Double Sextet Recording Sessions UPDATE

I'm sorry to keep posting on this same subject but this is seriously like porn for me you guys. (It's kind of sad, in a way.) Check out this highly revealing blogpost from blackbird Tim Munro, very technical, very candid—

This first movement is all piano and percussion madness, and, as the Kap said later, “That was actually much harder than I thought it would be.” They were doing amazing work, but the Kap decided to shift the tempo up very slightly for the last third of the first movement, and this eventually sent the recording booth into a technical tail-spin, and suddenly it was taking 5 minutes to begin a take in an unusual place.

—that sort of thing. AND, they have TWITTER VIDEOS from his iPhone! (Accidentally held portrait-style instead of landscape-style, so, DISORIENTING:)

In Case You Hadn't Heard

News on the official premiere recordings of new works by Reich & Pärt, two composers famous for their early, severe process-music, each of whose styles have aged over the decades like, uh, [consulting Wheel of Clichés] fine trappist cheeses, gaining bite and subtlety while still retaining the same delicious mixture of basic ingredients. Or something. NAMELY! Eighth Blackbird is in the studio with the composer, like RIGHT NOW, recording that Reich piece you people have been crying about forever, and the L.A. Phil is finally ready to put out its live recording of Pärt's Symphony #4, commissioned by the orchestra, as DG download next month. Hooray! The wait will be over soon. And I can stop listening to these dubious internet bootlegs (SH). Via 8bb and Mangan, respectively.

The Ojai Diaries: Part Three

IV. Fact: Stephen Hartke won the marathon. I got to know his music when I was an undergrad and he a professor at the University of Southern California (FIGHT ON), and so my roommate Chris studied with him for a little while, and I was dazzled by his jagged, yet straightforward, yet stylish scores (Hartke's, that is. Chris's were not that jagged). I'll get to his other big piece, Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen, in just a bit; meanwhile, Meanwhile was a perfect, perfect exploitation of everything 8th Blackbird does well. Built around the Matt "the Duv" Duvall's brilliant percussion chops—it was, as a number of pieces on the marathon program seemed to be, substantially gamelan-inspired—it gave the players a chance to switch instruments, switch positions onstage, work out complex rhythms, and indulge in some nitty-gritty contrapuntal writing. There was no wasted business. I mentioned lunch with the Mac in a previous entry; over his vej-mex entree, he said something I thought was pretty interesting about 8bb's programming: their first priority, he said, is "craft." Which I guess seems obvious, because not many people when you ask that question are going to answer, "We're really interested in playing a lot of sloppy crap." But at Ojai at least, it seemed to be coded with a few surprisingly conservative connotations. Well, maybe not too surprising, since they're a "Pierrot Plus" ensemble, that the definition of "craft" isn't too far from something Schoenberg might have approved of: dense textures; complex, oft-dissonant harmonies; & when the cultural vernacular crept in, it tended to be the sort of rarified vernacular that informs Pierrot and Tin Hat both. And Steven Mackey! Speaking of rarified vernacular. I am predisposed to dislike the music of Steven Mackey for reasons I am not entirely able to justify. Maybe it's purely a generational thing—the way he heard electric guitars played when he was a teenager had deemed "pretentious" by the time I was a teenager, and so I'm doomed to have my enjoyment of his guitar-playing and -writing tainted by an irrational and faddish distaste. Or maybe it's something more substantial than that—maybe I wish he were bold enough to sever his guitar performance from the performance practices of its native vernacular, the NEARRR, NEARRR, NEARRR note-sculpting of the 70s rock guitar solo. (Is that, in fact, a more substantial complaint? Not sure.) All of this aside, Heavy Light, for solo Steven Mackey (guitarring and stomping pedals), is a thoughtfully constructed piece with a few really stirring moments—that crazy barred theme that kept recurring over the speeding ostinato!—composed with real, yes, craft, and performed, like everything at the festival, with real virtuosity. Tin Hat singer/fiddler Carla Kihlstedt's was the most grueling set. Not just grueling for her, who simultaneously played a gutsy violin part, sang her heart out, AND grew a human infant within her womb (LET'S SEE TODD REYNOLDS DO THAT)—the set also dragged a bit; there weren't any printed copies of the texts (by Kafka), so first Lisa Bielawa gave a spoken introduction to the piece, and then Kihlstedt gave a spoken introduction to the piece, and then she spoke the text to each song before she sang it, even though a combination of clear miking and amazing diction made it possible to hear each word pretty clearly (from where I was sitting). Just for sheer wows, it might have been the performance of the day, and the musical writing was idiomatic, complex AND true to the text, but all the talking, combined with the limited range of available colors (one violin, one voice), combined with the fact that the descending sun was, during this piece, shining DIRECTLY INTO MY EYES, made the cycle seem extremely long. I've never been a great fan of John Cage's Construction No. 3. It's just never come together for me as a musical experience the way my favorite Cage does. But it's the bread & butter, yea the rice & beans of the percussion quartet, and it is a lot of fun to hear. It is a FIESTA. And the drummers who presented it (Greg Beyer, Nathan Davis, Todd Meehan, Doug Perkins—you might remember the Meehan/Perkins duo as ex-So Percussionists) were first-rate chamber musicians, pleasin' the crowd with high-energy, absolutely synchronized playing. Copious applause. More soon.

