a href="http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/?portfolio=michael-mizrahi-the-bright-motion">The Bright Motion</a>, </i>on New Amsterdam, the label run by Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and William Brittelle. Like many of New Amsterdam's releases, this is very much an "in-house" affair -- NOW also records for New Amsterdam, and the album features works by Greenstein, Brittelle, NOW co-founder Patrick Burke, and NOW guitarist Mark Dancigers. This musical not-quite-nepotism also takes place on most Bedroom Community releases. I suppose you could look down on it as insularity, but I prefer to see a benefit in collaborators working repeatedly in the same circles. As I mentioned <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2012/05/lets-talk-about-music-part-1.html">in my last post</a>, I think it is fruitful to continue pursuing collaborative relationships over time, even if it might mean that a certain aesthetic similarity<b> </b>can sink in.<br />
<br />
We'll talk a bit about what that similarity might be later. For now, the music: it's great. (Hint: I'm only going to be talking about albums that I like this week.) Dancigers' <i>The Bright Motion</i> -- specifically, the first movement, written several years after the second movement -- is easily the best piece on the album. (<a href="http://michaelmizrahi.bandcamp.com/track/the-bright-motion-movt-i">Listen here.</a>)<br />
<br />
It opens with a series of hazy arpeggios, a Debussyian filagree, articulated with breathtaking clarity by Mizrahi. A chorale-like melody soon enters on top of the filagree; it quickly fades away into the arpeggiated mist, but returns with greater force, in a powerfully pianistic middle section. It's the kind of arch-Romantic structure -- big-boned melody supported by rich arpeggios -- that is just one of the best ways to use a piano. It reminds me of this:<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Pgn4SQFgU9Y" width="420"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
And this:<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/x8l37utZxMQ" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
Those are two very different composers who know exactly what the piano is about. It's always refreshing to hear a pianistic moment like this, a reminder that, despite the fact that the instrument can and has been used for just about everything, there are still composers who can summon forth that old 1895-y full-bloodedness and pull it off.<br />
<br />
The movement seems about to conclude where it began -- the wafting, subsiding filagree gestures return -- but then entirely new material emerges, a series of paired phrases providing a calming denouement. The filagree makes one final, brief appearance, and quickly dies away, making for an almost seamless segue into the second movement (the "original" <i>Bright Motion</i>), a slightly less compelling but equally beautiful piece, again rife with moments of arpeggios rippling off of thick melodies.<br />
<br />
Judd Greenstein's <i>First Ballade</i> and Patrick Burke's <i>Unravel</i> are tied for my second-favorite works on the album. <i>Unravel</i> features an incessantly recurring three-note motive, which constantly "unravels," unspooling into longer and longer phrases before snapping back into its original form. Jazzy, low bouncing figures take over, setting up a conflict between registers. Eventually, the original motive returns in heavenly hyper-major mode, a Beethovenian gesture of triumph in non-Beethovian musical language. Mizrahi brings to the work a lilting clarity -- a touch reminiscent of Bill Evans -- elucidating Burke's dense textures. <br />
<br />
Greenstein's piece is a great match-up of lyric impulse and rhythmic drive, a mixture which really highlights Mizrahi's strengths. There is a groove underlying the beginning section, but listening to Mizrahi's playing, one doesn't really feel that the rhythm is pushing it incessantly forward, Bang on a Can-style. In the classic Bang on a Can, hard-driving grooves, individual rhythm units feel deliberately, aggressively metric. Here, the "units" are phrases which breathe and deserve the rubato Mizrahi gives them (Greenstein cites Chopin as an big influence on the piece). By the halfway point, these phrases become cascading series of Chopinesque arpeggios, making clear that the piece is less about groove than, well, ballade. There's a story here.<br />
<br />
Ryan Brown's <i>Pieces for Solo Piano</i> is a set of four curious miniatures which exclusively employ the higher registers of the instrument. This particular range meshes neatly with Mizrahi's delicate technique, and allows for a very tactile experience -- you can hear the keys chiming out each high note. Several moments feel just like William Duckworth's <i>Time Curve Preludes</i> -- that mix of quasi-minimalism, Satie, blues, and processes at work (the second movement, <i>Buckle</i>, feels particularly <i>Time Curve</i>-esque). The final movement, <i>Shoestring</i>, is perhaps the most intriguing. It spins out a simple two-note gesture in the piano's stratosphere over two minutes. At the very end, though, Mizrahi sounds a single low note -- the only thing below middle C in the entire piece. It's an obvious but intriguing, Haydnesque gesture -- is Brown telling us that the whole piece was a joke, a gimmick? Is he reminding us of the artificiality of the concept of writing for only a third of an instrument's range? Or simply telling us that the piano can do much more than what it just did?<br />
<br />
I didn't really get into William Brittelle's <i>Computer Wave</i>, which had the postminimal rhythmic intensity of the rest of the album but lacked the poetry and breadth of the other works. John Mayrose's <i>Faux Patterns </i>is dreamy, and Mizrahi's playing made the pedaled dissonances feel particularly mysterious, but the piece never grabbed me.<br />
<br />
So what does this album tell us about contemporary music? In <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2012/05/lets-talk-about-music-part-1.html">the last post</a>, I mentioned <b>place</b> and <b>production</b>. These are important to this album, but don't come to the fore as obviously as they do on <i>Silfra</i>. So here are two other interesting aspects that are particularly felt on <i>The Bright Motion</i>, and have implications for much other new music:<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Personal Collaboration:</b><br />
Collaboration is a very big thing right now, which I'm increasingly obsessed with. It's not anything new, of course, but some things have changed in significant ways. One, I think, is the degree of personal connections which are present, and even dramatized, in contemporary collaborations. Mizrahi writes in his liner notes for the album:<br />
<br />
"Several composers told me they composed with my hands, my sound, and my approach to the keyboard in mind, and I communicated frequently with all the composers throughout the process of learning, performing, and recording their music."<br />
<br />
Having written about this idea in my undergrad thesis (yes, I get to mention it again) with regards to Muhly's <i>Keep in</i><i> Touch </i>and <i>The Only Tune </i>-- two works which utilize Muhly's close collaborators but also dramatize aspects of the friendship between them -- I'm very conscious of what statements like this mean. It may not necessarily be anything new that a composer would write for a performer's specific musical personality, and tie their music to their relationship with their collaborator -- one can assume this was happening with Britten and Pears -- but the openness with which it is discussed is striking.<br />
<br />
Last year, I heard Ken Ueno lecture about his music and discuss <i><a href="http://www.kenueno.com/performancenotes.html#Talus">Talus</a></i>, written for his friend, the violist Wendy Richman. Ueno based the piece's harmonies on a spectrogram analysis of an X-ray of Richman's shattered ankle, which she broke at a rehearsal in 2006. This is co-biographical music, where the performer's life, not just his or her musical skill set, becomes ingrained within the work itself.<br />
<br />
The implications of this are fascinating. Would a performer that is not the original be missing a "secret" aspect of the music without having lived the experiences it describes? (If it's not your broken leg in the score, does that shape how your play the piece?) If Yefim Bronfman played Dancigers' <i>The Bright Motion</i>, would an essentially personal quality of the music -- the hands, the sound, or the approach -- be lost? Certainly all the pieces on this album can be performed by pianists that aren't Mizrahi (unlike, say, <i>The Only Tune</i>, which pretty much requires Sam Amidon). What would be lost, though, and what might be gained? <br />
<br />
<b>Brightness/Presentness:</b><br />
This is really, really hard to quantify or even qualify. There is a certain open emotional quality present on this album, and in much new music. Isaac Shankler mentioned this as a characteristic of *blankity-blankity*-classical <a href="http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/who-cares-if-you-call-it-indie-classical/">in a recent NMB post</a>, and I think he is on to something. This pervasive emotional state -- somewhere between optimism and ecstasy -- is why I <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/12/year-in-review.html">misinterpreted the title of the Ecstatic Music festival</a> a while back. I do think that much music by composers like Muhly, Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli, Dancigers, as well as bands like Sigur Rós/Jónsi, has this hard-to-name quality. It is both an emotional aspect of the music as well as a way of dealing with musical time -- to quote the title of one of Greenstein's pieces, a <i>Being There </i>essence of musical presence. I think it has to do with a mixture of postminimalism and Romanticism, staking out a place between the abstraction of the former and the personal implications of the latter. I still haven't figured out exactly what the musical qualities of this "brightness/presentness" are, but it's what allows me to hear Hahn/Hauschka and think immediately of <i>I Drink the Air Before Me</i> or Jonsi's <i>Go </i>or Dancigers' <i>The Bright Motion</i> (it can't just be an Icelandic thing). I'm going to write myself in circles if I keep talking about this, since I haven't quite <i>figured it out </i>yet, but I will keep it in mind, and I hope you will too.<br />
<br />
Next up: So Percussion and Cage.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-62788245572136868812012-05-14T18:16:00.000-04:002012-05-14T20:05:23.774-04:00let's talk about music (part 1)After reading <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/listen-to-this-20120510-1ydnh.html">this</a>, and voicing my thoughts on Twitter, I thought I finally had to do it: write a blog post about *redacted*-classical. I even started writing it! Then I got super confused, slightly angry, and very tired. So I decided to do something else.<br />
<br />
I rarely review albums here -- I don't consider it too fair for me to write them up, since I don't listen to everything that's coming out and feel more comfortable in general talking about the live experience. <i>However</i>, I've gotten a bunch of great albums lately, and in lieu of talking about some giant, amorphous musical scene which has been defined by a ridiculous set of terms, I'm going to talk about three albums, and what each one might suggest for contemporary music. I'll talk a bit about each album individually and discusses characteristics of it which I think are indicative of (but certainly <i>not </i>unique to) how composed/classical/new music is being made in our time. Without further ado:<br />
<br />
<b>Album Number 1: Hahn/Hauschka - <i>Silfra</i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b><br />
<b><i><a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CJ8BEBYwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2012%2F05%2F13%2F151712146%2Ffirst-listen-hilary-hahn-and-hauschka-silfra&ei=NHuxT_rsLKqi2QXSx6HrCA&usg=AFQjCNH6V0BucyQmjQ_IVZ5ITRmpE3To6Q">You can listen to it on NPR for free here.</a></i></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
There is something somewhat extraordinary about this album -- actually, there's something somewhat extraordinary about the direction Hilary Hahn has taken in recent years. A press release plopped into my inbox several months ago mentioning the upcoming release of <i>Silfra. </i>It was the first I had heard of the collaboration between Hahn and Hauschka, a German prepared-piano virtuoso (this was, admittedly, the first I had heard of him as well). Hahn has been pushing into relatively unexplored territory for a former child prodigy -- I suppose it got started (or at least publicly acknowledged) with the 2008 recording of the Schoenberg concerto, but that didn't particularly impress me as a unusual act unto itself (neither did last year's Ives album). But then there was the <i>Encores</i> project, the composition contest, and now this. It's not like famous virtuosi haven't devoted themselves to fostering new music in the past (Maurizio Pollini and Pierre Laurent-Aimard are two good examples), but it seems to happen less often in America, and rarely with such fascinating eclecticism.<br />
<br />
And rarely does a violinist who has been releasing albums of concertos and sonatas nearly every consecutive year since she was a teenager dive into improvisation. I'm not sure what exactly motivated this. T<a href="http://hahnandhauschka.com/about/">wo lengthy essays</a> outline the history of the H&H relationship (totally what I'm calling this now, since the bagel joint is defunct), but it's hard to get at exactly what drove Hahn in particular. It's actually always hard to get at exactly what's driving Hahn, from the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZl1_NXKls">quirky YouTube videos</a> to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao-ZRDLgf0U">Happy Birthday Ives</a> to the <a href="http://www.hilaryhahncontest.com/">slightly hare-brained ideas turned into quasi-institutions</a><span id="goog_460004056"></span><span id="goog_460004057"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a>.<br />
<br />
But what about the music? It succeeds! Maybe not beyond-your-wildest-dreams succeeds, but it is a very impressive freshman effort for a collaborative idea that seems to be new to both musicians. The album, though divided into individual tracks/pieces which don't flow into each other, feels like an organic whole. This has its up and its downs. There is really only one kind of "mood," if that's the right word, for the fifty minutes of music -- a kind of perpetual vacillation between ecstatic and melancholic -- and the drama comes from shifting variations of that interplay, rather than abrupt changes of style or emotion. <br />
<br />
