Have You Heard These Things?

New Corey Dargel, everybody. He and violinist Cornelius Dufallo are premiering a new song-cycle at the Stone Nov. 29, and here's a taste—fiddle loops, brutal lyrics, 7/8 time. Highly recommended. It's like Owen Pallett meets Stephin Merritt meets rhythmic complexity? Yikes, okay, the previous sentence just embarrassed us all. Let's move on.

I haven't written much about our New Amsterdam friends lately, which is totally a mistake. They've been continuing this monthly ARCHIPELAGO concert series at the Galapagos Art Space, and I kicked myself when I realized I'd forgotten to tell y'all to check out the show by Roomful of Teeth, a new-music chamber choir, which based totally on YouTube clips, I'm pretty sure is going to become the new thing. Like Toby Twining and the Toby Twining Singers! Or Meredith Monk and the Funky Bunch! Look here they are singing Judd Greenstein: And here they are singing Caroline Shaw: Seriously, isn't this going to be a big deal?

Anyway. The next Archipelago concert, on Nov. 20 (there will also be a Dargel one in the spring), is all about Victoire, whom—as we have established—you totally love, and special guests Arturo en el Barco. Arturo en el Barco is one Angélica Negrón and her band, and you'd really better check it out, here. Eerie, sample-driven ambient, very good. It makes me want to wear gloves. And eyeliner. Actually, after listening to a little Arturo and a little Victoire just now, I think I am going to try to bring hats back, so this is a dangerous combination. You're warned. You're welcome.

Epi-Scene

I had a dream about Hilary Hahn the other night. In my dream I was reading an article in a scholarly journal, collected in a library binding, which cited a conversation that she had had with Anne-Sophie Mutter, but there was no transcript of this conversation beyond the excerpts printed in the footnote of this article, and so I went to Hilary Hahn's apartment to talk to her about it. There was another girl there who was just a dumb fan, and was NOT there out of serious musicological interest, like me, but Hilary Hahn was very polite to both of us, and played a little for us on the violin, and then showed us a bizarre string instrument I'd never seen before, sort of a cross between a ten-course lute and a viola da gamba. What does this dream tell us? First of all, it tells us that I have THE MOST BORING FUCKING DREAMS OF ALL TIME. Seriously, if I dream about a famous concert violinist again, she'd better KILL AND EAT SOMEONE in that dream. "Scholarly journal," jesus. But it also tells us something about the power of good marketing. I don't own any Hilary Hahn CDs. There are a great many musicians whose actual work is far more present in my life than Hilary Hahn's. There are CERTAINLY more musicians who are marketed more aggressively, and whose personalities are more present in the culture. But Hilary Hahn is the one whose image appeared in my weird dream. Why is that? I think it's because Hilary Hahn has been successfully marketed to me. Hilary Hahn is probably the sort of thing I like, and so Hilary Hahn turns up wherever I look when I go to look for things I like. She is all up in my imagination. If I haven't yet decided I need (e.g.) her Schoenberg concerto in my life, well, it's probably just a matter of time. In other words, I blame Amanda Ameer. She's Hilary Hahn's promoter, and is therefore the one person—other than (obvs) hardworking, talented, lovely Hilary Hahn—most responsible for the fact that Hilary Hahn has seeped into my subconscious. I really hope that all you artists and promoters out there are reading her blog as faithfully as I am, but just in case you aren't, check out her recent blog-dialogue (DIABLOGUE?) with Nico Muhly on the subject of The New-Music Scene. Her thing is here; his thing is here with a follow-up here. Read all the comments, it gets pretty heated. DRAMA. What's funny is that, presenting each other with a really open-ended question, both AA and NM came up with VERY SIMILAR answers. (Were they reading off each other's test papers??) They both said, "Scene? NEW AMSTERDAM RECORDS." Also they said, "Who is this Darcy James Argue??" It sounds as if somebody has got to THEIR subconsciouses, too! New Amsterdam is EVERYWHERE. There are a handful of very influential music critics who love and love to support New Amsterdam and New Amsterdam knows how to reach them. New Amsterdam knows how to reach US. Okay now, did you read those comments? New Amsterdam cofounder Judd Greenstein and publicist Steven Swartz, who both deserve a lot of credit for the marvelous ubiquity of their label, both wrote in to defend themselves—which makes sense, since AA & NM were both fairly critical of various aspects of the scene that JG & SS have worked to build. But maybe they should be congratulating themselves instead: is this some kind of (friendly, admiring) "backlash"? Is this the consequence of going from "something spontaneous," as Nico says ominously of Bang on a Can, to "an institution"? Because if so, that sounds like—well— It sounds like success! New Amsterdam is a brand. It has a strong reputation, and a readily identifiable sensibility. It is AGGRESSIVE about supporting members of its community of artists. Have its responsibilities shifted, now that it's an institution too? Probably. New Amsterdam has to be as true as ever to its sensibilities that define it, and not only maintain but probably raise the standards that have given rise to its burly rep. But the greater responsibility lies with the dissidents that New Amsterdam will, inevitably, earn itself. If you don't like this scene, if you don't fit into this scene, you need to start your own! MUSIC ITSELF needs you to start your own. You have friends, right? Put out your own damn records! Support the composers who slip through the cracks! Do your own thing—but collaborate, cooperate, compete! (This advice does not necessarily apply to Nico Muhly personally, who already does in fact put out his own damn records, in a matter of speaking.) The tools you need are all around you, and journalists and bloggers are all looking for something new and great. I know I am. New Amsterdam is a scene, an institution, and also a model—they did it; they've succeeded; so can you. P.S. Darcy James Argue is a JAZZ COMPOSER, people, go to his BLOG, it's really good, and there are free mp3s RIGHT THERE. You can find out for yourself whether you like it. (I think you will like some of it.) P.P.S. This YouTube of NewAm artist Caleb Burhans playing 1st violin in Nico Muhly's arrangement for that Grizzly Bear song cracked me up so hard:Ha ha ha whoever posted this video hates him SO MUCH. As I write this, it is the only video uploaded to this account, which means they started their YouTube account JUST to hate on Caleb Burhans (as, in the future, there will be a YouTube account dedicated to hating on each and every one of us, I suppose). Said the aforementioned DJA, "Someone needs to write a concerto for Caleb called "h8 u pluck bro." AGREED.

