Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Orbiting

Take note of a blog by Steve Brookes, who writes on music for The Washington Post. He has a link to the purported blog of pianist Lang Lang, though I can't quite tell at a cursory glance whether it's for real or not.... The Ne(x)tworks ensemble, whom I wrote about in brief a few weeks ago, will perform again at the Gowanus silo space Issue Project Room on June 7. The program includes "graphic" and "open" scores (works that leave much to the imagination of the performer) by James Tenney, Christian Wolff, Julius Eastman, Cornelius Cardew, and John Zorn.... Reader Neville Young sends along this story from the UK, which describes how a Yorkshire woman has subjected her neighbors to various forms of "mental torture," including "loudly playing a choral work 'about rape, pillage and the trashing of villages.'" What is the piece in question, Young asks? The first that comes to mind is Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible.... Tonight, as part of WNYC's American Music Festival, Mark Morris will present favorite works of Gershwin, Cowell, and Partch.... Harrison Birtwistle recently won new fans at the Ivor Novello Awards. Taking the stage at the end of a ceremony that also saluted the Kaiser Chiefs and James Blunt, he made the following remarks: “Why is your music so effing loud? You must all be brain-dead. Maybe you are. I didn’t know so many clichés existed until the last half-hour. Have fun. Goodbye.” (Via The Rambler.)

Photo: AirTrain Newark!

New Music Links

North American composer sites (a quick cross-section): John Adams, John Luther Adams, Mark Adamo, Robert Ashley, Eve Beglarian, Derek Bermel, William Bolcom, Martin Bresnick, John Corigliano, Kyle Gann, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, Jeff Harrington, Stephen Hartke, Phil Kline, Joan La Barbara, David Lang, Tania León, Steve Mackey, Ingram Marshall, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Ned Rorem, Christopher Rouse, R. Murray Schafer, Steven Stucky, Morton Subotnick, Christopher Theofanidis, Augusta Read Thomas, Joan Tower, Melinda Wagner, Julia Wolfe, Charles Wuorinen, La Monte Young, Evan Ziporyn 

Some notable international composers (an even quicker cross-section): Thomas Adès, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Louis Andriessen, Harrison Birtwistle, Pierre Boulez, Benet Casablancas, Chen Yi, Unsuk Chin, Marc-André Dalbavie, Beat Furrer, Osvaldo Golijov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Heiner Goebbels, Guo Wenjing, Georg Friedrich Haas, Jonathan Harvey, Oliver Knussen, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Magnus Lindberg, Tristan Murail, Olga Neuwirth, Per Nørgård, Arvo Pärt, Wolfgang Rihm, Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Iris ter Schiphorst, Salvatore Sciarrino, Jörd Widmann

A few notable younger composers: Sameul Carl Adams, Timothy Andres, Lera Auerbach, Mason Bates, Lisa Bielawa, Betsey Biggs, Aaron Cassidy, Raphaël Cendo, Anna Clyne, Corey Dargel, Jonathan Dawe, Alexandra Gardner, Stephen Gorbos, Judd Greenstein, David T. Little, Jimmy López, Matt McBane, Paula Matthusen, Missy Mazzoli, Alex Mincek, Nico Muhly, Andrew Norman, Stefan Prins, Sean Shepherd, Gregory Spears, Andrew Staniland, Dmitri Tymoczko, Dan Visconti

Collectives: Bang on a Can, Common Sense, Minimum Security, Pulse Optional

NYC new music calendar: SoundArt

NYC ensembles: Absolute Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, American Composers Orchestra, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Modern Ensemble, Amp Music, Anti-Social Music, Antares, Argento Music, AXIOM, Bang on a Can, Build, Capital M, Columbia Composers, Composers Concordance, Contemporaneous, Continuum, counter)induction, Cygnus, Ensemble Sospeso, Da Capo Chamber Players, Either/Or, Electric Kompany, Ensemble 21, Ethel, Fireworks, Flux Quartet, Forecast Music, Friends and Enemies of New Music, Glissando Bin Laden, ICE, Interpretations, Jack Quartet, The Knights, Ljova & The Vjola Contraband, Locrian Chamber Players, Lost Dog New Music Ensemble, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble, Newspeak, North/South Consonance, NOW Ensemble, Object Collection, Queens College New Music Group, Red Light New Music, S.E.M. Ensemble, Sequitur, Signal, So Percussion, TACTUS, Thing NY, TILT Brass, Victrola, Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire

Non-NYC ensembles: Montpelier VT VCME Boston Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Musica Viva, Callithumpian Consort, Collage New Music, Dionsaur Annex, Alea III, Composers in Red Sneakers Rochester Ossia, Musica Nova Syracuse Society for New Music Kingston Deep Listening Princeton Composers' Ensemble Philadelphia Orchestra 2001, Relâche, Bowerbird, Network for New Music Pittsburgh Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble Baltimore Peabody Camerata, Evolution, Mobtown Modern, Ligetisplit DC Great Noise Ensemble, Contemporary Music Forum Atlanta Bent Frequency, Thamyris Cleveland Cleveland Contemporary Players Bloomington Aguavá, IU New Music Ensemble Chicago Eighth Blackbird, ICE, Contempo, CUBE, Dal Niente, noamnesia, MAVerick Ensemble, Accessible Contemporary Music Allendale MI GVSU New Music Ensemble Kalamazoo Opus 21 Lansing Musique 21 Minneapolis Zeitgeist Milwaukee Present Music Iowa City Center for New Music Kansas City newEar Nashville Alias Music Memphis Luna Nova Houston Musiqa Dallas Voices of Change Austin UT New Music Omaha/NYC ANALOG Arts Ensemble Boulder Pendulum Seattle Seattle Composers' Salon, Seattle Chamber Players Portland Music Population Orchestra, Third Angle San Francisco San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Kronos, Earplay, OOGOG, Paul Dresher Ensemble, sfSound, Edmund Welles, Adorno Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Formerly Known As Classical, San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra Santa Cruz New Music Works Los Angeles E.A.R. Unit, Monday Evening Concerts, Ensemble Green San Diego NOISE Davis Empyrean Ensemble Phoenix Crossing 32nd Street Santa Fe Santa Fe New Music

Composer lists: Thomas Moore, NetNewMusic

New-music sites (with MP3s): Art of the States, Other Minds (with separate RadiOM radio site)

Advanced musicology

A longtime friend of Noise draws attention to this passage in a Washington Post article about the al-Qaeda ideologue Mustafa Nasar: "With his pale white skin and red hair, Nasar physically blended into British society more easily than many Islamic fundamentalists. But he sometimes struggled to reconcile his beliefs with his surroundings. For instance, friends said, he was well educated on the finer points of Western classical music and enjoyed talking at dinner parties about composers. But he refused to actually listen to the music, for religious reasons."

Like a freight train

Forty-six minutes under the wire, happy sixty-fifth to Bob.

Photo: Outside Hibbing, Minnesota.

Irregular beauties

Reading the new issue of Poetry, I was happy to see several new poems by the great British poet Geoffrey Hill (husband of Nixon in China librettist Alice Goodman). I immediately noticed that one big new poem, "Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power," alludes to Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. It's hard to sum up the drift of this typically rich, dense, and elusive text ("What lives is the arcane" is one telling line), but Hill seems to be arguing for the power of a more oblique art to act on history with positive force. The poem ends with an encomium to Messiaen's masterpiece, placing it in historical context that may also be a metaphor for the present moment:

...it strikes chords
direct and angular: the terrible
unreadiness of France to hold her own:
nineteen forty
and what Marc Bloch entitled Strange Defeat;
prisoners, of whom Messiaen was one,
the unconventional quartet for which
the Quatuor
was fashioned as a thing beyond the time,
beyond the sick decorum of betrayal,
Pétain, Laval, the shabby prim hotels,
senility
fortified with spa waters....
Strike up, augment,
irregular beauties contra the New Order.
Make do with cogent if austere finale.

For Hans Fantel

I was so sad to read in the New York Times this morning of the sudden death of the Austrian-born writer Hans Fantel, whose deeply moving article on Mahler's Ninth Symphony I reprinted here just last month. Dan Wakin tells his story.

