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.

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.

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 Bathgate & Lisa 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.

Composerly Memes

laskdjfals;fjals;dfjsalfkj I have been SO LAZY lately, I scarcely blogged a blog all summer. My big excuse is that I finally wrote my first article for a glossy magazine and I've been stressing over that but really it's a short article and a pretty puny excuse. Also I helped my brother move to Texas! Scroll down the right-hand column to see the bitchin' lamp we got for his new office. But that is also a puny excuse since the whole time I was in the car I was revising that article.

By the way all of my interviewees for that piece were SO GREAT, I can't believe how much amazing material they gave me. It was pretty painful to distill pages of brilliant comments from James "La Cieca" Jorden and Zachary "Z-Wolf" Woolfe into the itty bitty handful of quotes I could actually shoehorn into the article. Which brings me the other thing I've written lately, this pair of reviews for La Cieca, of discs from the James Levine 40th Met anniversary boxsets: Berg's Lulu, Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles. You'll want to click through; some great comments await. A sample:

So provocative! Clicky clicky.

Cieca's comments also got me to thinking again about the ways in which composers are and aren't oppressed by mainstream classical institutions. Apparently Caleb Burhans' string quartet for JACK was actually Boo'd, at Darmstadt? Which is on the one hand distressing (were they booing it on the grounds of style alone? or was the piece actually bad?? neither of those is a very happy possibility!) and on the other hand, forget it, JACK, it's Darmstadt-town. Somebody told me that the Kronos Quartet was boo'd there before they even sat down; after the performance, they shook the dirt off their tevas and never looked back. If that story's true, MORE POWER TO KRONOS. Y'all don't need those bitches. (I mean, can you IMAGINE booing someone BEFORE THEY PLAYED?)

In some respects, what seems like systematic institutional discrimination is really just built in to the institutions—the perennial complaint, for instance, that only "academic" composers are recognized by academia; well, duh!—and there's no way around that tautology except to wait for that battleship, whether it's The University or The Symphony or The Festival Scene, to slowly turn your way. (Okay actually there is one way, and fortunately a lot of people are doing it nowadays, which is to get your friends together and pilot your own sleek little dinghy into those uncharted waters you've got your eye on.) And sometimes you will actually, personally be kept down by composers who find your music ideologically unacceptable, such as in (PDF) this article John Halle wrote about what a jerk Mario Davidovsky was to him. He makes a pretty convincing case!  Mario Davidovsky:  jerk.

A combination of the above factors has produced a surprising number of bitter, bitter boomers and post-boomers. What's great though is that those people's students, having been told that there are no stylistic Wrong Answers, are increasingly setting out in fleets of those metaphorical dinghies. Look at Corey Dargel! I know I keep harping on him, but that's just because he's one of my super duper favoritest composers in the world right now. Or in other words, if he would like a pull-quote for his press materials: Each new song from Corey Dargel only reinforces my sense that he is one of the most compelling and important composers emerging from the New York scene. I'm still kicking myself for having missed the reading from his new opera (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), The Three Christs, this past Monday, and someone should probably kick ME for having totally failed to review his new record yet despite its having come out like last year or something. (I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL REVIEW IT, I'VE JUST BEEN… BUSY.)

But one interesting thing about his success is how few of the conventional trappings have surrounded it. Yes, he has written for starry new-music institutions like the American Composers Orchestra and the newer but no less starry International ICE Ensemble, but mostly he's been putting on concerts in nightclubs, by himself or with a handful of friends, and putting out largely D.I.Y. records on independent labels. He basically embodies the notion that you young composers don't need to chase the DMA, the prizes, and the professorship in order to be able to make the music they want to make.

(Lest we romanticize the situation over here, let us also note that for many composers, while "making the music they want to make" might be very important, things like "comprehensive dental insurance" might also be very important, and it's pretty nasty to have to trade that stability for the opportunity to make meaningful art.)

And so while I am totally OVER hearing established, middle-aged composers with tenure or glamorous commissions or whatever complain about what victims they are because they got one bad review someplace (I'm not even going to name names here; you can fill in the blank), I do have to cringe whenever I hear America's most Dargelicious composer picking up their old refrain, with tweets like this about the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's open commissioning thingie, Project 440:

Because FIRST of all, isn't that kind of a mean thing to say about the composers who made the finals? Actually, now that I look at it, the rhetoric he's using borrows a lot from the old modernist bullies—the finalists are "mundane," not "innovative" enough.

