spring for music contest entry no. 1

Vote for me here!

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. 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:

New York has long been considered the cultural capital of America. Is it still? If not, where?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 seven out of a total ten commissions for new pieces 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 Connotations. (Crazily enough, the Times called that unadventurous; imagine what Harold C. Schonberg would have thought of today’s programs.)

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 Hymnen 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."

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 Le Grand Macabre, and in a few months, the orchestra will bring Stockhausen's grand, three-orchestra Gruppen 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.

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.

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.)

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 From the House of the Dead, have been imported from abroad, and evidently Gelb thinks of Europe as an out-of-town tryout zone.

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 The Gospel of Mary Magdalene; the Chicago Lyric Opera recently announced a commission by opera newbie Jimmy López.

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 Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark than the Wooster Group.

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.)

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 in Alabama, too.

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.

following up

"Bridging Genres and Generations on the Fly." New York Times, February 5.

"New Kind of Online Dating: Classical Competitions. New York Times, February 12.

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 the past, since usually only a hundredth of the crazy things swirling around in my head makes it down onto the page and into print.

So, first things first: 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 via Kickstarter, 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.

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.

The Ecstatic Music Festival is, of course, still going on; the yMusic concert is archived on the Q2 website here; and Son Lux has released an instrumental version of We Are Rising which is well worth checking out.
---

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 The Virtuoso Liszt, 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 The Ivory Trade, which tells the story of the Van Cliburn Competition, and Tia DeNora's s must-read Beethoven and the Construction of Genius, 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 great article on the role of women in the Prix.

This was also a very fun article to write. You can look at the full playlist of wed pianists here. I mentioned three performances which I thought were particularly audacious and inventive:


Vladislav Boguinia prepares his piano


Derek Johnson lays it down on electric guitar


And an unnamed man does one hand on the keys, one on the strings

It was great talking to David Lang (whose Death Speaks 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 wed judges. The results for the Lang competition will be announced in early March; Hahn's 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 here; you can listen to Norman's Orpheus 440 commission, Apart, Together, here; and Orpheus will be performing its next 440 commission, by Clint Needham, at Carnegie on March 24.

That's all for now. I leave you with Pleyel's Hymn, which has been haunting my scholarly dreams as of late.



*No, I did not enter.

a vicious cycle

You 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 Carmina Burana CSO Muti opener is completely uninteresting to me, especially when followed by a classic Muti bizarro sandwich. The ACJW stuff looks good -- a Samuel Adams piece in the mix and some Missy Mazzoli too -- and this Gabriel Kahane concert 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.

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 voices from Cuba, like Leo Brouwer).

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 all-Beethoven concert in the fall.). 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.

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, The Beethoven Project. In Pierre-Laurent Aimard, we've got The Liszt Project (okay, that one's a little different). The New York Phil will be doing their Modern Beethoven soon.

I object wholeheartedly (wholeheartedly!) to this trend.

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 will 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 Eroica might resemble the Ninth Symphony).

That's not innovative at all. Innovative could be saying: what's going on with the Eroica? 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 Eroica?), resonances with the past (what other composers wrote antecedents to the Eroica? what other Beethoven works that maybe aren't symphonies lead up to the Eroica?), resonances with the future (what did the Eroica inspire?), or, my personal fave, resonances with the far future (what contemporary music jells nicely with the Eroica?). At least thinking about these questions helps a little bit.

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.

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.

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 fin de siecle 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.

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 Choral Fantasy, a concert aria, and some piano improv. Besides Lincoln Center's replication, where else will you get an event in that spirit?

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 wasn't 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.

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 projects (like this one).

*Note: I am against the cycle as a concept, EXCEPT for this, which will be the best thing ever.

shaping notes

This 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.

Shape notes are quite the rage these days. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang Am I Born to Die at a New Sounds Live concert last October, followed by David T. Little's Am I Born, a remix of sorts (it looks like they're reprising it in March). On Friday, the Asphalt Orchestra is playing 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 sponsoring a shape note sing-a-long on February 26.

Unfortunately, the audio for the Brooklyn Youth concert is no longer online. Their Am I Born To Die 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."

I'm curious about what those basic part writing rules and sound are.

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.

Am I Born To Die 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 Kentucky Harmony, had an alto part added by William Walker in the 1867 Christian Harmony, 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?

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? (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.)

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 Traveling Home 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?

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.



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 Word of Mouth chorus, a group of '70s New England folk revivalists. I picked up their Nonesuch album and fell in love with the sound.

Go here and click on Kedron Watch this, too:




Kedron's an interesting case. David W. Music has traced it back to Amos Pilsbury's 1799 United States' Sacred Harmony, 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. Kedron made its way into multiple tunebooks (including the Sacred Harp) in different versions attributed to different authors.

