Composers

Classical Music, Composers, Los Angeles, Orchestras

Last Night in L.A.: Brett Dean (Part 1)

Six years ago, Sequenza21 published an interesting interview with Brett Dean.  The violist who was once the youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic was beginning to be recognized as a composer.  This was about the time he made his first appearance with members of the LA Philharmonic in a “Green Umbrella” concert of new music, performing his work “Intimate Decisions” for viola.  S21, typically prescient, gave a lede to the interview stating that if you hadn’t heard of Dean yet, “You will.  You will.”

This season Dean is the first contemporary composer to be given a spotlight by the LA Phil, in two programs.  Yesterday’s subscription concert featured Dean’s “Viola Concerto” (2005) with the composer as soloist and the full orchestra conducted by Salonen.  Salonen brought out a microphone to introduce Dean to the audience, commenting on how rare (these days) it is to hear a composer performing his own concerto, much less to be so accomplished in both performance and composition. The Phil was one of the co-commissioners for this significant work.  Dean relates that it was initially written as only two movements, but that he then felt the piece needed an introductory movement to provide a frame-setting for the musical ideas.

The first movement, “Fragment”, establishes Dean’s sound, quietly growing in space.  “Pursuit” then places the solo viola in a chase with the orchestra.  Dean’s notes for the work refer to this movement as what could have happened if Paul Hindemith had played in a band with Tom Waits, an interesting idea.  There are occasional respites from the chase, including a lovely and technically-demanding cadenza which also includes elements of bird calls.  The relationship to Australia’s spaciousness and to its birds is a recurring element in several of Dean’s compositions.  “Veiled and Mysterious” returns us to space and quiet of the first movement.  The viola seems to meditate, and then it leads the orchestra into a re-examination of ideas of the first two movements.  The viola, finally at peace, enters into a closing dialog with the English horn.

Dean made great use of sonic color from his orchestra, and the sound in Disney Hall was responsive.  In the third movement, for example, a solo cello begins the orchestral accompaniment, with tremolo from violas; a second solo cello joins in, then a third, then a fourth.  Other strings join the tremolo and then add their own lines.  Bowed percussion add cool, metallic sounds to color the interactions.  This is attractive music, music willing to be introspective as well as active, music able to take advantage of quiet as well as to build sound.

The program for the concert built in color.  Haydn’s Symphony 82 (“The Bear”) began the program.  Following intermission, Salonen conducted a sonic spectacular bringing out every possible color in Ravel’s orchestration of “Pictures at an Exhibition”.

On Saturday, the LA Opera did a really good job of community outreach.  They presented two performances of a new work “Concierto para Mendez” with music by Lee Holdridge and libretto by Richard Sparks.  This is a musical celebration of the life of the trumpeter Rafael Mendez; it combines elements of documentary, opera, and concerto for trumpet.  Soloists from the Opera provided the singers and the LA Opera Orchestra provided the musical continuity and support.  Mendez had an amazing life:  dragooned into Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army as a trumpeter at the age of 10; immigrant to the United States as a laborer at 20; discovered as a musician and becoming a member of the Russ Morgan and Rudy Vallee orchestras; injured in an accident and having to readjust and retrain his embouchure; first chair trumpet for the MGM Orchestra, the best of the studios, at 35; starting a life as soloist and teacher at 40.  Six local trumpet students were selected to appear as his students in the work.  The performances were free. 

by JerryZ
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

4 sentences about classical music that I don’t mind reading

There seemed to be an universal agreement with Soho the Dog when he posted his famous 8 sentences, but on half of them, he was either being way too literal or just wrong.  

“Jazz is America’s classical music.”
Yeah sure, Johns Adams & Corigliano and their peers are this continent’s contributions to the field of classical music, but this, dear fellow, is what we call a metaphor. In this case, it applies to the fact that jazz is an aesthetic that is entirely unique and has risen to the serious-minded plateau of traditional classical music. Why is that so hard?