The Ojai Diaries: Part Two

Brother Dave and I missed the 11pm set by recorder quartet QNG; we were eager to return to the motel and get some important drinking done. I had been making a halfhearted effort to talk Dave into Music for 18 Musicians the next morning (he is not a Reich fan), but when the sun actually returned I said blahhhh and rolled back over. A favorite piece, and almost always worth seeing live, but not, today, worth subjecting a reluctant sibling to an hour of pulses AND, yknow, getting out of bed. We went for a walk on Ventura Beach instead. We stumbled, almost literally, upon not one but two rotting seal carcasses! One was headless. We also went to see Drag Me to Hell, which was hugely entertaining, even though I guessed the final plot twist a mile away. (SPOILER: Somebody gets dragged to Hell.) Somewhere in there I also posted my update on the previous day's concerts, even though the Good Nite Inn of Camarillo did not manage to get our $5 in-room WiFi working (did they try switching it off and then on again? That ALWAYS works), so I had to run down and post from the lobby, which had a Free WiFi Hotspot also. After all that, lunch and some shopping, it was time for the MARATHON CONCERT FINALE. I wore a special New Music outfit, which consisted of relish-stained khakis plus my GAP t-shirt with Chuck Close's pointillist Philip Glass portrait on it worn under a semi-transparent white dress shirt, so that my midsection gave the fascinating illusion of being haunted by the ghostly apparition of Philip Glass. Did you see me there? Who were you? I think Sidney Chen (of Standing Room fame) and I spotted each other, but I am basing this entirely on this person's resemblance to M. C-'s South Park avatar, since I have never met him, and I was so anxious of saying ARE YOU M. C-? and its turning out not to have been him that I did not approach him and instead just leered weirdly, from a distance, in much the same fashion as how that baby with the unibrow eyeballs Maggie Simpson on The Simpsons. Sorry about that. Our seats this time around were much closer, which was a plus—more live sound in our ears—and we were on the keyboard side. Also, our seats had cushions on them now. People, if you go to Ojai, CUSHION YOUR ASSES, I cannot stress that enough. Those benches are BEASTLY. We were probably warned of this on some portion of the festival website that I was too lazy to read. One thing I did miss about our new seats was the awesome folks that had been sitting next to us. Right, right next to us on Saturday was an attractive middle-aged couple who, by the time I saw them again Sunday afternoon, seemed to have attended every event of the festival so far; the husband was, like me, a religious reader of the Denkalog, and was rightly proud to have contributed this highly amusing objet. (Rereading it now, I see that I was moved to comment on that same post!) There was another lady right there who knew some of my faculty from 'SC, and another who told me something fascinating about Frank Gehry, which I've promptly forgotten, and so on. One lady thanked me for "bringing positive energy." This is what I'm talking about when I tell you that this Ojai crowd is fricken awesome. Also? There was some music. III. Double Sextet was FIERCE. This performance of the dodectet version of topped the NYC gig I saw for precision and intensity. I think they sold Dave on Reich, honestly. I keep telling everybody it's one of Steve Reich's best new pieces, and 100% deserving of its Pulitzer Prize, but NOBODY BELIEVES ME. Please believe me, kids. Then Jeremy Denk and Lucy Shelton went through a bunch of Stravinsky songs, whose Russian somehow issued from Shelton's lips as naturally as Pierrot's German did. Her voice was a bit worn in spots, like your favorite coat, and I worried about whether certain notes were even getting picked up by the mike, but there was no questioning the warmth and authority of her interpretation. The next tune, a Lee Hyla duet for bari sax and bass clarinet (We Speak Etruscan), wanted more authority—the Mac played what seemed to be an atrociously difficult part with the stamina and dexterity of an athlete, but I wished he could have brought the part the same degree of assured style that he brought to the less virtuosic repertoire. Okay, I