There’s the usual Big, Deep Subjects tossing around in my head, seeking coherence, but in the meantime I have the call and response of stereo listener to toss off.
Naxos has been putting out a Robert Craft series focussing on Schoenberg and especially Stravinsky – the records are a mix a new productions and repackages of the older recordings he made for Musicmasters and Koch. The new one out this week is just that, a collection of the Octet, Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, the Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements. The chamber works are two of the composers most attractive Neo-Classical pieces. They are concise, colorfully orchestrated, energetic and completely transparent; you can hear what they do and how they do it simultaneously.
Symphony in C is in the regarded catalogues of Stravinsky masterpieces, but I have a personal soft spot for the Symphony in Three Movements. It is forceful and direct, exciting and covers a broad range of territory in a quick 20 minutes or so. Stravinsky has mentioned that some of the music comes from his experience of watching newsreel footage of World War II, and the first movement also has conveys the attractive side of American industrial might, with the sonic equivalent of of lights flowing and bouncing off a curved, polished sedan as it motors down a Los Angeles boulevard at night. Stravinksy himself has recorded a definitive version, and I’ve experienced the work performed magnificently under Michael Tilson Thomas and David Robertson. The Craft recording, leading the Philharmonia, is also excellent. Symphony in C on this CD is also superb – this is a work that seems difficult to perform consistently well. It is Stravinsky’s most Classical exploration of Neo-Classicism, and frequently I find there is too much focus on the Classical gestures and not enough sense of the long line, the forward motion that always seems to be leading logically to cadences and climaxes. It is these qualities that Craft captures, he has great understanding of this music. This is an excellent set of music, an excellent way to explore this facet of the composers long career and also an excellent way to get started with Stravinsky and Robert Craft in general. All the recordings in this edition are worth hearing, and since the publisher is Naxos they are all at a bargain price (4 for the price of 3 for New Yorkers who can shop at J&R).
I’ve had the CD on the stereo since Tuesday, and it usually leaves me wanting to hear something else. I’m also continuing the unfortunately slow process of, after moving in 18 months ago, getting my collection out of boxes and onto shelves. I’m now done with “A” through “Joe Henry,” which I managed yesterday. Part of the process is pulling out things I have not listened to in a while and thinking, I’d like to listen to that. So Hindemith followed Stravinsky, an EMI CD with Wolfgang Sawallisch leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in some of his most important works, including the Nobilissima Visione suite and the Symphony Mathis der Maler. Hindemith is a composer I usually admire more than enjoy. His best qualities are his overall craft and skill, the ability to write what he hears, and he shares the Stravinskian values of transparency of structure and means of expression. I find him frequently bloodless, however. Perhaps it’s a cliche, but he seems to me to consistently desire the Romantic expression that is the great achievement of his national music, and that expression is an uncomfortable fit for his chosen style. I think that the idea of melody is a good example of this problem. Stravinsky can write enjoyable melodies, but there’s nothing that’s usually memorable, because the melody is ornamental to the overall structural and rhythmic purpose. Hindemith writes similar music, but there’s much more of a focus on displaying the melody, and the music suffers because the melodies are not strong. An example is on the CD, where the ballet suite ends with a Passacaglia, a form based on a repetitive and rising baseline that is laden with emotional power. Bach wrote stunning, wrenching Passacaglias. Hindemith’s is inventive, but the line itself, given orchestral emphasis, is a little clumsy.
This is a long-winded way to saying that, despite the possible problems, I love this CD! Even the most logical, po-faced music has a rhetorical aspect to it, and in the hands of a skilled, committed performer with ideas, any music can be made convincing. This is what Sawallisch doe. He believes in the music and present it with utter commitment and conviction. He makes us believe through the skill, force and especially style of his gestures. The suite is presented with emotional depth and plangency, and the symphony presents the composer at his best and in the best light. The opening captures a quality that is both austere and grand, with quite, open, glassy chords building to a magnificent and moving cadence. It is seductive in the best sense, offering us belief in the thing which, in the moment, we seek.
