Nun of the Above

On my way to her first opera, Hildegard, on Friday night, I was thinking again about Sarah Kirkland Snider’s music, and how I might describe an album like Unremembered to somebody who had never heard it. I surprised myself with the absurd phrase psychedelic folk—surprised, since her music has always struck me as grounded and unpretentious, not “hallucinatory” per se—but if you were talking about an album from the 70s that used tape delays the way Snider uses imitation, blurring the edges around the harmonies and orchestration, what else would you call it? Anyway, it was just a passing thought. I shrugged it off.

A couple hours later, I was sitting at the Prototype Festival’s New York premiere of Hildegard, and all of a sudden the word “psychedelic” didn’t seem all that absurd. If you’ve read my profile(s) of Snider and the making of her opera for Parterre Box, you might remember a couple of things about this project: that music director Gabriel Crouch (who expertly led the outstanding NOVUS Ensemble here) raved about Snider’s orchestrations, and that one of the things that got her obsessed with Hildegard von Bingen’s story was Hildegard’s lifelong, debilitating, chronic headaches (Snider suffers from chronic migraine, which some scholars suspect may have caused Hildegard’s visions). But I wasn’t prepared for how acutely Snider would apply the orchestra towards sonifying the throb and shimmer of a headache. It was so intense—it was so vivid—and yet, it was oddly lovely, and not quite like anything I’d heard before.

The projections in Elkhanah Pulitzer’s production, designed by Deborah Johnson, likewise managed to seem persuasively hallucinatory, pretty, and new throughout the piece, evoking Hildegard’s recorded visions while also suggesting that those images were only a simplified rendering of something deeper, stranger, and more complex.

This was my favorite thing about the piece: how weird it was. Pulitzer’s production inserts strange, crow-headed figures without explanation, like the marginalia in illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. (“Weird Medieval guys,” social media would call them.) Snider’s visions don’t depict Jesus or any recognizable Mary, but some other masked, female figure—God isn’t a patriarch here, but instead appears as some mysterious aspect of the Divine.

I only wished it could have been weirder. Snider’s music was so delicious during Hildegard’s visions that I kept yearning for the next one whenever the action returned to the “real world.” The dizzying interplay of high soprano voices weaving in ensemble—incredible! Just beautiful stuff.

But—although keen composer of dramatic scenes—Snider hasn’t written a libretto that lives up to the strangeness of her subject. I’d read the libretto before, and even seen duets and arias previewed in concert, but seeing the action onstage I was struck by how familiar the story beats in Hildegard were. And by “familiar” I mean familiar from Hollywood melodrama, not “familiar” as in the rich archetypal familiarity of the great opera libretti—the way that Hoffmansthal adopts the conventions of bedroom farce or the quest-romance only to warp them into something subtly more dangerous. 

And this should have felt dangerous. This is a blasphemous opera, a story about love between nuns, an oppressive church hierarchy, and acts of cruelty and violence. But the drama comported all too easily with my modern liberal sensibilities: other than a satisfying moment when a villain of the piece, Father Cuno, defends his apparent grasping for ecclesiastical glory (and resources) by pointing out how many more patients the abbey could serve, I never felt that I was in danger of agreeing with him. I never really wondered whether Hildegard’s visions might be ”mere” hallucinations, or whether her love for her fellow nun, Richardis von Stade, might be unhealthy. Instead, I felt comfortable. I wish I could have felt just a little… well… yeah. Weirder about it all.

While Pulitzer and Johnson’s visuals were rich and satisfying, Laurel Jenkins’ movement choreography for the figures in Hildegard’s visions could have hit a little harder, with something closer to the abstract geometry of postures you see in a Medieval illustration (or a Robert Wilson production, RIP), to complete the effect created by Pulitzer’s attractive tableaux by bringing an equal sharpness and unity. 

