My interview with Dennis Russell Davies, who is conducting the ACO concert, is up on Musical America’swebsite (subscribers only).
If you’re looking for a terrific way to celebrate PG’s birthday, Brooklyn Rider’s latest CD on Orange Mountain Music includes Glass’s first five string quartets. The earthiness with which they play the music may surprise you at first, but it provides a persuasive foil for some of the more motoric, “high buffed sheen” toned performances of minimalism that are out there. In a 2011 video below, they give a performance of a more recent work, a suite of music from the film Bent.
“Seventy-five used to be a very old age for a composer. Of course, with Elliott Carter around, it makes me feel like a youngster!” – Philip Glass.
The American Composers Orchestra, led by Conductor Laureate Dennis Russell Davies, gives the American premiere of Glass’s Ninth Symphony tomorrow at Carnegie Hall.Also on the program: the NY premiere of Arvo Pärt’sLamentate for piano and orchestra with Maki Namekawa as soloist.
Tomorrow, Musical America will be running my interview with Davies.
Steve Reich turns 75 today. One of the premiere maestros of minimalism continues to dazzle us with thought-provoking and musically moving creations.
This morning, I introduced some of my undergraduate BA students to Reich, playing excerpts from Piano Phase, Music for 18 Musicians, and Different Trains. Some of them were unfamiliar with his music, but one student piped up,”What about Four Sections? I like that one too!”
If our students, particularly our student musicians, are picking out favorites and learning to perform Reich’s music, that is indeed a promising sign for the future of his works. As a small online musical offering, below are three student performances of Reich. The first is the trailer for Grand Valley State University’s Music for 18 Musicians recording. It was released a couple years ago, but has remained in heavy rotation in these parts! The second is an excerpt of Six Marimbas by students at the University of Kentucky. The third I’ve shared before, but can’t resist posting again: a pianist playing both parts of Piano Phase - at once!
And, just for my morning class, a video of a dance performance of Four Sections.
Now that we’ve gotten the cover art discussion out of the way – and Nonesuch has acquiesced to the concerns of those who felt the artwork exploitative and inflammatory – let’s consider the music on Steve Reich’s latest recording.
An interest found throughout Steve Reich’s output concerns spoken word recordings, which he has employed in a number of pieces, from his early phase compositions to his most recent multimedia works. One of his watershed pieces from the 1980s, “Different Trains,” was written for the Kronos Quartet. It juxtaposes spoken word recordings detailing train travel in the US in the 1940s (Reich was frequently traveling from coast to coast to visit his estranged parents) with spoken word accounts of the treatment of deported victims of the Holocaust in transit to concentration camps.
“WTC 9/11” (2011), also for Kronos, employs similarly emotionally charged taped material, this time referencing the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. Scored for three quartets (using overdubs), field recordings, and electronics, the piece’s outer sections are propelled by the jarring sound of a telephone’s “dead wire” signal, and also incorporate alarmed shouts of air traffic controllers and emergency first-responders. These are woven into the gestural fabric of the quartet’s music, which outlines each utterance with a melodic motif. Also incorporated are snippets of 2009 interviews with lower Manhattan residents, recalling their reactions to the tragedy and reflecting on how it has changed them.
The central passage is particularly evocative: the voices of Jewish officiants chanting and singing psalms over the remains of victims in the months following 9/11 interweaves with angst-filled sustained passages of string writing. One wishes that this area of the piece had been allowed more time to develop and register. Instead, Reich cuts it short, returning to the pensive and dramatically charged material of the opening to close out the work in portentous fashion.
In comparing it to its predecessor Different Trains, I would say that this piece takes a similar approach to the treatment of material. That said, its affect is entirely different. At around fifteen minutes long, “WTC 9/11” is a terser utterance than one might imagine as a response to an event with such far-reaching consequences. But in so crafting it, Reich has recaptured some of the blunt force trauma to our nation’s psyche in the days following the initial event. He’s also avoided some of the overt sentimentality that other artworks commemorating 9/11 have been unwilling to forgo. It is this quality that gives “WTC 9/11” a potent dramatic heft that, though jarring at times, proves taut and unflinchingly eloquent.
