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.

More Tales from the Tank

I love Mark Swed. (So do you!) When I lived out West I used to feel like he was my critic, in a way that I have never quite felt about our East Coast critics.

Also, I hate to look like I'm leaping to the defense of Nico Muhly, a composer who really couldn't need my support any less. He's got his own damn blog, for one thing, and for another, hasn't he already gotten a metric ton of love from the classical press? Also, I can't even pretend to be objective about (#1) a friend who has (#2) paid me American dollars to write about his music in the past. Still, I couldn't help but laugh, "fa fa fa," at the way Swed's review of Nico's latest CDs is basically begging to be deconstructed on Nico's own aforementioned blog. Swed uses all these Code Words! Here, let me show you what I mean.

First, read the review in full. Isn't it well written? But very negative!

OR IS IT. Let us examine, shall we, its Nico-related passages:

Here the chorus is being used to persuade a wider public than New Yorkers about Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of that town.

Muhly, who turned 29 last month, has already received two of New York's top accolades — a New Yorker profile and a Metropolitan Opera commission. Although less known elsewhere, he has L.A. champions in Gershon and also the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's Jeffrey Kahane. Plus, Muhly has also composed appropriately treacly soundtracks to "Joshua" and "The Reader."
…
Muhly can be a precious and facile composer, a showoff.
…
But Muhly also has a delicate touch, and when the sweet sounds of ethereal early music singing meets post-Minimalist rhythmic rapture, the music floats in its own special space.
…
A young composer begging attention couldn't ask for anything more.

This reminds me SO MUCH of this passage from Philip Brett's essay on Britten (which I already quoted, appropriately enough, in my liner notes for Nico's first album):

To appreciate the fact that there was considerable tension surrounding not only Britten's homosexuality, but also the success that he enjoyed despite it, one has to dig a little deeper beneath such blatant attacks as that against "bachelor composers" in the Craft/Stravinsky conversation books. What is revealed is a curious set of opposite and equally loaded critical terms. On the one hand Britten's music was characterized as "mere cleverness," "devilish smart." On the other it was accused of sentimentality. Behind both attitudes, of course, lay the unspoken fascination with Britten's homosexuality, both labels being the reverse sides of the oppositions claft/cleverness, sincerity/sentimentality, which belong among a whole plethora of binarisms that Sedgwick has claimed as "epistemologically charged pairings, condensed in the figures of 'the closet' and 'coming out.'"

Tell me I'm wrong! In fact, I was actually delighted to discover that we could easily go through this review and switch out these loaded words of faint praise for nearly exact synonyms, and by merely substituting tonally different (often, less "gay"-coded) adjectives, totally invert the apparent meaning of the review. Watch:

Here the chorus is being used to persuade a wider public than New Yorkers about Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of that town.

Sounds like a con job! How about:

Here the chorus champions Muhly, a young composer who is the talk of New York.

Same meaning, totally different connotations. But let's get to the gay-bashing:

Plus, Muhly has also composed appropriately treacly soundtracks to "Joshua" and "The Reader."

"Appropriately treacly" soundtracks to a creepy kid movie and a Holocaust picture? What could be appropriate about treacle? Well okay, I'm not arguing with his actual opinions here, it's fine, I'll let it go. But:

Muhly can be a precious and facile composer, a showoff.

Aren't "precious" and "facile" TRANSPARENTLY ways of complimenting an artist in a mean way? You could just as easily say:

Muhly is a meticulous but prolific composer, a virtuoso.

Except when you say it that way, it doesn't sound faggy enough.

Anyhow, you get the picture. How could such a positive review be so mean! Well, I sort of understand where Swed's coming from. There's this weird provincialism in New York that assumes that it's the classical music center of America, if not the Universe, and when you're working in a market that is constantly getting dismissed, you gotta represent. And there's nothing to sour one on an artist like the stink of Media Hype.

But the problem is that neither of these things is Nico's fault ("begging attention"? he doesn't even have a publicist!), and even if they were, they wouldn't be audible on the CDs under review. Please, music critics, review things that are audible!

Of course, I'm prejudiced totally oppositewise, so you're probably taking all of these opinions with a grain of salt as well. (If you ain't, you oughta be.) Thanks to Proper Discord for bringing this one to my attention—there is not enough Swed in my life. But, maybe somebody should say something to him.

Contactular!

