Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Stockhausen in the flesh

Enlightening, amusing, perplexing, sometimes haunting memories of Karlheinz Stockhausen, collected by Tom Service for the Guardian. I never met the composer, though I did experience his presence at the premiere of the Helicopter Quartet in 1995 and at a Berlin concert in 2002. The orange sweater, which Service mentions, to some degree dissipated his intimidating reputation. The last line of the piece is absolutely right: the twentieth century, the epoch of vastly ambitious, at times megalomaniac musical conceptions, which really began with the late works of Wagner, is indeed over. But its echoes reverberate all around us. What next?

Update: Steve Hicken asks an excellent question: "If Stockhausen's death signals the end of 20th century music, when did (or when will) the 21st century start?"

At the blog around the corner

Photograph by Sasha Frere-Jones.

This inspires a yearning that only time travel would satisfy.

Update: Ben Ratliff, whose book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound was one of my favorites of the year, reviews the reunion show in the New York Times. Sasha will presumably weigh in at a later date. Maybe it's not too late for we youngsters to get a real taste of Led Zep's raucous majesty. There is a classical connection: John Paul Jones, the band's genius bass player, was an organist and choirmaster when he was still in his teens.

Festive playlist for the 99th birthdays of Messiaen and Carter

— Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood (Nonesuch)
— Leon Kirchner, Works for Solo Piano, with Leon Fleisher, Peter Serkin, Max Levinson, Jonathan Biss, Joel Fan, and Jeremy Denk (Albany) [Vot a bunch!]
— Giacinto Scelsi, The Works for Double Bass, with Robert Black (Mode)
— Lisa Bielawa, A Handful of World (Tzadik)
— Michael Tippett, Piano Concerto and Piano Sonatas, Steven Osborne with Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Hyperion)
— Salome, live at Covent Garden 1947, with Maria Cebotari (Gebhardt)
— Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, Requiem for Fossil Fuels
— Schoenberg, Dear Miss Silvers: Originaltonaufnahmen 1931-1951 (supposé)

Closer to the source

I recently posted a shot of snow-dusted New Jersey under the heading "Sibelius weather." Finnish poet and blogger Karri Kokko wrote to offer an authentic Sibelian landscape, photographed outside Helsinki. Go here and here for more. Kokko went to the same high school as Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928-2007

A press release from Stockhausen Verlag (via John Supko):

The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away on December 5th 2007 at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg and will be buried in the Waldfriedhof (forest cemetery) in Kuerten.... Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer, who have performed many of his works and, together with him, have taken care of the scores, compact discs, books, films, flowers, shrubs, and trees will continue to disseminate his work throughout the world, as prescribed in the statutes of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, of which they are executive board members.

Stockhausen always said that GOD gave birth to him and calls him home.

****

…for love is stronger than death.

IN FRIENDSHIP and gratitude for everything that he has given to us personally and to humanity through his love and his music, we bid FAREWELL to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lived to bring celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings, so that Man may listen to GOD and GOD may hear His children. On December 5th he ascended with JOY through HEAVEN’S DOOR, in order to continue to compose in PARADISE with COSMIC PULSES in eternal HARMONY, as he had always hoped to do: You, who summon me to Heaven, Eva, Mikael and Maria, let me eternally compose music for Heaven’s Father-Mother, GOD creator of Cosmic Music. May Saint Michael, together with Heaven’s musicians in ANGEL PROCESSIONS and INVISIBLE CHOIRS welcome him with a fitting musical GREETING. On behalf of him and following his example, we will endeavor to continue to protect the music.

— Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer

At his greatest, in works such as Gruppen, Kontakte, and Momente, Stockhausen released sounds of mind-opening and mind-bending power. Exerting an influence that extended from the recondite circles of the postwar avant-garde to the Beatles and Björk, he was, for all his bewildering eccentricities, a giant of late-twentieth-century music. As Tim Rutherford-Johnson says, it's deeply sad that he never got to hear his mammoth opera cycle Licht complete. (It had been announced for the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden in 2008, but according to this article the plans came to naught. There may be a performance in Essen in 2010.) Listen here to the epoch-making electronic work Gesang der Jünglinge. Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices have a superb new CD of the gently transporting Stimmung. New Yorkers can hear ICE play the Donnerstag-Abschied tonight. 

