Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Sailing to Jersey

Our Girl in Chicago brings up the subject of humor in Henry James, which reminds me of a favorite passage in The American Scene. Absent from his homeland many years, James finds himself, for reasons not quite divulged, on a steamer to the Jersey shore within a few hours of his arrival. If I am not mistaken, what follows is the world's first New Jersey joke:

Heavy with fruit, in particular, was the whole spreading bough that rustled above me during an afternoon, a very wonderful afternoon, that I spent in being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of — well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition? ... It might have threatened, for twenty minutes, to be almost complicating, but the truth was recorded: it was an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation made so convenient — to be learning at last, in the maturity of one's powers, what New Jersey might "connote." This was nearer than I had ever come to any such experience; and it was now as if, all my life, my curiosity had been greater than I knew.

This seems as good a moment as any to reveal that I am taking another break from the blog; I must spend a few dark weeks in the maw of Book. I'll be back in time for Actual Easter. Please patronize Music Blogs. Support a starving composer.

Agenda 3/28 - 4/3

A good week ahead. On Monday I'll be at the Boston Symphony concert already adumbrated. If the new pieces by Harbison and Wuorinen don't pan out, Levine puts on a grand Brahms Second. On Wednesday I'm in NJ for Harry Partch opera's Oedipus, in Montclair. Why Montcair? The armory of microtonal instruments that the remarkable Partch constructed for the performance of his music is now in the possession of Montclair State University. I will thus miss a Juilliard recital by violist Nadia Sirota, who is playing the Bach Chaconne, the Britten Lachrymae, and two premieres by Ryan Streber and Nico Muhly, the second an electronic piece featuring pre-recorded vocals by Antony of Antony & The Johnsons and programming by Björk's longtime collaborator Valgeir Sigurdsson. On Thursday, the Orchestra of St. Luke's plays Carnegie under the direction of Donald Runnicles, who shot up sharply in my estimation after his fluid and characteristic Rosenkavalier at the Met. The program includes Martinu's Revue de cuisine, a nineteen-twenties "jazz" ballet involving kitchen implements, and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 with the hyper-musical Ivan Moravec. Saturday night, the American Youth Symphony presents a new piece by Lera Auerbach, a young Russian-émigré composer who's written music of extraordinary power and intensity. Finally, on Sunday, the New York City Opera introduces a new production of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West, which hasn't been staged in this city in years.

Wuorinen v. Wuorinen

There's a mini-symposium in the New York Times among conductor James Levine and composers Charles Wuorinen and John Harbison, all of whom figure in a Boston Symphony concert on Monday at Carnegie Hall. The discussion is moderated by Daniel J. Wakin, the Times' classical-music reporter, who's been doing a fantastic job on his beat. Here Wakin asks some sharp questions, with interesting results:

WAKIN: ...you wrote [in 1979] that the tonal system could be found only in backward-looking serious composers, is no longer used by serious mainstream composers, has been replaced and succeeded by the 12-tone system.

WUORINEN: Well, that's a categorical statement which cannot be — of course, it had more to it then, although to some extent it is obsolete now. But it depends on what you mean by the tonal system.

LEVINE: That is spoken by a man who is tired of how difficult it is to make anything understood, in any of these distinctions.

So that's all cleared up. I like what John Harbison has to say about the future of contemporary music: "I'm very optimistic. Somewhere along the way I became the opposite of worried. And I think it's because I began to understand the carrying power of the intensity, as against the rule of numbers. And intensity wins every time." Yes! Intensity is what composers have to offer. They have the opportunity to work on big canvases, in forms and languages entirely of their choosing, and whether they write pure diatonic tonality, pure atonality, twelve-tone, microtonal, spectral, computer-electronic, neo-medieval, or, perhaps, all of the above, they will find their audience if they write with intensity of feeling and clarity of purpose. Those who teach should ask not whether their students are writing in the "correct style" but whether they are achieving what they're aiming at. I think composition teachers have learned from the mistakes of previous generations, and now understand this. I think.

Boulez is alive

A fascinating piece in the Guardian compiles various composers' assessments of Pierre Boulez, who celebrates his eightieth birthday tomorrow. They range from the effusive to the dismissive; the comment by Thomas Adès is especially striking. Would it have been better to suspend, at least for one day, the endless feuding that the name Boulez inspires? Absolutely not — it would betray the splendidly pitiless spirit of this singular man, who spoke so contemptuously of his elders when he was young, and who still happily goes on the warpath. Just last year he had this to say about his old friend Stravinsky: "[He] began so well, pursuing a real line of development. But then he becomes an epigone, trying this historical style, then that one. There is virtuosity of gesture, but no content." Oh, Pierre. Happy birthday!

