This and That

A reader sent me a copy of this CD, by Duo 46. The duo consists of violinist Beth Ilana Schneider and guitarist Matt Gould. All of the music on this album (by Anthony Joseph Lanman, Daniel Adams, Paul Richards, Kristi McGarity, Richard P. Schaefer, Pierre Jalbert, Joshua Penman, Neil Flory, Russell Sarre, and Stacy Garrop) was commissioned by the Duo. The program explores a great deal of the textural possibility (but hardly all of it) presented by this challenging medium. The pieces are exceptionally well-played and recorded. Buy it, and the Duo can commission more music!

I've added Rob Witts' Musicircus to the blogroll. For two reasons: He has the good taste to post about Richard Powers, one of my favorite writers, and the bad judgement to list me as one of his "Daily Readings".

Kyle Gann rhapsodizes about finally getting to hear a performance of Roy Harris' Third Symphony (scroll about 5/8 of the way down). In a later post, about the need for different kinds of singers for different kinds of operas (a point I heartily agree with), Mr. Gann perorates thusly:

Maybe they'll appear when classical music finally dies, which classical musicians keep promising me is about to happen, so I keep waiting for the final announcement. It's been dying longer than friggin' Generalissimo Franco.

It would have been bitterly ironic had the hoped-for demise (accent on the first syllable, ala Ward Bond) occured before Mr. Gann got to hear the Harris.

New Directions in Lounge Music

I went to lunch last Friday with some new colleaques. The restaurant had a grand piano that was outfitted with a device (several generations [technologically speaking] old) that sent MIDI signals to the piano, causing it to play standards and pop songs. For minutes at a time, however, the device would malfunction and send out MIDI signals that would play isolated chords (triads up through 9th chords) and brief (two- or three-notes) melodic fragments with long, pregnant pauses between them. I dropped a chip into the tip jar and wondered how much it got per Gig.

The Times Are Never So Bad

Two recent posts highlight some issues that are central to artistic experience in today's world.

Greg Sandow rebuts the canard that young people have a shorter attention span than earlier generations. Greg mentions activity after activity associated with young people that require intense concentration for long periods of time. He goes on to attribute the aesthetic trends that some point to when leveling the short-attention-span charge--quick cutting in film and video, especially--to a desire for complexity, due to the ability to process more information, faster. I tend to agree with Greg, in part, but I would point out that more information doesn't necessarily lead to more complexity. And both of these desires may be in play here. (Alex Ross gently bemoaned the desire of some younger composers for more complexity not too long ago in a post that pre-echoes some of Greg's points.)

I think the kind of complexity that Greg notes may have more to do with an aesthetic that I have felt in the air for a few years than with a desire for complexity, per se. I call it the aesthetic of co-incidence, and I've seen and felt in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love), the television series Boomtown, and in the novels of Richard Powers (especially Gain and Plowing the Dark). All of these treat coincidence as thematic material, and have coincidences that would be eye-roll inducing in other contexts. The techniques used in these works--radical tone shifts, changes of cinematography, multiple points-view, and changes of voice and tone--all provide the layering necessary for this aesthetic of co-incidence to work. And they can be very complex.

The other post is an excellent one by George Hunka on his struggles with one of Schoenberg's piano pieces. Read the whole thing, of course, but the part most relevant to our discussion is this:

As I mentioned in an earlier post (and with the nagging feeling I'm beating a dead horse), the piece I'm working on is scarcely a minute long, but so far I've heard it (in both my own dreadful rendition and those of other pianists) a hundred times, at least. As Beethoven and Wagner reshaped the course of music, their more daring compositions waited for years to be recognized; now the Choral Symphony and the Tristan love-death motif are as familiar and listenable to many of us as old show tunes, even if only as an element of a movie score. As we heard them over and over again, as their innovations trickled down to more popular and less rarefied forms of music, they became a part of the culture–not offensive or challenging to the ears any more, even boring to some. Considering the disapprobation that still attaches to the work of Schönberg and the Second Viennese School generally nearly a century or so following its composition, I wonder how much of this is attributable to the fragmentation of our leisure time.

