So eighth blackbird is POSTPONING their first ever composition competition (or "comp comp" as they are calling it because they do not have a proper name for it yet; may I suggest "I WANT YOUR SEXTET") due to general public outcry. Now we love eighth blackbird, as you may recall, sometimes unwholesomely, so, IN THE TANK, but I think this whole thingie is a big kerfuffle over not much.
See, if you're not a Sequenza21.com addict like Danny, then you might not be aware that that is where the voices of dissent gathered, in the comments section of this post on the subject. The complaint: a $50 entrance fee. Their battle cry: comp the comp comp!
Some very interesting people weighed in in; Corey Dargel (whom we also love), points out that $1000 would in fact be way too low for a commission, when you consider the time and trouble that goes into fulfilling it—but of course this isn't a commission. With a commission, you sign a contract that says you will write something, and then you have to write it. This is totally voluntary, an excuse to stop that score for Pierrot Plus from rattling around in your desk drawer.
This being the Internet, of course, there are also less-than-thoughtful responses. One commenter sniffs that his music won't be of interest to 8bb because a "serial composers [sic] chances aren’t very good these days," which really makes no sense, not just because I wasn't actually planning to enter, I just showed up for the whine-tasting is something of a childish attitude, and not just because I am entitled to performances of the music I am willfully writing in what I perceive to be an outmoded style is a slightly crazy attitude, but also just because this is eighth blackbird we are talking about, and they are HUGE FANS of some serial composers, so sweetie please do your homework.
And what is this? "...8bb has never had particularly strong community interaction, having been guided early on by success-driven agendas." Dude, no. Haven't they actually been pretty good about commissioning young composers? And, now think about this, what the hell is wrong with a "success-driven agenda"? What does the word "success" mean in this sentence, and why should we be so afraid of it? Should 8bb be shooting for failure? Who has a "failure-driven agenda"? (If you are my father, do not answer that question.) If they weren't "successful" then we wouldn't even be having this conversation, now would we, because nobody would want eighth blackbird to play their music.
But what's most striking about these comments is the peculiarly adversarial relationship that some of the commenters are imagining between composers and performers, formulated by one composer as a "men-women, white-black, straight-gay" sort of power imbalance. 8bb won their Grammy "[on] the backs" of the composing class!
Wait, what? I mean, well sure, if you want to get all Marx-y about it, then yes there is an imbalance of power between performers who have dedicated their careers to performing new works and composers of new works, because such performers are so few, and DMA composers are so many. And yes there is an imbalance of power between eighth blackbird and, well, YOU (I am assuming, when I write this, that you are not a world-class composer of new music), because they have earned so many laurels doing their jobs, and you are still on your way, with much to prove.
But then let's take this economical analysis of the situation the rest of the way and you will discover that you, composer, DO NOT NEED eighth blackbird. They do not have a monopoly on musical performance. You can play your own music! Your friends can play your music! You can form a collective of likeminded composers and performers and record it yourselves, distribute it yourselves. It's the 21st century! YouTubes are everywhere! Seize the means of production! Composers of the world, unite! You have nothing to etc but your etc.
Is $50 too high of an entry fee? Okay probably yes, just because a lower entry fee would have encouraged more submissions and been less of a PR headache. I'm not against an entry fee in principle, though, just because it seems like a smart way to stem the cataract of scores that you KNOW is already gushing in their transom. And look: if you think that an entry fee is too great a gamble, then fine, don't pay it. You're free! No one can make you enter this contest.
The important message here, though, is that this adversarial attitude is Not Healthy. Not for your career, and not for Music. Performers are not the enemy—performers are, or can be, and should be, your friends! Corey Dargel, you are going to be in Chicago this weekend, right? eighth blackbird, are you going to be in Chicago? Why don't you guys check out his show, which I am pretty sure will be great, and then afterwards he can buy you some beers (because of the POWER IMBALANCE), and then you can all be friends. Sound cool? Okay now hug.
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:)
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.
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.
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.
