Delayed Reaction

My multi-week odyssey to find a brick-and-mortar store with a copy of Ys to sell me came to a close yesterday. The album is no revolution or revelation, just ("just") very honest and well put together. The symbolism (or would it be allegory?) is rather heavy, but the core is a confessional treatment of a romance. I'm still waiting for my decoder ring to arrive in the mail, but the music is very affecting, clear in its own way.

I don't buy into the criticisms of Newsom's singing. She sounds very in control of her instrument, carefully choosing when it cracks and flutters. She's able to conjure a sound which I can only compare to a squeaking rubber balloon, but for some reason sounds quite beautiful to my ears.

The main thing I was left wondering about after my first listen was the album's extreme "consonance." Her words are mellifluous and consistently rhymed, the orchestral backings are always lush. It's a choice, but I'd be curious to hear some of the songs with a little more grit .

***

DJA requests that we abolish the use of the adjective "pretentious" in our critical discourse. I agree, and myself would add "twee" to that list. I can't read about Belle & Sebastian's latest without getting hit in the face by this one. It's certainly apropos for much hipster-friendly music, but can we nip this one in the bud?

***

I feel I should toss in a few words on why I bothered reacting to an album that's already been heavily lauded and desired. I'm usually suspicious of reviews that appear too soon after a new product enters the marketplace. They feel too attached to the PR mechanism of the vendor. In the rush to get the first review on the block, publications are just handing out free publicity. I'd prefer that critics take as long as they want to publish a piece, even passing on something if they don't feel like anything should be said. If I "have" to know how good something is as soon as it's available, I'll buy it myself (or make friends with someone who feels that same need). When we live in a society that's trying to sell us something at every street corner, do we really need to contribute to the problem?

Love

Love is the newest release by "The Beatles," rather, the newest officially sanctioned release of Beatles material. In case you haven't already heard what it's about, it's a set of Beatles-on-Beatles mash-up action performed by George Martin & Son. The album got a good consideration in strictly musical terms by AllMusic, so I'll direct you there if you want the standard review.

As their reviewer says, the juxtapositions are pretty tame. The main interest in Love isn't the new relationships, but the restored quality of the source material. Us younguns know the Beatles primarily through the shoddy remaster jobs of their albums which date to the early years of the CD. A good song's a good song no matter how rough the recording is. However, a band that spent so much time in the studio is going to get shortchanged by technology that takes a giant step backwards from their original working conditions.

Something about hearing the masters handled with such care makes the songs sound fresh again. The vocals in general were the main event for me. The expressive nuances can be heard more clearly, the madrigal-y quality of the backing vocals get a lot more attention. "Help" becomes intense, "I Am the Walrus" is shocking and weird instead of well-worn.

This album prompts a tricky question: what does it take for a piece of music to be "new?" What kind of status do recordings have as musical artifacts? I can't say I've gotten a lot of listens out of this one (the songs are ultimately well-worn with me), but the initial impact was significant. The quality of sound made its own statement. There was something new-enough in that experience for me.

Yuk yuk yuk

This moment occurs at the top of the very last page of a 30'-ish multi-movement piece, Peter Garland's Jornada Del Muerto (piano solo). If you're going to wander through the desert for the while, I guess it behooves you to come away from the experience with a healthy sense of humor...

RSS Feed

I was playing with the tags feature in the new version of Blogger, which has caused some older posts to float to the top of my RSS feed. Apologies for any confusions.

Being Serious

One of the best parts of school vacation is spending time reading cookbooks. Reading a recipe is a lot like score reading. You're looking at instructions for performance, not the work itself. Like score reading, when you do it enough, you start to get a sense of what a recipe will taste like without having to prepare the dish. Also like score reading, while you may get the gist of the flavors, it's no substitute for actually eating.

