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.
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.
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.
Wait, This Beatboxing Cellist Is Actually Pretty Incredible
So when I got this link, I thought, "Oh great, another dumb YouTube stunt." Then cellist Kevin Osula started playing—elegantly, precisely, stylishly—and I said, oh great, another classical nerd trying to show off how "cool" he is by spicing his playing up with some lame beatboxing. And then he started beatboxing, and you know what? You win, YouTube. This guy's great; I'm the asshole.
Thanks, Shelley!
Tonight in New York: Go Hear Timo Andres and Gabe Kahane "Do" Ives
I know I talk about Hilary Hahn way too much around here (basically it's because (1) she's awesome and (2) her publicist is just extremely good at blogging/tweeting/etc), but did you guys read this review of her recent Washington recital (helpfully tweeted by a piqued publicist)? There was were all these dumb complaints about how she played music that sounded raucous and modern, or at least did sound raucous and modern when it was written a hundred years ago, and probably does still sound raucous and modern to people who haven't listened to a lot of music written since then, and there was this especially weird line about Charles Ives and George Antheil being a "second-tier Americans." Now PEOPLE. I'm not an especially huge fan of Charles Ives, I never have been, but even when I HATED Charles Ives my one-liner was "of all the great composers, Charles Ives is easily the worst"—because no matter how smug or even ungainly his music often seemed to me, in my rash youth, there was really no denying that Charles Ives was, in addition to being one of the most influential composers of the last century, capable of great beauty. So don't go hating on performers who have a greater appreciation of his music than you have managed to cultivate, because maybe someday you'll go hear Jeremy Denk play the First Piano Sonata at the Ojai Festival and you'll realize that you've been terribly mistaken all along, and Ives is in fact a very wise and sympathetic composer.
Or you'll go to Merkin Hall tonight, when Timothy Andres and Gabriel Kahane present their own works in dialogue with those of Ives as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, and these extraordinarily ear-pleasing young composer-pianists can show you what THEY hear in his music. I've sung Andres's praises plenty—you all really need to go out and buy his record, Shy & Mighty—but even while the glossy piano-man-ism of Kahane's music is often "not my thing," I am totally at a loss to explain why everybody ELSE isn't a huge fan of his. Look, who DOESN'T want to hear this?
Like, your MOTHER should probably be a huge Gabe Kahane fan. She should hear him on NPR and ask you why the music you listen to isn't as lovely as his. Well, SHOULDN'T she? "If you're going to get me modern music for Christmas, I wish you'd get me something that sounds more like that Gabriel Lehane I heard on NPR," she'll say when she opens the Messiaen CD you got her. You ruined Christmas, AGAIN. Jesus you're a terrible son. Or daughter.
Anyways, it's going to be great tonight. Here's the setlist, an anthology of György Kurtág's Bach arrangements(!), Ives's songs, and original works by both composers. Kahane's singing and playing guitar, in addition to sharing keyboard duties with Andres:
J. S. BACH/GYÖRGY KURTÁG Göttes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit
CHARLES IVES The Things out Fathers Loved
TIMOTHY ANDRES At the River (world premiere)
GABRIEL KAHANE Durrants
IVES The Housatonic at Stockbridge
KAHANE Fall 2007 (from Piano Sonata)
ANDRES Some Connecticut Gospel
BACH/KURTÁG Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr
KAHANE Where are the arms?
ANDRES How can I live in your world of ideas?
IVES Tom Sails Away
KAHANE The Baffled King (world premiere)
KAHANE North Adams
BACH/KURTÁG Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir
IVES Serenity
This morning, Ecstatic Music organizer Judd Greenstein tweeted a discount code—IVES—which you can use to buy tickets here.