Nixon not in New York

The Chicago Opera Theater production of John Adams's Nixon in China is winning raves from the Chicago critics: Wynne Delacoma, John von Rhein, Marc Geelhoed, Andrew Patner. Patner writes: "It is a part of Adams's unique artistic character that he is able to combine a structural and even populist savvy with a genuine technical facility and originality to create works that, as they say, have legs and take on long and busy lives of their own in the concert hall as well as in the opera house.  And his particular take on the deceptively simple (emphasis here on deceptively) rhythmic and harmonic loops of the minimalist system finds a certain depth and psychological as well as aesthetic resonance that moves it out of its initial period of composition and première and comes as close as any recent music has to achieving timelessness."

After its 1987 premiere in Houston and follow-up stagings in Amsterdam, Washington, and Brooklyn, this great American opera came dangerously close to dropping out of sight. In 1996 I wrote a piece for the Times complaining about the total lack of productions. In the last few years, it has had a resurgence; the Chicago show is a co-production with Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the Portland Opera, and the Minnesota Opera, all of whom have had success with the work (a Houston Grand Opera version is upcoming). Next month comes a revival of Peter Sellars's original staging at the ENO in London, with James Maddalena again in the lead. Yet the stubborn fact remains: Nixon has never been staged by New York's two big opera companies. That datum measures quite precisely the degree to which both the Met and City Opera have been inept in the field of contemporary music. Hopefully, the situation is about to change.

Babbitt is still 90

Age, With Grace. The New Yorker, May 29, 2006.

Crossed signals: For "bass trombone" read "bass trumpet."

Sibelius in 2008

Is it possible we could have a President Sibelius? Probably not, but people are beginning to mention Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas, as a dark-horse candidate for 2008. A cursory search fails to reveal whether Sebelius's husband Gary, son of former Congressman Keith Sebelius, is of Finnish descent, or related in any way to the great symphonist. (Via Alex Star.) [For more information, see Michael Kaulkin, with additional comments by Ingram Marshall.]

Pandora's half-empty box

In the course of a lively critics' conversation at ArtsJournal, Terry Teachout recommended something called Pandora, which is supposed to "help me discover more music that I'll like." You enter the name of an artist or song, and it suggests more music in the same vein. I'm afraid I had bad luck with the device on my first few tries. I typed in "Mahler." It said:

We found several. Which 'Mahler' did you mean?

— The Mausker, by Deerhoof
— Masher, by the Mountain Goats
— Madner, by Underworld
— Madder, by Groove Armada

I then typed in "Debussy." It said: "Do you want 'Debussie' by Daphne Loves Derby?" Not right now.

Update: Maryann Devine has queried Pandora on this issue. She was told that "classical music is so complex that they haven't been able to incorporate it into their algorithm." Mm-hm. To play fair, I entered "Simple Twist of Fate," my favorite Dylan song. I got Neil Young's "Thrasher," another all-time favorite, together with other songs from Blood on the Tracks and a bunch of strummy stuff I didn't immediately care about.

Update 2: Ace young composer Timothy Andres points out that the similarly constituted Last FM site has assimilated notational music, up to a point. Type in "Mahler," and you receive recommendations ranging from the obvious Bruckner to the less obvious Leadbelly to the one and only Дмитрий Шостакович.

Condi's at it again

Here's another fascinating glimpse into the musical mind of our Secretary of State, whom Tony Tommasini recently interviewed in depth for the Times. Her current playlist includes Mozart's D-Minor Piano Concerto, Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love," Aretha Franklin's "Respect," Kool and the Gang's "Celebration," Brahms's Second Piano Concerto and F-Minor Piano Quintet, anything by U2*, Elton John's "Rocket Man," Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

*A conspiracy-minded reader wonders whether this choice is in any way related to the fact that U2's Bono is the guest editor of the special edition of The Independent in which the list appears. Musical taste dictated by cultural context? Surely not!

Salome day

Tidbits

1) Geoff Edgers is writing an arts blog at the Boston Globe. 2) Congratulations to Jeremy Eichler, who will succeed Richard Dyer as the Globe's chief critic. My alarmism of last year was unwarranted. 3) Ernst Toch's Gesprochene Musik, or Spoken Music, one of the great experiments of Weimar-era Berlin, is about to receive its first complete performance since 1930. It will be heard in June as part of a program by the Christopher Caines dance company, at New York's City Center. The final movement, "Geographical Fugue," is a longtime choral favorite; here's a rendition by the Lycoming College Choir.

