Rodney has been doing such a great job with the Proms that it’s given me time to finish one of my new projects–the Cleantech Collective, a social community for people who believe there is serious money to be made in cleaning up the planet which, of course, is the most persuasive argument for doing so. (See Tragedy of the Commons for details). Also, having this thing with the lower back. When I sit down, it takes me about three minutes to get vertical again. Who wants to be Rodney next week while I consult my physical therapist?
The Prom concert on Tuesday night was given by the BBC Symphony and John Adams, with pianist Olli Mustonen. The big event of the evening was the first performance of Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony, a big instrumental piece based on scenes from his opera of the same name. In this project he was consciously following the example of Hindemith with Mathis der Mahler in not merely assembling a sort of suite from the opera, but recomposing the material into a related but nonetheless independent symphonic composition. In a pre-concert talk Adams said that the task had been much more difficult and time consuming than he had at first envisioned: what he had assumed he could do in a month actually took seven. His main problem was with the reworking of the original music, containing vocal lines, as a completely instrumental texture including those lines as instrumental parts in a completely convincing way.
The symphony is in four movements, The first, The Laboratory, from the beginning of the opera is set in Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory, and includes what in the opera was a choral setting of text from a book about the military uses of atomic weapons; the second, The Bedroom, is based primarily on music setting a poem by Baudelaire which is a set piece in a scene in the opera for Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty; Panic, the third movement, the most extended, uses music from the second act having to do anxiety about whether or not the bomb will actually work (and other kinds of panic, Adams said); the concluding movement, Trinity, is an intensely sorrowful song based on the opera’s climactic music, sung by Oppenheim, setting the Donne sonnet, Batter My Heart Three Personed God. The symphony is a wonderful piece, serious in its intent and imposing in its execution, and always compelling and engaging. It is gorgeously orchestrated, full of beautiful lines, beautifully written for the instruments and completely sure in its dramatic trajectory and timing. (Adams should write a tuba concerto immediately; the writing for tuba was especially imaginative and effective.) It was exciting to hear it, and it makes me want to hear the whole opera as soon as possible. If there’s any quibble about it, it might be that so many of the tunes are in the horn, the trombone, and the bassoons. Adams spoke about this in his talk. Most of the music he used in the symphony involves men’s singing parts, and he put them in instruments which have the same range. The exception to this is the last movement, based on the Donne setting, which he moved up in register and turned into a wonderful trumpet megasolo. One might wish that he had spread the other voice parts over the entire register and timbre of the orchestra as well.
Adams the opera composer has a pretty near perfect sense of how long things should go on and when something different should happen. Century Rolls, a big piano concerto, suggests that Adams the instrumental composer doesn’t. It seemed to me that each of the three movements went on too long, the first movement most egregiously, being, to my mind, about twice too long.
(I presume there was some kind of process going on which caused this to happen.) The instrumental writing, although engaging and interesting, also lacked anything like the specificity of the beautifully shaped former vocal lines in the Doctor Atomic Symphony, and although the piano part seemed plenty hard, it also most of the time was just part of the general texture, rather than standing out in any way. The exception to this was the second movement, which was very beautiful. It’s title is Manny’s Gym, Manny being Emmanuel Ax, for whom it was written, and the Gym in this case being a Gymnopedie; the quality of the piece as a Gymnopedie is not immediately apparent, but is gradually revealed, presumably also systematically somehow. The third movement, Hail Bop, was intended, apparently, as a sort of tribute both to bebop lines and to Nancarrow, but didn’t actually seem much different in character or method from the first movement. The performances of both the Adams pieces seemed to be near perfect.