“Mozart and Beethoven were the popular music of their time.”
There is no 200-year-old equivalent of Justin Timberlake. The pop star is a 20th century creation of a nascent mass media. These composers were, by any measure, more important to their contemporary cultural life than anything that exists today in the classical community. The estimates are that somewhere between 20 and 30,000 people flocked to Beethoven’s funeral. Franz Stober even painted the thing:
 

Lady Di, sure. But can you imagine people turning out like this when Philip Glass checks out?

“Orchestras need to do away with tuxedos because they’re stuffy and outdated.”
Not to mention that they’re utterly absurd. Orchestras started wearing this crap because that’s what the audience wore (There’s a lovely scene in the old movie ‘Tales of Manhattan’ that perfectly illustrates the sartorial peer pressure which gave rise to this tradition). But when do you ever see an audience in white tie these days? In what universe does it make sense for an orchestra to continue to dress this way?

“Composers today only write music for other composers.”
An absurd generalization, of course, but it does put its thumb on the fundamental issue that arises out of classical music being so cloistered: there is no general audience for new classical music in America.

by Jodru
Composers, Experimental Music

What, Edgard Varese as sideman?

Paul Griffiths gets off one zinger of a closing paragraph in the October 6 2006 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (London). The book under review is: Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann (editors), Edgard Varese: Composer, sound sculptor, visionary (500 pp., Boydell and Brewer, 25 pounds sterling).

” … Unlikely as it must seem to anyone familiar with the old myth of the lonely pioneer,” Griffiths writes, “Varese did indeed work with jazz artists, including the trumpeter Art Farmer, the saxophonist Teo Macero and the drummer Ed Shaughnessy. We have the evidence, as [Olivia] Mattis tells us in perhaps the most tantalizing sentence of the book: ‘Recordings of several of these sessions, which also survive in the Paul Sacher Foundation archives, are astonishing.’ Perhaps, before scholars descend to wear these tapes out, the Sacher Foundation could release them on CD. Varese swinging: that would be something to hear.”

Note the “also” in the passage above. Question: So who else has these tapes?

PS. See amplification by Steve Layton and Micah Silver below in “Comments.”

by Richard Buell
ACO, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

The Year of Brad Lubman

Brad Lubman has been involved in the new music scene for nearly two decades but this looks like his breakthrough season.  Conductor/composer Lubman makes his guest conductor debut at the helm of the  American Composers Orchestra Friday evening at  Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, when the ACO kicks off its 30th season with its first Orchestra Underground Composers OutFront! concert.

In addition to leading the orchestra in music from Michael Gatonska,  Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gandolfi, Susie Ibarra,  Charles Ives and our own wunderkind Corey Dargel,  Lubman will conduct the world premiere of his own Fuzzy Logic, for woodwinds, brass, percussion, synthesizer, piano, and amplified cello and video. Lauren Radnofsky is amplified cello soloist and Boom Design Group creates the visual designs.

The program will be repeated at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 15 at 7:30pm.

If you miss those shows, Lubman’s  new music group Electric Fuzz will be gigging Friday, October 20, starting at 7 pm, at Joe’s Pub Electric Fuzz was formed in 2006 by performers and composers who played together as members of the Musica Nova Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music.  The group is currently collaborating with Boom Design Group, a team of virtuoso visual artists and web designers, who draw on their own performance backgrounds to produce improvised and interactive video installations.

The Joe’s Pub event will feature the premiere of a new Lubman work named for Electric Fuzz; plus Jumping to Conclusions, a quartet with electronics; and several pieces for violin, cello and synth that Lubman has co-composed with ensemble member Lauren Radnofsky. Music by David Lang and Pierre Boulez rounds-out the event.

Lubman has enjoyed a busy and multi-faceted career, but is probably best known among new music insiders as a gifted utility infielder who can deliver a superior performance from any world-class orchestra or ensemble on a moment’s notice, a talent honed by having been Assistant Conductor to the mercurial and (in my view) inexplicable Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Music Center from 1989-94. 

This is his well-deserved chance to bat cleanup.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation

Do the Just Thing

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Dear Jerry-

Thanks for your kind words earlier this year about the Ben Johnston String Quartet release on New World Records. I am the producer of that disc, and also the 2nd violinist in the Kepler Quartet (so, not an unbiased perspective…)

I am writing you and your readership with a plea, an invitation (however you wish to frame it) to become a part of bringing this great composer’s legacy into broad daylight. We recently received a Copland grant towards finishing the recorded cycle of Ben’s  10 string quartets, but still need to raise significant dollars to make it happen.

