Saturday, August 6, 2011

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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Thursday, May 5, 2011

In Other Hip Hop–Related Cello YouTube News

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Thursday, April 21, 2011

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!

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Saturday, March 5, 2011

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.

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Thursday, February 24, 2011

This Is A Video of Two Young Classically-Trained Sopranos Singing "Come Sail Away" by Styx While Wearing Sailor Moon–Style Japanese Schoolgirl Uniforms



via Videogum.

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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Terrible News

Even people who can't name five classical pianists have probably heard of the Five Browns, the celebrated quintet of piano-playing siblings who all studied Juilliard and then made such a splash on Oprah. But now the three Brown sisters—Deondra, Desirae, and Melody—have made the incredibly sad accusation that they were sexually abused by their own father, Keith Brown.

Not long after the charges were filed last week, Keith drove himself and his wife Lisa over a 300-foot embankment in their Porsche in an apparent accident, and remained hospitalized as of last night. His daughter's names were not released by the court, but they've chosen to come forward as the victims in their father's case.

You can read about it here.

There's not much that I can add to the awful facts in this story, except to say that I've always heard great things about the Brown siblings as people, that I admire them tremendously for coming forward unashamed, and that I wish them and their loved ones all the best in weathering such a horrible situation.

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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Adams' Behemoth

Opera is an anachronism. It was an anachronism from the moment it was invented—wasn't it?—the last gasp of the neoclassical tendencies of the Renaissance, as an attempt to revive the musical dramas of antiquity, and it's even more of an aesthetic archaism today, now it that exists almost entirely as a repertory of 200-year-old "classics."

So, yes, that's the "joke" of Nixon in China, the opera by composer/librettist/director team John Adams, Alice Goodman and Peter Sellars, that you've got characters from the age of television, Richard and Patricia Nixon, stepping out of a flat 747 and singing rhymed couplets with vocal techniques invented to sing the music of composers born in 1813. But it's a lot more than that, too.

It was all Sellars's idea—he hand-picked Goodman, a former student of his, and had to talk Adams into it, convince him that the "joke" was not all there was to the project. Aside from his Adams collabos, his most famous (though far from only) ventures have been stagings that transplant the settings of classical operas into the present day, and the critical resistance is usually predictable, and partly justified—attempts to make opera "relevant" to a contemporary audience can seem at once redundant ("Mozart's operas are immortal; they were never irrelevant, and require no updating!") and futile ("Is a Nozze di Figaro set in Trump Tower going to win over anybody who'd otherwise be watching reality TV?"). But insofar as there is ever a distinction between concept and content in a theatrical production—and a Sellars show may be keen to narrow the gap between the two—these objections respond only to the former, in the abstract, and not to the latter. Sellars' agenda is more nuanced than updating sets and costumes.

For instance, when he decided to stage Handel's oratorio Theodora, about the persecution of early Christians, Sellars was addressing a genre of musical drama that has no obvious analogue in contemporary culture. Oratorio tells a story without sets or costumes or even action, instead being a series of monologues and choruses—it's a presentational mode of drama, of the sort that has all but disappeared from popular entertainment in recent centuries.

But in translating Theodora to the operatic stage, Sellars dramatizes the Emperor's opening arias as a Presidential press conference, at which the Chief Executive promises to hunt down and torture the infidel, and the "audience" onstage responds with a chorus choreographed to look like a TV commercial, pointing to cans of diet soda when they get to the couplet about how "sweeter than the trumpet's sound / Their groans and cries are heard around!" Absurd, yes. (Or not? That actually sounds a lot like a few press conferences from the past decade or so.) But by connecting Handel's forms to contemporary politics, he demands that we reconsider the emotional stakes of what might—without his anachronistic touch—be merely beautiful. By reinventing the action in terms of television, he illuminates not only the politics of the drama, but also the politics of our age, the politics of the musical form, and the politics hardwired into our media.

