Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Serenading the Glorious Leader

The New York Philharmonic is thinking of visiting North Korea next year and that has caused a great deal of tut-tutting from the nuke ’em, don’t serenade ’em crowd.  The conservative position was captured rather nicely by Terry Teachout in a piece called Serenading a Tyrant  in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday:

“Why … is the New York Philharmonic giving serious consideration to playing in Pyongyang, the capital of what may be the world’s most viciously repressive dictatorship?” he wrote. “Attendance at the Philharmonic’s concerts will be carefully controlled. And of course any concert in Pyongyang can’t possibly reach the North Korean people, because only the elite, for the most part, are allowed into Pyongyang.”

Here’s my thought.  If a goodwill visit by an American orchestra opens the door for even a single sliver of sunlight to shine on one of the planet’s darkest lands, it will be worth it…even if it means letting the world’s most obnoxious dictator claim a propaganda victory.  Music has survived a lot worse.

What do you think?  Or, if you don’t want to think, go over to the New Yorker and read Alex’s brilliant piece on Philip Glass. (Somehow that didn’t come out right.)

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Somebody didn’t get the memo

The biggest shock of the day was reading in the NYTimes Book Review a review by Pankaj Mishra of Coltrane:  The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff, the following sentence:  “Jazz’s turn to the avant-garde and exoticisms of the 1960s now seems as inevitable as the rise of atonal music after the breakup of the stable societies of 19th century Europe.”  These days you’re likely to get stoned if you so much as hint that there was any kind of inevitability in the rise of atonal music (whatever that might be).  Fancy not knowing that “we” all now regard “atonal music” (whatever that might be) not only as not being inevitable, but as being a downright aberration or perversion (if they’re different things).  How did Pankaj Mishra fail to find that out?

by Rodney Lister
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths

A Tale of Two Györgys

kurtag & ligetiRecent postings here notwithstanding, I swear I’m not on a complete György Ligeti kick; but it just so happens that the German-news-in-English website Sign and Sight has printed the translation of a speech György Kurtág gave in remembrance of his great friend, fellow Hungarian and fellow composer. (The occasion was Kurtág’s receiving the Ordre Pour le Merite in Berlin.)

The German version was originally published in August this year, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As a bonus, this article includes all the extra stuff that Kurtág never got to say during the ceremony.

It’s a beautiful, intensely intimate memoriam.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Piotr Szewczyk’s Violin Futura Rocks On

After his spectacular Spoleto Festival performance of the 16 piece Violin Futura set, Piotr Szewczyk continues to promote the series with a new video and an upcoming gig at the Santa Fe New Music Festival, February 2nd.

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Check out the entire series, which was designed around short, exciting pieces for solo violin composed just for Piotr. My favorites include our own Lawrence Dillon’s Mister Blister, Piotr’s Cadenza and Carson Cooman’s The Doors in the Sky. Other composers featured include Mason Bates, John Kennedy, Marc Mellits, and myself with Puce. Piotr’s use of YouTube videos and the web in general for promotion of the series is a model for any new music superstar wannabe.

by Jeff Harrington
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #39

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:

Strange and intimate places via Myspace

Rather than go in-depth on one or two musicians, we’re going to play epicurean. The back-stories and other works of each of these musicians may (or sometimes, may not) be found easily enough with a few clicks around; I’ll leave that up to you. Right now, it doesn’t matter; I only want to lead you to a specific track on their individual Myspace pages, tracks that keep echoing around in my mind long after the first encounter.

None of these are truly “classical”; yet none are quite pop, jazz, etc. etc… they all inhabit the cracks in between, with no apologies or justifications other than that they exist. They’re also each one “intimate”. By that I mean we feel a kind of “beside-ness” with the artist, drawn into their space rather than simply presented to. Simple or complex, across all cultures, that drawing-in is one of the greatest achievments of any art. So simply find the suggested title on the flash player on each page, click and listen, and see where each leads you.

10-D PJ  (UK)  “My tears are for you” — Exquisite mix, match & mash of completely different Asian-and-otherwise recordings, creating some entirely new place in the world.

Charles Reix  (Montréal) “Contemplation” — Brilliantly dark, serpentine duo for shakuhachi and ‘cello.

