Month: October 2010

Going to Church

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Via Overgrown Path, here is James MacMillan on his recent experience with writing a new mass setting in connection with the papal visit to Britain. In reference to certain interactions with the church hierarchy, MacMillan writes:

In all their years of facilitating the commission of new music, Boosey and Hawkes had never dealt with such rudeness and shoddy behaviour.

Why am I not surprised?

There is a lot more to say about the state of Catholic church music, but I am late getting out to Mass, back with more soon.

Music Illiteracy Alert

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Another week, another questionable bit of writing about music in the NY Times. I don’t mean a review with which I disagree. I mean the following:

In the article about Arvo Pärt in last week’s magazine section, Arthur Lubow notes that  “…it is also important that Pärt, a fanatic for detail, painstakingly adjusts each score to achieve the result he is after.” Goodness, a composer who painstakingly adjusts each score! What will those crazy composers think of next? Who knows, maybe writers will start “painstakingly adjusting” their writing after having it looked at by someone who knows something about the topic on which they are working.

And in Paul Simon’s review of Stephen Sondheim’s new lyric collection, he states that “He [Sondheim] often uses dissonance (notes from one key added to chords from another, as if the ear were hearing two different keys at the same time) to indicate a character’s inner turmoil.” So there is no such thing as dissonance using only the notes within the key? Maybe Simon missed the class on diatonic non-harmonic tones. There are hints of polytonality in Sondheim’s music, but that is not the only source of dissonance.

OK, enough sarcasm. I am happy to see writing about significant composers get some column inches in the newspaper of record. And the Pärt piece is remarkably free from gaffes given that it is written by (I assume) a non-musician. Simon’s review is basically well-written as well. I think his mistaken explanation of dissonance is trying to refer to the use of blue notes, because it comes in the context of an intriguing point about how the sound of jazz does not play a role in Sondheim’s musical vocabulary. This is partly explainable by the European settings of some of his shows. Still, I hear little, if any, black influence in the music of “Company”, a quintessentially New York City show. My sense is that jazz musicians respond in kind, so to speak, because few show interest in covering Sondheim songs. What Sondheim tune would you like to submit for consideration by The Bad Plus?

May 2013 UPDATE: regarding the last sentence above, see this.

Birthday coincidences

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Google Alerts let me know that Northwest Reverb listed me among other musicians with the birthday of October 29. And with whom do I share this date? Jon Vickers and Václav Neumann (very good); James Dillon (well, OK, I guess); but also Harold Darke - known for initiating the longest-running lunchtime organ recital series in the world - and Vivian Ellis - whose tune Alpine Meadows served as the theme song for the BBC’s comedy quiz show My Word!

George Crumb once remarked to me how many musicians seemed to be born under the sign of Scorpio, a phenomenon of interest to him, given the fact that he labeled each of the pieces in his first two books of Makrokosmos for piano with the initials of someone born under a different sign. A colleague standing nearby, the late musicologist Eugene Wolf, overheard George talking about the preponderance of musical Scorpios and poured cold water on George’s observation by saying, “yes, about one-twelfth of all composers.” Interesting that Crumb and Berio share a birthday. According to George, he was born the day the stock market started to go down in 1929.

Upcoming in Philly

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Two leading new music groups in town are active soon:

- this Friday, Oct. 29th, the Network for New Music Ensemble will collaborate with composer Hyo-shin Na at the Korean Arts Festival being held at Haverford College.

- Nov. 6 at Trinity Center in Philadelphia, and Nov. 7 at Swarthmore College, Orchestra 2001 plays music by Tan Dun, May T-Chi Chen, Penn alum Jennifer Barker, and Penn faculty member Jay Reise - Jay’s piece is a premiere.

Emersons in Philly

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I went to hear the Emerson Quartet’s concert here in Philadelphia last night, presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. They opened with Haydn’s last, incomplete quartet - just the inner movements from what would have been an exceptional four-movement work. (What am I saying? Are there any “unexceptional” Haydn quartets?) This was followed by the Philadelphia premiere of a recent quartet by Lawrence Dillon called Through the Night. This is a big statement - about 33 minutes worth. The piece is basically a huge variation set on the traditional tune “All Through the Night”, framed with atmospheric “Twilight” music. Some of the variations are more straightforward, with the tune readily apparent; others are more fantastical. Two dream-like movements serve as keystones for the set. There is a remarkable variety of affect and character here, with idiomatic quartet writing throughout. The trademark Emersonian intensity and razor-sharp ensemble served the piece beautifully. The same qualities were apparent in the big Schubert G major quartet that closed the program, the Emersons reveling the major/minor chiaroscuro of the piece, and never tiring in the fiercely driven - but always graceful - third and fourth movements.