Other than that, the cast was fully committed—it was easy to believe that Nola Richardson, as Hildegard, was indeed a saint. Her part often sits very high, and it took her light, clear soprano just a moment to ease into it in her first appearance, but other than a few moments in which it seemed that the amplification system was bugging out on her, she gave a lovely and compelling vocal performance. Mikaela Bennett, as Richardis, fairly beamed star power straight out into the audience, giving a brilliantly colored and detailed interpretation, and the intertwining of soprano lines 

Baritone David Adam Moore, as Abbot Cuno, gave an appropriately dark and authoritative performance both dramatically and vocally; Roy Hage, as Volmar, seemed to struggle a little more with Snider’s challenging tenor part, which lingered in his upper registers and sat heavily in the break.

As a Sarah Kirkland Snider fan from way back, Hildegard is a piece I’ve been looking forward to with curiosity and more than a little excitement. She’s definitely shown a new side of her artistry here, composing a thrilling, brilliantly colored, dramatically score. Of course it’s not a perfect piece—but a truly great libretto is hard to find, and I know from my conversations with Snider that if she hadn’t written this text herself, the piece might never have happened. As it is, I’m deeply grateful for the chance to see and hear the arrival of a brilliant new opera composer, and desperate to hear what she does next.

The Bodies Keep the Score

 

Another summer festival review for Parterre! This time, Matthew Aucoin's Music for New Bodies, at Lincoln Center.

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

 

I reviewed Julius Eastman at Lincoln Center for Parterre Box! 

The Turning Point

I reviewed Yuval Sharon's George Lewis vs. Claudio Monteverdi staging, The Comet/Poppea, for Parterre Box.

Sexual Orientalization

I wrote about John Adams’ Antony & Cleopatra for Parterre.

 

Frick in the Sheets

At the newly renovated Frick, the Jupiter Ensemble played Handel & Muhly with Lea Desandre & Anthony Roth Constanzo, and I reviewed it for Parterre Box.

Robert Boudreau, 1927-2024

I just heard the sad news that we've lost Maestro Robert Austin Boudreau, whose American Wind Symphony Orchestra was one of the most outrageously ambitious musical projects of the last century.

In addition to commissioning a vast body of work for the idiosyncratic instrumentation of the "wind symphony" (NOT "concert band," but rather an orchestra of obbligato woodwinds, brass, percussion, etc., sans string section or saxophones), Boudreau also commissioned a barge—the Point–Counterpoint II, pictured above—from the great architect Louis Kahn, to sail America's waterways, dock for an audience, and transform into a bandshell to perform open-air concerts. (It also contains a floating art gallery.)

I've read that the Point–Counterpoint II—which was saved from the scrapheap by arts lovers and activists including Yo-Yo Ma—now has a permanent home in Philadelphia, but Boudreau's most enduring legacy is that massive body of works commissioned from a diverse array of men and women, celebrated and obscure, living on all six inhabited continents. Here's one of those commissions, Hymnos (1972) by Ivana Loudová:

Robert Boudreau died on the Fourth of July. He was 97 years old. 

Viva La Cieca

Please, please read these memorial tributes to James Jorden—editrix (in his cyberdrag persona as La Cieca) of the notorious Parterre Box queer opera zine—by Zachary Woolfe in the Times and Ben Miller in Van.

Like me, Ben and Zach have risen with generations of opera queens who came of age reading James's proto-Gawkeresque mix of tawdry gossip and incisive criticism, and whose relationship to the art form was shaped by his insistence that the opera house could be more than an Apollonian temple of white marble, that the music drama at its heart it was a real, living thing, filthy and demented and campy and nasty and sexy and sublime.

Years ago, I was asked by the Opera News, the official Metropolitan Opera Guild magazine that James would ultimately—Liza Minnelli-like—outlive, to write about opera resources on the internet, and one of the reasons I'm now embarrassed by that article, as I am by literally everything I have ever written, is that in my brash and rebellious youth, I secretly believed that there was only ONE resource on the internet that mattered, and it was Parterre.com, and I didn't do a very good job of hiding it. 

James was endlessly supportive of the opera bloggers who came after him, including myself. He not only inspired me, he encouraged me, he published me, and he linked to me here and everywhere else I was writing. I can never repay him.

