Sequenza21

In just over a week minimalist musicians, scholars, and fans will descend on Kansas City, Missouri for the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, which runs from September 2 to 6.  I’ll be there–I’m giving a paper on Saturday–and I’ll be blogging regularly to give you a participant’s view of the proceedings–papers, concerts, lunchtime conversations, drunken rants, or whatever else is happening that seems noteworthy.  I’ll also be Twittering (@galenbrown), and the conference has its own Twitter account (@2ndminimalism). We’ll be encouraging other Twitter users to post their own thoughts with the hashtag #minconf.

Our pal Kyle Gann is one of the co-organizers of the conference, and in order to whet your appetite I asked him a few questions about the event:

GB: You went to the first version of this conference two years ago in Wales.  How did that conference come about, and what made you and the organizers decide to turn it into a regular thing?

KG: I don’t know what led Pwyll ap Sion (author of a book on Michael Nyman) and Tristian Evans to attempt the first festival. They clearly didn’t think it would succeed much, and when they got three dozen paper abstracts, they expanded it from one to three days. They lined up three keynote speakers in case two decided not to come. The last day of the conference, a group of us formed the Society for Minimalist Music, and decided to hold the conference every other year, alternating between Europe and America. When someone asked who should direct the next one, everyone sort of looked at me.

I have to say that Bangor, Wales, was an over-the-top picturesque spot for a conference, even if you did have to fly to London and take a four-hour train to get there. Kansas City is a wonderful place too, but I think only the barbecue can compete in the charm area. (more…)

In celebration of Louis Andriessen’s seventieth birthday, the first UK performance of his The Hague Hacking was scheduled for the Prom concert on August 17.  The piece was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed with that orchestra by the pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who were the performers for the Proms, playing this time with the Philharmonia Orchestra.   There were several sources, or perhaps references embedded in The Hague Hacking: the piano parts make use at the beginning and subsequently in the piece of the notes of the beginning of the Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which Andriessen knew not so much from knowing the piece itself as from knowing its use in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, The Cat Concerto (Warner Brothers used the Lizst in a similar way in a fairly well known Bugs Bunny cartoon, Rhapsody Rabbitt); the work also uses a Dutch “sing-along ballad” about The Hague, O, O, The Hague (Andriessen suggested in an interview that the text of this song is vulgar), whose notes are presented first at lengths which render it unrecognizable, but on subsequent reappearances faster, finally, apparently, at the end of the work, at its original speed; in addition the work’s Dutch title, Haags Hakkûh, makes allusion to the slang name (the second word of the title) for what we are told in Robert Adlington’s program note is a “a distinctive kind of dance, characterized by quick ‘chopping’ foot movements, that emerged in Dutch nightclubs in the 1990’s.

All of these allusions are very subtle, however.  If one knows they’re there, the notes of the Lizst are recognizable, but if one wasn’t looking for them they could easily be missed.   The surface of the piece is full of fairly rapidly zig-zagging hocketing notes in rhythms that one could see coming from some kind of house music, but since the bass is fairly consistently in long notes, certainly not suggesting any kind of dance music, the sense that there’s some kind of clubby dance music going on is absent.  O, O, the Hague not being a particularly well known tune, outside of Holland anyway, a non-Dutch listener has to take its presence there on faith.   What one hears if one isn’t worrying about all these subtle allusions is an engaging,  mostly slow, rather monumental work with very active surface texture, although not as lively as all the preliminary information suggested.  The orchestration is forcefully sonorous and bell-like and the piece makes an impressive sound.

The concert also included three dances from El amor brujo by De Falla, and two works of Ravel, the Mother Goose ballet (the movements from the original four hand piece, which Ravel turned into a ballet, changing their order and adding music, mostly short interludes connecting the movements, and Bolero.   The performance of Mother Goose was astounding and unforgettable due to  beauty of the playing, particularly of the winds, and its great subtlety. (more…)

At the suggestion of an admirer of Sequenza21, I filled out and submitted an application last night to A National Summit on Arts Journalism, a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, which will feature five competitively-chosen projects at its annual conference on October 2. It would be great if S21 were one of them.

I hope the judges don’t take away too many points for typos. The form was one of those where you paste your stuff in but you can’t see it all while you’re working or fix it later and I’m getting a little senile besides.

Our application is now online here and you can leave comments which I hope some of you will do.

If you have a project of your own you want to submit, better hurry. Applications close Monday.

HDTracks.com

Over the years since the advent of the MP3 file format, every now and then some misinformed or luddite journalist writes an article about how MP3 and digital downloads are killing music because MP3 has lower fidelity than CDs.  I always maintained that MP3 encoding wasn’t nearly as bad as the doomsayers claimed, and that in a few years when file storage got cheaper and internet bandwidth got broader digital downloads would outstrip CDs in quality.  My rationale was that 44.1kHz recording makes CDs high enough in fidelity that there isn’t enough demand for higher quality to make a replacement medium economically viable–the failure of SACD to take over the market seems to support this theory.  With digital downloads, however, there’s no need for new hardware standards–most media players and computers can play 96kHz audio no problem, somebody just needs to sell the recordings.

That’s where HDTracks.com comes in.

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