Composer David Rakowski has begun blogging at Zio Davino. His earthlink website with the usual composer stuff and a lot more is still available. Davy is the real thing; I know this first hand from performing his Bogan songs a few times. He is best known for his massive collection of piano etudes - you can find performances of lots of them are on YouTube. I don’t know of a more important contribution to the piano literature by anybody of my generation.
Month: July 2010
Martino on Schoenberg’s pastry
Jim Ricci at Deconstructing Jim has an interesting post regarding Don Martino and Schoenberg, including excerpts from Martino e-mails such as the following unexpected comment: “S’s music is to my ear (after Pierrot) uniformly ugly and pedantic with the countenance of stale and heavy German pastry.” I was startled to learn from this post that there is an unperformed Martino Concerto for Orchestra resting in a desk drawer - Gil Rose and BMOP, we need you.
Stealing sheet music
There are so many things wrong in this piece by David Pogue that it is hard to know where to begin.
1) Yes Patelson’s may have closed, but the assertion “New York City doesn’t have an independent store that sells classical music scores.” is dead wrong. On the contrary, Frank Music on 54th Street is still operating.
2) Neither Pogue nor the commenter he extensively quotes seems to understand the difference between scores that are in the public domain, and scores that are under copyright. To make downloads available of copyrighted scores is to facilitate theft, pure and simple.
3) The commenter who gave a thumb drive to participants in the Van Cliburn competition filled with 15 GB of music says that it “blew their minds”. What probably blew their minds was that they couldn’t understand the point of such a thing. Professional musicians usually require urtext editions, free from the emendations and fingerings that appear in the corrupt editions commonly used in downloaded scores. Quality control doesn’t exist in the downloading world. Furthermore, pros usually consult more than one edition of the score, seeking up-to-date scholarship regarding editorial details. Lastly, professional performers often don’t want to deal with 8.5X11 printouts of loose sheets. (True, there are exceptions here, as anyone who has observed the pianist at a song recital can attest. (Let’s hope that accompanist photocopied a score he paid for.)) The nice bindings on the Dover reprints of PD material are one of their selling points.
4) Both Pogue and the commenter he quotes are clueless about the role of sales of older music in making the publication of music by living composers possible. The royalties Boosey earns on Copland, Strauss, and Britten help make the publication of works by less prominent composers possible. Beyond publication, Copland’s royalties go to the Copland Fund for Music, which has financially supported myriad recordings and performances of new music.
5) In reference to his 15 gig of scanned scores, Pogue’s commenter says that “Basically, every significant piano piece is in the pile.” The contemptible idiocy of this statement is obvious. There is no piano music still under copyright that is significant? (I am giving this commenter the benefit of the doubt - that his thumb drive contains only PD music, not stolen goods.) There is no significant piano music yet to be written?
6) People who favor theft of musical scores or other “content” like to say things such as the following from Pogue’s commenter - “As slippery as digital rights are, the fact is that digital publishing probably gives people more ways to make more money and reach far wider audiences than the paper-based music publishing racket ever did.” But folks who make comments of this sort rarely offer substantive suggestions for how this might happen - because it can’t happen.
“Paper-based music publishing” is not a “racket”. Stealing copyrighted sheet music is.
Take the “1” Train
I was pleased to see the reminiscence by Peter G. Davis in the Times Arts and Leisure about his composition studies at Columbia, and about Jack Beeson in particular. It is a welcome corrective to the absurd tales of how serialism at one time ruled the world, or at least ruled Columbia University. My experience at Columbia, about 20 years after Davis’s, was of a similar diversity in approach among my colleagues and my teachers. I did not have a chance to work with Jack, but I wish I had, and I wish I knew more of his music. (I saw him for the first time in years at the American Academy of Arts and Letters Ceremonial this spring - and for the last time, as he died very soon thereafter.) I recall being very impressed by a broadcast of Lizzie Borden several years ago, but it is not easy to come across his other operas, let alone the instrumental music.