I'm currently browsing through the book based on the French Laundry. High dining, to say the least. Not something I'll do every night, but it shares some secrets that will work with more pedestrian fare. One thing this book does well is communicate Thomas Keller's attitude towards food and cooking:

Unlike meat and poultry, fish is not regulated for quality and it's not inspected, which is why quality ranges are huge. How can you know when fish wasn't handled right? Was it dumped on the boat, is it bruised and beaten up? How was it caught—did it drown in a net, its gills filling with water, its flesh becoming waterlogged? Once caught, was it properly iced?. . . Our fish is packed in ice or seaweed and stored in our walk-in cooler in the same position it swims—not haphazardly, and not on its side. The flesh is too easily damaged. This is what I mean by treating your products with respect.

Not only does he ask all the questions, but it's essential for him to know all the answers. However, he's no Alton Brown-style food scientist. Alton will get a costumed cohort when he wants to describe the different cuts of meat from an animal. Keller rolls up his sleeves:

One day, I asked my rabbit purveyor to show me how to kill, skin, and eviscerate a rabbit. I had never done this, and I figured if I was going to cook rabbit, I should know it from its live state through the slaughtering, skinning, and butchering, and then the cooking. The guy showed up with twelve live rabbits.

It's not that he thinks it would be fun to do, he considers it part of his personal education. Interestingly, the book is pretty low on arrogance. He seems constantly determined to make the best food he can. Talking about how great he is would just take time away from that.

Finally, Keller's thoughts on "performance practice":

These recipes, although exact documents of the way food is prepared at the French Laundry, are only guidelines. You're not going to be able to duplicate the dish that I made. You may create something that in composition resembles what I made, but more important—and this is my greatest hope—you're going to create something that you have deep respect and feelings and passions for. And you know what? It's going to be more satisfying than anything I could ever make for you.

Alarm Will Sound, 12/15/06

Alarm Will Sound played Kilbourn Hall a couple weeks ago. Since all of the group's members are Eastman alum, it was as much a concert as it was a homecoming: the audience was cheering before they heard a single note. The program was kind of an AWS sampler: the first movement from the Ligeti Piano Concerto, a handful of pieces by AWS composers, and a set of Aphex Twin arrangements. All of the pieces emphasized the kind of fluid virtuosity that is often featured in pieces for sinfonietta ensembles. The individual and ensemble challenges didn't seem to make anyone break a sweat.

Alan Pierson has a playful presence on-stage. His mannerisms suggest a little bit of the gawky kid next door. He conducts with a baton, but feels the groove with his whole body. The group as a whole is very comfortable using their bodies along with their instruments. It looked like they were, you know, having fun and stuff. Even when members weren't playing, you could also see them feeling the groove.

The rhythmically active nature of the program made the concert hall setting feel a bit stiff. There were times, especially with the Aphex Twin arrangements, when I wanted to get up and dance. The friends who went to the show with me felt the same way, but a (highly unscientific) lookaround during the danceable moments suggested we would've been in a very small group.

In general, the concert pointed out a lot of pitfalls in finding a halfway point between staid new music concerts and rock shows (generalizations to follow). When you go to one of the former, it's almost excusable when it feels uptight. The emphasis is placed on the music being played, not the individuals playing the music. Rock shows have a reversed dynamic. You go for the group, to see their current material and to follow their creative development. Pierson more or less said between pieces, "We're going to play some stuff we've been touring with for a while, then play some material off our latest CD."

Rock groups usually package together a personality, a sound, and a musical identity. For AWS to become the group they're trying to be, they'll need a similar package. They have the first two parts mostly together, but they've got a long way to go on the last one. The group has plenty of talented composers, but this show didn't reveal anyone that they could really rally behind. They've made it clear they can play anything they want, but I think their long-term success will depend on what they choose to play.

