Once again, one of our regulars is responsible for adding some coolness to the world. 

“But I do believe the people who are the most immortal are the composers. The man on the street, he knows who Beethoven is, he knows who Mozart is. And I’d like to compose.”– Joshua Bell, from a CNN story on his win of the Avery Fisher Prize

April 7^th, 2011: Gerald called. Says if I don’t do Tchaik in Berlin this November I can kiss my contract goodbye. Sigh. My cello sonata needs the time. I just got the draft back from Yo-Yo who has reservations about the dead butterflies. But that’s the sound I want!! He’d do it, but I can tell he’d rather not . . . And Manny still can’t get the hang of bowing piano strings. I’ve showed him ten million times, but . . . Anyway so I have to put the entire thing back under the knife. Also heard from Sony. They want to hear “exosphere” before agreeing to record. Fair enough, but you try to find twelve accordion players who are available the same afternoon for a session! Ugh. And Edgar’s in town next week and wants to have dinner at Saint Georges. I guess I can spare the money. He’s a pal, and, who knows? Maybe I can get him to commission that bass and percussion piece I’ve been thinking about . . . Oh and the rehearsal with Hillary? Disaster. Ask her to play double-stop trills, no problem. But write one measly microtone, and forget it: we spent twenty minutes on one single note, and I’m still not sure she has it. At least the fifth annual S21 concert at Carnegie was awesome. Wish those guys would show me some love . . .

Consider this: Christopher Rouse does not compose every day; he starts every piece in full score, on measure one; he doesn’t use a piano much, because he can hardly play; he finds the entire process of composition miserable from start to finish and perennially aspires to artistic levels he believes he cannot attain; he only hears the bad things when his pieces get performed, and he is waiting for the day when people wake up and realize he’s no good.

Rouse is, as in his music, unafraid to air his honest thoughts. He can appear neurotic and contradictory one moment, pragmatic and confident the next. He was so thoroughly interesting, I couldn’t resist trying to switch him before interview’s end to my own favorite topics: music and education. But we still had music to discuss.

Rouse has two upcoming world premieres: a Requiem (commissioned by Soli Deo Gloria, Inc.) and Wolf Rounds (commissioned by the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music). The former takes place March 25^th at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the latter at Carnegie Hall on March 29^th.

Rouse has been thinking about a Requiem for a while and all along the idea of interspersing the Latin liturgical text with secular poetry has inspired him. In his new work, he uses the secular texts to tell the story of a man’s encounters with death: a Seamus Heaney poem describes death from the perspective of the man as a ten year-old boy; a poem by Michelangelo mourns the death of the man’s father; a Siegfried Sassoon poem relates the suicide of a comrade in the trenches of World War I. These poems – and others – are sung by a solo baritone; the Latin is reserved for the chorus. Musically, Rouse organizes the work into an instrumental palindrome, building up from the opening unaccompanied baritone solo to the tutti “Tuba mirum,” and closing again with the solo baritone.

In Wolf Rounds Rouse gets the chance to rock out. The 17-minute work for symphonic band attempts to capture the rhythmic vitality and virtuosic energy of Rouse’s favorite rock music – most notably Led Zeppelin. Over a driving beat, instruments take up variations of the same melodic line; the close, quasi-canonic counterpoint calls to mind the circling of wolves around their prey. There are even some flutter-tongue trombone growls: mimesis, but also a nod to John Corigliano’s Symphony No.3 – another work for symphonic band.

Near the end of the interview, Rouse told me he was worried about his stage bow at Disney Hall. It takes 90 seconds to reach the stage from the balcony, and it was possible the applause might not last that long. The performers have assured him they will stretch the applause in the unlikely event such measures are necessary.

P.S. He’s also on MySpace.

A good time is to be had this Saturday night at Zankel Hall.  Chris Thile and The Tensions Mountain Boys will premiere his bluegrass/classical suite “The Blind Leading the Blind.” As long as your sensibilities are broader than “Sator Arepo tenet opera rotas,” you should have no problem. 

