NICE

So I went Monday night to hear the International Contemporary Ensemble, or as they're sometimes known, "ICE," or "the ICE ensemble," or as I like to call them, "the international ICE ensemble." The international ICE ensemble are actually not, as their name might lead you to believe, from Iceland, but rather from Chicago or New York or something. [Note to self: look up where ICE is from before clicking PUBLISH. Actually, eh, don't bother.]

BUT ENOUGH WITH THE JOKING, I'm just a little punchy, the point is that they were pretty fantastically great. It's such a cliché, and a fallacy, to say that an ensemble can (or should) play so well that they present a given piece umediated by of interpretation, but that was certainly the illusion Monday night—I kept having to remind myself to pay attention to the performers, not just the score, so that I could tell y'all about them.

The program was part of a Mostly Mozart series curated by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, your favorite pianist (I mean seriously, am I the only one who watches this video frame by frame to make sure he hasn't cheated and grown a third hand?), looking at the music of Bach in the context of a giant survey of polyphony, spanning cultures and æons. This concert specifically was about juxtaposing the European/British avant-garde with their interpretations of baroque counterpoint, so the first piece was a Purcell arrangement by George Benjamin, featuring Aimard on celeste, accompanied by just a few ICEpeople who kept sneaking in to realize and resolve the long lines the celeste couldn't sustain. It was eerie and sweet and unsettling, and I wish I had a CD of it. SOMEBODY SEND ME A CD OF IT.

Next was Benjamin's Antara, featuring Aimard on sampler—dueling ICE's Corey Smythe—and Claire Chase and Eric Lamb played (the fuck out of their) flute soli. The piece is an elaborate exploration of a sampled pan-pipe—flutes imitating its breathy sound, violin harmonics imitating its overtones, and the keyboards, of course, supplying the "actual" pipes. It draws the listener into a dense and shadowy thicket of sound, only to be BOMBARDED BY AN AMBUSH OF BRASS BRASS AND PERCUSSION. The samplers controlled their attacks with pedals and noodled through microtonal scales, but still Benjamin was unable to fully liberate the sound of a sampled pan-pipe from the cultural context of somebody scoring a TV show and wanting a naïve Andean sound (TV scores are racist) but being too cheap to hire actual Incas. The flutes aped the pipes, the band aped the pipes, the samplers aped the pipes—I wonder if the piece would have felt more satisfying if there had just been an actual set of pipes onstage. Why not? Maybe that was the point? At any rate, odd, and beautiful.

Next, from Harrison Birtwistle's Bach Measures, two arrangements of Bach's Li'l Organ Book chorales, which were pretty zesty and sparkly and cute. "I think that one's from Birtwistle's Christmas album," said somebody next to me, which has prompted me to do another mockup for you guys in the classical record industry:

YOU'RE WELCOME, again.

It occurs to me that there's something perhaps inherently campy about Bach arrangements for new-music ensemble. It's drag, basically: they put on those shoes and those tights and that big curly wig and they get a little zany about doing those things they aren't supposed to do (Perfect Authentic Cadences, NAUGHTY) while ostensibly underlining those things that are most 20th/21st-century about Bach's own music. You can read about this in my forthcoming dissertation, "SWITCHED ON: Performing Bach and Gender in the 20th Century." I think part of this lurid effect stems from the chamber orchestra's lack of a firm sonic foundation in the form of a large string section: the colors are constantly shifting, every line is broken up amongst the different sections, and we get a lot of coloristic frosting, not a lot of actual cake.

That's fine! It's fun! Just something to be aware of. Another thing that is fine and fun, but be aware: usually with a project like Aimard's "Bach & Polyphonies," the comparison/contrast between old and new is a little skewed towards the contrast. What usually happens is that the tonal stuff ends up sounding a little dry and old-fashioned and the crazy bleep bloop music sounds crazier than ever. Birtwistle, though, a composer I don't know well (not that I know Benjamin well, or Lachenmann), really did open up a bit when his Slow Frieze was paired with his Bach arrangements. Those same contrapuntal voices, chugging along steadily through their material, except that they were all chugging along at different speeds in the Birtwistle, and without a tonal center. But the point is, the piece spoke, and all the more clearly thanks to Bach's intervention.