What would Elgar say?

Composers have been generating some nutty headlines lately. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Musick, was recently questioned by the Northern Constabulary when a half-eaten swan carcass turned up on his Orkney Islands estate. The swan is a protected bird in the UK, and the police were unamused when Sir Peter offered them swan terrine. (Would this taste good, Amateur Gourmet?) In Russia, Leonid Desyatnikov, a polymorphous composer with minimalist leanings, has written a wildly controversial opera entitled Rosenthal's Children, in which a renegade Nazi geneticist  succeeds in cloning Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky. All five geniuses sing onstage, and there are also fleeting appearances by Stalin, Krushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. No word yet on whether Stalin and Krushchev have sex, as happens in the novel on which the opera is based.

Rather less nutty, and all too familiar, is another story out of Scotland, this one concerning the composer James Dillon. He threw a public fit when the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, under the direction of Alexander Lazarev, mangled his latest work. Any composer will be able to reel off a few horror stories of this kind: orchestras, who pride themselves on extreme professionalism, do not always include decent treatment of living composers in their job description. Most of the victims suffer in silence, anxious not to bite the hand that offers them crumbs. Dillon has bravely chosen to speak out. Lazarev, by the way, is the same self-righteous twit who mocked and humiliated a Sydney, Australia audience after they applauded the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth.

Woefully underrepresented in this odd litany are American composers. Let's work up some publicity, people! I want to see Aaron Jay Kernis arrested for trying to smuggle zebra meat through LaGuardia; or Jennifer Higdon wiretapped by Homeland Security after writing an opera entitled Condi's Secret; or Richard Danielpour banned for life from Lincoln Center for throwing pies at Lorin Maazel. In my dreams....

Okey Denoke

The German soprano Angela Denoke is giving a first-rate performance as the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier at the Met. Any New Yorker who loves Strauss' sixteen-ton comedy, or who wants to experience the ultimate artistic meditation on the self-absorbed minitragedies of thirtysomethings, should try to see it. Denoke sings with phenomenal purity of tone, yet she is also an emotionally transparent, actorly performer; there's a welcome lack of expert caution in her delivery, and an expressive dark lining to even her brightest upper notes. Last night, Kristine Jepson was an excellent, athletic Oktavian; the appealing Laura Aikin had maybe a bit of an off night as Sophie (constricted in the early part of Act II); Peter Rose cut a likeable, consistently funny figure as Ochs, enlivening parts of the opera that can otherwise drag (as it were). Donald Runnicles avoided the over-refulgent, singer-swamping sound that has marred some of James Levine's performances of this work; in all, it was a luminous, fleet-footed night. Ja, ja!

Messiaen's Beyond

The great event in New York this week is the return of Olivier Messiaen's Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà, or Illuminations of the Beyond, which had its premiere at the New York Philharmonic in November 1992. The composer of the Quartet for the End of Time finished this eleven-movement cycle shortly before his death in April of the same year; it is a long, difficult, wayward, fiercely eloquent, and stupendously beautiful work. More than that I won't say; if you live in New York, hear for yourself.

The boy who cried zwolf

Kyle Gann writes, in a long disquisition on Schoenberg and twelve-tone music: "I think what we need to do is quit teaching 20th-century history with a dishonest thumb on the scale in Schoenberg’s favor. For decades, academic historians have presented the Second Vienna School as central to a European modernist canon, at the expense of dozens of other composers more popular, outside academia, than Schoenberg: Copland, Milhaud, Cowell, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Messiaen, Britten, Weill, Cage, Partch. It’s time to restore these composers to the center of 20th-century music, and redraw 12-tone music as the interesting but infertile cul-de-sac that it was." This is more or less what I am trying to do in my book, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that Schoenberg is less significant than Milhaud, or, for that matter, less popular than Partch. The big story in 20th-century music is, in my view, not the "death of tonality," which in fact never happened, but the rejuvenation of tonality, which began with Debussy and Satie. Schoenberg's positive achievement was to add new harmonies to the field. He didn't see it that way, of course; he wanted the new chords to replace the old. Even he, at the end of his life, realized that his earlier edicts had been too severe, as his correspondence with the hyper-dogmatic René Leibowitz shows.

