Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Organo con forza

The bracing organ sounds in the joke entry below come from a two-CD issue on the Phono Suecia label, with the brilliant Swedish organist Hans-Ola Ericsson — protagonist of one of the finest recorded surveys of Messiaen's organ music — playing works of Ligeti, Sven-David Sandström, Arne Mellnäs, and various others. No recording in my collection demonstrates more vividly the organ's capacity to produce an extraordinary variety of timbres, or, on a more basic level, to scare everybody to death. The set opens with Ericsson's own work Melody to the Memory of a Lost Friend XIII, first heard in 1985. It's the source of the huge cluster crescendo in my peculiar tribute to Kate and Wills, which also contains a reprise of the "Dark Harvest Song." The opening fanfare is, of course, from Shostakovich's Salyut, Ispaniya.

Fanfare for the Royal Wedding (world premiere)

Fanfare for the Royal Wedding

What manner of music will be chosen for the royal wedding tomorrow? Details are top-secret, although Christopher Warren-Green, the music director of the London Chamber Orchestra, promises that the program will "extremely beautiful, and fitting." Alas, these stock phrases suggest that the avant-garde end of the musical spectrum will be neglected. I suspect that it is too late to submit a score for the nuptial hootenanny, but I offer here a Fanfare that I composed for the occasion. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I assembled it, but the boundary between composition and assemblage has of course been problematized in this post-postmodern age. Apologies to Dmitri Shostakovich, Hans-Ola Ericsson, Arne Mellnäs, Jan Morthenson, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Richard Wagner, Merzbow, Justin Bieber, and Magnus Lindberg.

Previously: Tristan + Isolde.

In praise of Debussy

"He is as perfect as antiquity or Mr. Pater: one hears genius all the time, and I know of no sensation more delicious: I felt I was listening to music for the first time."

— George Moore to Maud Cunard, 1916, after hearing Ibéria

Miscellany: Durham, LBJ, etc.

I went to see Bill Morrison's film The Miners' Hymns, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Voiceless, almost textless, only fifty-two minutes long, it is a beautiful and devastating work, having the weight of tragedy. There's one more showing at Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday.... Spring for Music, Tom Morris's festival of inventive orchestral programming at Carnegie Hall, begins on May 6. On Thursday, Spring for Music hosts an online chat with composer Steven Stucky, whose concert drama August 4, 1964 will be played by the Dallas Symphony on May 11.... The Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, an ethnically diverse group under the direction of Jeri Lynne Johnson, presents a "jazz hot" program in Philadelphia on April 28: music of Milhaud and Stravinsky. Over the weekend comes the premiere of Paul Moravec's short opera Danse Russe, a comedy about the making of The Rite of Spring, with a libretto by our old friend the Hon. Terry Teachout.... Make Music New York has announced some events for the 2011 edition of its midsummer musical jamboree: John Luther Adams's Inuksuit in Morningside Park, a participatory iPhone work by Aaron Siegel, and a rendition of Louis Andriessen's Hoketus on the outdoor balconies of the New York Stock Exchange.... There's a XenakisFest this week in Tempe, Arizona.... Starting on May 1, the Cleveland Orchestra will present three all-Italian programs at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Modern fare includes Scelsi, Dallapiccola, Berio, and the American premiere of Stefano Scodanibbio’s fourth string quartet.... Congratulations to the magnificent Manny Ax, who on Thursday will play his hundredth concert with the New York Philharmonic.

For Peter Lieberson

"My love, if I die and you don't," from Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs; Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony (Nonesuch 79954).

I am devastated to learn of the death of the composer Peter Lieberson. He passed away in Israel this morning, at the age of sixty-four, of complications arising from a lymphoma that had been diagnosed not long after the death of his beloved wife, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, in 2006. Despite the debilitating effects of the illness and its treatment, Lieberson went on composing; the New York Philharmonic presented his song cycle The World in Flower in 2009; the Boston Symphony played Songs of Love and Sorrow, his memorial for Lorraine, in 2010; and the National Symphony premiered Remembering JFK earlier this year. I am told that he was working on a percussion concerto when he died; he had been receiving medical treatment in Israel since last December.