Still: let’s keep ’em honest.  If you will promise us a well-edited and not too long-winded review, Jerry and I will in turn throw our estimate clout around and get you in for free. 

You know how to reach us.

Speaking of bluegrass, how about a round of random and rapturous applause for Franco Donatoni!

Watching Olga Neuwirth’s opera Lost Highway is like watching a Harry Potter movie after having read the book: the material transfers all right, but one wishes the team behind the retelling had gone further in re-imagining the original work for a new medium. Lost Highway follows David Lynch’s movie more or less scene for scene: many images from the film get repeated on stage, and many lines from the screenplay find their way – sometimes awkwardly – into the libretto (written by Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek). Neuwirth’s principal musical conceit is to have Fred and Renee – the dull, troubled couple – speak their lines, while Pete and Alice – the sexy, transformed version of the same couple – sing theirs. This sounds promising in the program notes, but in reality Neuwirth doesn’t follow through: the majority of the lines in the opera – including those belonging to Pete and Alice – are spoken. What lines are sung come across often as labored and sluggish, rather than fantastical and intense. Neuwirth adopts a highly melismatic approach to setting the text, and this approach, while it blends well with her very ambient score, has the undesirable consequence of suddenly retarding the action on stage. Seeing as many of the most emotive and seemingly “operatic” lines are spoken, one wonders how and why she really chose what to have sung.

But still: Lost Highway is by no means a bad time. My comments above notwithstanding, the show in general moves along with sure-footed efficiency, and the often very short scenes rarely close without making an impact. There is also much to admire in Neuwirth’s music. The murky electronic burble that underscores most of the action recedes nicely at many times to reveal a sardonic choir of brass instruments, or an intimate set of strings. She even manages to sneak in some amusingly “American” sounding bluesiness and to capture the peculiar, dreamy dread that is Lynch’s trademark. And her decision to make Robert Blake’s “Mystery Man” a countertenor is a touch of genius. I didn’t get, however, the extended quotation from The Threepenny Opera early in the show. Nor can I imagine an explanation that would convince me this was the right time for a little haranguing from Bertolt Brecht.

The Oberlin Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble did a splendid job in the pit, and certainly this entire project does that wonderful school proud. But if composers, artists, or playwrights are to do justice to David Lynch, they must be as imaginative as he is. Neuwirth and Jelinek might have done better by dropping the original screenplay altogether, throwing together a libretto by riffing spontaneously on Lynch’s images, themes, and language, and turning Lost Highway into a wild fantasy on a wild fantasy. What we have instead is something much more literal-minded, and, therefore, something not especially faithful to the original material at all.

One of the many pleasures of the brief (but free) all-Chinary Ung concert given earlier today at Juilliard by the Da Capo Chamber Players was the absence of any blathering about “East meets West.” I’m sure part of the reason for the absence was a simple lack of time for blathering altogether: the performance was given in conjunction with the school’s Composers’ Forum which apparently keeps to a pretty tight schedule. But whatever the reason, such cross-cultural discussion would have been out of place. Ung’s music does not sound eclectic; it does not sound as if it had some agenda of cross-cultural reconciliation. His music sounds like music written by someone from a different musical culture who has found a way to manifest that culture with Western instruments. And the sound of Western instruments in such gifted Eastern hands is disarming, refreshing, and exciting. Ung’s command of extended techniques and his sensitivity to blending instruments must make him (with Tristan Murail) one of the foremost masters of tone color around. Ung’s ability to draw consonant intervals out from dense currents of heterophony, and then to place them back gently into the stream, was amply displayed in “Oracle,” “Luminous Spirals,” “Spiral VI,” and “… Still Life After Death,” the pieces on tonight’s program. While I thought most of the pieces were a little too long, the beautifully tapered endings did not lack impact, and the extra time to savor the sonorities pouring forth from the stage was welcome.  A highlight was the concluding vocal duet from “Still Life” between Lucy Shelton and the violinist (David Bowlin). Ung calls upon the violinist to stand and lowly chant an old Buddhist text while the singer whispers and stammers away into another life. This could have been nonsense, but instead it was the most moving music I’ve heard in months.

