Wagnerism
Amsterdam playlist
Here, as promised to several people who were in attendance, is a playlist for my event today with the Calder Quartet at the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale. It was again a deep pleasure to participate in this singular gathering. The theme was music from the American West Coast, with a few digressions.
Stravinsky, Three Pieces for String Quartet
Henry Cowell, The Tides of Manaunaun
Cowell, Quartet Euphometric
Dane Rudhyar, "Stars" from Pentagrams
Harry Partch, "There Are Rides On The Highway At Green River" from US Highball
Lou Harrison, The Perilous Chapel
John Cage, "Quietly flowing along" from String Quartet in Four Parts
Webern, Five Movements for String Quartet
Discussion of La Monte Young
Terry Riley, excerpt from String Quartet (1960)
James Tenney, Saxony
Michael Pisaro, "Fool" from Tombstones
Michelle Lou, HoneyDripper
Andrew Norman, Sabina
Among the oldest trees
The Bristlecones Speak. The New Yorker, Jan. 20, 2020.
When I spent time in Death Valley in 2016, I became mesmerized by the sight of Great Basin bristlecone pines clinging to the slopes of Telescope Peak, the highest mountain in the area. I soon made my way to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, in the White Mountains, northwest of Death Valley. I made several visits there in recent months, talking to scientists about these extraordinary trees, the world's oldest. The piece above is the result. I obviously owe a huge debt of gratitude to Andy Bunn, Matt Salzer, Brian Smithers, Connie Millar, and Tim Forsell, who served as my guides. (A connection to my day job: Andy's parents, Frank and Betsy Bunn, are longtime supporters of Emmanuel Music.) I enjoyed the hospitality of the volunteer crew of GLORIA Great Basin, an organization worthy of support. I also received excellent counsel from Jared Farmer, who is writing an eagerly anticipated book about the bristlecones and the mystique of ancient trees. Above all, I thank The New Yorker for letting me go on such strange jaunts.
The Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest is closed for the winter and won't reopen until some time in May, when the roads are cleared of snow. If you go, I recommend setting aside a full day: the walk through the Schulman Grove, the main visitor area, takes about three hours, and the drive up to the Patriarch Grove, another site of spectacular old bristlecones, takes about an hour. If you are not of the camping persuasion, there are decent places to stay in Big Pine and Bishop. Matt, Andy, and I recommend the somewhat paralyzing burgers at Aaron Schat's. The Eastern California Museum in Independence is very much worth a visit, as is the former internment camp at Manzanar, the darkest of American national parks. Anyone passing through Tucson should take a look at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, which has exhibits in its lobby, including A. E. Douglass's pioneering tree-ring chronology. Someday I hope to visit the Great Basin National Park in Nevada, where remains of the Prometheus tree can still be seen on Wheeler Peak. I also hope one day to catch a glimpse of Campito, the ghost horse of the White Mountains. If you follow that last link, you'll find many more mountain and desert stories by Tim Forsell.
A reading list: Michael Cohen, A Garden of Bristlecones; Ronald Lanner, The Bristlecone Book; Donald J. McGraw, Edmund Schulman and the "Living Ruins"; Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise; Darwin Lambert, Great Basin Drama; Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees; George Ernest Webb, Tree Rings and Telescopes: The Scientific Career of A.E. Douglass; Colin Renfew, Before Civilization: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe; David Muench, Timberline Ancients; Rachel Sussman, The Oldest Living Things in the World; Ashee Noren, Ranger Al Noren; scholarly articles by Edmund Schulman, Wes Ferguson, Bryant Bannister, Val LaMarche, Malcolm Hughes, Charlotte Pearson, Matt Salzer, Brian Smithers, Connie Millar, and Barbara Bentz, among others.
Apex 2019
"Aus LICHT" at the Holland Festival.
At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2019, which also mentions highlights of the decade now ending.
The Rest Is Noise Person of the Year is Lara St. John.
Some notable music books of 2019: Andrew Patner's A Portrait in Four Movements (University of Chicago Press), Arní Heimir Ingólfsson's Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland, Mark Stryker's Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press), Nicole Grimes's Brahms's Elegies (Cambridge UP), Susan McClary's The Passions of Peter Sellars (University of Michigan Press), Mark Berry's Arnold Schoenberg (University of Chicago Press), Damon Krukowski's Ways of Hearing (MIT Press), Oliver Soden's Michael Tippett: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Outside of music, I read with great enjoyment Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs), Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (FSG), Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, Patrick Keefe's Say Nothing, Andrew Marantz's Antisocial, and Amy Waldman's A Door in the Earth, among others.
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."
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)
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.
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
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)