mean, whatever: it was dazzling just to see him and Jeremy Ruthrauff skronk their way through the bebop-damaged daredevilry. It is probably around this point that I should mention that Maccaferri looked GREAT this summer. Better than I remembered. I melted. (Call me.) Then QNG took the stage—they turned out to be a quartet of attractive Dutch women, well made-up, who wore matching black babydoll tees with their ensemble's acronym on the front and their own group photo on the back. The first piece in their set, by Victor Ekimovskij, was conceptually simple and wholly pleasurable—it put me in mind of Larry Polansky's four-part canons. All four players played the same, highly repetitive material one after the other, on soprano recorders, from four positions surrounding the audience on the benches. The parts kept pace with each other, but didn't seem to be synchronized to a common pulse, and the delight stemmed from hearing the texture of the piece change gradually, one voice at a time, as each of the players moved on to the next transformation of the material. The sweet tootling of the recorders in the open air also recalled, of course, the singing of happy little birds (the piece was called Kites Flying). Afterwards, a more traditional seating arrangement for the more traditional recorder-quartet fare, the famous In Nomine of John Taverner (John Taverner is the dead, great one; John Tavener is the alive, but only occasionally satisfying one), and then finally another recent piece, Tall P by Pete Rose (whose name must invite even more confusion and/or dumb jokes than poor John Tavener's). Tall P wasn't a stupid piece, not at all, but I took an instant dislike to its campy jazz references, for the most part overly familiar elements like a heavyhanded walking bass and a 12-bar blues form. "Encore!" shouted one of my neighbors, when it was over. "Encore!" But I thought we'd just heard the encore: the piece didn't, say, invite the audience to probe into its structure or harmonies, it was a vehicle for the awesome virtuosity of the performers, who bent their blue notes with a facility that almost made me dizzy. Their ensemble was bewitching. I kicked myself for missing their Paul Moravec the night before. And then, the intermission. More soon.

Reich's Pulitzer

Sheesh, it's nice to be able to say that, finally. Yes, this award reflects better on the prize than it does on Steve Reich. Yes, it misses Reich's very best work by a few decades. But—well, I'll get to that in a second. First, notice that the reaction on Twitter was, not surprisingly, swift and, a bit more surprisingly, thoughtful. Steve Smith was unimpressed by the committee's decision: "Lest it seem unclear, I am elated that Reich won a Pulitzer. That is not a source of complaint whatsoever"; but, "When is Pulitzer even going to award a composer for the right piece, and in the right year? Always 2, 5, 10, 50 years late." Corey Dargel was concise: "Let's just say it would be nice if the Pulitzer was a trend-setter rather than a buzz-killer." Yea verily. But (I'm getting to that "but" now) y'know what? The Double Sextet really is one of Reich's best pieces. To my mind, it's his greatest work in, well, decades. Being realistic here, and also a little sad, let's admit that the committee was never going to recognize his very greatest or most important scores, as obvious as it may seem to us that Music for 18 should've gone home with the gold that year. However, it ain't—as it pretty much did with John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls—rewarding the piece solely on the basis of the composer's name, rather than on the the merits of the piece. When Adams won, we easily could single out scores premiered just a few years before as being far more substantial and deserving: El Niño, Naïve and Sentimental Music both showcase, on a grand scale, all the things John Adams does better than anybody else. Is Double Sextet overshadowed by anything Steve Reich wrote even in the past ten years? I said it before and I'll say it again: it's a great score. Prime Late Reich. There remains, however, the matter of whether the sex appeal of the ensemble premiering the work may have swayed the judges' decision. I plan to investigate this possibility further in the months to come.

