Theater of Found Sounds

Abschied (Part 3)

2011-11-23T01:51:00.001-05:00

Gaps, Wounds and Other Empty Places

Abschied (Part 2)

2011-11-17T22:56:00.001-05:00

Quartal Chords and Handfuls of Earth

Abschied (Part 1)

2011-11-09T00:57:00.000-05:00

A Spoonful of Soup, a Few Grains of Caviar, and Two Chords

The Image of Melancholia

2011-10-07T18:05:00.001-04:00

I.

Melancholia will pass us by.

Lars von Trier's Melancholia is a disaster movie in two parts. The first, a fiasco of a wedding; proving the pessimist's adage that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. You sit transfixed, despite the unfolding calamity, by the carefully framed images, the deep, rich colors, and while von Trier's signature unsteadicam work is still very much in operation, he tampers it with its unmoving, stationary opposite: breathtakingly gorgeous slow-motion sequences that have the same painterly quality, perhaps even mythic quality, that one sees in the work of Bill Viola. You witness Justine's (Kirsten Dunst's character) wedding unraveling; you gaze into her blank, despondent stare (never directly at the camera, never directly at us); you see her forced smiles and how desperate she is to feel anything but nothing at all. You find yourself consoling Justine, saying: "Well, it is horrible yes, but it's not the end of the world ..."

Cue: the end of the world.

II.

Is it even possible to make the observation that there are far worse things than the end of the world? Or is extinction the (default) standard bearer?

III.

I'm not convinced that the purely non-diegetic use of Wagner as film score (especially since von Trier appropriates from Wagner at his most iconic) works, if only because as a composer, the Tristan Chord evokes far too many associations to the point of distraction. Is von Trier's film, because of his use of Wagner, mere metaphor about the end of tonality rather than the end of the world? Or is he perhaps expressing the trite if oft-expressed sentiment that the end of the (musical) world came as a result of the end of tonality? I exaggerate of course (just my leap of logic, not my observation that Wagner distracts). Though I wish that I were exaggerating when I say that for most people, unfortunately including many musicians, music ended in 1900.

IV.

I witness. I gaze. I see. A film ravels in its images even when it expresses the pictorial in musical terms (slow-motion has always been, for me, the province of music, despite its abandonment by composers and appropriation by video artists). In an increasingly extensive and diverse visual culture, I've recently been giving much thought to the question of how music expresses itself visually, for to exclude from music the image (or the imagistic) is to rehash the old Hanslickian position that all (real) music can only be absolute music, and that if music partakes in the extra-musical, it must somehow be inferior. To adopt that position is as ridiculous as saying that words can never a describe a tree or a flower, can never paint a scene without subjugating itself to the visual; a language is poorer and less true to itself if it can never be anything other than an expression of its grammatical rules. So to argue for a pictorial turn in music is not to argue for the privileging of the image over sound, but allows for music to articulate with immediacy its full range of expression.

Titilated by Titles, Knowing by Names

2011-08-16T11:53:00.001-04:00

Reposting from my Tumblr!

Moving House

2011-06-13T00:30:00.002-04:00

The Theater of Found Sounds is moving to Tumblr, mostly in an effort to consolidate both my blog and all my various scattered music pages. I may eventually purchase my own domain name, but for now, the perfunctory Marc-Chan-Music tag will have to suffice. All posts will of course remain archived here in Found Sound land, and while I haven't given up on the aesthetics of borrowings, and am in fact embracing it with even more passion, I will surrender the name in favor of my own. It's been a great ride in Bloggerland - five years and 763 posts - but I'm moving to Tumblr because I can keep the blogging going while sharing my music as well. And the layout's pretty cool too.

To Look (Download!)

2011-06-06T11:33:00.003-04:00

Just released a recording of "To Look" with Delea Shand, soprano and Chris Goddard, piano. Go download it (it's free!) and take a listen! The song reimagines the final moments of Virginia Woolf and locates her thoughts in three verbs: to look, to know, to love.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://cpp2011.bandcamp.com/track/to-look-delea-shand-soprano"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;To Look - Delea Shand, soprano by MSM Contemporary Performance Program Class of 2011&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Composing A Childhood

2011-05-18T12:52:00.011-04:00

"For a long time, life deals with the still tender memory of childhood like a mother who lays her newborn on her breast without waking it." (Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood)

I.

Memories intrigue me. Not only for what we remember but how we remember. Tunes and transcriptions fascinate me for that reason alone: they exemplify the memory function of music (tunes are tuneful only if we remember them; transcriptions require us to highlight choice parameters at the expense of others, but the joy that one feels in listening to a transcription must come from recognition). But to remember is to accept the inevitability of forgetting, and all of us experience forgetting, either trivially in names or shopping lists, but more puncturedly in the way our childhood conceals itself to us. But childhood also reveals itself unexpectedly, as if by chance, withheld to us for years and then offered anew through the medium of a faded photograph, a passing scent or a petite madeleine.

Confronting our memories is both joyful as it is terrifying: joyful because the patina of the past always seems golden hued, and the adjectives that accompany our childhood are always variations of "carefree" or "simpler"; but terrifying because we realize that we do not stand outside of time, that we too (our parents, ourselves and our children) are subject to its laws: for Barthes, looking at a photograph of his mother (then looking at himself), this too, we too, shall pass.

There are two possible responses to this remembering: we either attempt an erasure of time when we re-present our past, and in doing so we attempt to escape our future, filled, as it is, with dangers, threats and, ultimately, death; or we trace a prophecy of what is to come in our past, seeking the capacity of our past to echo our future, revealing Ariadne's thread: "Here, in fact, or not far away, must have lain the couch of that Ariadne in whose proximity I first experienced what only later I had a word for: love." There is a beautiful scene in the movie Howl, in which James Franco, playing the role of Allen Ginsburg, re-defines for us the notion of prophecy:

"At the moment of composition you don’t necessarily know what it means; it comes to mean something later. After a year or two, the meaning becomes clear ... which takes time like a photograph developing slowly. What prophecy actually is, is not knowing whether the bomb will fall in 1942, it’s knowing and feeling something which someone knows and feels in a hundred years, and maybe articulating it in a hint that they will pick up on in a hundred years.”

II.

There is a curious genre that some composers tackle, the ostensible children's piece, a work in which a composer makes obvious his or her journey into lost time. To name the most widely-known: Schumann's Scenes from Childhood (as opposed to the more pedagogic Album for the Young), Debussy's Children's Corner Suite and Kurtag's Games. But for composers, we experience not only a private past (our personal memories, the experience of which is entirely hermetic, its relevance entirely subjective) but a public past as well (our early encounters with music's past, the experience of which is shared, the interpretation of which is not entirely subjective). Thus to transcribe, must reflect, on some level, a different sort of journey into lost time, albeit a public as opposed to an entirely private one, and one's approach to borrowed material can be said to reflect a Proustian, Barthesian, or Benjaminian view of re-presentation, in the same way that one could view, interpret and talk about (a vocabulary is always what I'm after) a composer penning a children's piece.

III.

"The empty grave and the heart weighed in the balance - two enigmas to which life still owes me the solution." (Walter Benjamin, Two Enigmas)

Schumann The Poet Speaks: What is it he says when the poet speaks (the extended monologue in the middle of the movement, where Schumann notates the music senza misura: it exists outside of time)? What happens when a memory encounters a figment of childishness in which was reflected (too soon to understand; too late to matter) a prophecy? Our childhood is in many ways an empty grave: it is forever closed to us, buried; and yet its presence still exerts an influence on our lives, casting a long shadow on the rest of our adulthood.

(The Poet Speaks is at 15:30)

IV.

Kurtag's Hommage to Tchaikovsky. To embrace our childhood is not to be embarrassed by our memories. To transcribe is to reveal how we listen; to display our capacity for play. Sometimes to subtract is not only to take away, but to add; to preserve the identification of the original through register alone, but also to paint a picture of a child, not playing, but playing at Tchaikovsky.

V.

There is also a literal side to a composer's metaphorical remembering of childhood: in what he sees in his children, whether we speak of Schumann, Kurtag (I was moved to see a performance at Zankel with Kurtag and his wife, their backs to the audience, on two upright pianos with the practice mute depressed, and their son sitting on stage but behind the pianos, gently amplifying their purposeful muteness) or Debussy.

It is touching to read Debussy's letter (dated 2 December 1910) to his daughter ChouChou:

"1. Once there was a papa who lived in exile ... 2. and every day he missed his little ChouChou. 3. The inhabitants of the city saw him walking past and murmured 'Why does that gentleman look so sad in our gay and beautiful city?' ... 5. So ChouChou's papa went into a shop ... and asked for the most beautiful postcards they had, so that he could write to his darling little daughter ... 6. The said papa went back to his hotel, wrote this story which would make a goldfish weep, and put all his love into the signature below, which is his greatest claim to fame.

LepapadeChouchou"

But I am even more deeply touched by a letter (dated 8 April 1918) that the 12 and a half year old (!) Chouchou writes to Raoul Bardac after the death of Debussy. Chouchou herself would die sixteen months after her father, from receiving the wrong treatment for diphtheria, on 16 July 1919, four months short of her 14th birthday:

"... I saw him one last time in that horrible box - lying on the ground. He looked happy, so happy and then I couldn't control my tears. I almost collapsed but I couldn't embrace him. At the cemetery Mama, naturally, couldn't have behaved better and as for me, all I could think of was, 'I mustn't cry because of Mama'. I summoned up all my courage. Where did it come from? I don't know. I didn't shed a single tear. Tears restrained are worth as much as tears shed ..."

Red Roses. White Dresses.

2011-03-28T14:17:00.003-04:00

Anne Midgette took note of Counts' use of reverse chronology in his staging of Schoenberg's Erwartung. She however thinks that it distracts us from the mystery and ambiguity inherent in the score. Obviously I disagree with her on this point, but we may genteelly agree to disagree. Where I think she's dead WRONG however is in her characterization of the "rose petals showering down over a Greek chorus of white-clad dancers" as cliche. I think that it shows Counts' imaginative interpretation of the stage directions given by Marie Pappenheim (Schoenberg's librettist): "A woman comes; delicate, clothed in white. Upon her dress red roses, the petals partly gone ..."

(We Know) Who Killed This Woman's Lover

2011-03-27T22:13:00.007-04:00

Opera is dead (undeniably). Operatic institutions are dinosaurs edging toward extinction (if not already on life-support). Operas make for the least compelling of theatrical experiences (let alone compelling musical ones). But every so often a production comes along that says to us nay-sayers that opera is every bit as exciting, and transfixing and terribly moving as the very best that the Harry Potter franchise has to offer; that it is truly an art form that overwhelms by the perfect collaboration between so many art forms. Such a production has come and if you're as lucky as I am to be in New York at this very moment, you simply must MUST go to the New York City Opera's Monodramas, a performance of three one-woman scenes, written by John Zorn, Arnold Schoenberg and Morton Feldman (sung passionately, brilliantly and close to flawlessly by Anu Komsi, Cyndia Sieden and Kara Shay Thomson).

Admittedly, three one-woman scenes do not an opera make. And each scene revels in its own intense interiority, so much so that narratives have to give way to the conceptual. Zorn's opera is textless, and Feldman's Woman (just like Schoenberg's and Zorn's protagonist, they are all nameless) sings in such an impossibly high register (you HAVE to hear Cyndia Sieden to believe it) that it becomes no different than Zorn's textless vocalise. So what are we left with, with so much taken away? Conceptual, textless monologues with nameless heroines: if this is opera, it is because opera, as noun, de-territorialized is opera, as genre, re-territorialized.

Tommasini's review in the Times could and SHOULD have gushed a whole lot more. Don't get me wrong, his review was enthusiastic but it misses aspects of the production that I think are simply brilliant. It overlooked, especially, the breathtaking re-vision, by director and set designer Michael Counts, of Schoenberg's Erwartung, conceived, in this production, in the tradition of Francois Ozon's 5x2, and Jason Robert Brown's The Last 5 Years, and Christopher Nolan's Momento and Gaspard Noe's Irreversible, as a scene that presents itself in reverse chronology, that runs itself backwards in time: so that we begin at the end and we end at the beginning. So, for Tommasini, what happens to the Woman's lover remains an enigma: "... did he wander off and get killed? Did the crazed woman kill him in vengeance? Did any of this happen?", when in fact, Counts shows us exactly what happens, that it was indeed the Woman who plunged the knife into the man's heart because we see her taking the knife OUT of his chest; her lover does not rise from the dead to dance with her, but he is in fact coming back to life because we have reached the point in the story BEFORE his murder; and the "silent sisterly characters" are no ghosts who follow and tend to the Woman, but are aspects of her dissociated personality that re-merge (my jaw DROPPED at the way this scene was staged) with her near the end of the scene when we arrive at the point in time before her psyche's fracture.

Schoenberg described Erwartung as a way of representing " ... in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour." Counts understands slow motion in a genuinely filmic way: his use of reverse chronology forces us to understand Erwartung not as simply the aftermath of a murder and a woman's descent into guilt-ridden madness, but to see the idea of expectation as an irreversible aspect of a woman's fate. An ordinary chronology would be mere moralizing, that madness is the payoff for her crime. By placing the fracture at the beginning, the scene's climax is a woman standing on the edge of sanity: we sympathize with her because we understand (and have already seen) her horrible, inescapable fate.

To Look

2011-02-24T23:31:00.002-05:00

Interview with composer Wang Jie

2010-10-13T19:16:00.062-04:00

Shanghai-born composer Wang Jie (Wang is her family name) has been described by the New York Times as a composer of "introspective" music and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review describes her work as "scrupulously crafted ... [embracing] both Chinese and Western ... expression." Her opera NANNAN was performed by the New York City Opera during their annual VOX festival and her piano trio SHADOW was featured by the New Juilliard Ensemble during the Museum of Modern Art's Summergarden series. Jie is the winner of the ACO's (American Composer's Orchestra) 2009 Underwood Commission and the audible result of that commission is From the Other Sky, a narrative song cycle (or, as described on the ACO's website, a "multimedia concert opera"), that will be performed by the ACO on Friday October 15th 7.30pm at Zankel Hall.

We spent most of the interview discussing From the Other Sky, but once again, we embraced the tangent. However, unlike my previous interview with composer Daniel Wohl, which took place through email (hence giving me, through cut-and-paste technology, the ability to preserve tone of voice), my interview with Wang Jie was conducted face to face, over coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on 110th. I am no stenographer, so I have to admit upfront that what is missing and what I failed to capture in the text is Jie's distinct manner of expression, the vocal gestures that are entirely hers and hers alone. That said, my usual conceit applies: BOLD are words by Jie and italics are mine.