Of the several other fine composers associated with Columbia not mentioned in Davis’s article - George Edwards and Fred Lerdahl among them - I would call your attention to Chou Wen-Chung. He was Varese’s assistant and musical executor, and some of the music to be heard on the upcoming Lincoln Center celebration of Varese would not be performable without Wen-Chung’s efforts. Later serving as a mentor to the whole group of composers who came to this country from China in the 80’s- including Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Bright Sheng, and Chen Yi - Wen-Chung’s work with the U.S. China Arts Exchange overshadowed his composing for a time. But the music is overdue for revival. At a moment when there is so much interest in music that crosses cultural boundaries, Wen-Chung’s pioneering synthesis of Euro-American modernism and Asian sensibility should be much more widely known.
Stimmung at 42
Today I listened to Stockhausen’s 1968 composition Stimmung for the first time in about 30 years, and I thought the piece held up pretty well. Scored for vocal sextet, Stimmung is Stockhausen’s take on overtone chanting, in which a singer, by manipulating the shape of the mouth, causes overtones in a sustained note to become more prominent. The effect is sometimes uncanny, in that a single voice seems to be sounding two tones - a low fundamental and a higher pitch which is in fact simply an overtone. The technique is associated with Tibetan monks, and has long been used by David Hykes in a group called the Harmonic Choir. (I remember hearing them at New York’s St. John the Divine during my Columbia days.)
Although Stimmung is sometimes spoken of as a piece built on a single chord, that is no more the case than it is in Schoenberg’s “Summer Morning by a Lake” from the Five Pieces for Orchestra. Stimmung is about the play of the overtones, not the sustained chord. It is a spectralist piece before there was spectralism. Yes, in a sense Stimmung is a kind of minimalist work, and Paul Hiller, the artistic director of the Theatre of Voices, whose excellent recording I listened to, compares the piece to Terry Riley’s In C. There are similarities in the way the pieces both depend on the performers moving with a certain degree of flexibility through a series of modules prescribed by the composer, and Stimmung does rely on brief repeated figures. But it is not about process in the manner of the classic works of minimalism. There is too much fantasy at play here for a minimalist piece: poems are recited; various deities are invoked; and the days of the week are named in different languages (perhaps a foreshadowing of Licht, Stockhausen’s cycle of operas named for the days of the week);. The music at times sounds like devotional chanting, at other times like a work of electronic music, for the sound of the overtones is similar to what happens when a synthesizer’s low pass filter sweeps over the harmonic spectrum of a low sound, with the filter set to emphasize its cutoff frequency. When the names of the gods are introduced, the phonemes that make up the name are picked up by the singers who are chanting a repeated overtone figure. It is as though the name Quetzalcoatl, for example, colors the repeated figure, adding percussive sounds, bringing out additional harmonic content. Or is it that the name is heard through the filter of the overtones? What is the figure? What is the aural scrim through which we listen to the figure? I feel certain Stockhausen relished that ambiguity, that rejection of dualism. It reminds me of the spot in his Momente where the solo soprano says “is near and far – at once.”
Who’s afraid of an interview?
I very much liked Edward Albee’s responses in this interview.
A spinning world of a novel
It was a National Book Award Winner, and a bestseller, but I have only now caught up with Colum McCann’s superb novel Let the Great World Spin. The stories it tells describe a mosaic of contrasting yet interrelated lives in New York City, framed by Phillipe Petit’s tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Beautifully written and deeply touching, I recommend it highly. Thank you to Beth at Louie, Louie for suggesting it.
(It’s a small thing, I know, but in the they-always-get-the-details-wrong-when-it-comes-to-music department - shouldn’t someone have told McCann that he shouldn’t have his character Gloria attend the Metropolitan Opera on Sundays, as the house is dark on that day of the week? Or was that not the case in 1974?)