On the face of it, this would seem to be the "tautological" complaint. Why isn't Orpheus (most famous for recording, like, Handel's Water Music and the Mozart wind concerti) commissioning more out-there music? Well, they're not a new-music ensemble; they really don't hang out on the cutting edge. But have they really chosen such boring composers? If I could pick four winners out of the final 12, here's who I'd probably go with. This decision is totally subjective and shockingly non-binding:

1. Timothy Andres, composer/pianist, bright young star on Nonesuch Records.
Facile comparison: John Adams.
I'll admit I've never been shocked by Andres's music, but it seems like a good fit for Orpheus, and frankly, it's incredibly well put-together. Listen to this stuff, both of these pieces are really kinda moving:

2. Tyondai Braxton, rock star, plays with BATTLES on Warp Records.
Facile comparison: Frank Zappa.
I was never a huge fan of the BATTLES LP, but I have to admit Braxton's style meshes incredibly well with the sound of a chamber orchestra in these clips. Exuberant to the brink of kitsch; maybe even (dare I say!) subversive?

3. Alexandre Lunsqui, Brazilian awesome person.
Facile comparison: Dude, I don't know. Somebody from Europe?
Okay now HERE are some unfamiliar orchestral effects. This is crazy! What's even going on here! This is very exciting! Alexandre Lunsqui should be famous!

4. Andrew Norman, Modestonian pianist/composer.
Facile comparison: STOP IT, LEAVE ME ALONE, I DON'T KNOW
I am IN THE TANK for Norman, having admired his music immensely since I was a young 'un (btw I'm sorry this list is All Male and includes not one but Two pianists from Yale), and he's such an intensely self-critical and publicity-shy composer that it causes me a spasm of physical pain to hear someone gripe that he isn't enough of an "innovator" to deserve his little bit of success, but all the same, I hope you'll agree that it's not just me, that his music is quite well-wrought, lively, and satisfying to the ear:


I mean, right?? These are all good composers! Everyone one the list whom I DIDN'T name is a really good composer! They would all write something awesome for Orpheus! Let's just relax, everybody. Young composers, I want to see a little bit less of this

and a whole lot more of this:

Right?

Discuss.

Two Reviews

I tweeted these links, but didn't blog them:

Here's my review of the new Timo Andres CD. I made some really odd choices in formatting this review, which understandably got taken out in editing, but which would've changed the tone or even the sense just slightly: for one thing, I hate short, one-sentence paragraphs, so the last paragraph originally read,

Fortunately, now that we’re all jaded citizens of the 21st century, we’ve all heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony enough and never need to hear it again. Just kidding, no we haven’t. Hear the New Haven Symphony play it (right after the Eighth Symphony) on May 13 at Woolsey Hall or May 15 at Fairfield University—it’s why we’re alive.

And this sentence became slightly different when the Mark Trail–like weirdness of my italics was corrected:

A generation (or two) has passed, the battle is over and the Andres/Adams camp has won — and is there anything more tiresome than the pose of rebellion?

Emphasis on POSE. I love rebellion! It's the pose that's tiresome.

And then, here's my review of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at the New York Phil. I should have mentioned in the first paragraph, when I mentioned how "self-righteous" I was at twenty, "dropping the…Grand Macabre I’d just bought at Tower Records into my CD player," I would not have dreamed that ten years later I'd be reviewing a production for Parterre Box. I was planning to review this for my own blog, but then I scored a pair of press tickets and decided that I therefore ought to review it for a publication that people actually read. If you're a Ligeti fan, I hope you'll click through—I tried to make the review as thorough and meaty as I could.

Q: What's Shy, Mighty, and Forthcoming from Nonesuch Records?

A: It looks as if Timothy "Timo" Andres' album of two-piano music, Shy and Mighty, has been slated for a May 4 release on the record label that Adams and Reich and those guys call home. You're so excited! You've been hearing about his music for years, but you live out in the boonies and never get to hear it! Well it is YOUR LUCKY DAY, sweetie. (May 4 is.) ANYWAY, you can listen to some clips from the cycle here; you can find more info here, plus an album cover photo that will make you wonder how I forgot to include him in my roundup of new-music sex symbols. Rowr!

Uh-Oh

The good news is, I finally got around to interviewing New Haven new-music mainstay Jack Vees, apropos of tonight's performance of his Party Talk. The bad news is, Party Talk is canceled! The WORSE news is, I think it's because Timo Andres has swine flu!

Dammit. Ah, well: the Cerrone, Knight, Kuspa, and Wang performances are still scheduled to go on. Everybody drink lots of hot soup and get plenty of rest and let's Party Talk soon.

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.

The Norman Invasion

Ooh check it out! Andrew Norman, that up-'n'-comin' young composer I'm creepily obsessed with, has been shoved onto the internet by fellow up-'n'-comin' young composer Timothy Andres, who designed his webpage and took that picture there. Go! There will be blog updates soon, I gather, but for now start with the music page. Excellent.