Four Text Messages

1. Last night, out of the blue, Maury D'Annato:

Did your hits just go way up?

What? Why do you ask? Did—WHOA, I just got my first-ever link from La Cieca, the world's greatest opera blogger! This is, dears, the classical music blogging equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. I'm still a little dizzy. Did La Cieca just compare me to Alex frickin' Ross? And yes, for a hot minute my hit counter went through the damn roof. 2. Night before last, I got this message from one of my Gregs, who's caught Eighth Blackbird on their tour of the West Coast, reading simply:

OMG bearinettist = dreamboat.

Y'see people?? I do not lie. Now okay, that right there speaks for itself, but later Greg also shared some very interesting thoughts on the Reich and Rzewski pieces we discussed earlier, so remind me to tell you all about it. 3. & 4. Did you hear that Glenn Branca was one of two electric guitarists to win $25,000 grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts? Well the other electric guitarist was this Mick Barr guy, who is from around here! So I txt msg'd my friend Kyle, the lead singer of Mick Barr's old band, for comment:

Haha! Knowing Mick, he'll spend it on Danzig bootlegs.

A minute later:

Or a deluxe ant farm.

He's kidding, people, he's kidding! He loves the Mick Barr! And his music. Although, weirdly, when I listen to Barr's records, they kind of sound like they'd be made by somebody who could manage spend $25,000 on either Danzig bootlegs or a deluxe ant farm. Or maybe somebody who could tell Philip Glass that Two Pages (for Steve Reich) needs a little more focus.

Tardiest Concert Review Ever

So I never did tell you about that Eighth Blackbird concert Nov. 14. If you didn't get in, I'm sorry—the joint was packed, sold out, standing room only. If you did, go you! The crowd was young, hip, and attractive. The theme of the concert was "Two Mavericks," which (much to JoJo's understandable irritation) led to my paraphrasing the best thing Kyle Gann's said all year:

We in American music owe a great debt to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Those two have so cheapened and tainted the word "maverick" that it will be at least a generation, maybe two, before anyone will be able to use the word non-ironically again. And that means, surely, that there will be no more talk about the "American maverick composers."