My father teaches film, among other things, and he finds that he frequently has to explain to his students that Steven Spielberg did not invent movie-making. I tell people I make electronic music, and have a similar experience explaining to them that Aphex Twin did not invent the field. Instead there have been three full generations of electronic composers, with a new one, armed with laptops, fast on the way.
For more than a generation, Roulette has been a premier resource for experimentation in and presentation of electronic music, and for the past year they have been celebrating 30 years of this music with a packed schedule (they also are offering generous concert packages for supporters). Thursday night they presented a concert from two important second generation composers, Larry Austin and Annea Lockwood, who continue to experiment and look past the edges of what has been, and could be, done.
Experimentation is as much about process as about results, and the possibility of failure, or unexpected results, is inherent, so it’s no surprise or even disappointment that the results were mixed. The successes, gladly, were grand in an intimate way.
With one exception, all the pieces called for performers to interact with electronics. The exception was Austin’s “John explains…,” solely produced on the computer. Though it’s a digital instrument, the piece is a throw-back to the tradition of analog tape compositions, adapting a taped conversation with Cage by accompanying it with digital sounds. It’s interesting enough to listen to, or overhear as Austin explains, Cage, but musically the piece is nothing but mild, a conversation with background music which itself seems to have no relationship to the source. However, its intimacy was emblematic of the theme of Austin’s work this night.
Intimacy was more fully and successfully explored in three pieces for soloist with computer music, “Redux” for violin, “Tableaux: Convolutions on a Theme” for alto sax and “ReduxTwo” for piano. This is virtuosic music with an introspective, exploratory quality, and the soloists essentially accompany themselves, as their live playing is recorded, altered and combined with pre-recorded music and then played back through an octophonic speaker system. The result is an intriguing set of interior dialogues on public display. “Redux” was the most abstract in tone, utilizing fragmented phrases interrupted by transitions to accented pizzicato and bow strokes, all mixed in a polyphonic spread that ended with the sense that it was both the right length and that there was still intriguing territory to explore. Patricia Strange was the exceptionally able performer.
“Tableaux” for alto was presented in mixed media style, with a distractingly bland video of clouds washed through a variety of colored filters. The electronic results produced a pleasing bed of blended, static timbres, while Stephen Duke played through the long, lyrical, challenging lines. His playing was committed, expressive and involving. The coda brings forth the theme on which the piece is based, that from “Pictures at an Exhibition,” and after a moment of surprise, Austin and Duke completely convince the listener of the right sense of this choice. It’s a quietly confident and joyous piece. The final work, with pianist Joseph Kubera, continued this line of deeper exploration; the music is based in atonal systems and occupies the sound world of Webern. It is familiar in style and yet original at the same time, and, like the previous works, exceptionally idiomatic and well-written. The altered playback of the live performance goes the furthest in creating an antiphonal dialogue between the performer and himself, and since this is music, the sense is of a series of questions being answered with more questions. It was a fascinating, involving piece, successful and satisfying.
More problematic were Annea Lockwood’s two works. The first “Jitterbug,” featured David Behrman and John King performing against the background of pre-recorded sounds. The musicians are asked to interpret graphic scores based on images of rocks, to improvise in other words. There is an inherent problem in this; the performance gave the impression that the players were meant to improvise with the direct accompaniment of the tape, but tape cannot listen and respond, an essential foundation of improvised music, and so the result was of two musicians seeking proper windows in which to make music, while something mechanical rode blithely around and over them. The tape itself was the most interesting part of the piece, composed of buzzing and clicking insect sounds, but it seemed to have no internal organization. In all, the work started, went on too long, then ended without the feeling that anything had been said or accomplished.
Her other work on the program, “In Our Name,” was more successful but still flawed. This is an electro-acoustic work for voice and cello (Thomas Buckner and Ted Mook, two superb musicians), utilizing two poems from two former prisoners at Gitmo. This is political art that thankfully avoids the easy-out of most political art, the presentation of a slogan for consensus. A great deal of this success is that fact that the work is performed at all, as the Pentagon deemed poetry a security risk, because of its ‘content and form.’ When ideas and the words used to express them are deemed dangerous, than merely presenting them answers the political question.