I think he's right about the fragmentation of leisure time, though that doesn't square with certain points Greg made about the willingness of people to spend hours learning the complexities of video games or to spend hours getting a sound just right on a recording. Still.

There's something to this, and it may be, as George suggests, related to the strangeness of Schoenberg's idiom, despite the fact that it is nearly a century old. It is interesting to note that in an age when people will gladly sit through multiple viewings/hearings of Tolkien and/or Wagner, the blazing intensity of these short pieces by Schoenberg (and others like them) remains problematic.

Workshop (I)

Everything is Green is simmering on the back burner for the moment, while I take care of some other projects that keep insisting on attention. I just finished a short piece for brass quintet called A Certain Light. The title comes from the remarkable Chapter VI of Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

Let the trumpets sound! But not too loudly.

Miscellany

I've been asked to post a link to the allClassicHall classical music forum. If it proves to be substantive, I'll link it in the "Links and Resources" on the main page here.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson provides an introduction to Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated here. There's a link for just about every section of the piece.

I'm cleaning up the blogroll a bit by removing the links to individual Sequenza21 composer/bloggers. The growing list of composers blogging at S21 can be found on the magazine's homepage, or at the S21 Composer's Forum, which will remain in the blogroll.

Cornicello

I've added Anthony Cornicello's 'blog to the 'blogroll. I knew Anthony back when he was an undergraduate. Kids!

Search and Celebration

I was looking through William W. Austin's Music in the 20th Century: From Debussy through Stravinsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966) and I came across this passage regarding Bela Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and Music for String Instruments, Percussion and Celesta (p.323):

The differences between the two great works with percussion are as remarkable as the similarities. The Music for Strings is like a search, poignant and thorough; the Sonata for Two Pianos is like a celebration, festive, mysterious at times, playful often, and gloriously affirmative.

It seems as if we must categorize works of art, since there are two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people and those who--well, you know the rest. As readers of this and other blogs know, the concert music world is full of conversations and controversies centered on divisions of musical repertoires based on such characteristics as style, compositional techniques, and even whether pieces are "simple" or "complex".

None of these categorizations really gets at the reasons we write, play, or listen to music and truth be told, they are often as not used to deny intellectual and artistic space to the music of the "other side" of the categorization and its supporters.

Of course, few pieces will fit simpy or wholly into either the "search" or "celebration" category. Even so, it seems to me that the ideas behind these categories could, with some expansion and explication, prove useful in probing the connections between pieces that seem on the surface to be unrelated. This would be far more beneficial to our art than spending our energy on pointing out differences that are more superficial than they are substantive.

Teaching/Learning

Corey Dargel posts about trying to find new ways to teach theory, if teach it we must. And we must, otherwise we're limited by habit.

Kyle Gann responds with an excellent idea--teach acoustics first. More specifically, the acoustics of interval. All pitched music, whatever tuning system or style, is based, at least in part, on interval (the "distance" between two notes). So, if you teach interval first, you can go in most any direction you want or need.

Happy Fourth!

Some music for the day:

John Cage: Apartment House 1776
Charles Ives: The Fourth of July
John Adams: Short Ride on a Fast Machine
Duke Ellington: "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue"
George & Ira Gershwin: "They All Laughed"
Elliott Carter: A Celebration of Some 150x150 Notes
Terry Riley: In C
Steve Reich: Clapping Music
Milton Babbitt: Whirled Series

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city

Kyle Gann directs us to an article by Jennifer Higdon on her early experiences with the music and ideas of John Cage. He describes it as "the frankest admission and most thoughtful self-analysis I've ever seen of why an Uptown composer doesn't like (some) Downtown music".

Hmmm. The thing is, I don't consider Cage to be a downtown composer. Mr. Gann's own definition of downtown music is helpful, but it's more indicative of what downtown isn't rather than what it is, as he himself suggests. I don't consider Morton Feldman downtown, either. Much of Stockhausen fits Mr. Gann's definition better than Feldman or as well as Cage, for that matter.

Everything's waiting for you.

