Kill Them with Sweetness

Quick rundown of congrats for the New Amsterdam Records-and-affiliated crowd of young composers:

The WNYC podcast doesn't seem to have put out a lot of episodes lately, so it was a pleasant surprise to find in my pod-hole an episode dedicated to Missy Mazzoli's Victoire! Listen to it (mp3 here, podcast RSS feed here) and tell me what y'all think. For me, one of the most satisfying features of the music is the canny use of electronics—and one of the most troubling is the integration of the clarinet. Sometimes I think it wants to be a trumpet? At any rate I feel that the place of the woodwind section within the bandsemble lineup, as I noted so long ago in my Free Speech Zone review, is its weak spot, its Achilles heel if you will. Listen yourself, enjoy, & tell me what you think.

ALSO, let's toss a bouquet of congratulations at Ted Hearne, who won the Gaudeamus Prize for his Katrina Ballads! (Via, probably, @dja?) Here's the thing: I am not that crazy about the Katrina Ballads. Why am I so resistant to a work that is so obviously well-crafted? I enjoyed the New Haven premiere of Hearne's Eyelid Margin immensely, but his political music makes me feel more harangued than provoked. A clearer example than this might be his piece You Have AIDS. No, no, you don't actually have AIDS! (I mean, unless you do. Get tested, everybody!) No, that's just the title of the piece. It asks the listener to assume the position of a South African man being apprised of the fact that he has AIDS by what must be one of the worst HIV Counselors in the world ("So, like I said, you have AIDS. / Am I going too fast? HIV. CD4. AIDS. Any questions?"). I guess the idea is to shock the audience into an awareness of the reality of the AIDS crisis in Africa, but when I listened to this sound clips, I felt more like I had found myself at the audience at LEASE: The Musical. As if there's something smug, or presumptuous, or, it seems unfair to say, condescending going on here.

"Unfair," because, what—are Ivy League composers not allowed to comment on events affecting Black America or the developing world? That's absurd. I'm not fully able to articulate where I'm coming from with this, which may be why I've allowed my attempt to qualify my congratulations run on about ten times longer than the actual congrats. What is wrong with me?? Do I just dislike this off-Broadway sort of idiom? Maybe that's it, is that it feels in some superficial way like a Urinetown without the intentional self-parody, or an I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky without, well, okay I'm not actually going to defend I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky:

John Adams – "Leila's Song About the Wise Young Women"
from I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky

I'm sorry. I'm obsessed.

And our final CONGRATULATIONS WITH EXCESSIVE QUALIFICATIONS (should I start drafting this blog before I post, so I know where I'm going before I get there?) goes to Corey Dargel, whose "Condi songs," Con Dolcezza, earned a tweet from that very special lady who makes me fantasize about going to one of those weird ex-gay camps where they teach you how to un-limp your wrist and then make you marry a lesbian, just so that the two of us could be forced into a sexless opposite-marriage, Rachel Maddow.

I actually love these songs. Almost a year after the election of Barack Obama, now that the people in charge of representing America to the rest of the world are less prone to making them totally hate us, and we can look back on Condoleezza Rice's tenure the way we look at pictures of a kegger gone horribly wrong ("I can't believe we actually DID that, dude we were so WASTED"), I'm hearing these pieces for the first time, and they've lost little of their impact—because Condoleezza Rice has lost little of her mystery. How did an intelligent, cultured woman end up rubber-stamping such a disastrous foreign policy? How did someone whose family struggled up from slavery join an administrative team that turned its collective back on the cause of equal rights for Americans? Dargel doesn't pretend to answer these questions, but he asks them more eloquently than I've ever heard them asked before, by generously and sensitively setting to music remarks that make Rice sound more like a civil rights leader than, say, a coldblooded conniving bureaucrat with the blood of innocents pooling about her Manolos.

But since I'm being a total bitch to everyone today, I'll also point out that this performance is a bit unsatisfying—I feel as if really pulling off a number like "Gospel Song" requires a vocal instrument with more gravity than this lady is able to muster. ATTENTION ALL SINGERS, please check out this piece! I want to hear a second recording.