The musical language resembles a languid postminimalism, with short, repeated violin patterns hovering over open drones and crunching prepared piano sounds. It actually reminded me more than anything of the music of Valgeir <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson</span></span>, who produced the album (more on that later). The energy of tracks like <i>Bounce Bounce</i> comes out of a very loose, un-mathematical version of minimalism, with Reichian patterns, multiple violins superimposed over each other, and an appealing jangliness which evokes <i>In C</i> -- the see-sawing fragments which the violin plays aren't far from the 53<b> </b>cells of Riley's masterpiece.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JVw9B5HtFZI" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
Hahn's contribution to the album is a particularly interesting way to watch the transformation from classical virtuoso to quasi-composer take place. The improvisation itself is fairly "rudimentary" -- she's not exactly reading chord changes or doing Braxton-style free jazz. But it's compelling in its own right, mostly due to Hahn's musicality -- she delivers each gesture with refinement and purpose. <i>Krakow</i>, a conventional duet of unprepared piano and violin, is a lovely Satie-like miniature, which benefits hugely from Hahn's presence. We hear a series of snapshots of a "Romantic violin melody" -- like soundtrack outtakes from a movie about <i>shtetls</i> in Eastern Europe -- layered on top each other, fading in and out. Hahn delivers these drooping turns and cadential figures with the same grace you'd hear in a recording of Faure sonatas.<br />
<br />
What Hauschka offers is fascinating, too -- especially if you listen before watching any videos of how he works. With piano layered atop prepared piano crunches and buzzes and what sound like modified pedals, I was under the impression I was hearing multi-tracking. But look at this!<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/43Z4yljYY_c" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
It's a completely fascinating version of polyphony, with different registers taking on not only different sound qualities but different emotional spheres. <i>Godot</i>, the album's longest and most delicate track, has all kinds of sounds I had no idea a prepared piano could make -- subdued hammer-pounding effects, spectral ratcheting -- which layer into terrifying moments that feel less mechanical than natural. What's most impressive is how the effects coalesce -- about nine minutes in, the various registers of piano notes and effects become a haunting progression of noise as harmony.<br />
<br />
The collaboration works well -- the voices blend together naturally (so much so that occasionally it's hard to tell what is violin and what is piano string), and you get the sense of kindred musical spirits. My only gripe is that it feels like a lot of <i>the same</i>. As an album experience, this works pretty well; but by about 2/3rds through, individual tracks tend to run together. One hopes this is the start of something, not just a single product in itself -- collaboration needs to build over time, and one-offs can be fascinating, but dialogues built over years can be even more artistically fruitful.<br />
<br />
<b>Anyway, what does this tell us about new music today? Two things that I'll talk about (and then more later this week):</b><br />
<br />
<b>Production:</b><br />
As I said earlier, this sounds like a Valgeir <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson</span></span> album -- it's not entirely clear how much of a compositional role <span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson</span> actually played in the making of <i>Silfra</i>, but I can't help but think it was a major one. It's also not entirely clear exactly how the process of improvisation then production worked -- remember, Hahn's violin is often layered atop Hahn's violin multiple times, so someone is doing this editing, and it's not clear if it's Hauschka or <span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson or Hahn</span>. It seems to me that <span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson</span> is really a strong presence on the album, and a lot of the musical elements point straight back to an album that's very close to my heart -- Nico Muhly's <i><a href="http://bedroomcommunity.net/releases/speaks_volumes">Speaks Volumes</a></i>, which I increasingly think was a pioneering record back in 2006 (maybe that's just because I wrote my undergrad thesis on it, I don't know).<i> </i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
The conventional role of a classical album is to mimic the live concert experience -- to construct a space that would allow one to pretend that he was hearing an orchestra or string quartet in an actual hall. Most pop works a bit differently -- since the '70s, at least, it's about creating an entirely imaginary listening space, independent of the "reality" of the concert. That's what <i>Speaks Volumes</i> did as well, and deliberately so -- even the pieces without electronics included the sounds of musicians breathing and noticable close-micing. One can hear the presence of <span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson's </span>Greenhouse Studios on the album (more on that idea, too, in a bit). In Muhly's <i>Keep in Touch</i>, <span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson</span> recorded Nadia Sirota trying out all kinds of funny little sounds on her viola, which he mixed into the piece's electronic backing track. That seems to be what's going on in <i>Silfra</i>, too -- re-interpreting the physical sounds of the violin and prepared piano and transforming them into <i>musique concrete </i>elements.<br />
<br />
I know they're going to be touring this thing, and I wonder how that's going to work -- the layering doesn't exactly accomodate for a live experience with just acoustic instruments. In this instance, as well as pretty much every album that <a href="http://bedroomcommunity.net/">Bedroom Community</a> has released, the album becomes <i>the work</i>, a self-standing piece of music, often before the concert experience has even take place -- it's almost like a score, in a way, the blueprint of the music from which a live performance will extract one particular rendition. The producer takes on the role of co-composer. This isn't necessarily new -- the great producers of olde like Walter Legge at EMI created Wagnerian opera which existed only on record -- and electronic music has long invented experiences which cannot be re-created live. But this idea of transforming chamber music -- which is really what <i>Silfra</i> is -- into an imagined, recorded experience, rather than a mimesis of a live one, is impressively new.<br />
<br />
<b>Place:</b><br />
Greenhouse Studios is only fifteen years old, but as far as I'm concerned it already has a myth surrounding it. The fact that there is a sound common to all of Bedroom Community albums as well as <i>Silfra</i> testifies not only to Sigurdsson's importance as a producer but also to the fact of his studio as a place in which collaboration takes place.<br />
<br />
We tend to think of music-making today as being removed from place, that the Internet today has replaced the need for art existing physical locations. (Certainly that's the vibe that people gave in the Spring for Music contest.) I would argue that perhaps the opposite has happened, that as music has taken on its own life in the electronic ether, place becomes almost more important. There's a reason that people seem fixated on Brooklyn as the source of some new musical movement; there's a reason that installation art has seen a surge; there's a reason <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CIYBEBYwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmakemusicny.org%2F&ei=QoKxT5j7DOWC2wWW4LDpCA&usg=AFQjCNEbfmElhAOfRiZ79nSE_8BC-lbEFw">Make Music New York</a> has grown in popularity, that we have <a href="http://dalniente.com/season/events.html">The Party</a> and <i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/09/video-john-luther-adams-inuksuit.html">Inuksuit</a></i>.<br />
<br />
Hahn and Hauschka collaborated online before meeting in Iceland, exchanging recordings and creating improvisatory ideas via the Internet. But for the Hahn and Hauschka arrival in the studio, they apparently attempted to start from scratch, "forgetting" what they had learned (this is a theme among recent collaborators), with Iceland's mountainous landscape out the window. Though collaboration takes place online, the physical space becomes a kind of muse, unique merely for the fact that it exists in real life. Silfra is the place where the tectonic plates of North America and Eurasia meet -- as the collaborators have attested, Iceland itself permeates the music-making.<br />
<br />
Iceland has, in recent years, become a wellspring for musical inspiration -- even Robert Lepage seems to think the tectonic plates are the place to find Wagner's <i>Ring</i>. Perhaps it's our new, more politically correct Orient, but I think it may have to do just as much with the inspiration of the actual people on the ground -- the <span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðssons</span> and Jónsis -- as the myths which lurk beneath them. How much is Valgeir <span style="line-height: 16px;">Sigurðsson</span> defining the sound of not just Icelandic music, but the sound of Iceland itself? Is he tapping into some tradition that goes back to the Vikings, or is the myth being re-created and reenforced with each new gorgeous soundscape? Those are questions for which I don't have answers.<br />
<br />
Let's meet back later this week, for discussions of Michael Mizrahi's <i><a href="http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/?portfolio=michael-mizrahi-the-bright-motion">The Bright Motion</a></i> and So Percussion's <i><a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CF0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsopercussion.com%2Fthecagebootlegs&ei=h4OxT97vK6aC2wXL0tmcCQ&usg=AFQjCNGj4SNeZZb1-Gx8PZJpxPbRfaEv0A">The Cage Bootlegs</a></i>.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-68126364611814139792012-05-01T23:42:00.002-04:002012-05-01T23:42:39.611-04:00for the birth of a childIn 1944, Schoenberg wrote a short canon in honor of the birth of Richard Rodzinski, son of the famous conductor Arthur Rodzinski. The text is priceless:<br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>I am almost sure, when your nurse will change your diapers,</i><br />
<i> she will not sing you one of my George Songs,</i><br />
<i>nor of my Second String Quartet;</i><br />
<i> but perhaps she stills you:</i><br />
<i>Sleep, Richard, Sleep! Your father loves you!</i>Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-44423874635500647822012-04-26T13:22:00.000-04:002012-04-26T13:25:24.943-04:00year 1: almost done<div style="font-family: inherit;">
It may seem strange to be coming to the end of the school year in April, but that's the way it is over here. What with my earlier promises to give you all an insider's view into graduate school, I thought I might at least let you know what I worked on this semester, in case you might be interested. But first, <b>important business:</b></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
1. Thank you all for voting in the Spring for Music contest. We almost won! Hopefully some people reading this have newly discovered the blog from the contest. Many of the contestants have completely awesome blogs, and it was disappointing to see some of <a href="http://dmvclassical.wordpress.com/">my</a> <a href="http://likelyimpossibilities.blogspot.com/">favorites</a> weeded out when they should have easily taken the cake. Major kudos to <a href="http://neoantennae.blogspot.com/">Neo Antennae</a>, one of the finalists, whose blog I didn't know and who is apparently only sixteen! If I could write that well when I was in high school, I would be some Alex Ross-Justin Davidson-Michael Kimmelman critic fusion-monster by now.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
2. Do you live in the Triangle area? Do you know what that is? If you do, will you be there this coming Monday, or the Sunday after that? If not, would you be willing to?</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Either way, you should come to: <a href="http://newmusicraleigh.org/">New Music Raleigh</a>! At CAM Raleigh and Motorco! I'm playing sax (for the first real gig since, well, I graduated in 2010) on Louis Andriessen's <i>Worker's Union</i>, David Stock's <i>Keep the Change</i>, and, in the second show, the premiere of Duke composer David Kirkland Garner's <i>the machine without horses</i>. The rest of the crew will also provide Judd Greenstein's <i>Be There</i>, Scott Lindroth's <i>Bell Plates</i>, and John Supko's <i>Into the Night</i>. Details for both shows <a href="http://newmusicraleigh.org/schedule/">here</a>.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
3. <a href="http://www.theriteofspringat100.org/coming_soon/">This is going to be awesome</a>, trust me. Get ready.</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<b>And moving on:</b></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
My two big projects this semester brought me to opposite ends of the American musical spectrum: sacred music circa 1790-1844, and secular music circa 1950-1963. I've never really thought of myself as an "Americanist," but that's certainly the direction I'm headed in. One came out of an awesome seminar on Copland: an examination of the context of, and circumstances behind, the premiere of his <i>Connotations</i> at the opening of Philharmonic Hall, and Lincoln Center, in '61. Let's take a listen:</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<b> </b></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<b> </b></div>
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Tgcsor_CzKI" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Not exactly <i>Appalachian Spring</i>, right? So why be so audacious to an audience which included Jackie Kennedy, the Secretary of State, the UN Secretary General, Henry Cowell, Isaac Stern, and a slew of Vanderbilts and Rockefellers? I wish I had some footage from the CBS live broadcast (it's housed at the Paley Center), where you get to see Jackie chatting up Bernstein and Copland at intermission. It's a fascinating historical moment, and I was surprised to see no one had written a dissertation about it already.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Anyway, the case I made in the paper basically boiled down to: Copland expressed much concern about orchestral programming in several lectures/essays in the 1950s, and writing a deliberately hostile, serial piece for a New York Philharmonic gala audience was an attempt to advocate for the programming of more difficult music. Basically, he was doing what I whine about all the time on this blog, but in musical form. Here's what he said about NY Phil programming in 1956:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
font-size:10.0pt;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:JA;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">"Under
such conditions we composers are strongly tempted to ask: What are you doing to
our audiences? Frankly, we have very
little confidence when we bring our pieces before such audiences. Often we sense that the audience that listens
to us is not the right audience for our music.
