Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Dylan's Modern Times (in brief)

Final Theme. The New Yorker, September 18, 2006.

The Proms goes post-minimalist

If I understand this announcement correctly, next year's Last Night at the Proms will feature Daniel Bernard Roumain's Concerto for Laptop and Orchestra, or possibly one of Mason Bates's recent works mixing orchestral and laptop-generated electronic timbres. I may be mistaken.

...at the End of a Tragic Day...

"What have you to help you hold in a single thought reality and justice"? — Charles Olson, "This Is Yeats Speaking"

Previously: Speech found the ear..., Requiems
Concise commentary on the present: Sasha

Benchmark

As of today, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is exactly 250,000 words long. I placed a mousie toy on top of the manuscript to keep the kitties from losing interest and wandering away. My editor and I are looking for a similar device that will work on human beings. It's a big day: I've met the goal I set for myself twenty months ago, when, having finished a rough draft, I ran it through Word Count and discovered to my horror that I had produced 390,000 words. As you can see in a picture taken on that dark night, Penelope was frightened as well:

Advisory

The new season of The Wire begins on Sunday night. Alongside old themes of street crime, police work, and city politics, the greatest TV show in history introduces a new subject: education.

More: Jacob Weisberg writes a spot-on paean to the show.

Don't be too hard on yourself

The New York Times Magazine is publishing excerpts from Susan Sontag's diaries. Here is an entry for April 20, 1965:

another project: Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen. Buy records, read, do some work. I've been very lazy.

As all-devouring as Sontag's intellect was, this project apparently defeated her in the end.

Agenda

With clear skies prevailing, downtown New Yorkers should check out a Sound Art concert in Washington Square Park today at 3PM. The impressive lineup includes sampling virtuoso Carl Stone, dissonant-chromatic rock band Jerseyband, the hypnotically inventive composer-vocalist Joan La Barbara, the crack young percussion ensemble So Percussion, electronic composers Luke DuBois and Daedelus, and Princeton professor Paul Lansky, one of the reigning geniuses of electronic music.

Update: Steve Smith has a report on the event, and Darcy James Argue has a photojournal. I caught an early portion of the proceedings, enjoying the combination of experimental sound and summer sun on a patch of grass nearby. Lansky's Ride, with speaking voices and nature murmurs bubbling up from a molten flow of electronic sound, was mesmerizing. Read to the end of Steve's post for news of another sound-art event — in a Starbucks, of all places. I also recommend an upcoming S.E.M. Ensemble concert at the Spiegeltent downtown, although I won't be able to attend, because it's opening night at the Met.

Quote of the day

“I’m Irish and I believe in ghosts. I don’t want to be haunted.”

— retired FBI agent Dan Coleman, telling the New York Times why he wanted no part of ABC's fantasy 9/11 docudrama.

What are you playing?

I've had this bee in my bonnet for a while, but why in God's name is it so difficult for orchestras to put complete season schedules on their websites? I am looking in every corner of the Montreal Symphony site for a chronological listing of what Kent Nagano is doing in his inaugural season, et je ne trouve rien. Contrast the fast-rising Nashville Symphony, which has a link on its front page to "entire 2006 / 07 season." Thank yew! ... Addendum: Paul Wells has a report on Nagano's opening concert in Montreal, for which bells were rung in churches across the city. Nagano likes the Ustvolskaya-Beethoven combination; I heard him do almost the same program with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin in 2002 (with Ligeti's Lux aeterna in place of The Unanswered Question).

Barge of the future

On October 7, in the gently rocking confines of BargeMusic (not pictured), I will host Composers on the Edge, a New Yorker Festival event. The concept is to round up some inventive young artists who are airing out the definition of what it means to be a composer in this frazzled day and age. The panel includes Mason Bates, who divides his time between composing and DJing; Corey Dargel, whose work hovers on the border between art song and art rock; Nico Muhly, steeped in Renaissance polyphony, minimalism, and Björk; and Joanna Newsom, a harpist-songwriter who absorbed twentieth-century repertory at Mills College. I fear that Prof. Heebie McJeebie will have a heart attack if he ever hears about the manifest aesthetic impurity of these young people's efforts, but for most others it ought to be a lively evening — more like a concert with intermittent talk than a panel discussion. Tickets go on sale at noon today.

Update: As of 2:30PM, it's sold out.