The concert began with an excellent performance of the suite from Billy the Kid by Copland. For my money, this is the best of the Copland ballets; it’s always interesting and inventive and always, however pompous it may be to put it like this, music of substance, which, it seems to me, can’t be said for the other two. In his pre-concert talk, Adams said that he thought that the ‘populist’ Copland pieces were better than his other pieces. With all due respects to Mr. Adams, this seems to me to be quite foolish. Not that I want to make the opposite case, but rather I’d like to do away with the distinction. The manner of Billy the Kid, the way it’s put together and the way it works, is really not different from the manner of the Sextet/Short Symphony, for instance, and, for that matter, even with the cowboy tunes, it doesn’t sound all that different; nor does Music for the Theater, say, sound all that different, really, from even the Lincoln Portrait. Arthur Berger, when he wrote a review of the Piano Sonata in the 1940’s (hailing it as evidence of Copland’s return to his ‘asbsract’ style) got a rebuke from Copland for making the distinction between his ‘popular’ and ‘abstract’ (I think those were Berger’s terms) works; to Copland it all just seemed to be just his music. (Nowadays, I think people would probably list the Piano Sonata among the populist pieces, anyway, which says something about the validity of the distinction.) Generally, when somebody tries to make a lot of the difference, as Mr. Adams did, they’re not really trying to say anything much about the music so much as they’re just trying to take an opportunity to bash modernism, as Mr. Adams went on to do, and I’m not sure how much anybody gains from that.
The concert (and possibly the pre-concert talk) can be heard online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.
What will music sound like in 50 years?
What will your music sound like in 5 years?
Back in 1994, these composers weighed in on what music would be like in 150 years: Milton Babbitt Pierre Boulez Harrison Birtwistle Brian Ferneyhough Steve Reich Franco Donatoni Louis Andriessen
On Aug 9 The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton, presented the first performance of …onyt agoraf y drws…(…unless I open the door…) by Welsh composer Guto Puw. The title of the piece refers to a Welsh saga in which, after suffering heavy losses in a battle with the Irish, and the death and beheading of Bedndigeidfran, his men, having been enchanted, return to Harlech and feast happily for seven years entertained by the singing of Rhiannon’s birds and cheerfully conversing with Bendigeidfran’s severed head, without any recollection of their past troubles. Eventually they move on to a hall in Pembrokeshire, where they continue partying happily for another 80 years, never in any of this time either aging nor remembering the past. The hall has three doors at its end, and they are told that they should not open the third door. When they eventually and inevitably succumb to temptation and open the door, they are flooded with all the tragic memories which their enchantment has spared them, except with even greater intensity and greater sorrow.
The strength of Puw’s piece, which depicts the partying and the aftermath of the opening of the third door, is in its orchestration and its writing for instruments, which is masterly and colorful. The beginning music is bustling and cheerful, featuring the piccolo alluding to Rhiannon’s birds and the gradual emergence of a Welsh foksong (‘Machynlleth’); Puw uses sustained chords trading off between various sections of the orchestra in the midst of the general bustle to suggest time’s standing still. Although this first section is involved with the opening of the first two doors, it doesn’t actually depict those two openings, only the general party atmosphere during that time. There is a moment depicting the opening of the third door, but the sense of any change in the emotional atmosphere in its aftermath is almost completely lacking. Puw’s program note claims greater chromaticism at this point, but it is only slightly more so than formerly, and doesn’t read as any kind of real change. An Irish reel thrown into the texture may be supposed to allude to the enemy that defeated the Welsh in the battle, but the whole tenor of things is just as jolly as ever, so one misses a sense of any dire consequences from the opening of the third door. It may be that Puw was worried about being too vulgarly pictorial, but, in fact, for this listener vulgar pictorialism, especially at that point, was just what the piece could have used more of.
The Puw was followed by the Walton Viola Concerto in a very fine performance, with Lawrence Power as the soloist, and the Rakhmaninov Symphonic Dances, played about as well as one could ever hope to hear them played. Although both of those pieces are quite high grade stuff, they both leave me a little cold. In the case of the Walton this makes me a little sad, since I generally like his music and I’ve often tried to like it, but it always seems to me to be a little aimless and featureless, lacking in color and nice tunes. The concert on August 16th with the Bergen Philaharmonic, conducted by Andrew Litton, presented Walton’s First Symphony, one of his very best pieces, which is full of color of all sorts, tuneful, and tightly and impressively made, particularly in its incessantly abrasive scherzo and its intensely sad slow movement. In a performance as good as this one was, it’s completely thrilling.