Lieberson was a magician of harmony. He wrote with a rare combination of modernistic rigor and Romantic sensuality, the latter coming ever more to the fore in recent years. Among his major works are the First Piano Concerto, written for Peter Serkin; Drala, a sumptuous symphony in miniature; the opera Ashoka's Dream, which had its premiere in Santa Fe, in 1997; and the Neruda Songs, the last of which can be heard above. His father was Goddard Lieberson, the mighty president of Columbia Records, his mother the dancer Vera Zorina. He studied composition with the late Milton Babbitt, among others. He was also deeply versed in Tibetan Buddhism, and for a time ran a Buddhist meditation center in Nova Scotia. “What makes the human life so poignant is the recognition of its profound impermanence,’’ he told David Weininger last year.

I hope it's not indulgent to add that I had a personal connection with Peter. I took a course from him in college — a wonderfully discursive theory class in which we spent week after week admiring isolated chords in Schubert's "Erlkönig." He had the final word on my non-career as a composer, describing my end-of-term Sonatina as “most interesting and slightly peculiar.” Although I never again met Peter in person — I once saw him together with Lorraine in a crowd in Santa Fe but had an attack of shyness — we struck up a correspondence after Lorraine died. When I sent him a copy of my book The Rest Is Noise, he sent, in return, the manuscript reproduced above, which I will always treasure. The original hardback edition lacked any mention his music, and for the paperback I decided to insert a sentence about Neruda Songs, comparing it to Strauss's Four Last Songs. It is now the last work named in the book.

No one could defeat death

"Den Tod niemand zwingen kunnt," from BWV 4, "Christ lag in Todesbanden"; John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists (Soli Deo Gloria 128, Vol. 22 of the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage).

Nietzsche was wise

"When one is young, one deifies and despises, without that art of nuance which is the finest gain in life, and understandably one must atone hard for having so battered people and things with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the very worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly duped and abused, until the subject learns to put a little art into his feelings, even to make a stab at the artificial: that is what the real artists of life do."

                              — Beyond Good and Evil

Fricka knows (II, expanded)

As noted below, I have a piece in this week's New Yorker on a single, highly charged moment in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: a ten-bar passage that plays in the orchestra at the end of Act II, Scene 1 of Die Walküre. Essentially, I've tried to write a piece that approaches Wagner in microcosm, rather than from the grand historical perspective that so often dominates discussion of the composer. Aiding me in this quest are the scholars Thomas Grey and Barry Millington, the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe (who sings Fricka in the Met Walküre that opens on Friday), and the conductors Justin Brown, Simone Young, Simon Rattle, Christoph von Dohnányi, and James Levine (on the podium this Friday, if all goes well). All offered their thoughts about the music. Accompanying the article is a podcast with the New Yorker's Blake Eskin.

Starting at 7:20 in the YouTube video above, you can hear most of the music I discuss in the piece. Fricka, Wotan's wife and the goddess of marriage, has just conducted an interrogation in which she takes apart her husband's grandiose scheme to win back the cursed ring. She leaves him in a psychologically shattered state, spiraling toward the self-accusatory monologue of the following scene. You first hear Fricka's closing arioso ("Deiner ew'gen Gattin"), in which she demands that Brünnhilde, Wotan's loyal Valkyrie, uphold her eternal values and allow the rebellious hero Siegmund to die. Wotan swears that Brünnhilde will do so ("Nimm den Eid"). Then come those ten remarkable bars in E-flat major (see also the post below). Finally, Fricka's parting words to Brünnhilde—"Your father has something to tell you" was Blythe's wonderful paraphrase to me—and the orchestral announcement of the motif of the Curse. Rosalind Plowright is Fricka, Bryn Terfel is Wotan.

I used a couple of favorite older recordings on the podcast. For "Deiner ew'gen Gattin," I chose Margarete Klose, recorded in 1938 as part of EMI's incomplete prewar Walküre set. Klose is even more penetrating on this rare recording from the 1940 Bayreuth Festival, which a YouTube poster retrieved from an undisclosed source. (I consulted a couple of discographic experts, who believe it to be authentic.) For Wotan's monologue, I chose Hans Hotter on the 1955 Bayreuth Ring, which many Wagner connoisseurs now prize as the one Ring to rule them all, to take a phrase from Tolkien. Hotter's delivery of the lines "Endloser Grimm! Ewiger Gram!"—"Endless rage! Eternal grief!"—tears at the heart, and Joseph Keilberth's orchestra positively boils behind him.

