Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Where's Pablo?

Present somewhere in this throng are Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Picasso, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Satie, Milhaud, Man Ray, Miró, Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Aaron Copland, the Prince of Monaco, and the Princesse de Polignac.

The image comes from the richly stocked American Mavericks website, allied to the public-radio series of the same title. I've looked at this site many times, but I only just discovered that it has some spellbinding film clips relating to the avant-garde showman George Antheil, who began his career as one of the chief Futurist noisemakers of twenties Paris and ended it as a Hollywood film scorer, love-advice columnist, and amateur torpedo inventor. The page linked here contains an interview with Paul Lehrman, who's restored the film that Fernand Léger made to accompany Antheil's Ballet mécanique, scored for sixteen player pianos, masses of percussion, and airplane propellers. The real find, something I'd been hoping to see for years, is an excerpt from Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 film L'Inhumaine, which tells of a Faustian scientist who starts raising people from the dead in an effort to win the favor of a famous opera singer. Having not seen the entire film, I can't elucidate the plot further, but what's apparently happening in this scene is that a crowd is demonstrating for and against the imperious diva (Georgette Leblanc). Where does Antheil come in? Some of the crowd shots were actually filmed during his Paris debut, on Oct. 4, 1923, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

As Lehrman tells it — repeating the story given in Antheil's wildly entertaining and sometimes wildly inaccurate autobiography Bad Boy of Music — L'Herbier showed up with his cameras at the concert, anticipating that a photogenic riot would occur. In fact, the researches of ballet historian Lynn Garafola suggest that the whole thing was a setup. An advance piece in Figaro announced that the concert would be filmed and that a riot was not only expected but desired. Still, it's fun to see a high-class Parisian audience looking and acting like the crowd that went nuts during the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ten years before — yes, in the same space. I've tried and failed to glimpse the mesdames and messieurs named above; perhaps readers with high-tech equipment will have better luck.

On the same theme, see my old post about Edgard Varèse's appearance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Agenda 11/30-12/5

A good week for the music in NYC:

Nov. 29: Andromeda liberata, a concert-length serenata that may or may not be the work of Vivaldi, arrives at Zankel on the heels of a "wildly controversial" DG recording. Whoever wrote it (OK, I did), the Venice Baroque Orchestra under Andrea Marcon are destined to make a glorious noise.
Nov. 30: The composers of Bang on a Can, whose work seems to deepen with the passing years, collaborate with electronic artist DJ Spooky and director François Girard on the theater piece Lost Objects. It has its gala premiere tonight at BAM, with performances to follow Dec. 2-4. Iron your black stretch T.
Dec. 1: Till Fellner, the deft young Austrian pianist whose Well-Tempered Clavier on ECM was almost too pretty, rolls into Zankel with Liszt, Beethoven, Haydn, and the Bach.
Dec. 2: Rodelinda at the Met. La Fleming, La Daniels, Mehta, Blythe, Relyea, the works. Stephen Wadsworth, who directed a smokin' Xerxes at City Opera with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson a few years back, will try to repeat the Handel magic. Also tonight: David Robertson conducts the NY Philharmonic in Bartok's Second Violin Concerto (with Christian Tetzlaff),  Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, and some crazy thing by Beethoven.
Dec. 3: The haughty hotties at Trrill are recommending the regal young Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman (pictured above), who sings tonight at Weill Hall a deliriously tasteful program of Ravel's Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, Britten's Auden cycle On This Island, Montsalvatge's Canciones negras, songs of Copland and Bolcom, and, not to snub the Germans, Lieder of Joseph Marx. Essential: www.measha.com.
Dec. 4: The Arditti Quartet lights up Zankel with an irrepressibly tuneful program of Nancarrow's Third Quartet, Carter's Fifth,Ligeti's Second, and Helmut Lachenmann's Third, subtitled Grido ("Scream"). Same group plays diffferent program at LACMA in LA on Nov. 29 — part of the grand old Monday Evening Concerts series. (I found this out by Googling, not by looking at the Arditti's site or Colbert Artists' Arditti page. Similarly, there is a lack of good tour info on Till Fellner's page at ECM or the Venice Baroque Orchestra's page at DG.)
Dec. 5: I'm going on a wild new-music bender this afternoon, trying to see part or all of the following events: the premiere of Joshua Penman's Songs the Plants Taught Us at the New York Youth Symphony; an Arvo Pärt concert by the venerable Continuum ensemble, which played the composer back when he was a Soviet footnote; and Birtwistle's Pulse Shadows at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Noted

1. Hot pic of the ninety-one-year-old Licia Albanese chez Trrill.
2. Tim Johnson on music and national identity.
3. Alex Abramovich and I will be talking about the Dylan book on WNYC's Soundcheck Wednesday Dec. 1 at 2PM. Alas, NBC's Passions is on at the same time.

