Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Leaves of Leifs

Ten years ago, I excitedly greeted Arní Heimir Ingólfsson's biography of Jón Leifs, even though it was in Icelandic and I understood nary a word. It took a little while, but Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland, Arní's English-language adaptation of his book, is now available from Indiana University Press. It's a thoroughly absorbing study of a formidable and sometimes troubling figure who possessed one of the more original musical voices of the twentieth century. None other than Björk supplies a blurb: "He pioneered in notating glaciers and orchestrating eruptions, sometimes masterpieces (sometimes not), but he had the courage to embrace the cliché and show us the way."

Video of the day: Fuck Wagner

Nightafternight playlist

Facce d'Amore: Arias of Cavalli, Handel, Boretti; Jakub Józef Orliński, with Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo D'oro (Erato)

Olga Neuwirth, ...miramondo multiplo..., Remnants of Songs, Masaot / Clocks without Hands; Ingo Metzmacher conducting the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, with Håkan Hardenberger; Susanna Mälkki conducting the ORF Radio Symphony, with Antoine Tamestit; Daniel Harding conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Kairos)

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, "For Violin and Orchestra," A. G. Madsen, "Nachtmusik"; Ryan Bancroft and Nicholas Collon conducting the Danish National Symphony, with Christine Åstrand and Per Salo (Da Capo)

Zosha Di Castri, Tachitipo and other works; Ekmeles, ICE, JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Julia Den Boer (New Focus)

Ockeghem, Complete Songs, vol. 1; Blue Heron (BHCD)

Avet Terterian, Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4; Kirill Karabits conducting Bournemouth Symphony (Chandos)

Scott Cazan, Dyads (a wave press)

Ravel, Miroirs, La Valse, Stravinsky, Petrushka, The Firebird; Beatrice Rana (Warner)

Preliminary end-of-year list

Early selections for my list of Notable Recordings of 2019.

— Bruckner, Symphony No. 9; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)

— Weinberg, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 21; Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with the Kremerata Baltica and Gidon Kremer (DG)

— Beethoven, Complete Piano Sonatas; Igor Levit (Sony)

— Prism II: Bach, Fugue in B Minor, Beethoven, Quartet Opus 130; Schnittke, Third Quartet; Danish Quartet (ECM)

— Speak, Be Silent: works of Chaya Czernowin, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Mirela Ivičević, Liza Lim, and Rebecca Saunders; Riot Ensemble (Huddersfield Contemporary Records)

— Morton Feldman Piano; Philip Thomas (another timbre)

— Zosha Di Castri, Tachitipo and other works; Ekmeles, ICE, JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Julia Den Boer (New Focus)

— Ockeghem, Complete Songs, vol. 1; Blue Heron (BHCD)

— Andrew Norman, Sustain; Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic (DG, digital only)

— George Benjamin, Lessons in Love and Violence; Stéphane Degout, Barbara Hannigan, Gyula Orendt, Peter Hoare, Samuel Boden, Benjamin conducting the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House (Nimbus)

Bell, water, power

Thought of the day

"The people who are in control, the worst of the worst who are attacking us with anger, brutality, deception, exploitation, suppression, intimidation . . . those people, like myself, are old. They’re at the end of their time, too. And it’s almost like the thrashing of Tyrannosaurus rex. Its tail is crushing and wiping and swiping. It’s hitting people and other creatures and hurting them. But it’s dying."