P.S. The Da Capos are currently recording a CD of Ung’s works. The label? Bridge. (Of course.)

The Tablet PC-wielding piano-playing super-awesome Hugh Sung is celebrating one year as a blogger. He has a podcast here introducing his cool gear to musicians. Get with the program, folks, and give Hugh a click.

Busy here chasing pentatonic collections in Debussy.  I think there goes one right now… 

Nice burble of activity going on here. Way to keep the fires burning, people.

Robert Zimmerman’s learning how to take the heat over in the Composers Forum. Click on comments: some heavyweights are weighing in.

A charming post from Jeffrey Biegel, who’s performing Lowell Liebermann in Germany. I wonder what all the Kool Kats in Deutschland think about our Lowell.

Anthony Cornicello digs the five-octave marimba; Naxos’s hawking some Virgil Thomson; Jay Batzner’s uncovered a copy of the long suppressed video of Einstein on the Beach. Huzzah! Makes me long for a Lego Lohengrin. (Paging Robert Wilson!)

And just below Steve Layton has the real deal from South of the Border.  I wonder if having CD reviews on the home page constitues illegal immigration.  

(Boo!  Hiss!)  Tough crowd.

And Gottschalk has top billing in CD Reviews.

Gottschalk???

I’ve got some serious dissertating to do over the weekend. Aren’t you glad it’s a long one, too? When I told my ear training class they had off because of Abraham Lincoln, one orange-haired genius said: “We should shoot all the Presidents!”

Jerry’s back next week. Poor guy’s in San Diego.

Sometimes you don’t need to travel far to be where the hot stuff’s happening. We’ve got fresh action on a lot of fronts here at the ole dump.

First stop: Composers Forum. Robert Zimmerman, a new voice here whose presence advances our already unstoppable progress through Dixie, finds the whole “I’ll be understood after I’m dead”-thing a bit ridiculous. But he knows a few famous folks these days who don’t. I think I’m going to go leave a comment . . .

Back now. Moving on.

Next: Lawrence Dillon has a reflection or two on Ned Rorem’s Our Town. And some interesting dirt on the John Williams.

Next: the inimitable Elodie Lauten problematizes the notion of calling oneself a composer. Uh-oh.

Next: things are getting a bit slow for Jay Batzner. But he has some spoils from the battlefront nonetheless.

Next: take a stop in CD Reviews and read about a sexy new thang featuring some Babbitt and Rakowski. Yowza! Then go see what happens when you look up “Hayes Biggs” in Grove.

And – as if this weren’t enough – Jacob Sudol finds a particularly well-established contemporary German composer to be no lach-ing matter. Hardy, har, har . . .

Phew.

There’s only one course of action left for the reasonable person: drop everything and call in sick. You have some catching up to do.

I had never given a moment’s thought to music written for television until 1997. I was watching The Late Show with the great Peter Takács when he suddenly – in reference to Paul Shafer – said: “This guy’s a genius.”

While there’s no reason the art of composing for television cannot be done ingeniously, I cannot at the moment think of a television composer who enjoys the status of “genius.” This is in stark contrast to film composers, a small gaggle of whom regularly get the G-word applied to them (Bernard Hermann, Toru Takemitsu, Ennio Morricone . . . ). But what about Mike Post? Or Alf Clausen? Or . . . Michael Giacchino?

The punchline: Lost returns tonight! Hooray! While I admit Giacchino’s work isn’t the first reason I tune in, I am nonetheless looking forward to those low harp plucks, string tremolos, drum thuds, and creepy ostinatos with which he skillfully scores the show. His terse, austere music rarely gets the sort of attention Mama Cass and Drive Shaft have received, but when Giacchino gets a chance to let things rip, the results can be wonderful. My favorite musical moment is from the first season at the end of the episode “Deus Ex Machina:” a plain-spoken but impassioned string section raises magnificently through Terry O’Quinn’s raging words; he is “beatin’ [his] hand bloody” on a door in the ground that just won’t open. But then –