Mr. Johnston just turned 80, is in reasonable health, and has just moved to Wisconsin for family reasons-which means that his expertise is now wonderfully available to us. We have have a talented, committed ensemble, schooled in the challenges of Just Intonation, and a stable, supportive label behind the project.

All the pieces are in place to finish this project except for getting past the aforementioned monetary hump.

Wouldn’t it be a healthy scenario  if we could get a grassroots, Howard Dean-like campaign going, and include as many individuals as possible from the new music online community, at modest contributions, in support of this truly great, and largely-overlooked composer late in his career?

Could be worth a small investment for the Karma alone, not to mention the accessibility of this ground-breaking music…

We’re going to attempt it, because we know it’s the right thing to do, not the commercial thing to do—anyone out there with us?

For details, please see

http://www.keplerquartet.com/fundraising/

May we all have each other’s support when we need it!

Eric Segnitz
Kepler Quartet

ericsegnitz@yahoo.com

by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Contemporary Classical

It’s a Blog!

We have a terrific new blog to unveil this morning.  It’s called From the Faraway Nearby: An American Composer in Latvia and is written by Charles Griffin, a native New Yorker who is now living in Liepaja, a small industrial city in the western region of Latvia, on the Baltic Sea.  Fascinating insights into a musical world that is far different from the one most of us know.

Elsewhere, the classical pretentiousness thread goes on forever on the Composers Forum page.  Leonard Slatkin weighs in with some new fodder over at Drew McManus’ Adaptistration, which is where the conversation began.

Did I mentioned that Steve Reich is Composer of the Month in the S21 shop?

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Minimalism

Happy Birthday, Steve

Steve Reich turns 70 today.  There will be the usual superlatives–greatest living composer, most important musical thinker, and other fun, but largely unreliable, speculations. We won’t burden Reich with any of them.  The path of music history is already littered with the ghosts of greatest livings whose work has since fallen into neglect and obscurity.  Others fade for awhile only to have their reputations re-claimed by forceful new advocates.  One of the great things about leaving behind a body of work as essential to its time as Reich’s is that it is a legacy each age can evaluate on its own terms and through the prism of its own judgements and tastes. 

Suffice it to say that Steve Reich is one of the few composers to have captured fame, fortune and widespread admiration in his own lifetime and one of the even fewer who have a real shot at musical immortality. That’s an achievement worth celebrating. 

And he still has time on the meter. 

Events in the Steve Reich@70 festival:

BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Choreography by Akram Khan and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, with the London Sinfonietta, Tuesday and Thursday through Oct. 7 at 7:30 p.m. BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100

CARNEGIE HALL

A concert by young artists participating in a weeklong professional training program, on Oct. 19 at 7:30 p.m., Zankel Hall; a concert of works performed by the artists they were written for, including Pat Metheny and the Kronos Quartet, Oct. 21 at 8 p.m., Isaac Stern Auditorium; and a “discovery day” of lectures, talks and films, and an all-Reich program including “Drumming” and “Daniel Variations,” Oct. 22 starting at noon in Weill Hall, with the concert at 7:30 p.m. in Zankel Hall. (212) 247-7800

LINCOLN CENTER

A concert with the Los Angeles Master Chorale including “Tehillim” and the New York premiere of “You Are (Variations),” Oct. 28 at 8 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall; and “The Cave,” Nov. 2 to 4 at 8 p.m., Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, 899 10th Avenue, at 58th Street. (212) 721-6500

WHITNEY MUSEUM

An installation of “Three Tales” from Wednesday through Oct. 15, with a free four-hour concert by some important young ensembles (including Alarm Will Sound on Oct. 15 at 2 p.m. webcast live on whitney.org. 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street(800) 944-8639.

Composer of the Month

by Jerry Bowles
CDs, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Family Bidness

Elodie Lauten is performing and presenting her piano and chamber music on Tuesday, October 3 – 8 PM at Faust Harrison Pianos, 205 West 58th Street in Manhattan.