1. From the Other Sky

From the Other Sky is a narrative song cycle in three movements with a postlude. Each movement represents a different scene in the story: the first movement takes place in the palace of the Zodiac Animals; the second movement sets the scene on Earth; the third movement we're back in the Palace; and the final Postlude returns us to Earth. The work is scored for chamber orchestra, coloratura Emily Hindrichs (playing the role of the Lark), mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann (playing the role of the Rat and the Crippled Woman), and a non-singing actor Hugh Sinclair (both director and playing the role of the Rooster and the Grim Reaper). I play the role of the Monkey as well as keyboards in the orchestra.

The story (an original one by Jie) is a fable on how the thirteen animals of the Chinese Zodiac (in the order of Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig and Lark) came to become twelve (the Lark doesn't exist in the Chinese Zodiac as we know it). The Lark is an accidental heroine (the Holy Fool in the tradition of Wagner's Parsifal) who saves the world unwittingly: as a result, not of what she does, but what is done to her.

2. Quotation

I use quotation quite extensively in From the Other Sky: Brahms’ Lullaby, Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, and Vivaldi's Spring, but in a twisted ... rock-and-roll way (I have a strong suspicion that Jie's theatrical aesthetic, her use of the obvious punchline, revels in Camp, a sensibility that, as Sontag describes it, is "in essence ... its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration ... the Camp eye has the power to transform experience.").

3. Opera

I love opera. I love the repertoire (Jie impressively cites, chapter and verse, her favorite scenes from the Mozart operas that she loves in the course of the interview) because the emotions feel more real to me. Opera is where life and its emotions exist in an ideal space: the sets, the costumes, the singers, the orchestra are larger than life; the magnitude of the production overwhelms you. Opera is the only place I know where one can experience a complete immersion in an art form.

4. Form

Form is sequence, timing, order and repetition. Without form, without a routine, you cannot create surprise, at best only "shock" ... I pry further, for the use of these terms intrigues me ... Mahler is a composer of surprise, whereas Wagner is shock ... My curiosity piqued, I pressed on ... It is not a value judgment: the best composers use both in their arsenal. Mahler for example both surprises and shocks. But for me, a surprise is something organic rather than a violent jolt; it is the gradual revelation that variation is taking place, rather than a brute display of difference. And if I had to choose one over the other, I'd pick "surprise". Anyway, back to opera: if I wanted shock, I'd go to the circus.

5. Musical Ancestry (or where do you see yourself in this thing we call our tradition?)

Stravinsky is a big model for me: especially with his use of rhythm in clarifying form. But also Mahler and Ligeti. The important pieces for me would be Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Orpheus and the Requiem Canticles; for Mahler it would be his song cycles and his last two symphonies; for Ligeti I would have to say his keyboard music (that guy has good ideas: he knows how to sustain them and he knows when to stop!), "With Pipes, Drums and Fiddles" and "Le Grand Macabre" (though I think now that the staging hides the flaws in the form of that work).

6. What Music Wants

When I was studying at Shanghai Conservatory, everyone was worshipping European complexity and so was I. I was working on a string quartet that I wanted to show to the composer Qu Xiao-Song, and I proudly mentioned to him that my goal for the work was to make it more Ferneyhoughian than Ferneyhough. Qu Xiao-Song responded straight to my face: I'm not interested in looking at your music because I know what you want to write but have you figured out what music wants you to write? He continued: I hear too much ambition and ego in your music, but once you’ve figured out what music wants you to write, you won't even need to show your music to me.

7. Desert Island Discs

One of my favorite things to request from composers is a simple list of the music that they love, where "love" is that which requires no rational explanation, only unembarrassed affection (an experience before words, born in the absence of signs, like Cage's love for Satie). Starting with this interview, I have a new favorite question, a variation on Desert Island Discs: I ask a composer to tell me, with no editing on his or her part, what the most played tracks on his or her iTunes are. The humor, the lesson, is in the difference between the two.

Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, Mahler's Ruckert Lieder, Bach's Sonatina from his Cantata no. 106 ("God's Time is the Best Time"), the last movement of my First Symphony because it reminds me of who I am, and Mozart's Requiem.

And what are the most played tracks on your playlist?

The second movement of Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, Bach's Sonatina from his Cantata no. 106 ("God's Time is the Best Time"), and Bill Evans' The Dolphin (Before and After).

Bill Evans?

Yes! I love how he plays the same thing differently on the second take and I'm trying to figure out what he does ...

***

From the Other Sky will be performed by the ACO on Friday October 15th 7.30pm at Zankel Hall.

Interview with composer Daniel Wohl

2010-10-11T00:24:00.072-04:00

The Theater of Found Sounds is pleased to kickoff the Fall season (and kick OFF this blog’s unconscionably long hiatus) with a new series of interviews with composers in and around the New York region. The second decade of the 21st century seems like such an unlikely time, fiscally and culturally, to be a composer (dare we even begin to explore the ontology of what it means to be a "composer" composing today?), and yet there has been an audible spike (if not yet in visual prominence) in the proliferation of composers producing interesting and individual work today, each one of us pursuing what intrigues us and all of us discovering our own way in navigating through the complexities of the composer-performer-listener dynamic. I have a strong suspicion that we haven't really lost a notion of a "common practice" after all, merely misplaced it, but I will leave such conclusions for another day, after the accumulation of a little more data.

I'm also trying to figure out if an optimal formal structure exists for the representation of interviews in print, apart from the usual magazine format of fictionalizing the event as if it were occurring in real time. I have taken the liberty of modifying and amplifying our email interviews, providing connections where required rather than leaving gaps in sense and meaning. I hope however that I have merely provided a structure to enable me to condense into a single post the series of interviews that stretched over a week. It is, obviously, not my intent to alter the content of the interviews: only to give them shape. I am optimistic that given sufficient interviews, the interview form on this blog will both evolve and eventually find itself.

It's a genuine pleasure for me to begin this series with an interview with composer Daniel Wohl, co-founder and composer-in-residence of the stellar ensemble Transit New Music. Daniel Wohl is a Paris-born composer based in Brooklyn who writes for a variety of instruments that range from computers and slide whistles to orchestras, chamber ensembles and string quartets. Recently described by the New York Times as a composer whose “ingenuity was evident” and one of this generation’s most “imaginative and skillful creators”, his recent work draws heavily on his background in electronic music and delves into sounds produced by decayed audio, noise, and prerecorded media, while maintaining a direct link to influences ranging from Debussy to Reich.

We spent most of the interview discussing Transit’s new CORPS EXQUIS project, premiering on October 14 at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Brooklyn on a triple bill with So Percussion and a world premiere by Tristan Perich. But conversations are fertile ground for tangents and free associations, and we ended up discussing issues that I think are shared by all composers working today, and these concerns connect us, whether we are conscious of them or otherwise.

(Ed: Daniel's thoughts are in BOLD, and mine in italics)

1. CORPS EXQUIS PROJECT

The CORPS EXQUIS PROJECT is a work for chamber ensemble, electronics and video. I composed the music, Transit is performing it, and six different videos are being made to go along with the score (by Antoine Catala, Alexis Gambis, Brian Gibson, Satan's Pearl Horses, Andrew Steinmetz/ Teddy Stern, Brina Thurston). Though the music is written for a chamber ensemble, it also relies heavily on electronics: Casio sounds, drum machines, found sounds and pre-recorded distorted acoustic instruments feature very prominently in the Corps Exquis Project.

So Percussion will also be performing a brand new work composed by the group and the Transit collective has commissioned and will be premiering a new work from composer Tristan Perich. This new piece of Tristan's steps away from his work with 1-bit electronics and incorporates a specially created system he designed to digitally process amplification.

2. What is corps exquis (as opposed to cadavre exquis)?

Corps exquis (the exquisite body), as Daniel points out to me, borrows from the familiar Surrealist parlor game "le cadavre exquis" or "the exquisite corpse (or cadaver)" but leaves behind its darker, more Gothic (perhaps even Frankensteinian) associations. For those unfamiliar with the game, the "exquisite corpse" is a method first embraced by the Surrealists (primarily among literary and visual types, rather than among composers) in which a collection of words or images is assembled collectively, with each collaborator adding to the composition in sequence, either by following a rule or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

The familiar children's books in which the pages are cut into thirds, the top third showing the head of a person or animal, the middle third the torso, and the bottom third the legs, giving children the ability to "mix and match" by turning pages is a lovely example of this Surrealist concept embraced by popular culture. Whatever the variation of method, what to me is essential (and to Daniel as well) is that the element of chance or surprise be allowed a certain degree of free rein.

This project is an "exquisite body" on several levels. Each video artist worked with a frame from the previous video as a seed to their own work (in a sense, this would constitute the most traditional application of the corps exquis method). They were also given parts of the music beforehand upon which they based their work, though I did revise the music often, so it became more of a back and forth between the two mediums (referencing the collaborative aspect of the exquisite corpse. What intrigues me about the idea of the exquisite corpse is that it can be said to both embrace the idea of collaboration (we acknowledge that we're writing a part of a whole) and at the same time refuse it, because one writes with, potentially, very little knowledge of the preceding section). Also, the "exquisite body" works on a purely musical level: I came up with a series of six instrumental "songs" as a musical counterpart to the videos, where an element from the previous song is present in the one that follows, though this element is often disguised or transformed in some way.

What interests me about the exquisite corpse format is that it brings you out of your comfort zone and there's of course an element of surprise involved. I still have no idea what the final product will look like (though I will soon find out in rehearsal!), or how the music will "fit" with each specific video. There's an element of releasing control over the final product that's both exciting and nerve-racking for a composer.

Composition can be a very insular activity: you sit at your desk or keyboard and you embark on a kind of solitary journey. Though I have collaborated with other musicians, composers and choreographers before, I thought that it would be fun to branch out and to create a more substantial connection in my collaboration with other artists, specifically with video artists who's works inspire me, and hence the idea for the Corps Exquis Project.

3. The Instrumental "Song" and the Art/ Pop Divide

My use of the word "song" is specific in trying to bring together the perceived musical divide between various artistic cultures. I wanted to focus particularly on the area where the popular song format crosses and meets with the instrumental, through-composed pieces that I typically work with. And what I came up with was a way of grappling with the musical issues that I often delve into (I often work with the notions of contrast in music. I tend to strive for beauty while inserting a healthy dose of noise into the mix. I work with prerecorded or found sounds which I like to artificially decay or distort in some way. I'm also very interested in the interaction of live musicians and electronics, often synchronizing the two to create a sort of amplified instrument) but within the more concise and direct form of the song.

The way I composed much of this music was to treat the instrumental lines as samples of themselves - so there isn't necessarily a developmental quality in much of the material, though there is variety within the "samples". This really gives the pieces a non-classical feeling. I also used many sounds that are commonly found in a more popular context (although I did distort many of them to find more interesting possibilities): for example a drum machine with a distortion pedal, a circuit bend CASIO sk1, a delayed and decayed organ sound. One of the many things I like about indie or electronic music is the vast expanse of timbres that are available to an indie pop musician. A composer of classical music typically only uses acoustic instruments and the extended techniques available for those instruments. Though these always sound fresh in the hands of a great composer, I thought that it would be fun to delve into the limitless palette of timbres available to indie pop musicians working today.

Also the format of the song, with its sectional quality, clear direction and well defined mood appealed to me as a model for Corps Exquis.

4. Found Sounds

Found sounds include so much more than a sample from "real" life, than aural readymades. It encompasses other preexisting materials such as algorithms, proportions and mathematical sequences (with composers such as Tom Johnson and John Cage). Found sounds encourage the notion of a composer who is not merely an inventor, but a discoverer as well.

Found sounds are a big part of my music. I use a variety of source material as a jumping-off point for pieces. Naturally produced sounds, prerecorded instruments, vocals, machine-generated noises.

Found sounds are great to use because they're accidental. I'm one of those composers who loves to create music accidentally. I like planning things out but allowing elements to influence the final product. In "Glitch", a string quartet I wrote, the electronics for the final movement are taken from a glitch that arose inside my computer while I was writing the piece.

5. Chance and the Aesthetic Accident

In terms of the exquisite body idea, it seems to me that the primary motivation for its appeal is the idea of the happy coincidence - that one derives an unexpected aesthetic pleasure from an unanticipated combination, an unplanned meeting of minds. Cage and Cunningham collaborations come to mind here, where they would agree only upon the duration of the movements but the end result was revealed only on the day of the actual performance. Can we accurately describe this as an updated version of the Corps Exquis idea? One that is especially applicable to musical collaboration?

The element of surprise in the Corps Exquis Project resides both in the way the music and video will interact, and how the videos will flow into one another. The exquisite corpse idea on a musical level however doesn't hold any surprises for me, but it was nonetheless a productive constraint and jumping-off point for the music.

6. Musical Ancestry (or where do you see yourself in this thing we call our tradition?)

Musical inspiration is always evolving. Over the past few weeks I've been listening to music by Lucky Dragons, Ingram Marshall, Cage, Animal Collective, Julia Wolfe, Dan Deacon, Chopin ... These people and many, many others inspire me and remind me why I strive to make good music. I'm also very inspired by young composers working today; people I'm sharing the bill with on October 14th are some of my all-time favorites, but there are many others, especially in the NY area that are doing some fascinating stuff.

I think we have fewer hang ups than the previous generation about what's right and wrong in music, but also less to rebel against. I think many of us are just trying to make good music, or we're working with concepts that interest us. There are no stylistic restrictions, no ideas off limits. I think you can create your own language, even if it's a patchwork of all your influences, or if it's coming from completely different musical traditions.

7. Man-becoming-machine (Machine-becoming-man)

What intrigues me most and strikes me as something quite special, quite unique in Daniel's music, is this symbiosis between Man and Machine, in the interaction of live musicians and electronics, a way of, in Daniel's words, synchronizing the two to create a sort of amplified instrument. I hear it clearly in "+ou-" (in fact, while the music ebbs and flows, the form's clarity is beautiful and extremely striking), where you cannot tell where the electronic element begins and where the acoustic element stops or vice versa.

One of the most memorable musical moments in my life happened while I was studying in Michigan. I was at a piano recital and as the pianist struck the first chord, a distant radio playing some sort of warbling chord sounded at the exact same time. This struck me as an incredibly beautiful moment. It was magical the way the piano and this invisible instrument were combining into some sort of amplified instrument. I've been striving to manufacture these kinds of moments with my music ever since.

8. Desert Island Discs

One of my favorite things to request from composers is a simple list of the music that they love, where "love" is that which requires no rational explanation, only unembarrassed affection (an experience before words, born in the absence of signs, like Cage's love for Satie).

I'm a sucker for these pieces and songs:

Magnetic Fields "Born on a Train"
Serge Gainsbourg "L'anamour"
Chopin Nocturnes op 72 no. 1
Debussy "Jardins Sous la Pluie"
Mozart Sonata in A Minor

***

Once again, Transit’s new CORPS EXQUIS project premieres on October 14 at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Brooklyn on a triple bill with So Percussion and a world premiere by Tristan Perich. Many thanks to Daniel Wohl for his time and patience.