Did someone say turkey?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sonic quiet

Several years ago I looked on in horror as MTV pundit Gideon Yago sweated through an interview all five ferociously smart members of Radiohead. The memory of that encounter made me more than a little nervous in advance of my New Yorker College Tour interview with Sonic Youth, which took place last Saturday. In addition, I had a certain personal investment: the band's Daydream Nation was the second rock record I ever bought, during my belated discovery of non-classical music in college, and it permanently rearranged my view of the musical universe.

In the end, it went pretty well, despite several dumb questions from the interviewer. Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo have been playing together since 1981 (drummer Steve Shelley joined in 1984), and they muse on their long career with the ease and wit of people who have nothing left to prove. The most interesting part for me was when they talked about their creative process, which mixes conventional song-oriented work — filling in the outlines of an acoustic sketch — with a procedure much more like that of a jazz group or solitary composer. A lot of the time, they said, they simply set a process in motion — patterns and textures in collision — and see what emerges from the mix. They never talk about chords in the studio, they said; no one ever says, "OK, let's go to F." Yet the result is not nearly as dissonant as you might expect (ferociously dissonant as this band can be), because they nourish clear forms when they rise up. There's an obvious kinship with the working methods of the minimalists. Sonic Youth's new album, the semi-eponymous Sonic Nurse, has some of their sweetest melodies to date, alongside the usual hallucinatory soundscapes.

On the train back, I was happy to read in Arrive, the official magazine of Amtrak’s Acela Express, of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Quiet Car, which I rhapsodized in a previous post. (The irony of a Sonic Youth fan sitting in the Quiet Car is duly noted.) Quiet Car turns out to have been brainchild of Alma Goodwyn, pictured above. She is the deacon of a Philadelphia church and an activist on behalf of the homeless. After she worked with sympathetic passengers and conductors to create a Quiet Car on her regular commute, Amtrak made the institution official. “I just like to make things better if I can,” Goodwyn said. Alma Goodwyn is an American hero.

Give the gift of Popov

Leon Botstein's marvelous recording of Gavriil Popov's First Symphony, which I raved about back in September, is now in stores, on the Telarc label.

More non-breakthroughs

A few months back I noted how scientists are in the habit of touting musical "discoveries" which have long been commonplace among composers and musicologists. A new example arrives from The Guardian (link via Byzantium's Shores): "Why is Elgar's music for 'Land of Hope and Glory' so quintessentially English, while Debussy sounds so French? It is all because the music mimics the composer's native language, say scientists. The researchers studied the question because while many classical scores have a distinctly national feel, no one had put forward a good explanation for why that should be." No one? People have been obsessing over this question for centuries: writings on the subject would fill many volumes. Rousseau wrote in his Essay on the Origins of Languages: "At first there was no music at all other than melody, nor any other melody than the varied sound of speech, the accents formed the song, the quantities formed the meter, and one spoke as much by sounds and rhythm as by articulations and voices." Johann Gottfried Herder wrote prolifically on similar topics, noting how each country's language formed a body of folk song. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Bartok and Janacek were measuring with extraordinary precision how folk songs mirrored the rhythms of everyday speech and the qualities of particular languages. Unless there is some genuine methodological breakthrough that the writer has concealed, this is a non-event.

Cindy Adams moment

I looked out my window today and saw, many floors down, Bono holding a pizza on a truck. U2 was doing some sort of parade down Seventh Avenue. Only in New York.

Balanchine in every pot

The Right Venerable Maharajah Terry-Thierry Auguste Baron von Teachoutismus Ah Um has received official confirmation from the US Senate as our nation's first Secretary of Brahms. In all seriousness, I heartily congratulate Terry Teachout on his appointment to the National Council on the Arts. It's almost enough to make you think the Senate knows what it is doing.

Alex Ross, Alex Ross

Regarding the Google predicament I wrote about below, I am deeply touched by the outpouring of support from the bløgösphère, the blogizzosphere, and all the other spheres. Thanks to you all. Special thanks to Byzantium's Shores and Zeke's Gallery, who went above and beyond the bounds of duty. Here's hoping Google takes a page from Yahoo, which has the right idea. I promise now to shut up on this topic.