Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

20th-century agenda: Messiaen

"Zion Park" from Messiaen's Des Canyons aux étoiles; Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Asko Ensemble, the Schönberg Ensemble, and Slagwerkgroep den Haag (Naive 782179).

The centenary of Olivier Messiaen, a formerly radical-seeming composer who now belongs to the ages, is being celebrated with a rather impressive array of concerts around the world. Andrew Patner describes a ten-day Messiaen festival now unfolding at the University of Chicago; the kickoff concert last night had the great British organist Gillian Weir performing Messe de la Pentecôte, among other works. (When I reviewed a great pile of Messiaen organ discs for Fanfare magazine some years ago, I came to the conclusion that Weir's cycle, originally issued on Collins Classics and now available from Priory Records, reigned supreme.) Chicagoans should take note of a screening of Paul Festa's intensely personal documentary film Apparition of the Eternal Church on Saturday morning. Festa's website gives a sense of the movie, although nothing can quite prepare you for the experience — for one thing, it's a bit racier than you might expect. As this page reveals, there will be two more showings of Apparition in Chicago and others in Sackville, New Brunswick; Austin, Texas; Concord, NH; Washington DC; Tempe, Arizona (I will appear at a related event with William Bolcom); and the Barbican in London. Another big Messiaen festival is unfolding in Montreal, leading up to a grand birthday presentation of Saint Francis under the direction of Kent Nagano. The actual centenary falls on December 10; oddly, neither Carnegie Hall nor Lincoln Center has relevant programming that day, although Reinbert de Leeuw and the Yale Philharmonia will present Turangalîla at Carnegie on Dec. 14 — in the wake of a week of Messiaen at Yale — and in February David Robertson will conduct the Juilliard Orchestra in From the Canyons to the Stars during the reopening festival of Alice Tully Hall.

For many people, the gateway to Messiaen's world is the Quartet for the End of Time, although there is no right place to start. Despite much formidable competition, the finest recording of the quartet remains Tashi's, on the RCA label. Currently at the top of my recommended CD list is a budget six-CD reissue, on the Naive label, of some staggeringly good recordings of major Messiaen pieces under the direction of de Leeuw and Pierre Boulez. Of the two conductors, it's the scandalously underrated de Leeuw who shows deeper sympathy for Messiaen's all-devouring aesthetic; the recording of From the Canyons to the Stars attains a degree of passion and intensity that you rarely find on disc. The beginning of "Zion Park," from Canyons, is excerpted above; the ending is pure animal joy in sound. Three other cherished Messiaen recordings: Pierre-Laurent Aimard's Vingt Regards (preview his new DG album here), Riccardo Chailly's Turangalîla, and Nagano's Saint Francis. You can hear more audio excerpts on my Messiaen/Ligeti pages.

Update: Marcus Maroney and Steve Smith add details of more events in Houston and New York. I should also mention the Celebration Messiaen series in Pittsburgh and the ongoing OM Century series at Jacaranda in LA. Notice that the Messiaen 2008 site linked up above has an audio archive of Claude Samuel's extensive interviews with the composer — a great resource for scholars. According to that site's concert listings, the Quartet for the End of Time will have been performed 145 times by the end of the anniversary year.

None but the lonely flute

Obama listens to Bach, Coltrane, Dylan, and Stevie Wonder. McCain likes ABBA. We now know something about the musical inclinations of Sarah Palin, who, according to actuarial estimates, has a 14.2-15.1% chance of eventually becoming president if McCain wins. This video from the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant reveals that her favorite artist is James Galway.

In the interests of equal time on the Alaskan musical front, I offer a link to Philip Munger's work Variations on a Theme on the Katrina Hexachord, which draws on the six-note dissonance that George W. Bush famously struck on a guitar the day the levees broke in New Orleans. There are, incidentally, several competing transcriptions of Bush's chord(s), depending on which photograph you look at and how you read the placement of his fingers. I still lean toward Paul Mitchinson's transcription, which produces the set of notes that the music theorist Allen Forte has named 6-Z49. This is the complex that governs the apocalyptic final bar of Strauss's Elektra, where a quick, brutal chord of E-flat minor collides with C major:

Throughout his career Strauss used this abrupt juxtaposition of tonalities (major and minor triads with roots separated by a minor third) as an emblem of death ; his inspiration was, no doubt, the passage in Wagner's Tristan that marks the hero's demise. Again, E-flat minor interrupts a spell of C, though at trembling low volume:

How uncannily sensitive of Bush to reach for this same doom-laden formation of notes on that dark day in 2005!

This being a music site, I wish to remain absolutely neutral on political matters, but for any interested NYC readers I pass along the information that Brad Mehldau, Chris Thile, and Wordless Music are holding a benefit concert for one of the presidential candidates at Le Poisson Rouge on October 10.

Recordings: Solti (Decca), Pappano/Domingo (EMI).

Postcard from Luxor

Photo by Nick Frisch.