Kept

2010-06-05T10:37:00.003-04:00

I'm endlessly fascinated by one composer's thoughts about another. It reveals so much more about the one doing the thinking rather than the one actually being thought about, and it provides for a less cringe-inducing read than when a composer writes about his own music (with a few exceptions of course). Two books I'm reading right now: Lou Harrison's Music Primer and Messiaen's book on Ravel's piano music. The latter has little gems of observation, whether filtered through the lens of Loriod or not doesn't concern us, observations such as:

"Since all the pieces in Le Tombeau are dedicated to friends killed during the 1914-18 war, one might perhaps imagine Ravel wanting, in his only fugue (the only fugue in his entire output), to reunite these people he had loved, and so create a kind of multiplied presence drawn from the one theme, which is repeated twenty-two times."

There are certain impulses which seem to come naturally to music: one is play, and the other is mourning. To understand Ravel's fugue as spirits mingling, reunited once again in musical space, is really quite touching.

Harrison's Primer is loaded with gems of wisdom. My favorite: "If you really have to be a composer and are attractive and uninhibited, then try to get yourself "kept" - whether by a man or a woman. This might be easier than undertaking a whole second career in order to be able to afford composing and you might get a little restorative affection as well."

Ah, the sublime earthiness of wisdom, the joys of a kempt and kept composer.

Playing And Mourning Part 4

2010-04-27T17:26:00.005-04:00

There are two memorials which stand side by side: Josquin's for Ockeghem and Byrd's for Tallis. Both invoke a pagan's view of death, that in Nature's eagerness to claim her prized singers, she leaves us stranded. Both mention the dead by name, their accomplishments, how their loss means that we are so much less than in their absence. For Byrd: "Tallis is dead, and music dies."

For Josquin: "Put on your mourning garments, Josquin, Brumel, Pierchon, Compère, and weep great tears from your eyes: you have lost your good father." When Josquin mentions Ockeghem by name, we do not hear it. It stays hidden in the dense counterpoint, lost to us in the throng of death overtaking life. But when he mentions his own name and those of his colleagues, it stands in a stark homophonic landscape. The ones who live on can no longer hide in the shadow of he who is lost to us.

Playing And Mourning Part 3

2010-04-27T11:43:00.004-04:00

Transcriptions may either be motivated by play or by mourning. Berio's are mostly made conscious of the rueful nature of looking back, not that he attempts to recapture the past, but he seems resigned to the technologies that have made it impossible for us to escape the pervasiveness of our memories. Sciarrino's seem on the one hand to be acts of playfulness (his elaboration for solo flute); on the other, they also seem to be acts of graffiti (his puppet opera/ biopic on the life of the murdering-prince Gesualdo). But is the memory too strong, too vivid? Is the reason why we embrace Feldman because Feldman, in his music, embraces forgetting? Are the Number Pieces of Cage important because we can never remember what they sound like?

The orchestrations by Brant (of Ives) and Bartok (of himself: the pianos/ percussion sonata and then concerto) embrace the original in every way except that they both fail to capture the inherent messiness in both pieces: by adding instruments, one curiously trims the loose edges. But the messiness in Ives' Concord and in his own orchestral music is what should have been left untouched (or is this musical disarray something that only Ives could capture in sound?); the striking imbalance and self-imposed poverty in Bartok's original is missing, and its absence is sorely felt in the orchestral transcription, which seems suddenly too neat, too coordinated. How do you transcribe as though you had forgotten the source material? How do you remember what has no shape; how do you memorialize mess, or are memorials inherently neat?

Playing And Mourning Part 2

2010-04-26T17:31:00.004-04:00

Canons are obvious occasions of play in music. When we mourn, we understand music as memorial - it remembers for us if and when we forget. How does music remember? There is the Renaissance idea of soggetto cavato: we carve a space in music by way of names, by happy coincidence that letters spell notes. Josquin is exemplary. Remember Ravel's Hommage to Haydn? Or Feldman spelling C-A-G-E in his tribute to Cage? Sometimes music remembers by way of stylistic reference: we step into the shoes of those who have come before us. It is necessarily an intimate act as what we do is, in some way, to deny ourselves for the sake of another's memory. And yet it should not solely be characterized as an act of self-denial. In remembering there are associations with warmth and familiarity, the way one remembers one's grandmother by making a recipe, following it to the letter, tracing each handwritten step, that she passed down to you. I wonder what we'll find when we take a close look at Le Tombeau de Debussy, a publication in the now-defunct Parisian Revue Musicale that commissioned ten composers to write (mostly for piano solo - though Ravel provides us with a movement for violin and cello) hommages to Debussy after his death in 1918. The ten: Paul Dukas, Albert Roussel, G F Malipiero, Bartok, Florent Schmitt, Stravinksy (the chorale which eventually found its way into the Symphony of Wind Instruments), Ravel, de Falla, and Satie. How do composers mourn the passing of another? How do we remember?

Playing And Mourning

2010-04-24T18:23:00.010-04:00

Music may be usefully divided into two categories: works whose primary activity is that of playing and works whose primary concern is that of mourning. If one accepts that, as a verb, the play's the thing, then one accepts as well the presence or necessity of rules. Without rules, no matter how arbitrary, there can be no game. And playing cannot be easily distinguished from games. If one accepts rules, then one accepts the exception, the freedom from rules. One accepts rule-breaking and in the specific case of a musical rule like voice leading, one accepts the free note; in the case of a canon, one accepts the free voice. Here I think of the tenor voice in Tallis' Miserere Nostri, here I think as well of quartet of flutes in Ives' Unanswered Question.

If one accepts mourning, then one accepts life and its sanctity. To mourn is to regret the absence of something, of someone. To mourn is to embrace life so that its absence is felt as a loss. But if one accepts life, then one must accept death as well for we cannot properly talk about life without mentioning death. To accept death is to accept memory, for mourning is an act of recalling. To accept memory is to accept forgetting, for memories are finite and one can forget. We mourn because without a life's presence, we can build no more new memories. Its store cannot grow. Only a forgetting is inevitable.

Transcriptions have for the longest time been utilitarian. They provided a means of transmitting information and functioned as a surrogate for memory. Transcriptions after the advent of recording technology have, more often than not, been seen from the point of view of irony. And yet, listening to Sciarrino's Bach transcription:

... irony is not a word that immediately comes to mind. Seeing irony in all transcriptions results from seeing all transcribing as an act of mourning: that one mourns the loss of notes that one can never reproduce with authenticity; the way the 19th century may be seen as a collective mourning of the loss of Beethoven. Transcribing in the post-iPod generation is motivated not by mourning but by play. Seeing this opens up a whole new avenue for understanding what it is a transcription attempts to do.

Playing. Mourning. Remembering. Forgetting. What we do in life. What others do in our stead when we die.

Why I Love Canons

2010-03-25T16:35:00.003-04:00

Too Big To Fail (And The Economics of Joy)

2010-03-07T14:56:00.004-05:00

Joy seems to be in short supply these days. It's absence is especially noticeable among symphony goers and subscribers, the ones who diligently attend, whether they want to or not. They go out of habit perhaps, or perhaps out of a sense of duty, whether to an ailing orchestra or to themselves, as cultural connoisseurs. But once seated, and if seated long enough, these joyless subscribers begin noticing the proverbial lint marring their cultural mink, and having spent so much money on their tickets they consider themselves duty-bound to express their dissatisfaction: either their disdain for the music (oh, I'm glad it isn't one of those Philip Glass pieces), or their discomfort (I don't like this seat), or their increasing awareness of their multiplying frailties (I can't hear the orchestra). Simply put, if they are not enjoying themselves, no one else should as well.

I don't however, despite the tone of my post, blame them. I used to think that the reason for this absence of joie de vivre at a symphony concert was entirely the fault of orchestras as institutions: they had become too big, too impersonal, too Bank-of-America-esque, too concerned about their past that they could not see into their future, which to my eyes had already ceased to be bleak and had crossed over into extinction. I too used to trump the familiar clarion call of young composers unaffiliated with institutions, singing praises of our independence, waving the proud banner Orchestre Est Mort. For me there was nothing left to say in that medium: bring out the formaldehyde, pen the final chapter, clear a wing in the museum where we may honor what once was.

But I must confess that I was probably too hasty in my pronouncements, and to all my composerly friends I rescind my judgement, thus reworded: it is not the orchestra that is dead and that has failed us but the halls that orchestral music is performed in. Concert halls are, thus revised, too big. In a hall the size of Avery Fisher, the only person best positioned to enjoy the sonic wonder that is an orchestra is the conductor. But for the rest of us sitting in the rafters, balcony or back orchestra, like the dear gentleman I quoted above who could not hear the Phil from his uncomfortable seat in a program that did NOT include the music of Glass, our sound source of greatest intensity is who we have immediately around us: other unhappy audience members. The music I heard last Friday night was not the Brahms concerto, no, it was instead the woman sucking on her candy, it was the man who hushed her five times through the first movement (great timbre, amazingly measured crescendi), it was the man beside me who breathed audibly through his nose (I'm not complaining, after all, one must breathe in order to live), it was the paper percussion of flipping program notes, and it was the gentleman who squirmed uncomfortably in his chair and who could not wait till the music was over to inform his wife that they should aspire to get better seats next season. While one may easily lay blame on such individuals for their incivility, one should also take into consideration evidence that excuses, but could never justify, such behavior, and it is the simple fact of high-priced tickets in too large a hall. We expect to get what we paid for. And if Brahms is on the program, 4'33" just won't cut it. In the simple economics of joy, we have invested too much to be even slightly disappointed (what Kyle Gann forgot to mention in his history of 4'33" is that 4'33" is constantly being performed in the unconscious periphery of a large space. The significance and similarity between 4'33" and Avery Fisher Hall is that both work and venue do not distinguish between listeners and makers of sound: 4'33" requires a suspension of disbelief that the two are one; Avery Fisher Hall proved it as fact last Friday night in the cacophonous back orchestra rows).

It is not my purpose to ridicule concert goers. I only want to point out the root of their all-too evident unhappiness: concert halls are simply too big to be venues of joy. And without joy, why bother? Joy comes from an unexpected discovery (when was the last time you discovered something new in a subscription symphony concert?); joy comes from sheer sonic pleasure (in large halls, sound loses all sonic intensity by the time it reaches the third row no matter how large the orchestra is or how loud they play); joy comes from a shared experience, from the belief that one's encounter with beauty diminishes in isolation, but multiplies in community. Music played in a hall too large to fail becomes divisive, where it should ideally be bringing people together. Music is an intimate art, an intimate act. We do it injustice when we assume too much - that playing it, without due consideration of the fragile nature of sound, is sufficient; and when we assume too little - that it is after all only music, when it should be seen instead as an opportunity for community, for intimacy, and for the joy in seeing the two as one.

Feldman Says ...

2010-02-27T19:27:00.006-05:00

Morton Feldman held the post of Professor of Composition at the University of Buffalo from 1973 till his death in 1987. During his tenure he gave a series of lectures which have been preserved, transcribed and converted to audio files, all of which may be found here. It's definitely worth a listen and a read. I don't think that these have been reproduced anywhere else, including Chris Villars's wonderful collection "Morton Feldman Says". The most revealing talk was the one where Feldman talks about Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety. Two quotes:

"I was consciously attempting to relive my own musical history while thinking of her. Those were the harmonies of my youth. What was unconscious was the significance of putting the tempo at quarter note equals ninety. It was also unconscious that I repeated those falling thirds 87 times, very close to that fated number of her death";

... (digression) ...

I've been thinking about time lately (always, always time), and in the context of reliving one's own musical history, I recently came across a wonderful passage in John Daverio's book Crossing Paths where Daverio argues that the F minor Impromptu of Schubert represents Schubert embodying sonata form, his personal past, in the context of a character piece, music's (then) Romantic present. But I digress ...

And: "The feeling I have about this composition is that I went back as if making peace with a steady pulsating beat, making peace with measured time, a chronological time, that is analogous to life passing by or passing us by. One, two, three, four. It takes very little time in music to count up to 90".

What's curious is why Feldman describes the number of occurrences of the falling third as 87 (three short of the number of Madame Press's death), when it does in fact repeat a total of 90 times (how Feldman weaves the number 90 into the score, not only in terms of the tempo marking - quarter note equals 90 - but in terms of the repeated figure that accompanies our listening, an ironically tender metronome, is beautifully Josquineque or Dufayesque or Bergian). I've been thinking quite alot about time lately, and why time seems to speed up as we get older. A dear friend of mine recently described a theory of his to me about this very phenomena. For him, the perception of time quickens as we get older because we perceive duration only in relation of our constantly lived, constantly renewing present (the part) to our entire past, to our memory (the whole). Hence, for my almost-2-year-old niece, this second year of hers feels long because its exactly the length of her experience of what a "year" means, what it constitutes. But if you're 50, a year is merely 1/50th of your entire accumulated past, and while clocks measure time equally for both 2-year-old and for 50-year-old, its mechanics privilege space over time: it assumes an equal journey for toddler and adult, when in fact we have so many more memories to bring to the surface, to confront, and to re-experience. Feldman's Madame Press then is an essay of a life well-lived and evidently well-loved, but it is also, in essence, an essay about all our lives, its inevitable finitude, and how we perceive the years that tick by, sometimes noticed, sometimes not, the quickening of a pulse, the quieting of a heart.

Miserere Nostri

2010-02-09T00:30:00.016-05:00

We know precious little about the life of Thomas Tallis: an ardent Catholic who worked under the reign of a Protestant queen, and, as proclaimed on his tombstone, he lived and died at the ripe old age of 80 "in mild and quiet sort". No picture of Tallis survives, no image. Only cathedrals of sound. His music, placed beside that of his pupil William Byrd, 40 years his junior, is less eccentric, less "sensual", at least in terms of its dissonance treatment. No voices leading others to go where they should not; no cross relations piling quickly one on top of another, the way Tarantino would stage a bloody car crash; no admission of the body electric. But in Tallis I hear something else, if not erotic then ecstatic, if not sensual then overwhelming (dare I say "transcendent"?), his music dwells, not on the moment the way Byrd does when he draws our attention to a dissonant clang, the way a bell tolls calling us to attention, but on the expansion of of a single moment, dwelling on duration despite the hurriedness of the world. His music speaks so clearly because he says precious little.

There was a tradition among Elizabethan composers to make of Miserere texts an opportunity for virtuosity. And Tallis was certainly not above such display of his craft. Miserere nostri has 7 distinct parts: two high voices and five low ones. Of the five, two are low bass voices, and the three middle voices are labeled "discantus", "contratenor", and "tenor". The highest two sing in canon, singular, flawless, a mirror image one of the other; unwavering in line, distant, oblivious to the lowest five voices. This is an image of heaven: an ideal perfection we aspire to but can never reach. Perfection is however always cold and unbending, the way a canon is. It is unchanging and unchangeable. It neither admits grace nor yields pity.