Ha. His point being that, just as some of us (not Gann) might complain that labels like "post-minimalism" are reductive, or of limited use, so is he annoyed with the throwing-up-of-hands that accompanies anti-label labels like "mavericks," which deny that these composers might have been part of larger artistic communities, traditions, movements. Steve Reich may, like so many composers, resist that big-M brand of the Minimalist Ranch, but he is not satsfied to occupy the margins of musical culture; in a piece as his ostentatiously rigorous as his Cello Counterpoint, which opened the program, one almost hears him stomping his feet outside the gates of the canon, demanding to be admitted. I've probably grown too accustomed to the Maya Beiser recording—that lady can do ANYTHING—and hold Oberlin cellist Ted Rankin-Parker to too a standard, missing Beiser's ringing tone and flawless intonation. But if his cellism was less sure in the high-wire treble registers Reich wrote the solo part for, TRP nevertheless made a solid case for the piece. I have never been so confident that a piece of "new music" is guaranteed a place in the repertoire of an instrument. Actually, here's a YouTubes of Rankin-Parker sawing it off at Oberlin: Now! Think of the piece that accompanied Cello Counterpoint on that Beiser disc, You Are (Variations), where for one of the variations, Reich busts out the L'homme armé cantus firmus. (L'homme armé being, for those who don't know, an all-time Top 40 hit of the Renaissance; you can hear a pretentious arrangement of it from about 1:35-2:15 of this video.) Is Reich using the tune to make some kind of statement about war or arms proliferation or something, like Karl Jenkins in the retarded video I linked to in that parenthesis? Um, I'm guessing not. More likely he's making a statement about the seriousness of his own musical intentions, by using the tune as Dufay, Josquin, Ockeghem, Palestrina et al did in the masses they wrote, back in olden times. Reich has been catching a lot of well-earned laurels lately, like the retrospective boxset and concert series that accompanied his 70th B-day, and I think he's more conscious than anybody of his career's slow but inexorable progression from boy terror to gray eminence. The richness and complexity of his recent oeuvre demands to be recognized as the work of a master. Frederic Rzewski, on the other hand. His new piece, next on the program, was a thrilling mess. Inspired by Dürer's engraving, The Knight, Death and the Devil—projected above the stage during performance—it was a set of disconnected, inconclusive miniatures made up of disconnected, inconclusive instrumental lines. The piece asserted itself not, like Cello Counterpoint, as a composer's monolithic tour de force, but as a challenge to the audience. The foot-stomping here was literal, as the musicians were called upon to incorporate seemingly unmusical sounds, bleatings and beatings, into the instrumental texture, and implausibly, it actually worked. Eighth Blackbird's heterogeneous line-up, even supplemented (as here) by an accompanimental string quartet, could not be an easy one to write for, but the notes and noises alike were well orchestrated—a broad and nuanced palette. The piece's most arresting use of noise: at the foot of Matthew Duvall's battery of percussion, I saw a little metal pail full of bottles and dinner plates. Oh how neat! I thought. He's going to blow across the tops of those bottles or something. Maybe tap on them with little beaters, like how he's been banging on those big metal trashcans he's got hanging down. WRONG. Warning sign #1: The string quartet stepped back from Mr. Duvall. Warning sign #2: Mr. Duvall donned a pair of protective goggles. The Duv then took down one of the suspended trash barrels and proceeded to hurl all of the bottles and plates against the inside bottom, where they shattered into tiny pieces, and then he put a lid on the can, picked it up and shook the tiny pieces into dust, and then he poured the dust back into the metal bucket. Then the next movement started. The goggles came off, the string quartet came out of hiding, and with Duvall on the glockenspiel, the band struck up a dainty rendition of... you guessed it... L'Homme armé. Obviously, in the context of this Dürer pic—which was projected above the stage during the piece—and in the context of two idiotic American wars, Rzewski's decision to quote "The Armed Man" is not gonna be entirely academic. The Knight quotes a number of old tunes about arms and war, most of which I didn't recognize; significantly, both times I caught L'homme armé, it was immediately preceded by the sight of the Duv completely wrecking something: first the plates and bottles, then the trashcan itself, which he pretty well stomped into oblivion. Not a coincidence that the sound of crushing metal should be followed by a delicate waltz on a tune with the lines, "Everybody better put on some chainmail." (My rough translation.) It was actually pretty frightening to see. I don't know if you knew this, but the Duv is HUGE. Composers, if you've just been commissioned to write something for 8th