For his first opera with John Adams, Nixon in China, Sellars proposed a subject that would run his anachronistic alchemy in reverse. In the first act, instead of turning the conventions of opera into the stuff of television, Sellars, Adams, and librettist Alice Goodman took a televised event and turned it into grand opera. All the conventions of grand opera are there: choruses, pageantry, down to the the drinking song that ends the first act and the ballet in the second. The libretto itself is in rhymed tetrameter. But while opera usually treats a familiar myth or historical subject, in place of the usual heroic tableaux—the death of Dido, the damnation of Faust—Nixon draws upon a new, different sort of cultural memory. What struck critics most at its first appearance, prompting many to dismiss the opera (as they would dismiss many of Sellars' stagings) as a facile postmodern gimmick, was the contemporaneity of its subject matter. That is, Nixon's visit to China not only had taken place within living memory, but Nixon himself was actually invited to the premiere (he declined), and most of the audience had probably witnessed many of the dramatized events on television at the moment they took place. The idea of an opera about the President, specifically about President Nixon, was a novelty—a joke—even if it was a good one.

Well, about twenty years later, the novelty is gone. Nixon is dead now, a whole generation of operagoers has been born since his trip to China—but the opera remains fundamentally relevant. Not only because it's well enough put together to stand up to two decades of close listening, but because its observations on the essentially changed nature of cultural memory in the age of television will remain timely as long as there's still some kind of TV.

In Thomas May's indispensible John Adams Reader, May asks Sellars about the label "CNN Opera," as it was applied to his and Adams' Death of Klinghoffer specifically and to their history operas in general. Sellars responds:
One of the most important reasons to do these operas was to say precisely that we aren't getting the actual history of our times. We are used to the media feeding frenzy, with the rush to judgment and the rush for the scoop, and then it all gets dropped. In the Age of Information we are strangely underinformed about what is going on and what is at stake—exactly because there's a historical blank for so many Americans. The way journalism has evolved context is not reported very deeply. [As artists] we have to make a structure which is context rich. Opera is able to go inside to a place where the headlines aren't going. The classic thing with Greek theater is that it's not, say in Oedipus Rex, about what does an exploding eyeball look like, but about why someone would dig out their own eyes. Whether it's about suicide bombers or 9/11 or any of these events that have happened to America, the question that is not allowed to be asked to this day is "Why would people do this?" That's the question, of course, that drama asks. Exactly to find what was not in the news, what was missing from the news: that's why we worked in this genre.
The fact, in other words, that opera is out of step with our times is why it is absolutely essential.

Act One gives us, to a large extent, what has made it into the public record. While the President's entrance aria is an internal monologue, even that monologue is on the subject of outward appearances and public persona:
News has a kind of mystery
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the world was listening.
…Though we spoke quietly
The eyes and eyes of history
Caught every gesture…
Transforming us as we, transfixed,
Made history.
The audience at the HD broadcast I attended chuckled at these lines:
Millions more hear what we say
through satellite technology
than ever heard a public speech
before. No one is out of touch
telecommunication has
broadcast your message into space.
John Adams's opera, which he described as "a media event about a media event," had become a global satellite broadcast about a global satellite broadcast. (Note that the word "broadcast" is used precisely three times in Nixon, and only once does it refer to the act of transmitting a signal over the radio; the other two times, it uses the word's original meaning, the act of scattering seeds in every direction.)

Act Two of the opera introduces another strategy essential to all Adams' stage works: the counterbalance of the Heroic, the Public, the Yang, by an equal and opposite force. The focus of the drama turns to Mrs. Nixon, the model First Lady on her seemingly inconsequential tour of the capitol, the opera becomes something very different.