So here's what happened: My brother had a piece premiered by the orchestra we were in in high school, the wonderful Claremont Young Musicians Orchestra, so my dad offered to fly me out to hear it. (You can hear it here; didn't they do a great job??) Well so, then I got a twitter from Ojai saying I should come out for for the festival, and so yeah, why not come out to CA for two weeks instead of one? Well, while I might've been happy to spend the whole four days listening to new music and stalking bearinetists, my brother was pretty much up for just two days of Ojaiing—but long story short, here I am, at a motel in Camarillo, embloggening yesterday morning's performance by Jeremy Denk. "God, that lady looked so familiar," my brother said after we picked up our tickets from the (extremely helpful) box office staff; well, then he realized that the same lady who was doing their Twitter feed and working in their box office had also been in his 20th-century opera class in grad school, so when we ran in to her again he got to freak her the heck out by remembering her from a music theory seminar they'd taken together on the East Coast like a decade ago. I saw hardly anybody I recognized: the Mac (of course) and his fellow blackbirds, the Meehan/Perkins duo (was very sorry to miss their performance Thursday), new-music publicist extraordinaire Stephen Swartz, Donald Crockett (one of bro's old teachers), and sitting not too far away from us, Frank Gehry! I asked him to sign a sheet of titanium for us. Ha ha ha ha, I've been making that joke all day. The crowd was surprisingly old for a new music festival; I'm used to the Brooklyn Vegan-looking crowd at the Bang on a Can marathon. It's nice to have a reminder once in a while that old people can be AWESOME. Those are the subscribers! said the Mac over Mexican. You know how "subscribers" is usually code for everything that's wrong with a musical institution? ("Oh, we can't do a new opera every season, the subscribers would flip.") Well let's us new music people put our ageism on dry ice for one minute and take a look at this fantastic Ojai crowd. Hip, adventurous, good-looking, gray. ANYWAY.
I. Jeremy Denk. It's crazy, I subscribe to his blog's RSS feed, so I can tell you all about the repertoire he plays, I can tell you what he reads and what he thinks about, but I've never actually heard him play! Well, hell of an introduction: Ives Sonata No. 1 and the Goldberg Variations, in that order. Oddly, I've never heard the Goldberg Variations in person, either, even though I have listened to an absurd number of different interpretations on disc. It was intense—a piece you can really get lost in, and I did. Afterwards, I could barely speak, like when you spend the whole day at home alone, and then when the phone finally rings you've forgotten how to make the words that go after hello. The amphitheater acoustic wasn't the friendliest for pieces this dense—following one of the inner voices in the Goldberg, I lost it in the sonic fog; somewhere behind us, a murder of very vocal crows cawed through the Ives—but the weather was cool, the air was fresh, and when the spell of a slow variation was broken by the shout of a distant child, it was accidentally sublime. So, how was Denk's Bach? The technique was stunning. A friend of mine is fond of quoting: "Dude, if you're gonna play the Goldberg Variations, you gotta bring your A-game," and, yeah. There were a few missed notes in the passages that really demand to be played on two harpsichord manuals, preferably by some kind of three-armed mutant, but that was about it. Interpretation: with counterpoint this lively, and character-pieces this full of—well—character, it seems silly to quibble, but I crave a darker, more pensive 32, and Denk was all extrovert, his Goldbergs wide open and brightly illuminated. And the Ives? I'll admit it: remember how I said, we've all got great composers we don't like? Mine's Ives.
His avant-gardisms have always struck me as bratty; his Americanisms have lately reminded me of the things I hate about Connecticut. But Denk revealed an Ives above all that—a wiser and more sensitive voice. I left the concert craving a second hearing. (Who's recorded this piece? Must check ArkivMusic as soon as I get to some WiFi.)
II. "What did you think?" brother Dave said after that evening's performance of Quasi Sinfonia by David Gordon, for eighth blackbird plus additional players. "I'm glad he wrote that instead of going on a shooting spree," I said. I kid! But it was pretty intense. It started off with the ensemble's polyrhythmically multilayered imitation of a convoy of car alarms, then pushed relentlessly forward through four movements, all of them focused on the texturally dense exploration of obsessively limited materials. I was pleased. I think I have to go hear more D.M. Gordon now. So. "I've heard three pieces today, and I think that's the third one to include a super-gnarly hymntune quodlibet," I said.
"Yeah, well, I don't think we're gonna go four for four," said Dave. That would be correct. Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire is plenty gnarly, but decidedly profane: alas, A.S. forgot to bring the hymntunes. And between Elyssa Dole's dancing, Mark Dechiazza's stark, mock-somber staging, and Lucy Shelton's sultry vocal performance, I felt like a character watching a concert within an Almodóvar movie. The dancing was elegant. The moving—I sometimes felt that the blackbirds projected too much stage presence; the less they "performed," the more convincing they were. The Duv, there being no drummin' in Pierrot, did put on an impressive dumbshow—his face was compelling, and I was very fond of a bit of business he did with his bowtie.
