Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

CD of the week: Stile Antico

Clemens non Papa's Ego flos campi, from Stile Antico's forthcoming CD Song of Songs (by kind permission of the Harmonia Mundi label). The disc arrives on April 14; the group will make their North American debut at the Boston Early Music Festival on June 12. The Tallis Scholars, long-reigning masters of Renaissance polyphony, sing at St. Mary the Virgin in NYC on Thursday; they have a superb new Josquin CD.

Yes, you can make it a ringtone

iTunes is offering the first movement of Cage's 4'33" as its Discovery Download this week. Opinion in the comments section is strongly divided. My favorite: "NOTHING more Classical than the sound of absolutely nothing." Except, of course, for the sound of absolutely everything.

Ebène Quartet (in brief)

Four Play. The New Yorker, April 6, 2009.

At the audio-rich Instant Encore site, you can hear two recent Ebène concerts from the Friends of Chamber Music in Portland, Oregon: an all-Beethoven program and one of Haydn, Fauré, and Schubert (with "Misirlou" encore).

O Internet

The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, who made that nifty video promoting their best-selling CD of Music for 18 Musicians, again prove themselves the new-music YouTube masters with a trailer for their upcoming release In C Remixed. Four GVSU players will participate in Carnegie's all-star In C on April 24.... Sound Mind, the blog of Toronto critic John Terauds, points to streaming HD video from Indiana University. There's a complete production of Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, among other things.... The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, in celebration of its 120th anniversary, has put up ten symphonies for free download.... Trinity Church on Wall Street has an array of webcasts on its site. Because of the Gergiev / Prokofiev festival, I missed the choir's performance of Buxtehude's remarkable Membra Jesu Nostri, but I was able to watch it a few days later, and also caught up with Sospiro Winds and Imani Winds.... If, after listening to a few minutes of Gustavo Dudamel's Francesca da Rimini on the DG e-player, you get the sense that something sensational is happening, you will not be wrong.... eMusic has for the first time picked a classical group as artist of the month. It's Missy Mazzoli's new-music band Victoire.... Schirmer enters the realm of digital scores.... BBC 3's Listen Again feature is well stocked at the moment: you can hear Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia performing Mahler's Ninth (part of the City of Dreams festival) or the Brahms F-minor Quintet with Mitsuko Uchida and the Hagens.... The gifted young Canadian composer Andrew Staniland, whom I first encountered on a Wordless Music concert in 2007, has won the CBC's Evolution composer competition, co-produced by the Banff Centre. There's a video link for his winning work, Devolution.... The long-awaited Blog de Midgette begins.... Behold Ethan Iverson's 16000-word interview with Marc-André Hamelin.... O resto é ruído!

Gergiev's Prokofiev

I've been waiting twenty years to hear a live performance of Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, one of the black masterpieces of twentieth-century music. Last night I finally got my chance, courtesy of Valery Gergiev, who has begun what promises to be a gripping four-concert survey of Prokofiev's symphonies and concertos with the London Symphony at Lincoln Center. An almost unbearable tension underpinned the performance: the Londoners played with frenzied concentration, yet Gergiev imposed a coolly controlling hand, allowing little of the rubato that characterized the Second Piano Concerto (with Vladimir Feltsman) before intermission. The coda, with its shattering dissonances separated by silences, had me in a cold sweat. The audience remained eerily quiet as Gergiev held the fermatas beyond what seemed possible. You can get a backstage glimpse of the LSO tour from the orchestra's tour blog, which seems mostly the work of flutist Gareth Davies.

Photo: Library of Congress.

Trovatore, Sonnambula at the Met

Matt Damon in the role of Manrico.

In this week's New Yorker, I write about new productions of Il Trovatore and La Sonnambula at the Met and comment briefly on the company's 125th-anniversary gala. An excerpt:

Nothing in these operas is any more implausible than the events of the average Shakespeare play, or, for that matter, of the average action movie. The difference is that the conventions of the latter are widely accepted these days, so that if, say, Matt Damon rides a unicycle the wrong way down the Autobahn and kills a squad of Uzbek thugs with a package of Twizzlers the audience cheers rather than guffaws.

In the past few years, my columns have all been available online, but this one can be read only by New Yorker subscribers. You can also read the magazine via the Digital Edition.

Ax what you can do for your country

Drew McManus notes that Emanuel Ax generously waived his fee for his appearance this weekend at the financially troubled Columbus Symphony. "We didn't ask him," Columbus's executive director told the Columbus Dispatch. In the article, Ax continues his skeptical inquiry into the alleged "rule" forbidding applause between movements of a concerto or symphony. On his blog, he wonders why concert audiences behave this way when opera audiences applaud after arias. It's a good question, with no logical answer. The argument that opera is less "serious" than symphonic music won't hold up. Is Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin less serious than his First Piano Concerto? Is Don Giovanni less serious than, well, anything? For more, see my endless 2005 post on the history of concert-hall applause.

