I'll Cut the String that Makes the Hammer Strike

Update your links. It's not The Rest Is Noise anymore, it's Unquiet Thoughts. (Via Steve Smith.)

Improv Everywhere

I always feel kind of stupid "alerting" people to something Alex Ross has written, since if you're not reading him faithfully already, what are the chances you're going to read this blog—but this New Yorker piece is probably worth noting all the same. The subject is the lost (and recently regained) art of classical improvisation. Of course, still lingering in the air of the concert hall, like a sulfurous odor, is an ethos that prizes the art of composition over the art of performance in every case: composers who spotlight the performers' virtuosity rather than their own are dismissed as "superficial"; music history textbooks are actually histories of musical composition, with the greatest performers who ever lived mentioned as footnotes to the scores they played; the highest compliment a critic can pay a performer is to say that he channeled the spirit of the composer. The notion that someone might play something that hasn't been written in the score, or god forbid just make a piece of music up on the spot, might still rankle some classical aficionados, especially if the aficionado in question is an utter tit. People tend to forget that some of our greatest composers were also great improvisers; e.g., the famous marathon concert that introduced Beethoven's Fifth to the world also featured an extended solo jam from our Ludwig Van before he launched into the premiere of the Choral Fantasy. It's true! Anyhow, as Ross observes, those crusty ol' attitudes are changing—though mostly in the relatively narrow realms of cadenza and ornament—and I don't have much to add to his observations, other than... 1) Lawrence Brownlee. Right??? I just watched the DVD of Maazel's 1984 a few weeks ago, and even more impressive than Brownlee's ability to bang out expressionistic tenor coloratura up above high C is the incredibly sweet timbre to his voice while he does it. This guy is a star. In a year's time, your mother will know who he is. Here is a video uploaded by someone called LawrenceBrownleeFan: 2) Schnittke's Beethoven cadenzas. Again: right??? I was about to link to ArkivMusic dot com, where I believe at one time you could buy a print-on-demand CD of Gidon Kremer playing them, but it's no longer available, because somebody hates you. Ah well, I can listen to my copy all I want, la la la, gloat gloat gloat, and you can settle for YouTube, as Ross suggests. 3) Richard Egarr's recordings of the Handel organ concerti. I really didn't think that he could do anything as interesting on the organ as he does on the harpsichord. I was WRONG. These recordings are revelatory, a thrill. 4) One quiet word of dissent: reading this passage

For a recent paper in NeuroImage, Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari studied what happens cognitively when someone improvises; they observed increased activity in two zones of the brain, one connected to decision-making and the other to language. Even if a soloist extemporizes for only a minute, the remainder of the performance may gain something intangible.

I could just imagine a Greg of my acquaintance reading it at the exact same time on the other edge of the continent and emitting a grunt of frustration, followed by SEE, THIS IS EXACTLY WHY I CAN'T LISTEN TO RADIOLAB. People make too much, I think, of studies that say, "When you do x, the y centers of your brain light up!" What, after all, does this data really tell us? Can we really draw from this study the inferences that we're being invited to draw? I don't buy it; let's not go there. Furthermore, I am a staunch opponent of doing something in art just because it seems to be rooted in nature or biology. Not that there's anything wrong with nature. It's just that sometimes, art is better.

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.

Move Over, Tyler Perry

Hooray, Alex Ross went to the Yale Baroque Opera Project's production of Il Giasone by Cavalli, and had some kind words for my good friend Michael Sansoni, who "vividly etched the comic part of Demo." It's true, Mike was hilarious in the performance I saw as well. Of all the singers, I thought he managed to get the most mileage out of the jokes in the libretto. What surprised me was how much there was to get out of the libretto in the first place. It's an opera about Medea! And it's laugh-out-loud funny! That's why I'm so frustrated that (as Ross notes on his blog) the Harmonia Mundi recording, spectacular to hear, is available only as an mp3 download, with no booklet. Could HM please put up a PDF with the English translation on Amazon, or iTunes, or their own website? (And as an addendum to Ross's Cavalli discography, I should note that there's a DVD of La Didone out, which I haven't seen but it's Fabio Biondi conducting and that kid is hot stuff.) But yeah, c'mon people. I'd like an English translation with my four hours of Italian recitative, please.

Four Text Messages

1. Last night, out of the blue, Maury D'Annato:

Did your hits just go way up?

What? Why do you ask? Did—WHOA, I just got my first-ever link from La Cieca, the world's greatest opera blogger! This is, dears, the classical music blogging equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. I'm still a little dizzy. Did La Cieca just compare me to Alex frickin' Ross? And yes, for a hot minute my hit counter went through the damn roof. 2. Night before last, I got this message from one of my Gregs, who's caught Eighth Blackbird on their tour of the West Coast, reading simply:

OMG bearinettist = dreamboat.

Y'see people?? I do not lie. Now okay, that right there speaks for itself, but later Greg also shared some very interesting thoughts on the Reich and Rzewski pieces we discussed earlier, so remind me to tell you all about it. 3. & 4. Did you hear that Glenn Branca was one of two electric guitarists to win $25,000 grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts? Well the other electric guitarist was this Mick Barr guy, who is from around here! So I txt msg'd my friend Kyle, the lead singer of Mick Barr's old band, for comment:

Haha! Knowing Mick, he'll spend it on Danzig bootlegs.