Of the lowest voices, four of them form a second canon (a mensuration canon: both prime and in inversion!) in four degrees of slowness (in the proportion 1:2:4:8). These voices are difficult to hear as canon if only because mensuration canons have a habit of beginning together rather than one following another. Also, with their increasing degrees of slowness, the perception of a "melody", what our ears can follow, whose prime virtue is movement is lost. Our lives too exist by way of duration and the perception of duration. Does it speed up as you grow older? Or does it slow down? But these four voices constantly reach upwards into the register of the highest two. They graze briefly throughout at the underbelly of God, only to be rebuffed, quickly pushed back down, beaten back, always dropping a full octave, but they pick themselves up and they try again.

The last voice is the tenor. It neither leads nor follows another voice. It is the only voice that is free from canonic display. This then is the exception to the rule that I find myself increasingly drawn to: it is the thread that unravels. The "tenor" is also the "sense", the "content", the "meaning" of something. It is the moral of our tale. This voice, perhaps abandoned by the others, perhaps standing alone because it stands out from the rest, is marked by its imperfection. It constantly changes; it evolves; it is flawed; it pays attention to the other six voices, every so often imitating them mildly, but finding them unapproachable, unattainable, moves on; it yields; it admits the possibility of compassion. It is the sole voice not bound by law, by predestination, but sings with free will. But given choice also means being left to find our own way, its own way, through the bramble and the thicket of our world.

Thomas Tallis Miserere nostri

Rules and Their Exceptions

2010-02-07T22:05:00.011-05:00

Music may be described as a kind of rule making, or if the word "rule" feels a trifle too stifling for an inspired artist, then I suppose we could substitute as well the word "patterning" or "system" (perhaps "ecosystem"?). A canon then would constitute the non plus ultra of my compositional world, seeing that it is both a work built from a rule and the rule in itself; both the archetype and its worldly manifestation. George Steel's Art of the Canon at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on Saturday night proved to be a two-fold revelation for me as a composer: (1) I really am a big, BIG fan of Tallis; and (2) Byrd's O Salutaris Hostia is a work I wished I had discovered earlier. Nothing much more to say with reference to (1). Fandom is subjective. It merely describes a listener to whom a certain composer's work speaks so immediately that appreciation comes by way of love rather than study. Perhaps I could also say that "love" is what happens when communication occurs in the absence of signs. Let me then recommend a work other than Spem in Alium: take a few moments out of your day tomorrow and treat yourself to his Miserere nostri. It is not a very long piece (even though it is slow) but it accomplishes the fine art of making art of duration.

Duration. That was my only (and rather meager) complaint about an otherwise exemplary performance, both the singing and the programming of George Steel's fine Vox Vocal Ensemble. The trouble with canons is their duration: in order to preserve the rule that harmony must be maintained, that the framework must be one of proper dissonance treatment, canons, at least the very strict ones, tend to be rather too brief. And to string a concert together of many brief works does not, for these pair of ears, quite work. I feel justified in my observation since for me an emotional peak of the concert came (and I believe for many in the audience as well) in the first half of the program, when Mr. Steel chose to perform the Tallis recommended above immediately following the final consonant chord of Webern's op. 2 canon "Entflieht auf leichten Kahnen". Hearing then, what was possible with such segueways, it left me a little disappointed that Mr. Steel did not find other possible routes to connect his diverse set of pieces. Simply programming one canon after another would of course be too naive a solution. I suspect that the answer may be found in the use of spatial devices: by placing his ensemble in their various divisions (not all the singers sung at the same time after all) in and around the audience, I think that the very quality of space that divides the singers, would bring together the program into a rather unique whole. It would also allow those of us sitting in the rafters to fully enjoy the music and its attendant vocal intensity, which was otherwise somewhat diminished, given sound's tendency to drift heavenward, straight up into the soaring domes of St. Mary.

Just a little to say about (2), which was my main discovery of the evening, for which I'm truly grateful to Mr. Steel, not only for the finely nuanced and insightful performance of the Byrd canon, but more importantly that he closed one eye to the observation made by the musicologist Joseph Kerman that Byrd's O salutaris hostia "... must be about the most dissonant composition that Byrd ever wrote. Even if we apply greater clarity with the accidentals ... it makes a ceaseless racket of false relations and resolutions ... the piece has the air of an exercise that would scarcely survive actual performance." I am happy to report that the performance survived intact - false relations and all. It is not Byrd's deficiency in counterpoint at play here, instead it is Byrd's understanding that every rule must include an exception, that every form is best understood in terms of its own unraveling. Here then is a canon that says, as Mr. Steel so eloquently puts it, "I lead, but please, do not follow." I feel that there is a history of music waiting to be written that is not a history of rules but of exceptions; a history of "what went wrong (if only it did)"; a history book that values the role played by the numerous "losers" throughout music history, and that recognizes exceptions as, often, our only source of relief from the suffocating obstinacy of a music history solely written by its winners.

Pronouns and Elsewhen

2010-02-07T13:03:00.004-05:00

Change begins with pronouns. As a stand-in for persons mentioned in the course of a conversation, pronouns assume an ideal reality: they re-imagine norms by simple virtue of their usage. The first wave of change in pronouns began with academia, in the use of "he or she", acknowledging in the process the role of women in intellectual dialogue. Presence indicated by simple inclusion. Absence by exclusivity. A decade into the 21st century, our conversations are now marked with "she or he", not a nod to feminism, but an acknowledgment that the term "partner" is probably better suited to modern conversation than the gender-specific nouns "husband", "wife", "boyfriend" or "girlfriend".

Case in point: Food network. Rachel Ray, busy making a Valentine's Day meal, was simultaneously throwing in nuggets of encouragement into her usual banter, urging her viewers (at least those of us on a tight budget) to stay home instead on February 14th, to express Cupid's feast day in a more bucolic, homemade fashion. What caught my ear was her use of pronouns: "So guys and girls, if you're making this for your honey, and she ... or he doesn't care for anchovies ...". We have now a multiplicity of relationships, of possibilities, and it is beginning to feel strange for our words, for our language, to exclude them. Soon too our laws and our institutions, for these too have their backbones built and their bricks balanced on words.

These signs are small, nearly insignificant. But I am encouraged by them: they may merely be words, but their repetition and their increasingly ubiquitous usage implies an aspiration towards an ideal elsewhere (elsewhen?), a blending between two worlds, our current one and our future one that we cannot yet see but can already hear. Deleuze: "We must not conclude that such signs are negligible ... These signs are empty, but this emptiness confers upon them a ritual perfection, a kind of formalism we do not encounter elsewhere. The worldly signs are the only ones capable of causing a kind of nervous exaltation, expressing the effect upon us of the persons who are capable of producing them."

One in 8 Million

2009-12-08T10:46:00.002-05:00

So my blogging seems to have taken back seat to my other activities, which include "I sail'd out to sea" that's getting its premiere by TACTUS at the Tank this Thursday (9pm curtain time! Would love to see you there if you can make it!); lots of doctoral work and writing; getting a head start on my Christmas reading with Peter Yates, Paul Rosenfeld, Adorno and this fascinating interview by Rocco Di Petro with Boulez; and have I mentioned all the writing that's involved in getting a doctorate? The trouble is, I'm easily distracted. Especially with this amazing series in the New York Times of interviews with everyday New Yorkers - characters all. That's a musical right there waiting in the wings. I'm also starting some preliminary work on a theater piece based on Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas - but that's for another day's discussion. Till then, I'll see you Thursday, or go listen to those interviews, or enjoy this gorgeous if brisk winter day, which seems to have plunked itself down unannounced, right when I had forgotten what rosy cheeks and cracked lips felt like.

Quiet Thing

2009-11-20T23:39:00.000-05:00

Viola Spaces

2009-11-11T23:02:00.004-05:00

Garth Knox, ex-Arditti member and viola Superman, is coming to New York and will be performing from his Viola Spaces on November 19th. Definitely a must-see for composers and violists alike. Viola Spaces is a set of viola studies and here are two of my favs (all of them may be found on Garth's website):

Rewriting Beethoven's 7th

2009-11-01T00:52:00.007-04:00

I've been wanting to listen to this work by Michael Gordon for the longest time and there's finally a short 8 minute excerpt of this symphony of found sounds on the New York Times blog. I think that it's a very effective piece. My only reservation is that there is a tendency for most borrowed music (and the Gordon suffers a little from this I think) to evoke a sort of nightmarish sound world (Berio's Sinfonia being the prime example). But I don't think that post-modern uneasiness has to be a necessary consequence of musical borrowing. It is possible to construct a work entirely from borrowed pitch material without evoking a crumbling or disintegrating landscape. Choice examples: Gombert's trope on Josquin's Mille Regretz, Cage's Thirteen Harmonies and Marshall's Kingdom Come. I think it's great that we recycle. But recycling shouldn't come across as disturbing. It shouldn't stick out like a sore thumb. We can swap heads, bodies and feet without making monsters in the process. I think that a musical borrowing works best when a listener finds meaning in the new work simply on its own terms, rather than from figuring out references to the borrowed sound.

Samuel Vriezen at the Roulette

2009-10-28T12:23:00.005-04:00

Samuel Vriezen's playing the Roulette tonight. He's doing the epic Chord Catalogue by Tom Johnson and his own Within Fourths/ Within Fifths, inspired by Johnson's brand of structuralism in music. Tom Johnson deserves to be more widely known, not only as a Minimalist who embraces the term, but as a composer whose take on "music as process" is neutral enough that it may be embraced by any composer of any aesthetic. A couple of reasons why we haven't heard much of him: when he worked in New York, it was primarily as a music journalist rather than as a composer; now focusing on composition, his base of operations has shifted to Paris; it is exceedingly difficult to get hold of a copy of his classic (must-read!) book "Self-Similar Melodies"; and except for the classic theater piece for double bass player (Failing), his music is seldom programmed among New Music groups in New York. All the more reason to go for tonight's performance at the Roulette. Tom Johnson's found an ideal interpreter in composer/ pianist Samuel Vriezan, and tonight should be a treat. I know it clashes with the Merce Cunningham tribute-marathon at the Armory, but if I had to choose (and how lucky it is to have choices on a rainy New York evening), I would pick Vriezen playing Johnson, and so should you.

John Cage Trust Blog

2009-10-23T19:38:00.004-04:00

Laura Kuhn, of the John Cage Trust, has a wonderful new blog out, and it's off to a great start with a clip of So Percussion performing (improvising?) on some of Cage's own percussion instruments, most of them quirky, all of them quiet. And all this taking place on the living room floor of Cage and Merce's apartment.

I Sail'd Out To Sea (i)

2009-10-21T19:15:00.003-04:00

New work for three voices and an indeterminate number of instruments acting as resonance chamber, or perhaps acting as the sostenuto pedal to the three singers. The recording's a little raw and I hope to have more time to rehearse with this group before the premiere performance at the Tank on December 10th. But in the mean time, I'm glad for the recording all the same, gives me the opportunity to tweak, to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Let's Play "If I Had An Orchestra"!

2009-10-13T21:28:00.003-04:00

If I had an orchestra, here's the gala opening night program:

1. Ingram Marshall Kingdom Come
2. John Cage Apartment House 1776
3. Charles Ives Three Places in New England

That's a program I'd stand in line for. So Mr. Gilbert, what are you waiting for?

Two Bows

2009-09-29T22:45:00.003-04:00

So France-Marie Uitti has a book in its finishing stages all on contemporary cello technique, including of course, a detailed explanation of her two-bow technique. Till the book goes to press, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with her website and her blog, but it's sufficiently detailed that we have at least a place to start. So lately I've been thinking about half-imagined ensembles, wondering what they'd sound like, take for example an ensemble consisting entirely of prepared instruments (piano, guitar, double bass, harp ...), or a string group organized by bowing technique rather than family resemblance. I'm drawn to the prepared ensemble because the principle behind a preparation really isn't (primarily at least) the transformation of an instrument from one recognizable object to another, but functions instead as a means by which we disengage notation from sound, what we see from what we hear.

Options

2009-09-22T00:28:00.002-04:00

Music and life are inextricably linked. Take for example my generation's relationship with the idea of the score: what seems clear to me is that we are now more than ever willing to err on the side of less information, less detail, rather than more, in the way that lead sheets have always been scarce on performance directions. We're also pretty satisfied with setting up a system - the meta-work - and then leaving it up to the performers to fill in the blanks. We see that in the iPod and its open source code that allows for 3rd party apps. And there's so much to learn from a Gershwin song, which relies more on the changing nature of performance practice than on details inherent in the score. The moral is simply this: it's not as satisfying to tell a performer exactly what to do than it is to give him options. Options: what a word. To have options, in music, in life, is a gift. I'm grateful for the options I have (thanks Mom), and there is no worse fate imaginable to me than a life without options. But I've been accused of being too laissez-faire in terms of my performance directions, and it's not that I don't care, but I honestly do feel that it's not as essential as it has been made out to be. After all, I think that our relationship to the score has changed in light of the score's changing relationship to the ubiquity of recordings: conscientious performers have recourse to recordings, often made in the presence of composers. They're cheap to produce, they're reliable in quality, and we're more than eager to sit in on your rehearsals.

We Hear What We Know

2009-09-18T23:07:00.003-04:00

When Kurtag performs his four-hand music with his wife, he plays on an upright, his back to the audience, and the practice pedal down, muting the sound, isolating strange upper partials. It may be puzzling to some, a gesture of love to others (volume sufficient only for two), but to a New Yorker, it's what our ears are used to. I'm lucky enough to have a piano in my apartment, but, out of necessity, I always have the practice pedal down. It's what I hear when I practice and it's what I hear when I write. Lately I've come to wonder if I've grown accustomed to the muted upright, so much so that I now associate it with what I love about sound (since it is my most immediate and constant experience of sound): soft, treble-heavy, bass-absent, hardly resonating, nearly motionless. It's a little like love I think, even though composers hardly ever talk about love, though Kurtag comes close, when he chooses quiet over loud, familiarity over strange, private over public.

Repeated Measures (2009)

2009-09-11T23:17:00.005-04:00

(with thanks to LPR, David Broome and the good people over at Red Light New Music for this recording)

Brant-New

2009-09-03T09:14:00.002-04:00

Some things I'm learning from Brant's book (WARNING: nerdy orchestration tips ahead! Read at your own risk!):

1. An alternative to col legno battuto involves replacing the bow with a carpenter's nail. Brant even suggests suitable lengths for each member of the family: violin 2 1/2" to 3"; viola 3" to 3 1/2"; cello 4" to 4 1/2"; bass 5" to 6". This of course frees players from the obligation of obtaining a second (cheaper) bow, or for that matter, worrying about using their primary (and pricey) one. That said, I worked with an amazing violinist in a quintet of mine that had extended passages played col legno battuto, and he told me, in no uncertain terms, that these were things a composer shouldn't worry about (apart from the fact that these passages were marked at a low dynamic level) for any violinist worth his weight in salt would figure out a way to do most anything. But what most convinced me was not what he said but how he said it, in the most no-nonsense, inimitably Slavic way imaginable.