So, CONTACT! all caps exclamation mark is the new, new-music ensemble within the New York Philharmonic, and they are doing their best to raise its profile as this hip, edgy new thing—they're putting the public in direct CONTACT! with the ensemble and its composers by holding concerts in the more informal Symphony Space, inviting red-hot, tastemaking bloggers [cough cough] to its shows for free, and even allowing liveblogging on the premises to those who might so opt.

I opted out, but I could not resist the siren call of free Phil tix. Not that tickets were terribly expensive in the first place—I bought an extra ticket for my extra date (2 arms = 2 slots for arm-candy), and the house was small enough that everybody seemed to have a pretty good seat. I'd never actual been to a show in Symphony Space before (I know, I know), and it is a very different place to hear classical music. My auxiliary date thought it looked like a repurposed discotheque, and yeah maybe it does look a little cheap and gaudy, and yeah the acoustics are a little dry (more on that later), but it achieved what the Phil was obviously after, which was to let their collective hair down a bit.

Okay, there was something a little forced about the whole setup—the Phil's chamber group playing in front of an exposed brick wall, wearing the new-music "all black" uniform rather than the symphonic "concert black" uniform, and then the MCing, sheesh the MCing between each piece. John Schaefer is, to be sure, a treasure to the world of contemporary music, but every time I see him MC something it feels like that weird moment in the game show where Alex Trebek asks June from Yuba City about the hobbies she mentioned in the pre-interview. Alan Gilbert's remarks were articulate and pleasingly blunt, and Magnus Lindberg was UTTERLY ADORABLE, cannot stress that enough. Why not just give Lindberg the mike? Did adding yet a third facilitator to introduce the composers to the audience really make us feel more at home? I dunno.

(The funniest moment of Mandatory Informality actually came after the concert, when a really nice staff photographer apologetically asked Nico Muhly, with whom we were in mid-shmooze, if she could get a picture of him holding a plastic cup of beer instead of a plastic cup of wine. We didn't ask why—these were her instructions, she said—but I assume that wine was too snooty? They wanted more of a "Facebook kegger pix" vibe? It was completely not a big deal, and I've already made too much of it, but I swear it was very funny at the time.)

I'm not sure the pre-performance chitchat was terribly helpful to the audience, either. During Sean Shepherd's piece, These Particular Circumstances I found myself listening for the correlations between the titles of each of the twelve continuous movements of the piece and the musical materials of each before I finally realized I was enjoying the piece less this way than if I'd just sat there and listened.

More important than knowing what Shepherd's scheme was, was perceiving that Shepherd had conceived of a sturdy structural scheme, and yes one could, and it was satisfying. I also thought of Boulez, whose works are often structured as similar chains of "effects" explored singly in short, attacca movements movements, and who also features, like Shepherd, a richly colored, volatile, Frenchy style. But the voice was Shepherd's own, engaging rather than confrontational, not ashamed to wink at the audience once in a while. (Date #1 caught a reference to The Planets and tittered.) Your Friend & Mine Nico Muhly characterized Shepherd's style quite well in the intro to his own piece—"like a flock of birds turning upon a single point," he said or something like that, which is right! Alive and chaotic with tiny details, centered and organized invisibly, but perceptibly. I shall keep an eye out for Shepherd's name in the future.

He also came across quite well in the little intro-interview (INTROVIEW!)—small, handsome, charming. Danny likes this.

Nico's own piece, Detailed Instructions, showcased his by-now-familiar musical obsessions—the influence of Adams and Glass, yeah, and also his orchestrational obsessions: piccolo, viola (molte viole, no violins), low brass (trombone bass trombone, tuba). The first movement was positively arid, Gilbert further baring the piece's already exposed clockworks like Boulez conducting the Rite of Spring. Were these the right choices, compositional and interpretational, for a premiere in such an acoustically unappealing space? The audience could hear everything that was going on, which was impressive, but we could also hear everything that wasn't going on.

There were also balance problems, or at least one big balance problem—the viola is such a quiet instrument, when that were playing off of the brass or the woodwinds, it wasn't much of a contest; the hapless fiddlers would've had to lay into their instruments like orchestral soloists for the whole piece, which didn't happen, and sometimes they were totally inaudible.

THAT SAID. The slow second movement was lovely—very lovely—maybe one of the most moving things Nico's ever written, and the third was like a happy speedread through early Glass, constantly shifting and moving urgently forward. I would very much like to hear this again, especially with an amplified or closely recorded ensemble.