I'm so embarrassed by the way James and I drifted apart. Remember that viral video—was it in Vanity Fair?—in 2017, where a magazine asked their staff what they thought Hillary Clinton should do now that she'd lost the run for President, and one of them said she thought Hillary should take up knitting? James, who had been pro-Clinton in the primaries, fumed on Facebook that it was ageist and sexist and so forth, and I, a Bernie Bro, found it funny and really not all that offensive, and he blocked me, and we were both too proud and petty to re-friend each other again. I always felt stupid looking back on it, but never as stupid as I do now, writing this and crying a little—not for James, of course, who in the influence and inspiration he offered lives on forever, just as surely as he jolted opera back to life for so many of us, but for myself, at having let my old, old, old friend slip away from me forever.

So let's not dwell on that. I'd rather think of that night, years (and years and YEARS) ago, after the opening of an Ariadne revival at the Met (please don't read my stupid review of that, either), when James presided over a roundtable of (then-)young gay opera bloggers, including Zach and me, at that restaurant just off Lincoln Square, and told us, "Looking at you all, I think I know what it must feel like to have children," and I think he did, too. He was the mother of us all. 

LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS: Helmut Lachenmann Gives You the Finger

(via Marcos Balter)

Mysteries of the Poorly Explained

Hooray, what a crazy summer! I no longer live in New Haven, for one thing (though I'll still be writing previews and whatnot for the New Haven Advocate). That's right! We picked up and moved to Brooklyn! I'm totally free! I need a day job! Call me! I've also been writing a bunch of exciting stuff, most of which isn't online yet, but I'll let you know. (There is this Cunning Little Vixen review, which I didn't link here yet.)

But, so, you know who ELSE has had a crazy summer? The world of New Music! (SEGUE.)

I mean there was this nonsense. Did you read this? So many problems with this, but it seems like with all the big noisy response to it (this guy's PIIIIIIIISSED), nobody's really put a finger on what's wrong. I think they're distracted by the piece's tonal misfire: a lot of people seemed to think that Swafford hated the music he was describing; I guessed instead that Swafford had simply aimed for "bitchily knowing"—in order to amuse his audience and impress them with his grasp of the subject matter—and missed.

It seems to have been the "knowing" part that he missed. We get this from the first paragraph, right away, where Swafford describes the audience at the New York premiere of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre:

The audience was largely made up of the youngish and hipish, which can't be said of the usual operatic performance. They went nuts over the opera, which they probably called the "song."

Okay. Now. CLEARLY the audience at Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre is not going to be an audience that would call an opera a "song." (I mean, nobody calls an opera a "song," anyway, they would call an aria a "song.") This is a young audience, but it's a young audience that aspires to connoisseurship. This is not a couple canoodling to Boheme in the park with a bottle of wine. (NO OFFENSE TO THOSE CANOODLERS, Puccini is great.) Ligeti fans are gonna get their shit right! They know what an "opera" is, and they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. And then there's

Around 1999, I went to a program of new semi-improvised electronic "noise music." What it sounded like was Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1960s: squawk, snort, rumble, gleep. I wouldn't be surprised if that young composer never heard of Stockhausen. (The Beatles did, however, which is why they put Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. The main piece they knew was his electronics-and-voice piece Gesang der Jünglinge.)

Honey, I would be not just surprised but flat-out ASTOUNDED if that young composer never heard of Stockhausen. If you don't think young electronic musicians don't know Stockhausen, then you don't know young electronic musicians. (And while we're on the subject, Gesang der Jünglinge is not an "electronics-and-voice" piece, it's an electronic piece that uses taped vocals. And also, the Beatles also famously knew Hymnen by Karlheinz Stockhausen quite well, since that was the inspiration for "Revolution 9," so it seems odd to refer to Gesang as the "main piece" they knew. The essay seems full of weird oversights like this.)