2. What distinguishes the practice of orchestration in the 20th century (as opposed to the 19th) is how a composer deals with octaves and unisons. In the 19th century, no real distinction is made between the two, and they are often used interchangably. In the 20th century, unisons are frequently used to create "new" timbres and the octave is regarded as an "acoustic action". I'm not sure if I agree completely with his analysis of the octave though. I think the octave has always (and still is) been used to strengthen the octave harmonic. Unisons on the other hand are different creatures altogether. I have a penchant for unison doubling than for octave doubling. How about you?

3. Orchestrators create sonorous combinations that reward the nervous system. I like that idea.

4. Chimes have distinctly audible partials when played loudly. Brant notates them for us so that we can most effectively double the chime with the piano.

It's an amazing book. Go buy it.

Face It - You're Already Extinct

2009-09-01T12:30:00.004-04:00

The music industry is trying (or at least I hope they are) to find a balance between profit margins and marginalizing their listeners (and their musicians). And they're failing miserably at it. I don't think anyone knows what the music industry will look like 10 years from now (if anyone does, tweet me), but the rug is being pulled out from under their feet and they're trying desperately to stay balanced. It's too late corporate-monster-whore-of-Babylon, and you're looking increasingly stupid and ridiculous in the process. The metaphor of music as property is dead. Over. Finished. Artists still need to protect their intellectual rights, and they should be paid for the work they do. Stealing is still wrong, but punishing a couple of college kids with the most punitive of fines only serve to alienate and is, frankly, evil. Does evil exist? Yes: Anything that gets too big, too bloated, so much so that common sense gets thrown out the window - that's evil staring at you right in the face.

Art as Performance as Lecture

2009-08-31T10:08:00.002-04:00

Artist Davis Thompson-Moss.

Oliver Herring

2009-08-31T10:07:00.000-04:00

I'm quite addicted right now to other people's lives.

Of Monsoons, Elephants and Smiles

2009-08-30T10:23:00.003-04:00

A shout-out to Ben's sister Katie who's over in Khon Kaen Thailand right now and will be for the next four months on an exchange program. Head over to her blog for some vicarious Thai-living, smiles and all. It's not a music blog, but she writes beautifully, and so much of music would be incomplete without this thing called "life" no?

Metaphor

2009-08-25T07:46:00.000-04:00

Helsinki 1907

2009-08-23T00:16:00.012-04:00

1. We know their story, that famous meeting in Helsinki. We've eavesdropped on their conversation many times before. Sibelius and his Blakeian desire to see the world contained, the whole merely hinted at, not shown but represented by its parts and the logic through which they fit together. And Mahler, with his all-embracing symphony that becomes a world through accumulation, through abundance, that it should burst at its seams with evidence of its own existence. Sibelius reveals Nature by imitating (with apologies to Cage) the manner of her operation; Mahler replicates, however imperfectly, Creation itself. Many dichotomies exist. Few of which interest me as much as this: Mahler or Sibelius? It is not a question of art containing the world but how we represent it, for Mahler what we put in, for Sibelius what we leave out.

2. My music has little by way of dynamics. Dynamic control relies less upon a composer's whim than on the discretion of the performer; put differently, it is acoustical phenomena not composerly desire. Dynamics are expressive not of human affectation (loud meaning "fierce", meaning "grand", meaning "meaningful") but of sound's relation to its space, its attack and its inevitable decay. We play loudly not because of the representation of "anger", but because we want to be heard. Giving up control of dynamics does not mean giving up loud or soft. It means we listen more than we speak.

3. However one orchestrates and no matter what one thinks of orchestration, its study is one of political economy, for an orchestra as an entity, as an idea, mimics the world: from our metaphors ("economical use of horns", "the strings were a wasted resource", "distribution of material"), to its history that maps the relationship between individuals and groups (the impossible-to-delineate background/foreground, for example, of a continuo), to how we even begin to define what constitutes a group (by virtue of the material it consumes: strings, wood, brass; or by virtue of its sonority, of its sound at work: "oboe" sonority which, for Brant, includes trumpets and trombones playing with straight mutes).

There is ideology at work in categories, in the fact of an orchestra. It is likewise at work in the act of orchestration, in how one hears an orchestra, as when one makes the argument, as Adler does, that there can only be one successful realization of the opening of the slow movement in Brahms' 3rd symphony. Adler traces the manifold alternate realities of those opening measures by playing the theme first on first violin, then on second violin, then viola, then finally on double bass. It is impossible to disagree with Adler's logic when argued as such, that the theme is unimaginable on any group other than that of the cello, but where he is mistaken is in his claim, in his assumption, that his attempt is one of trying to represent "melody", an abstract entity, on alternate string groups, when what he is in fact doing is attempting to replicate the sound of a cello, unsuccessfully of course, without using the cello. Adler designed his experiment knowing full-well the inevitable outcome, he crafted an argument, albeit unconsciously, knowing that he would emerge the victor.

4. Whither then Mahler or Sibelius? Perhaps it is less a matter of all or nothing, but instead a question of how we go about choosing what to include or what to exclude, and we do it imperfectly, making mistakes as we go about our day describing (and circumscribing) the world, choosing only to err on one side or the other. But I'm placing my bets on leaving more out than is necessary than with putting more in. So much of music - its tools, its media, its materials - already expresses the world in its copiousness, in its design, in its objectivity and in its mode of operation, that I am left with the feeling that we may perhaps throw caution to the wind when we embrace less, confident in its sufficiency. We do not need to hold a mirror up to the world, we need only be a part, no matter how small, of it.

Being Becoming

2009-08-20T09:37:00.002-04:00

So I'm doing research now for a review of Robert Carl's "Terry Riley's In C" (for American Record Guide) and I came across this quote courtesy of Kyle Gann:

My pieces each gradually explore a soundworld that's felt to be all present from the beginning, which I guess means my music is more about being, and Robert's is about becoming.

I like that idea. All the music that I've written in the past 3 years is more about being than becoming, and while I used to think, for foolish reasons, that the latter was somehow superior to the former, I don't any more. To reveal everything from the get-go is, as I once wrote of Taylor Mac, to be naked on stage when the curtain rises. The only place then left to go is muscle, sinew, and blood.

Sand

2009-08-20T08:21:00.003-04:00

No need for monument nor masterpiece, no towering cathedral nor towering icon, no need for new heroes (none are required, none need apply), no new Mona Lisa (she is everywhere), no undiscovered sound (choose everything or nothing at all), no need for art, for what's made, for what lasts, just the making, just the moving of hand, the pouring of sand on light, then the sweeping away. Always the sweeping away.

Marc <3 Barney Frank

2009-08-19T17:12:00.000-04:00

After all, a spade's a spade.

Silence is, well ...

2009-08-13T01:11:00.004-04:00

Everyone knows how I feel about 4'33", about the paralyzing effect that it has on me, if only because, taken as a musical ideal, it comes close to impossible to compose knowing the unbearable redundancy of notes. But silence can, in many less musical but more human ways, be godsend, be what its reputation makes it out to be. Take, for example, relationships and how fraught they are with words. Words spoken in quiet confidence, under cover of trust and affection, can, when the relationship turns sour, become ammunition, can obliterate years of goodwill, waging a loser's war of you-say-I-say. Not to have said anything is to have won the war before ever having to have spilled any blood. But this type of timid silence imposes an embargo on the heart, for to love is to speak freely, to confess, to let thoughts spill from the tip of your tongue without first having to catch them mid-air. To love is to chatter unfettered, to let words swirl, uncensored, unmoored, between mouth and ear. Anything less is a compromise: a heart cannot grow when one shuns its store of words.

Big is Scary, Mostly Redundant and Evil

2009-08-03T03:03:00.002-04:00

Applies to most anything. To orchestras and orchestral music (well, I wouldn't say they're evil but don't fight me on the redundancy); to institutions, obviously; and to corporations (like Apple). Now, don't get me wrong, I'm an Apple convert. I love my MacBook Pro. I own an iPod (many generations back, so no video capability), but I don't have an iPhone (doubt if I ever will). Apple gives new meaning to "design as art", which I'm obsessed with right now so great stuff all around. But then you read about exploding iPods, gag orders and teams of lawyers intimidating a father and his daughter, and suddenly my laptop loses a little of its metallic sheen, and its sleekness becomes a little too slick.

Rummage

2009-07-29T10:49:00.005-04:00

Going through old journals, forgotten files, dusty boxes. My summer in Singapore has come so quickly to an end, and every end is accompanied, in my case, by bouts of nostalgia. Parallel activities: rummaging, tidying up in the most casual fashion, clearing traces of me and wishing to leave my room mostly as I found it, I came across these old contact prints of Lady taken by my dear friend Stephen many, many years ago, for him before Toronto, and for me before New York. I owe him these paper memories, this tangible there-ness that depends so much on a photo's quietude. Stephen managed to capture in these few fleeting images the almost perfect grace that I had the privilege of knowing and loving for thirteen years.

Cadenzas On The House

2009-07-29T00:55:00.005-04:00

With thanks to Rob Haskins for pointing me in the direction of this gem of a piece by Vivaldi. And while the ritornello form intrigues, I can't help but be distracted by the sheer opulence of Vivaldi's instrumentation (aided, in no small measure, by the zesty and exemplary performance). It's like a musical free for all, a "cadenzas all around! on me!" sort of writing that is both appealing as it is addictive; not to mention creating, in the process, an approach to orchestration that considers, not the highlighting of theme nor delineation of form as its primary purpose, but the simple joy of aural chemistry, of varying colors in neat, discrete sequences, so that no combination ever repeats itself. Things to look out (listen out) for:

1. The use of tin foil on the violins to create a virtual tromba marina (thanks to Rob for this delectable tid-bit);
2. Where one holds the bow (almost at the center!) on a Baroque violin;
3. The buxom mandolinist at 2:45;
4. The wickedly cool recorders (and their attached humans). A perfect description of recorder sound: hollow. Not "hollow" bad, but "hollow" good, as in empty of overtone confusion and "lack of affectation";
5. The little aside by the bassoonist at 2:35.

If Elgar is "noble", and Ravel "exquisite", then Vivaldi must surely take the adjective "joyful".

RIP: Merce Cunningham

2009-07-27T12:23:00.002-04:00

Life's Too Precious To Spend It With Important People

2009-07-20T10:14:00.012-04:00

"Once upon a time, there was a little boy. And he went outside."
Harry Partch

What a tragic but amazing life, and a truly amazing man. Lots of great moments in this documentary. Two (of many) moments that stood out: the performance in Part 3 of Barstow in its original instrumentation for adapted guitar and voice. And if that performance wasn't kosher enough for you, head over here for seven versions of "Number One", I'm sure you'll find something that pleases; and the other, also in Part 3, is hearing the kithara playing two chords, one major, one minor, both so closely tuned that it's not the easiest of tasks to tell the difference. But the magic happens when Partch plays those two chords against each other. *Shudder* with delight, no? But that uneasy mix, of a tuning so untampered with that it sounds out-of-tune to us, of a conviction so pure that it can only live precariously among us, is what is most affecting in the end.

Too Many Notes

2009-07-11T23:25:00.006-04:00

That's how I feel. I'm probably being annoyingly obsessive-compulsive, but there are just too many notes already. Two notes seem to be just about right; one note aspires toward the condition of 4'33", which hangs over my head as an impossible ideal. That's how I view 4'33": oppressively perfect. It is also the only example of a literal silence, despite Cage's protestations that it's simply an absence of intention rather than an absence of sound. Every act of silence post-4'33" can only be metaphorical now. And even then, it's still too much. But back to two-note music. Feldman's (Madame Press) is the Platonic ideal. Crane's (Sparling) is the shadow dancing on the cave wall. Both are impossibly beautiful. Can there be a third? Or has the two-note ideal been used up, exhausted? Our hands are now forced to write with three notes. And three notes seem to be three notes too many.

Sparling -

Durational Indeterminacy

2009-07-11T03:48:00.003-04:00

My favorite works (of others, of mine) are those that leave a certain parameter of music open to chance, open to the spontaneity of a performer performing at a particular point in time, in space. My parameter of choice would be that of duration, and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that duration is the least understood of all musical parameters, at least in reference to its expressivity, and hence is fair game for the most amount of experimentation. One specific area, however, where I'm open to chance operations but not to indeterminacy in performance is that of pitch. I tend to prefer music where the pitch material is chosen by the composer before a performance rather than by the performer during. I've never been particular convinced that pitch indeterminacy makes sense even when handled by as gifted an improviser as Lukas Foss or Valentin Silvestrov, something always feels amiss, missing, to me. But choosing pitch material via chance operations or through pre-composed processes (like Cage, former; like Eno, latter) never comes across as, never sounds, at least to my ears, random. The only difference between the two methods, I feel, is one of composerly temperament: how necessarily meticulous you are at requiring the exhaustion of your material. That's what the Number Pieces are all about I think: Cage exploring duration. Feldman with his Durations series, with his extended works, similarly explores another side to duration. Music lingers so that we too may stop and linger when our ear discovers something beautiful. Lingering is not an aesthetic choice, it is the only remedy we have to speed, a panacea to immediate gratification. To linger is to ignore utility, and to focus on sound.

Robert Carl on In C

2009-07-06T11:13:00.002-04:00

Head over here for a podcast with Robert Carl talking about In C.

And You Ask Me Why I Love New York?

2009-07-04T05:19:00.005-04:00

It's the trash dude. It's the trash. It's the fact that the city takes a long time to pick up the trash. And it's because of folks like Joshua Allen Harris, who look at trash bags and see inflatable creatures, breathed into life by exhaust fumes from the bowels of Manhattan.

And here's another reason to fall in love again.

HERB & DOROTHY Trailer from Herb & Dorothy on Vimeo.

5s and 7s

2009-07-03T01:54:00.002-04:00

For whatever reason, when I think of Scriabin I think of quintuplets and septuplets, not to mention the very fine art of notated rubato, in the same way one thinks of 'noble' listening to Elgar, or trills when listening to Beethoven. Xiayin's new Scriabin CD is out on Naxos and here's 20 mintues with her live on John Schaefer's Soundcheck.

India's Stonewall

2009-07-02T09:58:00.001-04:00

Rational thought finally wins out thanks to the New Delhi High Court.

Sonatas and New Interludes: Review

2009-06-30T21:32:00.004-04:00

Of the new interludes the most inviting was Mr. Chan’s Interlude II, a study in repeating, slowly morphing figures built around chimelike tintinnabulations and ending up in a chromatic Minimalist swirl.