Obituaries are rolling in: Ivan Hewett, Andrew Clements, Pierre Gervasoni (in French, with a tribute from Boulez), Reinhard Brembeck and Andrian Kreye (in German), The Times, Paul Griffiths, and Mark Swed, the last of whom quotes Esa-Pekka Salonen calling Stockhausen "the rock star of my youth." ANABlog has a massive collection of links. Chris DeLaurenti of The Stranger has an excellent primer on the composer. Ljova drew my attention to a poignant aside on a Stockhausen.org page anticipating the composer's eightieth birthday next August: "A commission for another Hour would be very nice!" Meanwhile, Kyle Gann reports another lamentable piece of news: the death of the pioneering American-music scholar H. Wiley Hitchcock. And the distinguished American composer Andrew Imbrie has passed away in Berkeley.

Return of Agenda

The above photo, from Baltimore, is of no relevance to the text below.

Tonight is an obvious candidate for this season's Night of Too Many New-Music Concerts in NYC. You can choose among the Borromeo Quartet playing Reich's Different Trains and Beethoven's Opus 130 at Tenri; the Ensemble ACJW, at Zankel Hall, performing Takemitsu's Tree Line, Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony, and Reinbert de Leeuw's In the Lovely Month of May under the direction of de Leeuw (who, I'll keep saying until I'm blue in the face, is a great conductor); The Knights at Weill Hall; the first of four performances of Elliott Carter's What Next? at Miller Theatre (the last performance, next Tuesday, will fall on the composer's 99th birthday); a rendition of Tan Dun's The Gate by the Brooklyn Philharmonic; Lukas Foss's children's opera Griffelkin at the Manhattan School; counter)induction playing a new work by Ryan Streber, among other pieces, at Christ and St. Stephen's; the debut at Brooklyn Heights' First Presbyterian Church of Ensemble de Sade, which aims to bring out the "masochism and sadism" inherent in the traditional concert experience in a program of Schoenberg, Penderecki, Nyman, and Zorn; the International Contemporary Ensemble doing Stockhausen (Donnerstag-Abschied), Saariaho, Xenakis, and Reich in conjunction with the Moving Theater at the Whitney; thingNY at Yippie Museum Café; and works of Eve Beglarian and Jacob ter Veldhuis at the Movado Hour. (Much of the above comes courtesy of Steve Smith's Time Out New York listings.) On Saturday night the Japan Society presents the last of three performances of Harry Partch's legendary and long-neglected Delusions of the Fury, which Tony Tommasini reviewed glowingly in the New York Times. This has been sold out for a while, but some unclaimed tickets may be available before the start of the performance. On Sunday Da Camera of Houston presents the first of two performances of a Dada and Jazz program at the Guggenheim. And on Wednesday the Talea Ensemble plays at Tenri. I will of course be at all these concerts, thanks to my newly acquired superpowers.

Messiah on crack, etc.

Yuletide is upon us, and it's time once again for a perennial audio favorite (courtesy of The Rambler).... Saxophonist and composer C.R. Kasprzyk has responded to Howard Stern's assault on the musical avant-garde by creating a text-sound composition in the vein of It's Gonna Rain.... Clarke Bustard mulls over conservatives' new interest in music and arts education. Read more about Mike Huckabee's education ideas here.... In my coverage of Carnegie's Berlin in Lights festival I somehow overlooked the Festival Blog, where three young writers provided running commentary on the Berlin events. Nick Romeo wrote of Max Raabe's cabaret evening: "Near the end of the performance I couldn’t help thinking of an exhibit at the Met last year titled 'Glitter and Doom.' It presented paintings from the Weimar period that were haunting in their blending of elegant decadence and grotesque corruption. Max Raabe certainly captured the glitter of those years, but I craved some of the doom." Nice.

Sibelius weather

Amtrak takes a refreshing pause somewhere in New Jersey.

