With the centenary of Olivier Messiaen drawing nigh, here are some additions to my Messiaen 100 post of some weeks back. First, the DG label is releasing a mammoth, thirty-two-CD Complete Edition of the Maître's works, with authoritative performances by the likes of Olivier Latry, Roger Muraro, Pierre Boulez, Myung-Whun Chung, and Kent Nagano (his great recording of Saint François d'Assise). Also, I earlier neglected to mention that the Cleveland Museum of Art is offering a strong cluster of events over the next several weeks: the Quartet for the End of Time twice, Christopher Taylor playing Vingt Regards on the night of the birthday (Dec. 10), and From the Canyons to the Stars with Oberlin players on Dec. 13. Note also ongoing observances at Jacaranda in LA; Mark Robson will do the Vingt Regards on Dec. 6. Matthew Odell plays the same huge work at An Die Musik in Baltimore on Dec. 7. Up in New Haven there's a series called Messiaen at Yale, with Paul Jacobs undertaking Livre du Saint Sacrament, the composer's final organ masterpiece, on the 10th. Here in NYC we'll have a Quartet in the Music at Our Saviour's Atonement series in Washington Heights on Dec. 7; the same work at NYU's Mission Française on Dec. 10; a Voices of Ascension concert the same night at the Church of the Ascension in the Village, with yet another Quartet and Jon Gillock playing organ selections; a Miller Theatre tribute with AXIOM on Dec. 13; and Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Turangalîla with Yale players at Carnegie on Dec. 14 ($10-25). But nothing on this continent beats the climax of Automne Messiaen in Montreal: the entire organ output during the day of Dec. 10, plus Vingt Regards that night and a Nagano-directed Saint Francis on birthday eve. See the master event list for Messiaen events around the world. The day after, of course, Elliott Carter turns one hundred; James Levine leads the celebration at Carnegie, with a Making Music event the following night. At Southbank in London, the unstoppable Boulez will lead a Messiaen concert on Dec. 10 and a Carter concert on Dec. 11, including something of his own on each night for the sake of variety — or, perhaps, continuity.
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Happy Thanksgiving
Remembering Harvey Milk, who died thirty years ago today.
Lenny in the common room at 2AM
Carnegie Hall's Leonard Bernstein festival is heading into its final weeks: On the Town has a short run at City Center starting on Wednesday night, and Alan Gilbert conducts the Juilliard Orchestra in the Kaddish Symphony on Nov. 24. American Scholar offers a nice bit of Bernsteiniana online: an account of a memorable appearance that Bernstein made at Harvard in 1986, with Gilbert as his student presenter. Two others who helped to organize Bernstein's late-night soliloquy at Adams House were James Ross, then a music tutor and now on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Music; and Robert Kiely, beloved master of the house. Kiely recalls that Bernstein gave his speech while puffing on a cigarette and sipping Scotch from a dining-hall glass. His topic was terrorism.
Photo: Library of Congress
Chacona talk intro
From the manuscript of Bach's Mass in B Minor.
"Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues," my solo talk at this year's Festival, is based on the second chapter of my new book,"Listen to This" (available Sept. 28th). With the help of a slightly demented iTunes playlist, I'll trace a couple of recurring motifs, riffs, and bass lines across nearly a millennium of music. One is a dance form called the chaconne, which has traveled from one extreme of human expression to another. It began as a bawdy, subversive Spanish dance of the early seventeenth century — Juan Arañés's "Un sarao de la chacona" tells of an African heathen dancing with a Gypsy and a blind man poking at girls with a stick — and, after about a hundred years, it had evolved into Bach's shiveringly dark Ciaccona for solo violin:
I'll also talk about a series of four descending notes that is often associated with lament. It's an echo, probably, of human sobbing or sighing. Listen in sequence to an old Romanian lament, John Dowland's Elizabethan song "Flow My Tears" (which later gave its name to a novel by Philip K. Dick), Claudio Monteverdi's "Lamento della Ninfa," and Nina Simone's scalding version of "Strange Fruit":
If you add two more notes to the pattern, it becomes chromatic (consecutive white and black notes at the piano):
Deployed ominously in the bass, this downward-trudging figure has persisted across centuries of musical history. Here it is in Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas," the "Crucifixus" of Bach's B-Minor Mass, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:
The device became à la mode again in pop music of the 1960s, for unknown reasons. I've made a montage of "Chim Chim Cher-ee" (from "Mary Poppins"), the Beatles' "Michelle," the Eagles' "Hotel California," and Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," with more or less the same bass line appearing in each :
Eventually, I'll get to Led Zeppelin, but I don't want to give too much away in advance.
"Chacona": From the album "Villancicos y Danzas Criollas"; Alia Vox 9834. Dowland: Andreas Scholl, Andreas Martin; Harmonia Mundi 901603. Monteverdi: Bernarda Fink, René Jacobs, Concerto Vocale; Harmonia Mundi 901736.37. Purcell: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Nicholas McGegan, Philharmonia Baroque; Harmonia Mundi 907110. Bach's Ciaccona: Gidon Kremer, ECM 506502. Bach's Mass in B Minor: Philippe Herreweghe, Collegium Vocale Gent; Harmonia Mundi 5901614.15. Beethoven: Osmo Vänskä, Minnesota Orchestra; BIS 1616.
Newly arrived
Listening:
— René Pape: Gods, Kings, and Demons (DG, out Nov. 11)
— Brahms, Symphony No. 1 and Schicksalslied; John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir (SDG)
— Corigliano, Dylan Thomas Trilogy, with Thomas Allen and Leonard Slatkin conducting the Nashville Symphony (Naxos)
— Carter, Complete Piano Music, with Ursula Oppens (Cedille)
— Lully, Psyché, with Carolyn Sampson, Karina Gauvin, and Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs directing the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus (cpo)
— Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs (Columbia)
Reading:
— Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley)
— Eric Salzman, The New Music Theater (Oxford)
— Simon Morrison, The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years (Oxford)
— Daniel Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven (Norton)
— Judith Tick (ed.), Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion (Oxford)
— Joseph Polisi, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman (Amadeus)
Union Square, 11/5/08, 1AM
The last time I heard spontaneous singing in Union Square was in the days after September 11, 2001 — an experience I wrote about here. The crowd on Tuesday night consisted largely of college students and people in their twenties; some were children when 9/11 happened. I doubt that many members of this exuberant throng were thinking about what happened in this city seven years ago, but, for various reasons, I certainly was. The young man in the foreground is holding up a rush edition of the Daily News: President Obama.
A quick search of YouTube reveals that young crowds across the country broke into the national anthem in the early morning hours. You can find videos for the East Village, Times Square, Berkeley, Portland OR, Amherst, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Madison WI, and Harvard Yard (with band), among others. Two obvious conclusions: 1) contra Palin, the entire country is "pro America"; 2) increased support for music education would be nice.
One more musical angle: Bob Dylan announced the outcome of the election by playing "Blowin' in the Wind."
For Barack Obama
It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than nobility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
— Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