Loss for words

I'm overwhelmed by this news from the MacArthur Foundation and by the response from so many friends and colleagues. A simple, deeply heartfelt "thank you" to all.

Stockhausen in Berlin (photojournal)

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and Michael Gielen conducting the WDR Orchestra; Stockhausen Edition 5.

In an enormous hangar at Tempelhof Airport, the Berlin Philharmonic is giving four performances of Stockhausen's massive 1955-57 work Gruppen, for three orchestras, under the direction of Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding, and Michael Boder. Above, the score itself (hovering over Wannsee), together with an audio snippet (not of the passage shown, but of the electrifying sequence in which a set of chords goes spinning around the hall). Below, the orchestral groups distributed left, right, and center in Hangar 2:

The bold soprano

Photo: Ken Howard.

At this year's New Yorker Festival I will be interviewing Dawn Upshaw. The event is on Saturday, October 4, at  7:30 p.m., at the Ailey Citigroup Theater on West 55th Street. Tickets can be obtained here. Upshaw won't be singing, but we'll be showing some video of her performances. The photo above is from Kaija Saariaho's Amour de loin. Below, Upshaw sings "Tancas serradas a muru," from Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre:

DG B0004782-02. By kind permission of the composer and Universal Classics.

Anniversaries in and out of C

Schoenberg, "Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide" (excerpt); Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish, Nonesuch 79237.

Last December, I attempted to generate a wave of enthusiasm for Worldwide Atonality Day, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Schoenberg's dreamily dissonant song "Ich darf nicht dankend." A resounding silence greeted my proclamation, perhaps because it wasn't entirely persuasive; the song was, after all, published with a key signature, thereby retaining at least the appearance of normalcy. Either that, or no one cared. In any case, I now offer September 27 as a more plausible candidate for atonality's big birthday. On that date in 1908, Schoenberg wrote "Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide" ("You lean against a white willow"), the thirteenth of his Buch der hängenden Gärten, or Book of Hanging Gardens, songs on texts of Stefan George. The snippet above comes from the eternally awesome Schoenberg Center; to see the entire manuscript, go to this page and click on 418. A few rogue triads notwithstanding, it is difficult to hear this music as tonal in any meaningful sense. Another significant date will be December 21 — the centenary of the premiere of Schoenberg's Second Quartet, which caused the first great music riot of the twentieth century.

By an interesting coincidence, this month also brings the fiftieth anniversary of the tonality-rejuvenating phenomenon of minimalism — insofar as anyone can define a late twentieth-century musical tendency that has caused endless terminological angst. In September 1958, La Monte Young finished his Trio for Strings, which, with its glacially slow harmonic movement and its hypnotic concluding meditation on the interval of the fifth, is often dubbed the first minimalist piece. On Wednesday, September 17, at the Players Theatre in Greenwich Village, NYC, the online composer community Sequenza21 presents a Minimalism at 50 concert, celebrating an occasion that has otherwise gone unmarked. The Trio won't be heard — apparently a performance is slated at Young's MELA Foundation later this season — but there will be exceedingly rare performances of piano pieces by Terry Jennings, one of the first composers to follow Young's lead. Terry Riley's In C, an arrangement of Steve Reich's Piano Phase for marimbas, and Philip Glass's Piece in the Shape of a Square fill out the program. For some relevant samples, see this page of my Audio Guide.

Noise: the ultra-pretentious edition

Readers may be surprised to hear that I spent much of the summer working on The Rest Is Noise — a book I supposedly finished writing last summer. These things have a way of pulling you back in. In anticipation of the paperback edition (to be published by Picador Books on Oct. 14), I have been devising a couple of web-only features that will become operational in the next few weeks. The paperback itself required a little more work than expected. And I have been preparing the manuscript for translation into German, French, and various other languages. The task has been to track down, as much as possible, the original-language versions of all quotations that appear in the book. Only the translators will see this somewhat ridiculous multilingual incarnation, but here's a sample paragraph:

“Il y a trop de musique en Allemagne,” Romain Rolland wrote, back in the heyday of Mahler and Strauss. Something was lurking, the French writer suspected, in these humongous Teutonic symphonies and music dramas—a cult of power, un “hypnotisme de la force.” Germans themselves recognized the demonic strain in their culture. During the First World War, the not yet liberal-democratic Thomas Mann wrote a manifesto titled Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in which he praised all the backward German tendencies that he would later come to lament in the pages of Doktor Faustus. In the earlier work, Mann states that die Kunst “hat einen unzuverlässigen, verräterischen Grundhang; ihr Entzücken an skandalöser Anti-Vernunft, ihre Neigung zu Schönheit schaffender ‘Barbarei’ ist unaustilgbar . . . .”

To summarize briefly, there is too much music in Germany, and beauty-creating barbarism may also be a problem.

The other exciting development around here is that I have finally acquired Sibelius — the software, not the composer. Up above is the Salome clarinet line that I'm always rattling on about, the one with the scale that starts off in C-sharp major and then detours weirdly into a semblance of G major. For more, go to my Chapter 1 page, now featuring l'auteur lui-même at the piano.

