Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, New York

The Sun’s Not Yellow, It’s Chicken

If you’ve been wondering who is responsible for dumbing down American musical culture, it’s people like Ronen Givony and me.  Givony, as many of you know, is the mini-Sol Hurok who is responsible for New York’s priceless Wordless Music series.  Like me, Givony is not a composer or musician or even someone who reads music.  But, also like me, he loves new music and wants to help nurture and promote the talented people who do.  The web has given us both platforms to indulge our desire to do so.  

According to Andrew Keen, that makes us the worst kind of well-meaning but dangerous and misinformed schmos.  We are”amateurs,” in the most perjorative sense.  Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture blames the equalitarian nature of web publishing and self-promotion for everything from Britney to global warming.

I dunno.  Seems to me that influential “amateurs” have always been with us.  Weren’t a lot of the explorers and scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries people who simply pursued their discoveries, quite often using their own resources?  

I’m sure this august group can think of many examples of amateurs who have had some influence on the advancement of new music.  Share some of them with us, please.

p.s.  By the way, I am no longer an amateur web site builder and manager.  My first paid-for site called MyVenturepad opened for business yesterday.  Nice article today on the front page about the changing of the guard at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe.

by Jerry Bowles
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #40

Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing musicians that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Julie Harting (b. 1957 — US, NYC)

Julie HartingThe talk is always “Oh that Schoenberg, making this artificial system that nobody really gets or feels!”… Except there are a few people like Julie:

When I was 7 or 8, I found a miniature violin in my father’s closet, because he played violin when he was a kid. I also found a book called A Tune a Day, and I taught myself from the book to play a little violin, so it was clear that I was musical. But I ended up playing the tuba, but it was never really my instrument. It was really weird, loving music and being accomplished at it, but not playing an instrument that was mine. I ended up very depressed and confused, and when I was 18, after a year of college, I hitchhiked to Montreal with a friend. I was alone a lot, and one time when I was walking alone on a huge hill in the back of McGill University, I had this thought that at the time felt like it was coming from outside of me, that said I should compose. I took that and I said, “OK, that’s it.” It was my lifeline. After that, I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston, and then I finally got to Manhattan School of Music. […] But musically, Schoenberg is my big influence – his music and also his writings. Schoenberg’s also a person who’s very much concerned with integrity. It’s an inner journey when you compose, so you write the music that you feel is right, which means there’s kind of this morality to it, in a sense. You search for yourself, for what’s honest, and what’s truthful, and that’s what you write in music. Schoenberg’s such a key person for that, as well as Beethoven. Mahler’s great, too.

Maybe Julie’s music is “old school”; but if it is, I can happily go back there to study a little. It’s never a question of style so much as the voice, and Julie’s is a wonderfully distinct voice. At her site linked above, you can hear a number of her pieces; I’d particularly recommend the Trio for flute, cello and piano, and hoc est corpus meum for solo violin.

Samuel Vriezen (b. 1973 — Netherlands)

Samuel VriezenSamuel posts around these parts, though infrequently enough that I feel OK about plugging him here. We’ve been bumping into each other for years on the USENET classical newsgroups, a happy breeze of true contemporary thinking amid all the John Williams wannabees and folk who haven’t gotten past Holst or even Yanni. From the rather complicated and involved pieces of his time in University, he’s been progressively paring back both his scores and materials; still finding the complicated and involved, but arising out of seemingly simple and clear actions and reactions. He’s also great Euro-advocate of our own expat composer, Tom Johnson, who pioneered many of these same concerns. Samuel also performs, and has helped produce a number of great exploratory concerts in Amsterdam over the years. His site linked above has plenty of listening, both to his own work and others equally interesting (Johnson included). If you’re ever headed to Amsterdam, he’s your hook-up, go-to guy.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Critics

You Can Leave Your Hat On

If you haven’t read Galen’s rather lengthy piece called Imprecations and Exhortations: A Rather Lengthy Defense of Richard Taruskin over in the Composers Forum, you should do so immediately.  I’ve been taking a short nap for the past couple of days and just go around to it and it’s very thoughtful and very good.  (I say that because on my first day of journalism school as Horace Greeley and I were checking in, our first prof said “Never say ‘very.’ If you must, write ‘damn’ instead.”)  Damned fine work, Galen.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Did You Ever Go Clear?

Translating pop music into more ambitious musical forms is a risky business that sometimes produces surprising results.  Who would have guessed, for example, that Twyla Tharp’s recycling of Billy Joel’s songs to tell the central story of the Sixties generation would be such a compelling and moving theatrical experience–an effect greatly heightened by having those songs reproduced note by note on stage by the world’s best tribute band.  Once you’ve seen it, you’re forced to admit that Joel (who you might have previously taken lightly, as I did) writes really intelligent songs that display a wide and deep musical versatility.  It’s one of those ‘aha’ moments like seeing Fleetwood Mac and realizing that without the undersung Lindsay Buckingham’s fabulous guitar work and arrangements, they’re pretty much another lounge act.

On the other hand, who would have thought that a stage musical built around the music of Bob Dylan would reveal him to be a writer of archly pretentious lyrics of little musical grace, played with three majors and a minor?