"Mrs. Nixon went to look at the Summer Palace of the imperial Manchus in the western suburbs yesterday," reported the Times (in an article headed, "All Peking's a Stage"), "and as she passed through the Gates of Longevity and Goodwill she laughed and said, 'That's prophetic.'" Goodman spins Pat's soundbite into "This is prophetic," an aria that asks the audience to reconsider the monumental in intimate terms:
Let the expression on the face
Of the Statue of Liberty
Change just a little, let her see
What lies inland: across the plain
One man is marching—the Unknown
Soldier has risen from his tomb;
Let him be recognized at home.
The aria signals a turn from the monumental to the intimate, and sure enough, the opera's heroic narrative begins to unravel. Chiang Ching—Madame Mao, the anti-Pat responsible for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, presents her ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, and the characters in the opera soon find themselves unable to distinguish between this drama and their reality, as if all of Peking really were a stage, and the story of the opera suddenly veers off from the historical record.

The exploitative imperialist letch singing and dancing in Red Detachment bears, as Mrs. Nixon notes, a striking resemblance to Henry Kissinger, and is in fact played by the same singer; unable to bear suffering of the main character—a brutalized peasant girl—the First Lady drags her husband into the drama within the drama; a storm erupting within the ballet gets the onstage Nixons "sopping." With her appearance her at the midpoint of the opera, artist-tyrant Chiang has torn through both the art of politics and the politics of art to open a wound through which historical reality bleeds out, and when the prima ballerina misses her cue, Mme. Mao finally interrupts the action of the ballet with a literally show-stopping aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung" ("When I appear," she sings, "the people hang / Upon my words") as metadramatical chaos breaks out.

It's a perplexing scene, but if you're wondering why this half-hour metadrama has been interpolated into an opera about Richard Nixon, you've got it backwards. Before he proposed Nixon, Peter Sellars wanted to put on his own staging of The Red Detachment of Women. It was only after his failure to mount this Communist propaganda ballet during the Reagan years SOMEHOW FELL THROUGH that he asked John Adams to write this opera, and it remains, in some ways, its raison d'être, in the same way that the death of Siegfried is the reason for Das Rheingold. It's this insane, beautiful moment here…
…that Nixon exists to justify.

When Act Three begins, the characters have retreated entirely into the private sphere—into dream and memory. This last act was actually written to depict the last banquet before the exhausted Nixons returned home to the States, but Sellars, in a typical move, restaged it into a literally private space, with twin beds instead of tables in order (among other things) to emphasize the scene's dreamlike qualities. The music is often hushed and sweet, rejecting the set pieces of the first two acts in favor of a through-composed score that weaves together all the characters' reflections on their respective lives and homelands.

Ultimately, this is the enterprise at the heart of Nixon—the artists were much more interested in allowing the men and women who took part in this meeting to plead their own cases lyrically and eloquently than in, say, punishing Mao for the brutality of his regime, or Nixon for the Vietnam in his past and the Watergate to come. Adams and Sellars went on to take the same strategy with all of their operas, and this is the form's greatest strength: not to document or narrate (text and photographs do that better), or even necessarily to "dramatize" in the conventional sense (don't the movies do that better?), but to allow each participant in the drama to express him/herself directly, fully and eloquently (only the operatic tradition offers arias, ensembles).



This means Alice Goodman has to hit a very tricky tone in her libretto, a combination of the long-lost art of high rhetoric with the sort of language a Dick Nixon might have used (astoundingly, the one F-bomb in the opera is not his), and she more than lives up to the challenge (as, I hope, you've noticed from the passages I've already quoted). But while the text is often lovely and smart in its lines and phrases and passages and particulars, what really amazed me on this listening was the overarching symbolic structures.

For instance: "The people are the heroes now," goes the piece's most famous couplet; "Behemoth pulls the peasant's plow," "Behemoth" here representing (among other things) the monstrous power of the state, and the inexorable force of history, harnessed—according to the Communist myth—in the service of the people. Think Thomas Hobbes too, of course: Behemoth and Leviathan go hand-in-hand (hoof-in-flipper?) in the Hebrew Bible.