So while it's great that he's taking the lay reader on a brief (word-counts being what they are) tour of contemporary music, especially some really important stuff that hasn't yet filtered into the mainstream, there's this implicit promise that he's letting the reader in on the ongoing conversation about what's going on NOW in the world of new music, but since Swafford doesn't actually know what's going on now, he sorta lets the reader in on a conversation that is taking place almost entirely in his own mind. For instance, his insistence on lumping composers as different as Jennifer Higdon and Osvaldo Golijov into the "Atlanta School" of composers, which seems to be more a marketing term than any kind of useful distinction, or worse, this bit of nonsense:

Our other two current trends are nicely complementary, one aggressively noisy and the other aggressively pleasant. For the noisy sort, I propose the genre aesthetic brutalism. Since this music tends to have a certain punk sensibility, and authentic punks aren't given to explaining themselves other than with blows to the head, let's listen to a defining example, a cut from "Eight Songs," by Jefferson Friedman. These are arrangements of pieces by the noise band Crom-Tech, played here by the Yesaroun' Duo, Eric Hewitt on baritone sax and Samuel Z. Solomon on drums…

Now. You can "propose" genres all you want, but the usefulness of such an exercise can be quite limited. What Swafford is saying here is, Here is a piece of music I presume you've never heard before, in a style with which you are presumably unfamiliar as well. I propose that this single point of data represents an larger artistic movement, and I've just made up a name for it. Yes, he could call it "aesthetic brutalism," but since this generic descriptor has as yet has only been applied to a single piece of music, he could just call it Eight Songs, same as Jefferson Friedman did.

Other problems with this example: Jefferson Friedman did not, except in the very loosest sense of the word, "compose" Eight Songs. They are, as Swafford acknowledges, arrangements of songs by Crom-Tech, the avant-garde post-hardcore duo. Here are Friedman's arrangements:



And here's an actual Crom-Tech recording:



Friedman himself remarks of the pieces:

In the end, my job ended up being at varying points along the continuum of transcription-arrangement-composition, depending on the particular section at hand. As much as possible, I tried to respect the original material, but in order to do that (and in order to make it humanly possible) some tweaking was necessary. When all is said and done, though, these are Crom-Tech's songs, and I'm just happy to have played a small part in spreading the gospel.

Obviously, merely by putting his name on these songs, he's making him a part of his oeuvre in some sense, and god knows I don't mean to diminish his contribution to these thrilling arrangements. But it seems a bit odd to choose—as the "defining example" of this new classical genre that Swafford has made up—a relatively faithful arrangement of eight pieces of popular music that were actually composed over a decade ago. At any rate, it is certainly not representative of Friedman's work, which from what I've heard bears the merest vestiges of Crom-Tech's influence. Go listen to his string quartets, they're gorgeous! You'll love them! But they don't sound like this.

And then, what's that weird thing doing there about how "authentic punks aren't given to explaining themselves other than with blows to the head"? Did his idea of punk rock authenticity come from that Quincy episode? By a weird coincidence, I just interviewed Mick Barr of Crom-Tech for one of those upcoming articles, and somehow we managed to hold a lengthy conversation about his music without once banging ourselves in the head with our phones.

I mean, do you see how many mistakes Swafford makes in every single paragraph of this article? A brief selection of other boners:

Setting up a quotation from composer Joshua Fineberg, Swafford offers Stockhausen's Stimmung as an example of "the avant-garde of the'60s and '70s, and its often private, inaudible arcana"; in context, Fineberg himself is clearly suggesting nothing of the sort, since after all Stimmung is just a prolonged exploration of the overtone series. Unlike the Stockhausen works Swafford is evidently familiar with, Stimmung's construction could hardly be more exposed and audible, or its harmonies less complex. Fineberg is simply pointing out that its construction is relatively static. Which it is.

Later, Swafford cites a lecture by an "academic brutalist" that "consisted of incomprehensible mathematical jargon illustrated by slides of cigarette butts on the street"; on Facebook, the unnamed composer (Ken Ueno) pointed out that in fact his lecture contained no math whatsoever, and explained exactly what was going on with the two slides of cigarette butts he did use in the presentation.

All in all, it's really too bad! This could've been a great opportunity to introduce a broad audience to some gorgeous music. If only it hadn't been so graceless, careless, and wrong.

Now come back tomorrow, and I'll explain why everyone is wrong about that new Steve Reich album.

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