The work begins in darkness with dramatic drones from the musicians, then the real playing begins. The first poem is recited and sung, accompanied by cello, and interrupted powerfully by the sound of screaming through the intake of breath; it’s severe and effecting. The singing of the poetry is musically successful and powerful. Strangely, this is only half the style of the piece, which has a bizarre and flawed binary structure. All the power and momentum essentially stops, as the second poem is merely spoken by the singer, at which point the piece ends. There are a few problems here. The first is that the piece goes from music to theater, letting go of all the things that are working without establishing enough theatrical sense for the transition to succeed. The second is that the poem, while a sincere expression, is not good poetry, there is no poetic art to it and it sorely needs to be set to music. Third, the switch in style and method is jarring, and the audience is still left puzzled over what happened when the work all-of-a-sudden stops. Ultimately, an involving, promising work becomes odd and dissatisfying. Perhaps it is a work still in progress.
Again, though, this is what experimentation is all about; try things, see what works, see what doesn’t, try again. It’s what makes music like science, solving problems, answering questions and building on the accretion of knowledge. That experimentation, successful and otherwise, is still going on is a true mark of the health of the musical world, and for everything that works and doesn’t work, I’m grateful that Austin and Lockwood are demonstrating their explorations to the world.
So sang Michael Jackson, 20 years ago. And damn right he was “bad!” Now, lately, sadly, he’s just bad. For all the badness you need, the new resource is The Bad Plus.
They come at you with a big, bad bang on their major label debut, These Are The Vistas. A classic jazz piano trio set-up with an aesthetic equally rooted in rock, they rattled teeth from the opening moments on the album, playing fast and loud, with the propulsive and heavy ostinato of “Big Eater.” But it’s not all bashing and superior rock-style production, this is a jazz group, and these guys can really play. Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and Dave King have chops, interplay, they can improvise and they are absolutely playing jazz. It may be all straight eighth notes, but the music Miles Davis pioneered 40 years ago means that you don’t always have to swing. And the point of The Bad Plus is that they play like a rock band.
The rest of the record is continually surprising, exciting and satisfying, even after five years of listening. Their version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a rush of intensity and imaginative resetting. Yes, that is the Nirvana tune; jazz musicians have been playing pop tunes for decades, including Charlie Parker blowing “On A Slow Boat to China,” Sonny Rollins doing “Hooray for Hollywood,” early Miles doing show-tunes and latter Miles playing Cindy Lauper, Lester Bowie’s wonderful brass arrangements of Sade and Marilyn Manson, and Brad Mehldau spreading the word about Radiohead and Nick Drake to a jazz audience. There may be some shock to hear jazz versions of such contemporary music, but I imagine that’s how every generation hears it, with the inherent prejudice that the pop music of today is a poor version of the past. It ain’t necessarily so. I think it’s safe to say that the pop music of the 1930s-40s had a certain striving for wit and charm, but our times are different and call for different music. And wit and charm haven’t gone away, I’m just not sure jazz players will ever do much with Elvis Costello. Too many words, maybe. This is not a schtick, it’s a way to make great music out of tunes the players dig, and the band has plenty of great original material as well, like the lyrical “Everywhere You Turn,” which begins with an astonishing and beautiful fade-in. The band’s interplay tells me that, like all good music nerds, they grew up digging progressive rock – the proof comes later.
Their follow-up record was Give, and it’s even better in subtle ways. It’s more musical, more certain in it’s purpose, less needing to demonstrate that something can be done, a little more expressive. They play Ornette Coleman’s “Street Woman,” and lay into “Iron Man” to end. That last cut is enjoyable and impressive, but it has a faint quality of obligation about it, as if the band, having done a trick, must now repeat it every time since the audience expects it. That can be a bit of a danger. That suspicion was confirmed by Suspicious Activity, which is the same thing, just a bit stale, and a disappointing three-pack EP of all covers, “Immigrant Song,” “We Are The Champions” and “Human Behaviour.” The music is giving way to the schtick, and considering the talents involved these records are disappointing indeed. Prog is a better listen than the latter records, but the sense of surprise, the sense that the band will surprise the listener, is almost gone. Name-checking the pop tunes is a slender interest, though their selection of “Tom Sawyer” goes along way to confirm my previous claim. Hey, it’s called “Prog.” But much as the title pleases my inner prog-rock nerd, the result is actually a little disappointing. They clearly are not going to have the power of Neil Peart driving them, but they also seem to be lacking the own sense of force that was so welcome all the way back on These Are The Vistas.
