And in This Corner

Composer David Little knows a lot more about Andriessen than I do, and has weighed in, here, on my Ojai review. His long and thoughtful response deserves a long and thoughtful response from me but instead I think I'm going to put some more ice in this coffee drink.

R.I.P.

Ideas

Alex Ross came back to New Haven! It was part of this Arts & Ideas Festival they've got goin' on here; he came & gave his spiel-with-music, and everybody was there. The lecture-hall was packed with festivalgoing bluehairs, hipsterish music-lovers, and of course the mainstays of New Haven's new-music scene: Ingram Marshall! Jack Vees! Timothy Andres! We all went up and said hi to him after, and even mobbed with admirers he was very very nice. The lecture itself was an entertaining defense of twentieth-century music, not a bad thing to drag a loved one to should Ross make a stop in your town, and he totally said my name! and also big-upped Eduard Tubin, whose birthday it was.

Anyway, I got to write the preview for the local paper, but as you can see there was barely room to say anything beyond "Hey you guys should go to this." So below is the full transcript of our email interview, complete with fawning and redundant questions. I made just a couple notes, too.

So what's going to happen at this talk, in your words? It's titled "Listening to the Twentieth Century"—also the subtitle of your book. How does the lecture complement Noise? What has the audience response been at lectures like this? Has it been different from what you expected?

Crazy things are going to happen at this talk. It's going to be total insanity. Prepare to be astounded, disgusted, and transfigured. Well, in fact, no. What I'm going to do is off an audio-enhanced overview of the twentieth century and also a little memoir of my own progress as a listener, going from Brahms to Berg to Xenakis to Cecil Taylor to Sonic Youth and on from there. A number of times I've given a more formal lecture in which I've tried to sum up the entire century in about an hour, à la Lenscrafters, but when I'm pressed for time it sometimes devolves into a dizzying barrage of names and soundbites. This will be more leisurely. I've had a nice response from lectures in the past. The audience is usually a mix of connoisseurs who already know a lot about the subject and people who are coming to it for the first time, and I always enjoy trying to find the middle ground between them—as I do every time I write for the New Yorker.

I thought it was interesting that you subtitled the book, "Listening to the Twentieth Century Music." It's catchier, obviously, but it also suggests something a bit more personal than a conventional history. What were your intentions in writing the book? What do you hope people take away from it?

Yes, it was a conscious choice to give the book a more oblique title. It's mostly about classical music, but with a few extended detours into jazz and rock. So I didn't want to limit it by calling it a purely classical-music book. If I'd called it a history of music in general, that would have been deceptive as well. And I wanted to get across the idea that I wasn't writing only about music but also about the wider culture, about politics and social changes and technological transformations. The idea was that by following the lives of certain composers you would experience the century itself in a different way. Yes, it's quite a personal endeavor. There's no authorial first person between the Preface and the Acknowledgments, but everything is colored by my own experiences and passions. If feel it re-creates the journey I took when I was in college, when I started out as someone who thought music ended with Mahler and wound up with a far wider musical horizon. My main hope is that readers will take the same kind of journey themselves, whether they were classical nuts who haven't yet developed a taste for modern music or pop listeners who are curious about noise on the classical end.

The response to your book has been huge, and overwhelmingly positive. In what ways were you surprised by its reception? Were there any aspects of the public or critical response that disappointed you?

In the months leading up to publication I was in huge suspense. Of course I feared that a bunch of weighty people would dismiss the book out of hand—how dare this little upstart journalist presume to write about Schoenberg! But even more I feared that it would disappear without a trace, lost amid the thousands of good books that come out every season. Sure I dreamed idly that it would become a titanic bestseller, but my practical hope was for a less than total disappointment. So, yeah, I was really stunned by the fact that so many people seemed to pick up the book and actually read it. The New York Times Book Review made a big difference by sending the signal that it wasn't a specialist work. I've been particularly amazed by the response in the UK, where few people read the New Yorker and I was an unknown. It would be very churlish of me to complain about any aspect of the reception!

Negative criticism of the book seems to have focused not on what it says, but what is missing from the text—but I also remember that you blogged about the agonizing process of whittling the book down to publishable size. What was the hardest to cut? Is there anything you wish you'd left in, or added?

I expected that criticism and tried to defuse it by declaring in the Preface that the book was in no way intended to be comprehensive and that a lot of great music was left out. Decisions about what to include were not made on the basis of merit; I wasn't trying to form a supreme canon. Instead, I found that certain composers lent themselves better than others to the kinds of stories I wanted to tell—music colliding with history, composers interacting with popular music, composers debating the future of the art, music as a religious or spiritual medium, and so on. And I really needed to avoid bombarding the average reader with too many names. I really regret cutting the sections on Vaughan Williams and Galina Ustvolskaya, among others. But I did the best I could.