Why? Because they have not been
musically nurtured and fed properly, with a resultant vitamin lack of musical
understanding."</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">What's the solution?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-font-charset:78;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-unhide:no;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
mso-default-props:yes;
font-size:10.0pt;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
mso-fareast-font-family:"MS 明朝";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-fareast-language:JA;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
</style><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">"Every
concert should deliberately have an element challenging to an audience, so as
to counteract conventional attitudes in music response."</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">So that's what <i>Connotations </i>is about -- Copland was dismayed by major American orchestras abandoning younger composers, and by younger composers thus abandoning the orchestra (and the broader public). In staking out a claim for a style of music popular among his contemporaries and younger colleagues -- serialism was, in many different forms, omnipresent in the late '50s/early '60s -- Copland hoped to incite change. Unfortunately, it didn't really work (the change, that is; I think the piece itself is pretty great).</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>And, paper no. 2: </b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">This one's a bit harder to explain. I initially launched an independent study on <i>The Sacred Harp</i>, a tunebook I've written about here in the past, and in an attempt to find a way "in" to a book which contains over five hundred pieces of music, I decided to focus on two oddities. Pleyel's Hymn (First) and Pleyel's Hymn (Second) are the only two tunes in the <i>Sacred Harp</i> with the same name; the only two which have a composer's name in their title; the only tunes by Ignce Pleyel, a pupil of Haydn who was actually the most popular European composer in America in the late 18th century; and the only instance of more than 1 tune by a non-American composer in the Sacred Harp, a notoriously American musical tradition.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">And that's not all! I ended up tracing the origins of both Pleyel's Hymns -- they were transformed in Britain from instrumental works into hymn melodies in the 1790s (by composers who were <i>not</i> Pleyel), made their way over to America in the first decade of the 1800s, and slowly weavedthrough traditional hymnals before arriving in the shape-note tradition in editions of <i>The Easy Instructor</i> in the 1810s. They go through many of the major shape-note tunebooks before finally arriving in the first edition of <i>The Sacred Harp </i>together in 1844. It's a complicated, twisted history, which I'm not going to get into here. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The gist of the paper has to do with American conceptions of European psalmody, and how Pleyel's hymns intersect with a big shift in American sacred music in the early 19th century -- the "Ancient Music" movement -- where reformers attempted to eradicate the nativist musical tradition derived from Billings and replace it with simpler (perhaps "blander"), classic European hymns. Pleyel became a kind of weapon in this reform movement. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Here's Pleyel's Hymn (originally Pleyel's First; there's some confusion in the recent <i>Sacred Harp</i> revision) </span></div>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EfVgseNxfIY" width="560"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
And Pleyel's Second (here incorrectly called the First) <br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/U0HbvMY-gi8" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Fairly simple tunes, and very conventional harmonic writing, compared to other <i>Sacred Harp </i>fare:</div>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/STtz7ZhEC6U" width="400"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">What's really interesting is that it then hung on into <i>The Sacred Harp</i>, which we usually think of as the quintessential Southern, American tunebook. That both tunes endured through numerous revisions of <i>The Sacred Harp</i>, and are still in the latest 1991 edition, confound some of our notions about the American exceptionalism of the shape-note tradition. It's a really complicated story, and one that I'll delve into more in a Master's Thesis next year.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Anyway:</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Following a pretty busy school year, I've actually got a pretty busy summer. At the end of May, I'm off to Vienna for two weeks for the Arnold Schoenberg Center's Summer Academy, with lectures, archival work, concerts, and hopefully hanging with composer-in-residence Helmut Lachenmann. I'll be giving a paper there (which I'll be writing in the coming weeks) on Schoenberg's band Variations. Many thanks to UNC's music department and graduate school for assisting with funding.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Then we're off to Washington D.C. for eight weeks. I am very fortunate and grateful to have received the music department's Pruett Fellowship, which allows for two months of research and work at the Library of Congress. I'll be splitting my time between working for the library's special collections and doing my own research -- continuing both the Copland and Pleyel projects. I'm looking forward to checking out the D.C. musical scene for the first time, and meeting up with all <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/classical-beat">those</a> <a href="http://dmvclassical.wordpress.com/">cool</a> <a href="http://ionarts.blogspot.com/">bloggers</a>.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Hopefully this will lead to more frequent blogging -- we shall see.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b> </b> </span></div>Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-6747912783744591812012-04-15T12:09:00.012-04:002012-04-26T11:30:51.355-04:00What is it, Lassie? Did The Arts fall down a well?<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: red;">As you all probably know, the contest has ended -- thanks so much for voting!</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><strike><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="color: red; font-weight: bold;">*This is the <span style="font-style: italic;">final</span> entry in the Spring for Music Blogging Fest. If you like what you see, <a href="http://springformusic.com/2012-great-blogger-challenge/">please vote here</a>.*</span></span></strike><br />"Save the arts? Really? Why do so many people think the arts need saving?</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Do we need to save the arts, and if so, what does 'saving' them mean?"</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">There are three questions here, so let’s address them one by one.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Question No. 1: Why do so many people think the arts need saving?</span><br />
<br />
The “Arts-In-Danger” shtick is a catch-all for a whole slew of problems, from the defunding of education programs to the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia Orchestra to the <a href="http://www.soundsandfury.com/soundsandfury/2012/03/civilization-as-we-know-it-is-fast-coming-to-an-end.html">dangers of pop culture</a> to the avant-garde’s alienation of the broader public. I’m going to speak mostly about classical music here, because <span style="font-weight: bold;">1)</span> it’s what I know and <span style="font-weight: bold;">2)</span> it’s what people are often talking about when they’re having these discussions.<br />
<br />
Those who preach The Danger seriously fall into two camps: the sky-is-falling folks like Norman Lebrecht, whose style of apocalyptic tabloid journalism works perfectly with the idea that classical music dies a bit more every week; and people like Greg Sandow, whose attempts to make classical music “relevant” end up taking an extremely narrow view of what art can be in order to find ways in which it can be fixed.<br />
<br />
Both branches of this unholy non-alliance miss the point. One ossifies the art form into a kernel of itself, romanticizing a small period of music to encompass the whole thing (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-Death-Classical-Music/dp/1400096588">the death of a subsection of the recording industry = the death of classical music</a>) and wrapping it up in shouting, Daily Mail-style declinist oratory. The other indicts an entire history and culture of listening because it doesn’t conform to today’s pop culture, blaming classical music itself for its problems. (<a href="http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2011/01/culture_change_2_-_hideseek.html">Like when he claims that the classical music’s irrelevance originated in the 18th century</a>, even though it was perhaps the <span style="font-style: italic;">most relevant</span> form of art in the 19th.)<br />
<br />
But is anything actually dying? When we talk about saving, we’re usually talking about one specific thing: the institutions. Carnegie Hall, Deutsche Grammophon, your local orchestra and opera house, if you still have one. The Detroit Symphony clawed its way out of oblivion last year; Opera Boston is <a href="http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-15/arts/30627936_1_development-director-metropolitan-opera-board-president">over</a>. But if the Louisville Symphony dies, art doesn’t die, right?<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Question No. 2: Do we need to save the arts…</span><br />
<br />
So, let’s talk about this <span style="font-style: italic;">need</span> for saving. The arts aren’t about to fall down a well, or get hunted to extinction by Japanese fishermen, or end up in any other situation in which they might require saving. The phrase itself is disingenuous: it’s talking about one specific kind of art in one specific kind of place. A single example never represents the whole – that Joshua Bell subway debacle, to which I refuse to link, only proved that people sometimes need to get to work.<br />
<br />
Preservation isn’t exactly a streak that runs deep in our history. Sometimes we preserve; sometimes we don’t. Today, we are shocked to find that tens of civilizations layered their own buildings right on top of Roman ruins. How could you destroy such a monumental chapter in world history to build your houses? But they did. (Take a class on pre-1700 music and you’ll find out just how many manuscripts of masterpieces were copied over with accounting records.) And sometimes, in excavating straight to the Roman “originals,” we risk destroying other parts of our past, digging for one “authentic” truth while ignoring the others. (Try digging through <a href="http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/travel/14explorer.html?pagewanted=all">this craziness</a>.)<br />
<br />
Mozart and Haydn weren’t classical until long after their deaths. Let’s not forget what Tinctoris said: “There is no composition written over forty years ago which is thought by the learned as worthy of performance.” The musical repertory is a nineteenth-century invention, codified in the twentieth. Go back to the American classical scene in the 1800s, and you’ll find a listening culture that resembles the circus more than it does the symphony – as Daniel Cavicchi writes <a href="http://departments.risd.edu/hpss/Cavicchi.html">in a new study</a>, “Leopold de Meyer played fantasies for the left hand while he ate vanilla ice-cream with his right; Wehli played a military piece; when he wished to imitate the cannons, he sat down on the keys in the lowest bass.”<br />
<br />
“Saving” can be stultifying, even dangerous. We can end up freezing things in time instead of allowing them to grow. Certainly this happened with the orchestral tradition. Constructing a canon made sense: it justified the orchestra’s existence as a keeper and reviver of historical treasures, guaranteeing its importance.<br />
<br />
Now, though, it traps us. In “classicizing” a large swath of our musical heritage, we cut it off from today’s present and the past’s present, cauterizing it from interacting with important components in our society – the very components it interacted with before it became “classical.” Music that was once political, was once humorous, was once dangerous, is now only contemplated; all secular music, no matter how bawdy or irreverent, becomes sacred. A friend of mine was recently shushed for laughing during a Haydn symphony; evidently, the lady next to him felt a sense of superiority about what she was listening to without even realizing that it was a joke.<br />
<br />
We could try to “save” some things, not let them “die out.” That might also mean not letting them change, not letting them grow, not letting them morph into more effective, more purposeful, more <span style="font-style: italic;">useful</span>. The separation of the composer and performer was an historical aberration, one <a href="http://boniver.org/">we</a> <a href="http://www.meredithmonk.org/">are</a> <a href="http://www.ziporyn.com/">correcting</a> <a href="http://www.paulineoliveros.us/">today</a>. Blow up the opera houses, in the words of '60s-era Boulez, and the ones that replace them might be better suited to the 21st century.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">But; and this is a very big BUT:</span> death isn’t always a good thing. The circle of life isn’t the best metaphor for a commerce-driven cultural market, <a href="http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/02/20/music-exec-slams-grammys-for-snubbing-justin-bieber-eminem/">where corporate tycoons can complain </a>that the Grammys are out of touch because the competitor that sold the most albums didn’t take home the prize. Blow up the opera houses, and there is a very good chance that we won't build new ones.<br />
<br />
Pure cultural Darwinism—orchestras as for-profit corporations, competing for funds—could give us more cost-efficient, driven, relevance-minded institutions. It might also give us no orchestras at all, if they cannot afford to employ musicians for forty-week seasons and pay for large concert halls. I’m all in favor of a future model of non-classical, touring chamber ensembles that provide a variety of music in a variety of concert settings. But then how will we hear our Mahler? There is about ninety years of music—stretching from Beethoven’s Ninth to Schoenberg’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Gurre-Lieder</span>—which demands the orchestra that we have constructed for it today (a similar situation exists for 19th century opera; it’s not easy to do without a big house). Yes, a pick-up group can make its way through Beethoven 9, but I’m not sure if I’d want to hear a “Resurrection” Symphony done by freelancers.<br />
<br />
And that ninety-year span is a period that we cannot forsake. If we lose Mahler, we endanger erasing a vital part of our cultural memory, a sublime piece of <span style="font-style: italic;">fin de siècle</span> artistic truth. This music is like the Passions, or the story of Passover: we need to tell these stories, relive these stories. Yes, those stories have changed remarkably over the years; but listen to Mengelberg and then listen to Boulez, and you'll realize that Mahler has too. Every couple years, wherever you may live, there should be an opportunity for you to hear this:<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/z_w5Mholo4M" width="400"></iframe><br />
<br />
Or this:<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9jb-W7vtvBo" width="400"></iframe><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Question No. 3: …what does "saving" them mean?"</span><br />
<br />
This is the really tough one, and the one that I had to hash out in a long discussion with @haliefrancesca. We want to save the arts; but we don’t want to be elitist, and the ones that need “saving” are the ones which are usually acquired tastes. We want to preserve our great cultural institutions; but we don’t want to artificially respirate things many people don’t like or care about. If the public doesn’t care about classical music, why should we agonize over saving it? And how should we save it without forcing it on people, or re-packaging it as something it’s not?<br />
<br />
