Vienna born conductor and composer Peter Paul Fuchs died in Greensboro, North Carolina on March 28 aged 90. For an appreciation of his music by John McLaughlin Williams follow An Overgrown Path.
I’m so glad you asked! TAFTO is Drew McManus’s “Take a Friend to the Orchestra” month–a month dedicated to bringing new fans into the fold. As always, Drew is marking TAFTO with a series of essays by hot, industry-savvy writers — how-to guides, analysis of the contemporary situation, and so on. The first two essays went up yesterday and today, and you should check them out.
Both of my fans (hi mom!) will want to know that my own contribution will be going up on April 12th, and the rest of you will want to know that you can see a list of the other contributors (including the likes of Frank Oteri and Leonard Slatkin) and other timely TAFTO information right here. Why, I’m reading it right now!
Seriously, this is good stuff and if you’re interested in discussions about the future of the classical music industry these essays will be worth reading.
Contrary to speculation that the mystery man in Friday’s photo is a Guantanamo detainee or a middle school crossing guard, the fashion-forward gentleman in question is, in fact, the Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis, aka JacobTV, whose work (it says here in the press release) “…has had a huge impact on the European music scene in the past decade, but he is far less known in the U.S.” It could happen.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, that well-known new music venue, is concluding its Spring 2007 Whitney Live series with Grab It!, a three-day festival dedicated to JacobTV, Wednesday to Friday, May 2-4, 2007 at the Whitney at Altria in mid-town Manhattan. The festival is the first large-scale examination of his work on this side of the pond, featuring some of his signature pieces as well as recent compositions and premieres, video, instrumental work, and a new evening-length dance piece set to his boombox music. He will also unveil a major CD/DVD anthology of his work on the Dutch label Basta, which includes orchestral music, boombox works, chamber music and video.
That would explain the “three pounds” of CDs I got from the Whitney which, by the way, are still up for grabs although, frankly, judging from the catty comments, you folks are not taking this opportunity nearly seriously enough.
Among the participants and performers in the festival are PRISM Quartet, Miro Dance Theatre, New Century Quartet, Frank J. Oteri, Kevin Gallagher, Electric Kompany, Margaret Lancaster, Dorothy Lawson, Meehan/Perkins Duo, and Kathleen Supové
The back story is that Limor Tomer, who curates the “Whitney Live” events, heard JacobTV’s music when the Prism sax quartet did a whole evening of his work at Symphony Space last year (Prism performs on the May 2 concert, then again twice in Philadelphia a few days later). She went wild over the music and decided to take the risk of programming three nights of his work, although no one here is really familiar with it. She hired the terrific new music publicist and all-round hottie Aleba Gartner to promote the show and, of course, we all know about my character flaws in the area of pretty gals.
Speaking of which, Aleba is also promoting the June in Buffalo Festival June 4-10 this year. This is one of the top festivals in America and it gets surprisingly little coverage although we always try to do our part. Anybody live in the Buffalo area who would like to “audit” the festival, do a little deep immersion, and keep a daily Sequenza 21 diary of the event? Something can be arranged.
Other stuff: I was having a Rome withdrawal attack last night and tuned into Showtime’s new Tudors mini-series. Pretty good, actually, but my favorite part is when a scruffy young man turns up at the cathedral with a letter from the Bishop of Canterbury introducing him as Thomas Tallis, a bright prospect who plays the organ, flute, sings and “composes a bit.”
And, finally, if I haven’t said so already, I think Steve Layton does a fantastic job week after week with his Click Picks. Thanks much, Steve. You’re a big part of our little success.
New York, NY, March 29, 2007. I’ve been a fan of Evan Ziporyn’s music since six or seven years ago when I first heard his work in a concert of piano music at Dartmouth College. (I think it must have been “Pondok,” in a recital by the fabulous Sarah Cahill, but I can’t seem to find evidence to support that conclusion. Sarah, if you’re out there. . .) Ziporyn is a fixture at Bang On A Can, and a member of the Bang On A Can All Stars where he plays a mean clarinet; he’s also a member of the music faculty at MIT and the founder of Gamelan Galak Tika. Last Thursday, Ziporyn teamed up with cello-percussion duo Odd Appetite (Ha Yang Kim and Nathan Davis) and bassist Robert Black (another Bang On A Can All Stars member) for two sets at The Stone, John Zorn’s Alphabet City new music dive.