Lieberson's Grawemeyer

Photo: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

The University of Louisville has awarded this year's Grawemeyer Award in composition to Peter Lieberson, for his orchestral song cycle Neruda Songs. It is impossible to think of a more suitable candidate. Neruda Songs is music of high craft and deep emotion; it is destined to live a very long time. The award would have been absolutely deserved under any circumstances, but in light of everything that the composer has endured in the last year and a half — the death of his beloved wife, Lorraine, the grief that followed, and then treatment for lymphoma — it must be especially gratifying. I wrote about Neruda Songs at the end of my memorial to Lorraine. Not long ago I received an e-mail from Lieberson, with whom I once studied. I am happy to report that he sounds in good spirits and is composing again.

Music and politics

Gustavo Dudamel conducted the New York Philharmonic last night in a hard-driving, powerfully controlled, at times very intense version of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Today, Venezuelans are voting on Hugo Chávez's "constitutional reform." Chávez said on Friday: "If God gives me life and help, I will be at the head of the government until 2050." ... Update: As it turns out, he will not.

Don Stravinsky

The costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis, in her massive and lovely coffee-table book Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design, quotes Al Pacino on the subject of playing Michael Corleone in The Godfather: "...the thing that I was after was to create some kind of enigma.... You see Michael in some of those scenes wrapped up in a kind of trance, as if his mind were completely filled with thoughts; that's what I was doing. I was actually listening to Stravinsky on the set, so I'd have that look." Which Stravinsky? I would guess Agon.

Tidbits

The LA Phil has a vastly improved website.... Soho the Dog is selling Strauss and Mahler T-shirts (profits go to a worthy cause).... NYC classical station WQXR is collecting votes for its annual Classical Countdown, held at the end of December. Wouldn't it be great to have some post-Tchaikovsky music pop up in the most popular category? I suggest a twentieth-century classic on the order of The Rite of Spring or the Quartet for the End of Time.... On December 5, Bob Shingleton's Future Radio broadcasts all four hours of Alvin Curran's marvelous Inner Cities piano cycle. In college, I put Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum on the air, then spent the afternoon working on my senior thesis, needing only to change the CDs once an hour.... Song of the day: Brooklyn band Barbez plays a wonderfully spooky arrangement of "The Portrait" from Schnittke's ballet Esquisses.

DG online (updated)

Tomorrow Deutsche Grammophon will launch an online Web Shop containing high-quality MP3s of 2400 albums in its catalogue, including six hundred out-of-print items. The bit rate is 320 kb/second, much higher than the standard 128 kb/s. I was given a quick preview of the site and was impressed by what I saw. Modern masters such as Ligeti, Nono, and Reich are well represented, as far as DG's catalogue allows, alongside the canonical greats. Test case: Stele. On the occasion of the Berlin Philharmonic's recent performance, a number of us wrote ecstatically of György Kurtág's orchestral masterwork, which has recently been available only on an import-only Claudio Abbado CD costing upwards of forty dollars. [Update: It's also on a Haenssler Classic Mahler set, Christopher Culver notes.] Now you can obtain the piece for $3.87 ($1.29 per movement). The design is smooth and the operation quick; I bought, downloaded, and was listening to a new Stele in under three minutes. These are definitely hefty files; the 12-minute work takes up 31 MB. But the quality is superb. I was actually kind of shocked to hear such rich sounds coming out of my iPod. Times are changing....

AC Douglas highlights the odd final paragraph of a Tech Crunch story about DG's site: "It may be worth noting that classical music receives less legal protection than contemporary music because only its recorded performances, not its compositions, are still under copyright." The writer seems to forget about the existence of twentieth- and twenty-first-century classical music. Hey, there's a hot new book on the subject!

Update 11/28: After some opening-day glitches, the Web Shop seems to be running well. As another test case, I bought Myung Whun-Chung's Des Canyons aux étoiles, which sounds lovely. I should mention that each download includes a pdf version of the liner notes.

Gift ideas

I have updated my recommended CD list in the left-hand column. I'm not quite ready to plunk down a best-of-the-year list, but the following CDs are certain to appear on it: GVSU's Music for 18 Musicians (innova), Paavo Järvi's Beethoven symphonies (BMG), the astounding Teresa Stratas Salome DVD (DG), and the Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Wigmore Hall recital (Wigmore Hall Live).