After intermission it was Berio's Contrapunctus XIX, one of Berio's many "completions" of unfinished works (in this case, the end of Bach's Art of Fugue) and the only piece on the program I'd heard before. The Gimmick is, see, that Berio ends the piece not by completing the fugue but by allowing each voice to trail off and then resolve to a ghostly cluster on the notes B-A-C-H (that's German for B-flat, A, C, B-natural), which Bach had used as a musical signature within the piece. It's a beautiful dedication, and heavily dependent on the ensemble's ability to summon up the appropriate musical color, which they did throughout the piece, keenly and sensitively. I did wish that they'd gotten a little sentimental—it would've been exciting to hear them let loose a bit more passionately on the B-A-C-H section, for instance, when that motif first came up.

But the real meat of the program was the final piece, Lachenmann's Mouvement, an astonishing work that I'm grateful to have heard in person—it's impossible to imagine such a piece having anything close to the same effect when emitted, disembodied, from a pair of speakers. The ensemble was divided spatially into three sections—winds, strings, percussion—which then traded and developed musical material, which was to my delight not, for the most part, pitch or rhythmic material, but pure timbre, created mostly through an incredible array of extended techniques. I never even knew, e.g., that bowing the pegs of a fiddle would even MAKE a sound. But the whole thing cohered, which I suspect is a testament to the band's exceptional musicianship.

Okay, a cranky little voice inside me asks the question of, if you're not going to let the performers play their instruments properly, why write for conventional instruments at all—that is, if you're going to treat the instruments like pieces of wood and lengths of tubing, why not just have them bow pieces of wood and strike lengths of tubing, since you're not really using the performers' training or their instruments' sound-generating properties—but yknow SHUT UP, cranky little voice, for there are plenty of practical and conceptual reasons why you might write unconventional techniques for conventional instruments, and so if you're going to do it this well, I'm not going to complain about it. The piece had basically everything I demand from a piece of avant-garde music—a clear, dramatic form, and arresting new sounds—and I could scarcely have been more satisfied by such an adventurous piece of music. The piece ended; the audience went nuts; ICE deserved it. Thank you, ICE! I shall endeavor to attend more of your concerts in the very near future.

Live from the Uncanny Valley

(Thanks to loyal reader Brett for this one.) There are a bunch of YouTube videos of the Vocaloid software singing Bach arias and chorales, but this duet from BWV 78 works much better than, say, the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion. The "choral" effect blunts the creepiness of Hatsune Miku's weird diction by making it sound sort of endearingly cheesy, a la Wendy Carlos's "Ode to Joy"—whereas these twins' goopy melismas are just real enough to be super disturbing. According to Wikipedia:

The series is intended for professional musicians as well as light computer music users. The programmed vocals are designed to sound like an idol singer from the future. According to Crypton, because professional singers refused to provide singing data, in fear that the software might create their singing voice's clones, Crypton changed their focus from imitating certain singers to creating characteristic vocals.

Understandable. (An idol singer! From the future! Awesome.) But this means that the technology is not here quite yet which would allow me to generate a synthetic battalion of Elisabeths Schwarzkopf...? Hey, let's work on that, Yamaha, shall we?

