After Radiohead announced it would allow fans to download its album for whatever price they chose, about a third of the first million or so downloads paid nothing, according to a British survey. But many paid more than $20. The average price was about $8. That is, people paid for something they could get for free.
Americans like to sit on their hands. Even when they’re telling the truth you have to worry. Are you trying to take something from me, steal my identity, assault my assiduously guarded self-image? I may be feeling something, but you’ll have to read between the lines. God forbid I should tell you what and why, and if I do it will likely be too late. These curious thoughts came to mind when I caught Lebanese oud master-composer-singer Marcel Khalife and his ensemble for the second time — the first was at New York’s Town Hall in 2004 — at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater.
Why? Because Khalife’s music goes straight to the heart, and never holds back, much less apologize for what it feels. Which isn’t to downplay its appeal to the mind. But its principal goal is to connect with the heart, and hearts and minds and bodies were certainly reached in this concert. Artists are people, after all, and wouldn’t you rather spend time with someone who can express than with someone who can’t?
The American media likes to portray Arabs as unlettered savages, but that’s hardly the truth. Arabic music, after all, is one of the oldest, richest traditions on the planet, and Khalife has devoted his life to expanding and deepening these traditions. With about 80 maqamat, or scale /modes, this music is complex, sophisticated, and highly expressive. Khalife drew on these riches in his latest nearly hour long ensemble piece, Taqasim, where he was joined by his son, Bachar, on Arabic percussion, and guest bassist Mark Helias. Taqasim means improvisation, and this three-part piece is an instrumental evocation of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work, which Khalife has set many times. It centers on the mid-lower range of the oud, and bass, with discreet, but colorful contributions from Arabic percussion like riqq ( tambourine ), and assorted drums. Lines coalesce and vanish, drones give way to unisons, the bass is sometimes played like a drum. The dream of Al-Andalus comes and goes.
Another, perhaps pan-Arabic, dream also seemed to be conjured, in further largely Darwish settings, which Khalife sang on the second half of the program — the primeval My Mother, with its wonderfully built contributions from Khalife’s other son, Rami, on piano, and the very famous Passport, which had an even more brilliantly structured and stylistically varied solo from him. The nearly packed house was also big on audience participation — a Khalife concert specialty — and yet another indication that Arabs aren’t wont to sit on their hands. I Walk (lyric, Samih el-Qassim ), which is a kind of hymn of defiance and solidarity, got a call and response treatment from the balcony and main floor, while the closing O Fisherman, Haila, Haila ( lyrics by Khalife’s Al-Mayadine ensemble ), had a thick driving intensity from piano — hammered chords — Khalife pere, Helias, and Bachar Khalife’s Arabic bass drum.
We in the West like to think that music is principally melody and harmony, though its wellspring has always been rhythm, which is something that Arabic music has never forgotten. Western musicians — and especially American ones — can learn lots from this music. And it isn’t afraid to communicate, and touch the heart, on the deepest possible level. Khalife is the first Arab to ever win the UNESCO Artist For Peace Award, and it’s easy to see why.His San Francisco stop is but one of many on his Taqasim Tour.
Michael McDonagh is a San Francisco-based poet and writer on the arts, whose poems have appeared in several places, including Stanford’s Mantis 3: Poetry and Performance, which ran 3 of the 6 poems Lisa Scola Prosek set as the song cycle, Miniature Portraits. He has done two poem-picture books with SF-based painter Gary Bukovnik, and has wriitten 2 pieces for the theatre — Touch and Go,and Sight Unseen. McDonagh is a staff writer on the arts for the SF-based BAY AREA REPORTER. He is the sole writer for www.alexnorthmusic.com; and contributes to www.classical-music-review.org, www.21st-centurymusic.com; New Music Connoisseur; and www.sfcv.org.
In this final piece on most prominent of the organizations that do noticeable programming of contemporary or near-contemporary music, I’ll deal with a variety of activities around the city.