Since we're keeping score now, Nico was a hit in the interview as well, very funny and dressed stylishly as ever—a black, I don't know, tunic I guess? very long, uneven hem, under a deceptively conventional black jacket. Nice!

Matthias Pintscher (sharply cut black suit, skinny black tie, hot) explained that he was attracted to the Hebrew original of the very familiar text he set, from the Song of Songs, by the language's density of meaning; for me, there was also a sense, listening to the music, that this cryptic score was also an untranslated utterance of some kind, an exotic code. That pedal G being passed around the ensemble, what does it mean? What's the connection between the text and the logic of this score? Dissonant and atmospheric, it was too elaborately knotted for me to untangle cerebrally, and instead I experienced it as the expression of some primitive passion—think of the way that Solomon expresses his love in terms of beasts, in terms of sweet fragrances, and so do Pintscher's songs from Solomon's garden communicate, with strange noises, with wafting clouds of sound. Also worth noting that the soundworld of the piece survived, intact, its premiere in the funky space—it contained its own resonances.

The presence of Thomas Hampson at this event was almost surreal. He was the most famous person on the stage that night, by a longshot, and with the exception of his star-aura was dressed like everybody else, all in black, plus his trademark pompadour and a pair of reading glasses for his sheet music. His out-of-placeness was at once awesome (America's most celebrated opera man sings avant-garde music in intimate venue?? YES please) and awkward. His vocal instrument is amazing, and he sang a difficult score very passionately, but was he really the best guy for the role? Mightn't a less polished artist have had a more incisive take? (One of my dates suggested that his Hebrew was less than spot-on, as well.)

Anyway: three World Premieres, three successes. Put this shit in the WIN column. And I tease, but the social atmosphere was quite congenial; there wasn't a sharp line between HERE'S WHERE YOU SIT FOR THE CONCERT and HERE'S WHERE YOU CHILL OUT AFTER, so everybody milled around and it was kind of a party right there. Your favorite people showed up! Again! Nico's librettist, playwright Craig Lucas; to my delight, Matthias Pintscher's seat was RIGHT NEXT to ours, and right behind us were Timo Andres and Ted Hearne; Zachary Woolfe was there from the Observer, and Jordan Brown from Musical America, and I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody I'll regret but hooray anyway. I was actually feeling not so hot due to some lingering flu-y crap, so I didn't get to drink anything and didn't get to stick around very long, but it was a nice vibe and everybody seemed to be having a good time and I had a nice nap on the train back to New Haven, iTunesing the Redhooker album, which I seem to be doing an awful lot lately. But they are a post for another day! And with that fair reader I bid you whatever.

In C Remixed: Too Much Remixed, Not Enough In C

That is the short version of my review. Glib, yeah, but it's true! The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble's interpretation of Terry Riley's masterpiece (I hate people who throw around "masterpiece" but, look, it just is, let's move on) leaves me wanting more, more, more. I hope you've heard of GVSUNME before; their performance of Music for 18 Musicians got a lot of press, partly because they work that piece, and partly because GVSUNME's backstory is a reporter's dream—did you know they have avant-garde music in places that aren't New York?? in STATE schools???—but that's a little condescending, and not entirely relevant to the enjoyment of their music.

Okay, this part is relevant: they're young, which gives them at least two advantages. One is that for classical musicians born after 1980 or so, the aesthetic code of minimalism is a first language. Not that they grew up humming Violin Phase, but they are too young to have known a world in which, say, Koyaanisqatsi had not inspired a whole world of imitators.

The other advantage is that young musicians don't take shit for granted. An ace professional ensemble could sleepwalk through a score like In C, and I'm sure many of them do. But every note counts on this recording; there are no throwaway gestures. Check out those string players! Their Bartok pizzicati, their sixteenth notes bowed heavily and close to the bridge, tell us that they are in this for keeps. (When the clarinets go for the same grit, wailin' in their high registers, it seems a little more affected, but I can deal with that.) They sound excited to dig into even the most superficially unglamorous phrase.

But it's over too soon! This is a speedy performance, just twenty minutes or so, which would make sense if they were trying to fit it on one side of a record; as part of a two disc set, it just seems ungenerous. I could listen to these guys play this for eighty minutes, easy. Why not make this a set with one disc of In C and one disc of remixes, instead of hurrying along from section to section quite so zippily?