But Behemoth (pictured) comes back—twice!—in the second act, in the form of the elephant sculptures Pat Nixon encounters on her tour. She does and doesn't recognize its significance:
This little elephant in glass
brings back so many memories.
The symbol of our party, prize
of our success, our sacred cow
surrounded by blind Brahmins, slow
Musclebound, well-dressed, half-awake,
with Liberty upon her back.
Tell me, is it one of a kind?
The audience laughs when Pat identifies the elephant with the GOP, and again when the chorus informs her proudly that the elephant is in fact just one of hundreds churned out by a factory. But this disconnect between her and her guides is Pat in a nutshell: the elephant is the Western symbol of memory (Pat's personal history), and the symbol of the GOP (Pat's personal America), she's right about that, but as she will again in "This Is Prophetic," her wishful thinking finds the personal in the monumental. To her, the individual is to be prized—to the Communists, what's great is not one handmade elephant but the ability to produce "hundreds every day." Like the "blind Brahmins" from the old parable of the elephant, the high brahmins of the Chinese and American diplomatic parties have both laid their hands on the same behemoth and mistaken it for two very different beasts.

In the opera's final act, there are several moments where the libretto obviously undermines the literal reality of Sellars's staging. Why is there a dance band in everybody's bedroom? How can Chou pass Pat a handkerchief, and give Kissinger directions to the bathroom? (DIGRESSION. How fantastic/insane is it that Peter Sellars went all Regietheater on HIS OWN OPERA, before even reached the stage? And then there were huge changes made to this act, or so I understand, between the beginning and end of its very first run—I can't say when it was added, but all kinds of crazy business was definitely inserted into this act between the 1987 broadcast from Houston and the 2011 broadcast from the Met. (In the other acts, the changes were mostly quite subtle.) A funeral procession brings the ailing Chou lilies, to foreshadow his death (the crackdown on mourning for Chou would prove to be the downfall of Chiang Ching and her Gang of Four); Mao's onstage jayo sesh with one of his secretaries was, I suspect, interpolated for recent productions, based on the scandalous 90s memoir of Mao's doctor.

(META-DIGRESSION. I've forgotten—was that Nancy T'ang (played by an appropriately funny and frightening Ginger Costa Jackson) with her hand on the Chairman's crotch? Please correct me. The scathing portrayal of T'ang (a.k.a. Tang Wensheng) in this opera sent me down quite the Google rabbit-hole. She was born in Brooklyn, apparently, became immensely powerful in Mao's last years, and not only is still alive but looks great. Much was made of the Met's decision to invite the surviving members of the American diplomatic party to come see the opera; I wonder if they invited Tang to see her opera-self jerk off the Great Teacher?))

But there are subtler hints about the team's original vision for the scene—dinner and food keep coming up in the characters' reveries. "We ate wild apricots," sings Chiang Ch'ing; "The taste is in my mouth," answers Chou. "Once we had roast / and a light film of dust" (dust being another of the opera's recurring symbols of history) "settled on each plate." Clearly, what's "supposed" to be happening here is that Chou and Ch'ing, eating a feast, are reminded fondly of much simpler meals from years ago.

Pat and Dick, on the other hand, are finding that Chinese food might not agree with them quite so well. Reminiscing about his service in the Pacific Theatre, he describes the nauseating jungle scene in terms of food:
I began to take in all the sights.
Picture a thousand coconuts
like mandrills' heads or native masks,
milk oozing from their broken husks,
the flooded rib of a palm frond
where several centipedes had drowned,
unsanded wood that smelled like meat…
Jesus, it grabbed you by the throat.
Not too hard to imagine Nixon pushing away a bowl of half-eaten Chinese beef and a coconut-milk dessert as he sings these lines. As if to say, I'd kill for a Quarter Pounder right about now, he goes on to reminisce about the little bit of home he managed to build, stationed in the Pacific:
I swapped
spam for hamburger meat and roped
in a few men to rig a stand.
They called it "Nick’s Snack Shack". I found
the smell of burgers on the grill
made strong men cry.…
Done to a turn, medium-rare,
Rare, medium, well-done, anything
you say. The Customer is King.
And this line, the Capitalist lie, finishes the arch stretching over the opera to that opening chorus and the corresponding lie of Communism: "the Customer is King," says America; say the Chinese, "the People are the Heroes."