The review in the New York Times is out! My heartfelt thanks to pianist David Broome and to the wonderful composers over at Red Light New Music, for their dedication, their hard work, and their inspiring inventiveness. You have my gratitude.

Instead of Water Boarding ...

2009-06-29T20:36:00.001-04:00

Music Offers No Solution. It Has No Content.

2009-06-28T22:14:00.001-04:00

When I listen to music I'm happy to be in a state of not knowing ... I know I'm listening, but I don't know what to do with it.

Punchline

2009-06-23T20:38:00.002-04:00

Best punchline I've read in a long while, courtesy of Steve Smith:

Mr. Guenther noted that three of those long-serving players were born or raised in Brooklyn, “which used to be a hotbed of classical music,” he said, sounding the evening’s only unplanned sour note. Mr. Guenther, too, will depart at the end of this season, and perhaps he will then find time to become acquainted with the many performers, composers and ensembles now thriving in Brooklyn and enriching the entire city.

Transcription As An Act of Subversion

2009-06-23T03:43:00.001-04:00

Holy Orbits Batman!

2009-06-22T22:29:00.010-04:00

They really should allow (or at least close one eye to) the filming of all performances at all venues (especially Carnegie Hall, whose tendency, on this issue, tends too much toward the militant for my taste), no matter the complications that arise from licensing or copyright or any such (obviously) essential yet musically unessential legal issues, especially if the recording's made not with the intent of resale in mind but with the intent of sharing, of capturing a moment in time that would otherwise have been lost to the archives or to individual (and hence imperfect) recollection. Obviously a certain code of honor/ conduct exists (or should exist) among the YouTube generation: don't disturb your neighbor while filming/ recording/ photographing; don't profit from the bootleg; don't be, in other words, an ass. I'm therefore IMMENSELY grateful for the bootleg (not quite a bootleg since cameras were allowed, but you know what I mean ...) of Orbits, especially since I couldn't make it for the performance. And just a couple of days after the event too!

Anonymity

2009-06-21T08:38:00.005-04:00

It goes without saying that discussion is welcome on this blog. I always welcome the opportunity to hear what everyone else thinks about the things I find important, and more importantly, what I find to be less important, musically speaking of course. We may not always agree, but in disagreeing, it gives me the opportunity to once again stand in awe of this vast and varied thing we call our musical life. That said, if I have to disagree with you, I think it's nice if I know who I'm disagreeing with. It's a simple matter of putting a face to an opinion. I just think that it means a little more that way. But whether we're agreeing or disagreeing with each other, I don't think that a discussion's the proper place for hyperbolic punctuation, expressions such as: !!!??. Now, THAT'S just annoying. No wonder "anonymous" and "annoying" share so many letters in common. I'm not in the habit of censoring comments. It's rudeness that I trash.

Brant's Book

2009-06-21T00:51:00.005-04:00

So, Henry Brant's Textures and Timbres is finally out! I'm like a kid on Christmas morning, but then again, orchestration texts have always been my favorite kind of secondary materials to indulge in. In order of preference:

1. orchestration texts;
2. (musical) aesthetics;
3. music history;
4. theory.

Theory I've never really cared for. Too much emphasis on pitch relationships, especially when it's implied that one can hear them, when I, more often than not, can't. So my order's been placed. I can hardly wait.

In the meantime, Brant's Orbits is being performed at the Guggenheim for free Sunday evening. It's scored for 80 trombones, Soprano and Organ. C'mon - 80 trombones! You've gotta make it for this concert if only to hear 80 trombones spiraling high above your head! I am drawn to Brant's preference for homogeneous orchestration, whether it be 80 trombones, 8 piccolos or 8 guitars (which is what I've been thinking about lately - just have to find the right approach, and I think Cage's String Quartet points the way). Stravinsky was the first, I think, to propose homogeneous instrumental combinations. Didn't he have an 8-note chord he needed to orchestrate in the Rite of Spring and he settled, not on 4 horns, 3 trombones and 1 tuba, but on 8 horns? There we go.

And don't forget the Cage Sonatas and New Interludes concert next Monday June 29th at 7.30pm! Here's the program order:

Sonata 1
Sonata 2
Sonata 3

Interlude by Paul Friedrich Frick

Sonata 4
Sonata 5
Sonata 6

Interlude by Marc Chan

Sonata 7
Sonata 8
Sonata 9

Interlude by Kevin Sims

Sonata 10
Sonata 11
Sonata 12

Interlude by Yoav Pasovsky

Sonata 13
Sonata 14/15
Sonata 16

4'33"

My interlude Repeated Measures is programmed right after Sonata 6, which, as it just so happens to be the case, is my favorite sonata in the set.

1-07 Sonata VI.aif -

Pefectly quiet music for a perfectly quiet summer evening.

Sonatas and New Interludes

2009-06-17T09:13:00.001-04:00

More publicity for the upcoming concert courtesy of New Amsterdam Records!

The Red Fish

2009-06-16T23:05:00.002-04:00

Great article in the Times today on Le Poisson Rouge! I have a new piece Repeated Measures getting its premiere there on June 29th at 7.30pm. It's scored for prepared piano with the same preparations as Cage's Sonatas and Interludes. I know I've mentioned this before somewhere on this blog, but I'm pushing the concert hence the repetition. The performance was conceived by pianist David Broome and the composer-collective Red Light New Music, and it features video by Justin Blome as well as four new commissions for four new interludes in a performance of the classic Cage score.

Repeated Measures pretty much describes itself: almost every measure is indeterminedly repeated and the work plays around with the fact that Cage left some pretty choice notes unprepared. There are, apart from the local repetitions, sectional chunks of repetition as well, with differences introduced by way of register, tempi, and a kind of rhythmic (rather than intervallic) invertible counterpoint - when you hear it in performance, just raise your hand and the bouncer will hand you a door prize. I've been structuring my music mostly with regard to tempo and duration for the past couple of years. Repeated Measures is similarly structured with its tempo increasing and then decreasing. And what is music if not time? And what is time if not its perception, its speeding up, its slowing down. And what is time if not its fleeting nature, and our desire to stand it still, if only for a while?

Melting Pot

2009-06-11T07:41:00.004-04:00

Since the Theater of Found Sounds is reporting from Singapore, I thought I'd share with you the kind of music-making that's taking place here, right along the equator. I grew up with tabla music playing on TV (during the in-between, non-prime time hours), and while I never did take to classical Indian music, I'm not surprised that others, like Krsna and Govin, did. Singaporeans, divorced from colonial influence, have developed a unique relationship to all things traditional, if only because they are so easily available, so widely accessible.

4'33"

2009-06-08T08:43:00.005-04:00

The trouble with 4'33" is its sublime literalness, its sweet condemnation into metaphor of everything else that follows.

Paper

2009-06-06T23:47:00.002-04:00

If Hal Leonard ever stops producing their line of manuscript paper, specifically Carta no. 32, then I would, in all seriousness, have to stop writing music. I think that all composers eventually find that perfect paper, that perfect pen, that perfect pencil, that perfect desk, that perfect chair, that perfect width of that perfect stave, and that perfect light at that perfect hour, with which to produce that less than perfect but flawedly satisfying work. Composers are all creatures of habit. It's what makes us so endearing.

Eighty and Repeated Measures

2009-06-05T10:11:00.003-04:00

1. Just a head's up to all you Number Pieces fans out there, though if you're a fan, and there's no reason why you shouldn't be, this would probably be old news for you: the first performance of Eighty will be broadcast on UMFM on June 17th at 11am EST. Fun, if geeky, facts: Eighty was written in 1992, the year of Cage's 80th birthday and is Cage's fifth largest Number Piece. Now you know. Now you simply have to listen.

2. Also, while we're on the topic of Cage, just to let everyone know about an upcoming performance of Cage's Sonatas and New Interludes at one of the coolest spots for new music Le Poisson Rouge here in New York City, courtesy of David Broome and Red Light New Music. It's a performance of the classic Cage score but with 4 brand-spanking-new interludes commissioned for the occasion, written by Kevin Sims, Yoav Pasovsky, Paul Friedrich Frick, and yours truly. Performance details:

158 Bleecker Street June 29th Monday at 7.30pm, though doors open at 6.30pm for imbibition.

Should be great fun! If you're in the city, drop on by! My interlude's titled Repeated Measures because that's exactly what it is. There's a little invertible counterpoint in it, but don't let the bouncer know, just acknowledge it with a sly wink and move on. Repeated Measures repeats/ recycles My Wounded Head 3, but since no one, well, no one besides Mr. Rob Haskins, has heard it yet, I feel it's kosher to repeat myself. But just a little. And hopefully with a difference. Cage in June! Good times all around.

Resonance

2009-06-01T21:35:00.008-04:00

Less about Barthes' grain, more about Proust's madeleine, I've been, of late, collecting incidents of emotional resonance (as opposed to the merely resonant), incidents of bare pitch material opening up into far bigger worlds than their surface content seems to allow for. Resonance is only possible when one is deprived of some information, when one hints at things, when one chooses (apologies to Kenko) to hide the moon behind a barely leafing branch.

Taps must be one of the most perfect and emotionally resonant pieces of music ever written (or appropriated, knowing its history: Taps is simply the Dutch bugle-call Tattoo played in slow motion, a Civil War example of a found sound, a Douglas Gordonesque/ 9 Beet Stretch-esque work of art way before its time). Its emotional resonance is undeniable (due in large part to our collective knowledge and memory of its use in military/ state funerals). Originally a call for lights out, what began as an invitation to end the day's activities, merged into metaphor by becoming the bugle-call signifying a soldier's final rest, an end to his life's work. However the aspect of Taps that is, to my ears, most perfect, is that the work refuses to draw a distinction between pitch material and instrumentation - you simply cannot tell the two apart. Taps consists entirely of the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th partials; played on a bugle, the work capitalizes on the limitations of a valveless instrument, giving rise to a tune impossibly rich in emotional resonance. It is impossible to hear the tune, to imagine the tune, apart from the bugle. Here then is a composer's dream: a flawless marriage between tone and timbre, between the purely musical and its utility.

Progressive Cuisine

2009-05-30T02:35:00.002-04:00

Courtesy of Thomas Keller, speaking about (at the 9 minute mark) molecular gastronomy, or progressive cuisine (intellectual cuisine). It's equally applicable to new music, though I wonder how gastronomists rank, in terms of generosity, with their auditor counterparts.

The question you ask yourself is: Do I like this or not? But you can't ask yourself: is this good or bad? You don't know because you've never tasted it before.

Awakening

2009-05-29T23:20:00.003-04:00

Here's a shout-out and hearty congratulations to my dear friend and colleague from my Manhattan School days Wang Jie who was recently named the winner of the American Composers Orchestra's 2009 Underwood Emerging Composers Commission, bringing her a $15,000 commission (so Jenny, where are you taking me for dinner?) for a work to be premiered by ACO's Orchestra Underground. Jie cooks a mean spicy rabbit stew as well, apart from her obvious gifts as a composer and orchestrator. Can't wait to hear the new work Jenny!

Push-Ups From Across The Pond

2009-05-28T19:39:00.008-04:00

1. Composer Matthew Lee Knowles' (A SEEmEd hEArt:ShowEd of mirror) (thE ShoCk wAS:of firSt mEdiA) (or iS hE:yEStErdAy thE dEliBErAtEly) has a flair for the non-essential gesture, a music that is bare as it is gratuitous (I suppose those two terms are, in the right context‏, not necessarily incompatible). There is a physical gesture attached to every musical gesture that Mat tries to make visible and evident. A SEEmEd hEArt ... consists of increasingly thick, widely spaced chords written for instruments that aren't inherently (or at all) chordal, all this taking place within increasingly narrowing time frames (governed by the stop-watch), giving rise to a musical acceleration and a metaphorical (what word would be most apt?) squeezing of form and sound. This idea of tempo as form is something that I find myself revisiting, a kind of rhythmic organization that does not (necessarily) give rise to rhythms or rhythmic patterns. Beethoven was, I think, the composer who planted the first seed. But enough of Beethoven, here's Mat:

2. This particular performance by the ARCO collective tries to find a way to render as indistinguishable the sound of a cello from a bass clarinet. And I've been thinking alot about orchestration lately, what it's for and why some people do it better than others (it's like ... push-ups. Maybe.). I don't necessarily think that one benefits from being a conductor (see here for an excellent and always endearingly curmudgeonly opinion of Kyle Gann) or that one improves from writing only orchestral music (though it is true, as it is for push-ups, that experience is invaluable). I've always thought that orchestral invention is similar in breed to contrapuntal imagination or harmonic invention or melodic invention - some people just do it better than others. And what's so wrong with that? After all, it's what we do with our limitations that distinguish us as composers. Enough said (especially since it seems to be a sore spot for many composers), back to orchestration. I'm drawn to the kind of orchestration implied in Mat's piece, and turned into a formal idea in Cage's Four1 (or Seventy-Four if one requires an orchestral version). I love being unable to distinguish between instruments, of interchangeable instrumentation despite natural limitations. I love how the piccolo may play what the double bass plays and get away with it (Mahler has I think moments that aspire to that). And I especially love how this brand of orchestration comes with its own profuse set of limitations, all following the general rule (mostly) that instruments are least characteristic when played softly (Feldman), and therefore any instrument may safely be paired with any other instrument (as in color choices - all colors go together given the right circumstances).

3. The ARCO collective also performed Neil Luck's Gogoplata (with hands clasped). That piece is for me an extremely appropos update of a scene from Erik Satie's Sports and Diversions. It's funny and serious, painful to watch, yet terribly captivating, and unabashedly sexy too - mouth stuffed with a microphone, body humping the ground, heaved panting amplified ... Perhaps it is time for a fully-updated version of Sports and Diversions? Maybe something collective in nature? Justin and James, if you're both reading, what say the two of you?

Summer Reading List

2009-05-24T11:12:00.004-04:00

I'll be flying off to Singapore on Monday - 22 hours in the air, yikes - when the summer gets too warm in New York, just go somewhere even warmer (family, friends) and even more humid (tropics). What is it about the summer and family time that seem to always go hand in hand? There's a phenomenological post to be written right there methinks. So, the Theater of Found Sounds will be moving to the tropics for the next two months (or so). But before that, here's a list of books I picked up at the Strand yesterday: Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time; Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth; and Michael Ende's Momo. Regressive reading I know, but I've always been an escapist at heart, always had a peter in my pan, always had a Cyrano whispering words in my ear ... But with words like:

... what Momo was better at than anyone else was listening. Anyone can listen, you may say - what's so special about that? - but you'd be wrong. Very few people know how to listen properly, and Momo's way of listening was quite unique ... Momo could listen in such a way that worried and indecisive people knew their own minds from one moment to the next, or shy people felt suddenly confident and at ease, or downhearted people felt happy and hopeful ... Such was Momo's talent for listening.

How could I resist?