Babbitt at 90

Very warm birthday wishes to Milton Babbitt, who turns ninety today. The composer is fêted tonight in a concert at Carnegie's Weill Hall, which includes works from various stages of his vast career. You can get a sense of Babbitt's rapid-fire intellect — entirely undimmed by age, as I can attest from seeing him last week — in this 2001 NewMusicBox interview, which ranges from state of twelve-tone composition to the state of beer. Asked if he steers students in the serialist direction, he says, "God no! I mean who am I to send these people to their death? No, absolutely not. I try to come to terms with what they want to do." The only topic that stumps him is hip-hop: "What is all this scratching of records?" (There is also, I must say, an inexact description of the New Yorker's music issue of 2001.) Difficult only on the surface, Babbitt's music exhibits, like his conversation, a deeply playful view of the world.

Worth reading

1) Steve Hicken's homage to Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, courtesy of The High Hat; 2) George Hunka's interview with pianist Marilyn Nonken; 3) Richard Dyer on Osvaldo Golijov's teaching session with a teen-aged composing prodigy; 4) high-concept pranks at Improv Everywhere, esp. Chekhov's Barnes & Noble reading (via Standing Room); 5) new O. C. blog by Timothy Mangan.

2nd anniversary issue

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

Many thanks to all who have visited the blog over the past two years — just short of a million hits.

Photo: Actor Brad Pitt in the role of Claude Debussy. 

Osmo's cosmos

At NewMusicBox, the gifted young composer Sean Shepherd is reporting from the Minnesota Orchestra's Reading Sessions and Composer Institute, where his toughly argued, gripping piece surface tension is about to receive a performance.

Gowanus music

Canal Zone. The New Yorker, May 15, 2006.

(Picture taken in 1997, during a boat tour operated by the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment. The silo now occupied by Issue Project Room is a bit farther up the canal. As you can see, our tour got stuck at the Union Street bridge.)

Prism Concerts

Last year, the Juilliard-based choral conductor Judith Clurman inaugurated Prism Concerts, at the recently renovated Central Synagogue in Manhattan. The synagogue is an opulent space, more acoustically contained than the average religious venue, and I've enjoyed both concerts I've attended there. I'd planned to mention the first event, an all-Handel evening, in a recent column, but space did not allow. Participating were Clurman's Festival Singers, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and a vocal team made up of soprano Jennifer Aylmer, mezzo-soprano Gigi Mitchell-Velasco, countertenor Randall Scotting, tenor Nicholas Phan, and bass Kevin Burdette, handsomely delivering arias from Solomon, Esther, Belshazzar, Samson, and Judas Maccabaeus (all of Act III). Organist Martin Ennis played the "Cuckoo and the Nightingale" Concerto, and in a departure from the theme, the American Brass Quintet gave the premiere of Paul Moravec’s ingratiating Cornopean Airs. The second Prism concert, drawing on the services of the superb Brentano Quartet, presented music from Vienna, specifically Schubert, Brahms, Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg. Prism's season ends on May 14 with a thoughtful program devoted to three composers of Jewish origin — Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco. None other than Deborah Voigt will be the soprano soloist. Little-known fact about Zemlinsky: his mother was the child of a Sephardic Jew and a Bosnian Muslim, and his Catholic father converted to Judaism in order to marry her.

Slowness

In a letter to the New York Times, John Cage scholar David Grubbs takes issue with the widespread assumption that Cage's As Slow as Possible, or ASLSP, which Daniel Wakin has amusingly and edifyingly covered in the Times, is the longest work in musical history. In fact, Grubbs points out, it is "but a blink of the eye of Parsifal (1882-39,969,364,735 A.D.), by the Canadian artist Rodney Graham. Mr. Graham's composition takes a short, supplementary passage of music prepared by Wagner's assistant, Engelbert Humperdinck, for the 1882 premiere of Parsifal and extends it more than 39 billion years. In his notes to the project, Mr. Graham cautions that this estimate as to the work's length does not take into consideration the projected extinction of our solar system."