If I thought there were two discs of absolutely essential remixes here, I'd be more forgiving, but really, two discs of remixes would be too many remixes of any one tune. Maybe I am getting all old and bitter? I used to LOVE the remix album, as a thing. Now I feel as if we can be finickier, when there's the possibility of releasing a track "download only," because while I can happily wander through the architecture of Terry Riley's funky cathedral for an hour and a half, one hour spent listening to five-minute chunks of In C with breakbeats under them is not an experience I will want to repeat very often. Crank the last track on your stereo, then feed the rest to your iPod to shuffle through at your leisure.

But I've skipped over the big question hanging over In C Remixed. Should In C even be remixed? I've kvetched in this space before about the delicacy of taking liberties with scores that already offer a great deal of leeway to the performer. In some ways, a piece with this added dimension of Conceptual beauty is that much more fragile; a bad-faith performance of John Cage is going to be yet far more unsatisfying than bad-faith Beethoven. On the other hand, one of the great things about screwing around with an open-instrumentation, open-form piece like In C is that every performance is, in a sense, a remix: you've got a page of stems, you loop them to make a groove. It's a short step from "open instrumentation" and "open form" to "open source." Was Terry Riley the first IDM artist??

No. Well, okay, maybe. Actually, one of the things that's so exciting about In C is that you can't really say what it is. I mean, yes, it's a piece of "Western concert music" in terms of context and construction, but on the other hand the cycling form and limited pitch materials push it, and so much minimalist music, into an in-between territory that could be something out of the vernacular. On a superficial level, anyway, it has a lot more in common with a rock jam than anything out of the European concert-hall tradition, and so it doesn't really come down as one thing or the other; it's content just to float there.

Which makes some of the remixes on this disc seem a little unimaginative by comparison. Yes, you could just tag a drum track onto In C, lay a bassline & synths under it, and it would become a piece of tonal pop music. But that would be pinning the butterfly down. Something is lost. Granted, something is lost in any interpretation of any piece of music, but with many of these remixes not much is added, either.

Herewith, a lumpy review of each and every remix, not quite in order.


Track 1: Jack "Meat Beat Manifesto" Dangers' "Semi-Detached" mix; I'm a fan of Jack Dangers, and this mix would be a credit to any chillout compilation, but it's hard not to suspect that he could've made essentially the same piece of music out of any source material. (Ditto, to a lesser extent, bass clarinetist Michael Lowenstern's "Bints" (Track 4) and "Foster Grant" mixes (Disc 2, Track 3), and Dangers' own "Extension" mix on track 1 of disc 2. Dennis DeSantis makes an appearance here as well (Track 10), as the world's most in-demand remixer of new music into undistinguished dance music.)

But the other 90s electronica star here, DJ Spooky, fares far worse. What's going on here? Track 8 sounds, without exaggeration, exactly like what I've described above: tag on a drum track, lay down a bassline & synths, and call it a day. Isn't this just a lazy run-through of pop clichés, slapped onto In C? And this is critical darling DJ Spooky we're talking about, here! Shouldn't he, of all people, know that the unexamined breakbeat is not worth banging?


Track 2: Mason Bates. Not an unconventional piece of electronica, but quite charming to the ear, and springing naturally from the source material. I especially like those moments of tension and release ("PONGGG!" goes the sampled chorus) that derive out of a certain self-conciousness this project could have used more of. But even better in this vain is the collage-like, sample-heavy Jad Abumrad remix (track 6), which I was poised to dislike (he's the RadioLab guy! They can be so freaking smug and simplistic) but actually it's awesome, one of the highlights of the set, for that same reason, self-consciousness generating musical drama.


Track 3: Glenn Kotche. Glenn Kotche, you are great! Why did I file you under "indie rocker with high-art pretensions"? This is formally surprising, dramatic and intense, with real rhythmic sophistication. Class, Glenn Kotche gets the gold star. Be more like Glenn Kotche.


Track 5: Zoë Keating, cellist, kicks off the performer-driven remixes on the disc, which are largely mediocre. Actually, violinist Todd Reynolds brings his remix to a nice climax (Disc 2, Track 5), but fellow fiddler DBR cannot help but drape those signature hair-metal violin stylings all over the mix on his own track (Track 11) and that's just embarrassing.


Track 7: Nico Muhly. Okay you know I'm IN THE TANK for homeboy so if you want objectivity skip to the next paragraph. I like this remix because it makes me genuinely uncomfortable—does that oboe REALLY have to do that? Why does this all sound so naked?—and then warms up so subtly.


Track 9: Phil Kline. Another one for the win column—seems simple without seeming lazy, a high-concept tribute to a high-concept piece.