The Prom concert on August 7 began with Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20, the intensely dramatic and mostly pessimistic piece, with each of its movements referring to a section of the requiem mass, which, bizarrely enough, Britten had thought, in 1939, was just thing to satisfy a commission from the Japanese government to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of the Japanese Empire. (In the event, the Japanese rejected the piece on religious grounds, and added that it didn’t sufficiently ‘express felicitations’ for the event.) Although in three movements, the work is really in one very tightly constructed span, starting with a slow lamenting march, moving through a relentless and ferocious ‘Dance of Death’ scherzo, and ending with a serene peaceful apotheosis of the material of the first two movements. The completion of Mahler’s 10th Symphony, by Derek Cooke and others, which followed, is, of course, not exactly the piece, but rather a very fully fleshed out version of Mahler’s sketches for the work as he left them when he died (described by David Mattews, who was one the people responsible for the realization, as having been in ‘a complex state of incompleteness’), suggesting what the piece might have been like had he finished it. Mahler’s sketches included a full score of the first movement, a ‘full score sketch’ of the second, a full score for the beginning of the third movement, followed by a short score, and an indication of ‘da capo’ for the first section, and short scores for the fourth and fifth movements. Although in many places the texture is very thin (one line) there are no gaps in its continuity, so the length and scope of the piece is fairly clear, even if many of the details are not worked out, so the realization consists of filling out textures and, in certain places, of making decisions about orchestrations. The Mahler is probably a little less complete in its realization of what the piece might have been like than is the Mozart Requiem, and a little more so than the Bartok Viola Concerto. The performances of both of these two works, by BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, were somewhat understated, if not downright bland. It would have been good in each case to have had a more urgent sense of the drama of the work, since both have plenty of drama. I found particularly bothersome in the Mahler, the modern almost complete avoidance of portimento in the strings, even when it was indicated in the score and the music cried out for it.
Proms concerts are available on line for listening at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.
9 P.M. (Lifetime) LOVE NOTES When a classical music critic becomes pregnant from a fling with (gasp!) a country-music singer, she decides to give her baby to her infertile best friend. But will she undergo a change of heart, or at least a change in musical tastes? Laura Leighton and Antonio Cupo star.
A female classical music critic? Must be a fantasy.
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, with so much good listening online:
Mayke Nas (b. 1972 — Netherlands)
Mayke studied piano and composition with Martijn Padding, Gilius van Bergeijk, Daan Manneke, Alexandre Hrisanide and Bart van de Roer at the conservatories of Amsterdam, Tilburg and The Hague. In 2004-2006 she was composer-in-residence with the Nieuw Ensemble. During the summer of 2005 she spent three months as artist-in-residence in Aldeburgh, England supported by a scholarship from Arts Council England, and in 2003 and 2006 she took part in the European interdisciplinairy workshop ‘Ziel 1 = Kunst’ in Oslip, Austria as representative of the Netherlands. Visit the link above and you’ll know exactly why Thea Derks wrote:
“[Nas’] music titters on the edge of sound and noise, but now and then puts a firm fist on the table as well; often there’s a comical side to it. Mayke Nas doesn’t like over-seriousness, but playfulness and ambiguity. She explores the bounderies of music with fearless energy and imagination, that also characterizes her personality. Instead of a biography, she sends two scores, a cd-rom and a link to her weblog. On it we find thoughts and reflections like ‘A puzzle of which half of the pieces are missing: that is a real puzzle’, and ‘Sturgeon’s law: 90% of everything is crap’. By ways of illustration she sends ten pictures of her hands counting to ten on the keys of the piano, along with the same amount of reasons to compose.”
For me, Mayke’s work is chock-full of wonderfully clever ideas, but realized in ways that go beyond making simply “clever” music; that’s a fairly rare combination. A number of the MP3s at the site are only excerpts, but poke around and you’ll find some complete things to hear (and see) as well.