Perhaps the most consistently interesting programming in Los Angeles is put together by Jacaranda. As implied by their subhead, “music on the edge of Santa Monica”, their programs do much more than give service to the idea that music is actually written and worthy today. (Yes, their performances are held within walking distance of the ocean.) This season they begin the first of two seasons focusing on the music of Olivier Messiaen, commemorating the centary of his birth in 1908. The first of the Jacaranda concerts, in two weeks, will include the performance of works by William Bolcom and Joan Tower that fairly directly invoke Messiaen, plus works by Elliott Carter and Steve Reich that offer indirect associations. Read their brochure. Season tickets for eight great programs are only $190.
I don’t subscribe to the Los Angeles Master Chorale because I can only take a little religious music in secular concerts without becoming tone deaf, and this makes half of the LAMC’s concerts pretty unappealing to me. But, oh, that other half! Their November concert includes the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in the premiere of Louis Andriessen’s The City of Dis plus God Protect Us From War by the Estonian Veljo Tormis whose work is new to me. The April concert programs Gorecki’s Five Marian Songs. The early May concert is entirely contmporary, with works by Gorecki, Morten Lauridsen, Salonen, Stucky, Judith Weir, Eric Whitacre, and the premiere of a work by David O. The mid-May concert of opera music includes the premiere of a choral concert suite from The Grapes of Wrath by Ricky Ian Gordon. Even the Christmas concert comprises music and arrangements by contemporary composers.
The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra includes a contemporary work in almost half of their programs, and they are active in promoting commissions of new music in a program enabling small donors to participate in commissions. It’s a model of a program. Pacific Serenades, a chamber group, seems to include the premiere of a new work in each of their concerts in a season, giving each program in three venues: one in Westwood, one in Pasadena, and one in a private home; season tickets are approximately $25 a concert. Their concerts seem to use the contemporary work as the spread in a sandwich between works of 18th and 19th century composers, which is a little more conventional than I like. But their list of premieres includes composers whose music I admire, and their site includes clips of several of the works.
REDCAT, the CalArts output in Walt Disney Concert Hall, provides an active music program edging to the avant garde. The major concert this fall will be in less than a week with California EAR Ensemble performing Andriessen’s Dubbelspoor plus works by Liza Lim, Franco Donatoni, and Raphaele Biston, whose work is new enough to avoid references to him in Google. The music program for the fall and winter is pretty adventurous, and it’s fun. CalArts also sends out regular emails of events at their campus in Valencia.
UCLALive, which has a great program of performances for theatre and dance, serving as the West Coast equivalent to BAM, comes close to ignoring contemporary music except for a few rare performers who have gained name recognition and whose music might have been described favorably in the New York Times (e.g., Kronos, Bang on a Can). The music programming is no more adventurous than the attitudes and positions of the speakers they bring in.
The Thornton School of Music at USC has a great program for the student audience, mostly by student performers. The calendar of events includes some programs that would really be worth going to. Noteworthy this fall is their Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Donald Crockett, performing Stephen Hartke’s Sons of Noah.
Too many events, too little money and time!
My father-in-law, Alfred Russell, died a few weeks ago. He was an amazing painter and a really eccentric person. He was one of the hottest Paris/New York abstractionist painters in the 40’s and 50’s. Ad Reinhardt was the best man at his wedding; he got Rothko his first teaching job; was friends/enemies with all the big names but because of his notorious provocateur spirit he never got rich while all of his equals sold their souls to the rich for millions of dollars. A famous article in October Magazine started the trend, when he lamented the ‘easy abstraction’ of the minimalists – mainly poking at Rothko and later Reinhardt.
He was a big modern music fan, amateur flutist and close friend of Edgard Varèse who in a Paris cafe once wrote him a solo flute piece which has never been premiered. I’ve got a mimeograph of it somewhere in a closet he gave me, but we’ve been looking for the original for years to prove it’s legitimacy.
Roberta Smith writes about him today in the New York Times – Alfred Russell, Painter with a Classical Style Dies at 87. Here are a few of his paintings from our site – Works of Alfred Russell. No need to offer condolences…
Without risk, one does not accomplish anything; one remains mediocre. When I left Hungary, I had no idea what was going to happen; perhaps I was going to be shot at the border… (György Ligeti, interview with Pierre Gervasoni, 1997)
In June of last year, we were saying our goodbyes to Ligeti. Sometimes it seems very distant now, sometimes like yesterday… And sometimes it can feel like he’s still around. The folks at UBUweb recently posted Michel Follin’s excellent 1993 Ligeti documentary, so for an hour you can revisit the man any time.