So now, there’s a new record out, For All I Care, and it’s generally a immensely satisfying return to form – the band is moving forward by going back to their roots, so to speak. Despite the strength of the original material, there is none of it on the record, and that’s all right. The addition is the indy-rock singer Wendy Lewis, and this is essentially a vocal record (there are three marvelous, short interludes based on a Stravinsky theme from his ballet “Apollo.”) Lewis herself is a mixed bag. She steps back and forth from indy-rock affectless, meaning artistic fecklessness, to chesty rock belting, and so she varies both from song to song and moment to moment. It doesn’t matter so much, though, because this is not a case of the band accompanying her, but her accompanying the band. Her presence seems to have them concentrating on playing, rather than putting on a show, and the playing is excellent. The choice of songs is also a nice mix of the expected and surprising. Nirvana appears on the opening cut, with an inventive stop-start take on “Lithium,” which is followed by a soaring, lyrical version of “Comfortably Numb.” I have never had any personal interest in Pink Floyd, but this has an irresistible magnificence to it. Another band which I’ve never cared for makes an appearance by proxy here, the Wilco song “Radio Cure.” Again, this is totally satisfying, continuing the anthemic lyricism which is at the heart of the band, and the secret heart of progressive rock. Lewis shines here, expressive as opposed to Jeff Tweedy’s po-face vocal style.
Another highlight is a properly fulsome performance of “long Distance Runaround,” which is probably melting nerd-hears, young and old, across America. As a long-time love of Yes – there, I said it – it’s a treat. One thing this band does consistently is treat all the material they play with respect, they really love this music. The proof is a dreamy, reverential take on, of all things, the Bee Gees’ “How Deep is Your Love.” And I don’t think Sarah Palin will be playing this version of “Barracuda” at her rallies, because in this setting, as with the whole record, every word of the lyric is crystal clear, and Lewis really shines her – she sounds her best when she really opens up. She also is a natural for “Lock, Stock and Teardrops.” She has a style but is not a particularly strong singer (pop singers can do, or turn to jazz, it just takes a lot of work – Curtis Stigers has done this successfully), and she’s frequently exposed in the production, but her presence seems to be the focus that has the band back to it’s muscular, supple, surprising best. Let’s hope for continued badness.
UPDATE: Lest I unintentionally misinform my readers, the variations on this record are two different performances of Milton Babbit’s “Semi-Simple Variations” and a variation from “Apollo.”
Through the wonders of modern technology, it’s actually possible for any of you, dear readers, to listen to some of the music I listen to. Via Simplifymedia, you can listen to my entire iTunes library through your own iTunes application and, if you have an iPhone, you can listen to all the non-DRM music. Download what you need from Simplifymedia, and send an email to “gtra1n” at “mac” dot “com” so I can invite you to join.
In the depths of a fairly cold winter, Juilliard gave us a a mix of shaggy and urbane visitors, bringing us some word of a mild and sunny land to the West – California! This was the Focus! 2009 festival, dedicated both to music from California over the last 100 years and to the argument of what makes for California music. Each proposition, intertwined, amounted to a mixed bag of success and failure, inspiration and mistaken notions. But it was free, so who’s complaining?
I’m not complaining, I’m listening and thinking and discussing. This is personally an important topic for me. I started becoming a composer in New York, under the tutelage of the late, great and sorely missed Meyer Kupferman, but I began to develop as an individual musical personality in California, in great part due to the influence of California music. There is such a thing, there is music that demonstrates and markedly different aesthetic than East coast music. While the roots of it are firmly set in a geographical place, there is no guarantee that a composer living in California will make California music, no is there a need for a composer who wants to make California music actually live in the state. Now that it has long been with us in the culture, it’s much more a state of mind. Of course, the pleasures of living on the West coast can certainly be stimulative.