Viola Sola

So yeah, Nadia Sirota's first album, first things first, came out this week! Last week I complained that the new New Amsterdam CD was not really up my alley, well let me tell you that the NEW new New Amsterdam CD goes alllllllll the way up my alley. Those of you who know me personally know that I am what is known as a "recovering violist," and as such I have an exceedingly high tolerance for the sound of sola viola. I could listen to Hindemith all day. It's a sickness. Also Nadia is kind of the coolest person ever, so I am 100% IN THE TANK on this one. Ahem. On her debut, Sirota shows off the music composed for her by three of her friends: Marcos Balter, Judd Greenstein, Nico Muhly. Balter gets the least time on the disc, and his work is the least familiar to me, but he comes off well. The combination of repeated figures and extended techniques still remind me of Walter Fähndrich's album Viola—which y'all should definitely investigate—rendered in miniature. That's an achievement, to build elegant little pieces out of these effects, and really pull it off. Greenstein is at his best writing for viola. Actually, I— Okay, DIGRESSION: I often think, not quite fairly, of the program note for his orchestral piece Chikasky as being more revealing than he means it to be—a piece about rock music and Romanticism, it examines both from a perspective that never totally gets inside rock, or escapes the Romantics. And then there's this—

Tchaikovsky, a composer with whom I've always had a love/hate relationship, enjoying so many of his melodies and his use of the orchestra, but hating his tendency towards long-windedness.