Thoughts From An Afternoon At The Whitney

2009-05-22T12:34:00.005-04:00

1. Jenny Holzer's work is disturbing. Disturbing because we aren't quite sure whether her works are sculpture or literature, text or object. These LED confessions and declassified documents painted in oil on canvas disturb us with their form and materials (sculpture/ object) as well as their content (literature/ text): marble benches are made to be sat on, yet sitting on them obscures the text; staring at LED lights flashing in rich, bright colors for too long makes you nauseous - and you feel 'sick' as well from reading about the facts of torture, what one human being can do to another. We feel powerless. We know about the abuse of power but can only observe an impotent Congress do nothing about it. But more than that, there is also something terribly disconcerting about turning art into brute fact.

2. Claes Oldenburg turns brute fact into art, and so acts as a necessary curative to spending time with Holzer's work. Here the facts of everyday objects - spoons, clarinets, toilet bowls - are turned into soft, friendly giants; gentle blow-up dolls in warm colors absent of hard edges.

3. I paraphrase Ellsworth Kelly: I am trying to get away from this business of 'choice' and focusing instead on simply recognizing.

New York, The Tide Is Turning

2009-05-18T01:42:00.006-04:00

If you live in New York, find out who your State Senator is, then write, call, email them, urging them to vote YES on Marriage Equality. Momentum's on our side, it would be a shame to be left behind.

I've been thinking that Whitman's Calamus is very much a document of our times, and while we share in his struggle against unfair persecution, and his desire to see as common place the hand in hand walking between comrades and lovers, all the pertinent issues are expressed in a muscularity and lyricism that is Whitman's alone. To hear "A leaf for hand in hand ... I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand", and

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the
destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these
States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large
that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades

is to remember that Whitman is our most persuasive and illustrious spokesperson. So New York, don't let Whitman down, make the right decision.

... Some days leave
some days grieve
some days you almost don't believe.
Some days believe you,
some days don't,
some days believe you
and you won't.
Some days worry
some days mad
some days more than make you glad.
Some days, some days,
more than shine,
witnesses,

coming on down the line!

Color Me Mahler (Fit the Ninth)

2009-05-17T19:35:00.003-04:00

You lingering sparse leaves of me on winter-nearing boughs,
And I some well-shorn tree of field or orchard-row;
You tokens diminute and lorn - (not now the flush of May, or July
clover-bloom - no grain of August now;)
You pallid banner-staves - you pennants valueless - you overstay'd of time,
Yet my soul-dearest leaves confirming all the rest,
The faithfulest - hardiest - last.

- Walt Whitman

Margaret Leng Tan At The James Cohan Gallery

2009-05-16T21:12:00.007-04:00

There is a certain amount of discomfort, of danger, inherent in the music of the Fluxus movement. A woman in the audience had her wrist tethered to a train of toy pianos (Alison Knowles' String Piece); Margaret Leng Tan screamed in varying shades of hysteria (Dick Higgins' Danger Music no. 17); the fate of elephants in the ivory trade was pounded home to us in maximum amplification (John Cage's 0'00"); and Margaret grew ever more hoarse singing a C major scale higher than her voice could physically manage (George Brecht's Impossible Effort). But danger always keeps close company with humor. We laugh when we are ill at ease, when we are unsure as to the significance of what we see or hear. Margaret's own Toy Piano Drag involved the word 'drag' not as noun but as verb, a literal dragging of a train of toy pianos along the floor of the gallery; Erik Griswold's Bicycle Lee Hooker redefined virtuosity in terms of how many instruments one could play (including a bicycle horn under one armpit) at any one time; and Brecht's Recipe involved eggs, strings, knots and extinguished matches. What the Fluxus movement reminds us, with Margaret as their most persuasive spokesperson, is that discomfort is very much a part of the aesthetic experience, and that sometimes distinguishing between danger and humor isn't as easy as it seems at first glance.

Color Me Mahler (Fit the Eighth)

2009-05-16T12:45:00.006-04:00

1. Repetition: It's okay if you repeat yourself. Indulge yourself for a while. I've a thing, when it comes to writing for the piano, for triplets over duplets. At last count, I've used it in 3 different pieces: My Wounded Head 3, Repeated Measures (to be performed June 29 at Le Poisson Rouge), and now in a new commission from Laurel Karlik Sheehan. I'm worried that I'm repeating myself. So I'm trying to take a little comfort in Mahler's mandolins. From 1904 to 1908, Mahler used the mandolin in three different works: symphonies no.7, no. 8 and also in Das Lied von der Erde. And why not? It is a sonority like no other, and it evokes the familiar for Mahler's Vienna, and the unfamiliar for us city-folk in 21st century New York (actually it recalls a different kind of familiar - that of mafia flicks and spaghetti westerns, but maybe it's just me). The mandolin never fails to pique a listener's curiosity, watch us all crane forward, ass on edge of seat, trying to identify the player, the instrument and the sound.

2. Sound vs. Symphony: It's usually only about sound for me. Narratives - when the music peaks, how sections relate to each other - I've never really cared for. I've also never really been able to hear tonal relationships, so the grand D major falling into Db major scheme of the 9th doesn't do much for me (of course, the muted resonance of strings playing in a very foreign Db major thrills me). Ditto my TV habits: if Ben misses an episode of Lost, he can't bring himself to watch a later episode without first catching up on what he missed. I, on the other hand, have never understood plot twists and can easily go to bed without first finding out who the winner is on Iron Chef. But sound! A piano, celesta, harmonium, 3 harps, organ, 2 mandolins, throw in a lingering flute and an almost inaudible clarinet, it's orgasm central right there.

In Bb (Stimmung at the New Museum)

2009-05-14T22:42:00.009-04:00

Stockhausen's Stimmung is in many ways the counter-cultural counterpart (Stimmung in 1968 and In C in 1964) to Terry Riley's In C: Stimmung's 51 moments to In C's 53 cells; Stimmung's Bb 'tonality' to In C's 'C'; Stimmung's Bb drone to In C's C-pulse. Both pieces evolve in an indeterminate fashion (but proceed single-mindedly from beginning to end) and both pieces owe much to 60s American counter-culture. The only difference (to my ears) between the two pieces is that while In C seems to have weathered time well, somehow remaining relevant 45 years since its conception, Stimmung seems dated, very much a child of its times, of the 1960s. There is also less joy in Stimmung, less confidence. It is almost as if Stockhausen was able to capture in sound everything about the 60s in America except its naive optimism. For Stockhausen, Stimmung was the end of something, of an idea, an experience, of winter in Connecticut; for Riley In C marked a beginning.

Color Me Mahler (What if I'm not a fan?)

2009-05-11T19:25:00.002-04:00

If Mahler's nostalgia gets too cloying for you, here's a list of other performances around the city that are well-worth checking out as necessary panacea to Mahler-indigestion:

1. Feldman's Neither with text by Beckett at the Cell (Wed/ Thurs May 13/ 14);

2. A performance of Stockhausen's Stimmung at the New Museum (Thursday May 14);

3. Margaret Leng Tan's bringing her toy instruments down to the James Cohan Gallery as part of their Nam June Paik exhibition (Saturday May 16); and

4. Xiayin Wang's playing Alice Tully next Monday (May 18) with premieres by Richard Danielpour and Sean Hickey.

Color Me Mahler (Perception)

2009-05-10T23:13:00.007-04:00

The Staatskapelle Berlin sounds different under Barenboim than it does under Boulez. The difference may however be a matter of perception. Most things are. And we're mostly unaware of it. A concert that I rave about may be panned by someone else. A performance that I think went smoothly, another may think failed miserably. I don't think it matters who's right, what matters is that we don't go off half-cocked solely on the basis of perception untempered by reflection. Mahler's 5th was astounding. Most of the audience, judging from the holler of approval and bravos galore, agreed with me. Except for a single, if extremely vocal, voice of dissent. Booooo! Boooooo! Boooooo! Everyone sitting front left balcony turned, disapprovingly, to see who this dissatisfied customer was. Perhaps someone was angry with Barenboim's politics? Or perhaps he wanted a slower performance of the Adagietto? Or perhaps he was angry that Barenboim managed to memorize the entire score of the 5th seemingly without any effort? Closer inspection however revealed that the guy was neither annoyed nor aggrieved, but simply mis-articulating his profound approval: bra-VOOOOOOOO! bra-VOOOOOOOOO! bra-VOOOOOOOOOO!

Color Me Mahler (Fit the Fifth)

2009-05-10T00:17:00.008-04:00

1. Adagietto. Sehr langsam. Molto Adagio. Three very different tempi (three varieties of slow) all occurring simultaneously in the 4th movement of Mahler's 5th symphony (we have to include a fourth variety of slow as well: Ausserst langsam und zuruckhaltend/ Molto lento e ritenuto, because so much of the movement is the song). The fonts imply that the 'Adagietto' indicates a formal outline, like a Rondo or a Funeral March, rather than tempo. But what I'm particularly obsessed with is the 'a tempo' indication at measure 3, which for the strings translates as 'Sehr langsam' and which for the harp translates as 'molto Adagio', a deliciously explicit indication that Mahler expects the solo harp to proceed at a different speed than the strings, to feel a different quality of slowness.

[Ed: Reposted from here. I was out in Queens the whole day. Dim sum lunch and then Ben's fabulously funny show - so many Sarah Palin jokes all in one evening - at the Queens Theater in the Park. This of course left little time for Mahler-reflection, but I still stand by my four degrees of slow.]

2. Translations are the undercurrent to any Mahler project.

Color Me Mahler (Intermission)

2009-05-09T00:58:00.007-04:00

Mahler has a knack for desolate landscapes, for long spans of nothing but the rumble of a bass drum, an instrument that's not so much heard as felt. These stretches of empty time remind me of Ozu's 'pillow shots' (transitional shots that suspend the narrative) and function similarly as transitional space, denoting shifts in mood, usually between the martial and the lyrical, the banal and the properly symphonic. In Mahler, it is not so much a gradual modulation that we experience as it is that we fall, quite without warning, into different 'tonalities', different moods, "mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."

Color Me Mahler (Fit the Third)

2009-05-08T02:20:00.005-04:00

Bruno Walter turned up at Steinbach, and stared in wonder at the magnificent mountain scenery, Mahler said: "You needn't stand staring at that - I've already composed it all." You've gotta love a guy for saying that no?

In symphony no. 3, we're still very much in the world of Wunderhorn, in a world governed by fantastic things, of angels and of birds perched over an infinite abyss, and Nature - as noun and as eschatology - still overwhelms the smallness of us, petty humankind, and our all-too brief history. Mahler always seems to brings out the misanthrope in me. Or, putting a slightly more positive spin on this, he seems to make me painfully aware of how ridiculous the human race can be: we fight, we glower, we put others down so we can feel better about ourselves, all this pettiness but to what end? If there is any consolation, it is simply that we still try to do good, whether or not an absolute good, as noun or as eschatology, exists. And that is Mahler's relevance for us today: yes there is his irony, and yes there is his nostalgia, twin conditions that we too experience ever so sharply in our century as much as in Mahler's, but more than that, Mahler is a man who has stopped believing in an absolute good, in an absolute truth, yet he still tries to imagine what it would sound like, what it would sing if it had a voice.

Color Me Mahler (Fit the Second)

2009-05-07T00:03:00.004-04:00

Before the big night tomorrow with Pierre Boulez, Dorothea Röschmann and Michelle DeYoung, take the time to indulge in a little comparative listening or listening as criticism, as commentary: not comparing between different conductors, but between different translations. In the case of the 2nd symphony, it's all about Mahler as arranger, as listener performing his listening (what can I say? I've been reading way too much Szendy): I mean the 3rd movement, Mahler's futile, aimless scurrying about while St. Anthony preaches to the recalcitrant fish.

Here's how the piano hears the story:

Here's how an orchestra hears it:

And here's how the symphony hears it, not as song (moving) but as movement (still) - and we mistake the fish for the water, timbre for text:

Here's how Berio retells the tale for our modern ears:

One story, so many ways of telling the tale. A little like trying to describe an elephant. Where do we locate the difference? In the quality of those chromatic scales.

A Note To All Mean-Spirited People

2009-05-06T23:11:00.005-04:00

So, the Mahler-lovefest's all begun. And I'm filled with very much love. Really I am. And you know ol' Gustav, it's mostly about the BIG-with-a-capital-B issues in life: death, afterlife. Death. Death. Death. I wish Mahler had something to say about why nasty, mean-spirited people exist in this world. The world that he hasn't yet turned away from. I'll say it here in no uncertain terms: I'm grateful for all the kind and gracious and NICE-with-a-capital-N people who have come into my life, but I really want the world to crack open and swallow up all the hateful people out there. But I'm not confident of that ever happening. So before I join Mr. Mahler in turning my back to the world, here's what I wish to every single one of those nasty, nay-saying, life-sapping, soul-stealing persons you've ever come across in your life (probably best not to play this at full-blast in the office, no nudity, just artful use of swear words):

So Much Left To Be Written In C

2009-05-03T10:37:00.003-04:00

Now that the In C celebration is slowly winding down, at least until the book comes out, here's a quick repost of my favorite reviews and reflections:

1. Courtesy of the New York Times;
2. Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal; and
3. Courtesy of the Standing Room (read this for observations from a performer's POV).

Throw Down Your Heart

2009-04-25T21:55:00.006-04:00

Bela Fleck's travelogue through the banjo's prehistory, tracing its roots back to Africa, is now playing at the IFC in New York. It's worth sitting for an hour and a half in the air-conditioned dark, despite the temptation of the sun, despite the glorious teaser of a summer that we're having this weekend. Here's the trailer:

But come especially for this song near the end:

Djorolen - Béla Fleck

In the folk tradition, musicians are keepers of melodies, tunes that are in many ways a tangible heirloom, to be passed on through the generations, to be kept in memory, to function as collective memory, to be sung. In the classical tradition, musicians are keepers of techniques, of the 'sonata-allegro' rather than 'Beethoven's Symphony no. 5'. We treasure them as much, certainly, but techniques are abstract, unlike the concreteness of song. We speak about and perform the classical tradition with different voices, in different tongues. In the folk tradition, they are often one in the same. All musics push towards abstraction, and the more we gain in sophistication, the more we lose in music's immediacy. I'm not saying that one is necessarily better than the other. Just as I don't think that we can consciously ignore the refinement of our voice. I'm just saying that it's something this film made me think about, which is, in my book, a good thing.

In C At Carnegie: Part II

2009-04-24T23:30:00.020-04:00

1. Joyful, joyous, exuberant, ebullient, ecstatic, euphoric, radiant, rhapsodic, rapturous, festive, celebratory, dynamic, cinematic, complex, elaborate, demanding, involved, intricate, accessible, simple, unadorned, uncluttered, unpretentious, propulsive, driving, forceful, impulsive, powerful, brutish, savage, swarming, thronging, dense, thick, condensed, concentrated, sparse, spare, scattered, gentle, tender, delicate, serene, sweet, lyrical, expressive, subjective, objective, brutal, booming, vernacular, unsparing, moving. And complete.