Disc 2, Track 2: Mikael Karlsson and Rob Stephenson actually rock this. Glitchily delicious; disorienting and gnarly.


Disc 2, Track 4: "Is In C in F?" is the title of R Luke DuBois's remix; the short answer is "No." A pleasant sheen over it, but not much to hold onto here.


Disc 2, Track 6: Kleerup. I have no intellectual or theoretical justification for enjoying this track so immensely, I'm just a sucker for a stiff electro beat and that giddy backbeat clarinet.


Disc 2, Track 7: Leave it to David Lang to whip up a remix—of the world's shaggiest, warmest piece of new music—that is VINEGAR TO THE EAR. Fortunately, I love vinegar, I pour it on everything, and so this dissonant scraping is a treat for me. If my ear had lips, it would be licking them. It sounds a little like software, if you know what I mean, but it's so much more daring than every other remix on this compilation, and digs so close to the heart of the source material, that it stands out in a crowded field.


In conclusion: Should you buy this? If you're an audiophile, or if you collect recordings of In C you should probably pick up the disc. If you consume electronic music in large quantities, you should probably download the album. The download isn't even a bad buy even if you don't like most of the remixes, although it's frustrating that iTunes and Amazon won't let you grab the excellent title track on its own, then cherry-pick the most interesting cuts from the rest of the set.

If you prefer to insert some live music into your ears, here's going to be some kind of crazy In C Remixed party at Le Poisson Rouge tonight at 6:30; Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble will be there, as well as DeSantis, DuBois, Reynolds, Lowenstern, and most exciting of all, Jad "MC Jad" Abumrad will be MC-ing. It's $15 to get in which isn't bad and since it's LPR you can get fully drunk on Rolling Rock and ask MC Jad to sign his podcast for you. Hooray!

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.

Hello Goodbye

Hey, look! Elfin young composer Trevor Gureckis, who has worked with fellow elfin young composer Nico Muhly, as well as wise old elf-king Philip Glass, in the ancient mythical land of Dunvagen, has a very short new soundtrack out on Glass's Orange Mountain label, via iTunes (here). In the interest of context, here's the film, entitled Les Adieux. How's your French?You can also download sheet music for one of the tracks here, at Gureckis's website.

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.

Nico vs. Cieca?

Have I mentioned how very much I love Parterre dot com? Well I do, I have read it religiously for years, and frankly it's taught me more about the world of opera than any other single resource I've come across. That's probably a bad thing. But I don't have much to add to moderatrix La Cieca's two cents on Nico's forthcoming theatrical project except to point out the in my not so humble opinion Uncanny resemblance between playwright cum librettist Craig Lucas and Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne. Who's with me, here? Anybody? Anybody? Okay never mind. At any rate, I was charmed to meet Lucas at Nico's Merkin shindig a while back, especially since he introduced himself as a fan of my blog! Then I ran away from him, fast, because frankly, from what I've read in my comments section, all of you people are completely insane. So he didn't get a chance to introduce himself, and I probably owe him an apology. Well, two apologies, now. And I was going to end this post right there, but then this afternoon I was chatting with a friend of mine and Nico's who seemed genuinely upset by the drubbing N got over at Parterre. Understandable. Look again, though. Of course the comments section is going to be a Haters' Ball, that's what comments are for. I have said nasty, nasty things under various pseudonyms. What's impressive is that many of the opera queens have leapt to the defense of what, on the face of it, seems like the least operatic project ever: teenagers staring at computer screens. Recently our doyenne has fretted over whether her Parterre Box has become an echo chamber; I think she can rest easy. (Nico himself responds here.) That said. Can we please squelch the kvetching, right this instant, over whether this opera will be, like, Bad for the Gays? Even if it turns out to be a piece of crap, and (in my again not so humble but highly biased opinion) I don't think it will since I like what I'm hearing about it from the Muhly Camp, I don't think that gay composers writing gay opera in the year 2008 really need to be worrying about the burden of representation. The pendulum has swung far enough, by now, in the direction of insipid Will & Grace shiny happy nonsense that I don't think we need to hesitate before we set down depictions of gay life—for the, let's face it, 60% gay, 40% gay-friendly new opera audience—that are ugly, disturbing, and yes, tragic. Also, this comment made me titter and hee. Thank you that is all.