Oh NO YOU DIDN'T. Tchaikovsky is CONCISE. His dramatic sense is impeccable. It is Greenstein who operates on the minimalist's timetable of delayed gratification. E.g., Chikasky, which develops a single theme, lasts more than half as long as the entire 1812 Overture, which which has a giant huge load of themes and cannons going off everywhere. My point: Greenstein's at his best writing for the viola, which is naturally an introspective, singing sort of instrument, and so suited to this inner Romantic whose voice is, it seems to me, the voice of the True Judd. The Night Gatherers is a shimmering, passionate lament scored for viola and string quartet (the Chiara Quartet); Escape is a rockinger workout for viola alone, in which we hear Greenstein digesting his minimalist influences and Sirota going full virtuoso. Nico Muhly. Last time I compared his Etudes for Viola & Electronics to a "bag of aural jellybeans," but sweet as they may be to the ear, they ain't finger-candy. They aren't that sort of etude. They're actually pretty gnarly, considering how simple they have to sound, with the added difficulty of playing along with an intentionally hard-to-follow tape track: the rhythm has a slightly hinky swing, and in Etude 1A, there're also a bunch of Grand Pauses the soloist has to count in her head, with no conductor and (I'm told) no click. She makes it through the minefield unscathed. (Muhly's Duet: Chorale Pointing Downwards is gnarlier still; the violist and a cellist—on this disc, Clarice Jensen—must be playing Twister on their fingerboards to get those double-stops in tune.) Best part of the Etudes, though? The BOOTY BASS on those electronics. Hard not to giggle. Interesting-funny, as opposed to haha-funny, is the way these pieces from the three (or more) disparate aesthetics of the three composers add up to a coherent portrait of the star performer—maybe that's my imagination, from listening to this excellent podcast, where she talks about how well her composer friends write for her personality as a player; or maybe that's because they actually have each captured a facet of her with these pieces; or maybe that's because she succeeds in making them all her own. Anyway, a disc worth owning, and a happily authoritative debut. You can get it here.

¡MATA!

Look okay at some point I promise that I'm going to stop making every single post I write about these New Amsterdam people, but for right now you're just going to have to deal, because you really have to go see the show that Judd Greenstein, the Suge Knight-style mogul behind the NewAm record label, is putting on Wednesday night for the MATA Interval Festival. Featuring, natch, a pair of blazing virtuosi from his roster. 8 p.m., ISSUE Project Room (232 3rd St, Brooklyn), $10 (cheap!). Nadia Sirota, the violist on everybody's shortlist for World's Greatest Human, will be playing pieces she commissioned from Marcos Balter, the aforementioned Greenstein, and Nico Muhly. I'm listening to the Balter right now off of his webpage, and it is tight (a moto perpetuo for Walter Fähndrich fans?), as is the Greenstein. The Muhly etudes on the program fit in very well with Judd's stated theme of "The NEW New Virtuosity," since they collectively sound like a brightly colored bag of aural jellybeans until you realize that they actually make quite extreme and, yes, NEW demands of the poor brave fiddler. This Andrew McKenna Lee person costarring, click on that link for a heaping paella of free mp3s composed and performed by Lee on acoustic & electric guitars. He does the classical guitar virtuoso thing you know and secretly love, but he does the art-rock guitar hero thing too, and I'm guessing this should be pretty hot live. There's a lot of flash here, the sort of thing that usually gets pooh-pooh'd in new music circles. It's nice that brain is favored over brawn in this little world, but let's not forget that the greatest virtuosi have always had, as the T-shirt says, ALL THIS AND BRAINS TOO. So yeah! Go to the MATA thing. You can read what the performers have to say about it, here (Sirota) and here (Lee)—definitely worth a read—and Judd's statement, again, is here.

Yet Another Reason to Vote for You-Know-Who

Poor John McCain! He gets a lawsuit here, a cease-and-desist there, and bad publicity all around, every time he tries to use a hip piece of music to accompany his campaign. Last I heard, the estate that controls "Happy Birthday to You" forbade him from singing it before blowing out the candles on his Cookie Puss. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been serenaded by a team of musical all-stars throughout his campaign. I'm pretty sure all he'd have to do is make a phone call and then bam, Justin and Britney would be in the studio recording their hot new single, "Vote 'Bama, Y'all." But WHOSE music are the Obama People using to touch the hearts of Americans across America? See if this tune sounds familiar: That's right! It's "Folk Music" by Judd Greenstein, from the album NOW by the NOW Ensemble, the now band playing now music for now people. You can buy the CD or a cheap, high-quality download from the New Amsterdam website, and I suggest you do so... now. (Via Judd's blog, natch.)