The answer – or at least my/haliefrancesca’s answer – is the too-obvious one: education. We need better arts education <span style="font-style: italic;">so badly</span>. I’m not even talking about making sure every kid knows how to read music or can name <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1280&bih=660&tbm=isch&tbnid=aoFbX9khkEh5tM:&imgrefurl=http://www.tmnt.jasonwasser.com/raph.html&docid=TR9CtcS1oo5okM&imgurl=http://www.tmnt.jasonwasser.com/images/raphael.jpeg&w=300&h=450&ei=CvWKT9CXJ5GQ8wTb2OzEDg&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=189&sig=111493464368473079107&page=1&tbnh=141&tbnw=93&start=0&ndsp=22&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0,i:88&tx=41&ty=39">four</a> <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1280&bih=660&tbm=isch&tbnid=AkILpzsZpfiWBM:&imgrefurl=http://geek-news.mtv.com/2011/03/29/jason-biggs-to-be-leonardo-in-new-tmnt-cartoon/&docid=OpsgEwCLOKQjpM&imgurl=http://geek-news.mtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-leonardo.jpg&w=300&h=450&ei=VfWKT8K6Gouk8AT95ZXuCQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=255&sig=111493464368473079107&page=1&tbnh=142&tbnw=93&start=0&ndsp=22&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0,i:86&tx=56&ty=84">great</a> <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1280&bih=660&tbm=isch&tbnid=i-9D5tA9W6JClM:&imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/terrible2z/3416389594/&docid=jmXF0VcvIGM9-M&imgurl=http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3564/3416389594_91283d54e1.jpg&w=267&h=400&ei=LfWKT6usMoG68AT3xe31CQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=322&sig=111493464368473079107&page=1&tbnh=138&tbnw=92&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:73&tx=37&ty=79">Renaissance</a> <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1280&bih=660&tbm=isch&tbnid=Tp9CRx6mQARTeM:&imgrefurl=http://dragonsquill.blogspot.com/2011_08_01_archive.html&docid=AYnodRV4yu83aM&imgurl=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcnT6YTsMt_G0MzjuATIXWVD4Ux-7YEL17mX2DRakDkQWzua2U7UPI3f5Eo0G14QjodMoohlFmbelgQYFeGlQn-k_CD_t0DzVbCcLQZl2joMbQmBA0e2VqgUcTSGbr8eURKm9w9bkDqaoI/s1600/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles--donatello.jpg&w=300&h=450&ei=QfWKT4vvOoGk8QTZ4-zrCQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=277&sig=111493464368473079107&page=1&tbnh=145&tbnw=97&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:70&tx=45&ty=64">painters</a>. (Though: a couple months ago I heard a college student--at <span style="font-style: italic;">a good college</span>--ask if it was Picasso or Shakespeare who painted the Mona Lisa.) I’m talking about fostering a sense of artistic experience, giving people hands-on connections to all of music history, local and global – Bach and <span style="font-style: italic;">pipa</span> and Josquin and Ives and Coltrane and Björk and shape-notes. Actually, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/30/bjork-tour-biophilia">Björk’s model</a> is a great one: hands-on musical education via iPads and composing, cutting to the heart of the creative experience instead of teaching note-reading and Minuet in G.<br />
<br />
And we need to continue to foster that education—without moralizing or dumbing down (that’s the tricky part)—until kids reach the age of independent cultural consumption (it’s earlier every year). We need to train our country to be educated consumers of culture, just how we need to train our country to be educated consumers of food or gasoline.<br />
<br />
That is not about forcing them towards a classical path: we need to show everyone all the options, so that when it comes time to make that decision, and find that passion, they make it knowing what choices are available. Democracy is great; we should all be able to vote. But it would be even better if everyone knew why he or she was voting, and what the implications were. Same goes for the arts. If everyone understands what’s going on in all facets of the arts, then we won’t need to artificially revive symphony orchestras or museums – people will go to them, I guarantee it. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kaiser/arts-funding_b_1338656.html"> This</a> looks like a good move; El Sistema is also a great idea.<br />
<br />
Today, the problem isn’t that nobody cares about classical music. It’s that many people aren’t even given the choice to care about classical music. So let’s tell them all about it, and find out what they think.<br />
<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Edit: People have requested the return of Coco and Igor. As a strict populist, I can only satisfy their demands.</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqeqTHQ5apFvJQhqpHrIk-8H6Qj_oWkwps2q8XcaDSpirL2cUPokcGNHSmSTBY6hod5MHcJtAUdHKWmb2kD62nVLBrK6ybCt5fMFsvCBOvizOPGfx7NS91p-S0j4dS8OlqYHpqkoly8GR9/s1600/IMG_1664.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5731706974903725138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqeqTHQ5apFvJQhqpHrIk-8H6Qj_oWkwps2q8XcaDSpirL2cUPokcGNHSmSTBY6hod5MHcJtAUdHKWmb2kD62nVLBrK6ybCt5fMFsvCBOvizOPGfx7NS91p-S0j4dS8OlqYHpqkoly8GR9/s400/IMG_1664.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 300px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-41404647876439636292012-04-08T10:15:00.009-04:002012-04-09T19:13:12.887-04:00art for all, but none for art<span style="font-weight: bold;">*This is an entry in the semifinals of the Spring for Music Arts Blogger Face-Off. I strongly encourage <a href="http://springformusic.com/2012-great-blogger-challenge/">you to follow this link</a> and vote for Seated Ovation on the right. Thanks!*<br /><br />Many countries have ministries of culture. Does America need a Secretary</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> of Culture or Secretary of the Arts? Why or why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;">In theory: absolutely.</span><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQv-ln8aFSGDQ8F5CXU-8FjJ5xCC1ZZMtqJapqcF2WWUaYU6WpnCNenLEAL4_eaw-fuwg4DPVwR7bSY0YzOzVhC0UHnDPUbmxX_46JnQsE-y33x_TQvBMwaggEtphq5CscOu45ClaDQ5ZP/s1600/IMG_2300.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQv-ln8aFSGDQ8F5CXU-8FjJ5xCC1ZZMtqJapqcF2WWUaYU6WpnCNenLEAL4_eaw-fuwg4DPVwR7bSY0YzOzVhC0UHnDPUbmxX_46JnQsE-y33x_TQvBMwaggEtphq5CscOu45ClaDQ5ZP/s400/IMG_2300.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5729043337033434850" border="0" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Igor volunteers for the position.</span><br /></div><br />I can’t think of anything better, and less controversial, than appointing a Secretary of the Arts.<br /><br />Imagine a world where the Bang on a Can All-Stars play every year at the White House; where Richard Serra gives lectures at the House of Representatives; where the Wooster Group stages a reenactment of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the steps of the Capitol Building every July 4th.<br /><br />Appointing a Cabinet-level position for the arts would demonstrate an astounding level of government commitment. Certainly its creation would mean that it had to be both effective and ambitious in its early years, funding projects across the cultural spectrum with a vast budget, adding a Composer Laureate, Artist Laureate, and Director Laureate to our measly Poet Laureate. Orchestras would have the financial backbone to experiment to a degree previously unprecedented; opera houses across the country could integrate new works into their repertory.<br /><br />In a decade, we would be Europe, a cultural paradise, with <span style="font-style: italic;">Regietheater</span> and new music festivals in every city. I witnessed a subsidized culture last year in Germany, and it is an experience not to be forgotten. The State Opera of Cologne mounted the premiere of Stockhausen’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Sonntag</span>, constructing two theaters within a massive convention center. <a href="http://www.smb.museum/smb/home/index.php?lang=en">Eighteen state museums in Berlin alone</a> covered all of the arts, over and over – an entire, <a href="http://www.smb.museum/smb/sammlungen/details.php?objID=21&n=13&r=3">gigantic museum devoted to post-war art alone</a>. A <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/03/maerzmusik-part-one.html">new</a>-<a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/03/maerzmusik-part-two.html">music</a> <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/04/maerzmusik-part-three.html">festival</a> spread fifty pieces over twenty-five well-attended events, only ten of which were written before 2000 (11 world premieres, 10 German premieres, 8 festival commissions) One time I saw the President at <span style="font-style: italic;">Fidelio</span>; the Prime Minister trekked out to the middle of nowhere for the opening of <a href="http://www.morgenpost.de/printarchiv/kultur/article1410698/Kunst-Anselm-Kiefers-Kuehe-in-der-Villa-Schoeningen.html">an Anselm Kiefer exhibit of cows</a>. When the Queen of the Netherlands came to town, her entourage <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/05/pellet-reviews.html">included the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra</a>.<br /><br />I’m not one of those people who think Europe is the be-all-and-end-all, and a lot of their cultural presence has little or nothing to do with state support. Britain is in a quagmire with regards to government arts funding, and budgets are being cut all over the continent. But an American Arts Czar (Czart?) would be awesome. Really, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_States">look at all those departments</a>. Surely we’ve got room for some arts.<br /><br />And surely we need a Secretary. To have someone with the clout of a Cabinet minister fighting for the NEA, unveiling new initiatives with not only a massive budget but also the public eye, would do a great service to art. The symbolism of the position would send a strong message to American artists that the country cared about what they were doing.<br /><br />Certainly there was a time in our history when the government paid a bit more attention to the arts, and it wasn’t all that long ago. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2012/04/02/120402crmu_music_ross"> As Alex Ross recently noted</a>, Harry Truman, who spearheaded the initial idea for the construction of the Kennedy Center, brought scores with him when he attended classical performances. A big portion of the Cold War was about cultural prestige, and that included funding, propagandizing, and proselytizing for American art. It didn’t always happen stateside: we tended to focus on Europe, funding the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Congress for Cultural Freedom to promote anti-Soviet aesthetics. But the Lincoln Center complex itself is a testament to our government’s commitment to the arts in a culture war, a set of living monuments to a society that spent millions on classical music.<br /><br />But we are living a different kind of culture war today, and it’s not the kind that ends up with $142 million for Lincoln Center. So,<br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><br style="font-weight: bold;"></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >In practice:</span><br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/umDr0mPuyQc" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="400"></iframe><br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5_XVuDxYcF5Hsd02O7JmbWElku5Jnti5t6vyShMvAJLv_OQm2KavRXHrodhaKVWsTQ3FzgZ9TsCCRGlPA_ciJ4qKDJek4phg0OpVA7DjjEbJG13FgRPG7DwHYgTxA6AIti4Yv_5UagbfF/s1600/IMG_1650.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5_XVuDxYcF5Hsd02O7JmbWElku5Jnti5t6vyShMvAJLv_OQm2KavRXHrodhaKVWsTQ3FzgZ9TsCCRGlPA_ciJ4qKDJek4phg0OpVA7DjjEbJG13FgRPG7DwHYgTxA6AIti4Yv_5UagbfF/s400/IMG_1650.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5729038701324488610" border="0" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Coco says no.</span><br /></div><br />I can’t think of anything worse, and more controversial, than appointing a Secretary of Culture.<br /><br />It was just a year ago that a certain Study Committee attempted to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/conservative-replublicans_n_812415.html">defund the National Endowment for the Arts entirely</a>. Mitt Romney <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/in-iowa-mitt-romney-outlines-programs-he-would-cut-as-president/?ref=nationalendowmentforthearts">is campaigning</a> with the promise of cutting the NEA, along with public broadcasting and the NEH. The real battles between legislature and the NEA took place in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it’s still bundled together with NPR as an enemy of the American people.<br /><br />Any attempt to create a position at the level of Secretary of Arts/Culture would be a political debacle. Let’s say we somehow actually get the position approved (can you imagine the nightmare of congressional hearings?), and The Secretary drafts an agenda of goals: revitalizing the Kennedy Center; funding an exhibition of American multicultural art which would tour the country and the globe (remember when we used to have arts ambassadors?); appointing a composer laureate; pushing for better arts education in the schools. Pretty modest, right?<br /><br />Cultural warriors take to their radio shows:<br /><br />“Obama is trying to force-feed us liberal propaganda paintings.”<br /><br />“Walt Whitman was a socialist fascist.”<br /><br />“Liberals want to give $500 million of your tax money to mime troupes and artists who paint with their feces.”<br /><br />“Composer laureate Steve Reich: more like Third Reich.”<br /><br />“You know <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintings_by_Adolf_Hitler">who else was a painter</a>?”<br /><br />We couldn’t even get America’s <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/11/commons-white-house-invitation-the-gops-hysterical-rap.html">nicest rapper to <span style="font-style: italic;">read poetry</span></a> at the White House without stirring up crazy.<br /><br />The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t be having a productive national debate about what the arts mean in American culture – the problem is that we can’t have a productive national debate about anything right now, least of all something as complex as art. If it’s hard to argue for throwing money at universal health care, it’s going to be much, much harder to argue for throwing money at a 75-year-old man <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egwXKQDYcvc">who likes the marimba</a>. Take a look at <a href="http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/curtain-up/2011/sep/11/censoring-steve-reichs-911-vision/">this article</a>. It’s absolutely crazy, and it’s probably one of the more <span style="font-style: italic;">in-depth, thoughtful</span> responses to a controversial issue in the arts. Take a complicated subject like that to television, and you’re screwed. (Remember <a href="http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/glenn-beck-art-critic">Glenn Beck, art critic</a>?)<br /><br />Let’s say, hypothetically, the Czart manages to convince the country that Steve Reich, Richard Serra, and Peter Sellars aren’t political liabilities. Then you’ll still have to reckon with the changes of elitism—why is my tax money going to something that most Americans can’t even understand?<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wvr1T1sFvEg#t=0m31s" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="400"></iframe><br /><br />There aren’t too many President Bartlets hanging around Washington these days. And there are many, many Governor Ritchies.<br /><br />It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the past, either – that came with its own set of complications. The construction of Lincoln Center, our cultural mecca, bulldozed seventeen blocks of ethnic neighborhoods and drove 7,000 families out of tenement housing.<br /><br />And I don’t mean to suggest that just because we might lose a battle, we shouldn’t fight it. If we conceded to conservative ideas about what to spend money on, there wouldn’t be an NEA, Planned Parenthood, or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUA2rDVrmNg">oops I forgot the third one</a>. In theory, we shouldn’t have to fight for the arts – they seem like the least controversial thing in the world. But the reality of today’s toxic political climate is that those things that seem beyond controversy – birth control, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-horansky/unesco-funding_b_1354926.html">UNESCO</a> -- are the ones that we have to spend much too much time fighting for.<br /><br />Right now, an Arts Secretary would be useless, and thus not necessary. Maybe we would end up with someone with a lot of political clout, but I’m guessing as soon as the entire Fox News crew came running after our Czart, he/she wouldn’t stand a chance (<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/10/glenn-beck-strikes-again_n_281986.html">remember this</a>?). Secretary after Secretary would be forced to resign under pressure from various non-existent “scandals.” The attention given to artists wouldn’t be the kind they wanted – suddenly people who had been successful for decades would find themselves “controversial” in the eyes of America.