Oh, right, and there's music in this opera, too. I don't feel any need to defend John Adams's work, though maybe I'm projecting a bit, since I'm basically his biggest fan in the world. The first time I heard his orchestral piece The Chairman Dances, drawn from the music in the last act, I was overwhelmed by the way it combined the layered rhythmic vitality of the music I listened to for pleasure (Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails) with the symphonic grandeur and harmonic sophistication of the classical composers whose music meant the most to me as an orchestral player. My brother bought me the disc of highlights for Christmas, and that's how I learned to love the setpieces from Acts One & Two, but the three-CD set went out of print for a few years around that time, so when I finally found the TWO-AUDIOCASSETTE box for sale at a Tower Records had to to buy it on AUDIOCASSETTE and got to know Act Three from popping the cassette into the tapedeck of our Honda Civic and driving around with it on a constant loop.

But it wasn't until this latest encounter with the piece, actually seeing it onstage (live at the first Saturday of the run, and then onscreen at the HD one week later) that I gained a real appreciation for Adams as a musical dramatist. It's difficult to verbalize—I'm not talking about the word-painting he does, like making the orchestra skip a beat when Dick says that "the nation's heartland skips a beat," but the subtle increase and release of tension that illuminates the subtext of, for instance, the otherwise arid first meeting between Nixon and Mao.

Adams was not quite as virtuosic at the helm of the Met Orchestra as he was at his desk. He wasn't bad either—he certainly brought out moments of great emotional intensity in the score—but if you saw Alan Gilbert conduct Doctor Atomic you know how much more dazzling and detailed that band's performance could've been.

With a single exception—James Maddalena, the terrific singer and actor who, a bit hoarse at the live performance I saw, found himself in truly dreadful voice at the HD—the cast was uniformly superb. Richard Paul Fink was not only funny as Kissinger, but offered moments of loveliness the role has probably never seen before. Russell Braun was exquisite as Chou En-Lai, the work's agonized conscience, and Robert Brubaker was superhuman as Mao, just HANGIN' OUT in the treble clef while sitting in the stooped posture of a decrepit old man.

Now I TOLD you people that Kathleen Kim was going to rock your world as the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung, and sure enough, she was a perfect terror of demonic intensity, but still flawlessly in tune on every high D. But my favorite was Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon. Her two performances actually seemed (to me) quite different in terms of the little emphases and rubati, really thinking about each word and each note coming out of her mouth right in the moment, digging ever deeper, intellectually, into the score to arrive at new emotional depths. Between the two of them, I was on the verge of tears for most of the second act.



And at the end of the third, I left the theater in a daze. I was stupefied. I could hardly speak, let alone articulate a reaction. This is, of course, the effect that a form like Nixon's is designed to produce—it supplanted my modern, quotidian experience with reflection, meditation, introspection. When I left the opera house, I stumbled to the next train out of town and fell immediately asleep; when I left the afternoon broadcast, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and discovered that the sun had set while I'd been in the dark, watching. The sky'd gone all orange and blue and was seemingly cloudless, but a thin flurry of huge white flakes snowed down as if from nowhere and then, after a moment, it stopped.

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Monday, February 14, 2011

Local Boys Make Good (OR, "Sashay; Chanter")

Hey look! Yale School o' Music alum Paul Jacobs is apparently the first artist ever to win a Grammy™ for a solo performance on the organ! JoJo fondly remembers Jacobs's recital of Messiaen and Hindemith on the Holtkamp organ at Battell Chapel, and the obsessed fan who sat in the front row, "conducted" from his seat, cheered loudly after every piece, and tried to talk to Jacobs during his pre-concert remarks. Ah, organ-lovers! Yikes! Anyway, he certainly deserves his little golden horn for that Messiaen double-disc, Livre du Saint Sacrement, which incidentally was JoJo's birthday present last year, because I am very selfish and only buy people gifts that I secretly want for myself.

But also, listen to this!