Ziporyn opened the set with “Partial Truths” for solo bass clarinet, from his 2001 album “This is Not a Clarinet,” which weaves together percussive sounding tongued notes, cycles of leaping figures that outline lovely contrapuntal lines, melodies sung through the instrument in harmony with the clarinet sounds themselves, and a variety of other extended techniques that pushed at the far edges of the acoustic properties of the instrument. The fullness and richness of the texture was remarkable given the limitations of a single, ordinarily monophonic instrument.
The atmosphere was very relaxed and informal as the remaining three members of the quarter took their places for the remainder of the concert, and Ziporyn explained that while some of the pieces they were about to play had titles, they were really just working titles and so we weren’t going to be told what they were. But they were all good.
The first piece with the quarter, for example, started with a devastatingly beautiful texture of rich descending lines and then slowly went haywire. The consonant harmonies of the beginning slowly went dissonant, and the notes themselves were played with harsh extended techniques. This was to be a common structural feature of the remaining works—clean, organized music that gradually broke down in fascinating and simultaneously beautiful and ugly ways. Talking with Nathan Davis afterward learned that about 30% of the concert was improvised, and most of that improvisation took place in the parts where things “get weird.” I also learned that while the first piece for the quartet was through-composed the performers were instructed to add harmonics and other effects to dirty-up the sound. The cello and bass would essentially play with deliberately sloppy technique in order to introduce the kinds of artifacts that one ordinarily avoids. Ziporyn’s clarinet would make the kinds of shrieks and howls that I remember making by mistake when I was first learning the saxophone in elementary school. But in this context those “ugly” sounds simply added to the character and to the beauty of the music. Other pieces switched seamlessly from one time signature to another, in the same effortlessly disorienting way that the best Philip Glass music does, and layering different time signatures over each other. Following the music by counting becomes impossible, but once you let go you drift above the grid carried by the chaotic beauty of the sounds.
And all that remains is to note that the performers themselves were uniformly excellent. All four have impeccable technique, and Davis and Kim are both skilled composers themselves which presumably enhanced the level of the improvisational components of the evening. I suspect all four will be heard on this summer’s Bang On A Can Marathon, so mark your calendars.
If you know this gentleman or his work and have some original thoughts about same,
and you want to write (for real, now) a decent sized post about said mystery person and work,
and you are not Frank J. Oteri or Samuel Vriezen,
leave your reasons for wanting to write said post below with your mailing address (or if you’re squemish about the internets, send me an e-mail.
Winner will get in the mail about three pounds of CDs of said person’s work.
In 1973 my mother bought me my first toy piano at Harvey’s Department Store in Nashville. This is not quite the heartwarming tale of a little tyke that it might at first seem to be, since I was at the time a student at New England Conservatory, and she was getting it for me so I could play the Cage Suite for Toy Piano in a concert in Jordan Hall. It turned out that, completely inadvertently (only operating according to her generosity), she had got me the Steinway of toy pianos, a Schoenhut. I’ve continued to play the Cage over the years, and last summer my toy piano more or less just fell apart.
As I thought about buying a new one, it occurred to me that I should do an inaugural concert on it. I began to ask people to write pieces for me, and mostly they agreed to do.
The concert is on Sunday, April 8 at 8:00pm in the Marshall Room in the Music Building at Boston University (855 Commonwealth Avenue).
The concert includes–in addition to the Cage–pre-existing pieces by Kyle Gann, Eve Beglarian, Richard Whalley, and Dai Fujikura (for toy piano and violin pizzicato–the violinist will be Peter Zazofsky). There are new pieces, which will be having their first performances, by Lyle Davidson, Pozzi Escot, Stephen Feigenbaum, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, John Heiss, Derek Hurst (with electronic sounds–i.e. on my boombox), Matthew McConnell, Matthew Mendez, Nico Muhly, Ketty Nez (for toy piano and piano–Ketty will be the pianist), Dave Smith, Jeremy Woodruff, William Zuckerman, and me (for clavichord and toy piano–the clavichord player will be Peter Sykes). (I’m pretty sure that’s everybody.) The pieces are all really good and all really different from each other.
