Call it the Stockhausen conundrum: even as modernist and avant-garde works alienate mainstream classical audiences, they intrigue fans of the noisier subcultures of so-called popular music. Here in New York you can often hear some very severe twentieth-century fare in dusky, clubby spaces. One is Galapagos, in Williamsburg, which, I learned through Eppy, is presenting a new-music series entitled Darmstadt. On Wednesday, Emily Manzo plays a free concert of John Cage, Galina Ustvolskaya, Eve Beglarian, Mary Halvorson, and Chopin (!), with video projections by Andy Graydon. Meanwhile, on Tuesday night at 8PM and 10PM, The Stone, John Zorn's new club, presents the Dedalus Quartet in back-to-back concerts of Elliott Carter, Kurtág, Feldman, Nancarrow, and György Ligeti. And, on Thursday, Lukas Ligeti, the great man's son, does a solo show in the same space.
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Keep the day job
A friend asked to see more of my amateur photography. The technique is to turn off the flash and put the camera on the floor.
Recording / Destroying Angel
Temporarily closing the file on the history and philosophy of recorded music, I want to mention Evan Eisenberg's marvelous book The Recording Angel, which has just been reissued by Yale University Press. It's a rhapsodic and ambivalent history of recording, at times enthusiastic about the possibilities of the medium and at other times skeptical of their impact on the art. The only way to sum it up is to provide some sample quotations:
Now the Symphony of a Thousand could play to an audience of one. Now a man could hear nocturnes at breakfast, vespers at noon, and the Easter Oratorio on Chanukah. He could do his morning crossword to the "One O'Clock Jump" and make love right through the St. Matthew Passion. Anything was possible; nothing was sacred; freedom was (barring complaints from neighbors and occasional desperate holding actions such as the Russian synod's 1912 ban on the recording of prayers) absolute. It was the freedom, once the cathedral of culture had been wrecked, to take home the bits you liked and arrange them as you pleased. Once again a mechanical invention had met capitalism's need to recreate all of life in its image. The cathedral of culture had become a supermarket.
We have all become like Prospero, able to conjure up invisible musicians who sing and play at our pleasure. Part of the fun is our sense of power. We can manipulate the poker-faced, flawless Heifetz. We can shut up Streisand. We can boost the basses and cellos of the Berlin Philharmonic, defying Karajan's meticulous balances.
[Arguing with Glenn Gould's defense of Muzak]: It is true that background music gives the listener "a direct associative experience of the post-Renaissance vocabulary," and a smattering of non-Western vocabularies as well. The problem is that the associations are all wrong. Muzak is nowhere near as neutral as it pretends.... We associate atonality with horror and anxiety; this may help a score like Wozzeck to succeed but dooms much of Schoenberg and Webern, whose attempts at serenity seem guilty by association. In the same way, the language of Debussy comes to express only sensuality, the language of Mozart only old-world grace, the language of jazz only insouciance. Each language is reduced to a couple of phrases, and with our huge vocabulary we cannot say anything, only quote. The alphabet soup that the mass media (including records) make of good music quickly spills back into the world of good music. Soon our best composers find that they cannot speak, or can only speak in quotes, ironically or pathetically.
The record listener is a child of the supermarket. His self-expression is almost entirely a matter of selecting among packages that someone else designs. And he tends to think that these packages exhaust the possibilities. That kind of freedom can be tyrannical.
People seem more comfortable dancing and courting to mechanical music. The charitable interpretation is that it lets them be alone with each other. The other interpretation is that it lets them be alone.
In the final section, Eisenberg moves beyond pessimistic pronouncements to extol the phonograph's ability to multiply musical meaning, with Schopenhauer, surprisingly, as his chief guide. There are further twists in the new edition, in which Eisenberg weights the pros and cons of music in the form of MP3s. It's a book well worth reading.
Glass's Koyaanisqatsi
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, June 27, 2005.
Some of the most compelling film music of the past year appeared not on the big screen but on the small one. Michael Giacchino’s score for the TV show “Lost”—the tale of several dozen plane-crash survivors marooned on a vaguely supernatural, “Tempest”-like island—has unsettled millions of American viewers with an eerie array of orchestral sounds: fluttery four-note figures, shivery tones produced by bowing strings near the bridge, nasty glissandos on the trombone, and, at moments of maximum tension, a low plucked note on the harp. According to convention, harps are called upon to herald angels or other vessels of goodness. Giacchino makes the instrument gaunt and deathly, much as Mahler did in the last song of “Das Lied von der Erde.” In general, Giacchino has done such a bang-up job of generating menace that the scriptwriters may have a hard time satisfying the expectations that he has created. Something mighty grim will have to crawl out of that lush jungle in order to justify those twangs of terror.
