When practicing an instrument or writing music, it usually seems like the amount of time you have to put to improve at the skill in question is disproportionate to your improvement rate. You might have to write half a dozen bum pieces before you can use some little idea you had, you have to play a few Mozart sonatas before you're happy with the tone quality for any of them, etc., etc.... I'd be genuinely surprised if someone with creative inclinations has not had this kind of experience.
There always seems to be a well-demarcated line between frustration and ownership with me and these problems. Progress can be difficult to feel. One day you leave the practice room pulling your hair out, the next you come back and something's clicked. Taking time out to rationalize the situation can sometimes help you get your bearings, but nothing really substitutes for those long hours spent in the trenches. Those times may make you wonder why you even bother, but you know the answer when you get one of those little epiphanies.
February 25, 2007
Tenney on Form
A second use of [form] that is, again often encountered in musical discussions is illustrated by such terms of "sonata-form," "ABA-form," "rondo-form," etc., which refer to specific formal types, generally associated with particular styles or historical periods. And although each of these formal types may be characterized by certain intrinsic formal features, common to all examples of the type, and constituting the original basis for classification, they tend to represent, in each case, not so much a form, but a formula, and are not, therefore relevant to the problems I am concerned with here.James Tenney, Meta (+) Hodos
I read a description of this book somewhere that was along the lines of "the most important 20th century theory book that no one's read" (though a search has revealed that someone is sharing a copy via BitTorrent). It is, indeed, pretty kickass, particularly considering it was his Master's Thesis. Whereas music theory tends to posit abstract structures and work towards the score and the listening experience, Tenney starts with the listening experience and works in the other direction. He tries to articulate how people process sounds, what gets us to group them together and divide them out. He does not assume that people hear a piece with a set of structural expectations. When he makes analogies, the vocabulary of visual art is used frequently ("figure" and "ground" as terms for structural importance, etc.).
As you might guess, American experimentalists provide most of the musical examples. Ives and Varèse get the most attention, but early Schoenberg (yay op11) and Webern make brief appearances. The analytical highlight for me was the discussion of how dynamics shape the opening of Density 21.5, implying a rhythm in an otherwise "static" pitch (way more interesting than aggregate completion).
Some Tenney links:
Daniel Wolf's very thorough review of Meta (+) Hodos
"John Cage and the Theory of Harmony"
Tenney Bibliography
Tenney Slideshow with "Raggedy Ann"
February 17, 2007
February 14, 2007
Some Facebook Groups Concerning Music
- All Hail Brad Lubman!
- Baroque Opera is Way Happenin'
- Christa Ludwig, awesomest Singer Ever
- Down with Equal Temperament
- Franz Liszt 4 Life
- French Music Lovers
- Got Perfect Pitch?
- I Live By the Sonata Principle
- I love Elliott Carter and Polyrhythmic Syncopation!!
- I'm A Fermata...Hold Me
- I'm Glad Pluto's No Longer a Planet; It Makes Gustav Holst's Suite Complete
- I'm such a music freak that I harmonize with the fire alarm...
- I wish I were an +6 chord so you could bring resolution to my raised member
- Mahler Is A Bad Ass!!!
- Modal Majority
- People for the Ethical Treatment of Accompanists
- Scriabin Is THE Bad Ass!!!
- We Bang Steinways!
- you know Louis Andriessen would be MIND-BLOWING in bed
February 11, 2007
Kronos Quartet, 2/7/07
Kronos's show at Eastman Theatre featured only pieces that were commissioned by them or arranged exclusively for them. It brought out what I see as the very best and very worst of the group. I have tremendous respect for them as dedicated advocates of new music. They played one of their under 30 commissions with the same commitment they gave to their proven showpieces. I'm still unsure, though, about their "world music" projects and pop covers. I understand they program this music along with Steve Reich and Michael Gordon to show that they think it's just as good. However, underneath the colored lights and amplification, I'm still sitting in the neo-classical temple of Eastman Theatre listening to a string quartet. It's hard to get away from the feeling that they're engaged in some old-fashioned exoticism.
The program opened with Potassium, a Michael Gordon piece. Its amplified glissandi would be familiar to anyone who has heard Weather, but it is by no means a rehash of that piece. It uses a large-scale ABA form similar to Reich's Triple Quartet. There's a very narrow range of ensemble relationships (lots of staggered entrance glissandi), but a wide range of timbres and harmonies come out. It's a very physical piece. You feel like a chemical element is being synthesized before you, but no soft metal like potassium. You'd need some high-powered lasers to work with whatever Gordon had in mind.
"Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me" is an Iraqi song, author unknown. The notes state that the arrangement they used is "based on a recording produced sometime during the Saddam period between the 1980s and 2002." The cello played a syncopated bass line that kept you on your toes. A fragment of the original recording was played as the song finished up.
"Raga Mishra Bhairavi" is an arrangement of sarangi music by Ram Narayan. The viola took its place here. The stage was dark so I couldn't quite tell, but it looked like John Sherba grabbed an electric sitar for this one.
Dan Visconti's Love Bleeds Radiant came in through the Kronos: Under 30 Project. My anal critic self thought it suffered from the typical young composer syndrome of too-many-ideas, but my adventurous programming self was intrigued by the idea of touring with something that's untested and uncertain. It gets that critical dialogue going between performer and audience instead of composer self and anal critic self. Maybe it's bad for every item on a concert program to be a proven masterpiece.
"Flugufrelsarinn," a Sigur Rós song, followed. I thought it was a very convincing arrangement that kept a lot of the band's sound intact. On the other hand, a friend who knows the band better than I do criticized the arrangement for not being loyal enough to the original.
Derek Charke, a new name to me, contributed Cercle du Nord III. It had a minimalist pulse but followed a seemingly programmatic form. There were occasional pre-recorded interjections of speech which were unfortuantely (intentionally?) hard to make out. I had trouble making sense of everything with only one hearing, but I can give it the compliment that I wanted to give it a second one.
"Lullaby" and "Tusen Tanakar (A Thousand Thoughts)" fell into Kronos's direct, sentimental style. Either you care or you don't.
The program closed with Reich's Triple Quartet. On recording, it seems like perhaps his most traditional piece. Three fast-slow-fast movements, arch forms, and large scale harmonic movement based on mediant relationships. In person, it seems as radical as any other. Throughout his career, Reich has found ways to get people to play their instruments in unusual ways. They're not necessarily original methods (sharing instruments comes from his study of Ghanaian drumming), but he always integrates convincingly into into his personal musical language.
Here he takes what is normally the most "intimate" of genres and turns a group into one cog in a larger machine: a live quartet plays against a tape of two others. When seen live, the combination creates a startling juxtaposition of the active and inactive (much like the usual fast music/slow music at the same time in other Reich). The music itself is incredibly lively, begging you to dance along with it. However, when 2/3 of the musicians are canned, the stage picture doesn't have enough energy to match. In addition, the group appeared intentionally deadened. Their gestures felt perfunctory and the lighting staying consistently dimmed and uncolored (both in big contrast to everything else that night). I always thought of the piece as good workout music, but in person the active/inactive juxtaposition is very unsettling. I wonder if I would feel the same way about the piece if it was performed by three live quartets.
Three encores ensued: "Beloved, O Beloved" from their Bollywood album (ebullient music, I'd like to hear the rest now), a Star-Spangled Banner à la Hendrix (the lighting projected distorted instrumental shapes on the side walls, the interpretation was about as radical as it was in '69), and "Lux Aeternum" from Requiem for a Dream (music that reminds you how "serious" the movie was).
The program opened with Potassium, a Michael Gordon piece. Its amplified glissandi would be familiar to anyone who has heard Weather, but it is by no means a rehash of that piece. It uses a large-scale ABA form similar to Reich's Triple Quartet. There's a very narrow range of ensemble relationships (lots of staggered entrance glissandi), but a wide range of timbres and harmonies come out. It's a very physical piece. You feel like a chemical element is being synthesized before you, but no soft metal like potassium. You'd need some high-powered lasers to work with whatever Gordon had in mind.
"Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me" is an Iraqi song, author unknown. The notes state that the arrangement they used is "based on a recording produced sometime during the Saddam period between the 1980s and 2002." The cello played a syncopated bass line that kept you on your toes. A fragment of the original recording was played as the song finished up.
"Raga Mishra Bhairavi" is an arrangement of sarangi music by Ram Narayan. The viola took its place here. The stage was dark so I couldn't quite tell, but it looked like John Sherba grabbed an electric sitar for this one.
Dan Visconti's Love Bleeds Radiant came in through the Kronos: Under 30 Project. My anal critic self thought it suffered from the typical young composer syndrome of too-many-ideas, but my adventurous programming self was intrigued by the idea of touring with something that's untested and uncertain. It gets that critical dialogue going between performer and audience instead of composer self and anal critic self. Maybe it's bad for every item on a concert program to be a proven masterpiece.