David Coll (b.1980 — US)
David’s recently been dropping by to comment, both at S21 and NewMusicBox (howdy, David! Y’all come back’n set a spell, hear?…). But since he’s new enough to not be one of our “regulars”, I thought I’d introduce you to his excellent work — by turns dark, contemplative, moody and even violently voluptuous. The link above will take you to his website/blog, which includes a number of complete MP3s (and a couple M4a’s for you iTunes folk). For a little info, I’ll let him tell it:
“The music of David Coll reflects an interest in the energy, range and character inherent in the sounds of instruments, while questioning their conventions of performance. His compositions exhibit extended instrumental techniques and both open-ended and highly-specified notation. After completing undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois, David obtained a M.A. at the University of California-Berkeley. Before continuing on for a PhD he is at IRCAM in the year-long cursus. This coming year he will continue there, working on a second piece.”
The Prom concert on Saturday night, August 11, featured the music of Nitin Sawhney exclusively. I have to confess that I did not know who Sawhney was, which is an big oversight obviously, since his website says that he is “widely regarded as one of the most influential and versatile creative talents alive today.” Had I been more observant, however, I would have realized that I had heard some of his work previously, though, since he is the composer of the music for the recent movie, The Namesake. Although he apparently does not like for his music to be described as fusion, in fact the two or three people I asked about him all used exactly that term in telling me about it.
Although his description of the Proms in his program notes (“…a slightly antiquarian and jingoistic institution…exuberant flag-waving [which] seemed unnervingly imperious and superfluous to the enjoyment of some breathtaking music…”) strictly speaking only applies to the Last Night (all the rest of the time one sees not a single flag of any kind, let alone seeing it waved), the fact of the program on the Proms once again raises (however tacitly) the question of how ‘universal’ (for lack of a better word) western classical music is: whether it speaks, or can speak, to the conditions of all people of all conditions, or is only the artifact of a specific society and can only be meaningful to those who are members of that one group (i.e. “dead white men”), and whether people of non-European origin are not only simply, as it were, locked out of an undertaking like the Proms, but are, in fact, discriminated against by not being by not having their own particular music included. In any case, the fact that one entire evening of the Proms was devoted to the music of a (native-born) British composer of south Asian origin was a significant event, and it was certainly seen as such by the many more than usual people of south Asian origin who were there. There were, in fact, plenty of people there–the place was completely packed–, reflecting, apparently (judging by sight), all kinds of other ethnic origins as well. Sawhney himself is certainly trained in western classical music and values it (“I liked playing Bach for control, Debussy for the emotion, Mozart for melodic ideas, and Chopin for the pyrotechnics,” he is quoted as saying in the program notes.), but he also casts a wide net of other interests and influences, including flamenco guitar, Punjabi folk music, tabla rhythms, and jazz. Each of these various interests was amply represented at some point in the thirty pieces on the program, performed by Mr. Sawhney, along with seventeen of his closest friends and the sixty-strong London Undersound Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stephen Hussey.
The program included selections from his seven studio albums, along with music from a number of theatrical productions and movie soundtracks, and two works in progress. For this listener the most appealing music was found in the second half of the program, which included music from The Namesake, flowing seamlessly into The Boatman, both ‘inspired’ in ways not specified by Tagore, Nadia (meaning ‘the river’), all of those featuring the singing of Reena Bhardwaj, and Charukeshi Rain, a collaboration with Anoushka Shankar. The Conference, in which a considerable number of the performers participated vocally, is a fiercely difficult bit of “tabla pyrotechnics,” and was perhaps the most impressive number of the evening. Perhaps the least personal music was contained in the two battle scenes from ‘the forthcoming and highly anticipated’ video game Heavenly Sword. A long stretch of the second part of the first half, comprising Noches en vela, Part I, Sandesa, Journey, Breathing Light, A Throw of the Dice, and Koyal seemed to have been produced in reference to the same polling which produced Dave Soldier’s Most Wanted Song, since they shared a certain mid-tempo blandness and easy listening scoring with it and with each other. Excerpts from Zero Degrees, a theatrical work written by Sawhney with choreographers Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and sculptor Antony Gormley about a trip from Bangladesh to Calcutta, in which a man harassed by border guards finds himself sharing a carriage with a corpse, were threaded through the whole evening; they were performed in a lazer speed unison speech by Khan and Cherkaoui with passion and humor, and they were mesmerizing.