Catching Up

Skip the next two paragraphs. They are boring. In fact, feel free to skip this whole post. The next one will be better. Today I'll just talk really fast and get a lot of stuff over with at once. So I haven't written anything for this blog in ages and that's for a lot of reasons but mostly I just haven't gotten very excited about anything. Things I did get worked up about but neeeever quite got around to blogging included Nico Muhly's Merkin Hall concert a month ago, the one I was talking about here, and the super-fun afterparty, which was actually just the gang from Nico's show crashing the New Amsterdam Records afterparty, because Corey Dargel and William Brittelle's record-release show (for Brittelle's high-concept new-music rock-opera Mohair Time Warp project) was exactly the same night and Bedroom Community & New Amsterdam Recordses are BFF, so it was a veritable who's who of whatnot, starring such boldface names as Valgeir Sigurðsson! Nadia Sirota! Judd Greenstein! Missy Mazzoli! Caleb Burhans! Corey Dargel (obviously)! and though I didn't get to talk to Corey Dargel I did get a chance to talk to Darcy James Argue, whose blog I have always admired but usually can't really say anything intelligent about because I know next to nothing about jazz music, but I'm trying, I promise I am, and finally I broke down and as you can see added him to my super-exclusive blogroll because he is one of so few people actually talking sense about new music nowadays, and also he was totally adorable in person. There was also someone there who looked exactly like Scott Johnson but I didn't want to ask him if he was Scott Johnson because if he wasn't I would have felt extremely stupid. That said, all of you need to buy the Tzadik reissue of John Somebody if you haven't already. The whole crowd was very cool, and in fact I will one-up Anne-Carolyn Bird's announcement that New Amsterdam Records dot com is her new Facebook for professional networking and say that I intend to do all of my networking, professional, social, and sexual, at New Amsterdam Records dot com, and I suggest they retool the site accordingly. Not only would a new-music dating website fill a major niche, it would prevent confused listeners from wasting google queries like this one. (A: No.) My biggest celebrity sighting of the evening though was at the intermission of the concert, where I saw (was it him? it WAS!) my boyhood hero, the rock star whose music has meant more to me than he could possibly ever know, Mister DAVID BYRNE. Like I get starstruck pretty easily, I'll admit but when I lived in New York I could handle running into Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch &c. pretty well, but there was DAVID BYRNE, who not only did I buy his Talking Heads records and solo records but I like watched and rewatched True Stories to the point where I am still regurgitating snippets of disjointed dialogue at my friends. Like the song says, it's a scientific lifestyle! He was hanging out in the lobby, apparently by himself, like he was just a dude. I wanted to run up to him and thank him for all the joy he'd given me; however, not only was I not sure it was him at first, but I quickly realized that if I were David Byrne I would carry around a thing of pepper spray at all times for the sole purpose of incapacitating people who felt the irrational need to run up and express how important I had been to them when they were in college. So I walked past him without looking at him directly and instead pretended to be reading a poster on the far wall, hoping to make celebrity ID based on peripheral vision alone, but when I looked at the poster closely I realized that there were about ten words printed it and I couldn't pretend to be reading it for very long, so I looked around like I was searching for something while I figured out my next plan, and then a nice usher lady came up and asked if she could help me. Oh, ah, no, thank you. (But it was totally him.) The other thing I kind of wanted to blog recently was the death of another one of my heroes, Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg is famous for taking garbage and accidents and turning them into art; what's far more important, though, is that he made it into art that was a pleasure to see, while still retaining that strange energy of accidental, garbage beauty. Like that famous erased DeKooning—even when he destroyed a work of art, it came out looking great. His work was mysterious and passionate and inimitable and oh-so-often imitated. But like jazz or dance, visual art is something I know almost nothing about—fortunately the Times got somebody to write an appreciation who does know what he's talking about when it comes to visual art, namely... David Byrne. Please read that link. I don't have much to add, except to wince whenever people use the word "deconstruct" this way, and then to quote Donald Barthelme, who describes what is, honestly, not my favorite Rauschenberg, in a way that I think is a useful description of what a Rauschenberg achieves. Here's the piece in question, and here's what Barthelme says (Not-Knowing, p. 19):