<br /><br />There are other ways for the government to fund the arts. But, at least right now, a position on the public scale of a Secretary would be a waste of time. I would love to see the Obamas take on the arts a bit more than they have – things looked promising with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzSmS5JRYdw">Karaoke Simple Gifts Inauguration</a>, and they’ve hosted some cultural events, but I want a bit more ambition (they’re trying to <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EEDD103CF936A25751C0A9649D8B63&ref=nationalendowmentforthearts">raise the NEA budget</a>, but not by very much).<br /><br />Oddly enough, the best shot at more governmental support for music might be…*dun dun dun* President Newt.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mlWAptKCsBg" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="400"></iframe><br /><br />Believe it or not, but Callista Gingrich is a pianist, French horn player* and singer—she majored in music at Luther College in Iowa—and as first lady, would make music education a top priority. So there you have it: vote Newt, and we’ll get not only a colony on the moon, but Space Arts Ambassadors to spread the Maple Leaf Rag around the galaxy.<br /><br /><br style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">In conclusion: Yes, we need one. It’s a battle we should fight. But for now, let’s see if we can fix the other parts of our government before adding new ones, and quietly double the budget of the NEA every year.</span><br style="font-weight: bold;"><br style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">And, rub my belly.</span><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPEIzqqa2dzSyzXiFtxLhz_L9GZzIbtrGa_-_OD30ZcQuYJrHMBwIxtNJNAO8Kc0ZM58sm62BcUnyG32AcnE6HDBhom-IS5LKsvmtXeMpT6jj8hMttHtDne_b5U8eAPE2dXEoBNbc6e3f9/s1600/IMG_1659.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPEIzqqa2dzSyzXiFtxLhz_L9GZzIbtrGa_-_OD30ZcQuYJrHMBwIxtNJNAO8Kc0ZM58sm62BcUnyG32AcnE6HDBhom-IS5LKsvmtXeMpT6jj8hMttHtDne_b5U8eAPE2dXEoBNbc6e3f9/s400/IMG_1659.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5729039241714231426" border="0" /></a><br style="font-weight: bold;"><br />*Someone please watch that video and explain to me <span style="font-style: italic;">where</span> she gets that syllable accent on French horn, I have never heard that before.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-82013884632808014362012-04-01T11:02:00.011-04:002012-04-04T11:23:12.555-04:00KITTEHS SAY DAT MUSIC SPEAKZ 2 US<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">**This is an entry in the Spring for Music Great Arts Blogger Challenge. If you like what you read, <a href="http://springformusic.com/2012-great-blogger-challenge/">please vote for me here.</a>**</span></span><br /><br />We live in an aggressively visual age; images dominate the popular</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> culture. But which art form has the most to say about contemporary</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> culture, and why?</span><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx6Gynox95Dtxc7OuJVP9jVvkk5T9Ss_6XlXzvLGVmK3bl6826ZcLjPluRqC6PjkEPsR2nYv7sUHnMnSpl6FmM3-4GWLIecDv7tlJRvBx8TP_XbJHOWXoLALhjALANamcQc8q63Xl66FNf/s1600/IMG_2278.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx6Gynox95Dtxc7OuJVP9jVvkk5T9Ss_6XlXzvLGVmK3bl6826ZcLjPluRqC6PjkEPsR2nYv7sUHnMnSpl6FmM3-4GWLIecDv7tlJRvBx8TP_XbJHOWXoLALhjALANamcQc8q63Xl66FNf/s400/IMG_2278.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5726456169841107330" border="0" /></a>Coco says music.*<br /><br />We may live in a visual age – more appropriately, we probably live in a digital age – but music is still the most consumed art form (besides the <span style="font-style: italic;">Hunger Games</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Twilight</span>, of course). Yes, this includes Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Lost in the Trees, and the Arcade Fire, all of which speak to contemporary attitudes and resonate with today’s daily life. But I’d like to hone in on a subset of a subset – the living composer, who writes works that address, critique, and engage with modern living.<br /><br />Speaking about contemporary society can take on many forms. Artists can hold forth on their political beliefs; they can comment more obliquely on what place art has in today’s society; they can use art to give a history lesson, showing us how we got to where we are today; or they can carve out a space of tranquility, commenting on the relentlessness of daily life by creating a respite from it.<br /><br />In the spirit of edification, let’s listen to some music and talk a bit about what perspectives it can offer.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">First up: </span>music as politics. Agit-prop is an effective political tool, and music has had an important role to play as political commentary – from Marc Blitzstein’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Cradle Will Rock </span>to Britten's <span style="font-style: italic;">War Requiem</span>. Ted Hearne’s 2007 <span style="font-style: italic;">Katrina Ballads</span> acts as both poignant memorial and biting political scrutiny. Each movement of the chamber work sets the words of different figures involved in the disastrous hurricane, from survivors to presidents. In some moments, it gives voice to the victims, casting eye-witness accounts in eerie chiaroscuro -- click ahead to Hardy Jackson, who describes in agonizing detail the loss of his wife:<br /><br /><iframe style="position: relative; display: block; width: 400px; height: 100px;" src="http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=3445780043/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB/" allowtransparency="true" width="400" frameborder="0" height="100">&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://katrinaballads.bandcamp.com/album/katrina-ballads"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Katrina Ballads by Ted Hearne&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;</iframe><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In others, the work takes on a deliberate political edge. Here, Hearne viciously spins Bush’s famous “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” into a hiccuping, furious mantra:<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/L_8IeYmFbvA" allowfullscreen="" width="400" frameborder="0" height="315"></iframe><br /><br />This is a work that captures the horror at the senseless destruction of a city, but also the rage at governmental incompetence in saving lives. Plenty of music mourns the dead, but only rarely does a piece engage with the anger of those left behind, or cast blame on those responsible.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Example No. 2:</span> art as release, but also reminder. Music can often act as a kind of narcotic, allowing escape from the burden of real life. John Luther Adams’ sonic landscapes allow one to bliss out for hours at a time, but they aren’t merely escapist: in conveying the vast expanses of Alaska and the brutally slow power of nature, Adams reminds the listener that there are spaces in the world that are fading.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ddFx0i3BdeM" allowfullscreen="" width="420" frameborder="0" height="315"></iframe><br /><br /><br />Adams’ <span style="font-style: italic;">In the White Silence</span>, like many of his works, builds massive arcs of sound sustained over Wagnerian lengths. The surface is gorgeous, with hushed, Feldman-esque strings, pealing bells, and plinking harp; underneath, complex mathematical structures lurk, driving the narrative.<br /><br />Adams once wrote: “Much of Alaska is still filled with silence, and one of the most persuasive arguments for the preservation of the original landscape here may be its spiritual value as a great reservoir of silence.” In works like this, Adams replicates that great reservoir. If climate change and drilling eradicate the Alaskan stillness, his music may be the only thing we have left – a sonic artifact from a disappearing land.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A third thing </span>: Art as history. All artists are obsessed with history in some way, regardless of how heavily they feel the burden of their forefathers weighing down. Some musicians takes on this historical bent head-on, making works which re-create the art of the past in a way that speaks to the present. Revisionist opera directors do this all the time, providing a contemporary note to <span style="font-style: italic;">Don Giovanni</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Parsifal</span>. Composers do it as well, arranging Renaissance madrigals or 18th-century string quartets for new forces, treating the past as a playground.<br /><br />Reinbert de Leeuw’s <span class="st"><span style="font-style: italic;">Im </span><em>wunderschönen Monat Mai</em> </span> is one of these. Leeuw is better known as a conductor (run, do not walk, to the store to pick up his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Olivier-Messiaen/dp/B0014GIZCY/ref=sr_1_3?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1333295357&sr=1-3">Messiaen</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Andriessen-De-Staat/dp/B000005J0K">Andriessen</a> recordings), but this re-imagining of Schubert and Schumann <span style="font-style: italic;">lieder</span> is a masterpiece. Leeuw conflates two of the greatest song cycles of the 19th century – <span style="font-style: italic;">Dichterliebe</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Winterreise</span> – and mixes in other classics like the <span class="st"><em>Erlkönig</em></span>. Composing for actress Barbara Sukowa and the Schoenberg Ensemble, he radically re-writes the past, transforming the 19th century into the early 20th: Romantic art song filtered through the snarl of Brechtian cabaret. Here’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Gretchen am Spinnrade</span>:<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gxZgaSQhMPI#t=2m58s" allowfullscreen="" width="400" frameborder="0" height="315"></iframe><br /><br />I see Leeuw’s piece as one of a vast number of post-1945 works which reckon with the German canon – attempting to grab a chunk of incredible music and liberate (or maybe redeem?) it from what happened to to the whole of Germanic art after 1933. In drawing a bridge between the worlds of Schubert and Kurt Weill, Leeuw re-conceives of the non-political Romantics as participating in the same kind of liberal project of the Weimar Republic as the <span style="font-style: italic;">Threepenny Opera</span>. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what specifically that tells us about contemporary culture – German or American – but it speaks powerfully. I couldn’t help but include it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">And finally: </span>Music as an alternate perspective. This is hugely important. In the grand narrative of art, certain stories are told again and again: the myth of Orpheus, the lechery of Don Juan, the return of Odysseus. And, though they are re-conceived in different eras and for different purposes, the point of view is almost always the same: the male. We have our central male protagonists, and their marginalized wives, girlfriends, mistresses. That's not to say that any of that art is inherently bad – but there is certainly room for seeing the classic stories from a different viewpoint.<br /><br />And that’s where Sarah Kirkland Snider’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Penelope</span> comes in. Originally a monodrama by Ellen McLaughlin (it's <a href="http://www.playmakersrep.org/penelope">coming to Chapel Hill soon</a>!), <span style="font-style: italic;">Penelope</span> was transformed into a song cycle by Snider. It tells the story of the wife of a damaged, amnesiac veteran who returns home; to help him remember, she reads to him from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Odyssey</span>, the ultimate story of homecoming.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DQQbGaJs1IM" allowfullscreen="" width="400" frameborder="0" height="315"></iframe><br /><br />Conceiving of a Homeric classic from the female perspective has its own lineage – Christa Wolf’s incredible <span style="font-style: italic;">Cassandra</span> tells the tale of the Trojan War through the eyes of its prophet – and <span style="font-style: italic;">Penelope</span> is a truly contemporary retelling. We are situated in an abstract but very real space, one in which the Island of Calypso and the Iraq War coexist. “The story, his story,” McLaughlin’s lyrics read, and Shara Worden breathlessly intones. But the work's title is Penelope, not Odysseus: it is her story. These issues are all too relevant – <a href="http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/the-woman-composer-is-dead/">a huge debate is currently taking place on NewMusicBox</a> about the role of the female composer (to which Snider had one of the best things to contribute). Looking to the national scale, the effects of a male-dominated political discourse are obvious, and inconceivably dangerous.<br /><br />Too often does great art (and, in particular, great classical music) gaze upon the female. Here, the female gazes back.**<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />*Yes, starting my post with one of our adorable cats is, in fact, a way of getting votes. I am shameless. And that is the score of one of Peter Lieberson's <span style="font-style: italic;">Rilke Songs. </span>Here's Igor with Reich's <span style="font-style: italic;">Music for Eighteen</span>.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrxDWsSCvvMA2Sosn5mLdsQnWpIrKf1xqrgO9cSjqKLQJAhKSh77f-G86Jiqoo85_DuT2Az2uN-dMYdbBrCfEIwnkx4rklcFxPCtEaqFVs_Jk_devwKrYLrrNBYMdOPj3bgOjV65jYoAHq/s1600/IMG_2279.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrxDWsSCvvMA2Sosn5mLdsQnWpIrKf1xqrgO9cSjqKLQJAhKSh77f-G86Jiqoo85_DuT2Az2uN-dMYdbBrCfEIwnkx4rklcFxPCtEaqFVs_Jk_devwKrYLrrNBYMdOPj3bgOjV65jYoAHq/s400/IMG_2279.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5726456925840412546" border="0" /></a><br /><br />**Please call me out if any of that sounded in any way misogynistic.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-14125918367902426772012-03-19T20:30:00.007-04:002012-03-26T23:24:53.692-04:00spring for music contest entry no. 1<span><a href="http://springformusic.com/2012-great-blogger-challenge/">Vote for me here! </a><br /><br />The internet is abuzz with protests regarding the Spring for Music blogger contest--to which this post is an entry. Given that I'm participating, I'm not exactly an impartial source, but I don't really see as much of a problem with the contest, and believe in the good intent of those who are putting it on.<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>If I had more time I'd explain why, but I figured I would put that time into trying to win $2500. So, without further ado:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;">New York has long been considered the cultural capital of America. Is it still? If not, where?</span><br /><br />So, at first I was going to say something along the lines of, “Yes, sort of,” and then talk about what the “yes,” meant and what the “sort of” meant. But then I spent a weekend at an academic conference and realized I can’t take on this question without gagging.<br /><br />Here’s the thing: a national capital makes sense. Even if it seems like most of our governing takes place on TV and Twitter (or doesn’t take place at all) we do need a physical place for all our favorite representatives to sit down and hash out our favorite new amendments and things.<br /><br />But there is no place like that—nor should there be one—for the arts, or for culture. (I’m just going to go ahead and talk about culture as being the arts, since I’m not a foodie, and I know there’s other kinds of culture but those are the only ones I remember right now.) Where do all of our arts sit down in a big domed building and hash out our arts amendments? It would be kind of interesting to see that big domed building, but I don’t think we have one right now.<br /><br />The reality: New York is, pound for pound, a Mechagodzilla of great music, dance, visual art, performance art, and more. The stuff is concentrated more densely per square mile than anywhere else in America. But a cultural capital is a concept we do not need, and it’s one that forces us to focus on a single city as representative of the most pluralistic, heterogeneous, and other-synonyms-for-diverse country in the world. I can’t think of a concept more un-democratic.