Technics Techniques

After I put up a post on the subject, Judd Greenstein pointed me to this excellent collection of hip-hop analyses from floodwatchmusic dot com. An embarrassing omission, because I'd already read the dang thing, since Judd had linked to it on his own blog, which I visit on a regular basis, and in fact I'm certain this was all in the back of my mind when I did my little song-n-dance. I have no idea why I forgot to mention or link to it in my own post. And then! NewMusicBox ran this delightful piece by... er... "renegade doctor of music from Harvard University, Erik Spangler (a.k.a. DJ Dubble8)," which not only gives a brief history of turntablism AND a primer on scratch technique AND some tips on how to compose music for DJ, it accidentally illustrates the weird tensions between the angle (academic-style music theory & composition) and the subject matter (hip-hop, the most disreputable of all vernacular musics) with little nuggets like,

To prevent other DJs from copying (or "biting") their personal sound, labels on records would often be covered up to disguise the sample sources. In order to win battles, one had to be original.

Oh, did one!

It might be worth pointing out, too, that by the time mainstream theorists and composers catch up to a trend or technology in popular music, it's probably already gone out of style. Analog DJing, as Spangler notes, is on the wane. In fact by now, the use of actual record scratching in a piece of music is going to be an exercise in nostalgia as much as anything else—not that such an exercise couldn't be richly rewarding, I'm just sayin'.

Okay, enough of this talking out of my butt. At this point I think the only way I could prove myself more out of touch with popular music is if I were to upload a picture of myself kissing a photo of Barry Manilow. Which, hell, while I'm at it:

And there we go.

The End of New Music Part III: The Curse of the Son of New Music's Ghost

Fun FSZ updates! In addition to the usual internet-style craziness, comments over on the Sequenza 21 post also include some interesting remarks from Steve Smith, author of the aforementioned Times piece, and on his own blog, Judd Greenstein offers some clarifications of his own. I'm also glad to see him back away from some of his, in his words, "absurdly hard-line" comments on musical modernism. In completely unrelated news, M. C- at The Standing Room announces here that he has finally discovered the greatest musician of all time. But to my horror, he has willfully neglected one of my very favorite Prince records. Ladies and gentlemen:

That is all.

The End of New Music Part II: Son of New Music

Okay, as promised, here's my thing on the Free Speech Zone tour. First, let me admit my biases: I really like the dudes from the NOW Ensemble. Composer Judd Greenstein went to college with one of my Gregs (also with, by a happy coincidence, one of the Books!), then went to grad school here in town, and I still see him around and everybody loves him. Same story with NOW bassist/sex symbol Peter Rosenfeld! But while I've always been embarrassed that this review never (apparently) made it into print, I hesitated to send it directly to Greenstein and fellow FSZ composer Missy Mazzoli just on account of it's sorta ambivalent. This has caused me to act really awkward whenever I see them, as in the following exchange from a merch table at this year's 26-hour Bang on a Can Marathon:

MM: "Hey!" DSJ: "Uh, hey!" [Thinking, Is that Missy Mazzoli?] MM: "Remember me?" DSJ [unconvincingly]: "Of course!" [That is Missy, right? But the lighting's kind of off in here, and I haven't seen her in a while, and isn't her hair different, and what if it's not Missy and I say "Missy!"?] MM: "It's me, Missy!" DSJ: "Of course!" [Oh dammit, I have that breakfast date scheduled for the exact same time as her piece is getting played.] MM: "How are you?" DSJ: "I'm going to miss your piece!" MM [slightly baffled]: "Oh!" DSJ: "People do have to sleep and eat, you know! Ha ha!"