Thomas Leer  (Scotland)  “Blood of a Poet” — The voice of Charles Bukowski, placed just so into the perfect “frame”.

Sylvain Chauveau and Felicia Atkinson (France)  “How the Light” — The simplest of songs: a few chords and figures, no sung melody. Yet a completely absorbing emotional “space”.

Olivia De Prato  (Wien-Venezia-NYC)  “Ageha Tokyo” — Over and over, a nervously unstable play of string and electronics suddenly refracts into hopefully radiant textures.

Samson Young[Update: Due to the flaky options Myspace offers for putting anything other than pop songs on the site, I passed over the tiny bit that tells me that “Ageha Tokyo” is actually a piece by the composer Samson Young (Hong Kong, but currently finishing his study at Princeton). A wonderful piece nonetheless, and Olivia’s is a fine performance. Samson’s own website, with much more information and listening is at http://www.samsonyoung.com/.]

Maxim Moston (Moscow-NYC)  “Myrtle Blue” — A solo guitar, with just a few chords, out-Harold-Budds even Harold Budd.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Opera, San Francisco

APPOMATTOX: The War Within

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Human behavior’s funny. The more we try to change the more we don’t seem able to. Are we cursed to repeat the same mistakes in our private lives — with lovers, friends — as well as in our public ones? Are we genetically condemned to disjunction, discord, and war, like Sisyphus trying to keep that enormous rock from crushing him each day? Philip Glass’ SF Opera commission, APPOMATTOX, which world premiered 5 October, and which I caught 16 October, seems to accept these things as givens. Its ostensible subject is Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U.S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on 9 April 1865, and its subsequent impact. But its central question seems to be how can we change history if we can’t even change ourselves?   

These are weighty questions, and Glass’ music addresses them with seriousness and point. The opening figure for double basses and wind mixtures is immediately affecting. Then Julia Dent Grant (soprano Rhoslyn Jones) emerges from a backlit alcove in Riccardo Hernandez’s umbrous metal set, her posture contained, “The spring campaign ___  In four short years I have grown to dread those words … ”  She joins four other women — Mary Custis Lee (soprano Elza van den Heever), her daughter Julia Agnes (soprano Ji Young Yang), Mary Todd Lincoln (soprano Heidi Melton), and her black seamstress Elizabeth Keckley (mezzo Kendall Gladen) — in an almost Baroque lament on the sorrows of war — ” never before has so much blood been drained … Let this be the last time.. ” The women who stand behind their men and keep it all together are, of course, the unsung heroines of any war, and Glass’ immediate focus on them, signals this piece’s unwavering depth.

(more…)

by Michael McDonagh
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Critics

The Norman Conquests

Norman Lebrecht is an entertaining writer who has never let the facts get in the way of a good story.  Come to think of it, he may have been the world’s first blogger–he adopted the sloppy research habit before blogs were even invented.  For years, he’s been planting verbal IEDs along the classical music highway, wiping out entire convoys of evildoers and occasionally fragging some innocent bystanders in the process.  So, it is with some smugness that one is able to report this morning, or the New York Times is able to report, that Stormin’ Norman has had a bit of a comeuppance.  The Brtisih publisher of his latest missle–Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry–has agreed to recall and destroy the book and apologize to Naxos Records Founder Klaus Heymann. 

Heymann had filed suit against Lebrecht for “accusing him of serious business malpractices” and for at least 15 errors of fact.  Penguin agreed to settle rather than go to court. 

For a much more reliable portrait of Heymann and his role as an internet music pioneer, see Alex Ross in this week’s New Yorker.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical, Microtonalism

Microtonal Train Wreck of the Super Cheese Wiz’s

In the interest of furthering dialog between our 12ET brethren and our more flavorful microtonalist artists I present this provocative YouTube recording of America’s favorite band, Van Halen attempting to close a set with their signature cheeseburger – Jump.
The backstage sound guy accidentally plays the synth opening at 48K rather than 44.1 causing a 1.5 semitone tonal conflict to occur. Eddie and the crew attempt to roll with the microtonal noise but no… it is not meant to be. Somehow I believe new music’s brilliant microtonalist/guitarist Neil Haverstick could have done a lot better.

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by Jeff Harrington