Mind Reader

My winter break got to a good start today with an unset alarm clock and a little transcribing for a solo recital I'm giving in the spring. My plans for school vacations usually include what most people would describe as work. I can't wait to get into them, however, because what I'm doing is entirely at my discretion. In short, less time with books and more time with music (and hopefully with the ol' blog). Over the next few days, I'll try to get some thoughts up on the Alarm Will Sound show that was at Kilbourn last Friday. Until then, an already-eloquent version of most of the program note I was intending to write for that recital:

Getting back to Cowell, let’s start with the early piano pieces, the so-called cluster pieces plus The Aeolian Harp and The Banshee. I think their simplicity is their strength, and the reason for their continued freshness. In this regard they share something with modern-day pop songs, in that relatively little information is conveyed, so that communication is immediate and right there on the surface. Many of the pieces have very simple, modal melodies, so the harmonic language is likewise very basic. I don’t really take Cowell’s justification of the tone cluster as the incorporation of the major and minor seconds into our harmonic/melodic language along some sort of musical evolutionary line too seriously. Okay — sure, fine. What blows me away about these pieces is that by compressing the interval relationships so tightly, they virtually cease to exist as such. So you are sidestepping the harmonic implications of the concept of interval, and what you are left with is: pure RESONANCE. That is the glory, the originality, the freshness of these pieces. By reducing melody and harmony to a background function, that of the simplest framework possible, one is affirming music not so much as a question of relationships, but rather of pure sounding and resonance. That is very radical, to me. One does not need to use tone clusters necessarily to achieve this effect. By severely limiting melodic and harmonic movement and by emphasis on repetition, the same effect can be achieved.

from Peter Garland, "Henry Cowell: Giving Us Permission"

Ossia Concert

Ossia is a student-run new music ensemble at Eastman. It's the group where Alarm Will Sound got together. Tomorrow (the 30th) at 8:00pm in Kilbourn Hall, the following program of mainly amerikanische Musik is on tap:

Alban Berg - Chamber Concerto
Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel
Lou Harrison - Concerto for Violin with Percussion
Baljinder Sekhon II - Lou [Concerto for Cello with Percussion]
Lou Harrison - Canticle no. 3

(The Berg was actually rescheduled from a prior concert. Baljinder is an ESM grad student. I'm working the celesta during the Feldman.) Any questions?

Feldman Explains It All

At least, that's how I feel when I read a Morton Feldman interview. Every one of them seems unique and uniquely insightful, so it was hard to resist checking out a copy of Morton Feldman Says when I saw it on the library's new books shelf. The material is mostly reprints from the collection of interviews on Chris Villars's Feldman site (Villars edited the volume).

The value in the book isn't so much in unpublished material, but in the extra scholarship that went into putting it together. All the interviews have been outfitted with footnotes, so if you aren't familiar with all the minor figures of the 1950s New York art scene, you'll get a few lines on who's being mentioned. If an allusion is made to an instrumentation choice in an unnamed musical piece, Villars tells you which piece.

A brief chronology gets into Feldman's personal life in spots, something that most writers gloss over when discussing him. Perhaps I shouldn't complain for the usual glossing over, because it would probably be more annoying to have people try to make tenuous connections between his music and his personal life. Anyway, it's nice to have a basic reference of the "what he was doing/where he was doing it" type of information.

Other useful bits in the volume are photographs (including one of Feldman with his mother, who he looks more than a little like) and some score samples. In general, the book's combination of chronology and photos provides a fuller picture of Feldman-the-man (versus -the-musician) than most sources get at. It doesn't strike me as indispensible in the same way Give My Regards to Eighth Street is, but most Feldman afficionados would probably like having a copy on their bookshelves.

That book is valuable for many reasons. His writing, with its distinct blend of humor and pentrating observations, is about as unique as his music. However, what really makes it essential is Feldman's efforts at answering a question of concern any kind of artist: you're at your desk, implements of the trade in hand. Now what the hell do you do?

Don't get me wrong. A solid technical piece on "so you think this music is intuitively assembled, but really it's highly structured and organic" is invigorating in its own way. There is something particularly probing, though, about Feldman writing about "concentration," or why he only worked only in pen, or the time when he finally found the perfect chair. It's a view of composition not fixated on the end product, but as a process that is a kind of performance.

Last year, I wrote about perhaps why composers are so guarded about these issues. I still feel the same way, that the act of writing music is a very personal process, one that other people shouldn't necessarily be privy to. With that in mind, Feldman's writings on compositional process strike me now as courageous in a certain way.