On becoming a book (book tour diary 4)

Some readers may be relieved to know that I am embarking on the final leg of my book tour. This Tuesday I'll spread the holiday cheer by speaking on music under totalitarianism at the Met Museum; on Friday I will give my audiovisual 20th-century lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art; on Dec. 3 I will speak at the Hilbert Circle Theatre in Indianapolis; on Dec. 4 I will appear at An Die Musik in Baltimore, as part of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series; and, finally, on Dec. 5 I'll read at my favorite local bookstore, 192 Books.

The Venezuela problem

The American tour of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela occasioned fascinating and occasionally intense debate on the Internet. Some were troubled by the sight of the young musicians donning Venezuelan national colors at a time when other students were protesting against Hugo Chávez's efforts to end presidential term limits and otherwise expand his powers. Bob Shingleton of On an Overgrown Path has been particularly outspoken, accusing musicians and administrators of complicity in authoritarian politics; here's a selection of his posts on the topic. Matthew Guerrieri mounted a vigorous and intelligent defense. What disturbs me, as I say in my New Yorker column, is that when politicians throw money at music, some in the classical business tend not to scrutinize the politics too closely. The twentieth century is richly stocked with cases in point. I have heard it said that the future of classical music is in Venezuela; I have also heard it said that the future of classical music lies in China. I, for one, am pretty content with classical music here in America, not least because it makes do largely without "official" support. (A story to watch: Mike Huckabee's dark-horse candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. As I noted last year, Huckabee is a determined supporter of music and arts education.) I'll throw a quotation from the maverick Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer into the continuing debate: "Art within the constraints of a system is political action in favor of that system, regardless of content."

Carnegie's Berlin in Lights

The Out-of-Towners. The New Yorker, Dec. 3, 2007.

Previously: Rattle's 2002 debut in Berlin.

Poll: Classical more popular than rock

Critic/author Jody Rosen drew my attention to a Zogby/Lear Center survey of political beliefs and entertainment preferences among 3939 American adults. Down at the bottom you find this surprising result: "Although moderates are less enamored with it, classical music barely nudged ahead of rock as the most popular music genre overall." Almost 62% of respondents said they listen to it. In fact, the basic value of classical music seems to be one of the few things that people of all political stripes agree on. You wouldn't know this from watching the major TV networks or reading magazines such as Time and Newsweek. The question, of course, is what people mean by "listening." Do they go to concerts? Do they buy CDs? Put your money where your mouth is, America!

Previously: Dead or Alive, Twilight of the Gods, Classical Music as Pop Culture

Unvexed

It's past two in the morning at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, and the Vexations marathon is going strong. The previous player seemed to be getting a little punchy toward the end of his run, but this one — I believe it's Paul Kilbey, president of the Music Society — exudes an eerie calm.

The scene around 5AM.

Early afternoon: a pale sun has risen over Cambridge, and Satie soldiers on. This appears to be Jamal Sutton. I, admittedly, slept.

2:28PM: Kilbey acknowledges the grateful applause of an invisible but not infinitesimal public. Alas, my connection went down during iteration #840, so I cannot comment on the interpretive choices that Kilbey made at the very end, but he had been tending toward a hard-edged neoclassical aesthetic. Congratulations to all!

Leftovers

Maulina delivers her annual Thanksgiving Day broadcast from a fur-lined igloo by George.

Beginning today at 7PM GMT, an intrepid team of pianists from the Sidney Sussex College Music Society at Cambridge University will play all 840 iterations of Satie's Vexations. There's live streaming audio of the event. Paul Kilbey, who organized the event, told me that he was inspired by my various posts on the Vexations topic. I'm honored! Overgrown Path has more.... Boston-based pianist and professor Michael Monroe, whose blog MMusing is new to me, proposes a delightful selection of classical vanity plates. My favorites: 81A BYE, FAUN PM.... Pandora now features classical music.... Matthew Guerrieri has turned on his Secret Crazy Music News Feed and discovered that Linda Kern Cummings, an angry heir of Jerome Kern, is fighting in the courts to win back some of the long-deceased composer's royalties. The killer detail is that Cummings is suing, among others, the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, which has evidently been receiving some of the royalties by way of charitable bequest. Way to go!... More Radiohead in Chicago: on Dec. 2 the dal niente ensemble plays arrangements of "Dollars and Cents" and "Nude" along with works of Lee Hyla, Christian Lauba, David Reminick, and Christopher Fisher-Lochhead.