So yeah, I thought I came off well. Anyway, here is that Free Speech Zone review, which I still pretty much stand behind, newspaper-y prose notwithstanding, although... one more disclosure: Firehouse 12 is an intimate, acoustically flawless venue (the Mates of State record there!) with a bar that, if you ask for a martini, hands you something that looks like a fishbowl with a stem on it. Long story short, by the time this concert was over I was feelin' some martini, so hopefully my aesthetic judgment was not as clouded as the judgment that would have stopped me from saying omg I'm so TIPSY with NOW Ensemble's Mark Dancigers sitting right next to me. Anyhow--

COMMON GROUND You say "preaching to the choir" like it's a bad thing. I'm suspicious of political art, as a rule. What's the point of a piece of classical music on political themes? Did a string quartet ever inspire someone to vote Democratic? Or is the act of composing political music merely therapeutic? I asked these questions Saturday night--before the Free Speech Zone Tour played to a packed house at Firehouse 12--and I left with a few more answers than I'd expected to. Named after tour co-organizer Judd Greenstein's piece on the program (named, in turn, after the corrals to which our President exiles all dissent at public appearances), Free Speech Zone paired young, left-wing new music groups NOW Ensemble (formerly of New Haven) and Newspeak in an evening of amplified protest. The concert opened with the setting of an unfortunate text: excerpts from Sam Smith's "Apology to Younger Americans," an essay listing Smith's regrets "on behalf of all my fellow members of America's crummiest generation." I wasn't impressed when I encountered the "Apology" as an email forward, and I was all the more dismayed to hear it sung aloud. Former Green alderman and Yale assistant professor of music John Halle's introductory remarks, dedicating his piece to the young NOW Ensemble, were genuinely touching, and his seamless writing made the most of the material. But when the words "Bill O'Reilly" are sung by an operatic soprano (the excellent Bo Chang--expressive and articulate, though seemingly unused to a microphone), something has gone wrong. Patrick Burke's contribution, External Forces, started promisingly--with the weird, unpolished sound of vocal humming from the instrumentalists. The piece attempted to describe the corruption of stable conditions by outside agents, but the chipper melody that emerged, as well as its interruption by crashing dissonances, were disappointingly obvious. The "breakdown" rang false, and when we finally retreated back to that eerie humming, it too had become a gimmick. Part of the difficulty of writing for the NOW Ensemble must have to do with its eccentric, Bang on a Can-inspired lineup: guitar, standup bass, piano, flute, clarinet. When the sonorities of the piece were pure and light, these instruments sang together like a choir, but when the rhythm section decided to rock out, the flute and clarinet were unable to join them. Greenstein's Free Speech Zone was the most affecting piece on the program, though accompanied by an undistinguished video presentation. The composer introduced his work wearing a t-shirt reading COMMON (as in the rapper); according to his bio, "Judd's music blends Romanticism and post-minimalist harmonic and textural elements with a strong grounding in hip hop, rock, and electronic dance music"--but that's got it backwards. While the textures of the piece occasionally turned jazzy, a pulsing/strumming figure embedded between polyrhythmic strata, the foundation was unmistakably classical. The instrumentation of the piece was convincing not because Greenstein had found some place for the woodwinds within a popular idiom, but because the winds' Stravinskian outbursts and sinuous lyricism were already at home in a music saturated with early 20th-cenury influences. *** After an intermission, Newspeak launched directly into director David T. Little's ferocious Electric Proletariat, a showcase for their unique virtuosity. This band's lineup was more inherently versatile than NOW Ensemble's, replacing the flute and bass with brutal violin and cello fiddling (amplified for most of their set) and adding a drummer and a percussionist for even more edge. Daisy Press, the group's vocalist, came on for Keeril Makan's song cycle Target, based on overwrought verses by Jena Osman ("It seems to be moving," went one line, "like a body made of parts." What?). The setting did not impress, but the performers made the most of the score's best trick: pairing sounds from the vocal line with close imitations from the ensemble. Press's near-oracular performance was half rock star (she definitely knew how to use a microphone), half new-music diva, and the instrumentalists' ability to take their cues from the back of her wild hairdo was miraculous. The last two pieces on the program cemented the overall tone. The closer, a cover of "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath, was tight, loud, and exhilarating (though Press's intonation wavered); the penultimate piece, Missy Mazzoli's lovely and hopeful In Spite of All This--the strings "unplugged" for a little while--underlined the evening's essential purpose. Yes, it was a "merely" therapeutic performance. But it was consoling for the audience as well--a sorely needed moment of community in dark political times.