Aside: Wow! When I got to that part, I felt a little twinge, imagining the parallel universe where there was room to give Galina Ustvolskaya a section to herself. And the more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became! Two of the big Noise narratives are about the liberation struggles of Oppressed Minorities: practically a whole chapter is devoted to America's failure to produce/nurture/support a great African American composer in its concert halls, and the emergence of the openly gay composer is such a prominent theme (Benjamin Britten, of course, gets his own chapter) that when Ross compares extremely out sex-and-power philosopher Michel Foucault to the rather less open Pierre Boulez with the remark, "What drove Boulez's own rage for order remains unknown," one might be forgiven for choking just a little on one's coffee, because OFF THE RECORD, oh honey. (Happy Pride.)

But the story of women's lib, arguably the single most important such movement in the past hundred years, is treated almost quietly by comparison, which in the context of a book like this seems a little odd—so in that parallel universe where Galina Ustvolskaya gets her own nice, long section, one imagines that this must have been redressed somewhat? Unfortunately, parallel-universe The Rest Is Noise is also 1600 pages long, and only twenty-three people have read it. So I guess we're better off. Wait, I forget what I was talking about. Okay back to the interview.

And finally, some questions about actual music:

Are there any composers or performers whose work you feel is especially underrated or otherwise due for reappraisal? I think of you as a very optimistic critic: you get to write about the things you love. Are there any trends in music that you find worrying? In music criticism?

Carl Nielsen is one of the great unsung composers of the twentieth century. Ralph Shapey is the great, gritty American modernist who always gets overlooked (yes, in my book too). Among contemporary composers, John Luther Adams, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Stephen Hartke, Guo Wenjing, and New Haven's Ingram Marshall deserve to be much better known.

HOLLER AT ME. Have I not said "Hartke"? Did I not, JUST NOW, say "Ingram Marshall"?? YOU'RE WELCOME, people.

I remain optimistic about ye olde classical, although the economic situation is obviously going to put some big-budget organizations in jeopardy. It's possible we could have a sort of end-Cretaceous event where a bunch of dinosaurs disappear but smaller groups thrive. The trend in music criticism, alas, has been toward extinction—not because of the so-called death of classical music but because of the crisis in traditional media. The Internet is trying to take up the slack, with mixed success. I do see some discouraging trends in Internet music writing and in newspapers that try to sound "bloggy." On your blog you recently took note of this annoying kind of piece in which someone blurts out an outrageous statement along the lines of "Bach couldn't compose a decent fugue to save his life!" Plus he was a homophobe!" And a lot of people jump in and say, "No, Bach was the best! And he loved the gays!" And that goes on until the next made-up controversy erupts." The real gift of the medium is in letting you go infinitely deep into some weird topic, with no fretful editor telling you to keep it simple or brief. I love it when Jeremy Denk writes 8000 words about an ornament in the Goldberg Variations and then somehow connects it to an episode of Make Me a Supermodel. That's something totally new in the history of dancing about architecture.

The End. Note to self: do most people who interview people for a living make such great interview subjects? Look into this.

I'll Bet He Does

The August '09 Allegro Classics distribution catalog scores the ultimate endorsement.

R.I.P.

Another Joke

Q: Why did Poulenc go to Morocco?
A: Sextuorism.

The Ojai Diaries: Part Four

V.

The best of David Rakowski's four (out of how many?) Etudes on the Ojai program was "Schnozzage," which you'll recall from our earlier post on the subject as the ideal blend of solemn counterpoint and comic spectacle, and Amy Briggs certainly earned her laughs and applause. Andrew McCann and eighth blackbird's Matt Albert also earned a few chuckles with Stephen Hartke's violin duet, Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen. Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen is divided into four movements—

I. Oh
II. Them Rats
III. Is Mean
IV. In My Kitchen

—which gives you some idea of the piece's sense of humor, but not much idea of how blasted good it is, so you can imagine my surprise at first hearing the piece, back in my college days, and discovering it to be a substantial musical achievement. It's an exploration of classic blues through classical music, but so was Tall P by Pete Rose, from the QNG set, and as we have established, that piece was kinda gay. The difference is that Hartke manages to go beyond those blues gestures composers keep reheating, and instead dug deep into some of those techniques that make historical blues recordings so weird and thrilling—the vivid, disorienting asynchrony, the elaborately ornamented heterophony. The fiddlers dug into the score and came out with a great show.