<br /><br />But let’s assume, for a minute, that there might be such a thing as a cultural capital. Should it be New York? Maybe, but not for the reasons you might think.<br /><br />New York still holds the big guns, whether that's your world-class symphony orchestras, ballet companies, or modern art museums. It also has the small guns -- the galleries, bohemian neighborhoods, and new-music composer collectives. But are these artistic institutions doing justice to New York's claim as the top dog?<br /><br />Take classical music. The fact is that the big guys of New York – the institutions that raise and spend the most money – have failed cultural life on a local and national scale in recent years. The musical organizations for which the city is best known are the ones that promote a deadening, mundane culture that entrenches stereotypes about classical music and its (supposedly) ever-aging audience.<br /><br />Let’s start with the New York Philharmonic. It may be one of the best sounding orchestras in the country, but the Phil’s artistic agenda is somewhat intriguing at best and monotonous at worst. In the 1950s and 1960s, Leonard Bernstein brought the Philharmonic to the center stage of the world, turning a European virtuoso ensemble into a proving ground for modern American composers, inspiring a generation of young listeners to tune into the American sound of Copland, Harris, and Ives. Fifty years ago, he led a season that marked the opening of Lincoln Center with <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00E10FD355C137A93C4A91782D85F468685F9">seven out of a total ten commissions for new pieces</a> by some of the world’s best living composers. Opening night of Philharmonic Hall (today Avery Fisher) signaled to the world the importance music both new and American, with the premiere of Aaron Copland's acerbic masterwork <span style="font-style: italic;">Connotations</span>. (Crazily enough, the Times <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A14F63D5515768FDDAF0A94DD405B838AF1D3">called that unadventurous</a>; imagine what Harold C. Schonberg would have thought of today’s programs.)<br /><br />Boulez continued in that spirit of experimentation, crafting cerebral concerts which may have driven off older subscribers but challenged what role an orchestra can play as a curator of new works. In 1971, Karlheinz Stockhausen debuted his <span style="font-style: italic;">Hymnen</span> with the orchestra, drawing a crowd described eloquently by the Times: "There was long hair, there were miniskirts and hot pants, there were bearded boys in sweaters and denims, there was even a suspicious odor that sort of resembled tobacco."<br /><br />The suspicious order today is more that of spoiled milk. Music director Alan Gilbert has made some attempt to inject the orchestra with the spirit of invention, after the sluggish tenures of the three M's (Mehta, Masur, Maazel). There have been some rousing successes, like the 2009 performance of Ligeti's <span style="font-style: italic;">Le Grand Macabre</span>, and in a few months, the orchestra will bring Stockhausen's grand, three-orchestra <span style="font-style: italic;">Gruppen</span> to the Park Avenue Armory. But the Phil’s programs are overwhelmingly more-of-the-same, with a Beethoven festival this year and a Bach festival the next. There's nothing wrong with embracing the classics, but it should be with the aim of invention or discovery.<br /><br />And where are the women? In the Phil's 2012-2013 season, only a single work by a woman will be performed. Imagine an all-male cast populating the Metropolitan Museum of Art or MOMA, and one can see that this artistic attitude does no justice to New York's claim to center of the musical world.<br /><br />Examine orchestras across the country and one can find a wealth of artistic conviction and a penchant for forward thinking. Gustavo Dudamel has built upon Esa-Pekka Salonen's strong legacy at the L.A. Philharmonic, steering an orchestra which plays more new music than any other in the United States, with programs cleverly juxtaposing old and new. Seattle has a new guiding light in Ludovic Morlot, who has in his first season already demonstrated a commitment to contemporary music. David Robertson does great stuff in St. Louis; ditto for Marin Alsop in Baltimore. Michael Tilson Thomas is the closest we have to a living Bernstein, and his San Francisco "Mavericks" series is currently exhibiting the best of our native musical minds. The Oregon Symphony shot to fame last year in an apparently stunning Carnegie Hall concert, under the auspices of Spring for Music, which mourned the horrors of war via Adams, Britten, Ives, and Vaughn-Williams. The New York Phil has a lot to answer for. (It should be noted that none of those orchestras have anything approaching an acceptable track record for programming female composers.)<br /><br />Things look even grimmer when we turn to New York's opera scene. The Metropolitan Opera, though never quite a hotbed of radical activity, has taken a turn for the worse in recent years. Peter Gelb promised a revolutionary regime, but the reality of the opera house is more boring then ever, though now with a commercial sheen. Many millions of dollars have been spent on a new Ring cycle that was artistically bankrupt on arrival. The best productions the house has seen so far, like Patrice Chereau's stunning <span style="font-style: italic;">From the House of the Dead</span>, have been imported from abroad, and evidently Gelb thinks of Europe as an out-of-town tryout zone.<br /><br />Meanwhile, opera companies around the country soldier onward, some with the artistic flaccidity of the Met, but others with a glimmer of ingenuity. The Virginia Opera and North Carolina Opera both presented recent Philip Glass scores this season; next season, the San Francisco Opera will premiere Mark Adamo's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Gospel of Mary Magdalene</span>; the Chicago Lyric Opera recently announced a commission by opera newbie Jimmy López.<br /><br />If one peers beyond the veneer of organizations like the Philharmonic and the Met, one might just stumble upon something approaching a cultural capital, if such a thing existed. The true artistic wisdom lies in organizations like the collective Bang on a Can, which fuels the new music landscape of the city, and whose free, annual marathon concert democratizes the avant-garde. Or the Ecstatic Music Festival, now in its second season, which brings together pop mavens with classical composers and performers, creating collaborations which resonate across genres. Or Le Poisson Rouge, a club whose evenings trade off between Arvo Pärt and Bill Frisell. These are the off-Broadway classical, or maybe off- off- Broadway, but any theater-goer will tell you that New York's cultural value lies less in <span style="font-style: italic;">Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark</span> than the Wooster Group.<br /><br />That experimental drive exists and persists in cities from Chicago down to Raleigh, and towns with orchestras that may not have a world-class budget but do display a world-class sense of innovation. Fantastic composers are sprinkled over the entire country, and new music ensembles crop up in the strangest places. American opera may find its future in the midwest. And let’s not even talk about the fact that plenty of America’s popular culture treasures – from film to country music – aren’t even based on the east coast. (My equating here of culture with opera and the symphony is a grand coup of elitism; my only excuse is that I write what I know.)<br /><br />I think we need to abandon the idea of cultural capitals entirely. We still need our great American composers, and though many lived and do live in New York, their paths can be international, multi-cultural, and hybrid (they always were: see Aaron Copland). And even if the Internet allows new kinds of communities to flourish, we still need places where artists can sit down and make art together—but those can be found <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_Shoals_Sound_Studio">in Alabama, too</a>.<br /><br />The strange and wonderful thing about American pluralism is that we can look beyond center and periphery, and see a landscape which thrives with culture, from classical music to hip-hop to shape-note singings---as long as we're willing to seek it out.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-88244981499884978122012-02-21T19:31:00.003-05:002012-02-21T20:15:25.323-05:00following up<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/arts/music/ymusic-to-bring-its-versatility-to-ecstatic-music-festival.html?scp=1&sq=%22william%20robin%22&st=cse">"Bridging Genres and Generations on the Fly." <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times</span>, February 5.</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/arts/music/orpheus-hilary-hahn-and-david-lang-start-competitions.html?scp=2&sq=%22william%20robin%22&st=cse">"New Kind of Online Dating: Classical Competitions. <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times, February 12.</span></a><br /><br />So there you have it: two pretty decent reasons for my recent lack of blogging. In all honesty, they were mostly written long before my last blog post -- I've just been inundated with work as of late. But I did want to follow up a bit on each of the two pieces, as I have done in <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/08/matsukaze-postgame.html">the</a> <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/07/two-boys-postgame.html">past</a>, since usually only a hundredth of the crazy things swirling around in my head makes it down onto the page and into print.<br /><br />So, <a href="http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/?portfolio=nadia-sirota-first-things-first">first things first</a>: yMusic. Even though I am very much aware of many of the players in the ensemble -- Nadia Sirota factored into my undergrad thesis in a major way -- for whatever reason, yMusic completely passed me by until the build-up to their album release last fall. They raised funds <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ymusic/beautiful-mechanical-an-indie-classical-record-by">via Kickstarter</a>, which is becoming an important method for getting money for classical musicians. The album, in case for some reason you haven't heard it, is great, but what's almost as interesting as "the music itself" for me is their working method, which is how I approached the article. Classical music has been too long marketed as a kind of monolithic "Here is the Composer Genius, and there is the performer who will worship him if he is worthy," but the fact is that the performer who is not the composer is a relatively new phenomenon. I'm fascinated -- journalistically and academically -- by the various bleedings-over of composer and performer, whether it's groups like yMusic which take a very active role in the compositional process, or collaborations like those of Nico Muhly/Sam Amidon, or veritable composer-performers like Corey Dargel or Gabriel Kahane -- or Son Lux, for that matter.<br /><br />Writing this piece involved talking to some of my musical heroes, and I had many, many fascinating conversations that couldn't make it into the piece. Pretty much all the famous people never got to speak -- I'm still kind of stupefied that I spoke with Annie Clark, Shara Worden, and Justin Vernon aka Bonnie Bear -- but in a way that's almost a good thing, because what they all said was that yMusic was the real talent, and the ones really deserving of star status. I am grateful to Gabriel Kahane, Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Richard Reed Parry, Ryan Lott, and all the members of the very busy ensemble for sharing a bit of how their musical lives work. It's a fascinating process, and one I am more and more intent on exploring further. As I've said before, people are talking a lot about this music, but they're not talking about the things that are really interesting: issues of musical authorship, issues of genre/style distinctions, issues of how the musicians define themselves versus how the press defines them, issues of performance practice, issues of construction of musical communities, issues of venue, I can go on, and I will at some point, in extreme length.<br /><br />The Ecstatic Music Festival is, of course, <a href="http://kaufman-center.org/mch/series/ecstatic-music-festival">still going on</a>; the yMusic concert is archived on the Q2 website <a href="http://www.wqxr.org/#/articles/q2-music/2012/feb/06/richard-reed-parry-son-lux-and-ymusic-live-merkin-concert-hall/">here</a>; and Son Lux has released an <a href="http://music.sonluxmusic.com/album/we-are-rising-instrumentals">instrumental version of </a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://music.sonluxmusic.com/album/we-are-rising-instrumentals">We Are Rising</a> </span>which is well worth checking out.<br />---<br /><br />Alas, I didn't get to bring in any scholarship in the yMusic profile, but I did get some musicology trivia into my competitions piece. The Thalberg-Liszt battle is definitively documented in Dana Gooley's excellent new study <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Virtuoso-Liszt-Perspectives-History-Criticism/dp/0521834430"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Virtuoso Liszt</span></a>, which unpacks the role, politically and socially, of Liszt in 19th century aristocratic society. There is much (but not enough!) good scholarship about musical competitions -- I also looked at Joseph Horowitz's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ivory-Trade-Business-International-Competition/dp/0671673874"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Ivory Trade</span></a>, which tells the story of the Van Cliburn Competition, and Tia DeNora's s must-read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Construction-Genius-Politics-1792-1803/dp/0520211588"><span style="font-style: italic;">Beethoven and the Construction of Genius</span></a>, which has a chapter detailing the 1799 piano battle between Beethoven and Joseph Wolfl. The Prix de Rome, a composition competition, is also a fascinating prism into French musical culture -- one of UNC's own, Annegret Fauser, has a <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/831898?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dfauser%2Bprix%2Bde%2Brome%26acc%3Doff%26wc%3Don&Search=yes">great article</a> on the role of women in the Prix.<br /><br />This was also a very fun article to write. You can look at the full playlist of <span style="font-style: italic;">wed</span> pianists <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF065DC0DB4857256">here</a>. I mentioned three performances which I thought were particularly audacious and inventive:<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TII9UdE73sI" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe><br />Vladislav Boguinia prepares his piano<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/sS_OTuZSgcI" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe><br />Derek Johnson lays it down on electric guitar<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0nuSlrj3nZ0" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe><br />And an unnamed man does one hand on the keys, one on the strings<br /><br />It was great talking to David Lang (whose <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Speaks</span> I am dying to hear, so please record that quickly!), Andrew Norman, Hilary Hahn, and Jeremy Denk, whose voice didn't make it into the piece but is one of the <span style="font-style: italic;">wed</span> judges. The results for the Lang competition will be announced in early March; <a href="http://www.hilaryhahncontest.com/">Hahn's</a> will be announced on June 15th (given that June 15th is my birthday, I'd better win).* All the Orpheus/WQXR Project 440 is still available to take a look at <a href="http://www.wqxr.org/#/series/project440/">here</a>; you can listen to Norman's Orpheus 440 commission, <span style="font-style: italic;">Apart, Together</span>, <a href="http://www.wqxr.org/#/articles/live-broadcasts/2011/dec/03/orpheus-chamber-orchestra-pushing-boundaries-2011/">here</a>; and Orpheus will be performing its next 440 commission, by Clint Needham, <a href="http://www.orpheusnyc.com/39/thile.html">at Carnegie on March 24</a>.<br /><br />That's all for now. I leave you with Pleyel's Hymn, which has been haunting my scholarly dreams as of late.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/U0HbvMY-gi8" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe><br /><br />*No, I did not enter.