Composers usually enter the filmmaking process late in the game. They’re given a few weeks to add music to the mix, often under strict instructions as to mood and style; they’re essentially applying a finishing coat of aural stimulus. But music can do much more than echo the action on the screen. It can evoke hidden lives, unknown destinies, unseen histories, forgotten voices. The greatest filmmakers have all understood the complicating significance of music, and one measure of their greatness is their willingness to delegate power to composers. When Eisenstein made “Alexander Nevsky” and “Ivan the Terrible,” he had Prokofiev as his house composer, and he would sometimes wait until Prokofiev had finished a certain segment before filming the corresponding scene. He wanted to chain the camera to the notes. Orson Welles followed Eisenstein’s practice on “Citizen Kane,” hiring the young New York composer Bernard Herrmann. For the final sequence of the film, which shows the destruction of Rosebud in the fireplace of Kane’s castle, Welles had Herrmann’s cue playing on the set. He later said that the score was fifty per cent responsible for the film’s success.
Music can take control of the image; it can also suggest a world separate from the image, or expose the image as a lie. Shortly after sound came in, Eisenstein and other Soviet directors wrote a manifesto declaring that soundtracks should create “sharp discord” with the visual dimension, in order to cultivate critical thinking on the part of the audience. (That’s not quite what Stalin had in mind, of course.) One early illustration of the practice was Shostakovich’s 1929 score for “The New Babylon,” a story of the Paris Commune. At the end, when the Communards are killed by a firing squad, Shostakovich responds not with a tragic utterance but with a distorted version of Offenbach’s Can-Can. Giacchino’s music for “Lost,” in its own non-Marxist way, plays this same game of estrangement. Dispatching the ghosts of Schoenberg, Xenakis, and other twentieth-century sonic terrorists into an island paradise, it touches on the universal modern suspicion that surfaces are not what they seem, that the center does not hold, that it ain’t necessarily so.
When the images themselves are terrifying, music can bring about an even trickier reversal, providing ironic reassurance or genuine compassion. Stanley Kubrick’s decision to play “We’ll Meet Again” over a montage of nuclear annihilation at the end of “Dr. Strangelove” is one famous example; another is Oliver Stone’s use of Barber’s velvety “Adagio for Strings” over scenes of carnage in “Platoon.” Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie, in their score for the new Gregg Araki film “Mysterious Skin,” do something wholly unexpected: as a horrendous story of child abuse in a Kansas town unfolds, the music sways toward a state of irrational bliss, as if to numb the pain. Music, in these cases, doesn’t show the image as a lie; instead, it is itself the lie we tell ourselves in order to survive.
Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series recently presented a mini-festival titled Sound Projections, in which live ensembles played alongside silent movies, both classic and modern. The series began with a vintage radical Soviet film, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s “The End of St. Petersburg,” for which Alfred Schnittke supplied a score in 1992. Pudovkin was one of the directors who had argued for freethinking musical narratives in film, and it was fitting that Schnittke, the master surrealist of late-twentieth-century music, should have subverted Pudovkin’s story of the education of a Bolshevik hero with all manner of brooding ostinatos, kitschy digressions, and anarchic pileups of tunes. The Asko Ensemble gave a committed, demented performance. The Ensemble Intercontemporain, from Paris, one-upped them by presenting Benedict Mason’s 1988 score “ChaplinOperas,” a kaleidoscopic companion piece for three classic Chaplin silents. It’s a dazzling, dizzying, ultimately wearying exercise in free association, as chaotic in technique as Chaplin’s films are clean.
The Lincoln Center series culminated in a blast of Glass: “Koyaanisqatsi,” “Powaqqatsi,” and “Naqoyqatsi,” a trilogy of documentary film fantasias conceived by Godfrey Reggio and scored by Philip Glass. (The live performances were courtesy of the Philip Glass Ensemble.) The titles are Hopi Indian words approximately meaning “life out of balance,” “life in transformation,” and “life as war”: the aim is to see human civilization in its mundane entirety, without reference to politics, culture, or history. There is no dialogue or plot; scenes of high-tech American cities, poverty-stricken Third World streets, frenzied factories, and empty canyons unfold in dreamlike motion. The images are sometimes sped up and sometimes slowed down. Humanity comes off as an insectoid species, though not without certain redeeming features. Glass’s trademark arpeggios and carved-in-granite chords generate a ritualistic, vaguely ancient air, circling back, time and again, to an abiding sadness.