Blackbird, be sure to include a part that calls for the percussionist to COMPLETELY DESTROY SOMETHING WITH HIS BARE HANDS, because he can totally do it. Afterwards, Michael Maccaferri (a.k.a. the Mac) confided that those residual bits of broken glass were NOT supposed to go flying towards the eyes of the latecomers sitting Indian-style next to the stage—it hadn't sprayed like that in rehearsal or at the Oberlin performances. There was some improvisation written into the score, but no danger, though since everybody left with their corneas unabraded, I'm thinking there will not be any lawsuits. Was the piece a success? The last movement, a melancholy piano solo achingly realized by Lisa Kaplan, brought the work as a whole to a satisfying conclusion—a little comforting at least with its strange, sweet-bitter beauty—but I stumbled out to intermission with more questions than answers. Obviously, these dark fragments were designed to leave the audience ill at ease, but how much, and in what way? The second half of the program reduced the band back to a sextet for a performance of Rzewski's Les Moutons de Panurge, a woolly old process-piece from '69. The concept of the piece is—wait, actually, instead of describing it, why don't I just link you to the score, which Rzweski has awesomely uploaded to the internet for you perusal (.pdf, .gif) and you can try to play it with your friends! Except that it's ridiculously difficult. The piece is conceptually fascinating, because it requires virtuoso performers to be at all interesting, but is nevertheless predicated on their failure, in a sense. Not only are you allowed to "slip up," you are almost required to totally trainwreck. For this performance, the Blackbirds played a version that dropped the nonmusicians from the score, and for a bit of variety, once the requisite trainwreck had taken place, the Blackbirds carried on in different, slower tempi. Which worked, musically, since the score is written to accommodate interchangeable parts, and since the 8bb kids seriously know how to listen to each other, but it wasn't quite to my taste—when it comes to old-school minimalism, I'll usually take it without cream and sugar. Then again, I am a bit of an aural masochist (as we have established). The last piece was another example of Reich's masterful late style, the Double Sextet for two Eighth Blackbirds. Now do not be fooled: although wanton googling will tell you that the version for twelve players is the one Reich "originally envisioned," and although Reich approves of the all-live versions of his pieces with prerecorded accompaniment, I'm told his preference is generally for the versions with tape, and with good reason. When Reich talks about his favorite interpreters, he talks about Boulez's Rite of Spring, Gould's Goldberg Variations, performers who hear "inside the music, like an x-ray machine," and show us all the layers at once. In the composer-supervised recordings of Reich's music, we hear this same interpretive approach; the players lock into a rhythmic grid, and parts in counterpoint are meticulously blended and balanced—all things that come naturally when the musicians are playing against recordings of themselves—even (sometimes) at the expense of vitality, expression, drama. This might not be such a big deal in, say, Violin Phase, but as Reich's musical language continues to mature, it begins to accommodate more and more dramatic gestures right there in the harmonies. We can already hear in recordings like Alarm Will Sound's Desert Music, So Percussion's Drumming, and Ensemble Modern's City Life a new edge, a new vigor, that Reich's own interpretations lack. The Kronos recording of Triple Quartet, with Reich at the wheel, is sensitive and warm, but what their CD puts across more than anything are the composer's contrapuntal wizardry—I want to hear a second recording that loses just a little control, that really exploits those Psycho dissonances. (I <3 David Robertson, but his disc disappoints.) So you can imagine my immense satisfaction when Eighth Blackbird's live Double Sextet, with six Oberlin kids interspersed among two antiphonal bands, rocked the heck out. The score was, well, your typical Reich score (JoJo: "I kept thinking of Sextet." Me: "Well then you should've like this twice as much!"), but studded with yet more of those bittersweet harmonic nuggets that Reich seems to be kneading into his scores more and more, like chocolate chips into already-delicious cookie dough. Er, or something. The rhythm section, led impressively by the Duv and the Kap, was totally unstoppable, and the two choirs of winds & strings were seamless. Every musician knows that dissonances are the hardest thing to tune, and Reich's score was filthy with them. The presence and expressivity of twelve solid performers trading these lines live and in person was, like, sublime. But I realize that I have failed to answer the question that all of you are asking: am I as disastrously infatuated with the Mac, after having finally shaken his hand, as I was when first I blogg'd him from afar? Oh hell yes. More than ever. He bought me a Guinness! It was awesome.