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-18918364619657423692012-01-26T17:35:00.003-05:002012-01-26T21:03:40.418-05:00a vicious cycleYou know it's the new year when Seated Ovation becomes the homepage for orchestral programming moanfests. Carnegie Hall announced their 2012-2013 season today, and it's a usual mix of awesome and ugh. A <a href="http://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2012/10/3/0700/PM/Chicago-Symphony-Orchestra-Opening-Night-Gala/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Carmina Burana</span> CSO Muti</a> opener is completely uninteresting to me, especially when followed by a <a href="http://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2012/10/4/0800/PM/Chicago-Symphony-Orchestra/">classic Muti bizarro sandwich</a>. The ACJW stuff looks good -- <a href="http://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2012/10/22/0730/PM/Ensemble-ACJW/">a Samuel Adams piece in the mix and some Missy Mazzoli too </a>-- and <a href="http://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2012/10/25/0730/PM/Gabriel-Kahane-Dont-Even-Listen/">this Gabriel Kahane concert</a> just looks sensational. And I am 100% in favor of Spring for Music, though some of the programs aren't exactly things I'd want to hear.<br /><br />I have mixed feelings about the Latin America festival. On the one hand, I admire Carnegie's interest in broadly taking on national musical cultures, which it's been doing for a while now. On the other, I am getting a little bit tired of the Dudamel/El Sistema celebration -- I have nothing against El Sistema per se, I just think there are a ton of great youth orchestras out there and I'd like to see them represented as well. (It would also be nice to see some classical/avant-garde <a href="http://www.carnegiehall.org/Subscriptions/2012-2013-Season/Voices-from-Cuba/">voices from Cuba</a>, like Leo Brouwer).<br /><br />But the cycle, oh, the cycle. A year from now, Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will be doing all nine Beethoven symphonies in four concerts. (Note that JGE's Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique is already doing one <a href="http://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2012/11/17/0730/PM/Orchestre-Revolutionnaire-et-Romantique-The-Monteverdi-Choir/">all-Beethoven concert in the fall</a>.). We've got Numbers 1, 8, and 5 in one concert; 4 and 3 in another; 6 and 7 in a third; and to round it off, 2 and 9.<br /><br />Symphony cycles, along with heaps of music by the same composer in one or a series of concerts, have become the norm in orchestra programming. In L.A., we've got The Mahler Project. In Pittsburgh, <a href="http://bit.ly/zjC1iG">The Beethoven Project</a>. In Pierre-Laurent Aimard, we've got <a href="http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/cat/single?PRODUCT_NR=4779439">The Liszt Project</a> (okay, that one's a little different). The New York Phil will be doing their <a href="http://bit.ly/pe4BvM">Modern Beethoven</a> soon.<br /><br />I object wholeheartedly (wholeheartedly!) to this trend.<br /><br />For starters: it's boring. I can think of few things less creative than slapping together a bunch of symphonies by the same composer, and pretending it's some kind of ambitious project. Yes, the audience <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span> make connections between early Beethoven and late Beethoven, or Mahler's First and Mahler's Ninth (every critic always mentions this when the cycle happens, as if it's crazy that the <span style="font-style: italic;">Eroica </span>might resemble the Ninth Symphony).<br /><br />That's not innovative at all. Innovative could be saying: what's going on with the <span style="font-style: italic;">Eroica? </span>One could provide a directly historical context (who else wrote symphonies in 1804?), broader cultural resonances (what other works echo the revolutionary might of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Eroica</span>?), resonances with the past (what other composers wrote antecedents to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Eroica</span>? what other Beethoven works that maybe aren't symphonies lead up to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Eroica</span>?), resonances with the future (what did the <span style="font-style: italic;">Eroica</span> inspire?), or, my personal fave, resonances with the far future (what contemporary music jells nicely with the <span style="font-style: italic;">Eroica</span>?). At least thinking about these questions helps a little bit.<br /><br />That's not to mention the alarm bells which go off in my head, the more I think about the cycle concept from a critical-musicological perspective. The entire concept of a symphony cycle was invented by record labels and high-profile conductors to sell box sets (feel free to correct me on this) -- it's continued by orchestras eager to show off their wares and push in-house label complete sets. It's foreign to Mahler and Beethoven, but for the latter, to me, it seems particularly wrong-headed.<br /><br />Traditional orchestral programming from the, say, 1950s to 1990s, consisted of something like those Muti sandwiches: your overture, your concerto, your symphony (before that, it was a mixed bag approach). These days, you still get some of that, but what conductors (and ESPECIALLY Music Directors) want to do is present A Big Piece: your Bruckner, Mahler, or Shostakovich evening-length symphony. It shows off the orchestra, it sells tickets, and it sells the inevitable albums which promote the orchestra internationally as one capable of making a big sound for seventy minutes. None of these things is necessarily bad -- I'm very guilty of wanting to attend Mahler concerts more than any other -- but it's unfortunately endemic. I'm almost glad Muti is around to provide some weird-ass rep for Chicago instead of just delivering Mahler after Bruckner after Mahler.<br /><br />And Mahler is a composer whose symphonies, from Number 1, do span worlds. Putting them together in seven to nine nights is a moderately terrible thing to do, not allowing the music to breathe, but the grand gesture of it kind of makes sense -- creating a super-opus out of super opuses. But the Beethoven thing seems, to me, like attempting to turn a composer who wasn't a <span style="font-style: italic;">fin de siecle</span> maximalist into one who was. Grafting together Nine Symphonies into one megathon is the equivalent of turning Beethoven into Mahler. When Beethoven started writing symphonies, no one was making any claims that they represented the world. Philosophically, Beethoven's First and Second are no different from the symphonies of Haydn or Mozart -- they don't lend themselves to a maximalist approach.<br /><br />Take a look at Beethoven's 1808 marathon concert: Yes, you had the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, but you also got a piano concerto, mass movements, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Choral Fantasy</span>, a concert aria, and some piano improv. Besides <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12424757">Lincoln Center's replication</a>, where else will you get an event in that spirit?<br /><br />Instead, we have the Beethoven symphonies as one mega-symphony, with all roads heading towards the Ninth. Can you imagine ending a Beethoven cycle on a symphony that <span style="font-style: italic;">wasn't </span>the Ninth? At first it sounds crazy, but think about it: it might actually be more interesting to hear the Ninth first, and work your way backwards, having the sound of late Beethoven in your ears when you hear the earlier stuff. Or maybe take 3 Beethoven symphonies and pair them with music of his predecessors -- we don't always have to move forward, we can move backward too. Or do late Beethoven with late Mozart, or early Beethoven with late Haydn. Or something with Spohr! Think a little! It won't make your brain explode, I promise.<br /><br />But still, the appeal is obvious. A symphony cycle creates a spectacle, an event around which to rally, and that is something that classical music always needs. I just wish that there were fewer projects, and more actual <span style="font-style: italic;">projects</span> (like <a href="http://internationalbeethovenproject.com/">this one</a>).<br /><br />*Note: I am against the cycle as a concept, EXCEPT <a href="http://blog.dso.org/2012/01/dso-joins-spring-for-music-roster-makes-triumphant-return-to-carnegie-hall/">for this</a>, which will be the best thing ever.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-84923920238703181272012-01-19T15:03:00.004-05:002012-01-20T11:32:14.024-05:00shaping notesThis is turning into quite the American semester. (That's a better lead than "Sorry for not blogging.") Between a Copland seminar and a Sacred Harp independent study, I've got America on my mind. I meant to do a long thing at some point in the fall about Ives, Hilary Hahn's great CD, 9/11, and Occupy, but that somehow slipped away into the ether. But shape notes! Now that's something worth talking about.<br /><br />Shape notes are quite the rage these days. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang <span style="font-style: italic;">Am I Born to Die</span> at a New Sounds Live concert <a href="http://www.wqxr.org/#/articles/q2-live-concerts/2011/oct/06/live-webcast-brooklyn-philharmonic/">last October</a>, followed by David T. Little's <span style="font-style: italic;">Am I Born</span>, a remix of sorts (it looks like they're reprising it <a href="http://www.brooklynyouthchorus.org/index.php?p=233">in March</a>). On Friday, the Asphalt Orchestra <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/concerts-and-performances/free-concerts/asphalt-orchestra?eid=R002_%7B814DAD03-B5B6-4434-B35D-1B183C65A66C%7D_20120120180000">is playing</a> arrangements of shape note tunes in the Met Museum's new American Wing, apparently inspired by field recordings from the '40s-'60s (which ones?). The Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Brooklyn Phil are also <a href="http://bphil.org/bphilwp/tickets/">sponsoring a shape note sing-a-long on February 26</a>.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the audio for the Brooklyn Youth concert is no longer online. Their <span style="font-style: italic;">Am I Born To Die </span>was extremely polished; Little's piece is a gorgeous, percussive explosion of the tune. The BYC didn't "sing the shapes" for the former; I asked Little via Twitter whether he used shapes in his piece and he said "not using shapes, alas (though there's totally a sibelius plug-in!), but following the basic part writing rules, sound etc."<br /><br />I'm curious about what those basic part writing rules and sound are.<br /><br />Shape note music, and in particular, the Sacred Harp, has always been "discovered." Going back to George Pullen Jackson's description of the singing community as a "lost tonal tribe," the story told about Sacred Harp has been one of outsiders looking in. The stunning sound of the music can't help but be described as raw, primitive, a kind of rural mouthwash for its weary cosmopolitan discoverers. It's constantly viewed as historical Americana (and usually on the brink of extinction) -- the description of the New Sounds concert calls it "19th Century shape note singing," as if there wasn't a huge community of singers around the nation doing the music every week.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Am I Born To Die</span> is actually an 1816 tune called "Idumea C.M," (songs were often named for places) by Ananias Davisson, with a text by the Charles Wesley. It first appeared as a three-part in Davisson's <span style="font-style: italic;">Kentucky Harmony</span>, had an alto part added by William Walker in the 1867 <span style="font-style: italic;">Christian Harmony</span>, and ended up in the Sacred Harp as well. So what was the BYC singing, and on what version did Little base his tune on?<br /><br />I'm also curious about the February sing-a-long, which advertises itself as taking "one back in time to the Brooklyn of the 1820s, when the great tradition of American shape note singing was the rage in New York." My impression of the history so far (and please contradict me on this, I'm very curious) is that shape notes basically migrated down south and out west at the end of the 18th century, as the elitist "Better Music" movement replaced American harmonies with European techniques. Was there some kind of 1820s Brooklyn renaissance? (who was exporting the Southern books to Brooklyn?) Shape note singing is traditionally unaccompanied -- what's the orchestra going to be doing? <span style="font-style: italic;">(Edit: Nevermind: see comments. The "Better Music" movement was on the rise in the mid 19th century, so shape notes were apparently still going strong in the Northeast in the 1820s. I am curious what those communities were like, though.)</span><br /><br />I don't mean to criticize any of this. The shape note tradition has long been flexible, and at least in its most modern iteration willing to accommodate all who are interested (Kiri Miller's <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/74bpw3ky9780252032141.html">Traveling Home</a> </span>handles this issue well) -- the battles fought in the 19th century about four shapes versus seven shapes, or whether gospel tunes should be allowed in the tunebooks, aren't exactly raging anymore. But if you're not singing the shapes and you're performing the music for an audience (shape note music is inherently communal and participatory), at what point are you still doing shape note singing?<br /><br />I first discovered the Sacred Harp a few years ago when researching my undergrad thesis on Nico Muhly. If you listen at 0:40 here, you'll hear Amidon singing rather loudly.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EhXxEJgfwIE" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe><br /><br />In an interview, I found out that Muhly was drawing on Amidon's knowledge of Sacred Harp singing -- the loud drawl is characteristic of the Southern style. Amidon learned Sacred Harp via his parents, who sang in the <a href="http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/word-of-mouth-chorus">Word of Mouth chorus</a>, a group of '70s New England folk revivalists. I picked up their Nonesuch album and fell in love with the sound.<br /><br />Go <a href="http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/rivers-of-delight-american-folk-hymns-from-the-sacred-harp-tradition">here</a> and click on <span style="font-style: italic;">Kedron</span> Watch this, too:<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_Dz7hOWvJHU" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Kedron</span>'s an interesting case. David W. Music <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/3052402">has traced it back</a> to Amos Pilsbury's 1799 <span style="font-style: italic;">United States' Sacred Harmony</span>, the earliest Southern tunebook. In that book, it was listed anonymous, and may be the one of the first American folk hymns -- an oral transcription of a genuine folk tune, set into four parts. <span style="font-style: italic;">Kedron</span> made its way into multiple tunebooks (including the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sacred Harp</span>) in different versions attributed to different authors.<br /><br />Sam Amidon recorded it on <span style="font-style: italic;">I See the Sign</span>. Here's a live version:<br /><br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/R_iV4thkUHI" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe><br /><br />So we have a song that was originally a folk tune, transcribed and set into three-part shape-note harmony at the beginning of the 19th century, reprinted with an alto part in Walker's <span style="font-style: italic;">Southern Harmony</span>, eventually reprinted in four voices in the Sacred Harp, picked up by a group of Northern revivalists who record it as concert music, and then passed down to a son who makes it stark folk song for solo voice and guitar, albeit with a touch of Nico Muhly organ, woodwinds, and strings (on the album, at least). This is fun, isn't it?Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-84706073320129101952011-12-29T17:58:00.002-05:002011-12-29T18:39:34.645-05:00these are a few of my favorite things (this year)Think of this more as a lazy reminder of things I wrote this year, rather than some kind of apotheosis of year-end greatness. It's me wanting to write a blog post but not really in the mood to say anything new or enlightening.