The Cult of the Composer

Oh my lord. So much for writing every day. We're moving out of our apartment! This will come as a great relief to everyone who has visited us in our present building, which is, er, a rotting little slum. Between the sudden, relative lack of hot water and the weird diesel smell coming up from the furnace(!!!) it finally seemed impossible to live here, and our friend David (pronounced dah-BEED) had to give notice on Mar 1st as to whether he was keeping his overpriced one-bedroom and so we're all moving in together! Me and JoJo and David and TygerTyger, finally moving into an apartment big enough for the four of us. JoJo is especially sweating the move, trying to figure out what books to pack and which to give away. I wish I hadn't left my camera in Vermont just so I could show you the giveaway stack, which actually runs up the stairway in a dramatic, fire code-defying fashion. You're all welcome to drop by and take something. If you do, feel free to slip a donation for moving costs under our door. (Update: Photo here!) Anyway, the things I would have blogged were I not busy alternating between apartment-hunting and the fetal position have been picked up by better bloggers than I: Jeremy Denk sticks it to somebody named Harold Fromm, who put this sloppy piece in the Hudson Review. The notion that we can get at the real Bach by desiccating Bach performance strikes me as... a bit misguided. Fromm's right to celebrate the notion that Bach, as opposed to, say, Beethoven or Mozart, is miraculously free from the sort of mythmaking that mucks up listeners' interpretations of a body of work. The picture we get of Bach from his paper trail, mostly business correspondence, gives a pretty realistic portrait of the artist as a serious workman—somebody with a job to do—which is, let's just say, NOT how we tend to imagine our Beethovens and Mahlers. Unfortunately, Fromm points out by example the converse hazard of interpreting a composer's music biographically, which is the perception that Bach was some kind of musical accountant. No. Bach's music is sentimental, at times even maudlin, and the notion that it should be performed bloodlessly is thrilling not because it is an 18th-century idea but because, as Richard Taruskin points out in "The Modern Sound of Early Music" (the Times headline is not his), it is a very 20th-century one. How odd that an article called "J.S. Bach in the 21st Century" should take its cues from a performance style invented in the age of Stravinsky and debunked in the Clinton administration! Fromm's article is not only useless, it is not even fashionable. Look and! An editor at ArtForum asked me to link to this thing they ran on Stockhausen at their website, but Alex Ross beat me to it. I've resisted commenting on Stockhausen's death mostly out of ignorance—like most new-music lovers, I'm simply unaware of most of his output, and I simply can't contribute more thoughtfully than so many commentators have already done. So I was excited to see Robin Maconie's piece, which presents in some ways a terrifically clear-sighted perspective on Stockhausen's work. Like: "Of the intricately interlaced mathematical rhythms of his early works, his pianist friend Aloys Kontarsky said, 'Oh, that’s just his way of notating rubato.'" How nice to read an article on Stockhausen that actually brings us closer to understanding his music! But then we get a little further and, hm, it seems that Maconie has, as they say, drunk the Kool-Aid. On his controversial 9/11 comments:

In a scathing and factually exhaustive account of what actually transpired at the fateful press conference, Stockhausen’s companion, American clarinetist Suzanne Stephens, defends him as a bewildered old man drawn into a media trap and cynically abandoned by the festival administration and its political backers, who had already been made uneasy by press accusations that Hamburg had provided a safe haven for some of the terrorists.

Pretty easy to believe, yeah. But then—

One can go a step further and interpret the entire affair as a fatwa deliberately engineered by the festival authorities, with the connivance of disaffected members of the press corps, to counter the massive loss it was already clear the festival was bound to incur in the wake of the Twin Towers attack, by removing at a stroke its single most expensive component—a four-day program of Stockhausen’s works....

"Fatwa"? Well, that's pushing it a little. The word is obviously chosen to evoke the way Iran tried to censored Salman Rushdie, and I'm sorry but canceling some premieres and promising to murder someone are not the same thing. Of course, Maconie isn't saying this is his own point of view, he's just throwin' it out there as something "one" might choose to believe... and then:

At Stockhausen’s level of awareness, however—a level of divination on which things that happened to him were construed not trivially or personally but as a convergence of “cosmic” forces for which the artist is simply a lightning rod—what mattered was not who was to blame or their individual motivations, but the absolute reality of 9/11 and the artist’s moral duty to account for it. Stephens was missing the point. The event had to happen because it did happen. That the composer was misconstrued is par for the course.

Er—"a level of divination"? I'm going to go ahead and suggest to each and every one of us that we back away from the implication that our favorite composer has mystical and/or supernatural powers. I mean, I'm being a bitch here, and I am grateful for Maconie's article, but there really is some crazy stuff built into his rhetoric. Much more plausible is Morton Subotnick's interpretation:

Egocentric people are usually distasteful, yet I didn’t find that with him. He got so much flack for calling 9/11 the greatest work of art ever. But I don’t think there was any malice in that. He was so involved with his own persona and with his own self. It was an innocent comment—very unfortunate, but innocent. Thank goodness we don’t all feel that way about things. But having a few such people in the world doesn’t hurt.

There we go. I hope that we can all agree that Stockhausen's ego was a great thing—who but a monster of ego would have attempted to build his enormous body of work!—fraught with disastrous potential. For instance, every vocal work of Stockhausen's that I have heard sets a text by the composer, always a gamble, and in his case invariably a losing one. His poetry is atrocious.