"Flugufrelsarinn," a Sigur Rós song, followed. I thought it was a very convincing arrangement that kept a lot of the band's sound intact. On the other hand, a friend who knows the band better than I do criticized the arrangement for not being loyal enough to the original.
Derek Charke, a new name to me, contributed Cercle du Nord III. It had a minimalist pulse but followed a seemingly programmatic form. There were occasional pre-recorded interjections of speech which were unfortuantely (intentionally?) hard to make out. I had trouble making sense of everything with only one hearing, but I can give it the compliment that I wanted to give it a second one.
"Lullaby" and "Tusen Tanakar (A Thousand Thoughts)" fell into Kronos's direct, sentimental style. Either you care or you don't.
The program closed with Reich's Triple Quartet. On recording, it seems like perhaps his most traditional piece. Three fast-slow-fast movements, arch forms, and large scale harmonic movement based on mediant relationships. In person, it seems as radical as any other. Throughout his career, Reich has found ways to get people to play their instruments in unusual ways. They're not necessarily original methods (sharing instruments comes from his study of Ghanaian drumming), but he always integrates convincingly into into his personal musical language.
Here he takes what is normally the most "intimate" of genres and turns a group into one cog in a larger machine: a live quartet plays against a tape of two others. When seen live, the combination creates a startling juxtaposition of the active and inactive (much like the usual fast music/slow music at the same time in other Reich). The music itself is incredibly lively, begging you to dance along with it. However, when 2/3 of the musicians are canned, the stage picture doesn't have enough energy to match. In addition, the group appeared intentionally deadened. Their gestures felt perfunctory and the lighting staying consistently dimmed and uncolored (both in big contrast to everything else that night). I always thought of the piece as good workout music, but in person the active/inactive juxtaposition is very unsettling. I wonder if I would feel the same way about the piece if it was performed by three live quartets.
Three encores ensued: "Beloved, O Beloved" from their Bollywood album (ebullient music, I'd like to hear the rest now), a Star-Spangled Banner à la Hendrix (the lighting projected distorted instrumental shapes on the side walls, the interpretation was about as radical as it was in '69), and "Lux Aeternum" from Requiem for a Dream (music that reminds you how "serious" the movie was).
February 09, 2007
Upcoming Show
Eastman Musica Nova
Kilbourn Hall
Monday, February 12, 2007
8pm
Program:
David Lang - Sweet Air
Caleb Burhans - Amidst Neptune
Vinko Globokar - La Ronde
David Lang - Increase
***
I'll be there playing piano on Sweet Air, "HarpsyKorg" on Increase, and singing on La Ronde (it's one of those anarchist open instrumention pieces). It'll be a short program: an hour or so, no intermission.
Kilbourn Hall
Monday, February 12, 2007
8pm
Program:
David Lang - Sweet Air
Caleb Burhans - Amidst Neptune
Vinko Globokar - La Ronde
David Lang - Increase
***
I'll be there playing piano on Sweet Air, "HarpsyKorg" on Increase, and singing on La Ronde (it's one of those anarchist open instrumention pieces). It'll be a short program: an hour or so, no intermission.
January 27, 2007
Sestina d'Inverno
I first met this poem of Anthony Hecht's in a high school English class (Hecht formerly taught English at the U. of R. — go Yellowjackets!). Honestly, anyone who doesn't like snow should quit their whining and go live somewhere else. Some of us are trying to enjoy this weather!
Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for "snow,"
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,
And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind
An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island
Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.
Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn't mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.
The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven's making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.
No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.
Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for "snow,"
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,
And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind
An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island
Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.
Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn't mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.
The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven's making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.
No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.
January 22, 2007
Raise your hand if...
Composers are accustomed to the question of "What kind of music do you write?" Pianists have probably gotten this one a few times:
"I'm a musician."
"What do you play?"
"Piano."
"Oh. I could never do two things at the same time."
January 16, 2007
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?
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?
January 09, 2007
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.
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...
January 03, 2007
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:
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.
December 28, 2006
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.
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.
December 22, 2006
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"
November 29, 2006
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?
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?
November 07, 2006
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.
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.
October 24, 2006
"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.
October 21, 2006
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."Prologue," Essays Before a Sonata
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. . .
October 18, 2006
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.
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