It’s in French (with a few German subtitles), but even though I don’t speak the language I had no real trouble following. You’ll get intimate vignettes in his studio, thoughts about many of his works (with audio and video clips), and an impressionistic journey through some of the major stations of his life.
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:
sound. from SASSAS (Los Angeles)
In 1998, L.A. artist Cindy Bernard and friends started a series of concerts and installations that became the non-profit organisation SASSAS, the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound. Their goal is “to serve as a catalyst for the creation, presentation, and recognition of experimental art and sound practices in the Greater Los Angeles area”.
Most of the concerts are held at the landmark Schindler House, a mid-century experimental home that has sliding walls opening the whole structure up to the back garden area. It provides an airy, casual and free-flowing space for both the artists and audience. Lately SASSAS has also been able to run a few concerts as well at both the Ford Ampitheater and REDCAT.
The list of performers is long and varied, from Pauline Oliveros and James Tenney to Chas Smith and Rick Cox; Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman to Jessica Rylan and Tom Grimley; Harold Budd, Petra Haden, Tetuzi Akiyama, Phil Gelb, etc… even my much-admired internet buddies Johnny Chang and Jessica Catron. If you’ve been spending all your time sitting in the concert hall listening to Wuorinen, here’s you’re chance to loosen up — and catch up — on all kinds of other vital forms of new music in the here-and-now.
Because SASSAS hasn’t just been presenting these concerts; they’ve also been pretty diligent about documenting them with recordings, photos and even video! The link in the title of this post will take you to the sound. mainpage. There you’ll see links to streaming Quicktime archives of many of these concerts, plus scrapbooks of notes and photos from them as well. And over on YOUTUBE, you’ll find another whole archive of video, that’s just begun and is sure to grow.
The L.A. Philharmonic’s New Music Group opened its season last night with a concert of three works by Kaija Saariaho, all written in the early 90s. This concert was to have provided a follow-up program to a major new Saariaho work, la Passion de Simone, on the philosophy and death of Simone Weil, which was premiered this summer in Vienna. But (as reported by Mark Swed) Peter Sellars, who staged the premiere, convinced the Phil not to do a mere concert version as planned, but to produce the semi-staged version of Vienna, with dance and lighting; so the Passion was postponed until next season when all of the right people (dancer and lighting designer) are available.
The major work of the evening, and a major one it is, was Saariaho’s violin concerto, named Graal theatre (1994/1997), in its second version for violin with chamber orchestra. Both versions are available on recordings. The version for violin and full orchestra was written for Gidon Kremer and premiered in the Proms of 1995 with Kremer and the BBC Symphony conducted by Salonen; the recording also includes Saariaho works performed by Dawn Upshaw and by the cellist Ansi Karttunen, so it has its own great program. John Storgards premiered the version for violin and chamber orchestra with the Avanti Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu; its recording includes two other Saariaho chamber works performed by Avanti.
The title of the work comes from a series of medieval poetry, updated by Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud, who also provided the source idea for what became the libretto for l’amour de loin. The idea used by Saariaho for this concerto was the co-existance of two systems of belief and actions: the spiritual chivalry represented by the Grail; and the profane and physical approach. The concerto has two movements, Delicato and Impetuoso, representing the dichotomy. In last night’s performance, Jennifer Koh was soloist, and she was very impressive overall. To me, Koh’s strengths suited the first movement’s feeling better than the second, and I didn’t hear enough change of feeling between the two to be fully satisfied, but this work is quite demanding and difficult and when Koh has the work so in hand that she is free from the score, she may be better able to put more fire into the second movement.
With Salonen in the audience, the 18 Phil musicians (5 strings, 2 percussion, piano, harp, and 9 winds) were conducted by our new Assistant Conductor, the 21-year-old Lionel Bringuier. He also conducted the work that served as a prelude to the concerto, Piccola musica notturna (1954) by Luigi Dallapiccola. This perfect introduction to the Saariaho is a charming work for eight musicians (3 woods, 3 strings, harp, celesta) evoking the sounds of an enchanted night.