The majesty of truth

"We are driving the pig train."

— Bill O'Reilly, on the media's coverage of the election.

Stockhausen in Nebraska

Karlheinz Stockhausen would have celebrated his eightieth birthday last month. On the other side of the Altantic, the late avant-garde master is being honored with a slew of concerts, as you can see from the official Stockhausen calendar (click "concerts" for the pdf). There are big events this fall at the Berliner Festspiele, the Festival d'Automne in Paris, London's Southbank Centre, and Warsaw Autumn, among other venues. Over here, practically nothing — unless you live in Omaha, Nebraska. On September 12, the ARTSaha! festival will present an all-Stockhausen program that includes the American premiere of Cosmic Pulses, his final electronic piece. There'll be a live webcast at 7:30PM CDT. The trumpeter and composer Joseph Drew, who co-founded ARTSaha! and blogs at ANAblog, recently attended the Stockhausen summer institute in Kürten.

Summer hiatus

Go here for an audio companion to my book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

Birth of the concert

Why So Serious? The New Yorker, Sept. 8, 2008.

Shakespeare at Glimmerglass

Mark the Music. The New Yorker, August 25, 2008.

Chen Qigang

In my piece on music in China, I wrote about the composer Chen Qigang, who directed the music program for the opening ceremony of the Olympics. It was revealed at last night's event that Chen himself composed the official theme song of the Games, a duet called "You and Me." Liu Huan and Sarah Brightman sang it while standing atop a floating sphere. Xinhua, China's official news agency, declared that the song brought "surprise and jubilation to the world." Chen didn't give away any secrets when I spoke to him, but he did say, “Now I understand how hard it is to compose a cheery little song.”

Zimmermann's Die Soldaten

Infernal Opera. The New Yorker, July 21, 2008.

O Albion

I am in England because The Rest Is Noise has been nominated for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize, to be announced on Tuesday. My chances of winning seem low, but I am thrilled to be here. Tonight I will appear at Topping Books in Bath. Update: Warmest congratulations to Kate Summerscale, whose book The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a reconstruction of a notorious 1860 murder case, won the prize.

Pre-hiatus playlist

— Purcell, Fantasias for the Viols, 1680; Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XX (Alia Vox reissue)
— Feldman, The Viola in My Life I-IV; Marek Konstantynowicz, Christian Eggen, Cikada Ensemble, Norwegian Radio Ensemble (ECM)
— La Pellegrina: Intermedii 1589; Skip Sempé conducting the Collegium Vocale Gent and the Capriccio Stravagante Renaissance Orchestra (Paradizo)
— Crystal Tears (music of Dowland, Robert Johnson, and others); Andreas Scholl and Concerto di viole (Harmonia Mundi)
— Hercules and Love Affair, Hercules and Love Affair (DFA)
— Portishead, Third (Mercury)
— Audivi vocem (music of Tallis, Tye, and Sheppard); Hilliard Ensemble (ECM)
— Quartets of Ravel, Adès, and Mozart; Calder Quartet (available at CD Baby)

Critical

Two more classical critics have fallen by the wayside: Paul Horsley at the Kansas City Star and Lawrence Johnson at the Miami Herald.  Johnson will continue to cover music at a blog called South Florida Classical Review. Neither paper is hiring a replacement. The Washington Post, on the other hand, has resisted the trend toward downgrading arts coverage and smartly hired Anne Midgette as a full-time replacement for Tim Page, who is now a visiting professor at USC. Still, the outlook is bleak for classical criticism in newspapers, or, indeed, for any kind of criticism in newspapers, or, indeed, for newspapers themselves. At MusicalAmerica.com, Justin Davidson declares that papers are essentially committing suicide, chasing after audiences that don't want them while spurning their loyal readers. He offers a radical proposal in response. Keep in mind, as Tim Mangan reminded us a while back, that editors are now using Internet hits to gauge the relative popularity of their writers, so support your local critic by clicking on his or her stories, writing comments, checking those little ratings boxes, e-mailing the stories around, and so on. Protest may be nearly as helpful as praise; it's the hits that count in this WalMartWelt.... Bob Shingleton has a nice post on the music of Joaquín Rodrigo, who made possible Sketches of Spain.... Andrew Patner hears the Concord in Risør.... Fact of the day, courtesy of an old Allan Kozinn piece: when Christopher Keene mounted Die Soldaten at New York City Opera in 1991, he spent $65,000.

Photo: Clifton Webb is sized up by Dana Andrews in Laura.

Deliver us from evil

On July 3 I saw the dress rehearsal for the Lincoln Center Festival presentation of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten. As early signs indicated, it's an astonishing experience; details will follow in a New Yorker review. Unfortunately, the only tickets still available for the run — 7/5 to 7/12 — are in the $150-250 range; cheaper seats are all gone. There's a video preview at the New York Times website.

Declare independence