O heiliige Schmach!

I'm fascinated by the dissonance that rumbles in the orchestra as this passage begins. First, the double basses and timpani play octave Cs, which are sustained throughout. Over that drone there appears a chord of D-flat major, creating a semitone clash with the C. Then a D-natural — the second note in the rising bass-trumpet line — sounds against the D-flat, dissonance doubled down. And when a C-flat is added to the D-flat harmony, it, too, jars with the fundamental C. After Wotan's first cry ("O heilige Schmach!"), the sequence is repeated, now with a chord based on G-flat. For a moment, you effectively have C major colliding with G-flat major. These clashes are sufficiently spread out in the orchestra that you don't hear them as painful conflicts: it's more an immense, vague groaning, as Wotan's world is loosed from its moorings.

Miscellany: Philly crisis, etc.

What is happening at the Philadelphia Orchestra? Peter Dobrin gives some essential background and context.... Early reactions to the world premiere of Stockhausen's Sonntag in Köln: Seth Colter Walls, Shirley Apthorp, Claus Spahn.... Harpa Concert Hall, the new home of the Iceland Symphony, opens in Reykjavík next month; the façade is by Olafur Eliasson, the acoustics by Artec. Not long ago the project seemed doomed to extinction on account of Iceland's economic collapse. Here's my 1995 review of the Icelanders at Carnegie Hall, with Osmo Vänskä conducting.... Kagel Nacht, a freewheeling theatrical celebration of the work of Mauricio Kagel, embarks on an East Coast tour this week.... The Urban Remix project has come to Times Square.... Tonight at St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia, the College of New Jersey Orchestra and Chorale will collaborate with Argento in presenting Mozart's Requiem together with Georg Friedrich Haas's Klangräume ("sound spaces"), which were written to tie together Mozart's original fragmentary score.... Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio has begun a remastering of Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1953 RAI recording of the Ring.... I'm very happy to have helped inspire Michael Century's forthcoming performance of Ann Southam's late-period masterpiece Simple Lines of Enquiry. It's at EMPAC, in Troy, NY, on April 25th.... The musicologist Alexander Silbiger has supervised an online thematic catalogue of the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi, whose pivotal role in the history of Western music is still not sufficiently appreciated. I'm presently delving into Tactus's monumental 12-CD box set of Frescobaldi's complete keyboard works.

Fricka knows

Secret Passage. The New Yorker, April 25, 2011.

Bonus track: Podcast.

Wagner gazes upon Australia

In 1877 Wagner received a letter from an Australian correspondent, telling him of a Melbourne performance of Lohengrin. This was his reply. Period photograph of Melbourne from the State Library of New South Wales.

Most honored sir!

Your news has pleased me very much, and I cannot refrain from thanking you for it. 

May you see to it that my works are performed among you in English; only then can they be understood intimately by an English-speaking public. We are hoping that this will happen in London. 

We (my family and I) were uncommonly interested in the enclosed views of Melbourne; as you were so kind as to offer to let us have more, I assure you that you would thereby delight me greatly. 

Please extend my compliments to Herr Lyster [the promoter] and even in your distant part of the world may you maintain a friendly feeling toward

your much obliged 

Richard Wagner

Bayreuth, 22 October 1877

My translation; the original text is in Jennifer Marshall, "Richard Wagner's Letter to Australia," Miscellanea Musicologica 14 (July 1985).