2. 53 adjectives. And then a 54th. We always add one extra to remember what was left stranded without notation: the 8th note pulse, the incessant, unforgiving C, that, since its introduction by Steve Reich, has now taken on the quality of a familiar tune, whose entrance always provokes applause and anticipation. The 45th Anniversary version of In C at Carnegie Hall opened sans pulse, heightening suspense, but launched, instead, into an elaborate sustained improvisation on C by classical Indian singer Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, soaring high over a rumbling bass of didjeridus, a double bass (Saskia Lane), a contrabass clarinet (Alexander Kollias), a contrabassoon (Katherine Chapman), a bass flute (Nicole Frazee), a growling bass clarinet (played with uncommon verve by Evan Ziporyn) and various other noise makers. This sustained crescendo of pure melody, led in turn to the most cinematic and heart-rending entrance of the C-pulse that I have ever heard: it was order patterning its way out of chaos; it was pure rhythm emerging from the depths of song.

3. Music is pattern-making. And minimalism is pattern-making unadorned, uncluttered by any other consideration besides listening to a pattern unfold and interact with other patterns in time.

4. The 45th Anniversary version was "conducted". No, there was no beating of time, instead Dennis Russell Davies acted, as described in the program notes, as "Flight Pattern Coordinator". His role was the provision of sign posts, literally - he walked around the stage at key points in the work's unfolding with numbered cards, ensuring that everyone's journey through all 53 cells would coincide with certain choice arrivals. This allowed for a more subtle and detailed orchestration of In C's sonic geography, which was certainly welcome in this version, with its collection of a veritable who's who of new music.

5. In C's subtlety is not found in its dynamic control or in its orchestration. An indeterminate work however is strangely more organic than a determined one, organic in the sense that the work's dynamics swell and ebb like an organism inhaling and exhaling. There is a certain naturalness and purposefulness, not to mention spontaneity, in the work's rate of change, whether in dynamics or in its thinning/ thickening of textures. No subito dynamics are possible (none are required). No orchestrated acceleration. No Bolero-like fussiness in its structuring of number of events per unit time. In C always reinvents itself because it is as close as one can get to a notated becoming: the 53 cells are not summaries of an architectural plan, but are snap-shots of a work already in progress, perpetually sounding.

6. In the 45th Anniversary version, individual players and groups had their chance to shine, like little cadenzas or solos in a jam session. Everyone stood out, but I have to single out the subtle and stunning improvisation by So Percussion, such captivating playing that even the musicians on stage stopped what they were doing and turned to listen to them.

7. Margaret Leng Tan's solo, amplified of course, consisted of a delicate play between her toy piano, toy glockenspiel and the Kronos Quartet. There was a delicacy to their collective sound that was unbearably beautiful.

8. The members of the Young People's Chorus of New York City along with new music regulars Joan La Barbara, Sidney Chen, Alfred Shabda Owens, Judith Sherman, and Michael Harrison sang lyrics specifically written by Riley himself, mostly phonemes rather than actual words. Their solo turn was striking and just as memorable as the others.

9. When amplification is used, it allows for a different kind of instrumentation. Pairing bass flute (the bass flute solo occurred at cell 48) with brass ensemble is only imaginable with amplification. But what a sound! Almost, dare I say it, Mahleresque.

10. Speaking of European influences, I swear I heard some Sibelius in there somewhere, especially in the slower sustained cells (specifically cell 35, the longest of all 53 - are the retrograde numbers pure coincidence? Or intentional? But also cells 14, 29, 42 and 48). The 45th Anniversary version made the most of these moments, playing up their lyricism, their sheer lushness of sound, their inevitable symphonic opulence. If the European symphony evolved from concrete sound to abstract form, then the American symphony returns it to its etymological roots, a sounding-together. In C is an acknowledged masterpiece, but remains the great unacknowledged American symphony, a symphony in perpetual search of an orchestration, constantly new, constantly searching, constantly reinventing itself.

11. This reinvention is an acknowledged virtue of the work. And bearing this in mind, David Harrington made sure to include young musicians as well, whether musicians from the Young People's Chorus of New York or from the GVSU New Music Ensemble, because reinvention is impossible without the vitality and the involvement of its youth.

12. Sounds that stood out to my ears: the Koto ensemble Koto Vortex, Michael Hearst on bass melodica, and Jeanna Velonis on accordion. I'm always including the melodica in every symphonic work I write from now on, because then the question is posed: who plays it (the woodwind section or the keyboard section)? And how do you ensure its audition? If taste is memory, ditto sound, and a melodica has a wheezing (the perfect descriptive word) quality to it, like a boy with runny nose, or an old man, a strange merging of then and later. I am nostalgic for a past (and a future) that may not even be my own.

13. How do you end a piece like In C? With the pulse deserted by everyone, left churning away all alone (does it end softly? or abruptly?)? Or, as in the 45th Anniversary version, a dissipation, a scattering of notes down the aisles, just the timbre of a piano and a toy piano lingering till the very end. And then the echo, the residual sound, the walls of Carnegie Hall holding on to its final resonance.

14. Applause occurred only at the end. But not before a significant pause of undisturbed silence after so much sound, allowing the reverberation to recede into the shadows. I would have applauded after the initial entrance of the pulse, and after So Percussion's solo turn, but saving it for the end allowed for an explosion of approval.

15. Carnegie Hall was packed. Terry Riley was cheered with whoops and whistles. The ovation was deafening and well-deserved. Who is In C's audience? Young (and old). Enthusiastic. Informed. Well-coiffed. Snappy dressers. Whoever you are, you made the evening memorable. Music listens to itself through its listeners. And I look forward to seeing you again, listening to you listening again, soon.

(For pictures, head over to Feast of Music.)

In C At Carnegie: Part I

2009-04-24T22:36:00.003-04:00

Breath. Taken.

Restless Leg Syndrome

2009-04-24T10:37:00.003-04:00

Beethoven's creativity required peaceful, conflict-free external surroundings ... Perhaps in the pursuit of an unattainable tranquility, Beethoven changed his lodgings almost as readily as his moods. "Scarcely was he established in a new dwelling," Seyfried wrote, "when something or other displeased him, and he walked himself footsore to find another." It was said that the slightest provocation led him to pack his belongings, and at times it became difficult to find an apartment for so unreliable a lodger. (Solomon)

From Beethoven's RLS to Proust's cork-lined bedroom, I'm beginning to feel less and less eccentric.

Woolf, VA

2009-04-23T14:13:00.001-04:00

Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) — this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the cloud going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. Life stand still here.

Before We Get To C

2009-04-22T20:47:00.009-04:00

So I'm gettin' all limbered up for this Friday's In C love-fest with its cast of hundreds, among them: Margaret's playing her toy piano and toy glockenspiel, the Kronos, Terry Riley himself, Morton Subotnick, Philip Glass, Kathleen Supove, Stuart Dempster ... and the list goes on. But before we get there, it's best to brush up on all 53 cells of music with a free download of the score courtesy of Other Minds. If you missed the free download of the original-cast-album on Amazon, fret not, there are tons of excerpts on YouTube to whet your appetite, or to tide you over till Friday. Here's one with the Shanghai Film Orchestra:

My personal fav's the live version by Bang On A Can, but really, you can't tie the piece down to a single version, so go ahead and explore the wealth of material out there. And if nothing pleases your ear, go ahead and get some friends together for an In C sing-along like these people did (I know!).

It would have been a good thing had Robert Carl's new book been published in time to coincide with this performance at Carnegie. Still, it gives us something else to look forward to when we're all suffering from In C withdrawal.

L'istesso Tempo

2009-04-22T09:16:00.017-04:00

Modern time signatures are uni-proportional and binary-biased. Renaissance notation allowed for multi-proportional relationships (i.e. binary and ternary): thus, one long might contain 2 or 3 breves; one breve might contain 2 or 3 semibreves; and one semibreve might contain 2 or 3 minims. Losing this flexibilty simplifies our notational system, but it also gives rise to much notational difficulty when it comes to ternary relationships, requiring the use of the dots or triplet signs when we try to squeeze three notes into the time of two. Occasionally however, the old Renaissance notation allowing for multiple proportions slips through the cracks. We see it in Bach: take for example the 20th variation of the Goldberg, which, while absent of triplets and dots, contains the simultaneous time signatures of 18/16 in the right hand and 3/4 in the left. This allows for two different values of 8th notes, one short and the other long (translated, a single 8th note symbol could mean either an 8th note or a dotted 8th, depending on whether it was followed by a note half its value or otherwise). Beethoven revisited this aspect of Renaissance notation in the concluding half (a set of five variations) of his last sonata. This set of variations has a basic triple pulse of 9/16, or the customary three groups of three 16th notes. In Variation 3, the 16th note may be read as either a regular 16th or a dotted 16th. In Variation 4, a 32nd could mean either a regular 32nd note or a dotted 32nd (the L'istesso tempo marking reminds us to keep the triple pulse constant throughout the movement). The problem in notation arises when Beethoven chooses to notate Variation 3 as 6/16 and Variation 4 as 12/32, all the while trying to fit these divisions within a basic triple pulse of 9/16. This aspect of his notation, while creating no problems with respect to performance, does give rise to questions of efficacy - was this the most practical, most efficient way of notating the complex tempo relationships in this set of variations? The variety in tempo relationships is impressive given the singular process of rhythmic diminution (every variation reduces the basic pulse (always grouped in threes) by half): for the Theme and Variation 1, the triple group is articulated by dotted 8ths; in Variation 2, the triple group is articulated by dotted 16ths; in Variation 3, the triple group is articulated by dotted 32nds. This gives rise to a different set of proportions for each of the succeeding variations: Variation 1 is 3 groups of 3 (3x3); Variation 2 is 3 groups of 2, with each of those 2 subdivisions further subdivided into 3 (3x2x3); Variation 3 is 3 groups of 4, with each of those 4 subdivisions further subdivided into 3 (3x4x3); Variation 4 (till the end) is 3 groups of 3, with each subdivision further subdivded into 3 (3x3x3). Understanding the processes involved and the rhythmic relationships does not help one in understanding or explaining the notation (apart from simply saying that it was the most efficacious method). This quirk of Beethoven's is, I believe, not so easily explained ... Strange how I started out writing a review to Schiff's Sunday afternoon concert, but ended up obsessing over those unmarked triplets instead ...

Listening To Mahler

2009-04-19T11:38:00.010-04:00

So everyone knows that I'm on a Beethoven-binge right now. This afternoon I'm heading to Carnegie for the final installment of Schiff's Beethoven cycle. Should be fun. I've been doing my stretches all morning, so I should be sufficiently limbered up for E major, Ab major and C minor. You know those augmented triads ... they need some serious stretching before consumption. What you may not be aware of is that I've spent a pretty penny purchasing tickets for the big Mahler feast/ love-fest in May. I wish I could say that I'm attending the whole cycle, but I'm afraid that, on a budget, I had to pick and choose. Still, Mahler live. Nothing compares. Not even the Simon Rattle recording of the 2nd that I'm listening to right now. Janet Baker notwithstanding. I've been thinking about Mahler and his use of Austrian folksongs, and that even though I grew up far from the Austrian countryside, I still find something strangely familiar about those movements that incorporate folksongs. Don't you? I wonder if Mahler used these folksongs in the same way that Beethoven incorporate the vernacular in his music. Perhaps with a sense of irony? Or is irony completely absent in Mahler's use of folksongs? And then I thought of a fundamental culinary precept: that taste is memory. So whither my memory of Austrian folksongs? And then it hit me: The Sound of Music. I think the reason why we dig Mahler, whether here in New York or growing up in Singapore is Rodgers and Hammerstein. So, Dick and Oscar preparing the way for Gustav. Who knew?

[Note: Of course, not a single authentic Austrian folk song was used in the score of The Sound of Music. Still, the memory persists.]

Transfigured Trills

2009-04-18T01:33:00.008-04:00

1. I don't really like using the adjective 'transfigured'. It doesn't really convey much information, and as description, it comes across as a little tired, a little worn. And Beethoven's trills, still today, listening to them performed live at Carnegie Hall by pianist Andras Schiff in the concluding chapters to his Beethoven marathon (begun more than a year ago), are everything but tired or worn. No other term seems as accurate in its appropriateness in describing what Beethoven does to the common-place trill: no longer purely cadential, not just a pedal surrogate, and definitely not your Mama's Mozart trill, Beethoven's trills are divorced from any function other than that of pure expressive sonority. To be able to take hold of the pedastrian and to make it sound strange and refreshingly new, isn't that what it means to be transfigured?

2. Andras Schiff performed three rather hefty sonatas (nos. 27, 28 and 29) without an intermission. And at Carnegie Hall, where leg room is conspicuously absent and largely imagined, it seems a miscalculation. Not that Schiff did not impress with his stamina, but I for one needed a brief moment to stand and stretch. And then there's the whole issue of information overload. Feldman was right I think when he discovered that the key to sustaining interest in an extended work was not to add more material, but to take away.

3. Ben and I made a wager on whether Schiff would risk the opening leap (8th note to chord) with just the left hand. And if you know the Hammerklavier at all, you'll know that that's a big deal. I lost. I assumed Schiff wouldn't be persuaded by the argument that 'if Beethoven wanted to use both hands he would have notated as such'. Musico-fundamentalism much? I am more persuaded by arguments based on the expressive capacity of physical gestures (the only other composer I know of who makes physical gestures a part of his expressive repertoire is Kurtag), rather than the truthfulness of texts, that it is more expressive, in a purely physical way (because there is no perceviable difference in sound, save the fluffed chord), to take the risky leap with one hand, and that if one should fail (and in a live performance, 9 out of 10 pianists would miss the top chord), it would be a noble failure: the phenomena of wrong notes as wounded cry.

Brendel takes the opening 8th with his left hand and the following chord with his right:

Uchida and Schiff don't. I for one would take the 8th with my right hand, all the while positioning my left hand over the next-in-line chord, hands crossed, so that, in body if not in sound, the chord comes first. If you take the awkwardness away from one place, you have to reinstate it somewhere else. And I've always had a thing for hand-crossings because it confuses, and because the resulting sound always surprises. One loses a modicum of control in a hand-crossing as one does in a leap, but without the risk of wrong notes.

4. I'm looking forward to the concluding recital this Sunday afternoon where Schiff will be performing nos. 30, 31 and 32. I'm looking forward to more trills, more wagers, more thigh-and-knee maneuvering, and to the very substantial encore that Schiff has a penchant for, as if it were necessary to balance the weight of the recital program. Friday night saw a performance of Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. This coming on the heels of the Hammerklavier and calf-fatigue was exhilarating, if tiring.