Throughout the concert it was very hard to make out words. The acoustics in the Albert Hall can be difficult, but the high degree of amplification not only didn’t help things, it seemed to be a positive hindrance. In Dead Man, at the end of the first half, which traces two parallel lives in India and America, and in which it is apparently important that there is ‘a sardonic English refrain and fateful Bengali verse’, it was simply impossible to tell that the performers were singing in any language at all. There is also some irony in the fact that each of the members of the London Undersound Symphony Orchestra, ‘painstakingly selected’ by Sawhney himself, was closely miked and mixed into a homogenous whole where it was impossible to hear how good any of them might be or what any of them might be doing, the goal seeming to be to produce a sound exactly like a highly produced recording with no perceptible qualities of a live performance at all.
Whatever reservations I might have had, though, it was manifestly clear that all of the performers involved were wonderful musicians playing with great intelligence and absolute dedication, and their performances were being received with great enthusiasm by a packed out Albert Hall, none of whose members had any reservations at all.
This concert, along with all the others, is available for listening online for one week after the actual performance at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/.
Two of S21’s favorite people are getting married…to each other. One of them is Brian Sacawa. The other member of the wedding is playing it coy but feel free to guess. Unless, of course, you know for sure, in which case hold it down until the intended makes the news public. Steve Smith gets credit for making the shidekh.
With at least 135 recordings (by my quick count) now in circulation, one would think there wasn’t much Philip Glass music that hasn’t already been submitted for the judgment of history. One would be wrong.
Orange Mountain Music has just released the second of a planned series of 10 CDs winnowed from the vast archives that Glass has assembled over the past 40 years. The recordings—most of them captured during live performances–span the entire range of Glass’ work and include music for film, theater, dance, and concert hall in a wide variety of scores including chamber music, solo instruments and orchestral works.
The first CD in the series, From the Philip Glass Archive –Theater Music Vol. 1, was released a few months back and contains two atypical Glass pieces in that there are few repeating arpeggios, not much of a driving pulse, and a lot of intimate touches. The first is a suite from Glass’ 2003 opera, The Sound of a Voice, the setting of two stories of Japan from a libretto by David Henry Hwang. Scored for violin, cello, flute, and pipa, the suite combines Eastern and Western in a light, engaging manner despite a few nasty coughs from sickly audience members. (Stay home, people!)
The second suite is drawn from music created for Jane Bowles’ 1953 play, In the Summer House, which was directed by Glass’ first wife Joanne Akalaitis. Scored for violin and cello, the piece is divided into 18 short movements, each more ravishing than the one before it. There is something to be said for being young and in love.
From the Philip Glass Archive – Vol. 2: Orchestral Music dips into Glass’ “world music” bag for Days and Nights in Rocinha, a 23-minute musical tribute to the Brazilian neighborhood that is home to the world-famous “samba school” and a place that Glass’ frequented often in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The piece was premiered in 1998 as a Dance for Dennis Russell Davies and Orchestra by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. It’s an engaging piece that demonstrates once again that Glass coasting is better than most composers trying their damnedest.
The second work on the disc is titled Persephone and is a challenging 5-movement, 27 minute tour-de-force for orchestra and voices, created for a Robert Wilson theatrical installation from 1994. Astute listeners will note that the dramatic high point of the piece—the fourth movement “Cocktail Party”–is borrowed from Glass’ Piano Etude No. 6 but, hey, if you can’t steal from yourself… The piece is performed admirably by The Relache Ensemble.
So today’s musical question is this: What is the best strategy for managing your compositional “brand?” Put it all out there and let history sort it out (like Glass, Martinu and many others) or publish and record only those things you think future generations will hear favorably (like, say, Varese).