The introductory essay in the program by Joel Sachs states emphatically that there is a California music, but then goes on to explain that it is ‘everything imaginable, and more.’ Well, no, it isn’t. This is a misguided way to argue a legitimate point, and musically the festival had more than a few moments of making the case that non-California music fit the bill. It doesn’t. The history of people, places and times shows that after the Nazis seized power, a flood of European composers fled to the West coast; Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Ernst Krenek and Hanns Eisler among them. Many of them became teachers, and thus helped make music in California. But of this list – the most important names – not a one of them could be called a California composer. They were representatives of various schools of Late Romantic and Modern music in the 20th century, music that had an enormous influence on the East coast establishment but which, like the waves, broke into ephemeral spray on the aesthetic coastline of the Pacific. The festival presented solid, well-crafted Modern music in the Euro-America vein by composers who live in California – Kurt Rhode, Wayne Peterson, Andrew Imbrie, Elinor Armer – and it was all a disappointment, like having a party to which no one comes. No, California music is not everything imaginable, it is not strict atonality or dissonant Modernism. It’s also not a cliched of do-your-own-thing grooviness, it’s not simplistic nor purely tonal. It’s not a school in terms of technique, it’s a style in terms of outlook and values.
As Charles Ives is the father of American music, someone consciously striving to carve an entirely new national aesthetic out of the raw materials of his country, so Henry Cowell is both his immediate descendant and the next logical step in the process, Cowell is the son who himself begat California music. He looked to the West, which should be natural in California, because much of the state is not even on the North American plate, it is literally part of Asia. It also overlooks the seemingly endless expanse of the Pacific ocean, an enormous and enormously inviting emptiness that seems to demand that artists make it all new again. That’s California, where people come to renew and reinvent. And where important and absolutely American art is invented – how could we have Noir without San Francisco and Los Angeles?
Cowell reinvented music in many ways as both composer and teacher. As the latter he published the New Music Quarterly, which spread knowledge of non-European music to an audience of musicians and composers, and as the former he made music that had been completely rethought from the very basics. He ignored 500 years of accreted knowledge in music and started from scratch with basic musical gestures collected from around the world. Using the fundamental instrument of Western music, the piano, he made music by brushing the strings, by pounding fists and arms against the keyboard. A selection of his piano works was given a powerhouse and sympathetic performance by Euntaek Kim who was absolutely in tune with Cowell’s sheer musicality, the idea that any melody or rhythm can be shaped in a performers hands into something that sounds like the very best music possible – if you watch 30 Rock and see Alec Baldwin make everything he says funny just through his delivery, you’ll know what I mean. Kim’s rolling fists on the keyboard, and sense of phrasing and dynamic focus sounded as familiar and even comforting as possible, as if tone clusters are what the ear thirsts for. There is something completely liberating about the idea that beautiful music can be made with fists on the keyboard, and Kim clearly found it deeply inspiring, playing with verve, sympathy, skill and power. His performance of Cowell was the answer, both limiting and unlimited, to the question of what is California music. Cowell’s language, too, is immediately and clearly American. He’s like Hemingway, saying “we talk this way” in our country.
The whole festival cohered around this point, for or against. The music by composers who live in California was admirable, but seemed stolid and dull. The music by California composers was incredibly fresh and cleansing to the ear, like Haydn. It was transparent in means and modest in affect and pulled the delicious slight of hand of showing you how it’s done while marveling you at the same time. This gives it it’s great emotional power as well, the sensation that there is a way out of aesthetic culs-de-sacs, that there is hope. Even the music that did not entirely succeed but was quizzical about the possibilities and its own nature was exciting to hear. The conscious Asian elements in Paul Chihara’s Logs and Grand Alap-”A Window in the Sky,” from Chinary Ung, were liberating and refreshing; there are clearly fertile possibilities in the wedding of the abstract, i.e. non-social, basis of Western music with the non-Western musical view of time, which is neither linear nor progressive. There are earlier examples of this in the work of Debussy, Colin McPhee and some of Britten, and these possibilities were adopted and carried far by the wonderful Toru Takemitsu, still an underrated figure of the 20th century. This in general is one of the real possibilities for the future of Western music, and Peter Sellars has pointed this out, expressing the idea that the proliferation of students from Asian countries at Western conservatories signals a renewal of the great tradition of Western music through cultures to which it is still new. I believe him, and California music is the proof. It can be hard to see from the East, and it was hard for me to get used to when I moved to the West, but there is an Asian history of this country and continent, just as there is a European one. Geography focuses the mind, however, and like Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorkercover, it’s almost impossible to see from Manhattan. But in California, eyes are drawn inexorably westward, and the peopling of California by the Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Russians is in the names of the land.
