Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Noted

"I've learned not to look at my music as sacrosanct."

— William Bolcom, at a panel discussion before the premiere of his opera A Wedding in Chicago, Dec. 11, 2004

The problem with Maazel

Anthony Tommasini writes in the Times: "Mr. Maazel has bought his way to the top without having paid his dues as a composer....Typically, the path to a premiere at a leading house like Covent Garden entails writing dozens of songs, often for singers you know well: the best way to learn how to write for the voice. Composing short, effective dramatic works, perhaps a one-act opera. Peddling ideas to small and midlevel companies and often being rejected. Finally, getting a smaller-scale work accepted for performance — on the condition that you will make any suggested alterations and accommodate the whims of the stage director, who may be a musical ignoramus. It is an exasperating but invaluable rigmarole. By the time you get through it and are ready to write a substantive work for a major company, you should have learned the ins and outs of opera.”

I haven't heard Lorin Maazel's 1984, which was roundly though not universally panned by English critics. Even if it turns out to be a masterpiece, Tony's point still holds: we're facing a grim future if opera commissions are awarded to whoever can most readily take care of money matters in advance. ("If you have the means, you develop your own opera," director Robert Lepage said of the 1984 situation.) Opera companies should be putting their main resources into premieres, not using them as a way of getting a new production almost for free. 

Autographs

Note: Sotheby's subsequently changed the code on their site, rendering my links useless. The main site is now here.

A helpful source pointed me to an upcoming auction of musical manuscripts at Sotheby's in London. The Sotheby's website shows sample pages from the 186 items on offer, and they give mesmerizing glimpses into composers' creative worlds. You can see Samuel Barber struggling to cut and revise his opera Antony and Cleopatra, which failed at the Met in 1967; Bela Bartok meticulously correcting the score of the Concerto for Orchestra a few months before his death; Debussy declaring his unfashionable devotion to "that which is naturally beautiful"; a 1622 edition of Monteverdi's Seventh Book of Madrigals; a curious signature by Leopold Mozart; the weirdly slanted handwriting of Max Reger; Schoenberg complaining about money; the manuscript of Sibelius' Night Ride and Sunrise; and  Wagner's very friendly 1847 letter to his future enemy Eduard Hanslick, in which he has the following lively metaphor for the art of criticism: "Whether I read praise or censure regarding myself I always feel as though the reviewer had thrust his hand into my entrails." Ouch! He also says: "I am fully convinced that criticism is far more useful to an artist than praise: the artist who is destroyed by such criticism deserves to go under, — only the one whom such criticism encourages has any true strength...." Hanslick would shortly put that thought to the test. (Translation from Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington's Selected Letters of Richard Wagner.)

The most newsworthy item in the collection is Joseph Gregor's typescript of the libretto for Richard Strauss' Daphne, with the composer's annotations in the margin. Strauss often formed precise musical ideas upon reading his librettos; this document promises to show how the lustrously beautiful music of Daphne blossomed in his brain, and, by extension, how his late style, the language of the Four Last Songs, arose. At least one Strauss scholar I know is agog at news of the sale. Gregor apparently sold off the typescript to help pay for a messy divorce, and no one has seen it for decades. Let's hope it ends up in responsible hands, preferably in a scholarly collection.

Sonic Hillary

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council recently handed out awards to Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, John and Dan Tishman of Tishman Construction, and Sonic Youth. Soon to follow: "Teenage Riot" at the Inaugural Ball.

Jazz notes (1)

Jeffrey Magee's excellent new biography of Fletcher Henderson, The Uncrowned King of Swing, notes that the bandleader was famous for delivering extraordinarily exciting live performances — “fiery full-band improvisations which had an ecstatic freedom such as I have heard from no other jazz orchestra,” one critic said. It's difficult to hear anything like this on Henderson’s records, captivating as they often are. Recordings can never be trusted as a total record of the musical past. Another thing that strikes me in Magee's book is the description of Henderson's absurdly strict musical upbringing. His middle-class parents would lock him in the piano room for hours to make him practice; the repertory was entirely classical music and church music. "He is destined to become an eminent authority," a college classmate later wrote, "classed with Rachmaninov and other noted musicians." Then he heard the blues, as personified by Ethel Waters, and his destiny shifted.

Shostaphobia

One recent development in the geologically gradual evolution of the symphonic repertory has been the ascension of Dmitri Shostakovich. The composer now routinely appears among the ten most-often-performed composers in the American Symphony Orchestra League's annual list. Not all conductors, though, endorse the notion of Shostakovich's greatness. Chicago Tribune critic John von Rhein just made passing mention of the fact that Daniel Barenboim "avoids conducting the music of Dmitri Shostakovich because he feels it wears its emotions too personally, and on both sleeves." Pierre Boulez has, of course, a long history of dissing DS. In 2000 he said, "Well, Shostakovich plays with clichés most of the time, I find. It's like olive oil, when you have a second and even third pressing, and I think of Shostakovich as the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler." And there's James Levine, who, in a recent Charlie Rose interview, claimed that "he loves to listen to Bruckner and Shostakovich but can't find a meaningful way to conduct their music himself" — a typically roundabout Levine utterance, hinting at stronger feelings. Interestingly, all three conductors are known for their advocacy of Elliott Carter. Does Carter make them sign a waiver before they can conduct his music? The notion that the composer of the massively cryptic Fifteenth Symphony wore his emotions on his sleeve is pretty laughable. It's also a second or even third pressing of the clichéd accusation that critics used to throw at Mahler.

Anniversary issue

 "I have four razors and a dictaphone."
— Andrey Tarkovsky, Diaries, 1979

Many thanks to all who've read this blog over the past year.

Weekend agenda

I commend to the attention of New York concertgoers several events of the  experimental, "downtown," woah-dude variety. On Friday and Saturday, members of the ne(x)tworks ensemble will present a new piece by Joan La Barbara, in collaboration with the Nai-Ni Chen dance company. Then, on Sunday, some of those same players will join Elliott Sharp, Jenny Lin, and other edgy notables in a tribute to the pioneering electronic composer James Tenney, a Project Room event in the East Village. The crowd favorite is almost certain to be Tenney's astonishing 1961 piece Collage #1, aka "Blue Suede," after which you'll never listen to Elvis Presley in the same way again. (You can hear it on a New World Records Tenney compilation.) Also, the Bamberg Symphony plays two concerts at Lincoln Center. On Sunday, they combine Ligeti's Atmosphères and Etudes (Pierre-Laurent Aimard pianifying) with Beethoven's Emperor and the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth.

Partched lips

When I recently wrote about Harry Partch, I made no mention Danlee Mitchell's Harry Partch Foundation in San Diego, which had custody of the Partch instruments from 1972 to 1989. For this omission I apologize. Incidentally, four important recordings of Partch's music, originally put out by the late lamented CRI label, have now been reissued by New World Records. Also, Innova, the label of the American Composers Forum, has a series of archival Partch issues, including a recording of the 1952 premiere performances of Oedipus, at Mills College, Oakland. Actually entitled King Oedipus, this original version of the opera uses W. B. Yeats' free translation of Sophocles; Partch later had to substitute a new libretto when the Yeats estate refused to cooperate. It's thrilling to have Yeats' text woven together with Partch's music. Of all composers, though, he is the one you have to hear live: most of his effects of resonance are lost in translation.

On Hollywood

"I'm not persuaded that the unfairness of being paid so much money to write or perform nonsense is truly a justifiable reason for lifelong malevolent narcissism."

— David Thomson, The Whole Equation

Das ist hardcore

I was thinking of changing my name to Alex Noise, but it turns out the name is already taken, by a German DJ who purveys "hard stuff for rough guys." Be sure to listen to the audio sample. It's my new theme song. Q.v. Funkyzeit mit Bruno.

Noteworthy / inexplicable

Strindberg and Helium. Via Björk.

Beethoven sitting in a room

NewMusicBox, the throbbing new-music webzine, has achieved a handsome new incarnation, more "bloglike" in design. Check out, among other things, a webcast of the S.E.M. Ensemble's recent concert at its Willow Place Auditorium, in the rumbling shadow of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Alvin Lucier's The Exploration of the House is a piece in the spirit of the same composer's experimental masterpiece I Am Sitting In a Room: fragments of Beethoven's Consecration of the House Overture are played live by the ensemble, recorded on computer, played back, then recorded and played back again in a looping pattern, so that the resonant frequencies of the room gradually transform the original, if you get my drift.