I hope you can come to this (what can only be described as an) unusual concert.
Next to the Mountaineers winning the NIT (okay, so it’s the tournament of losers…we won), the most exciting news in the world today is that our lil’ buddy Ian Moss is having his second annual Capital M world premiere extravaganza at Tonic next Wednesday. The concert will feature new works by Ian Dicke, Mike Gamble, Caroline Mallonée, Ian Moss, Edward RosenBerg III, Jonathan Russell, and Kyle Sanna. Noted provocateurs and ne’er-do-wells Anti-Social Music will follow with their particular brand of “punk classical” madness.
(A little early this week, as I might be out on the weekend) …Our regular listen to and look at compositions and performances that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since folks are nice enough to offer so much good listening online. Time to sit in on a few “first moments” in musical history:
George Gershwin & Paul Whiteman : Rhapsody in Blue – Original 78rpm Acoustic Recording (1924)
Made shortly after the premiere performance, and a year before the electric microphone came into use. The two records are on different pages: record one is here, and record two here. I can’t do any better than give B. Stockwell’s commentary from the Archive.org site:
“This is an edited performance, with cuts made to fit the 15-minute work onto two 78-RPM discs. Total time is under 9 minutes, but the cuts are pretty smart ones. This work was originally written for a large dance band, the way you hear it here. This isn’t ‘Symphonic Jazz’. It’s authentic 1920’s style — completely different from the bloated ‘violins and cellos’ versions that we’re used to hearing. You can hear the banjos in this version. Gershwin plays the piano part and the performance is fast fast fast. The opening clarinet glissando wails and breaks off into reedy laughter. This is SO different from the the syrupy swooning you now hear. The sound isn’t spectacular — the microphone wasn’t invented until the next year, 1925 — but these 78s are still pretty well transfered. The recording of Rhapsody in Blue was a hit. In 1927 the same group — again with Gershwin but now with a microphone — made another recording. Paul Whiteman had a quarrel of some sort and walked out of the recording session. They recorded anyway, with another conductor — Nathaniel Shilkret, I think — taking over. Whiteman was happy to promote the recording as his own, nonetheless. The electric version is better recorded but it lacks, well, electricity. Everyone, including Gershwin, just punches it harder in 1924.”
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Percussion Music from Lou Harrison’s Collection of 78rpm Acetate Records
An absolutely fascinating audio document, this 1971 KPFA broadcast by Charles Amirkhanian presented extremely rare recordings of percussion music from the composer Lou Harrison’s (1917-2003) personal collection. Especially important are the acetate disks of a concert given by John Cage’s percussion ensemble at the Cornish School in Seattle on May 19th, 1939.
Cornish (still there and going strong; as a college student in 1978 I caught Cage himself at a tribute concert in the same hall, performing some of his Sonatas and Interludes) was where Cage found a job accompanying dancers, and it was there that he founded his first percussion ensemble and experimented with the prepared piano. (The stage in the Cornish performance hall was too small to accommodate all his percussion during a dance performance, so Cage came up with the idea of turning a single piano into its own percussion “ensemble”.) The performers heard include Cage, his then-wife Xenia, and the dancer Doris Dennison. (there has to be at least one more, quite possibly Lou Harrison himself. The photo here shows Lou, John, and Xenia behind, Doris and Margaret Jansen in front).
The pieces on these recordings represent the core of the West-Coast experimentalist group (I know, I know, Harry Partch; but he was off on his own very different journey): Lou Harrison’s Counterdance in Spring, Henry Cowell’s Pulse, two movements from Cage’s own Trio, Johanna M. Beyer’s Tactless and Endless, William Russell’s Three Cuban Studies, and again Harrison with his Fifth Simfony. You just can’t get much closer to sitting in on the roots of this exciting period.
The remainder of the broadcast features a 33rpm disk that captures a 1948 performance of Harrison’s Canticle #3, introduced and conducted by Leopold Stokowski during a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
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On a personal note, I’ll mention the release of my own new CD, The Composer Plays IV: Works for Imaginary Piano, on the NiwoSound label. Along with my performance of Stravinsky’s Piano-Rag Music, the CD collects a number of my works that feature piano: either solo, doubled, or with recorded sound.
