Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Stars and stripes forever

The Newark St. Patrick's Day Parade, which I planned to see in connection with a future article, was canceled because of rain. I wish I'd known before going to Newark this morning.

Orbiting

The conversation gets ever livelier at Sequenza 21, where composers of all stripes thrash through old internecine debates — atonality good or bad, 12-tone music dominant or nonexistent, John Adams overrated or very overrated, etc. — and sometimes deliver deliciously brittle reviews of colleagues. The composer-as-critic is a tradeoff I'll always happily take: professional biases and jealousies may come into play, but the opinion is never fuzzy around the edges. The layout of the site is complex, like a Knotty Twelve-Tonish Figure. There's the forum on the main page, also a Composers Forum and individual composer blogs.... Bryant Manning is keeping it spunky on Mysteries Abysmal, as his blog has been renamed.... Take note again of Heather, very thoughtful pianist in Oakland, and of The Laurel Letters, offering beautifully composed reviews of Boston musical life.... Vilaine fille reigns supreme.

Abbreviated Agenda: 3/19

There's an awkward pile-up of events on Saturday, all of which I'd ordinarily like to see. Soheil Nasseri, the gifted young pianist whom I mentioned at the end of my Lupu column, is giving another recital at Alice Tully Hall. The program includes the premiere of a piece by the Israeli composer Avner Dorman. Tickets are $10 for those under 25. Simultaneously at Merkin, the Azure Ensemble is playing new and new-ish works by Libby Larsen, Judith Shatin, Jennifer Higdon, Marilyn Bliss, David Stock, and Zhou Long. I've never heard the group but the performers are all solid new-music veterans, and there's something poetic simply about the titles: Black Birds, Red Hills; Three Summers Heat; Light Refracted; Under the Azure Sky; A Vanished World; and The Elements. Finally, at 10PM downtown, Vox Novus will be presenting the video version of its 60 X 60 project — a series of 60-second works by 60 composers.

Bolero 911

A strange thing happened at the New York Philharmonic last night. Right at the start of Ravel's Bolero, as the snare drum entered with its soft, relentless beat, four policemen glided down the far left aisle and took up positions close to the stage. They stood still throughout the seventeen-minute crescendo, keeping their eyes fixed on the front rows. The possibility that something unexpected or even violent was about to happen added a tingling new sensation to Ravel's already sensational piece. But nothing did happen; no one was dragged off in cuffs. What it was all about, I don't know. I had previously noticed that one gentleman in that section seemed to have a boisterous personality; he stood up to applaud each item on the program, including the Wolfgang Rihm work, which almost no one else in the hall found exciting. He even gave a one-man ovation to the players as they filed out for the second half. Did his neighbors find his enthusiasm so alarming that they alerted the police? Was he a Rest Is Noise reader, acting on my incitements to inappropriate applause? Was MTT's posse in the house, ready to start a Hot 97-style beef? Were the guys from the 20th Precinct just looking to unwind? I prefer to savor the mystery of it all.

I had trouble deciding where to go last night — the Philharmonic affair or Anthony de Mare's recital at Zankel. Since I've Zankled quite a bit this season, I thought I should lend Maazel's merry band an ear. The Rihm thing, Two Other Movements, turned out to be a strange, grand, haunting creation. Prof. Dr. Rihm is hard to classify these days; he is a "difficult" German composer, ja, but he does not toe the Euromodern party line. He writes in the grip of palpably strong emotion, indulges long, songful phrasing, and gives glimpses of tonality everywhere — broken Hindemith chorales, occluded Debussy progressions, shrapnel from an explosion at the Parsifal factory.  The strongest twentieth-century presence is, interestingly, late Sibelius. Like the Master's Tapiola, the piece unfolds in one continuous arc, gathering to a black storm at the center and then subsiding toward silence. (The "two movements" are elided.) The gloomy coda is perhaps too protracted, but the final upward-spiraling string phrases have the "sense of an ending" that only a master composer can produce. Take note of the Ensemble Intercontemporain's upcoming performance of Rihm's huge instrumental cycle Jagden und Formen, on May 25.

The Philharmonic gave a committed reading. Beautiful soft trumpet solo. Maestro Maazel was on good behavior throughout; perhaps the police were there to prevent him from doing weird things to Bolero. Lisa Batashvili was a dazzling and vivid soloist in Chausson's Poème and Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo capriccioso. The pro-forma Haydn opener, Symphony No. 95, was several notches above a snooze, dark-toned and agile. There are more promising Philharmonic concerts coming up, especially Messiaen's final masterpiece Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà, under Kent Nagano. Also, in an effort to reach new audiences, the Philharmonic has named Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith (upper left) as its new artistic administrator. Wait, no — they've named Los Angeles Philharmonic administrator Chad Smith. Sorry for the confusion. Given the LAPhil's remarkable programming in the last couple of years, this is good news, I think.

Afterward, on the 66th St. subway platform, concertgoers were treated to a new Lincoln Center institution, Well-Prepared Saxophone Man. He's a top-notch player who times his performances to the end of each concert at Lincoln Center, and goes to the trouble of playing a bit of what you've just heard. Sometimes the choices are a stretch — Rosenkavalier doesn't sound so good on the sax — but Bolero, with its big sax solos, is a natural. W-PSM even worked in portions of the Bolero rhythm beneath the melody. I love the post-concert music-nerd subway ride. It's wonderfully strange to be sitting in a car full of people who've listened to, say, Katya Kabanova. Everyone instantly puts his or her affectless subway mask on, which seems a shame. We ought to be prattling gaily about the tempos.

