The radio host Howard Stern has lately been critiquing the state of the musical avant-garde, using as a case study the downtown NYC semi-classical band Zs. Listen to day 1, day 2 (John Cage is "horseshit"), and day 3 of Stern's inquisition. Funny that he or one of his cohorts cites the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," with its anarchic orchestral interludes, in the category of real music. The Beatles listened carefully to the 1950s and 60s avant-garde, Cage included. They had curiosity about every kind of music and didn't sit around mocking what they didn't immediately understand. Herr Dr. Stern has threatened to perform his own compositions at Zs' next Knitting Factory date, on Nov. 20. I'm sure the downtown crowd will give him a warm Rite of Spring welcome.
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Altman's ghost
Backstage at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN.
Book tour diary 3
Last Sunday morning, news that the Texas Book Festival was selling copies of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century spread rapidly across Austin, Texas, causing a great stampede in the streets. Some even donned running uniforms in order to obtain an aerodynamic advantage over their fellows as they sped toward the book tents.
Seriously, it was an honor to appear in the Texas Book Festival's retinue of writerly celebrities. I happened to speak on the same day as the notable young author Jenna Bush, daughter of our incisive and beloved Commander-in-Chief:
Destiny did not intend us to meet.
The previous day, in Houston, Howard Pollack, the biographer of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, invited me to visit the University of Houston. There I met the bassoonist Brad Balliett and the composer Elliot Cole, who gave me a CD of their experimental hip-hop project The Oracle Hysterical, which samples Lachenmann, Ferneyhough, and Stravinsky, among others. A sample:
Looking back fondly to the Evening of Spooky Modern Music last week in New York, I want to thank Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus for playing brilliantly — and from memory — a wild array of pieces, and the Paris Bar's David Brendel for conceiving and organizing the event. Spotted in the audience were such celebrities as Mark Morris, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Alex Abramovich.
My in-depth exploration of the Central Time Zone has now brought me to Chicago:
Last night I saw the Chicago Symphony's first MusicNOW concert of the season. Somewhere around 900 people, at least a third of them under the age of thirty, took in Mark-Anthony Turnage's Eulogy, Derek Johnson's Frozen Light, a Septet by the strikingly assured nineteen-year-old Liverpudlian composer Mark Simpson, and the world premiere of Nico Muhly's Step Team, which takes a surprising turn from dancing motion to still, sad lyricism and never goes back.
Notations
Rising from the grave
For the astringent modernist kids out there, Cafe Press has a selection of twelve-tone tees. My favorite is the "Keep Music Evil" T with "RIP Tonality 1682-1911" on the back. "Whether or not you agree that tonality died in 1911, you gotta agree that this shirt is funny. Piss off all your neo-romantic friends!" (Via Standing Room via NewMusicBox.)
Noise in Texas
I write from the fair city of Houston, where tonight I will give a pre-concert talk for Da Camera of Houston on the intimate side of the avant-garde — the emergence of radical musical ideas from fin-de-siècle salon culture. I've encountered Da Camera by way of their periodic visits to New York; they're expert at creating programs that place music in a broader cultural context, particularly a literary one. Some years back they presented excellent evenings devoted to the musical worlds of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust. This season, celebrating Da Camera's twentieth anniversary, artistic director Sarah Rothenberg has put together a kind of secret history of the twentieth century, going from the Belle Époque of Debussy and Fauré (tonight's concert) to the Symbolist mystery of Schoenberg's Book of Hanging Gardens, and on to the postwar abstractions of Cage, Feldman, and Elliott Carter.
As it happens, LA has a series not unlike Da Camera in spirit: Jacaranda, based in Santa Monica. Their theme for the season is "the OM Century" — the twentieth century seen through the prism of Olivier Messiaen. The opening concert, "Diana's Quiver," is all-Debussy; it happens on November 10. I recommend this group very highly.
Tomorrow I will be at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. Then two appearances in Chicago, at the University of Chicago and at the Art Institute. On Nov. 7 I have my Garrison Keillor moment at the Fitzgerald Theater in Minneapolis. Then I will return home for Berlin in Lights.
