Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

That’s Earle, Brother

I missed this little diatribe from Bernard Holland in the Times.  Thanks to Carmen Tellez for bringing it to my attention:

Unpleasant truths were another topic brought back forcefully by a concert at the Kitchen in September, by the fine young group Either/Or. Here was a program of 1960s arrogance and self-absorption, with people like Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown as the main offenders. Listening to a collection of composers sharing inside jokes and private messages in music that reeked of contempt for the public made me get down on my knees and give thanks that an era so damaging to music was over. It didn’t drive an intelligent public away from classical music by itself, but it helped.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Critics

“What’s the problem?”

Gavin BorchertGavin Borchert, composer and the Seattle Weekly‘s classical music critic, has an interesting take in this week’s rag, on current calls for jazzing-up or otherwise “slumming” the concert experience. A couple cogent paragraphs:

A couple of things puzzle me. First, the classical concert experience is, in all essentials, identical to that of dance, theater, literary events, or for that matter—barring the munching of popcorn and cheering the fireball deaths of villains—movies. Go to the performance space, buy a ticket, sit down in rows, watch and listen, try not to disturb your fellow audience members. Yet it’s only in conjunction with concerts that you hear complaints about what a crushing burden this all is. Second, why is sitting quietly considered such an unendurable ordeal? Millions of people do it every night in front of their televisions.

[….]

So what have we learned? Well, maybe people behave the way they do at concerts not because it’s an artificial standard imposed by ironclad tradition but because the music sounds better that way. Maybe listeners feel classical music most deeply when they pay quiet attention to it. Maybe sometimes not clapping is OK, and we don’t need to rush in and obliterate every silence. Maybe true innovations in concert presentation—new ways of getting music and music lovers together—will be concerned not with questions of formal vs. informal, loose vs. uptight, but with what setting best allows music to work its magic.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Don’t know what’s happening on PBS in your town tonight, but here in the center of the universe, Channel 13 is bringing us Kurt Weill’s brilliant (and somewhat depressing for the Christmas season) “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.”  Great cast includes Audra McDonald, Patti LuPone, John Doyle, and Anthony Dean Griffey.  Check your local listings.

by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths

“Ah What a chill, Ah what a wind…”

Paul Dirmeikis attended Stockhausen’s funeral on December 13, and has a report.

The family is already starting to slowly walk away. Some of us stay around the tomb, scattered between the neighbour tombs. Near the larger alley going down to the chapel, all members of Stockhausen’s family gathered together in a circle, holding their hands. Simon reads something. It’s around 4 pm. That’s it. One of the greatest composers of these last 50 years has just been buried. It’s a freezing afternoon in a distant German village. Fermata.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Bad Vibes From Benaroya

The New York Times leads off its Sunday Arts Section tomorrow with one of those double-bylined investigative reports that spell trouble for somebody. It appears that all is not well with the Seattle Symphony. The article is not up online yet but here’s the lede:

Any dictionary will tell you that a symphony orchestra trades in harmony. Anyone who has spent much time around orchestras will tell you that the harmony often stops at the music’s edge; that tensions abound in a body of 100 or so high-strung thoroughbreds as a music director seeks to impose a single vision.

And to judge from alarmist reports coming from here over a dozen years or so, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra has carried disharmony to new heights, lurching from crisis to crisis…

That’s the good part. I’ll put up a link as soon as I find it.

UPDATE:  See comments for link.

by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Contemporary Classical

The December Jinx Continues

Passed on by Carson Cooman:

The American composer Robert Moevs died Monday evening, December 10, 2007 at age 87. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin on December 2, 1920, Moevs studied at Harvard University (BA, 1942). He entered the US Air Force and served as a pilot. He resumed his musical studies at the Paris Conservatoire (1947–51) and then at Harvard (MA, 1952); his principal teachers were Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger.

For the next three years he was at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize Fellow. An inspiring teacher, Moevs served on the faculty at Harvard (1955–63) and at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (1964–91). He was composer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome (1960‹61) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1963–4).
Awards made to him include one from the National Institute of Arts and Sciences (1956) and many from ASCAP; in 1978 he received the Stockhausen International Prize in Composition for his Concerto grosso for piano and orchestra, which was later recorded on the CRI label. Among the conductors who performed his works were Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Michael Gielen, Erich Leinsdorf, and Leon Botstein.

by Jerry Bowles