Tuesday, October 04, 2005
It Had a Good Beat and Was Easy to Dance to
Correct me if I'm wrong but there appears to be a bias afoot in the "serious" music community which holds that music that is too immediately engaging, too easy to listen to, too much "fun," can't possibly be any good. This attitude is especially pervasive with the complexity crowd. As a listener who is left cold by Carter and would rather be captured by the Viet Cong and kept in a tiger cage and fed jungle worms than sit through an hour of Charles Wuorinen, this...let's call it, elitist...attitude is puzzling. Even Schoenberg, who may have invented the concept of music as torture, wrote works like Gurrelieder that are pure, sensual pleasure to the ear.
 These thoughts are triggered by the scheduled performance tonight at BAM of a long, throughly ear-engaging piece called Orion by Philip Glass which brings together some of the world's greatest players of indigenous instruments--Mark Atkins on the digeridoo, Wu Man on the pipa, Kartik Seshadri on the sitar, Foday Musa Suso on the African kora and many others--in what might be described (I'm showing my age here) as a multi-cultural hootenanny. I've been listening to a CD of Orion for several weeks now and I find it both thoroughly disarming and one more reason "serious" composers and critics tend to underrate Glass. His work commits the cardinal sin of academic modernism--it is commerically viable. For that, he is not to be forgiven.
Hey, we have a new blogger today. Jacob Sudol, a doctoral candidate at McGill, is going to be covering the Montreal scene for us and he checks in today with a review of a performance called "Old Life Was Rubbish."
posted by Jerry Bowles
10/04/2005
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