Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

More on EMPAC

In my column on Georg Friedrich Haas in last week's magazine, I mentioned my visit to EMPAC, the high-tech performing-arts center on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY. The complex is two years old — James Oestreich covered the opening for the New York Times — but I hadn't had the chance to see it until now. It contains a 1200-seat concert hall, a 400-seat theater, and two black-box studios. The main hall is housed in a spectacular egg-like wooden shell that is structurally isolated from the remainder of the building, ensuring that no extraneous vibrations disturb the sound picture. I'm not sure if I've ever heard music in so preternaturally silent a space. All the venues are wired into research and production facilities that would seem to be as technologically advanced as any in North America. It's an extraordinary place, and I hope to return soon.

London

Quote of the day

Dave Hickey in Air Guitar:

The presumption of art’s essential ‘goodness’ is nothing more than a political fiction that we employ to solicit taxpayers’ money for public art education, and for the public housing of works of art that we love so well their existence is inseparable from the texture of the world in which we live. These are worthy and indispensable projects. No society with even half a heart would even think to ignore them. But the presumption of art’s essential 'goodness' is a conventional trope. It describes nothing. Art education is not redeeming for the vast majority of students, nor is art practice redeeming for the vast majority of artists. The 'good' works of art that reside in our museums reside there not because they are 'good,' but because we love them. The political fiction of art’s virtue means only this: the practice and exhibition of art has had beneficial public consequence in the past. It might in the future. So funding them is worth the bet. That’s the argument: art is good, sort of, in a vague, general way. Seducing oneself into believing in art’s intrinsic 'goodness,' however, is simply bad religion, no matter what the rewards. It is bad cult religion when professing one’s belief in art’s 'goodness' becomes a condition of membership in the art community.

Dark Harvest Song

Dark Harvest Song

 Featuring Wagner, Strauss, Shawn Greenlee, Boulez, John Luther Adams, Justin Bieber, Merzbow, and Stockhausen.

Created for Brandon Stosuy's Dark Harvest night at Veronica's, Greenpoint, Nov. 21, 2010. No rights reserved.

Listen to This UK

The UK edition of Listen to This arrives in stores this week. Next week I'll be in London, lecturing at the British Library at 1PM on Nov. 30 and reading at Foyles that evening. On Dec. 1 I will be at Daunt Books in Marylebone. Reminder: I have an audio guide for the book and also an explanatory video for Chapter 2.

Sonic youth

Will Robin, whose blog Seated Ovation is based in Berlin this season, confronts the eternal question of how to attract younger people to classical music. His anecdotal sense, which matches mine, is that the German scene is far ahead of the American one. "Here, it’s just as natural for adults to attend the symphony as it is for adults to attend an art museum in the U.S.," he says. "And, generally, young people turn out for the Berlin Philharmonic. There’s an especially large surplus of the 25-35 crowd who dress well and seem culturally refined."

The rough video above gives a sense of the atmosphere at DG's Yellow Lounge events.

Georg Friedrich Haas

"Darkness Audible"

by Alex Ross  

The New Yorker, Nov. 29, 2010.

 

It has been a good year for weird music in New York. Works from the avant-garde end of the spectrum, long deemed a ghastly mutation of the great classical tradition, have lately made some headway with the public. In May, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic sold out three performances of György Ligeti’s absurdist opera Le Grand Macabre, which bears about the same relation to Puccini as Francis Bacon does to Norman Rockwell. The same orchestra played an all-Varèse program at the Lincoln Center Festival in July, to an exuberant crowd. A few weeks earlier, Make Music New York presented Iannis Xenakis’s percussion sextet Persephassa on and around Central Park Lake, with several hundred listeners drifting about in rowboats. And last month Gilbert’s Philharmonic delivered an explosive rendition of Magnus Lindberg’s 1985 piece Kraft, which raises a din not only from conventional instruments but also from discarded auto parts. (Edkins Auto Scrap, on Staten Island, was the chief supplier.) A few people fled the hall at the first brightly screaming chords, but the vast majority stayed and, in a scene seldom witnessed at Avery Fisher Hall, lingered to discuss what they had heard. Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic’s president, was sitting behind me, and afterward an elderly woman approached him, wagging her finger. “Fan-tas-tic,” she said. Perhaps audiences are finally beginning to approach twentieth-century music with the same open-mindedness that they have long accorded twentieth-century painting.