Miners' hymns

Above is a trailer for Bill Morrison's film The Miners' Hymns, a melancholy celebration of coal-mining culture in the great northern English city of Durham. The film is centered on the Durham Miners' Gala, an annual summertime meeting which, from the late nineteenth century until the Thatcher era, brought thousands of celebrants into the city. The gala was famous not only for its union activism but for its carnival atmosphere, its massed choral singing, and its myriad brass bands. Morrison's film has a soundtrack by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson — a brooding ambient creation, recorded in Durham Cathedral, for large brass ensemble, organ, percussion, and electronic sounds. I became aware of Jóhannsson's music when I picked up his gently hypnotic disc Englabörn at 12 Tónar in Reykjavík in 2005; I've had mixed experiences with his records since, but this one packs a considerable punch. Although I can't yet comment on Morrison's film, I've relished his masterly manipulation of "found" footage since I saw his contribution to John Moran's The Death Train of Baron von Frankenstein at La MaMa in 1993; he is best known for Decasia, his film symphony with Michael Gordon. The Miners' Hymns plays at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.

Interestingly, The Miners' Hymns is not the only Durham mining disc recently to cross my desk. NMC, the superb English new-music label, has issued a CD version of Big Meeting, an hour-long tape-collage composition by the Australian-born composer David Lumsdaine. In 1971, Lumsdaine and several of his students — he was teaching at Durham University at the time — set out with microphones to create an "electronic poem" based on that year's Big Meeting (as the gala is also called), recording hymns, songs, speeches, conversations, and brass bands all around the city. The piece, which was finished only in 1978, was originally in quadrophonic sound; Lumsdaine faced difficulties in attempting to convert the work to stereo, and a planned LP release never came about. For NMC, he has finally made a full digital remastering that seems a convincing alternative to the quadrophonic original. This YouTube trailer gives a flavor of it. Big Meeting is remarkable not only as a technical feat — I can't think of a electronic work that gives a more vivid sense of movement within a particular geography —but also as a haunting evocation of a lost world. If the sound of the miners' hymn in Durham Cathedral doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you must be one of the Koch brothers. Although the miners' gala carries on, its raison d'être is gone; the last of the Durham mining pits was closed in 1992.

Merci beaucoup, domo arigato

Belatedly, I'd like to offer thanks for two awards that The Rest Is Noise recently received: a Music Pen Club prize in Japan and the Grand Prix des Muses in France. I obviously owe a particular debt to the translators — Toshie Kakinuma and Laurent Slaars — who prepared the editions that won favorable notice. Slaars, not only a brilliant translator but also a singer who appears on several significant recordings by William Christie, accepted the Grand Prix on my behalf. The ceremony took place at the Fondation Singer-Polignac, with the great French music authority Claude Samuel presiding. As it happens, the Princesse de Polignac, née Winnaretta Singer, figures prominently in my narrative as a benefactor of twentieth-century Parisian music. This reminds me that I must finally look into Sylvia Kahan's book In Search of New Scales, about Winnaretta's husband, Edmond de Polignac, Proustian aristocrat and codifier of octatonic composition. Kahan earlier wrote Music's Modern Muse, a splendid biography of the munificent princess.

Nietzsche plays #operaplot

The Omniscient Mussel has again unleashed her annual Twitter #operaplot competition, with Eric Owens serving as this year's judge and prizes on offer from dozens of opera houses around the world. The idea is to summarize a well-known opera — or an obscure one, if you dare — in, at most, one hundred forty characters. We should acknowledge that the godfather of #operaplot was the noted philosopher and aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in his 1888 pamphlet The Case of Wagner, offered these jokey plot summaries of Wagner operas:

A Wagnerian ballet may drive one to despair—or virtue! [Tannhäuser.]

One should never know whom exactly one has married. [Lohengrin.]

Old corrupted females prefer to be redeemed by chaste youths. [Parsifal.]

"But why didn't you tell me this before! Nothing simpler than that!" [Tristan.]

It may have the direst consequences if one doesn't go to bed at the right time. [Lohengrin again.]

Let's hope that Miss Mussel and Mr. Owens will consider giving Prof. Nietzsche a posthumous honorable mention. He deserves no less. In any case, the competition will be accepting entries through the end of the week.