Rhythmic drive and insistent pulsation underpin most of Reich’s music. A signature aspect of his style is the incorporation of polyrhythms, which he learned from his studies of African drumming. Reich has created a number of pieces for percussion ensembles or featuring percussion as a strong component. But the Mallet Quartet (2009) is a nod towards the continuing evolution of pitched percussion instruments; it’s his first work to incorporate the largest member of the mallet family: the five-octave marimba. Two of these populate the piece with layers of ostinato repetitions and thrumming, resonant bass thwacks. Meanwhile, two vibraphones supply shimmering chords and sustained lines. The piece juxtaposes these forces of wood and metal, pulsation and sustain, demonstrating that these two instruments can provide abundant variety and color. Engaging in nimble interplay, So Percussion’s rendition of this piece is informed by their years-long association with Reich’s music; they’ve also release an excellent rendition of his earlier work Drumming. When I saw them perform Mallet Quartet live at Carnegie Hall, they did so from memory. This intimate and comprehensive knowledge of the piece is reflected in its authoritative recording.
Reich himself appears, as part of the Steve Reich and Musicians ensemble, in the recording of Dance Patterns (2002). It was originally written for Ictus to accompany Thierry de Mey’s film Counterphrases of Anne Terese de Keersmaeker’s Choreography. Here, mallet instruments are joined by pianos. While the limpid counterpoint and fulsome polyrhythms found in the Mallet Quartet prevails here, the addition of concert grands adds richness to the harmonies; some of the piano writing takes on a positively jazzy cast. Vibrant and accessible, it may not be a watershed work like his pieces for Kronos, but it’s the perfect way to introduce Reich to a new audience. Maybe a passel of foreign film buffs will catch the minimalist bug!
It seems fitting, in a way, that pianist and composer Dustin O’Halloran calls Los Angeles home. His post-classical instrumental compositions are frequently evocative in a fashion that’s also come to be associated with (good) film music: atmospheric, melodically direct, and capable of expressing a wide range of emotions. And even though O’Halloran has become active as a film composer in recent years, scoring An American Affair and the upcoming Like Crazy (out in October), he remains involved in creating music separate from images that’s equally involving.
Lumiere, O’Halloran’s debut for the Fat Cat imprint, is some of his most arresting music to date. With sterling support from Jóhann Jóhannsson, who handles engineering and mixing duties and contributes electronics to the proceedings, as well as members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) recording the string parts, O’Halloran crafts more intricate arrangements than those found on previous albums. While elaborations don’t inherently enhance, here they allow O’Halloran’s piano to become one texture among many, a percussive foil for richly layered strings and synths. Passages reminiscent of Francophone neoclassicism, variously recalling Satie’s Gymnopedies and Parisian waltzes, as well stretches bell-tinged minimalism, are frequently present in this collection of compelling compositions. Here’s hoping that O’Halloran will be able to maintain both scoring and non-programmatic creation in the rotation for a long time to come.
Back in 1992, I sang in violinist Paul Festa’s recital at Juilliard. I was part of a quartet that sang “Knee Play 4″ from Philip Glass’Einstein on the Beach. Paul even got us an audience with the composer himself. We travelled downtown and sang the piece for Philip Glass at his home. He was very helpful, offering several suggestions and even playing the piano for us.
I came across this video of the performance, taken at the recital. The most startling thing, besides seeing myself singing on YouTube, was seeing an earlier incarnation of myself that had a full head of hair!
Mantra Percussion recently recorded Aaron Siegel’s Science is Only a Sometime Friend for his Lockstep imprint. The version that appears here, a single, continuously played forty minute long piece for eight glockenspiels and organ, is somewhat different from the original conception of the piece. In its outdoor live version, passersby were invited to contribute improvisatory additions on extra instruments (one can see examples of this on YouTube).
While the studio version may not capture the delightful aleatory of its sister conception, it is a strong piece in its own right. Siegel certainly owes a debt to minimalism, in particular to works by Steve Reich such as Music for Mallet Instruments and the more recent Mallet Quartet. It shares an affinity with some of the drone partials of works byLa Monte Young and even the upper harmonics employed in certain spectral works as well.
But it also channels more recent innovations. It’s tintinnabular halo of overlapping glockenspiel lines take on more futuristic timbres, at turns mimicking micro-polyphonic synthesis and the homemade instruments of Tristan Perich. Indeed, this is music that is less about repetition as pulsating ostinato and more about its ability to create resonant accumulations, sonic washes, that gradually morph. It’s an elegantly shaped and often beguiling sound world. While Siegel’s view of Science as a fair weather companion is a common one in our skeptical era, there’s no doubting that the supple organicism of this work, outdoors or on the hi-fi, is well nigh irresistible.
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