I'm not sure about Kyle's choice of the word "infertile," though. Sometimes fertility works in mysterious ways. What's always worth mentioning about twelve-tone music is that it's not the same thing as "atonality," which is a fuzzy concept in itself. It does not dictate the content of a piece. It does not forbid the use of tonal elements, such as major or minor triads; indeed, unless precautions are taken in the construction of the row, it often generates them "by accident," as happens, rather mischievously, in much of Milton Babbitt's music both early and late. If you arrange your rows to encourage triads, say by choosing C E G D F A F# A# C# G# B D#, you will end up with a Richard Strauss-style barrage of chords: C major! D minor! No, wait! F# major! G# minor! Crazy! Whee! Alban Berg discovered this loophole right away, and rejoiced in it; he was able to resume writing grand late-Romantic music, which he had never really given up, while ostensibly following his Master's rules. He was like those prep-school kids who interpret "coat and tie" to mean sweatpants and T-shirts with tie and coat on top. It was Sibelius who said that Berg was Schoenberg's greatest work.

Paradox: By arguing with Schoenberg, we are reaffirming his importance. — Brendan McNamara has more.

Hello, hello, hello

A delightful article by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker describes the new science of Popstrology, which analyzes your personality on the basis of whatever pop song topped the charts on the day of your birth. Michael Eisner, for example, was born under the sign of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Cocktail," while 50 Cent is a child of the Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight." My Birthsong, I'm proud to say, is the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye." Not exactly my favorite Beatles song, but far better than the annoying "Judy in Disguise," which I missed by just forty-eight hours. (Birthmate John Anderies, don't you agree?) Particularly apposite to my life as a classical music critic are the lines, "I say high, you say low / You say why, and I say I don't know."

Poul Ruders, Mark Adamo

"Kafka Sings."

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, March 28, 2005.

The Danish composer Poul Ruders is one of contemporary music’s free agents — a lover of sweet melodies with a yen for dark chords, a comedian with a flair for apocalypse. His previous opera, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” made sonic thunder out of Margaret Atwood’s novel of a dystopian America ruled by Christian  fundamentalists. His major orchestral pieces — “Thus Saw Saint John,” the “Solar Trilogy," a First Symphony subtitled “Rejoicing from the Heavens, Grieving Unto Death” — unfold hypnotically wayward narratives that reel from antic joy to frozen despair. (There are excellent recordings on the Bridge and Da Capo labels.) Ruders has a special knack for reinventing familiar tonal harmonies and styles; he uses them sometimes to mourn lost worlds, sometimes to suggest otherworldly innocence, sometimes to convey the banality of evil. All these devices are hurled at the audience in his latest work, “Kafka’s Trial,” which had its première on March 12th at the Royal Danish Theatre.

Composers are mysteriously drawn to “The Trial,” Kafka’s tale of a bank clerk randomly hounded by the Law. Perhaps, like poor Joseph K., they feel persecuted for no reason. Gottfried von Einem produced a straightforward, solemn adaptation in 1953. A decade later, Gunther Schuller, in “The Visitation,” boldly transposed the action to black America. Ruders, in tune with modern times, makes the story all about sex and guilt. The libretto, by Paul Bentley, blends scenes from Kafka’s life with scenes from the novel. The plot is framed by the author’s crazed epistolary engagement to Felice Bauer, who, in July, 1914, convened a family tribunal in a Berlin hotel room to confront her fiancé with his neuroses. In the wake of that fiasco, Kafka wrote “The Trial.” Bentley believes that Kafka considered himself guilty of misleading Bauer, and that the killing of Joseph K. at the end of the novel is a form of self-criticism. Kafka scholars may not buy that theory, but there’s no harm in rewriting history if it makes for good theatre.

Alas, it doesn’t. Ruders has said in interviews that he wanted to write a Kafka comedy, or, rather, a comic nightmare. The problem is that the material of both the novel and the life is, at best, morbidly amusing, and Ruders can’t make it funny by force. The score has too many grotesque, wheezing episodes, too much infernal-machine music. The parodic touches are stale: klezmer references in the Kafka sections (the only sign of the writer’s Jewishness), a groaningly obvious quotation from “Don Giovanni” (“Joseph K.! Joseph K.!,” à la the Commendatore). Kafka’s air of gnomic mystery, his Hebraic awe before the inexpressible, fades away. The climax of the novel is the chapter “In the Cathedral,” where Joseph K. glimpses fate in all its hostile majesty. Ruders ordinarily thrives on gothic atmosphere—he once made a bone-chilling setting of Poe’s “The City in the Sea”—but his cathedral scene feels strangely attenuated, as if he were afraid of losing comic momentum. The music acquires the right dark magic only at the end, when Felice confronts Kafka. Here, finally, is urgent word-setting over pungent chords, such as Ruders supplied throughout “The Handmaid’s Tale.” (Both Ruders operas, by the way, can be performed in English.)