— Genesis P-Orridge to Randall Roberts, in the LA Times

Miscellany

Admirers of John Schaefer's long-running and hugely influential WNYC show New Sounds are reeling in shock from the station's decision to cancel the program — or, to quote a stomach-churning locution in an internal e-mail, “sunset the New Sounds brand." Laurie Anderson's succinct reaction: "Why would they do that?"... The Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, creator of one of the twentieth century's more formidable string-quartet cycles, is the focus of the third annual Bard Music West festival, an extension of the Bard Music Festival in upstate NY. It runs Oct. 18-19 at Noe Valley Ministry, in San Francisco. The Chronicle's Joshua Kosman has a preview.... From Oct. 23 to Oct. 26, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College jointly present Unit Structures, a conference and mini-festival around the magnificent legacy of Cecil Taylor.... The reinvigorated Monday Evening Concerts series in LA has announced an enticing 2019-20 season: Feldman's For Philip Guston, Xenakis's Pléïades, an Éliane Radigue mini-festival, a Davóne Tines recital, an Anne Carson/Beckett evening, recent works by Trevor Bača and Caroline Shaw, and so forth.... A similarly seductive WasteLAnd Music season leads off on Nov. 8 with a Matt Barbier evening of "sludge, debris, virtuosity, and fascination," as evidenced in works of Timothy McCormack, Michelle Lou, and George Lewis.... In the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes about Lena Herzog's unclassifiable and singularly haunting Last Whispers, which plays at Peak Performances in Montclair, NJ, Oct. 16-20.

Porgy at the Met, Venables's Denis

Star-Crossed. The New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2019.

Essay on Nietzsche

The Eternal Return. The New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2019.

There was a third book

Last week I turned in the manuscript of my third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Having spent nine years writing it, I'm now not entirely sure what to do with myself. To be sure, much work remains: copy-editing, fact-checking, determining the placement of more than a hundred illustrations. But the work on my end is largely done. The publication date is September 2020.

I say in the prelude that working on this book was the great education of my life. It took so long partly because I enjoyed the process of research so deeply. The central topic is Wagner's impact on non-musical artists, from his own lifetime forward. The list of Wagner-inflected poets, novelists, painters, dancers, architects, theater designers, and filmmakers is almost infinitely long. It begins, roughly, with Baudelaire and George Eliot; encompasses such titanic modernist novelists as Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, and Cather; and continues into the present, with the likes of Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog finding new images for Wagner on film. Add to this the composer's effect on philosophy, from Nietzsche to Alain Badiou, and, of course, his huge political ramifications, which are not limited to Hitler and the far right. The education consisted in reading, re-reading, viewing, and reconsidering a vast swath of cultural production. I'm not sure how many hundreds of books I read in the process, but I am much the better for it, and I hope that the book reflects a maturation of perspective.

It's not yet clear how many pages Wagnerism will consume, but it will be longer than The Rest Is Noise, which was not a short book. If it turns out to be anything other than an unreadable monster, Eric Chinski, my heroically patient and exacting editor, should take most of the credit. A great many scholars and critics have helped me along the way; I will do my best to give thanks to all in the Acknowledgments. The book will be dedicated to the memory of my beloved and brilliant friend Andrew Patner, who had many doubts about Wagner but loved Meistersinger nonetheless. May it be worthy of him.

Here is the table of contents:

PRELUDE: Death in Venice

1. RHEINGOLD: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the “Ring”

2. TRISTAN CHORD: Baudelaire and the Symbolists

3. SWAN KNIGHT: Victorian England and Gilded-Age America

4. GRAIL TEMPLE: Esoteric, Decadent, and Satanic Wagner

5. HOLY GERMAN ART: The Kaiserreich and Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

6. NIBELHEIM: Jewish and Black Wagner

7. VENUSBERG: Feminist and Gay Wagner

8. BRÜNNHILDE’S ROCK: Willa Cather and the Singer-Novel

9. MAGIC FIRE: Modernism, 1900 to 1914

10. NOTHUNG: The First World War and Hitler's Youth

11. RING OF POWER: Revolution and Russia

12. FLYING DUTCHMAN: “Ulysses,” “The Waste Land,” “The Waves”

13. SIEGFRIED’S DEATH: Nazi Germany and Thomas Mann

14. RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES: Film from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Apocalypse Now”

15. THE WOUND: Wagnerism after 1945

POSTLUDE

Jessye Norman in memoriam

A Postscript on the New Yorker website.

A Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

— Morton Feldman Piano; Philip Thomas (another timbre)

— Feldman, For Bunita Marcus; Aki Takahashi (Mode)

— Bruckner, Symphony No. 9; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)

— Julia Wolfe, Fire in my mouth; Jaap van Zweden conducting the New York Philharmonic, The Crossing, Young People's Chorus of New York City (Decca)

— Andrew Norman, Sustain; Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic (DG, digital only)

— Hannah Lash, Filigree; JACK Quartet (New Focus)

— Alkan, Etudes, Op. 39; Paul Wee (BIS, Nov. release)

— Scarlatti, Sonatas; Lucas Debargue (Sony)

— Schubert, Schwanengesang, Brahms, Vier ernste Gesänge; Gerald Finley, Julius Drake (Hyperion)

— Cipriano de Rore, Madrigals; Blue Heron (BHCD)

For Jessye Norman

For Christopher Rouse

The widely admired American composer, a musical thinker of force, wit, and deep emotion, has died at the age of seventy. His Sixth Symphony will have its première next month at the Cincinnati Symphony.

Mistakes at the LA Phil

It's unfortunate that the Los Angeles Philharmonic, one of the world's leading orchestras, has been suffering from muddled leadership on the part of its board of directors. When Deborah Borda left the LA Phil's top administrative post in 2017, the board had the opportunity to promote Chad Smith, the orchestra's longtime chief of programming. Instead, it brought in Simon Woods, who had had success in previous jobs but who lacked Smith's vision and imagination, not to mention his deep knowledge of the organization. Woods's early departure, announced Monday, gives the board a second chance to make the right choice.

Petrenko in Berlin

Safe Space. The New Yorker, Sept. 16, 2019.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent recordings of interest.

Feldman, For Bunita Marcus; Aki Takahashi (Mode)

Beethoven, Complete Piano Sonatas; Igor Levit (Sony)

Clara Schumann, Piano Concerto, Piano Sonata in G Minor, and other works; Isata Kanneh-Mason with Holly Mathieson conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Decca)

Mark Andre, hij 1 and 2; Mariano Chiacchiarini conducting the WDR Symphony, Marcus Creed conducting the SWR Vocal Ensemble (Wergo)

Weinberg, String Quartets Nos. 11–13; Silesian Quartet (Accord)

Ronald Stevenson, Piano Works vol. 2; Kenneth Hamilton (Prima Facie)

Luke Bedford, Through His Teeth; Opera Factory Freiburg (bastille musique)

Christopher Cerrone, The Pieces That Fall to Earth; Lindsay Kesselman, Theo Bleckmann, Christopher Rountree conducting wild Up (New Amsterdam)

Catherine Lamb, Point / Wave; Cristián Alvear (another timbre)

John Luther Adams, Become Desert; Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony (Cantaloupe)

in manus tuas: works of Andrew Norman, Caroline Shaw, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir; Lanzilotti, Karl Larson, Sarah Mullins (New Focus)

Korngold at Bard

Surround Sound. The New Yorker, Aug. 19, 2109.

A Trevor Bača moment

Ashley Walters performing Bača's Nähte at a WasteLAnd event, Nov. 16, 2018.  Walters will play the same piece live at Outhaus in LA on Aug. 1, as part of a three-day Underwolf Records festival (July 31 – Aug. 2). Many more videos from WasteLAnd's recent concerts are now online, including works of Liza Lim, Chaya Czernowin, Richard Barrett, Katherine Young, Nicholas Deyoe, and Andrew McIntosh. I especially recommend Klaus Lang's missa beati pauperes spiritu, which I was lucky to witness live; I am somewhere behind Michael Pisaro.

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Melissa Burrage, The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America (Boydell and Brewer)

Cate Haste, Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler (Basic Books)

Shayne Carter, Dead People I Have Known (Victoria UP)

Mark Stryker, Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press)

Walter Everett and Tim Riley, What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time (Oxford UP)

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (FSG, out 8/27)

Katherine M. Kuenzli, Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale UP)