That's from the score Timo Andres will be playing at Frank Tell's Fall '11 show tomorrow night. Nice, right?? Wouldn't you buy the living shit out of some post-apocalyptic outfits if that was playing in the background?? You'll recall that Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld used some Andres on the runway not too long ago—



—but this is an actual commission for actual new music to be actually performed live at the show. Should be very cool.

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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

First, the Bad News

Alex Ross points to this terrific summary of the situation regarding the Hungarian government, media and arts, by Iowa-based commentator Bernard Sherman. András Schiff, one of the finest musicians on this earth, has been singled out by anti-Semitic demagogues over there, and of course he has! What better way to protect your nation's cultural heritage, after all, than by shitting all over the human treasures it has produced? And if someone's going around saying he's troubled by political developments in his home country, you should DEFINITELY call him a dirty Jew, because that'll get him to change his tune real fast.

Ahem.

In much happier news, Ross also has some brief but excellent commentary on the recently unveiled New York Phil season. (Here's the season; here's the full press conference.) A few stories here: this year's can't-miss new-music bonanza is a performance of Stockhausen's Gruppen at the Park Avenue Armory; there's a new amazing digital archive of Philharmonic materials and lore; the season has no female composers on it at all.

I'm really not dismayed, should I admit this?, by the orchestra's ongoing championing of living European composers. Who in the heck else is playing European new music in this country? How else are we going to hear it? But I do think Amanda Ameer is right that the brilliant German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann was maybe not the most exciting choice for NY Phil artist in residence—he's replacing Anne-Sophie Mutter, after all, a German violinist of the very same generation, and it would appear that his programming choices are pretty dull: Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Berg, and somehow a D (Dvorak) slipped in there by accident. Now, I love all these pieces, I love Zimmermann's playing, and these concerts are going to be fantastic, but he's playing NO new works?

And now, here is a picture of Alan Gilbert that I have doctored so that it looks like he took it with an iPhone.
Thank you.

The L.A. Phil's new season is up, too, and the big news there is (for me anyway) the premiere of a new sacred oratorio by John Adams, entitled The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Maybe he gave it that title to distinguish it from a forthcoming work by Mark Adamo.

What? No, I meant because Mark Adamo's writing The Gospel of Mary Magdalene for the San Francisco Opera! Why, what "mary" did YOU think I was referring to?

Speaking of whom, is there anyone else who really, really misses Mark Adamo's blog? Because I sure do. I spotted him before the premiere of Bernstein's Quiet Place last year, and afterwards I was DYING to know what he thought of it. And now Nixon in China's up at the Met, and I'm dying to know what he thinks of that! Somebody lean on him, would you?? I'll put up my own take on Nixon soon (spoiler: it's a fucking awesome piece), but the operatic blogosphere ain't the same without his POV.

Alright, I'm outta here—now all y'all get on that train and go see Nixon in China, tonight.

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Monday, February 7, 2011

Okay Okay Here Is One More Bitchin' Viral Video

Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin perform Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Video by George Manak and Peter van der Ham (via @amandaameer).

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Friday, February 4, 2011

Classical Music Reaches New Audiences

Here are two EXCITING NEW FRONTIERS in classical crossover!

Via @werttrew, this one is already a VIRAL SENSATION, combining a beloved internet meme with an immortal work of classical genius:


Via loyal reader Greg, this SOON-TO-BE VIRAL clip is a "mashup" of classical technique with a couple of those songs the kids love so much:

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Thursday, February 3, 2011

Get Pierced Tonight

Hey, but so, New Havenites, I'm gonna go to this New Music New Haven concert at Sprague tonight, and you probably should too! I stupidly failed to mention Daniel Wohl's excellent Aorta for piano & electronics in my writeup of the Ecstatic Music Festival, even though it was one of the marathon's most successful uses of electronics, and he's got a piece on tonight's program, too (Pixelated for piano, toy piano, and glockenspiel—sounds cool); the headliner is David Lang, whose Pierced I don't know but am very much looking forward to. Other composers: Paul Kerekes, Garth Neustadter, Loren Loiacono, and the always reliable Jordan Kuspa. 8pm tonight, free.