A Frank Martin moment

Dylan in China

I'm not the first to point out that Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, has a dubious take on Bob Dylan's recent concerts in China. Much has been made of the fact that Dylan received approval to play in China only after the "content" of the shows had been approved—presumably, the setlists. (Here's the official statement.) Dowd professes to be outraged that Dylan failed to defy the regime with a string of protest songs. She writes, "The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout." She then asks why Dylan didn't offer "Hurricane," a tale of a man falsely accused, alongside comments about the detention of Ai Weiwei. She seems to assume that Dylan was barred from singing such songs, although I have yet to see evidence that the authorities asked for changes before approving the setlists, which included "Desolation Row," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

Let's recall that in 2008, at a concert in Shanghai, Björk caused a major controversy by shouting "Tibet! Tibet!" after a performance of "Declare Independence." It was a brave gesture, but the aftermath was frightening, and it led to a temporary ban on foreign musical acts. You can ask whether musicians should now be refusing to play in the PRC, but to expect an artist to issue incendiary statements while on tour is the worst sort of armchair moralism. In any case, Dylan almost never makes topical comments from the stage, and the notion that he would launch into a critique of the Chinese regime will amuse anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to him in the past twenty years. As for those protest anthems, they don't figure strongly on Dylan's setlists these days — here is an index of the songs he sang last year — and, as Adam Minter points out, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind" wouldn't have been very relevant to the Chinese situation even if Dylan had trotted them out. ("Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call"?) Indeed, their residual Popular Front stylings might have been something of a comfort to the Party elders. Rather more unnerving, in the present climate, would have been a number from Dylan's sizeable religious catalogue. Strange to say, that's what he offered, at the beginning of each of his Chinese shows: "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking." The current version of the song includes these lines:

    Jesus is coming
    Coming back to gather his jewels
    We're living by the golden rule
    Whoever's got the gold rules

You'd almost think it was a deliberate gesture. Then again, Bob began his last show of 2010 — at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut — with the same song.

Update: Ulysses Stone attended both Chinese shows and has a passionate report. He also points out that the last time Dylan performed "Hurricane" was in 1976. There are many more reactions at Expecting Rain. Further undermining Dowd's thesis is the fact that "Blowin' in the Wind" was featured in a report on Chinese state TV. If Dylan had played it in Beijing, the apparatchiks would probably have smiled and nodded along.

The corner of Strauss and Stravinsky

Yes, this is a real intersection in Silver Spring, Maryland. Neither composer would have been pleased, but the pairing has a certain pluralistic genius. Nearby in this suburban musical heaven are Brahms Avenue, Verdi Court, Beethoven Way, Schubert Drive, Copland Court, and Trebleclef Lane.

Stockhausen's Sonntag

Glimpses of the first complete production of Sonntag, from Stockhausen's Licht cycle, at the Köln Opera. Part I opens tomorrow night, Part II on Sunday, appropriately. The production is by La Fura dels Baus. (You can turn on translations in the "CC" setting on the video.)

Nightafternight playlist*

CDs in current rotation:

— Liszt,  Années de Pèlerinage; Louis Lortie (Chandos)
— Liszt, Piano Sonata, etc.; Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)
— Restless, Endless, Tactless: Johanna Beyer and the Birth of American Percussion Music; Meehan / Perkins Duo and the Baylor Percussion Group (New World)
— Grażyna Bacewicz, Piano Quintets and Piano Sonata No. 2; Krystian Zimerman, etc. (DG)
— Ben Johnston, String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, 10; Kepler Quartet (New World)
— Donnacha Dennehy, Grá agus Bás, That the Night Come; Dawn Upshaw, Alan Pierson, Crash Ensemble (Nonesuch, out May 3)
— Meredith Monk, Songs of Ascension (ECM, out May 16)
— Mompou, Música Callada, Secreto; Jenny Lin (Steinway)
— Striggio, Mass in 40 and 60 Parts; I Fagiolini (Decca)

*Steve Smith, founder of the genre, explains it here. These aren't necessarily full-on recommendations, although they may become so; see my CD Picks.

Gubaidulina at the Philharmonic

Anne-Sophie Mutter is currently playing Sofia Gubaidulina's In Tempus Praesens with Michael Tilson Thomas and the New York Philharmonic. Above is an excerpt from a video in which composer and soloist talk about the work. There will be more Gubaidulina at the Philharmonic in two weeks, when Kurt Masur, Cynthia Phelps, and Rebecca Young reprise her Two Paths, the two-viola concerto that had its premiere in 1999. I wrote a column on Gubaidulina back in 1997.