<br /><br />1. musikFabrik: Easily the most underrated new music ensemble in existence. They turned many of the best concerts I saw into <span style="font-style: italic;">events</span>, not only mastering insanely-complicated music but then playing it while doing some crazy, crazy choreography. See: <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/03/maerzmusik-part-one.html">Rebecca Saunders' <span style="font-style: italic;">Chroma</span> and Poppe/Heiniger's <span style="font-style: italic;">Tiere sitzen nicht </span>at MaerzMusik</a>; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/arts/music/sonntag-by-karlheinz-stockhausen-in-cologne.html?scp=1&sq=stockhausen&st=cse">Stockhausen's <span style="font-style: italic;">Sonntag </span>in Cologne</a>; an <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/09/double-retrospective-part-three.html">awesome Musikfest concert </a>(technically 2010). Take a glance at their <a href="http://www.musikfabrik.eu/front_content.php?idcat=6&year=2012&month=0">2012 schedule</a>: all the music you want to hear in New York but never do (<span style="font-style: italic;">Jakob Lenz</span>! new G.F. Haas!).<br />Somebody needs to bring them to America, asap.<br /><br />2. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/arts/music/matsukaze-opera-by-the-japanese-composer-toshio-hosokawa.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1">Toshio Hosokawa's <span style="font-style: italic;">Matsukaze</span></a>. I'm just going to go ahead and say that I think this is probably the best opera I've ever seen. I am hopelessly addicted to the unofficial recording I was lucky enough to obtain; the score is a dreamworld of fascinating, beautiful complexity; and Sasha Waltz's gorgeous choreography along with Barbara Hannigan's singing just sealed the deal. <span style="font-style: italic;">Needs</span> to come to the U.S. (Lincoln Center Presents, I'm looking at you).<br /><br />3. The Berlin Philharmonic. Kind of goes without saying. The best was, as expected, Simon Rattle's Mahler -- particularly the Second and <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/02/mahler-mysterium.html">Third</a>, but the <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2010/11/resisting-mahler.html">Second</a> actually took place last fall so doesn't really fall into this year's best-of. I also recently took in <a href="http://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/2461/heras-casado-hamelin-mendelssohn-szymanowski-berio">a great concert</a> led by Pablo Heras-Casado in the Digital Concert Hall.<br /><br />4. <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/05/weisst-du-wie-das-wird.html">Worms' Nibelungen Museum</a> -- totally awesome, well worth a trip if you're trekking across the country.<br /><br />5. The MaerzMusik festival. I have particularly fond memories of <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/04/maerzmusik-part-three.html"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Justė Janulytė</span>’s </a><i style=""><a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/04/maerzmusik-part-three.html">Sandglasses</a>, Chroma</i>, and <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/03/maerzmusik-part-one.html">Michael Vorfeld's <span style="font-style: italic;">Light Bulb Music</span></a><br /><br />6. <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/03/spectral-baroque.html">Lucia Ronchetti's haunting re-composition of Cavalli's <span style="font-style: italic;">Giasone</span></a>: another transcendent <span style="font-style: italic;">Gesamtkunstwerk </span>experience, this time on a small scale.<br /><br />7. <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/02/von-anderen-planeten.html">Anna Prohaska's breathes the air of another world</a>, in Schoenberg's Second String Quartet: a major talent on the rise.<br /><br />8. The Hamburger Bahnhof got run over by some reindeer: <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/02/youll-go-down-in-history.html">my</a> numerous visits to Carsten Höller's <span style="font-style: italic;">Soma</span><br /><br />That's all, folks. See you in 2012, the year <span style="font-style: italic;">classical music dies.</span><br /><i style=""><br /></i>Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-49858556562261083582011-12-10T17:03:00.004-05:002011-12-10T17:34:43.488-05:00end of lineThe semester is, for all intents and purposes, over. Yes, I've got a French final on Monday, and I still need to print out and put a Haydn paper in a mailbox, but my first term in grad school is basically done.<br /><br />What about all that juicy academic insider knowledge <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2011/08/transitions.html">I promised you</a>? I apologize for that one; turns out my time needed to be a bit more focused on learning that insider knowledge for myself before I could disseminate it to the rest of the internet crew. But I might as well try to let you know what I did the past four-ish months, so I'll at least have an alibi for not having blogged that much.<br /><br />Things are a little bit different for me this year because I am actually not teaching -- due to the warm generosity of the <a href="http://gradschool.unc.edu/programs/royster/">Royster Society,</a> for which I am eternally grateful -- so I can't give you the downlow on what it's like to be a TA. It also freed up my time a bit to take some extra things -- French 101 and a music theory independent study where I basically re-learned all the analysis skills I should have known in the first place (still on the docket: 18th century counterpoint, serial stuff). First-years in UNC's program take two seminars per semester as well as a year-long methodologies course. As I mentioned before, I took Afro-Latin music as well as the late instrumental music of Haydn. What that ended up being, research-wise, was two lengthy papers. Let's break it down, for those still paying attention:<br /><br />1) Textural Networks in Haydn's Opus 76 Quartets<br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Wh_bFPvBDv4" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe><br />Take a listen. Hear that beginning, a cello solo? That's not normal -- it's actually the only Haydn quartet which starts with a solo that's <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> the first violin (did I just blow your mind?). Anyway, if you listen closely, you'll notice that Haydn seems to be going for a fugue, and then shies away. The voices enter in ascent -- cello, viola, violin 2, then violin 1 -- but we never get anything approaching a fugue. It's a weird joke, and to an extent one of <span style="font-style: italic;">texture</span>, of how the instruments interact with each other. The bulk of my paper is tracing these textural oddities throughout this quartet, and then going on to expand that study beyond the G-major quartet to the entire Op. 76 set of six quartets. I ended up proposing the idea of a textural network, that Haydn considers texture as a primary structural element and weaves together textural elements so that they reference and play off of each other over the course of the six quartets. It's just another way of looking at what is a truly incredible opus.<br /><br />The personal why of writing this paper was a deliberate attempt to do more of what I tend to shy away from: stick-to-the-music, <span style="font-style: italic;">note-y</span> analysis. It's one of the skills I need to develop more, so this was a great opportunity to get to know some awesome music and write about it without getting into politics, gender, cultural capital, and all those other fun buzzwords I spend a whole lot of time normally talking about.<br /><br />2) Dialogue and Stereotype in Hans Werner Henze's Cimarron.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/s0M60Y5etqQ" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe><br />So what does Henze have to do with Afro-Latin music? Not a bad question. Henze lived in Cuba for several months in the late '60s and wrote two pieces, with libretti by Hans Magnus Enzensberger -- <span style="font-style: italic;">El Cimarron</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">La Cubana</span>, both based on documentary novels by Miguel Barnet. This paper was more of my regular style, using critical theory by Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha to unpack some of the problems -- but also acknowledge the strengths -- of music which appropriates the identity of an escaped Afro-Cuban slave for Henze's and Enzensberger's political purposes. I'm honestly not a huge Henze fan, but I think the <span style="font-style: italic;">Cimarron</span> is a fantastic piece, and sits in a cultural moment that also gave us Peter Maxwell Davies' <span style="font-style: italic;">Eight Songs for a Mad King</span>. However, there is some borderline racist stuff going on in there, and most people haven't addressed it. So I did.<br /><br />So those were my seminar papers. The methodologies course was also awesome. It's divided into 2 or 3 week mini-units, within which the first-years learn a skill set or theoretical concept from a different member of the musicology faculty: bibliography, interrogating evidence, pop music ethnography, how to re-interpret Schubert <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Litwin-Schubert-Schonber-Sonatas-Klavierstucke/dp/B000GYI3W2/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1323555889&sr=1-2">like a badass</a>, cultural transfer. Next semester we're doing a mega-unit on the <span style="font-style: italic;">Rite of Spring</span>, and some stuff on new music to boot. Seminar-wise it'll be all about Copland and 15th century Italy (no, not together); and I'm also going to be doing an independent study on the Sacred Harp, during which I will dip into the <a href="http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/sfc1/">astonishing resources</a> of our very own Southern Folklife Collection.<br /><br />I'll be in New York next week to work on some upcoming special projects as well as see My Brightest Diamond/yMusic/The National, Iestyn Davies, Contact! (hey, <a href="http://seatedovation.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-contact.html">it's been almost two years since the last one I went to!</a>), Stile Antico, and maybe more. I'll keep you informed, as always.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2201118595222755418.post-85075870329516823622011-11-27T11:05:00.002-05:002011-11-27T11:10:30.583-05:00truth thoughtsAs I’ve delved deeper into the recent history of American music, I’ve become more and more fascinated about the shift—whether subtle or seismic—which occurred around 1980. I wrote about this briefly in my <span style="font-style: italic;">Time Curve Preludes</span> <a href="http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/william-duckworth-the-time-curve-preludes">liner notes</a>; Nico Muhly has summed it up succinctly <a href="http://nicomuhly.com/news/2007/normal-amounts-of-time/">elsewhere</a>. As a musicologist, I’ve been interrogating the concept of periodization, and can’t quite decide if it’s appropriate to declare a new period or style or something happening circa 1980, or whether that’s just a way of furthering a reductive narrative. The term postminimalism is now in the vocabulary, and I think it’s an appropriate one in order to help carve up the history of American music into chunks – I’m just not so sure how worth a task carving up history is.<br /><br />But <span style="font-style: italic;">Satyagraha</span> happened in 1980, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Satyagraha</span> is a big deal. The Metropolitan Opera’s production, which I took in via an HD Broadcast last week, demonstrates this stunningly. From the very opening gesture, the music expresses, wondrously, what it is not. Listen to <span style="font-style: italic;">Einstein</span>; listen to <span style="font-style: italic;">Music in Twelve Parts</span>. The forcea driving the Glass of the ‘70s feel—and I don’t mean this at all disparagingly—mechanical, infused with a machine energy, driven and propelled forward in a kind of unstoppable onslaught. <br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Satyagraha</span> is brittle; it is fragile; it is human. We begin with the human voice, a frozen melisma in Hindi, before the cellos begin to bellow their scales. It the voice of Gandhi, astonishingly personified by Richard Croft at the Met, in whose voice we hear immediately the frailty of the music and the message. In Act I, Gandhi is a mere learner, a lawyer in South Africa, and not yet the guide: “I see them here assembled, ready to fight, seeking to please the King’s sinful son by waging war.”<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Einstein on the Beach</span> begins with the drone of the organ, which plays a full iteration of its eternal, passacaglia bassline before the chorus of the Knee Play enters with their intoned numbers. <span style="font-style: italic;"> Satyagraha</span>’s vocal opening expresses all of the wonders of this subtle/seismic shift, from electric to acoustic, but also from abstract to not-quite-so-abstract. The audience may have no idea what Gandhi is saying, but there is a message.<br /><br />The greatest strength of the Met’s production is that it powerfully navigates this balance of the abstract and referential, the timeless and the political. The directorial team, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, unleash a wonderland of newspapers and giant puppets, all of which appear wholly organic – a stagecraft which feels more real than practically any other opera production I’ve seen. Despite being a lover of the music, I had never glanced at the libretto for <span style="font-style: italic;">Satyagraha</span> before going to the movie theater; the images which McDermott and Crouch create, though, carve out a theatrical space which feels visually effortless and immediate while also seeming to allude to deeper relations to the text. The chorus, which sings as narrator and commentator, moves like an actual crowd of people, acting as a signifier for the actual bodies of the masses—inspiring and inspired by Gandhi—as well as the morals of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Bhagavad Gita</span>, on which the libretto is based.<br /><br />In an intermission interview, one of the directors mentioned the idea of corrugated iron and newspaper as symbols, or even relics, of the colonial era (one wonders how long the visual metaphor of newspapers will last; longer, we hope). Each of the three tableaux features a thematic figure, a sort of angel of history symbolizing the movement: Tolstoy in the first, Rabindrath Tagore in the second, Martin Luther King Jr. in the third. It is a tricky path between universalism and particularism, but the Met’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Satyagraha</span> achieves it just as well as Beethoven’s Ninth. McDermott and Crouch fix the figure in the background for the entire act as a silent but active presence. In the final moments of the opera, MLK gesticulates slowly towards an unseen audience, as Gandhi repeats the same ascending scale over glassy strings: the perfect balance of the hypnotic and the political.<br /><br />Which brings me to the one gaping problem of the performance I took in. The cast was spectacular, the chorus at its usual level of excellence, and the orchestra sounded superb under Dante Anzolini, though somewhat deadened by the movie theater’s lack of dynamic contrast. But the Met’s HD system is woefully inadequate for this production, and I never felt like I was really experiencing more than 70% of the events unfolding onstage (I was hoping to attend yesterday’s matinee in person but missed out). The problem is inherent in the broadcasting system, which is geared around focusing on singers for close-up shots, attempting to do filmic justice to opera. Sometimes this works: the last production I took in, <span style="font-style: italic;">Peter Grimes</span>, actually looked better in HD than when I went afterwards in-person, because the giant <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFgQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Flikelyimpossibilities.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F10%2Fadvent-calendars-revenge.html&ei=6GDSTqSIKKKtiQKz75H3Cw&usg=AFQjCNH9MACvKI_icAhkMWxynXDelVT2WA">Advent Calendar</a> made it difficult to grasp the individual characters. <br /><br />But <span style="font-style: italic;">Satyagraha</span>, especially in this production, is a triptych, and like a painting, you want to be able to see the whole thing at once, always. The importance of those historical figures in the backdrop is that they are always present, like the mesmerizing music; cutting away to focus on Gandhi’s face or a swath of the chorus disrupts the hypnosis. McDermott and Crouch conceive of the stage in its whole, but the image was sacrificed for individual moments in an opera in which individuality is anathema. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Satyagraha</span>, transformation does not occur in a single aria or dazzling moment; its beauty, like that of life, rests in gradual, imperceptible metamorphosis.Willhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00001122423953519326noreply@blogger.com1