Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Columbia tonight

Free and open to all.

Also, a little while back I had a great time appearing on WBUR's On Point show. It's the 20th century in 47' 36".

Dribs and drabs

Arthur Lubow profiles Gustavo Dudamel for the New York Times Magazine. A friend notes that the New York Philharmonic is playing it rather cool with regard to Dudamel's debut with the orchestra at the end of November; the concert is headlined "Gil Shaham Plays Dvorak."... Congratulations to Anne Midgette, who, Musical America reports, will be interim chief critic at the Washington Post while Tim Page takes a sabbatical at USC.... Some good news from Chicago, via John von Rhein: "For the second straight year, the [Chicago Symphony] exceeded 85 percent paid capacity in ticket sales, including a more than 3 percent increase in single ticket sales from the previous year. Roughly 30 percent of CSO main series concerts were sold out or exceeded 95 percent capacity. The renewal rate for CSO main series subscriptions was more than 87 percent, the highest in 11 years, according to orchestra officials."... I expended over twenty thousand words trying to explain what happened to classical composition after WWII; Timothy Mangan needs only a hundred.... Have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy home delivery of the New York Times? It's a splendid publication.

Milton Babbitt dance party

Ethan Iverson, with whom I am perpetrating An Evening of Spooky Modern Music Tuesday next, has announced the lineup of twentieth-century piano excerpts for the show, with edifying, amusing, and altogether richly learned comments. He includes a provocative remix of Milton Babbitt's Semi-Simple Variations, with backing rhythms by Bad Plus drummer David King. The possibility is raised of a full-bore Bad Plus rendition of Babbitt. We'll see if this materializes.

Dolly Parton, End of Time, etc

Sasha Frere-Jones and Matt Dellinger have produced an excellent podcast for the New Yorker website. It's related to Sasha's stern critique of modern indie rock. Don't miss a heart-catching Dolly Parton moment at the end.... I recently lamented the absence from iTunes of the Tashi recording of the Quartet for the End of Time. I'm informed that it will be arriving on iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc. at the end of this month.... The Mahler graffiti artist has struck Toronto again, reports PlaybillArts. Will this reign of terror never end?

12-tone Tony, etc.

Anthony Tommasini has created a neat video for the New York Times website in which he explains Schoenberg's twelve-tone method and where it came from.... New-music ensemble name changes: the Columbia Sinfonietta is now the Manhattan Sinfonietta, The Abstraction is now Build. Both have events coming up: the Sinfonietta plays Wolfgang Rihm's imposing Jagden und Formen at Miller on Oct. 18; Build (aka Matt McBane) is at Cornelia St. Café with NOW Ensemble on Oct. 22.... Composer, violinist, and Ne(x)tworks director Cornelius Dufallo has started a blog.... A bow of the head in honor of Margaret "Maggie" Carson, the irrepressible grande dame of classical-music publicists, who died on Thursday at the magnificent age of ninety-six. She represented such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas, and, as I learned from Bernard Holland's obituary, somehow worked for Theodore Dreiser and Ezra Pound. Here's a reminiscence by Howard Kissel.

Update: A fond tribute to Maggie Carson by Craig Urquhart in Musical America.

Noise 2.0

Now available for viewing and listening are book-related Audiofiles and Links. I will continue adding to and modifying the pages over coming weeks, but the basics are in place. Many thanks to the publishers and record labels who cooperated with this rather elaborate project, especially Boosey & Hawkes. Thanks to Dan Johnson for some last-minute help.

Irony of the day

The director Graham Vick, whose Il Trovatore was one of the most memorable fiascos in recent Metropolitan Opera history, and whose current Tannhäuser in San Francisco has been described as "unsightly and almost aggressively foolish" by Josh Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle, is complaining about film and theater directors infiltrating the opera business: "Opera is a completely different medium from film and theatre, and we forget that at our peril. If you don’t understand what a composer is trying to say musically, you’re not going to be able to express it. If you don’t understand the music, the opera won’t work. It’s that simple.” Why, then, do operas not infrequently fail to work when Vick directs them? Bring on Woody Allen, I say; he can't do any worse, and might do quite a bit better.

Radiohead eve

I ordered the Radiohead album, which is coming out tomorrow. In honor of Colin Greenwood, the band's impossibly generous and convivial bass-player, I elected to pay full price. I don't know whether the order numbers are going in ascending sequence, but mine was over four million.

Classical music, always a step or two behind! At Sequenza21, composer Jeff Harrington mentions that he started giving away MIDI files of his music on the Internet in, er, 1991.

The Gramophone speaks, etc.

The 2007 Classic fm Gramophone Awards have been announced. Artist of the Year was chosen by popular vote, via classical radio networks in thirteen countries, and the choice is unexpected and refreshing: the young German violinist Julia Fischer. Also refreshing is the choice of the underrated British composer Julian Anderson in the contemporary category.... Here's a wonderful program from the London Symphony: during the orchestra's upcoming New York visit, musicians will go out to play for home-bound music-lovers in the New York area. Read about the program and nominate recipients at WNYC.... Slatkin to Detroit: Mark Stryker reports.... Paul Jacobs, chair of the Juilliard organ department, will give a free performance of Messiaen's monumental final work for organ, the two-hour cycle Livre du Saint Sacrament, tomorrow night at the beautiful St. Mary the Virgin church on West 46th Street in NYC. I've heard this music twice before: in 1995, when Brian Schober played four pieces from the cycle at Grace Church, and in 1999, when Jon Gillock played the entire work at Riverside Church, as part of his Messiaen survey. Both performances were singular experiences. There are few final cadences as crashingly sublime as the one at the end of "The Resurrection of Christ."

Festival

Warm thanks to those who turned up at my events this weekend: the Peter Sellars interview (in which the director compared the standard operatic repertory to "some irritating person's record collection"), my Noise lecture (which clocked in at 75 minutes, an improvement over last year's Seattle marathon), and a book signing. Those who attended the lecture got a surprise gift in the form of the book itself. It was fun to see people wandering down Ninth Avenue holding The Rest Is Noise. The major thrill of the weekend was, however, getting to meet Werner Herzog. In a fit of eloquence I said to him, "Oh, wow, uh."