Copenhagen Diary

In the tradition of my Bayreuth Pilgrimage from last summer, here's a photolog of my trip to Copenhagen, on the occasion of the premiere of Poul Ruders' opera Kafka’s Trial. A review will appear in the New Yorker next week, alongside a report on Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata at the Houston Grand Opera.

As always when I'm in Copenhagen — OK, I've been here one other time — I stay at the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel. (One more movie line for Our Girl in Chicago: "It's a Radisson, so you know it's pretty good, yah.") The exterior is nondescript sixties modern, the lobby is nothing to get excited about, but the interiors, the work of the great Danish architect-designer Arne Jacobsen, make it seem unnecessary to go outside:

The view out the window:

But there's hardly time to relax. Music criticism, as some of you may not realize, is punishingly hard work, albeit not so much physical as mental. Here I am furiously studying the score, on the lookout for fugitive triads of E-flat minor:

The new Copenhagen opera house is called OPERAEN, or THE OPERA. There has apparently been some kind of architectural controversy about it. To my dilettantish eye, it looks pretty cool, as almost everything in Denmark does:

The Saw is opening in Denmark (sign in middle):

Back at the hotel, it’s time for the fun part — writing the review!

Night of the Living Dead, Pt. VI

Two stories on ArtsJournal: "Did Toscanini Kill Classical Music in America?" and "The Day Aussie Orchestras Died?" The big question is, of course, whether Toscanini killed orchestras in Australia. In the conservatory, with a candlestick.

Attersee redux

For a few moments of pure off-kilter pleasure, pay a visit to Edmund Welles, a Bay Area bass-clarinet quartet — "heavy chamber music, muzak for conspiracy theorists, songs of lunacy and purpose." Be sure to listen to their version of "Creep."

Bone-foresaking beauty

It's been a while since I've gone on a Bob Dylan bender, right? James Tata recommends Luc Sante's magisterial review of recent Boblications in the New York Review of Books. I recommend it, too, though, as often in Dylan criticism, there’s a reluctance to discuss the music. One of Sante’s few attempts at musical description occurs in the following paragraph:

Among the four fifths of the Basement Tapes material that remains officially unreleased is a song called "I'm Not There" (1956). It is glaringly unfinished—Dylan mumbles unintelligibly through parts of it, and throws together fragments of lyrics apparently at random—and yet it is one of his greatest songs. The hymn-like minor-key melody, rising from mournful to exalted, is certainly one reason for this, and another is the perfect accompaniment by three members of The Band, but the very discontinuity of the lyrics, in combination with Dylan's unflagging intensity, creates a powerful, tantalizing indeterminacy that is suddenly if provisionally resolved by every return of the refrain: ‘Now when I [unintelligible] I was born to love her / But she knows that the kingdom weighs so high above her / And I run but I race but it's not too fast or soon [?] / But I don't perceive her, I'm not there, I'm gone."

Two ultra-pedantic points. First, “1956” isn’t the date of composition; it’s part of the title. What it means, no one knows. Second, the song’s in B major. Why it ends up sounding sad and “minorish” is an interesting topic. I think it has something to do with the curious, not quite logical order in which Dylan shuffles through the five chords of the song (three major, two minor), and the way he lands on a G#-minor chord at the beginning of the second phrase of the refrain, where you might expect the tonic. You hear the same major-key mournfulness in “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” In any case, the fact that you can’t really make out the lyrics to this song, and yet keep listening, should be a clue that the music itself is the heart of the matter. As Eyolf Ostrem writes on his excellent Dylan-as-composer site, “’I'm Not There’ is Dylan's most musical song …. The meaning is veiled in the same way as the meaning of an utterance in a language that one does not understand is veiled: there seems to be a meaning there, but it is hidden.” This is not to deny that there are powerful verbal images at work — “the kingdom weighs [or waits] so high above her” — but if you go chasing after only the words you’ll be left with nothing, because much of the time Dylan may not have had words in mind at all — only chords, shorn tunes, and unsayable feelings.

Walt Whitman on Beethoven's Septet

“Dainty abandon, sometimes as if Nature laughing on a hillside in the sunshine; serious and firm monotonies, as of winds; a horn sounding through the tangle of the forest, and the dying echoes; soothing floating of waves, but presently rising in surges, angrily lashing, muttering, heavy; piercing peals of laughter, for interstices; now and then weird, as Nature herself is in certain moods—but mainly spontaneous, easy, careless…”

Daring in Duluth

On the subject of brilliant programming, see this season's programs by the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra: Love of Country, Tragic Love, Love of Nature (the Pastorale and the Rite of Spring), Unrequited Love, Forbidden Love (Tchaikovsky, naturally), Fatal Love (Carmen), and Love of Music. An article by Chester Lane in Symphony magazine alerted me to this venture, which is the brainchild of conductor Markand Thakar. Last season they did the Seven Deadly Sins, and for Wrath (paired with the virtue of Brotherhood) they put Beethoven's Ninth next to William Grant Still's And They Lynched Him on a Tree. Gives me chills just to think about.