I can’t think of another explanation for the fact that the JACK Quartet—a youthful group that has made its reputation almost entirely with avant-garde fare—routinely fills halls for performances of Georg Friedrich Haas’s Third String Quartet, which makes such extreme demands on players and audience alike that at one concert in Pasadena listeners were required to sign a waiver absolving the venue of legal responsibility. The work is subtitled In iij. Noct., a reference to the Third Nocturn of the old Roman Catholic Tenebrae service for Holy Week, which marked Christ’s sufferings and death with the gradual extinguishing of candles. Haas, who grew up in Tschagguns, a Catholic village in the Austrian Alps, asks for total darkness during performances of his quartet, the score specifying that even emergency lights should be covered.

In September, I saw, or didn’t see, a JACK performance of In iij. Noct. at the Austrian Cultural Forum, on East Fifty-second Street. When the blackout began, I initially felt a fear such as I’ve never experienced in a concert hall: it was like being sealed in a tomb. No wonder the members of JACK usually try out a brief spell of darkness with each audience, to see if anyone exhibits signs of distress. (Indeed, one young man sheepishly got up and left.) Yet the fear subsides when the music begins. The performers, who are positioned in the corners of the room, seem to map the space with tones, like bats using echolocation to navigate a lightless cave. They have memorized the score in advance, and it is an unusual document: Haas sets out eighteen musical “situations”—with detailed instructions for improvising on pre-set motifs, chords, and string textures—and a corresponding series of “invitations,” whereby the players signal one another that they are ready to proceed from one passage to the next.

Often, the music borders on noise: the strings emit creaks and groans, clickety swarms of pizzicato, shrill high notes, moaning glissandos. At other times, it attains an otherworldly beauty, as the players spin out glowing overtone harmonies. Toward the end comes a string-quartet arrangement of one of Carlo Gesualdo’s Responsories for the Tenebrae service (“I was like an innocent lamb led to the slaughter . . .”). That music is four hundred years old, and yet, with its disjointed tonal  language, it sounded no less strange than the contemporary score that surrounded it. Weirdness is in the ear of the beholder.

 

In the past decade, Haas, who is now fifty-seven and living in Basel, Switzerland, has emerged as one of the major European composers of his generation. He is allied with the French spectralist school, which draws musical material from a close analysis of overtones and other properties of sound. Haas also esteems various American experimental composers, particularly those who are concerned with microtonality, the division of the octave into more than the usual twelve pitches. In this way, he bridges a gap between American and European musical communities that historically have had little to say to each other. What sets him apart from many of his European contemporaries is that he is not afraid of theatrical gestures, opulent expanses of sound, landscapes on an almost Wagnerian scale. Not for him the studiously fragmented modernist discourse that Ligeti once defined as “event—pause—event.” He is an esoteric Romantic, dwelling on the majesty and terror of the sublime.

On November 12th, I went up to EMPAC—the dazzlingly high-tech performance complex at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York—to hear Haas’s in vain (2000), a work for twenty-four instruments which unfolds in a continuous seventy minutes. The performers were from the Argento Chamber Ensemble, which, under the direction of Michel Galante, has become an essential source of adventurous new music in New York. (The JACK’s September rendition of In iij. Noct. was part of a Haas mini-festival that Galante curated.) The Rensselaer hall, which has warmly precise acoustics, is ideal for Haas: his whispers and roars came across with extreme clarity.

In vain is a narrative of oppositions, setting light against darkness, dissonance against pure intervals, modern tuning against natural resonances. It begins with rapid, swirling patterns, like snow in high wind. Toward the end of the opening section, Haas asks that the lights in the hall be gradually turned down, signalling a shift into a different realm: the instruments abandon equal-tempered tuning and follow the overtone series. (If you pinch a stretched rubber band exactly in the middle and twang it, the tone goes up an octave; if you pinch it according to smaller fractions, the remainder of the harmonic series results.) Horns and trombones eventually take up a cascading theme that has an open-air, Alpine quality: Wagner, in the prelude to Rheingold, unfurls a similar sequence of intervals. Piercing chords on an accordion also hint at the premodern world.