A minute later:

Or a deluxe ant farm.

He's kidding, people, he's kidding! He loves the Mick Barr! And his music. Although, weirdly, when I listen to Barr's records, they kind of sound like they'd be made by somebody who could manage spend $25,000 on either Danzig bootlegs or a deluxe ant farm. Or maybe somebody who could tell Philip Glass that Two Pages (for Steve Reich) needs a little more focus.

Congratulations MacArthurs!

It's going to be a great year for new music. Alex Ross, best-selling writer, classical critic and all-around advocate of pretty new sounds (yes MAYBE YOU'VE HEARD OF HIM) has received a $500,000 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship. Also on the list: Leila Josefowicz! When I was a wee little Suzuki violinist and she was a wee little Suzuki violinist, she was like a fantasy version of myself. She studied with Idel Low? I knew Idel Low! I watched her onstage, playing the Mendelssohn concerto, and thought, she's just a year than me... maybe if I practice a LOT in the next twelve months... Yeah, no. Didn't happen. But as she outgrew the Child Prodigy pinafore, she grew into the tight pants and body glitter of the New Music Champion, in which guise she knocked my socks off with an intimate New York performance of the Adams concerto some years ago. She marked the ferocious accents of the last movement with pelvic thrusts (she did!), and suddenly a piece which I had known through Kremer's sweet, wry, neoclassical interpretation revealed itself to be something totally different and–y'know what–better. She tore it up. When I heard that she had devoted herself to learning and performing the complete Adams violin music, I was delighted. Hey, between the MacArthur prize and this shortlist, it's been a pretty good couple weeks for her! And finally I'll leave you with a clip of freshly minted MacArthur fellow Walter Kitundu, instrument maker-in-residence with the Kronos Quartet and bird photographer. (Note that this ties in nicely with our earlier discussion of classical turntablism.) Read more about Kitundu at the SFGate and/or at the SFist, or just watch the clip below and be delighted.

Nightstand! Of! STEEL!!!

Look, I've already said this to two people tonight, so I'm going to post it here, and I won't have to repeat it again: No, I have not read the Alex Ross book. I'm sure it's great. I know everyone's read it but me. I can't wait to pick it up. But I have not even bought a copy, and I will not buy a copy until I have finished reading Now, Voyagers by James McCourt (of Queer Street fame). If you haven't heard, Now, Voyagers is the sequel to Mawrdew Czgowchwz, the opera-queen novel as unpronounceable as it is indispensible. (Actually, it's pronounced "Mardu Gorgeous," so maybe just call it "the opera-queen novel" and we'll leave it at that.) If you are a faggot, like myself, and care enough about classical music to be reading this blog, you should probably be reading Mawrdew Czgowchwz right now instead of anything I have to say. And even if you are just a homo and do not care about classical music in the slightest, and have stumbled across this website through one of those crazy internet accidents, you should definitely be reading Queer Street instead of anything I have to say, because that book is the user's manual that they should have handed out with your homosexuality. Anyhow, I've only read the first few, insane pages of Now, Voyagers, because I've decided I'm not going to start reading it in earnest until I finish War and Peace. Yeah, you heard me. See, I've never read it, and here it is in this new translation from Pevear and Volokhonsky, our two most faithful guides to Russian literature, and check out how beautiful, just to look at! Now take off the dust jacket--still beautiful! Gorgeous. I smile to see it on my shelf. And there it sits. Because of course, before I even start in on War and Peace, I'd better finish reading Sodom and Gomorrah, because otherwise that would be one enormous novel too many--Sodom and Peace, War and Gomorrah, I'd get it all mixed up. But I've taken a short break from Sodom and Gomorrah to read La Colmena (The Hive), an astonishingly vicious novel of life after the Spanish Civil War by Nobel-laureate Camilo José Cela. Cela was an interesting character: a nobleman, an officer and, later, spy for Franco (betraying his fellow writers to the Fascist government), he was also famous for having claimed, in a televised interview, to be able to take a liter of water into his body through his asshole. (He offered to demonstrate for the cameras.) This translation is terrible, though, and so I've stopped reading it except as a crib to the original Spanish, which I'm reading in a beautiful scholarly edition, except that I've paused to read the most charming little thing: You're an Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa. A novel, kind of, it tells the story of Viskovitz, everyschlemiel, as his soul wanders from beast to beast--snail, dung beetle, chameleon, elk, parrot--looking for love. I hate to say, "Think blank meets blank," but maybe it'll help if I tell you to think, What if Woody Allen wrote Invisible Cities? Not as deep as Calvino maybe, not as funny as Allen at his best, but still a terrifically funny, insightful, remarkably sustained performance. Each chapter is a self-contained fable on the animal in man (and woman). And look, Roz Chast did the cover! It's great! You love her! Yeah, you'd better read this book, too. Anyhow, I'm delighted to add Alex Ross to the list. I'm just sayin', it might take a while. Bear with me, people.

Hooray!

Thanks to Alex Ross for the link! I was excited to get a sneak preview of the truly impressive collection of info and audio links he's put together to accompany his new book. If by some unfathomable set of circumstances you're visiting this page without visiting his first, I highly recommend the new addition to his already-essential website.