"In C" Redux

My friend Emily, who participated in the same performance of In C that I played in last month, responds with her own thoughts:

It was interesting to me the other players' reaction to the instruction "repeat as many times as you'd like/ you don't have to play together with anyone". Since most of them have not listen to a recording, they were free from the desire to imitate the recording and truly freely choose how many times they repeat. I noticed that those who plays in the school's orchestra never ventured beyond 5 times for each pattern. Some of them also interpreted that as you pick a number and stick with it for the whole piece, so they repeated for the same number of times for each pattern.

Read the rest here.

Birthday

. . . This reduces, or rather brings the problem back to a tangible basis namely:—the translation of an artistic intuition into musical sounds approving and reflecting, or endeavoring to approve and reflect, a "moral goodness," a "high vitality," etc., or any other human attribute mental, moral, or spiritual.

Can music do more than this? Can it do this? and if so who and what is to determine the degree fo its failure or success? The composer, the performer (if there be any), or those who have to listen? One hearing or a century of hearings?—and if it isn't successful or if it doesn't fail what matters it? A theme that the composer sets up as "moral goodness" may sound like "high vitality," to his friend and but like a "stagnant pool" to those not even his enemies. Expression to a great extent is a matter of terms and terms are anyone's. The meaning of "God" may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world. . .

"Prologue," Essays Before a Sonata

Link and Run

Darcy James Argue has a very thoughtful review of a recent Reich show at the Whitney. Key quote:

The formal and conceptual rigor of Steve Reich's compositions made groove music intellectually respectable in classical music circles, but it's the rhythmic authority of his band's own performances that made the case for his music so compelling, and served as the model for other musicians to attempt his works. Once Reich became established and canonized, his music's demands become part of the skillset that today's conservatory-trained students are expected to master.

Other quote o' the day, this one from an anonymous citation (*gasp*, how unacademic) in a history of Gilded Age America I'm reading. The rise of pop culture in America brought with it what this person described as "lunch-counter art." The metaphor works thusly: "But then art is so vague, and lunch is so real." One can only assume this remark was made pre-Hopper.

Local Languages

Among my classes this semester is a composer-oriented course on the analysis of 20th c. music. Model compositions make up a few of the assignments. After a little Bartók, we were unleashed on the Fibonacci series and told to do what we will with it. Earlier this week we met for a little show-and-tell.

The results were wide-ranging, to say the least. Everyone applied the numbers with varying degrees of rigor to various "compositional parameters": duration (yo), harmony, melody, density, etc. The number of ways in which people wrote music based on such a basic premise was interesting in and of itself, but the show-and-tell ceremony itself had some interesting features.

We all had to introduce our pieces, speaking in as much detail as we wanted. Pretty much everyone acted as a performer as well as composer (alone and in groups with friends from outside the class). Solo piano pieces were popular. One girl performed a choral work by way of a much-overdubbed recording of herself. Everyone clearly worked hard to present their music in the best possible light.

After each reading, the prof gave some feedback and opened the floor to anyone in the class. Some passages were replayed with changes based on this feedback. This made the music feel more like open works than finished pieces. Nothing was sacred, at least for the amount of time it took to see if something sounded better another way.

The prof made an interesting comment at the end of the evening. He noted that at the beginning of the session, most of us would not have been able to pick out the Fibonaccic features of each piece by ear, but by the end, all the little 1,1,2,3,5 semitone series were painfully apparent.

In addition to the rapport we developed through presenting our hard work in such a specific way, we developed a sort of linguistic rapport. The Fibonacci series-in-music is going to be inaudible to your man on the street, and probably to your seasoned concertgoer. However, by making it a common feature of our music, even if it manifested itself in different forms each time, the series became something we were all fluent in. It signified the brief commonality of the reading session just as much as it signified a certain set of proportions.

"Local languages" like this spring up around us all the time. Having a group write and perform Fibonacci music is no different than repeating an in-joke among friends, retelling a favorite story, or saying a prayer before a meal. Each act has a more specific function (fulfilling a school assignment, making people laugh, reinforcing group memory, voicing thanks), but they're united in their power to unite. These languages are often formed by the group who use them, often meaningless to anyone outside this group, but incredibly rich and resonant in meaning to those in it. I don't think their role in establishing group identity should be understated.