Jumping into the first wave of what I’m sure is to become common practice, no physical copy of the CD will be offered for sale in stores; it will only be available to subscribers at both eMusic and iTunes (the link is to eMusic; the CD is not “live” on iTunes yet, but will be soon — not only in the US, but iTunes Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia as well. iTunes folks can simply search “Steve Layton” to find the complete list of my available CDs in their country). For those who want something in their hand to read, complete liner notes for the CD can be had as a free downloadable PDF file (300 kb) from my own website. Enjoy!
It’s funny how our own personal preferences can make it so difficult to review concerts objectively. Take Monday night’s American Composer’s Orchestra concert, at Zankel Hall in New York – all seven pieces were good, often impressive, sometimes subtle and complex. But the things I want to rave about were not, I suspect, the things that most of the audience would have raved about when they got home.
Min Xiao-Fen’s Blue Pipa, for voice and the lute-like Chinese instrument named in the title, opened the concert effectively. Min performed the piece herself in a pool of light on an otherwise dark stage, and the combined vocal acrobatics and impressively virtuosic pipa playing made for a lovely and exciting piece. One audience member told me during intermission that it could have gone on for another five minutes and still been exciting.
Tania León’s Indigena combined the Cuban carnival music of her youth with quasi-tonal modernism in her trademark style. Her great skill lies in making this marriage organic—not so much seamless as deeply integrated, and never condescending to either tradition.
Speaking of integrative skill, Harold Meltzer’s Virginal performed the same feat with Renaissance stylings in a similarly modernist, quasi-tonal context. The contrapuntal music felt deliberate and rigorous in the same way that a 17th century fugue or an early 20th century serialist piece does.
But for all their virtues, and in spite of how well the audience liked them, none of the first three pieces excited me in the way that two sections of Vijay Iyer’s Interventions did. Perhaps a third of the way in, the orchestra drops out and Iyer, who was playing the largely improvised piano part, lets loose with a set of rippling riffs while pre-processed drum and hi-hat loops bounce back and forth in the speakers. I’m not convinced that the section really fit with the rest of the piece, but I have difficulty really minding. The piece’s long, static denouement was, for me, the heart of the piece. Most of the orchestra starts snapping their fingers in a steady slow rhythm, while the piano and strings give a long, droning, steady chord. It’s funny at first—you expect them to break into “boy, boy, crazy boy”–but as it continues the snaps reclaim their independence and provide an unusual sounding grid while the percussionist plays a slow pattern on a suspended cymbal. The cymbal patter sounds regular, but out of sync with the snaps, but if it was truly regular I couldn’t figure out the pattern. The overall effect was gorgeous and entrancing, and I didn’t want it to stop.
After intermission, Andrew McKenna Lee played his solo guitar piece Arabescata, which weaves together rock and classical language. It worked very well as a compliment to Blue Pipa from the first half—again sometimes pretty and sometimes impressively virtuosic. Kurt Rohde’s White Boy/Man Invisible was the least memorable segment of the concert for me, but as I recall the audience response was one of the most enthusiastic of the evening.
Rounding out the theme of integration of different musics, Steven Mackey played guitar for his Deal, a concerto of sorts for electric guitar and orchestra. Much of the first half of the piece didn’t engage me, although Mackey did a remarkably skillful job of combining the guitar with the orchestra in an organic way. As with Vijay Iyer’s piece, however, the final sections made the whole concert worthwhile. Most of the orchestra drops out, and Mackey sets up some looping grooves with his effects pedals against, surprisingly enough, recordings of what sounded to me like chickens, playing slowly evolving chords and countermelodies over it, building gradually over several minutes. By the time the orchestra came back, I was sold, but again it was some of the least spectacular music that did it. Maybe I just like the wrong things.
The nice folks at the American Music Center had a launch party for their latest cool initiative–Counterstream Radio–last night. If you haven’t checked it out yet, click on the toilet seat icon in the right column and some incredibly fine and varied music will follow you around the internets all day. Some members of the Counterstream team above, foreground: AMC president Joanne Hubbard Cossa, with Trevor Hunter, Lyn Liston, Lisa Taliano and Molly Sheridan. Sorry for the crummy picture, guys, and apologies to Frank J. Oteri and Randy Norchow whose picture didn’t work out at all.