After Cowell, the next logical step in the California aesthetic, and in many ways Ives’ figurative grandson, was Lou Harrison. After ‘traditional’ training and composing, including working with atonal systems, Harrison set out to make music that he simply liked, based on the music he like to hear, including Chinese opera. Even more than McPhee, he brought gamelan ideas to Western structures and techniques and produced a vast, varied and idiosyncratic body of work (Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig built their own instruments, he was a student of Esperanto and he created his own fonts). Another highlight of the festival was a performance of his Varied Trio, by Ariana Kim on violin, Chihiro Shubayama on percussion and Sharon Bjorndal playing piano that was absolutely the finest I’ve heard. This is a work that comes out of a synthesis of Western and Indonesian music, combining pentatonic scales, non-tuned ringing percussion and archaic European dance forms to create a work that is varied in its emotional scope and powerfully moving in its beauty. Kim’s playing of the extraordinary melody of the first movement was exceptionally expressive; she has a gorgeous tone that is clear, full and a balance between sweet and bitter and is apt for this music. Harrison’s work again refocused the ear and mind on the true point of the festival, and gently and forcefully demonstrated the fundamental nature of California music.
The big news and big name in overall event was, of course John Adams, who seems to be in New York constantly attending numerous events and premieres. Lucky us, because he’s not just the leading American composer, he is a composer who’s works will be performed for the next few hundred years, that is their quality and the importance of his voice. The capper to the event was a concert performance of his opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which I will discuss in an upcoming post. In concert, Harrison was followed by the world premiere of Adams’ String Quartet, performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet. It is excellent in the way of Adams’ best work – and his work has been consistently excellent lately. His voice as a composer is now both familiar and new. The piece starts off with a rollicking tempo and attitude, as the ensemble passes around the type of choppy, rhythmic phrase that we except in Minimalism. But that is a style that Adams has long ago incorporated as merely an element, and slowly he adds lines of increasing length and chromaticism, in the grand Romantic tradition that moves and satisfies him. There is a rise in activity, expression and tension, before the long first movement comes to a quiet close. The second, and final, movement begins with a dramatic quiet, a pulling back that builds suspense for what we expect to be an intense finale, and the music fulfills that promise. Antiphony in all the voices builds to a peak of tremendous energy and brings the work to a close with an explosive upward movement. Adams captures a quality of verve and emotional satisfaction and depth that sneaks up on the listener – every moment is exciting to listen to and so the listening experience really moves along, and before you know it he’s snuck up on you with something fairly profound. His recent orchestral work Guide to Strange Places is like this, it seems to be meant simply to entertain, but when it ends you realize that he’s had a real effect on the emotions. I think what makes this work is Adams’ unique and important way of combining Process, as in Minimalist music, with Resolution, as in Romantic music. The Process part is endlessly listenable, seductive in the way of the beauty and interest of colors and timbres, while the Resolution part is the essential power of music, the building up of tension directed towards an ultimate release which is the great contribution of Western music to the world. Beyond the sheer quality of his work, Adams is showing there is a way out of the fragmentation and didactic dead-ends of the 20th century, and that makes him I believe the next towering, essential figure in the art, after Stravinsky. And this way he found was possible, again, only in California, to which he fled in great part to escape the schools-of-thought confines of the East coast musical establishment and where, as he describes in his memoir, he came to find his voice while driving into the Sierras, listening to Wagner. Looking across the Pacific, he could see around the curvature of the globe to find what he sought in the Old World. He just had to get to the newest world first.
It’s the time of February when winter is most brown and grey . . .
. . . fortunately, there’s Bonnard at the Met.