We can ... wonder for a moment why the goat girdled with its tire is somehow a magical object, rather than, say, only a dumb idea. Harold Rosenberg speaks of the contemporary artwork as "anxious," as wondering: Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk? ... What precisely is it in the coming together of goat and tire that is magical? It's not the surprise of seeing the goat attired, although that's part of it. One might say, for example, that the tirecontests the goat, contradicts the goat, as a mode of being, even that the tire reproaches the goat, in some sense. One the simplest punning leve, the goat is tired. Or that the unfortunate tire has been caught by the goat, which has been fishing in the Hudson—goats eat anything, as everyone knows—or that the goat is being consumed by the tire; it's outside, after all, mechanization takes command. Or that the goateed goat is protesting the fatigue of its friend, the tire, by wearing it as a sort of STRIKE button. Or that two contrasting models of infinity are being presented, tires and goats both being infinitely reproducible, the first depending on the good fortunes of the B. F. Goodrich company and the second upon the copulatory enthusiasm of goats—parallel production lines suddenly met. And so on. What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation. Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital—no interpretation or cardiopulmonary push-pull can exhaust or empty it.

In other words, it's like that Speaking in Tongues collage Byrne talks about in his appreciation, with the images dividing and multiplying and obscuring each other and complementing each other, but it happens with meanings as well as pictures. (This vast network of subtexts of course undergirds all of Byrne's work, too.) You can waste a long, long spray of words describing what their relationships are and still never describe the thing itself, and forget about articulating the sheer visual beauty I was going on about before. Something huge and great and wonderful left the world forever two weeks ago today.

Whoa Wait a Minute!

After all my razzin' yesterday I forgot to remind everybody to go hear Nico's concert at Merkin Hall, this Thursday (May 8) at 8 p.m. His new material is very, very strong; honestly, I think his forthcoming CD, Mothertongue, stands head and shoulders above his previous effort, and you know how much I liked that one. Buy tickets here.

You Loved the Etude, NOW Try the Wallet

The opportunity to ruthlessly mock one's smarter, more successful friends comes along so rarely that I could not pass this up. I've been linked to Braithwaite Wallets, Inc., a deliciously pretentious designer of men's accessories that accompanies each of their two wallet designs with a self-serious, J. Peterman-style anecdote and a return policy that promises, "IF YOUR BRAITHWAITE DOESN'T ENHANCE YOUR LIFESTYLE" within thirty days, they will literally send someone to your home to pluck the wallet from your undeserving fingers. So here's the story behind their model, RAPTURED:

Walking down the street, he was reeling inside after the performance he had just seen. He didn’t typically listen to “concert music”, but this was unlike anything he had ever heard. The solitary piano player, the music that seemed broken and disjointed, the strange and beautiful harmony was still stirring within him. With his legs carrying him without concern for direction, he was happy to be alone in this moment to reflect on what he had experienced[.] Watching the strangers that passed by him, his swirling thoughts began to focus and take shape. The seeds of a grand idea, still vague but overwhelming, had been slowly cultivated by the unfamiliar music that unlocked his imagination. A new desire to turn his feeling into a plan, into action, drove his thoughts, as well as his legs, faster and faster. Finally relenting from his brisk pace, he looked up to see a café, a well-lit beacon within the darkened street, a space to calm his unharnessed visions. Once inside, he now wished he could put his ideas into words, that he could share them with someone else. His mind was distant, his body on auto-pilot. He approached the counter and ordered without glancing at the barista. After the steaming drink was set down, he reached into his coat, pulled out his wallet, removed a bill, and told the cashier to keep the change. “Nice wallet.” Looking up, he saw a woman admiring his Braithwaite. “Thanks.” “You look a little distracted.” As he cautiously began to explain the thoughts that had been overrunning him, she interrupted, surprised to find someone echoing her own enveloping ideas. He smiled as he listened to her recent insights, gladdened to find this new connection: a sense of harmonious collaboration uniting the two as they talked into the night.

At the top of the page is an embedded player, offering the wallet's "THEME: 'A Hudson Cycle' by Nico Muhly."

Ha!

Sorry, it's actually a terrifically beautiful wallet, as you can see, and I guess I can even see some connections between it and Nico's music. Minimalist texture, baroque flourish—even the asymmetrical pockets suggest Hudson Cycle's undulating polyrhythms—but can you imagine the accessories that might be inspired by the music of other composers? (Yes, I am segueing into a "bit" now.)

Grandma exhaled uneasily and then was silent. Dropping the syringe back into my purse, I signed her name on the new will with CHEATING LYING STEALING, the David Lang fountain pen.

Or,

"You seem uneasy, was it something I said?" Of course not—but I couldn't tell her it was my Arvo Pärt luxury hairshirt!

Or maybe,

As the klezmer clarinet slipped into a tango rhythm, the dark stranger lowered the brim of her Osvaldo Golijov-brand urban sombrero.