Other pianoblogs: Hough, Biss, and, of course, Denk. Hough has also addressed the applause issue.

In the beginning was the Word

"In principio erat Verbum," the first movement of Arvo Pärt's In principio, from the eponymous CD (ECM New Series 2050).

Dylan 33

Bob Dylan has given an interview about his forthcoming album, Together Through Life, and, in a typically playful, oblique way, he addresses questions of periodization and musical meaning: "Some people preferred my first-period songs. Some, the second. Some, the Christian period. Some, the post-Columbian. Some, the Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see that my audience now doesn’t particularly care what period the songs are from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don’t hang anybody up. Like if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed.... If there are shadows and flowers and swampy ledges in a composition, that’s what they are in their essence. There’s no mystification. That’s one way I can explain it."

A couple of weeks ago I got to hear the new record, which the Columbia label is scheduled to release on April 28. I'm reluctant to say much after a single audition, but to my ears it was no letdown after Dylan's recent trilogy of new material — Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. In the interview Dylan describes it as a "romantic" album, which seems about right, although this romance clearly has more shadows than flowers in the corners. The songwriting is more straight-ahead than on the previous two albums, which were stuffed — sometimes overstuffed — with verbal imagery. I kept thinking of Hank Williams's spare, chiseled writing, especially on "Life is Hard": "Sun is sinking low / I guess it's time to go / I feel a chilly breeze / In place of memories." (Note: what I heard may not match the finished work.) There's a fantastically chilling, end-of-one's-rope number called "Forgetful Heart," which has this Kafkaesque image: "The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a door." But the sadness of the scene is lightened by sweet-sounding arrangements (mandolin, accordion, and violin fill out the band) and by flashes of wit ("Down by the river Judge Simpson walking around / Nothing shocks me more than that old clown"). Some up-tempo, old-time rockers also keep the night terrors at bay.

The version I heard ended with the double whammy of "I Feel a Change Coming On" and "It's All Good" — a pair that may cause listeners to detect a political undertow in this seemingly intimate, out-of-time affair. The chorus of the gorgeously lilting, almost Motown-like "I Feel a Change" could be heard as Obamaesque, although with a certain ambiguous regretfulness Dylan adds, "And the fourth part of the day is already gone." (That's apparently a reference to the Book of Nehemiah.) A Dylan album can't end on such a half-hopeful note, of course. On the grimly boogeying "It's All Good," the singer dons a mask of lethal irony, surveying a ransacked social landscape and then adding, after each exhibition of desperation and decay, "It's all good." That smug little phrase has now been destroyed. Dylan's protestations in the latest interview notwithstanding, some people may indeed come away thinking that the human race is doomed, although at least we go out with a crooked smile.

Previously: Ain't Talkin.

Update: Scott Warmuth proposes that "the fourth part of the day" is in fact taken from The Canterbury Tales — seemingly a favorite source for Dylan of late.

Molto forzando e feroce

Lot 198 of an upcoming auction at Bonhams, in London, is the manuscript of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho. In this notorious sequence the strings end up playing a chord consisting of the notes E-flat, E-natural, F, and G-flat. Norma Herrmann, the composer's third wife, has put up for sale a large batch of manuscripts and memorabilia, including letters from Ives, Schoenberg, Vaughan Williams, and various other composers and musicians; a plaintive note from Orson Welles, inquiring about music for King Lear; a letter from Martin Scorsese, accompanying the script of Taxi Driver, Herrmann's final project; and a copy of Bellini's Il pirata with an inscription from Rossini to Chopin. (Via James Lavino.)

Audio: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sony 62700.

Composer rumble

"Subterranean Rumble Caused by Composers Contemporary with Lully," from François Couperin's L'Apothéose de Lulli; William Christie and Christophe Rousset, harpsichords (Harmonia Mundi 29012269)

Tully note

Tony Tommasini, in a generally warm review of Pierre Boulez's recent concerts with the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall, describes their rendition of Stravinsky's Pulcinella as "listless" and "stodgy and blurry." I agree. As Tony says, the problem may simply be that Boulez doesn't believe in the music. After all, just a few years ago he declared that Stravinsky "began so well" and then became "an epigone, trying this historical style, then that one." But there's also the matter of the hall. At the reopening concert for Alice Tully Hall, David Robertson led the Juilliard Orchestra in a performance of the Pulcinella suite that was in every way sharper, clearer, and more alive than Chicago's. Robertson is undoubtedly a better conductor for the score, but Tully's crisp acoustics also helped. No wonder three Stravinsky scores were heard during the first week; the dry acoustics match the composer's mature aesthetic to a tee. The debate over Tully is ongoing, with Allan Kozinn leading the prosecution, but I believe that in certain music the hall will be as good as it gets in New York City. Boulez himself might be very happy there.