Playing "In C"

Last night I played ringleader for about a dozen people who got together to play In C. The instrumentation was nicely eclectic: handful of string players, oboe, trumpet, sax, metal recorder, electric guitar, and percussion (a guy hitting a chair with yarn mallets). Three other pianists took an octave each on the piano while I beat out the pulse.

You read in books how the piece represents a different paradigm for performance practice, but it doesn't really set in until you play it. We were arranged in a ring, so everyone could see each other. However, the cave-like ambience of the room precluded being able to hear everyone well. As a result, little "cliques" formed. Instead of everyone playing off the group, people tended to respond mostly to the people immediately around them. Broader interactions occured occasionally, but they weren't common.

What stuck out to me was seeing how the players could be guided through the piece by their individual interest. People dropped off in places and picked up again when something seemed to grab their attention. Our performance had a very ephemeral, episodic flow. Every so often the group "clicked" and we got some intriguing interactions, but after a few moments it diffused back to murkiness. Hardly a unified narrative, but not boring either. From my vantage point, the experience was comparable to people watching on a busy street.

Though the piece is fully accepts the individuality and personality of all involved, it doesn't react well with diva personalities. Since everyone is of equal importance, you have to be okay with being another one of the unwashed. It's a self-policing system in a way. A spot in it is reserved for anyone who wants to make whatever contribution they feel up to, so long as they're willing to be co-equals. Anyone who wants to hog the spotlight will probably leave on their own, purely out of disinterest.

The followup question to this experience is whether this kind of social environment is implicit to open instrumentation pieces. Only one way to find out...

From the Vaults

[9/20 update: all download links now work properly]

Well, the metaphorical ones anyway. In reality we're talking more of a drawer. Composers often talk about "top drawer" works or putting their pieces away in a drawer. While we at times exaggerate our accomplishments for professional gain, I can vouch that I have a bona-fide drawer where I keep my completed scores (we composers lead such interesting lives).

I don't know why Kenneth Patchen is so neglected as a poet (...and a novelist...and a visual artist). Emily Dickinson offered a definition for real poetry, something along the lines of that it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. This is a regular experience when I sit down to read Patchen. His writing is deeply felt in a way that makes you question the clutter in your life, whether the things with which you occupy your time get in the way of living well in the world.

His poetry was set most notably to music by John Cage (a radio play: The City Wears a Slouch Hat). Charles Mingus performed with Patchen, though I don't believe any of their sessions together were recorded (though his work with other improvisers was). There are a few other composers I know of who have worked with his texts.

A couple years ago, I joined this fine bunch by using some of Patchen's poetry for a cycle called Four Affections. There's no elaborate concept to the sequence, just an exploration of different nuances of love. The following performance features Scott Perkins singing and yours truly at the keys. The score is available on request.

I. From Hovenweep
II. "The Snow is Deep on the Ground"
III. "I'd Want Her Eyes to Fill With Wonder"
IV. Geography of Music

More Musicking

From a BBC article on the social habits of music lovers:

Fans of musicals come out as the most mild-mannered group, with the lowest level of drug-taking and criminal acts.

They also drink less regularly than other music fans, and are among the most likely to do charity work.

(zing)

But followers of hip hop and dance music are more likely to have had multiple sex partners over the last five years and were among the biggest drug-takers surveyed.

"It comes out in the study that, in these types of music, fans score worse in various behaviours, such as criminality, sexual promiscuity and drug use," said Dr Adrian North, who led the research.

"It was shown that this had nothing to do with their ethnic backgrounds," he added. "The behaviour was linked purely to musical taste in its own right."

Musicking

What we need to keep in mind is that those taking part in performances of different kinds are looking for different kinds of relationships, and we should not project the ideals of one kind of performance onto another. Any performance, and that includes a symphony concert, should be judged finally on its success in bringing into existence for as long as it lasts a set of relationships that those taking part feel to be ideal and in enabling those taking part to explore, affirm, and celebrate those relationships. Only those taking part will know for sure what is their nature.

from Musicking, by Christopher Small

I can't remember the last time I've felt like I needed to lie down after reading a book. "Why do people do music?" is the broad and non-trivial question asked by Small. Its provocative nature comes mostly from its formulation: do rather than like, listen to, play, etc. He presents music not as a thing, but as an activity in which composer, performer, and listener play equal roles. It is a ritual where the ideal relationships of a community are lived out before its participants. The symphony orchestra is used as the main example.