Sam Amidon recorded it on I See the Sign. Here's a live version:




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 Southern Harmony, 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?

these 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.

1. musikFabrik: Easily the most underrated new music ensemble in existence. They turned many of the best concerts I saw into events, not only mastering insanely-complicated music but then playing it while doing some crazy, crazy choreography. See: Rebecca Saunders' Chroma and Poppe/Heiniger's Tiere sitzen nicht at MaerzMusik; Stockhausen's Sonntag in Cologne; an awesome Musikfest concert (technically 2010). Take a glance at their 2012 schedule: all the music you want to hear in New York but never do (Jakob Lenz! new G.F. Haas!).
Somebody needs to bring them to America, asap.

2. Toshio Hosokawa's Matsukaze. 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. Needs to come to the U.S. (Lincoln Center Presents, I'm looking at you).

3. The Berlin Philharmonic. Kind of goes without saying. The best was, as expected, Simon Rattle's Mahler -- particularly the Second and Third, but the Second actually took place last fall so doesn't really fall into this year's best-of. I also recently took in a great concert led by Pablo Heras-Casado in the Digital Concert Hall.

4. Worms' Nibelungen Museum -- totally awesome, well worth a trip if you're trekking across the country.

5. The MaerzMusik festival. I have particularly fond memories of Justė Janulytė’s Sandglasses, Chroma, and Michael Vorfeld's Light Bulb Music

6. Lucia Ronchetti's haunting re-composition of Cavalli's Giasone: another transcendent Gesamtkunstwerk experience, this time on a small scale.

7. Anna Prohaska's breathes the air of another world, in Schoenberg's Second String Quartet: a major talent on the rise.

8. The Hamburger Bahnhof got run over by some reindeer: my numerous visits to Carsten Höller's Soma

That's all, folks. See you in 2012, the year classical music dies.

end of line

The 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.

What about all that juicy academic insider knowledge I promised you? 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.

Things are a little bit different for me this year because I am actually not teaching -- due to the warm generosity of the Royster Society, 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:

1) Textural Networks in Haydn's Opus 76 Quartets

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 not 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 texture, 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.

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, note-y 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.

2) Dialogue and Stereotype in Hans Werner Henze's Cimarron.


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 -- El Cimarron and La Cubana, 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 Cimarron is a fantastic piece, and sits in a cultural moment that also gave us Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King. However, there is some borderline racist stuff going on in there, and most people haven't addressed it. So I did.

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 like a badass, cultural transfer. Next semester we're doing a mega-unit on the Rite of Spring, 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 astonishing resources of our very own Southern Folklife Collection.

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, it's been almost two years since the last one I went to!), Stile Antico, and maybe more. I'll keep you informed, as always.

truth thoughts

As 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 Time Curve Preludes liner notes; Nico Muhly has summed it up succinctly elsewhere. 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.

But Satyagraha happened in 1980, and Satyagraha 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 Einstein; listen to Music in Twelve Parts. 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.

Satyagraha 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.”

Einstein on the Beach 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. Satyagraha’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.

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 Satyagraha 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 Bhagavad Gita, on which the libretto is based.

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 Satyagraha 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.

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, Peter Grimes, actually looked better in HD than when I went afterwards in-person, because the giant Advent Calendar made it difficult to grasp the individual characters.

But Satyagraha, 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 Satyagraha, transformation does not occur in a single aria or dazzling moment; its beauty, like that of life, rests in gradual, imperceptible metamorphosis.

another word from hans magnus

Tonight, Juilliard is performing Peter Maxwell Davies' celebration of student protests, Kommilitonen! In light of this, a fun little quote from Hans Magnus Enzensberger:

"A critical rhetoric which transposes the concept of revolution to esthetic categories was only possible at a time when breaking with the conventions of writing (painting, composing, etc.) could still be regarded as a challenge. This time is now over. Proclamations and manifestoes announcing "revolts," "revolutions" of language, syntax, metaphor sound hollow today. It is not by accident that they meet with well-meaning understanding from the ruling institutions and are correspondingly remunerated.

What does it take to be a...revolutionary? From our experience with thousands of applicants we know that not everyone is suited to be an independent salesman. But we also know that there are thousands of able men who don't have the opportunity to develop themselves because of the limitations of their present income.
The world-renowned Chase Group, one of whose by no means insignificant subsidiaries is the Securities Management Corporation, was founded in Boston in 1932. IT offers a solid, even conservative, solution for long-term investments to small as well as large investors. Scientific analysts of the first rank insure a sensible aggressiveness of capital grwoth.
If you are revolutionary enough to work exclusively on a commission basis and work particularly hard the first few months you will create for yourself a winning existence with a winner's income.--
Job offer in a German daily, summer 1968."
-Enzensberger, Commonplaces on the Newest Literature