A man sitting behind me said, "I've got to find out if this Stephen Hartke wrote any piano music." A pianist, evidently. Yes, he did! His first sonata came out on the CRI label back when there was a CRI label, on Vicki Ray's From the Left Edge, with one of the composers' names misspelled on the back. (QUALITY.) Now it's out on New World. I wonder if they fixed the typo.

Sounder by Nathan Davis (who had played Cage's in Third Construction earlier in the day), composed for 8bb, percussion and Trimpin instrument, (TRIMPINSTRUMENT?), was actually a little of a disappointment. Libbey Park hosted a number of installations by Trimpin (TRIMPINSTALLATIONS?), the most dramatic of which was the Sheng High. An enormous water-organ, the Sheng High operated on sort of a player-piano or music-box (or barrel-organ) principle, only instead of using clockworks to read a rotating paper roll, it used electronic eyes to read a graphic score made out of strips of mirror on a giant revolving disc. In Sounder, Trimpin's Percussion Tree, literally a tree hung with cymbals, wooden shoes, and toy pianos, was less dazzling in action: I found myself wishing the Trimpster had wired everything with LEDs or something in addition to the mechanical beaters, so that the audience could make out which instrument was playing when from the other side of the theater. The instrument looked good, and it sounded good, but without that essential corporeal dimension connecting the image to the sound, I almost might as well have been listening to a sampler for much of the work. Davis's writing, though full of rhythmic interest, didn't quite sustain itself as much beyond a showpiece for the cybernetic ensemble.

Okay I get to review one more piece and then I am FREE. Workers' Union by Louis Andriessen is probably one of his best-known works, for any number of loud instruments, written in rhythmic unison (occasionally divisi à 2) with only the contour of the "melody" notated—the exact pitches are left up to the performer.

Now, "political" music is a funny thing—Andriessen's Marxist ideology paints him into a corner this article (by a Greg) articulates in a very interesting way. Andriessen's a Marxist, so he wants to cast off decadent bourgeois concert-hall culture in favor of brash, vernacular idioms, but on the other hand he doesn't want to embrace popular/commercial culture. So he troubles his clear forms and pulses with épater-le-bourgeois dissonance, intensity and duration (Worker's Unionis about a quarter-hour of loud, dissonant clusters, if you're doing it right):

At the risk of overstating the case, if Andriessen’s rigor saved minimalism from its experimental roots, his dissonance pulled minimalism back from the threat of popular accessibility. ...While Andriessen’s dissonance might lose him an 'easy listening' audience, it gains him a high-art cachet according to a value system hardly less puritanical.

A healthy dose of stick, in other words, to go with that delicious carrot.

Well if you know me, you know I love stick, so I was actually a little ruffled to see 8bb adapt Worker's Union with a pinch of dramatic license (I demand to be punished!):

They started out with just the core sextet, and then introduced additional players one by one, until everyone who had played at the entire festival was onstage banging their instruments as hard as they could, down to ululating Lucy Shelton and kinnnnndof cute percussionist Ian Fry wailin' on electric bass. But the playing was insanely tight, and the performance conceit was the logical extension of the festival ethos one of the blackbirds articulated in an article I've suddenly forgotten (REMIND ME IN COMMENTS PLS)—that all the players could me imagined as making up a sort of hyper-eighth-blackbird, a fully modular group of groups, each one passionate and precise and fearless. Maybe I can't remember where I read this because I made it up, and they didn't say anything of the sort, but let's pretend.

Did I say "tight" already? Or "precise"? How about "passionate," then. I did? Okay good, because all in all, this was an incredibly solid performance, noisy and raucous but with terrific ensemble. During one passage they all sang their parts WHILE playing them, and at various moments near the climax, you'd hear 'em go "YEAH!" or "UNGH!" like they were jamming. I just listened to the Bang on a Can recording of this piece again, and my heart broke a little with the realization that the 8bb All-Stars rendition was so much more perfect but I'll never get to re-listen.

I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to anybody after—apologies, all—my flight was taking off at midnight, so it was straight to LAX (to stand in a long pointless security line) as soon as the applause died down. Redeye to La Guardia, then an afternoon with a friend in Harlem, then the train home. Returning finally from the station, I walked past Furio from The Sopranos, standing outside a charity event at Goodfellas, our neighborhood mafia theme restaurant! (I don't know what that means, other than that our neighborhood has a very high guido density.) And then joyful reunion with roommates and cat, and then THE END. Roll Credits.