Babbitt dance party, for real

Back in 2007 I joined the jazz composer-pianist Ethan Iverson for an Evening of Spooky Modern Music at the Paris Bar. The playlist included Milton Babbitt's Semi-Simple Variations, with the composer's jazzy vibe accentuated. Ethan practiced the piece while on the road with his trio, The Bad Plus, and found that his bandmates, Dave King and Reid Anderson, enjoyed playing along. They got the idea of adding modern classical works to the Bad Plus repertory. The new Bad Plus album, For All I Care, includes the Babbitt, an extract from Stravinsky's Apollo, and Ligeti's "Fém" Etude. On his blog Ethan explains the genesis of the project and also the making of the fabulous video above. The dancers are Julie Worden (red), Michelle Yard (blue), and Laurel Lynch (black), from the Mark Morris Dance Group.

Much happens in the brief span of Semi-Simple Variations. Christopher Wintle once wrote a forty-three-page analysis of the piece for Perspectives of New Music — more than one page per measure. But, in fact, it is semi-simple. It's a theme plus five variations. The theme unfolds in six held notes over the first six measures, which take up the first thirteen or so seconds of the video. The work is also, in a way, variations on a rhythmic pattern. The piano begins with a quick little four-note burst. After that, we go through the other fifteen ways you can arrange a set of four units, with a "null set" or rest at the end:

And those rhythmic elements are then juggled according to the same kinds of principles that govern the permutations of notes. Presto, total serialism!

Previously: Milton Bizzabbitt, Clarinet Quintet.

The Tully tizzy

Sound Check. The New Yorker, March 16, 2009.

Renée v. Maria

Courtesy of the fertile mind of Michael Monroe, a tempo canon involving Renée Fleming and Maria Callas's differently paced interpretations of "O mio babbino caro."

A tempo canon is a canon in which the same music unfolds in several voices at different speeds. The classic example in Renaissance polyphony is the Agnus Dei 2 of Josquin's Missa l'homme armé Super voces musicales (1502), in which the lowest voice moves twice as fast as the middle voice and the top voice moves three times as fast:

Tallis Scholars, Gimell 206.

Kyle Gann, in his book The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, sets Josquin's Mass side by side with Nancarrow's canonic studies for player piano, written several centuries later. In Study No. 19, the tempos obey the ratio 12/15/20:

Studies for Player Piano, Wergo 6907.

Elliott Carter, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, and Arvo Pärt, among many others, have used related principles in their music. In the Kyrie of Ligeti's Requiem, the main subject begins with a drop from B-flat to A-natural, but each voice breaks away from the initial note at a different time. An awesome cloud of sound begins to grow:

Jonathan Nott conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Voices, Teldec 88263.

Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten consists essentially of descending A-minor scales, with the first violins playing sixteen times faster than the double basses:

Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Stuttgart State Orchestra, ECM 817764.

All this reminds me of something I perpetrated in college, in collaboration with Michael Pahre — a self-styled radiophonic composition entitled Ecstatic Radio Fantasia on Robert Ashley's "She Was a Visitor". At one point we set up a race among four recordings of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto; as I recall, Richter won. Michael Vazquez was the lead vocalist for the performance, uttering the phrase "She was a visitor" continuously for forty-five minutes (at one point it became "Cher was a Visigoth"). In this segment he was joined by Douglas Wolk, future author of Reading Comics, who, for unknown reasons, read aloud the printed matter on a Nixon in China radio promo. Bright college days! The Ashley work that inspired this silliness can be found at UbuWeb.

An interesting hyper-canon will ensue if you hit all the buttons on this page in quick succession.

Paper noise

The Rest Is Noise is now out in paperback in the British Isles, with a jazzy new cover and a kind blurb from Colin Greenwood of Radiohead. This version includes a new twelve-page supplementary section titled Suggested Listening and Reading. The same material can be found in the latest printing of the paperback in the US; here's a pdf. The American edition has now sold 100,000 copies. Once more I have to express my bewildered gratitude for the unlikely success of this obscure venture. Please don't forget the Audio Guide, containing several hundred musical samples related to the book.

On my current reading list:

Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air
David Grann, The Lost City of Z
Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever (forthcoming)
Barry Seldes, Leonard Bernstein (forthcoming)
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland