Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Pleasures and regrets

I've missed a slew of concerts because of a bout of flu — the Look and Listen festival and the Jacob TV shows, among others. (I've also fallen far behind on mail, new CDs, life, etc.) I did make it to the Met for Mark Morris's Orfeo, which I'll be writing about next week, and which I liked intensely. I'd recommend that New Yorkers go see it, but the remaining performances — indeed all performances in the Met's final week — have sold out. This week brings the usual dense cluster of new-music events, several of them free and open to the public at the Skirball Center at NYU: the American Composers Orchestra has its annual readings on Tuesday and Wednesday, City Opera presents Vox 2007 on Saturday and Sunday (here are video previews of Robert Aldridge's Elmer Gantry and Gordon Beeferman's The Rat Land), and the On the Edge opera showcase happens on Saturday night. There's also David Hanlon's Hold the Applause concert on Sunday, at VIM: Tribeca. Hanlon, you may remember, won the Rest Is Noise Classical Apocalypse 1970 contest.

Looking for Captain Ives

William Ives, Charles's Ives ancestor, arrived in Boston in 1635, just fifteen years after the voyage of the Mayflower. It is often stated in the literature that William Ives was a ship's captain, but I'm having trouble verifying this claim. There happens to be an entire blog devoted to William Ives and his descendants, and this entry suggests that Ives was a captain of the Colonial Militia, not of a ship; his stated profession was farming. The master of the ship Truelove, on which Ives arrived in America, was one Jo. Gibbs. For your information.

But skip the Il Divo

A good deal at Barnes and Noble: buy two classical CDs, get a third free.... A blog called Classical Convert looks at the music from the point of view of one who's twenty-six and started listening at twenty-three. He acknowledges: "Some modern stuff is full of weird combinations of notes which people will complain just sounds like garbage can lids clanking/cats wailing/people dying."... The redesigned site of Nico Muhly has a "news" feature that is suspiciously blog-like. Listen there to the "Agnus Dei" of his Bright Mass, and follow the link to his Guardian essay on English choral music (commissioned by guest editor Björk).... I was unable to include in my LA Phil piece Esa-Pekka Salonen's analysis of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "By the second sentence you have lost everybody. First sentence ["The world is all that is the case"]: OK, mm-hm, could be. Second sentence ["The world is the totality of facts, not of things"]: I'm not so sure."

Once upon a time

Courtesy of the WFMU blog, a completely astounding video of John Cage live on the CBS show I've Got a Secret, 1960.

Very big Bang

An e-mail from Bang on a Can brings news that this year's Bang on a Can Marathon is going to be over twenty-four hours long, beginning on the night of Saturday, June 2, and ending after sundown on June 3. The venue is the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. There will be music by John Luther Adams, Louis Andriessen, Christopher Adler, Derek Bermel, Jeffrey Brooks, Don Byron, Mary Ellen Childs, Mark Dancigers, Franco Donatoni, Brian Eno, John Fitz Rogers, David M. Gordon, Michael Gordon, Judd Greenstein, John King, Phil Kline, David Lang, Alvin Lucier, Missy Mazzoli, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Matt Tierney, JG Thirlwell, Galina Ustvolskaya, Edgard Varèse, Lois V Vierk, Julia Wolfe, Marcelo Zarvos, and Evan Ziporyn, and performances by Bang on a Can All-Stars, Iva Bittová, Bagpipe Orchestra, Robert Black, The Books, Don Byron, Clogs, Dälek, David Cossin, Eighth Blackbird, Ethel, Dominic Frasca, Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, Michael Harrison, Hartt Bass Band, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Vijay Iyer Quartet, Kyaw Kyaw Naing, Manorexia, Mashriq, Meehan/Perkins Duo, Juana Molina, Patti Monson, Now Ensemble, Odd Appetite, Milind Raikar, Real Quiet, red fish blue fish, Steven Schick, Mark Stewart, Mike Svoboda, TACTUS, Talujon Percussion Quartet, World Saxophone Quartet, Yo La Tengo, and the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Phew.

Saved by the bel

La Cieca has linked to this charmingly bad video of a sixteen-year-old Peruvian pop-star wannabe, who, in subsequent years, transmogrified into Juan Diego Flórez, the consummate bel-canto tenor of his generation. Moral: you never know where talent is going to come from.