Denk

A. C. Douglas points to this exquisite post by pianist and latest Blogroll inductee Jeremy Denk.

Mr. Denk's post includes some telling analytical comments about the ending of Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata (1945-46). I've commented in the past about the value of analysis for performers and listeners alike, and I wonder what Mr. Douglas, who is less amenable to analytical commentary, thinks of Mr. Denk's analysis.

One more thing. I wonder how the piece of the score included (via photograph) in the post got that way. We're left with a mystery: Does the pedal ever get released?

Traditional Musician

The Boston Globe has an interesting article on pianist/composer Frederic Rzewski.

Note the tension between Mr. Rzewski's institutional acceptance (he's being feted by the New England Conservatory) and his wry attitude towards the state of such institutions. It's a good, if uncomfortable, position for an artist to be in. I think the way the artist handles it will go a long way towards determining the quality of the work after the acceptance. That is, does the artist get comfortable (or worse) or does s/he take it in stride and continue making the art they would have made without the institutional imprimatur?

Changes and Stuff

I've added Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated! to the 101 list. It replaces Rachmaninoff's Paganini Rhapsody.

I've added Alan Thiesen to the Blogroll. His post on Elliott Carter is a winner. Speaking of the Blogroll, has anybody heard anything from Mark Dancigers and/or Martin Suckling lately?

Alex Ross on film music in general and Philip Glass in particular.

Interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on giving up an academic career not because you can't get a job, but because the students you train won't be able to get one.

Kyle Gann waxes eloquent on composers' politics and personality. The last sentence is very fine:

When we love the music and are disappointed in the musician, we can only tolerantly shake our heads and wonder at what fallible vessels the Spirit of Music embraces to express itself through.

Have you read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men? You should.

Ludwig van Narcissus

Dylan Evans, writing in the Guardian, tells us that Beethoven was a "narcissistic hooligan", concerned only about himself when he wrote his music of "morbid self-obsession ", that by the late quartets and the Ninth became "simply a vehicle for a self-indulgent display of bizarre mood swings and personal difficulties". Mr. Evans would have preferred the composer to recognize what his predecessors had, that "musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal", and eschew the explorations that led to music that embodied an "inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul".

It was simply beyond the pale for Beethoven to believe that as a composer he should have written what he imagined, felt, and heard. Selfish bastard. He should have written for the sensibilities of Dylan Evans.

Screed

I was going to post a sarcastic response to Miles Hoffman's article here, but the piece doesn't deserve even that. It is full of inaccuracies, as the comments after the article indicate. The inaccuracies are so extensive that it is clear that Mr. Hoffman is either spectacularly unqualified to write on the subject or he is engaged in culture war propaganda. In either case, shame on him, and shame on the Wilson Quarterly for publishing it.

Opera Review

The following is reprinted from the Tallahassee Democrat, 29 May 2005, with permission.

Summer, in the world of concert music and opera, is usually a time of lighter, "pops"-oriented fare and a relaxed atmosphere. At institutions with large and prominent opera programs, such as Florida State University, the summer is also the time for directing students to stage productions of one-act operas as part of their academic programs. Because these projects are often the first time these students are in charge of a full production, the operas mounted and the productions themselves frequently are at least a little outside the mainstream.

This was the case at FSU's double bill of Leonard Bernstein's domestic dramedy Trouble in Tahiti and Luigi Dallapiccola's totalitarian nightmare The Prisoner on Friday and Saturday evenings at Opperman Music Hall. The operas were chosen by the directors, Tracie Pope (Tahiti) and Tal Shahar (Prisoner), independently, but the evening as a whole provided an unsettling view of two very different, and very modern, ways of being trapped.

Sam (Evan Jones) and Dinah (Melissa Vitrella) are no longer communicating. In an attempt to avoid their problems, they decide at the end of the opera to go see the new film, Trouble in Tahiti, which Dinah already saw that afternoon. A trio (Christopher Diaz, Lisa Kotara, and David Margulis) comments on their life like a chorus in a Greek tragedy.