The first half of the program comprised two works for solo instrument plus electronics, each supplemented by video art reflecting the feelings of that work. The video artist was Jean-Baptiste Barriere. I first saw his work in his conception and creation of representations of Saariaho’s music in his CD set Prisma which contains two of the works performed last night. First was the evocative work Six Japanese Gardens (1993-1995) for percussion with electronics. The visuals are not necessary to “see” the tone pictures Saariaho paints in simple, unbombastic percussion, made deeper by the electronic additions. Steven Schick was the percussionist. This was followed by NoaNoa (1992) for flute supplemented by electronics. This work was named for a series of ten woodcuts of Tahiti by Paul Gauguin, made during his brief return to France; the drawings had been intended as examples of the illustrations he thought of for a wished-for book on his experiences in Tahiti. Catherine Ransom Karoly was soloist and pulled off all of the technical challenges of the work, including vocalizations. That Barriere’s video supplements seem so attuned to Saariaho’s music may be partially explained by the fact that they are married.
If you like Olivier Messiaen, you missed out on a phenomenal performance of his epic organ work Livre de Saint Sacrement on Tuesday night in New York. The performance was by Paul Jacobs, and took place in The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, just off Times Square. It was an impressive performance of a Messiaen’s very personal late-life (1984) magnum opus, and the cathedral was an ideal space for it.
Of course if, like me, you don’t like Messaien, you can be glad you stayed home and organized your sock drawer or whatever you did, because that piece is frickin’ interminable. It’s about an hour and a half of pointless, pedantic noodling intercut with loud for the sake of loud, with no meaningful or satisfying dramatic structure. There’s about a minute worth of actual good material spread through the piece, but of course it’s immediately abandoned in favor of more noodling. And then there are the sections which sound like nothing so much as Mario collecting those gold coins. By the time it finally ended I was ready to confess to where I hid the WMD.
So who’s going to help break the back of the mega-music corporations by buying – at any price – at your price – for nothing – a download of the new Radiohead album In Rainbows? I did it this morning and I feel good about it. I’m now promised an email with a download URL for the entire album tomorrow.
For those who haven’t been paying attention to the world’s greatest art rock band, their new album is downloadable tomorrow – without the cooperation of any record company. You pay what you want. You can pay $.01. You can pay $10.00 – that’s what I did. They deserve it and I’d like to see this business model work. And get this, they don’t even have a record company any more. They’re supposedly taking bids on who will get their hard copies into the record stores. Have any S21 readers bought the album? How much did you pay?
FWIW, I currently give away for free, all of my albums and scores and as far as I know was the first musician in the world to do that, starting in 1991. I even caused the L.A. Times to write an article about the other Harrington, David, from Kronos, about how he was freaking out the music world by giving away music back in 1995. I had to call them and ask them to issue a retraction.
But the model I’m thinking of switching to for my albums and scores is this – pay what you want. I think it’ll work and at the same time, it’ll keep poor people, poor students, from being discouraged from learning and listening to my music. It’ll mean setting up some type of PayPal system and hiding from the tech-savvy haxxors but I don’t think it’ll be that much trouble. When I get it done, I’ll post an article here about how to do it. We can all use a little money, and this model nicely allows for a hit album to benefit the artist directly and financially. For kids without a credit card I’ll probably implement a questionnaire/honor system, forcing them to describe their deepest fears about music.
However, from where I’m sitting, unlike the rock world, the new music world isn’t burdened by the record companies. It’s burdened by referral networks, academic networks, and critics who refuse to pay attention to the online world. For the new music world to become truly independent, democratic and egalitarian it’ll take this type of new thinking that Radiohead has begun. By selling, even at any price, I believe it’ll create less of the appearance at my website, which is totally natural, that I can’t give this sh*t away. Haha…
Excuse the LOLCAT reference in the title of this article if you don’t get it. 🙂
P.S., the Coen Brothers movie shoot on our street in Brooklyn Heights I mentioned in comments a few weeks ago is finally over. Here’s some pics for anybody that is curious. It was exciting and exhausting. And our garden may never be the same.