Elodie will perform selections from her new Piano Soundtracks CD, including Variations on the Orange Cycle, a work that was included in Chamber Music America’s list of 100 best works of the 20th century. Pianist Francois Nezwazky, violinist Tom Frenkel and cellist Kurt Behnke will give the World Premiere of her new trio, The Elusive Virgin Bachelor.

The concert is free and open to the public, however, a donation of $15 is suggested. For reservations and information, call (212) 388-0202 or (516) 586-3433 or email mailto:jamesarts@worldnet.att.net

So you think all S21 regulars are Euromodernist wannabes?  This should set you straight.  Tom’s Myron’s new Violin Concerto.

by Jerry Bowles
Boston, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Letter from Boston: Ghosts, yearning, time, the sea, and the Globe

From H.H. Stuckenschmidt, “Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work,” translated by Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977):

” … in 1934 [Schoenberg] answered a query from Dr. Walter E. Koons of the National Broadcasting Corporation [sic] in New York, who wanted a definition for a book which he was planning, of what music meant to Schoenberg. His reply was:

‘Music is a simultaneous and a successiveness of tones and tonal-combinations, which are so organized that its impression on the ear is agreeable, and that its impression on the intelligence is comprehensible, and that these impressions have the power to influence occult parts of our soul and of our sentimental spheres and that this influence makes us live in a dreamland of fulfilled desires, or in a dreamed hell.'”

He had to ask?

* * * * *

Let’s say that your tastes run to Gagaku, the world’s most ancient (and ancient-sounding) orchestral music. Or to Messiaen‘s deliriously half-cracked song cycle “Harawi” (“Doundou tchil! Doundou tchil! Doundou tchil!” — one can’t help quoting). Or “Pierrot Lunaire.” Or that claustrophobic film classic “Woman of the Dunes” (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) …

Then lucky you if you happened to be at the First Church in Boston, 66 Marlborough Street, on a recent Sunday night (September 17) for the local premiere of Lee Hyla’s “At Suma Beach” (2003).

Something you noticed first off, and with relief, about Hyla’s “reduction/adaptation” of the Noh play “Matsukaze” was its avoidance of bogus japonaiserie, even of the most refined type. (If you crave some queasy examples of that, go and listen to Toru Takemitsu on one of his really bad days. And by the way, how widely known is it that in the early 20th century the Japanese themselves were turning out imitations of “Madame Butterfly”? Source: William P. Malm, University of Michigan.)

The piece’s instrumental setup — clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, and percussion — has nothing particularly extreme about it per se. But any mezzo-soprano who thinks about taking it on had better be carrying extra insurance. You either sing it or you die.

Mostly sing it, that is. Also required are: speaking, half-speaking and half-singing, moaning, whispering, and even growling. The pitches are fixed most of the time, but every so often they’re let loose and encouraged to range just about wherever they like. But please to come back. Towards the close, a few choice ones go either very high or very low.

Does “At Suma Beach” have one text or two? The question arises because for some 25 minutes the piece is constantly oscillating back and forth between the Japanese and an English translation, the latter making a point of leaving the Japanese word order quite as it is thank you. An example: “So recited with reason/Still longing deepens/’Yoiyo ni/Nugite waga nuru kari-goromo.'”

It probably doesn’t matter, since there was a kind of double benefit here. (1) You got to hear the abstract beauty an unfamiliar language can yield up (such vowels, such rhythms!) and (2) you also got to hear a fair amount of informative content. The sad, eerie story did indeed get told. We always knew where we were and what the characters were thinking and feeling.

It went like this. A tiny wisp of clarinet sonority gently detaches itself from the other instruments. Then comes some obliquely pictorial moon and sea music (more wisps and glints), and the singer enters: Bach specialist Pamela Dellal, whose lustrous mezzo — and its extensions — seemed primed for anything.

We’re told about the two sisters, who are now ghosts, about stifled passions of centuries past, and about the lover whom one of the sisters has willed into returning in an other than human shape. Nothing comes of it in the end except more longing and pain, the passage of time, the wind and the sea — those wisps of clarinet sonority have returned — and the sea and the wind. We are where we were.