Or simply,

His eyes widened. 'Please, no,' he would have gasped, if not for the gag. "Anything but the Zorn!"

I think this could work!

Blogger Plugs Friends, Self

First! Everybody buy the new Kronos Quartet CD, which has liner notes by one of my favorite Gregs. The Nonesuch.com store has it on sale, which means you can download the mp3s right now AND get the CD in the mail and it'll still be a buck under the list price, even with shipping. (Buy it together with the new kd lang CD, which is one of her best, and shipping is free!) I've only heard snippets of the piece so far, but it sounds gorgeous, and anyway it's Kronos + Terry Riley + Wu Man, so you can be darned sure I'll pick up a copy at my local indie record shop (on account of I work there). As for the liner notes themselves, they are thorough, clever, and duly affectionate. Do read. Also! They ran my latest concert previews in the New Haven Advocate. Ezra Laderman, Alvin Lucier. The first commenter to count all the clichés in the article wins a signed copy of my book. Furthermore! Hope you all read Rebecca Mead's article in the latest New Yorker about my friend Nico Muhly. It quotes "music critic and blogger Dan Johnson," meaning me! But I thought some of the best parts of the article were actually the least flattering to Nico. Whenever I read a fawning magazine profile about the genius of the week I want to run out and stab said genius in the face. But this one turns out to be as much fun as her profile of Peter Gelb, which I hope you all read. Now, this isn't exactly unflattering, but I love that for a little perspective, Mead sought critiques of Nico's oeuvre from the composers he most admires. Namely, Philip Glass:

"The great anxiety among young composers is, when are you going to hear your own voice? But the real problem is, how do you get rid of it, how do you develop? Nico hasn't got to that yet. There is a lot of rapid growth in one's twenties, but the big challenge is to keep that alive over the long stretch, for the next forty years, and not let it get stifled by the meanness of the world we live in."

and John Adams:

...Muhly's music is "eclectic, nondenominational in the world of contemporary classical music, which tends to split off into lots of different orthodoxies. He obviously shows influences from the minimalist composers, but his music is not nearly as rigorously designed. It is very much like him: it is open, it is attractive, it is pleasing." Adams says that he hears his own influence on Muhly's work—"It's like meeting a twenty-year-old who looks strangely familiar, only to discover he's your long-lost son"—but adds that he finds it oddly untroubled. "I could use a little more edge, or a little more violence," Adams says. "At times, there is a surfeit of prettiness in Nico's music, and I am not sure it is a good thing for someone so young to be so concerned with attractiveness."

See? That's actually quite interesting. Glass's warning we can recognize as the product of his own bittersweet experience. The great Glass paradox is that there is at once no better established or more dismissed composer in American concert music. And indeed, this dual position stems largely from the strength and distinctiveness of the Glass idiom. It's worth considering, in light of his advice, how seriously Glass must have taken the long evolution of that idiom over the past few decades. As for Adams, I find he sums up Nico's music better than most critics do. For one thing, it is very like the music of John Adams. How come nobody points that out? There are echoes of Nixon in China all over Nico's orchestral scores. And it is also very like Nico himself. Some composers, if you meet them, you'll think, "That guy wrote that?" But Nico face-to-face is exactly the person you imagine when you hear Clear Music. And again, these are criticisms that shed a little light on Adams' own mature aesthetic. Criticisms, as a friend of mine pointed out, that have been leveled against Adams himself, especially early on in his career: derivative of minimalism, but without the rigor; pleasing and attractive to a fault. I would be the first to defend early Adams against these charges (and hey, I mount a similar defense re: Nico in the NYer piece), but perhaps it's still interesting to consider the extent to which both composers might be guilty—the young Adams, the young Muhly. Isn't Harmonium a lot less gratifying than the Klinghoffer Choruses, precisely because the latter pieces are a little less eager to please, a little more eager to put the "post" in "post-minimalist"? Anyhow, I spent a lot of time thinking about these remarks, which isn't something I usually do after I read an article about music. Why can't more criticism get me this excited? Clearly, what we need are more critics like this: practical, caring. Potshots are too easy. (If you read this blog, you know I take plenty of those.) It's so much more interesting to see people working out the problems in music they care about, rather than dismissing the stuff that doesn't excite them or cooing at the sheer perfection of the stuff that happens to accord with their tastes. Why not? Let's go just a little bit deeper. New Havenites, I'll see you at tonight's concert!

...and introducing Nico Muhly as Ian Curtis