Larry Dillon is on something of a roll with string quartets, with recent performances by the Borromeo, Daedalus and Cassatt quartets. Visit his website and read his blog for more info. David Finckel, cellist of the Emerson, blogs as well.

Penn Troika

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Go here for Kyle Gann’s post on Rochberg’s Serenata d’Estate. He talks about the similarity between certain moments in the Serenata and the work of George Crumb - so I had to post a lengthy comment there about the whole Penn Troika phenomenon. Kyle makes an intriguing connection between Rochberg and Feldman, of all people - funny to think of their work intersecting. Maybe the stasis of Varese is a common thread, with Varesian dynamics turned upside down in Feldman, of course. Earlier I wrote about Rochberg here, and here.

Listen to this, listen to that

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I am almost finished reading Alex Ross’s new book, Listen to This. It is great to have his larger New Yorker pieces between hard covers, as well as the new material. He is our most important public intellectual for music, and because of his importance everyone who reads his work is dismayed that Alex’s interests do not precisely correspond with his or her own. After all, my interests are smack in the middle of the mainstream, right? “Too USA-centric!” “Why would he spend a whole chapter on Dylan?” (Well, yes, why would he?) “Not enough about _____ (fill in country/style/composer of choice).”

My own complaint is that Alex seems insufficiently interested in that broad range of musics that  I suppose one could call “midtown” - John Harbison and Steven Stucky, Stephen Hartke and Melinda Wagner; Augusta Read Thomas and Eric Chasalow; Steve Mackey and Chris Rouse… (one could cite many more names - check “composers” under “links” above as just a start.) It’s the composers I have elsewhere called the “merely excellent” - there is nothing newsworthy about them, no catchy journalistic label (“midtown” is nearly meaningless) - just compelling music.

Nevertheless, you have to be grateful for the remarkable breadth that Alex’s writing does encompass.

Don’t forget to check out the supplemental material for the book here.

Fishy Pianism

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The Poisson Rouge calendar for November looks like a festival of new music piano superstars:

-November 9: Marilyn Nonken plays music by Chilean-American composer Miguel Chuaqui, and Frederic Rzewski’s monumental set of variations on a Chilean song of resistance, The People United Will Never Be Defeated! According to the listing on the club’s website, the piece is by “Rzewski/Iverson”. I assume this means that Marilyn has asked Ethan Iverson to create something for her to play at the moment in the score where Rzewski invites the pianist to play an improvisation. If this is what she has done, it is a very smart idea: a non-improvising pianist asking an improvising pianist for input on a piece that is almost entirely notated, except for one spot near the end of the piece. It will very interesting to see what Iverson comes up with.

-November 14: Aki Takahashi plays Feldman, Xenakis, and Peter Garland, with the JACK Quartet. I met Aki in 1977 when I was playing in the Gaudeamus Competition for Interpreters of Contemporary Music. I think she was there as an accompanist, I no longer recall. I do remember sitting with her and looking over her copy of Xenakis’s Everyali, (see an interesting essay about that piece here). I still have her three LP set of 20th century piano music (on the CP2 label - out-of-print - and with program notes by Paul Zukofsky - much interesting material at what I take to be Mr. Zukofsky’s site.) - Webern, Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, etc., and a lot of contemporary Japanese composers. More recently she is known as a champion of Feldman and Xenakis - certainly a nicely contrasting pair.

-November 17: Gloria Cheng plays a mostly French-oriented program: Messiaen (the early 8 Preludes), Boulez, Saariaho, Adès, Vivier, and Dan Godfrey. I earlier wrote about Cheng here. Except for the Messiaen, all  the pieces listed are new to me, and, indeed, there are several New York premieres.

-November 30: Anthony de Mare does a program of music for speaking pianist, in connection with a CD release. Music by  Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Jerome Kitzke, Derek Bermel, and, again, Frederic Rzewski, which brings us full circle.