Oh, and if you're NOT in New Haven, you can get watch high-quality streaming video here, also free! Hooray!

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Two Turntables and a Microphone Two Pianos, Four Hands

New Yorkers, and I know you're reading this, after work tonight you should probably all go to LPR and check out this crazy thing! Bruce Brubaker, whose records you really need to hear (I have listened to his Glass/Cage CD, Glass Cage, MANY MANY TIMES, and he also has a very cool CD of himself playing the music of Philip Glass and William Duckworth, Time Curve Preludes, and really just check out everything he's recorded, I don't think there's a dud out there and you'll get to know some great composers you never heard of before such as Duckworth and Alvin Currin) is putting on a very unusual sort of recital, which is that he and his student Francesco Tristano are both going to play solo piano pieces by different composers AT THE SAME TIME. Here's them doing the same thing at a different show, so that you can hear Philip Glass's Mad Rush with an atonal melody on top of it: It kind of makes sense, right?? It's a little like the Rambler's Bloggariddims mixes, but LIVE. ANyway this is completely great, and next year everyone will be doing it. Right?

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Thursday, January 27, 2011

Two Pieces of Experimental Music

No. 1

No. 2

both via Boing Boing.

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Saturday, January 22, 2011

It Seems Idiotic

I have a few friends who just don't understand why I love the comic strip Mary Worth so intensely. Maybe they will understand after clicking here:
via The Comics Curmudgeon.

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Monday, January 17, 2011

One More Thing

I mentioned that Bang on a Can All-Star Ashley Bathgate and All-Star emerita Lisa Moore are playing at today's Ecstatic Music Festival marathon opener; I didn't mention that they'll also be playing (as "TwoSense") a set in Manhattan Friday night (when, conveniently, the Festival has nothing scheduled) at "The Little Church Around the Corner" (1 E 29th): Bresnick, Chopin, Janacek, Prokofiev, Schnittke, $25 ($15 students)(suggested!), 7:30 pm.

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Sunday, January 16, 2011

Take Ecstasy with Me

Look I know I haven't mentioned this before and I REALLY SHOULD HAVE but you guys kind of have to go to the Ecstatic Music Festival that Judd Greenstein is curating at Merkin. It starts tomorrow, Monday afternoon, Jan. 17 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so you're off work!), and runs for freakin' MONTHS. Here's the program for tomorrow's FREE marathon, which starts at 2 and for seven hours, with lots of breaks and refreshments and whatnot so you're not being held prisoner or something:
Ne(x)tworks plays a piece by Julius Eastman (no not THAT piece, it is MLK Day, do you want to get us all in trouble)
Timo Andres plays Ives and Andres
Face the Music plays Missy Mazzoli and Christine Southworth
So Percussion plays So Percussion
Chiara String Quartet plays Jefferson Friedman
NOW Ensemble plays Greenstein
John Matthias, Adrian Corker & Andew Prior play Matthias
Julianna Barwick sings Barwick
Vicky Chow plays Daniel Wohl
Corey Dargel (w/ NOW Ensemble and Nathan Koci) sings Dargel (Other People's Love Songs, complete!)
Ashley BathgateLisa Moore play Kate Moore
Ashley Bathgate plays Michael Gordon's Industry
Gabriel Kahane sings and plays Gabriel Kahane
Nadia Sirota & Nico Muhly play Muhly
and Buke & Gass collaborate with Mazzoli's Victoire on some awesome new thing.
That's just the first day! I kind of CAN'T NOT go to this.

Here's the whole page for the extended festival. I hope you'll reconize some incredibly serious names here: Dan Deacon, Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer, Doveman, Owen Pallett, Clogs, Sarah Kirkland Snider, John Medeski, AND MANY MORE.