Of course Hyla’s music is informed here by what traditional Japanese music sounds like — that’s why he went to Japan for two months — but it’s informed as well by his ease and familiarity with many different kinds of music, high and low, mandarin and demotic. (On that two-month visit to Japan to gather material Hyla found that there are such things as Gagaku garage bands. Well, he would. And by his own admission he threw out quite a lot to achieve that seamless 25-minute span.)

Overall what most struck your reviewer most about “At Suma Beach” was its feeling of steady, subtle emotional momentum. Next, how shrewdly integrated the thing was, and what a fetching, varicolored “sound” piece it turned out to be without half trying. That’s how Hyla is with instruments. He can’t help himself.

Marvelous stuff. Chilling. Moving. Will we ever hear it again?

The excellent performers — please note their names! — were: the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble: Diane Heffner (clarinet), Cyrus Stevens (violin), Kate Vincent (viola), Michael Curry (cello), Donald Berman (piano), Robert Schulz (percussion), with Pamela Dellal (mezzo) and Scott Wheeler (conductor).

* * * * *

October looms, the evenings draw in earlier, and the Boston musical scene has come to life again — flutist Fenwick Smith gave his annual virtuosic staples-plus-oddities recital at NEC, the BSO has had the carpenters in at Symphony Hall to lay down a new stage floor (mind those acoustics, lads!), the Handel and Haydn Society/English National Opera’s strongly sung, nice to look at, hip-exotic “Orfeo” came and went, and a rather dimly played all-Nikos Skalkottas concert at BU succeeded in raising doubts — not what was intended at all — about the reputation of this composer, who was cited as one of the 20th-century’s half dozen greatest by Hans Keller, the flintily brilliant UK opinion-monger, Haydn expert, string quartet coach, and BBC heavy, now deceased. (Evidently the Bis CDs of his music make a different impression, and it turns out that folklorism can indeed lie down companionably with the 12-tone method. See various rave reviews in Gramophone magazine.) A big shock: how loud and vehement, bludgeoning home point after interpretive point (the victim: Mozart’s K. 387), the Borromeo String Quartet, once everybody’s darlings, has become. Well, look at all the touring they do. They’ve caught the disease. Richard Dyer is gone, very gone (as of Sept. 18) from the Boston Globe. What a change in atmosphere. It’s as if the moment he left they immediately whisked away the throne chair, vowing: Never again another monstre sacre, never never. The question now is: who is this Jeremy Eichler person? Is there any ragtime in his soul? Will he spell even a wee bit of trouble? Let us pray.

All of which may be neither here nor there. The real event of the month — we insist — was Lee Hyla’s “At Suma Beach.”

RICHARD BUELL can be reached at rbuell@verizon.net

by Richard Buell
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, Orchestras

An Orchestra Blooms in Brooklyn

The Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra announced the schedule yesterday for its usual four concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and there’s great news for contemporary music lovers, especially those who have a jones for the didgeridoo.  

The season opens on February 3 with two works by the Australian composer Peter Schulthorpe–Earth Cry and Mangrove–plus Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  Music director Michael Christie, now in his second season, was formerly director of the Queensland Orchestra, which explains the ‘Roo connection. 

The second concert, on March 10, pits Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round and a new orchestration of Dreams & Prayers of Issac the Blind against Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.  My money’s on Mahler by about eight minutes.

The orchestra will be joined by the Kronos Quartet on April 21 for the premiere of Julia Wolfe’s My Beautiful Scream, plus Holst’s Planets and Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, the wellspring of the spirtualist wing of contemporary music (Part, Taverner, Gorecki, Lauridsen, Whitacre et al), an important and popular modern movement mostly ignored by the fine young cannibals who gather here but greatly admired by those of us who don’t know any better. 

And, speaking of Gorecki, his Symphony Number 3–with a first ever staging by the Ridge Theater–is the centerpiece of the final concert on May 12.  It’s matched with Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Mahler and Mozart’s Exsultate jubilate.

The Philharmonic also does community and school concerts, and will present two genre-blending concerts, including a program with performances by Laurie Anderson,Nellie McKay, Joan Osborne and Suzanne Vega.

by Jerry Bowles