Ms. Pope's staging was inventive and engaging, though I found the mugging of the stagehands as they moved the scenery superfluous and distracting. An instrumental trio (Music Director Elizabeth Blood, piano, Sergio Acerb, bass, and Dave Cochran, percussion) provided lively accompaniment. Krista A. Franco's scenery rendered the '50s suburban milieu subtly and directly. All of the singers were in fine voice, and they handled Ms. Pope's blocking and Marko Westwood's choreography with style.

While Sam and Dinah's marriage leaves them feeling trapped, the incarceration of the unnamed protagonist of Dallapiccola's Prisoner is quite literal. His predicament is rendered concrete and personal in the composer's searing Modern, lyrical score. Ms. Shahar's production eschews specifics as to time and place, so the Prisoner's plight is universal. Ian Zywica's abstract scenic and lighting design was uncomfortably claustrophobic and transgressive. At times the light's shone at the audience, and felt as if you were under the gaze of the Inquisitor yourself.

Ms. Shahar's staging was lean and minimal, letting the music and the singers speak for themselves, for the most part. A Dancer (Terence Duncan) was a distraction, though he danced well. Lara Billings delivered a heartbreaking performance as the Prisoner's Mother and Aaron Beck was all false hope and bureaucratic emptiness as the Jailer/Inquisitor. Music Director Eric Schnobrick conducted a taut, well-paced performance, with FSU Professor Douglas Fisher and Ms. Blood on piano and a fine chorus in the pit.

Scott MacLeod dominated the proceedings as the Prisoner. He communicated anguish, fear, and exhaustion in his voice and in the demanding physicality of the role. It was a challenging role in a challenging opera. The Prisoner is not easy in any sense of the word, and the prolonged ovation by the audience was gratifying on many levels.

Addition

I've added the fine On An Overgrown Path to the blogroll. Dig especially the list of concert music web resources down the right side of the home page.

Goings On

Charles Downey, of the always interesting ionarts, has posted lots of valuable information on Leos Janacek's Makropoulos Affair (a 101 piece)and the composer's other operas. This quote, from an interview with soprano Anja Silja, is particularly telling with regard to shaping a character and a performance:

When I began singing it 35 years ago, I thought that Emilia Marty was a capricious, heartless diva. With time, I realized that she was instead a hypersensitive artist, a wounded woman, who has lived too long fearing death. The events of my own life obliged me to see things as they are. When you get older, you lose your friends, your loves. I know of what I speak: in 1966 and 1967, I lived through the loss of two men I loved, the director Wieland Wagner and the conductor André Cluytens. Emilia Marty became the identifying role of my life.

I hope you have been following the excellent series of posts by Drew McManus and his collaborators on the Take a Friend to Orchestra month project. There are no orchestra concerts in Tallahassee this month, but I do intend to take some friends to the FSU Opera production of Dallapiccola's Prisoner and Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti next weekend.

Critical Convictions

Terry Teachout and George Hunka have posts up about their own critical biases and prejudices. Readers of this 'blog and of my High Hat articles will not be surprised to learn that I would tend to find more of Mr. Hunka's views generally more amenable than those of Mr. Teachout.

In addition, Mr. Teachout's tend to lean quite a bit more to the prescriptive than do Mr. Hunka's. I wonder if that is at least in part due to Mr. Hunka's status as an artist/critic, while Mr. Teachout lacks the "/" and the different slant* it confers.


*As it were.

Everything is Green (IV)

I'm well into the second (of three) scenes of Everything is Green. The action is simple--a couple, in their kitchen in the morning, argue about something the man believes the woman has done, and which she denies. This scene plays out three times, each time at greater length and in greater detail than before, but with no greater communication between the characters.

The music forms the background for this domestic inaction, rather than amplifying or "commenting" on it. Each scene has a different textural basis and rhythmic profile, but is based on similar harmonic material. The two singers share some melodic materials (but not at the same time or even in the same scene) and rhythmic characteristics, but generally speaking, their music remains as separate as they seem to be.

I also have three other pieces going, at various early stages, and I'll probably write about them as they progress.