Important Notice for Fans of Reich, Rzewski, Bearinetists

Day after tomorrow AND day after that, sexy young Grammy winners Eighth Blackbird are going to play the famous Kitchen in NYC (512 West 19th Street, betw 10th & 11th), and it is going to be hot. Cello Counterpoint by Steve Reich and Les Moutons de Panurge by Frederic Rzewski will be performed along with two world premieres by each composer: the first performance ever of Reich's new Double Sextet in its live version for twelve players (guest-starring the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble), plus Rzewski's Knight, Death and the Devil, inspired by songs of war. Tickets somehow seem to be available for both the Nov. 13 show and the Nov. 14 show—$15 ($12 students), which is damn cheap. Show's at 8. Just to whet your appetite, here's a small fraction of the band, pounding out just a little bit of Reich's fonky rhythm section at their first rehearsal: Pretty dope, right? I like my Reich to have some teeth on it. I'm gonna catch the Friday concert, I'll see you kids there.

Let's Objectify!

This is weird and creepy and offers to push classical music yet further down that grody path to the tits & ass & dollars obsessions of popular culture but still: I am perversely glad to see the women of classical music getting even this much attention. Go ahead, click that link. It's a hundred percent Safe For Work. You're just reading it for the articles, HAR HAR. What's crazy is that whoever compiled this list for Playboy dot com made it a list of classical musicians that are actually quite good! Like, Hilary Hahn is a very pretty young woman and all, but let's face it, she's not the boring-pretty you usually see drooled over in men's magazines. (Gay men's magazines, wipe that smirk off your face, I'm looking at you too, those dudes are seriously BORING.) No, she's obviously on this list because she is blonde and young, but just as obviously because she does play Schoenberg and Bach (and Stravinsky and Spohr). The inclusion of Danielle de Niese, a great opera star for television, is possibly symptomatic of something bad. I watched her Giulio Cesare and while she did turn in a thrillingly watchable performance in a very difficult role to act, I am not sure that it was a thrillingly listenable performance. While (to pick another name from this list) Anna Netrebko sings some roles inappropriately, and sings others a bit boringly, at least she always sings notes. I've been skeptical of the opera queens' laments re: the changing shape of divas (Covent Garden didn't want Debbie Voigt? COVENT GARDEN'S LOSS) but de Niese's variety of opera-celebritydom does give me pause. Still, the creepiest talk here is about Anne-Sophie Mutter:

WHO SHE IS: MILF violinist with rock-solid technique and a body to match Mutter made the transition from hot Austrian prodigy to hot Austrian star violinist with ease. Early in her career she could be counted on to try out edgy new works; later she married Academy Award-winning composer André Previn and premiered his Hollywood-lite Violin Concerto. They’re divorced now, so maybe we can expect more daring things from her again.

Creepy, because it sounds like something I would hiss to my bitchy new-music friends without thinking about whether or not it's actually true, but with that word "MILF" (weird pun on "Mutter"?) also thrown in there for extra creepiness points. First of all, should I point out that she recorded the Dutilleux concerto while she was still married to Previn? (Although I do wonder whatever happened to that Boulez piece she was supposed to premiere. There was supposed to be an Anthemes III but I don't think it ever happened. Anybody?) It drives me crazy when people put together a whole narrative of an artist's career based on a single blip. Like when Harold Bloom used the words "precipitous decline" to refer to a single novel of Thomas Pynchon (guess he didn't like Vineland) even though it was bookended by two masterpieces. Only so much worse, because Harold Bloom didn't say "MILF."

Anyway, mostly I'm just jealous that Playboy dot com has stolen my thunder, because now nobody will care when I rate the hotties of the new-music scene. Even so, let me throw the question out to my commenters: whom do YOU nominate as the sexiest composers, performers, etc in new music? (And speaking of the Mac, any guesses as to the identity of his mysterious double-reed-playing crush, as alluded to in this post? Hautbois or Faggott?) Just to get the ball rolling, let me show you all this picture of composer Matthias Pintscher. You're quite welcome. (Link via the one the only Molly Sheridan)

Why They Really Call Him "The Mac"

Excerpted, an email from Lisa Kaplan of 8th Blackbird to Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche:

Michael Maccaferri, clarinets - grew up in Plymouth, MA. Enjoys the whole gay, rodeo circuit which the rest of us know NOTHING about. Has a great eye for graphic design and does a lot of the designing for the group. Was crowned the Drag Queen when we were in college at Oberlin’s annual drag ball for his handmade costume of “Marie Aquanette”. Used to be a vegan, but now he’s the groups only vegetarian. He loves good food and likes to cook. Constantly on his blackberry in rehearsals. He also has a dry sense of humor and is generally easy-going.

Now please allow me to point out one glaring omission, namely, homeboy is aitch-oh-tee, and I do mean eBay-his-underpants hot. Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, I am in sweaty gay love. Click stalkerishly cropped publicity photos to enlarge.