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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Hilary Hahn Has Commissioned a Shitload of New Encores

So over my Xmas vay kay in Cali (don't you hate people who say vaykay) (or Cali) I had a nice conversation with my violinist brother about Hilary Hahn's playing, possibly because both I AND a student of his bought him her recording of the Tchaikovsky/Higdon concerti for Xmas. I told him he has to watch this
  and he talked about how he heard from a friend about how even when she was just a kid her work ethic was utterly ridiculous, like just HOURS spent in a practice room, and now that's probably how come she has some of the strongest, cleanest technique in the biz. Now I played violin for many years, but if you ever heard me drag bow across string you'd understand that I don't necessarily have a terrific grasp of the finer points of violin technique, so it was gratifying for me to hear somebody who knows more about these things than I do say that yup, she has an incredibly strong left hand ("Just as I suspected!" —Einstein over here), and it was also interesting to hear his take on the Higdon concerto, namely that he did NOT believe, as I did, that it was likely to take off as a part of the violin repertoire, just because it's so damn difficult: "There are parts of that piece I listen to," (I'm paraphrasing) "and I think to myself, I could never play that! Which isn't a feeling I get when I listen to Ysaÿe or Paganini."

BUT ALL OF THESE SPARKLING INSIGHTS ARE JUST LEADING UP TO THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT that following the awesome success of her Higdon concerto commission, Hilary Hahn has commissioned TWENTY-SIX MORE PIECES from twenty-six different composers, short works for violin and piano. There will also be a twenty-seventh commission later this year, to be awarded according to some unorthodox scheme yet to be announced; I hope that this scheme will be somehow YOUTUBE-related, because of course the one thing classical music needs right now is one more YouTube Symphony or YouTube Choir or some shit like that. Or maybe it will be Crowdsourced or Wiki'd or Tumblr'd or something similarly WEB TWO POINT OH. Hilary H: jackin' her strat.

I TEASE, but seriously, but no but seriously, what's really interesting here is not the HOW of the commissions but the WHO. I mean I don't even know who all of these people are, but LOOK:

Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
Post-Soviet, Mugham-influenced, prepared piano–playing Azerbaijani lady

David Del Tredici
Neo-Romantic American gay

Jennifer Higdon
Pulitzer-winning composer of concerti for Hilary Hahn and eighth blackbird

James Newton Howard
Bigshot Hollywood film composer dude

David Lang
Pulitzer-winning Bang on a Can person

Edgar Meyer
Bluegrass/jazz/classical bassist (you may remember him from such Yo-Yo Ma collaborations as APPALACHIA WALTZ)

Michiru Oshima
Japanese composer for cartoons, which sounds like I'm being dismissive if you're not a total nerd for these things and therefore aware that they are a REALLY BIG DEAL in the enormous parallel universe that exists right next to the world of concert music but seldom overlaps it

Krysztof Penderecki
If you're reading this you already know who Penderecki is (actually I'm sure that goes for David Lang too, but)

Einojuhani Rautavaara
If you're reading this and know who Penderecki is you should probably also go find out who Rautavaara is

Max Richter
Pianist/composer, formerly of Piano Circus, who has also put out some pretty boss solo records—think "ambient"?

Somei Satoh
Extremely awesome Zen-influenced Japanese composer guy

Elliott Sharp
Improv guitarist and experimental composer

Valentin Silvestrov
Arvo Pärt's favorite composer, one of my favorites too, you REALLY REALLY need to get into him
And the rest:
Lera Auerbach
Richard Barrett
Mason Bates
Tina Davidson
Avner Dorman
Søren Nils Eichberg
Christos Hatzis
Bun-Ching Lam
Paul Moravec
Nico Muhly
Mark-Anthony Turnage
Gillian Whitehead
Du Yun
Going down the list, that's a pretty good breakdown, right there, of "serious" vs. "popular" traditions, ladies vs. gents, "Western" vs. non-, and so forth. This is a shockingly well-rounded commissioning program for a mainstream classical artist! Even if you hate 24 of these composers with a passion, there are gonna be two on here whose music you just live for. I'M GOING TO ALLOW THIS, y'all, and I am very much looking forward to hearing what comes of it.

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