Tristan Björk Agenda

Tonight in NYC, the Wordless Music series presents Real Quiet and the Books; ICE plays NYU composers at Merkin; and the Mannes Contemporary Music Festival opens. Tuesday night the NEC Percussion Ensemble invades Zankel, ICE presents Huang Ruo at Mo Pitkin's, a Paul Moravec piece is premiered at Mannes, and New York New Music Ensemble does Eight Songs for a Mad King. Wednesday you may choose among the LA Phil's Tristan Project, opening night of Mark Morris's Orfeo ed Euridice at the Met, Björk at Radio City, a Kyle Gann piece at MicroFest 2007, Reich's Drumming free at Mannes, ICE at the Tank, and the radically kitschy music of JacobTV at the Whitney at Altria. Thursday it's an all-Annie Gosfield program at Merkin and the opening night of the 2007 Look and Listen festival. Friday brings the Juilliard Student Composers Concert: works by Wei-Chieh Lin, Cristina Spinei, Daniel Colson, and Ryan Gallagher. Saturday night the Talea Ensemble makes its debut, with works of Anthony Cheung, Alexandre Lunsqui, Sciarrino, Harvey, and Grisey: Room 309 at Juilliard, 8PM. And on Sunday evening the excellent Jenny Lin is joined by Cornelius Dufallo and Yves Dharamraj for an all-Silvestrov program at Atrium.

Listening to:
— TIC: Works by the Common Sense Composers' Collective (Marc Mellits, Belinda Reynolds, Ed Harsh, Randall Woolf, Dan Becker, Carolyn Yarnell, John Halle), as played by the New Millennium Ensemble (Albany)
— Glenn Branca, Lesson No. 1, Dissonance, Bad Smells (Acute)
— Gershwin, Piano Concerto in F, Rhapsody in Blue, Cuban Overture; Jon Nakamatsu, piano, with Jeff Tyzik conducting the Rochester Philharmonic (Harmonia Mundi)
— Kalevi Aho, Tuba Concerto and Contrabassoon Concerto; Øystein Baadsvik and Lewis Lipnick, soloists, with the Norrköping Symphony and Bergen Philharmonic (BIS)

Slava

Mstislav Rostropovich, an overwhelming life force in the form of a cellist, died today in Moscow. Tim Page, in a fine appreciation in the Washington Post, quotes something that Rostropovich said to him in a 1982 interview: "There is too much emphasis on technical perfection nowadays, and not enough on what music is actually about — irony, joy, human suffering, love." And here's a vivacious chat that Charles Michener had with Rostropovich for The New Yorker in 2002: "When I am thirty-five years old, I feel life is so long—so lonnng! After that, so short!”

Sink down

Photo: Kira Perov

Some tickets remain for the L.A. Philharmonic's Tristan Project at Lincoln Center, none of them below $175. If you don't have that much cash lying around, you can still immerse yourself in Tristan via WNYC's week-long Tristan Mysteries series. Quoth the website: "Highlights include interviews with playwright Terrance McNally; anthropologist Helen Fisher; adult film actress/'Vivid Girl' (and Wagner fanatic) Savanna Samson; choreographer Mark Morris; and acclaimed video artist Bill Viola" — not to mention the bløgôsphëre's own Danny Felsenfeld, explaining the phenomenon of the "Tristan chord" with reference to music from Debussy to Radiohead. I wrote about the Paris Opera incarnation of the Sellars/Viola/Salonen Tristan in 2005, and I've done a quick survey of Salonen's CDs for the New Yorker website. If you're curious about Gustavo Dudamel, Salonen's successor in LA, you can hear him with his future orchestra via a webcast on KUSC on Sunday at 4PM Pacific time. An iTunes release of this same January 2007 concert, featuring Kodály's Dances of Galánta, Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman), and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, will arrive next month. Some random photos from my last L.A. trip follow the jump.

Dr. Mew

If you will permit me a kitty moment, I'd like to acknowledge the memory of Dr. James R. Richards, the author of the ASPCA Complete Guide to Cats, which we own. He died in a motorcycle accident on Tuesday — trying to swerve out of the way of a cat.