But the playing was incredibly tight. The amplification on the fiddle was a little high, but the blend was excellent, and every individual performance was stellar as well. Musically, there was nothing lacking: Schoenberg's most oblique lines sang out all limpid and expressive, somehow without diminishing their mystery. It was utterly involving. Can I also mention that just the fact of a Pierrot Lunaire under the stars, complete with chirping frogs, was pretty excellent? Yeah, I'm going to give my thumbs-up. More soon.
O Internet! Every day is a little journey. Each link leads to another link leads to another link and that's how I never get anything done.
Today's journey began thus:
I read Nico's blog this morning, which repeated an oft-twittered complaint, namely, "How come I can't buy the recording of Double Sextet yet?" Well, one reason is that there isn't a studio recording yet, just that live recording with the eighth blackbird/Oberlin CME dodectet that you may have heard streaming for a limited time online. It's an exciting document, certainly worth hearing (and surreptitiously downloading to your iPod while you, Reich addict and clever URL-hacker that you are, had the chance), but not really worth shelling out for when there's going to be a nice audiophile studio recording in the pipeline. Like, listening to it now, I think I hear a little "unintentional phasing" around 3:30 in the first movement. Totally excusable in concert, not so much in a permanent document—and who's going to pay twice for both downloads?
But that's not what Nico is saying, I don't think. (Is he?) He's saying, how come I can't buy the recording till 20fricking11? Isn't that kind of ridiculous?
Well yeah, it is kind of. Now to be fair, Nonesuch is usually a pretty good label for this sort of thing—they're less interested in packing a disc with the standard 60-80 minutes of music than they are in putting a piece in its appropriate context. Kronos Quartet has put out series of "singles," long pieces that wouldn't fit onto one of their crazy grab-bag records but wouldn't fill out full-lengths on their own; John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls would have made awkward company for any pairing (Side A: Transmigration, Side B: Scratchband!!! Um, no); and perhaps most perversely, they did a Nellie McKay with his release of Dharma at Big Sur and Yo Momma Blew Charles Ives, reflecting his bicoastal sensibility with a two-disc set clocking in under the length of a single disc.
But it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Just frinstance, while we continue wait for a CD of the Thomas Adès Violin Concerto, assuming that EMI has not crumbled into dust before they find something to pair it with, we can make do with the mp3 recording up on those iTunes. Nonesuch is usually a little ahead of the curve with this sort of thing—like, you get a free download of every purchase when you buy the disc off their website, and Steve Reich alone has two download-only releases available from them already—but is this a sign that they could be a little further-ahead still? Lossless soundfiles, maybe? Downloadable booklets? The DG Webshop already offers those things with downloads of their new releases. Why can't everybody be more like the DG Webshop? DG Webshop, stand up, you get a gold star.
OH HEY BUT SO BUT!! I clicked on the link in Nico's post, which led me to this interesting Steve Reich interview, whose comment section, in turn, led me to this YET MORE INTERESTING interview, a revealing double-profile of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, which you should all go read right now now now, even though the default when you click on that link is an annoying full-screen mode which, if you are me, you will immediately disable. It also includes, are you EVEN ready for this, a bonus clip from the primitive MIDI demo mock-up of Reich's forthcoming piece for "all rock-and-roll people," 2 x 5:
Steve Reich - 2 x 5
Okay, CRAZY. I gotta hear how this turns out. (In 2011.)
Thanks to Loyal Reader Graham for pointing out that the Pulitzer-winning Double Sextet is supposed to turn up on tonight's Colbert Report. So if you're on the West Coast you still have time to set your TiVos! I won't be able to watch, but we're guessing it'll be something like Colbert's thoughtful and sensitive John Zorn coverage?
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.
Inspired by the festival's charming Twitter feed, I just emailed a young classical music magazine my idea for a fabulous article on Ojai 2009, curated by eighth blackbird. See, it would be my funny, hip, subjective, irreverent, first-person account of the festival—sort of like "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas," only without all the drugs. I ran it by a Greg, who thought it was great, but missing one thing: all the drugs.
Greg: Do you have a coke hook-up in LA?
Dan Johnson: Not yet!
Dan Johnson: I'll ask around
Greg: I'll put out some feelers on your behalf
Dan Johnson: haha thanks
Dan Johnson: I'm not going to do coke at Ojai.
Dan Johnson: not even if it meant that I could offer some to the Oberlin alumni of 8th Blackbird and call the piece,
Dan Johnson: OH HI, O HIGH OJAI OHIOANS
Which is basically the most genius thing I have ever come up with. But also, kids? Say no to drugs.
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.
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.
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.
The music of Martin Bresnick can be hazardous to your health! Tim Munro of eighth blackbird reveals the hidden dangers, here. He's all right, thank goodness.
