Warmest birthday wishes to Esa-Pekka Salonen, the lodestar of turn-of-the-century music, who turns fifty today. Swedish Radio celebrated this scarcely credible landmark with a gala concert on June 18, and has now put up video of the event (start with "önskekonsert 080621"). It's a must-see, not only for compelling performances by the likes of Karita Mattila, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Kari Kriikku but also for zany historical footage of the "långhårig," baby-faced Salonen during his tenure at the Swedish Radio Symphony (1984 to 1995). Some of the material seems to derive from a TV variety or comedy show; see also Flying Salonen and Cirkus Salonen in the video archive. The Ojai bunny dance was not an isolated incident, it turns out. Amid the silliness, you get a sense of how forcefully Salonen campaigned for contemporary music from the beginning; the opening montage suggests that he actually got Magnus Lindberg's ear-splitting Kraft on TV (see 3:20). One regret: I was hoping for a surprise cameo by S. Epatha Merkerson.
Medici.tv, affiliated with the classical-video company Medici Arts, is now offering free broadcasts online. At the moment you can watch various events from the Aspen Festival, notably David Zinman conducting the premiere of John Harbison's Great Gatsby Suite; streaming tonight is Peter Sellars's production of Mozart's Zaide from Aix-en-Provence. You can also download items from Medici's back-catalogue, at the reasonable price of 7 euros each; the online stock includes Frank Scheffer's film of Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet, the same director's excellent Elliott Carter documentary A Labyrinth of Time, and Bruno Monsaingeon's mesmerizing portrait of Sviatoslav Richter ("There are two things that I hate: analysis and power").
The Baltimore-based new-music duo Hybrid Groove Project may be relatively new to the scene, but they're poised to stir up some major-league, headline-grabbing, Daniel J. Wakin trouble with their explosive summer jam, "HGP Anthem." Emulating epic hip-hop feuds on the order of Jay-Z vs. Nas, Tupac vs. Biggie, and Wagner vs. Brahms, HGP is calling out and taking down rivals such as the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), So Percussion, MTT, Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound, Eighth Blackbird, Levine and the BSO, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Kronos, among others. Wisely, they don't mess with Esa-Pekka. You may have to listen several times to catch all the in-jokes. I especially like the chorus.
This piece by Ben Rosen, showing how Peter Gelb has reversed declining attendance at the Met, is the work of a company insider, but it's quite informative nonetheless.
This Talking Points Memo video of White House spokespeople and affiliated pundits responding to Scott McClellan's memoir What Happened is more or less the funniest thing I've seen or heard since Arnie Schoenberg and His Second Viennese School. It's a tall order to find musical justification for posting such off-topic material, but I'll give it a shot. The comedy lies, I believe, in the fact that not only do these self-styled "moderately talented people" keep saying the same things over and over, but they utter them in strikingly similar speech-melodic patterns. I could cite Janáček's pioneering work on speech-melody in the Czech language, but in this company it seems more fitting to mention Harry Partch. Notice the recurrent falling intervals of "puzzled," the melancholy stepwise-descending motif of "Not the Scott we knew" (or "doesn't sound like Scott"), the fairly consistent tuning of the word "stumped." OK, I tried....
Update: Martin Schneider at Emdashes has written out a libretto for a McClellan opera, which I'd prefer to call Puzzled.
"A joy for a pop fan or a classical aficionado." — New York Times
"A celebration of what it means to be alive in a world of great music." — Kirkus Reviews
"He avoids jargon, he explains, he writes in real language. He reminds me of my other favorite music critic, Bernard Shaw." — Roger Ebert
An expanded paperback edition, with an essay on John Cage, is available from Picador (USA) and HarperCollins (UK).
My second book, Listen to This (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Fourth Estate), offers a panoramic view of the musical scene, from Bach to Björk and beyond. In the Preface, I say that the aim is to "approach music not as a self-sufficient sphere but as a way of knowing the world." I treat pop music as serious art and classical music as part of the wider culture; my hope is that the book will serve as an introduction to crucial figures and ideas in classical music, and also give an alternative perspective on modern pop. Listen to This includes material already published in The New Yorker as well as pieces written or heavily revised for the occasion. The first chapter, from which the title comes, appeared in the magazine in 2004. The second chapter, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues," is entirely new—a rapid-moving history of music told through bass lines. The third chapter, "Infernal Machines," weaves together various thoughts on music and technology. And it goes from there, touching on Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Brahms, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Sonic Youth, Cecil Taylor, and a dozen others. At the back of the book is a 4000-word survey of recommended recordings. The audiobook version, which I recorded myself, contains more than thirty musical selections. Translations are available from Bompiani in Italy (Senti questo) and Companhia das Letras in Brazil (Escuta só) and are forthcoming from Seix Barral in Spain and Actes Sud in France. The book has won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music writing and was a runner-up for the PEN Art of the Essay award.