Yet Haas is no nostalgist or sentimentalist. Just when the music seems to attain a state of primordial tranquillity, trembling sounds lead to a recurrence of the “snowstorm.” There is a huge slowdown, as if a computer simulation were malfunctioning. From an almost total standstill, the halo-like overtones reëmerge, with the lights again going down. Then comes one of the most animally thrilling episodes that any composer has created since Ligeti was at the height of his powers. As in the Third String Quartet, players cannot see the score, and so they work from memorized modules. At the climax, all these shimmering fragments are derived from a fundamental C, meaning that the music accumulates a glorious sheen, like a new dawn of tonality. Repeated gong strokes add to the sense of elemental ritual. A revelation is at hand. But it all goes awry: notes bend from their “natural” paths, the lights come back up, the frantically scurrying figures return, and, after several herky-jerky accelerations and decelerations, the music abruptly switches off. And you finally understand the title: a new kind of beauty seems ready to come into the world, but in the light of day it falters, and we end up back where we started.

Haas wrote in vain in the wake of the rise of the right-wing Freedom Party in the 1999 Austrian elections: the piece conveyed, in part, his despair in the face of decaying hopes for social progress. The title also bears a trace of Biblical injunction, a warning of the wages of pride. Yet that exalting glimpse of a nocturnal paradise of sound lingers in the mind. This modern masterwork transforms the concert hall into a place of shuddering mystery, suggesting that the way of truth goes through the dark.

 

Footnote: Audio excerpt.

EPS returns to LA

On the occasion of his first visit to the Los Angeles Philharmonic since his farewell in April 2009, Esa-Pekka Salonen tells the story of Bluebeard's Castle. (Via Opera Chic.)

Miscellany: Dark Harvest, etc.

The New York Times has a brief video of Paul Jacobs playing the newly refurbished organ at Alice Tully. Jacobs's rendition of Bach's entire Clavier-Übung III on Tuesday night was quite a feat, although, as Jim Oestreich notes, he got off to a jittery start.... Nick Frisch, Noise's sometime Chinese correspondent, has a fascinating report in the Boston Globe on how Beijing audiences respond to a Westernized version of Chinese opera.... Blog worth noting: Killing Classical Music.... A Wagner in Israel Society is announced. (Via AC Douglas.) ... This weekend in NYC, Peter Lieberson's monodrama King Gesar has a return engagement at the Rubin Museum's new chamber-music series... William Steinway's diary from 1861 to 1896 will be available in an online edition next month, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. (Disclosure: my mom worked on this project as a volunteer.) ... Philadelphians, take note: the JACK Quartet is coming to town this Saturday with a program of Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, and Gregory Spears (a premiere of a piece inspired by an artist residency at the Buttonwood Psychiatric Unit in Burlington County, NJ). The venue is the Ice Box at Crane Arts.... Brandon Stosuy of Stereogum has organized another DJ evening, for Sunday night. The venue is Veronica's, 105 Franklin St., Greenpoint; also participating are Drew Daniel (Matmos), Angel Deradoorian (Dirty Projectors), and Alex Ross (Miss Teen Schnauzer). Our theme is "Dark Harvest," and I plan to go heavy on the Germanic noise: Einstürzende Neubauten, G. F. Haas, and, of course, Wagner.

Après moi, rien

Claudia La Rocco on Jennifer Homans's new history of ballet: "I've never been able to wrap my head around the critical impulse to proclaim an art form kaput.... Perhaps it is best seen as a railing against one's own mortality. Critics age, too, and for some of them the world that helped inspire their creative identity diminishes as they do, replaced by new generations who depart from what they held most dear."

The future of books

Baby, the pet iguana of the distinguished young violinist Lara St. John, catches up on his reading.

Beatles meme

Ann Powers has posted fifteen favorite Beatles songs. I can't resist following suit.