Jesus, WHY am I so negative. Anyway, congrats again to everybody, and if you didn't already know that Naxos is picking up the New Amsterdam catalogue, the first releases are trickling out next month—including the debut from NOW Ensemble, and Dargel's Other People's Love Songs—so if you actually still buy records in a record store nowadays, you will suddenly be able to find them there! Hooray. Okay g'bye.

Danny-Come-Lately

As I am, generally speaking, not as interested in attending live performances of new works as I am in hiding in my dank troll-cave and shunning all joy, I missed the premiere performances, right here in New Haven, of TIMBERBRIT, a new opera by Jacob Cooper about a fictional reunion between Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. I mean not only had I seen the flyers around town, I think like Ingram Marshall was in line in front of me at the coffee shop one day and he was telling me how excited he was about the piece and STILL I did not go. Well now that it's been all over NPR and all the HOT MUSIC BLOGZ I'm jumping on the bandwagon and watching this video of "Worst Fantasy" and kind of digging it:Mellissa Hughes TEARS UP this aria, which was apparently composed by slowing actual Britney Spears music down to an excruciating dirge, and this video is pretty well put-together too. So it looks like I missed out. ON THE OTHER HAND, I watch this video from the semi-staged piece and am ever-so-slightly annoyed. Not by the musical performances—look! it's our favorites, like there's Ted Hearne as Justin Timberlake, and isn't that Trevor Gureckis on keys? why yes I believe it is—but there's something naggingly annoying about the failure to even semi–stage direct this semi-staging. Wouldn't the logical maneuver here be for the singers to face each other with the microphones in their hands, as one would do in any he-said she-said pop duet? And then TH wouldn't have to hang on the mic stand like, and everybody could inhabit their character, and the idiom, a little more fully? (C'mon people I can't do everything for you.) So I'm not totally sure I could've endured a whole evening of such semi-staging combined with such aggressively, awesomely unbearable music. (Like DOOM METAL with POP BELTING?) Though apparently there's a fully staged version coming? Which could be awesome? Keep ya posted. Via I think Matt Marks—who has helpfully written in, since I posted this with the actual spelling of Mellissa Hughes's name (double L as in mellifluous, not single L as in melisma), and the correct URL to his webpage. Tune in next week, when I talk about how I missed the free New Haven premiere of Chris Cerrone's apparently awesome operatization of Calvino's Invisible Cities, because I didn't feel like it that day. God I am horrible.

Tomorrow Night in New Haven

This week's article for the New Haven Advocate was more stressful to write than usual. I think I've configured my Gmail settings in some moronic fashion such that my messages just get sucked straight into spam filters and die there, and so I found myself sending repeated, increasingly crazed emails to the composers involved (Martin Bresnick, Ted Hearne, Polina Nazaykinskaya, Andrew Norman, Naftali Schindler), culminating in a last desperate phone call to a composer's house on Sunday morning, just before this issue went to press. So, yeah, MANY thanks to all of the above for their patience. (The best part was when I wrote to another composer, bitching that I hadn't heard from him, and then discovered that he had in fact responded in time, but HIS response had been eaten by MY spam filter. Er, sorry about that.) I'm also sorry this piece is so short—the conversations I did manage to have with those involved were incredibly rich, and I wish I could have presented them in full. If you get a chance to go to the concert I wrote about, tomorrow night at 8 in Sprague Hall, it should be pretty exciting. Lisa Moore and So Percussion are playing Bresnick's recent Caprichos Enfáticos, which you can preview here. Ted Hearne wrote a piece, Eyelid Margin, for a consort of outdoor instruments (brass and double-reeds), which should be interesting to experience in an medium-sized recital hall; Polina Nazaykinskaya's presenting a trio of Blok songs for mezzo and piano; Andrew Norman will play a new piano piece, called I think Make Believe; and Naftali Schindler has written a Violin Duet, one of my secretly favorite combination of instruments—see B. Bartók, H. Górecki, D.H. Jóhnson—which claims to be influenced by both klezmer and Tuvan throat-singing, so, awesome.