Which leaves Björk's response... not much for me to say here, actually. I think she gets it spot-on. Most electronic artists, when they talk about Stockhausen's influence, are being pretty superficial—like a playwright saying he was influenced by Shakespeare because he writes his plays in English. Like, it's true, but not very interesting. Björk's obituary, but also her music, reveal a real depth of familiarity with Stockhausen's body of work. Beyond his electronic innovations (cribbed by so many pop artists) and his arcane compositional processes (aped by the avant-garde), she's actually been listening to his music, its alien textures and strange, gnarled melodies. Listen to Medúlla or the Drawing Restraint 9 score again after hearing Stimmung or Tierkreis... it might illuminate a facet of Stockhausen's (or Björk's) oeuvre that you hadn't noticed before.

Motetten, Mo' Problems

Next time you want to stir up a whole pot of crazy, just start talking "performance practice" with a roomful of Bach queens. Sure, it might start out as a civil, intellectual conversation, but before you know it, they're all shouting Authentic This, and Authentic That, Correct This, and then the hair-pulling starts. Of course, by Bach queens, I mean those other Bach queens. JoJo and I may have a dozen different Goldberg Variationses or so, despite living in a hovel, but we are ideologically pure. Completely. To show you what I mean, let's first watch this YouTube video, posted a little under one year ago, of period-instrument veteran Ton Koopman playing Bach's "little fugue" in G minor:

Wow! Pretty exciting, right? Koopman adds a few subtle ornaments, and takes the fugue at a breakneck speed (but not so fast you can't tell what's going on); elegant, but with plenty of gusto--in other words, some of the best musicianship that the current fashion in historically informed performance has to offer.

And now let's take just a glance at the YouTube viewer comments. Go ahead, click here.

Did you see that? There are THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE COMMENTS on that video, as of this writing, most of them weighing in on an absurdly vitriolic argument between just a handful of commenters. (I'm especially pleased to note the dude who, to cement his Bach cred, cites his first-name-basis relationship with organ virtuoso Virgil Fox, pictured above. Another glimpse into Virj's unorthodox Bach performance practice may be had here.) Why the hysterics? Why does everybody have so much invested in this shouting match? What's so great about making "correct" music?

One of the most important shapers of modern Bach performance practice was Wanda Landowska, the first star harpsichordist of the twentieth century. Bach queens that we are, we've just bought a DVD documentary about her, basically just for the performance footage:

If I may quote a pair of Koopman Kommenters,

Too bad the camera kept on cutting away RIGHT when I wanted to see how something was done Yes, this is typical almost all classical music films (as well as pornos :-) )

But these frustrations aside, I hope you can see why JoJo & I had to have a DVD of Landowska. Look at those fingers! Even if she had not been such a pioneer, she would still have been one of the last century's greatest keyboardists. But what's interesting about Landowska's greatness, for the purposes of this blog, is that she was neither "authentic" nor "correct" in her performance practice. She was certainly sure of herself--"You play Bach your way," she famously joked, "and I'll play him his way"--but her custom-built harpsichord was enormous, with a steel frame and a penetrating tone, dwarfing in size and sound anything that Bach would have used. And if memory serves, her Bach-his-way mot referred not to the use of harpsichord but to her strange, square, and almost certainly mistaken rhythms in the first fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier (big giant mp3 available here).

Still, I say that she was a superior artist not just despite but, in part, because of these peccadilloes. Landowska's iconoclastic approach to interpretation is one of the reasons her recordings are still worth listening to so many decades and performance-fads later.

Her harpsichord may not resemble 18th-century (or 21st-century) specimens, but it is a gorgeous machine and makes a rich, tremendous sound. Poulenc wrote his Concert Champêtre for it and for her; Ton Koopman's recording, on an "authentic" Baroque instrument, is a hilarious botch--the solo is practically inaudible.

Thanks to our friend Don--and to the lovely gentlemen then executing the estate of Denise Restout, Landowska's widow--here's a color photo of that same harpsichord from the video above, taken in that same living room, but this time with JoJo at the controls. (Not pictured: JoJo's inexpressibly intense glee.) It was more than a little out of tune, but still a spectacular work of art, from the impossibly elegant lid over its keyboard to its ranks and ranks of crisscrossing strings. If you ever get the chance to see and hear a Pleyel harpsichord in person, dude, take it.

What's got me thinking about all of this is the new Hilliard Ensemble CD of Bach motets. Martin Geck's liner notes summarize what is probably the most heated debate of Bach performance practice, the controversy over the size of the choir that should be used--musicologist Joshua Rifkin having discovered late last century that Bach's music was probably written not for a "choir" in the traditional sense, but for a small ensemble of vocal soloists. This revelation has, not surprisingly, gone down pretty poorly with Bach traditionalists, but is finally managing to gain some traction these many years later, resulting in some exquisite recordings by the Hilliards, Paul McCreesh and Konrad Junghänel, in addition to Rifkin's own. And keep in mind, this is all based in some pretty solid scholarship. But here's where I get off the bus:

"Rifkin feels that Bach feels that Bach proceeded so economically not because of the evident shortage of virtuoso boys' voices, (a shortage of which he himself complained), but for artistic reasons." Well, Bach complained about a lot of things. One of them was that his choir was just too small--he wanted, at minimum, three voices on a part. His ideal choir and the choir he was stuck with were two different things. Richard Taruskin snipes, in his Oxford History, "One often daydreams about what the music heard today sounded like when first performed. It would seem that in the case of Bach, it might be better not to know."

So on the one hand, Bach was probably writing his music for a choir many times smaller than is commonly used nowadays, but on the other hand, he probably wished he was writing for a choir just a few times larger than the one he was using. But on the other other hand, for all of our idealization of Bach as a creator of abstract music, was an imminently practical composer. His vocal music, even at its most difficult, sits quite easily in the voice--of all the motets recorded here, it is worth noting that the most spurious, BWV 230 (though brilliant, lovely, etc.) is also the most likely to cause vocal strain. And to pick up where I left off with Geck, the motets' "intricate counterpoint would, [Rifkin] argues, be heard to better effect when sung one voice to a part. In other words, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied requires a different kind of choral body than the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah." But on the other, other, other hand, what happens in those moments when Bach reaches for a Handelian grandeur that the four- or eight-person choir just can't achieve so convincingly?

This is why my favorite interpreter of the motets is still René Jacobs--the countertenor-cum-conductor best known for his recent Mozart operas--whose sense of drama is a surer guide than any dogma. He augments a chamber choir with the subtle, colla parte accompaniment suggested by historical evidence (NB: the historical evidence is, again, totally self-contradictory) and alternates pragmatically between soloistic and choral textures, and the result is extremely effective. Is the Hilliard Ensemble disc, one-on-a-part, a-cappella, something less? No--it's something different, something purer. When they get to the most emotionally intimate motet, Komm, Jesu, komm, I can hardly imagine a superior performance.

Really, there is hardly a reasonable approach to Bach's scores that would not illuminate another facet of his genius. There are no wrong answers here, only wrong arguments--his music is almost indestructibly elastic. Or as a favorite teacher put it, "The answer to the old question, 'Should Bach be played on harpsichord or piano?' is yes."

I Have a Sneaking Feeling This Isn't Gidon Kremer's Official MySpace

Unless by "Latin" he means "Latvian." I just watched Back to Bach (EuroArts), his new DVD of the Bach Partitas for solo violin, and it was an odd experience. Never having seen him play in person, Kremer has only existed for me as photographs and disembodied sound; I'd never heard him speak or seen the way he bends his knees when he fiddles. It's nice to get to "know" him. And of course the performance itself is phenomenal. I have found Kremer's recent ECM recording of the Sonatas & Partitas literally mesmerizing--no, I mean literally mesmerizing, as in, it's no use talking to me while they're playing, because at some point you'll ask me a question and discover that I have been hypnotized by counterpoint for the past three minutes and have not heard a word you've said--and while the video editing is occasionally a little choppier than it has to be, the sound is good, and I'm delighted to actually see Kremer's amazing bowstroke pick all the different lines out of a string of sixteenth-notes. The accompanying documentary is engaging enough. Kremer warms up, tunes his fiddle, makes a face after a bad take or two. In interview, he confesses that he's actually still fond of his first recordings of the Partitas (now unavailable; thanks, Philips): while he has a few interesting things to say on the subject of Glenn Gould and Bach interpretation, his urge to re-record isn't as quite like the fierce revisionism of Gould's New Goldberg-Variation Testament of 1981. Sir Simon Rattle and Sofia Gubaidulina, two more musicians I've never seen sit down for chit-chat, also put in talking-head time, and while I was glad to hear from them, I found myself wishing by the end that the gang at EuroArts had just padded the disc with more fiddle-porn. Why not show us the Sonatas, too? Ah, well. Maybe worth buying, even if you already own the CD (you do own the CD, right?), and definitely worth renting. Netflix has it! Trailer & more info here.