But, I digress.  What we’re talking about here is Philip Glass’s Book of Longing – A Song Cycle Based on the poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen, which was performed this summer at the Lincoln Center Festival and has just now been released in a 2-CD package by Orange Mountain Music, Glass’s own music label.  I’m a person who knows the difference between W.H. Auden and literate pop songwriters like Cohen and Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon, but the combination of Cohen’s wry, spare words and Glass’s wry, spare settings creates something that approaches a higher art form.  Not quite Auden/Britten but something not embarassed to be seen in that neighborhood.  I’ve played it a dozen times and keep discovering witty surprises and  hidden delights.  All the piece needs is a video by Yasujirō Ozu (or, his still-living contemporary disciple Jim Jarmusch) to be the complete multimedia package. 

I also realized, for the first time, that A Thousand Kisses Deep is probably the best song ever written inspired by oral sex.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical, NPR

Sure It’s a Commie Front, But NPR Rules

The big news today is that NPR and 12 NPR Member stations are launching NPR Music, a free, comprehensive multimedia music discovery Web site, that features on-air and online content aggregated from NPR and the participating stations as well as original-to-NPR Music materials such as interviews, reviews, blogs and live performances.   The press release goes on to note that specific sections of the site are dedicated to rock/pop/folk, classical, jazz/blues, world and urban music.   In each genre, program and subject area, users can explore NPR’s and the stations’ renowned music journalism; intimate interviews and studio sessions with artists and bands; NPR’s and stations’ popular national and regional web concerts; reviews and news; original blogs from critics, experts and artists; and podcasts.  The site culls from NPR’s and the stations’ extensive music archives to present thousands of features; at launch, the site’s Artist Index alone, an A to Z artist directory, offers content about more than 2000 performers.  More than 200 new features will be added from NPR and the stations monthly, joining thousands of hours of archived concert, story, review and interview pieces.

Sounds pretty neat to me.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Dispatch from Tenri: The Kenners

The versatile performing duo known as “The Kenners” played a terrific concert Saturday night at the Tenri Cultural Institute. The program featured works by Charles Wuorinen, Toru Takemitsu, and Jason Eckhardt, and premieres of one form or another by Kate Soper, David Brynjar Franzson, and Petr Bakla. The Kenners’ catch is that each musician plays more than one instrument. Saturday’s program required Eliot Gattegno to switch between alto, tenor, and soprano saxophones; Eric Wubbels alternated between piano and accordion. (Sometimes he performs live electronics as well.)

Soper and Franzson provided the world premieres. I liked Soper’s I Had a Slow Thought on a Hard Day for accordion and alto sax. A meditative piece interspersing lyrical gestures with pitch-less pulling and pushing of air through both instruments, the music successfully sustains a slow rate of development and builds elegantly into more continuous passages. Franzson’s aggressive and noisy piece for the same combination, Closeness of Materials, reminded me pleasantly of Salvatore Sciarrino. But the music ends before much of a shape has been established.

Receiving its New York premiere was Petr Bakla’s WAFT for piano and tenor sax. Reminiscent of Shih’s work, the piece blurrily taps up and down the chromatic scale without quite doing enough to compensate for the inevitable intervallic monotony. But timbrally the piece is attractive. Jason Eckardt’s Tangled Loops for piano and soprano sax is an extravagant, virtuoso work with some sumptuous dissonances and out-of-this-world passage-work; but the composition’s block-like construction seems at odds with the very pregnant material with which Eckhardt fills the sections.

Charles Wuorinen’s Divertimento is a great piece, and I don’t feel the need to comment about it here (again), other than to say I felt the Kenners’ performance brought out wonderfully the music’s emotional contrasts. But hands down the best work on the program was Toru Takemitsu’s stunning Distance for soprano sax and off-stage accordion. The saxophone’s wild outbursts of multiphonic music dance over an accordion drone which, somehow, manages to foreground and expand upon the on-stage solo. Imaginative, clear-eyed, and intensely emotional, the piece was also the most convincingly paced work on the program. Its progress felt both surprising and inevitable. Let us hope The Kenners themselves enjoy a similarly successful progress.

by David Salvage
Contemporary Classical

A Rose By Any Other Name

There was a terrific profile of Gil Rose, Music Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and of BMOP itself in Sunday’s Boston Globe.  If you don’t know BMOP you’re missing out on one of the best forces for new orchestral music around.  There’s a lot of good stuff in the article, which is why you should read it for yourself, but it might be of particular interest to this crowd that they’re putting together their own record label “BMOP Sound” which will be launched in January “with five new releases adding to its existing catalog of 13 commercially released CDs, and 28 more albums in progress.”  Later in the piece we also learn the interesting statistic that Rose receives upward of 150 unsolicited scores every month–so if you’re wondering why James Levine and Essa-Pekka Salonen aren’t returning your calls this may give a sense of how overwhelmed with submissions a music director with a national profile and a known interest in new music must be.  (It also makes Bang On A Can’s claim that “we will listen to everything” all the more impressive.)

BMOP inaugurates its 10th season at 8 PM tomorrow night (November 2nd) in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall with a concert of piano concerti.  Nina Ferrigno, Anthony Davis, Joanne Kong, and Marilyn Nonken will be playing the pianos, and the program consists of pieces by Elliott Schwartz (the premiere of a new revision), Anthony Davis, Michael Colgrass (the U.S. premiere), and David Rakowski (world premiere).  I’ve heard parts of the Rakowski, and it rawks.

by Galen H. Brown