Anyone prone to engaging in "whither classical music?" debates really should read this book.

In other news, Zoilus has a lovely round-up of conflicts in copyright law brought on by the "digital age."

Back to School

For all intents and purposes, summer ends when school starts. I've got a few more days before classes get going, but I'm back in Rochester and settling into this year's digs. Part of procrastinating from unpacking (besides writing this post) is checking out this year's concert calendar. New music-ally speaking, it would appear as if BoaC has annexed upstate NY. Only two Musica Nova concerts are without a piece by any of their composers, and one of them is a Steve Reich 70th birthday show (featuring Music for 18 Musicians, and hopefully the composer himself for some face time with us student types). Us American experimentalist student types can also look forward to an Ossia concert with Cage's The Seasons, Feldman's Rothko Chapel (I wonder if they've gotten a celeste player yet...), and a couple Lou Harrison pieces.

Crumb Speaks

The following quotes are from a published collection of interviews with R. Crumb. The interviews were conducted from the mid-'80s to mid-'90s, so as Amazon informs you, "they reflect the mature Crumb." Recurring topics include the role of the artist, censorship, his life, and (of course) sex. He's very candid throughout, definitely one of the better sets of artist interviews I've read recently.

Do you think, getting back to what Trina wrote, that the artist has any sense of responsibility to society as a whole, to the readers of his work, to how his work is perceived by other people?

That's complicated. It depends on the medium. For instance, making a movie is different from drawing comics or writing a book. With comics or a book, it's a very solitary thing. Getting involved with actors in a collective venture like film is somewhat different. A film can very rarely ever be as personal and intimate of a statement as a piece of writing or a comic book or a painting that's produced by one person. (69)

So, say, John Zorn's use of porn on album covers and during performances is a different act than Crumb publishing his comics. He's a little dodgy about what kind of role the artist should play in censoring his own work, but he stresses honesty and authenticity as important traits for an artist. Ultimately, these features are more attention-worthy than any taboo content that slips in. Here's his version of what he thinks the role of the artist should be:

Allowing the subconscious to do the work isn't the only way for artists to tell the truth, is it?

I think so, because your conscious mind can never know the truth. It can only know homilies or ideas. What is truth? It's a kind of revelation, it's not a concrete fact like one plus one equals two. That's not truth, that's arithmetic. If you look at a work of art, and there's an identifying spark, that's a revelation. You can't say, "Here's what it's all about; here's what the truth is." Maybe you can't define it. It's just something you experience.

Aren't there truthful artists who meticulously, intellectually work out what they're doing?

Sure, and sometimes the truth comes through in that stuff. If the person has an earnest desire to tell the truth, often he'll plow through all of that intellectual bullshit. If that desire is there, sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. It's complicated. A person almost has to be crazy to tell the truth. The mind is really a complicated mess. (60-1)

Sound Porn

Via Boing Boing, a set of mini-movies (NSFW) that focus on sound...or a woman undressing (or both?). They show a model putting on and taking off different outfits in an anechoic chamber. Each of the outfits are made from different unusual materials, so the environment ends up dramatizing the sounds they make. The arty pretense is basically a cover for the bad porn that ensues, but it's interesting to see what eroticizes the videos. The images are too low-res to really reveal anything, so it's really the combination of sound and suggestion that makes them work.

A lot of writing on the nature of sound (I'm thinking mainly of The Tuning of the World, which I mentioned in the post just below this) talk about its impact on defining a space and influencing one's perception of time, but there's something to be said for the fact that there's a sensuality inherent to the act of listening closely to sounds.

...

Now, I'd like a moment to pause and reflect on the fact that I just wrote an analysis post on porn. Bad porn, no less. I swear this won't happen again.