I hesitate to render a final judgment on “Kafka’s Trial,” because the opera was hobbled by a spectacularly stupid production, which erased the distinction between real life and fiction and buried all the characters in an onslaught of puerile sexual imagery. Both Kafka and Joseph K. became idiots of id, desperate to try out every imaginable sexual act—anal, oral, you name it—with every woman who sauntered past. Watching it was like being trapped at a really gross Eurotrash orgy. There were also four Kafka doppelgängers wandering about the stage; at one point I thought they were about to get it on with each other, which might at least have brought us closer to Kafka’s real sexual issues. Johnny van Hal soldiered bravely through the unsympathetic title role(s), but the standout in the cast was Gisela Stille, lending a warm, rich soprano to Felice.

The première took place at the Royal Danish Theatre’s new opera house, on an island in the Copenhagen harbor. It is a sleek, cool, thoroughly Danish building, with bulbous glass walls and a severe overhanging roof. The acoustics are vivid, though lacking in focus and bass. From the look of things, the management wants opera to be racy, hip, not too deep. Coming next season is a world première by Elvis Costello.

At the beginning of the month, the Houston Grand Opera gave the first performance of Mark Adamo’s “Lysistrata.” Like “Kafka’s Trial,” it is an opera based on a familiar literary  source, in this case the comedy by Aristophanes. And, as in the Ruders opera, a certain amount of creative violence is done to the original. Adamo wrote his own libretto, and he shows little interest in the political issues that have made “Lysistrata” a favorite of left-leaning theatre companies since the invasion of Iraq. In Aristophanes, the women of Athens and Sparta go on strike against the men of the two belligerent city-states, demanding  that their endless war end. The “sex strike” still  happens in Adamo’s version, but it becomes the backdrop for the central drama of a relationship — the one between Lysia and the Athenian general Nico (a character that Adamo invented for the occasion). A brittle antiwar satire becomes a sumptuous love story, poised between comedy and heartbreak.

And it works. I can imagine a roomful of European progressives snarling at Adamo’s bourgeois sensibility, but I relaxed a minute after the music began, knowing that I was in the hands of a brilliant theatre composer. Adamo’s effortless expertise was on display in his 1998 maiden effort, “Little Women,” alongside spells of cutesiness and clumsiness. He still indulges in cloying gestures—enough with the jokes in the supertitles!—but he has taken several big leaps forward, particularly in integrating his proudly tonal melodies with more dissonant connective material. Adamo’s accompaniments would make a good primer for any young composer learning to write for and around singers. Each strand of the vocal line is punctuated by some perfect short gesture: cello pizzicatos and a smattering of harp; a four-note horn solo; a vaguely Balinese rustling of mallet percussion and string glissandos. The orchestral writing is often little more—or nothing less—than a play of light around the voices.

Act I is stocked with pratfalls and silliness. In Act II, the story takes a much more serious turn. Lovers on both sides fall into melancholy contemplation of the competing demands of private love and public life. The audience is invited to read “work” for “war” throughout. “Our will is not our will,” sings Nico. “I am not my own,” sings Lysia. Slow dotted rhythms, reminiscent of Britten in his ceremonial mode, give the music a sudden grandeur. As the cities work their way toward reconciliation, the women sing radiant, flowing chorales around the Greek word “Evoe!,” the exclamation of praise in the Bacchanalia. At the end, the gods descend to warn the humans of their folly: “Never will it end. Never will it end. Time to time, it may suspend, but never will it end.” The orchestra constructs a huge passacaglia based on intertwining downward scales, and the chorus gathers for one last chant of “Evoe!” It’s almost shocking how deep this seemingly lighthearted opera goes.

The Houston production was on the ugly side, with cartoonish sets colored orange and bright blue. But it didn’t sabotage the drama, as the Copenhagen production did. The singers were excellent: Victoria Livengood, Myrna Paris, Chad Shelton, and, especially, Emily Pulley, as Lysia, who mastered every nuance of the opera’s wide emotional range. Opening night was a bittersweet occasion, for it was the last Houston première presided over by David Gockley, the company’s visionary general director. Gockley has introduced thirty-three new works in about as many years, writing himself into musical history in the process: Adams’s “Nixon in China,” Meredith Monk’s “atlas,” and Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place” came into being on his watch. Next year, he decamps to the San Francisco Opera. Too bad he isn’t moving to New York.