1. "A Hard Day's Night." The ninth greatest chord of the twentieth century.
2. "Yes It Is." Amazing texture.
3. "I Want to Hold Your Hand." A downward major scale conquers America.
4. "Michelle." Lamento!
5. "And I Love Her."
6. "Tomorrow Never Knows." Bring on the Stockhausen!
7. "For No One."
8. "All You Need Is Love." The title is now inseparable from Klaus Kinski.
9. "Eleanor Rigby." If only string ensembles had been strictly rationed in rock/pop from then on.
10. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." More lamento!
11. "Julia."
12. "Helter Skelter." Beatles hardcore.
13. "A Day in the Life." Xenakis!
14. "Revolution 9." John Cage!
15. "Something." What Ann said.

Milhaud comes home

Photograph: Chris Brubeck

The Metropolitan Symphony, an energetic and progressive civic ensemble in Minnesota, is presenting this Sunday a ninetieth-birthday tribute to Dave Brubeck. In the course of preparing for the event, Bill Schrickel, the Metropolitan's music director (also the acting principal bassist of the Minnesota Orchestra), received the above photograph of a remarkable self-portrait by Darius Milhaud, which has long been a prized possession of Brubeck's. Milhaud taught the jazz master at Mills College, in Oakland, and became a close friend. In the 1950s, Brubeck and his wife, Iola, set about building a home in Oakland, and one day Milhaud asked them to reserve "one square foot" for him, because in his wanderings he had come to feel homeless, and, he said, "I want to have some place I can stand and say, 'This is my own.'" In 1958, Milhaud visited the finished home and saw the "Milhaud place"—a spot in the hearth of the living-room fireplace. The next day, he sent along the self-portrait, all the lines of which are themes from his jazz-classical masterpiece, La Création du monde. The inscription says: "To the 7 Brubecks, the owner of the square foot. Souvenir of Création du monde, Milhaud 1958." The Brubecks had the portrait engraved in copper and placed it in the hearth. They subsequently moved east, but Milhaud lives with them to this day. 

Avant-Hudson

The view from EMPAC, in Troy, New York.

Nielsen moment

Michael Schønwandt conducts the Danish National Symphony.

The book tour for Listen to This is winding down. I'd have posted more zany pictures and anecdotes along the way, but a persistent head cold laid me low for a while. As it happens, several remaining events will place me in conjunction with colleagues in le Monde de Pop. On Monday, Nov. 15, I will appear alongside Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker's pop critic, at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. On Nov. 20, at the Miami Book Fair, I'll share a stage with the iconic rock critic Greil Marcus, who has a new collection of writings on Bob Dylan. And on Nov. 22, at Housing Works Café in NYC, I'll join a reading for Best Music Writing 2010, of which I'm honored to be a part. Also present will be such rock/pop eminences as Ann Powers (editor of the volume), Robert Christgau, Jody Rosen, Greg Tate, and Sasha again. I thought I'd take the opportunity to muse about my extra-classical adventures.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has a perceptive obituary.

Marini: Passacaglio à 4

Biagio Marini, Passacaglio à 4; Monica Huggett leading the Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists; Avie 2202.

A looming catastrophe for UK music schools? This Daily Telegraph story suggests as much, although the figures are disputed.... "As simple, seductive, and beautiful as breathing": Andrew Patner praises A Midsummer Night's Dream at Lyric Opera of Chicago.... Joseph Horowitz throws some cold water on the Met.... Donald Rosenberg covers the crisis at Opera Cleveland.... Remembering the great Shirley Verrett.... Mark Stryker reports on another concert by striking Detroit Symphony players.... Jens Laurson, of ionarts, interviews Rudolf Buchbinder, in feisty mood. Editors at G. Henle Verlag respond to being called "morons." ... Another bracing new score by Andrew Norman, one of the most gifted of younger American composers: The Companion Guide to Rome, for string trio.... Tomorrow night at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC, Taka Kigawa digs into the archives of the Second Viennese School.... On Sunday morning, Charles Rosen lectures on "Chopin's Last Years" at the 92nd St. Y.... Worth exploring: the work of composer, vocalist, and dancer Gabrielle Herbst. She appears on Nov. 17 at Roulette.