“Koyaanisqatsi,” which was shot during the nineteen-seventies and released in 1983, is the masterpiece in the series, and a singular event in film history. There is no more potent example of a score dominating a film. The relationship between filmmaker and composer extended Eisenstein’s ideal to the nth degree: Glass watched the footage and wrote some music, Reggio and his editors listened to the music and reworked the footage, and the process went on until the appearance of fusion was total. In an interview that accompanies the “Koyaanisqatsi” DVD, Glass provides his own eloquent definition of the film-music art: he calls it “observing accurately the distance between the image and the music.” In other words, instead of trying to make image and music serve the same ends, you play one against the other, letting the disparity become an emotional experience in itself.
Glass’s solutions to the challenge of “Koyaanisqatsi” are riveting. The opening is famous and majestic: a deep bass voice chants the title phrase in monotone while an electric organ turns slow pinwheels above it. As the camera of Ron Fricke, the cinematographer, floats across immense Western landscapes, a flute plays a lonely figure in open intervals, perhaps in tribute to the prairie music of Copland; then the bass chant returns, sounding very much like a sad, angry god. A later sequence, devoted to various forms of transportation, dwells for a long time on slow-motion footage of a jumbo jet taxiing on a tarmac. Glass responds to this grungy image with music of exhilarating quickness and lightness, high female voices predominating. In later sections, Glass abandons his attitude of cosmic detachment and picks up the racing rhythms of Fricke’s cinematography. To depict the decay and destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, in St. Louis, the composer writes a monstrous neo-Baroque moto perpetuo, which, as the buildings fall, devolves into nothing more than descending scales. (This footage has become more haunting with time; Minoru Yamasaki, who designed Pruitt-Igoe, was also the architect of the World Trade Center.) During the twenty-minute frenzy titled “The Grid”—crowds swirling, traffic churning, televisions flickering, hot dogs and Hostess Twinkies being exgurgitated from production lines—Glass and his musicians become manic machines, firing off notes like so many 0s and 1s. The distance between sound and image disappears, and the viewer is left with little space in which to think or breathe.
When I saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in college, I dismissed it as a trippy, slick, MTV-ish thing, to which some well-meaning soul had attached hippie messages about the mechanization of existence and the spoliation of the planet. At Lincoln Center, I understood it as something else altogether—an awesomely dispassionate vision of the human world, beautiful and awful in equal measure. What made the difference, apart from the fact that I was no longer a facile collegiate ironist, was the experience of hearing the music live, with Kurt Munkacsi’s sound design adding heft and definition to every gesture. For all the deliberate coldness of some of Glass’s writing, “Koyaanisqatsi” is deeply expressive; its blistering virtuosity is often the only sign of emotional life on display, excepting a few wan smiles on the faces of pedestrians who hurry through Times Square.
“Powaqqatsi” and “Naqoyqatsi,” the sequels, don’t match the force of the original, though they are absorbing throughout. Glass supplies many passages of cool, aching beauty, but the urgent side of his early style, the technique of eviscerating repetition, is diminished. As a whole, the trilogy mimics the uneven shape of the composer’s career, which has ranged from achievements of staggering originality (“Music in Twelve Parts,” “Einstein on the Beach,” the Violin Concerto) to statements of baffling neutrality (a world-music cantata entitled “Orion” is the newest instance of the latter). These days, he often seems trapped in his formulas; he writes “Philip Glass music” in place of music that happens to be by Philip Glass. But he has won his place in history, and he may figure out a way to knock us sideways once again.
Still from Koyaanisqatsi, dir. Godfrey Reggio, cinematography by Ron Fricke.
Summer blockbuster review: Batman
"After a slow start, Batman Begins begins — to rock!" — Alex Ross, Syndicated Online Verbiage. Opera fans might be intrigued to know that Boito's Mefistofele figures in the plot of the latest caped caper. A performance of that work so frightens the young Bruce Wayne that he asks his parents to take him home, whereupon they are shot by an economically downtrodden miscreant and a dark destiny takes hold of the child. The score, by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, is a dour, serviceable Philip Glass heavy-metal symphony. Christian Bale isn't quite all that, but he gives good bat.
Second annual Bloomsday post
Robert Sherard, in his biography of Oscar Wilde, remarks that the great cosmopolitan aesthete resembled the actor Henry Irving. When Irving arrived in the United States, he found to his irritation that Americans made much of the resemblance (it was "the only unkind thing" said of him, Irving's biographer stated). At this period, Sherard writes, "Wilde...was still masquerading and mumming; and if there is one person in the world for whom the hardworking and conscientious actor, the sincere artist, has a dislike, it is the man who acts, as an amateur, by grimace and posture on the stage of life." The resemblance became less marked as the years went by, yet the faces merged once again in Sherard's mind when he watched a performance of the Victorian play The Lyons Mail, telling of a real-life Frenchman named Joseph Lesurques who in 1796 was mistaken for a highway robber and beheaded on flimsy evidence. Here Sherard describes Irving's performance of the lead role:
In the scene where Lesurques, having been denounced by the witnesses from the inn, makes his pathetic appeal to one of the women to speak the word which admitting her mistake shall absolve him from the horrible charge which has been brought against him, and the witness turns mournfully but resolutely away, Lesurques' face assumed a look of agony and horror, as the vista of what lay before him opened out—a look in which the blood rushed to the face and made it turgid and vultuous, there was at the same time a distending of the eyeballs, which seemed about to leap from their sockets, a twisting and contortion of the mouth roughly kneaded into a mass of agony by torturing hands, while the face lengthened as though by two crushing and simultaneous blows on each cheek it had been flattened downwards .... At that moment Irving presented the exact facial picture of Oscar Wilde, as looking sideways at the foreman of the jury from his place in the dock in the Old Bailey he listened to the verdict that meant to him ruin, shame, and death.
At the center of the inebriated, phantasmagoric "Circe" chapter of Ulysses is the Trial of Leopold Bloom, in which literature's average man par excellence is accused of all manner of bizarre crimes — of being nothing less than the "archconspirator of the age." This spectacle was probably meant to reflect in part the persecution of the European Jews, a subject that Joyce had pondered as early as 1906, when he was reading tracts on anti-Semitism in Rome. But it also echoes the persecution of Oscar Wilde, at his sodomy trail of 1895. You can find many signs that Joyce was thinking of Wilde when he wrote this scene — for example, the rather campy line "I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest ... Queens of Dublin society" (ellipses are Bloom's own). Then there's a brief reference to The Lyons Mail, and the accusation scene in Sherard's biography (which Joyce owned) provides an interesting subtext for it:
BLOOM
(scared, hats himself, steps back, them, plucking at his heart and lifting his right forearm on the square, he gives the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft) No. no, worshipful master, light of love. Mistaken identity. The Lyons mail. Lesurques and Dubosc. You remember the Childs fratricide case. We medical men. By striking him dead with a hatchet. I am wrongfully accused. Better one guilty escape than ninetynine wrongfully condemned.
The shade of Henry Irving shows up later in "Circe," behind another hallucinatory figure, that of Bloom's sex-obsessed grandfather Lipoti Virag. This apparition enters with Henry Irving's characteristic gait — a sideways movement, often likened to the crawling of a crab. He possesses Irving's spider-like legs and high, nasal voice. He is outfitted in multiple overcoats, which a reminder of Irving's most famous entrance — as the burgomaster Matthias, bundled in fur coat, cap, and muffler, in The Bells. This play, based on a French melodrama The Polish Jew, was Irving's principal vehicle, even more than Hamlet; it first made his reputation in 1871. Matthias is a man haunted by a murder he committed fifteen years before; one Christmas Eve, he hears sleighbells, which remind him of the sound that accompanied his original crime. Like Bloom, he is tormented by hallucinations; they eventually drive him to his death. In the play's extensive dream sequences, an imaginary court summons a mesmerist to draw out Matthias' confession. Matthias conducts his own defense — "is it a crime to dream?" — and, like the character in The Lyons Mail, protests gross injustices and false accusations; but he yields to the prosecution's questions under hypnosis. Here again a man is on trial, except that this time he has actually committed the crime in question. The man he murdered was the Polish Jew of the title. What all this has to do with the cryptic figure of Lipoti Virag is anyone's guess, but it's telling that Joyce should have filigreed his chapter with these stories of grueling trials and unspeakable acts; they seem an essential part of Bloom's frame of reference, his way of living in a politely hostile world.
Countdown
John Adams' website has a synopsis of Dr. Atomic, his third opera, which will have its premiere at the San Francisco Opera on October 1. Most of the action takes place in the hours leading up to the Trinity atom-bomb test, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The final line given in the synopsis is "Zero minus one...."
Bradology
A call for academic papers on Brad Pitt: "Depicting masculine American whiteness in various states of crisis, his
characters generally enact complex postmodern agencies; they are never
wholly coherent, they are often self-destructive, and they generally
rely on a certain amount of play -- between stability and instability,
between life and death, between autonomy and alter-dependency, between
control and abandon. Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic
codes of race, class, gender, and regional or national identity, his
characters explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural
landscape." (Via Beautiful Atrocities.) I'm not so sure about all that, but Mr. and Mrs. Smith looks hot. There is no strictly musical point here.