In the late 1980s I was an announcer at WHRB, the Harvard student radio station, hosting a program called Music Since 1900 and organizing "orgies," or comprehensive continuous surveys, of Britten, Nielsen, Shostakovich, Ligeti, and Mahler. On a more dubious note, I was responsible for an event called Schnorgy (works of Schnebel, Schnabel, and Schnittke) and an Ecstatic Radio Fantasia on Robert Ashley's "She Was a Visitor" (sample here). I'm ever grateful to WHRB for widening my musical horizons: as I recount in Listen to This, DJs in the station's jazz and rock departments broke down my lifelong resistance to non-classical music. WHRB — and in particular David Elliott, an alumnus and longtime guardian of the station — also led me to my present vocation: I made my debut as a music critic in a 1988 Program Guide, reviewing Robert Simpson's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies on Hyperion. Tomorrow afternoon (Nov. 10, 1-6PM) I'll be hosting Afternoon Concert on WHRB. My rather hectic playlist, ranging from the Eroica to Rothko Chapel, can be found below. Tomorrow evening I'll do a reading at Harvard Book Store.

Book tour finale (On dabbling in pop)

The book tour for Listen to This is winding down. I'd have posted more zany pictures and anecdotes along the way, but a persistent head cold laid me low for a while. As it happens, several remaining events will place me in conjunction with colleagues in le Monde de Pop. On Monday, Nov. 15, I will appear alongside Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker's pop critic, at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. On Nov. 20, at the Miami Book Fair, I'll share a stage with the iconic rock critic Greil Marcus, who has a new collection of writings on Bob Dylan. And on Nov. 22, at Housing Works Café in NYC, I'll join a reading for Best Music Writing 2010, of which I'm honored to be a part. Also present will be such rock/pop eminences as Ann Powers (editor of the volume), Robert Christgau, Jody Rosen, Greg Tate, and Sasha again. I thought I'd take the opportunity to muse about my extra-classical adventures.

For Henryk Górecki

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has a perceptive obituary.

CD of the week: Monica Huggett in Italy

Marini: Passacaglio à 4

Biagio Marini, Passacaglio à 4; Monica Huggett leading the Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists; Avie 2202.

Miscellany: Shirley Verrett, etc.

A looming catastrophe for UK music schools? This Daily Telegraph story suggests as much, although the figures are disputed.... "As simple, seductive, and beautiful as breathing": Andrew Patner praises A Midsummer Night's Dream at Lyric Opera of Chicago.... Joseph Horowitz throws some cold water on the Met.... Donald Rosenberg covers the crisis at Opera Cleveland.... Remembering the great Shirley Verrett.... Mark Stryker reports on another concert by striking Detroit Symphony players.... Jens Laurson, of ionarts, interviews Rudolf Buchbinder, in feisty mood. Editors at G. Henle Verlag respond to being called "morons." ... Another bracing new score by Andrew Norman, one of the most gifted of younger American composers: The Companion Guide to Rome, for string trio.... Tomorrow night at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC, Taka Kigawa digs into the archives of the Second Viennese School.... On Sunday morning, Charles Rosen lectures on "Chopin's Last Years" at the 92nd St. Y.... Worth exploring: the work of composer, vocalist, and dancer Gabrielle Herbst. She appears on Nov. 17 at Roulette.

Returning ghost

In the late 1980s I was an announcer at WHRB, the Harvard student radio station, hosting a program called Music Since 1900 and organizing "orgies," or comprehensive continuous surveys, of Britten, Nielsen, Shostakovich, Ligeti, and Mahler. On a more dubious note, I was responsible for an event called Schnorgy (works of Schnebel, Schnabel, and Schnittke) and an Ecstatic Radio Fantasia on Robert Ashley's "She Was a Visitor" (sample here). I'm ever grateful to WHRB for widening my musical horizons: as I recount in Listen to This, DJs in the station's jazz and rock departments broke down my lifelong resistance to non-classical music. WHRB — and in particular David Elliott, an alumnus and longtime guardian of the station — also led me to my present vocation: I made my debut as a music critic in a 1988 Program Guide, reviewing Robert Simpson's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies on Hyperion. Tomorrow afternoon (Nov. 10, 1-6PM) I'll be hosting Afternoon Concert on WHRB. My rather hectic playlist, ranging from the Eroica to Rothko Chapel, can be found below. Tomorrow evening I'll do a reading at Harvard Book Store.