Ooh check it out, a comment from fearless soprano Melissa Fogarty, regarding her upcoming performance of David Del Tredici's My Favorite Penis Poems:
Wow, I'm very flattered by your testament to me without having heard me sing a note--thank you! But I must give credit where credit is due: I will be joined by tenor Robert Frankenberry. He will be singing "Now you know" as well as "Street Instructions at the Crotch" and "Hot to Trot." Even so, I've got some pretty "heady" texts--"Die Forelle" (not your grandmother's Schubert!), "The Importance of Gourdcrafting" (I'm sure singing about sex with a donkey is a terrific career move!) and finally, Rob and I will be duetting on "Please Master" I'm sure we will both rise to the occasion!
Hooray, thanks for stopping in! This only has me more excited about the recital—I can't stop trying to imagine a "Please Master" duet. Yowza.
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.
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.
A story about the CT Roller-Girls ("Crush Them Bones," Nov. 6) misstated some details. Correct player names are: Ramona Rotten, Eve Coli, Paula G. Imnaughty and Liberty Violence. C. Mya Rage is on Elm City Bone Crushers, not WidowMakers. The WidowMakers have the highest number of skaters returning. Virginia Wolverine got engaged but did not have a baby. The bout on Nov. 8 was a full production event, not a scrimmage. Black Cherry will return to skate against Maine. And the lower ticket prices are not a result of the Pabst Blue Ribbon sponsorship.
We regret the errors.
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.
From the lips of La Cieca, we receive word that David Del Tredici's long, hard Penis Poems wait is over at last. The Pulitzer-prizewinning queer radical's most outrageous song cycle yet, My Favorite Penis Poems, has finally come into the concert repertoire after years of teasing.
Soprano Melissa Fogarty will be offering her golden throat to Del Tredici's infamous piece on the stage of Symphony Space on December 4.
BAD PUN BREAK. Kudos to Fogarty, who will have to endure more than my obnoxious teasing to bring this piece to life. I've talked about the strange SM overtones of the composer/performer/audience relationship before, but a work like this really—okay one more bad double-entendre—lays them bare. Sheet music is, after all, a set of instructions; instructing somebody to look out over a room of strange men and women and intone the words (THIS IS ALLEN GINSBERG SAYING THIS, NOT ME) "please master touch your cock head to my wrinkled self-hole" is almost a sexual act in itself. True, singers are called upon to portray a great variety of characters onstage, but just reciting some of these poems in public could probably get you arrested as a sex offender in Oklahoma.
My first reaction when I heard Del Tredici couldn't find anybody to sing these was, "Man, singers are a buncha prudes," but as one reviews the text it becomes apparent why a lady might think that singing the poem "Now You Know" by Antler might not be the savviest career move. Between what I know of Del Tredici's virtuoso vocal writing and his poets' eagerness to shock, I think it's already safe to say that Melissa Fogarty is the most daring classical singer in the United States. Brava.
MORE BAD PUNS. All right, everybody, prick up your ears: you can buy tickets for Del Tredici's Orgelbüchlein at the Symphony Space website and discover, for yourself, the penis mightier than the sword.
CORRECTION: Melissa Fogarty reports that she will be joined by tenor Robert Frankenberry at the premiere. Frankenberry will sing "Now You Know," "Street Instructions at the Crotch," and "Hot to Trot," and will duet with Ms. Fogarty on "Please Master."
As if it weren't enough that my previousposts on Doctor Atomic contradicted each other and themselves, I've just come back from seeing the piece a second time, and this experience was radically different from the first. Worth discussing? Myih.
I also noticed that I was sitting just behind everybody's favorite CT/NY power-couple, omnipresent librettist J.D. McClatchy (who will, don't you worry, get his very own episode of Libretto Problems) and amazing fanastic brilliant graphic design genius Chip Kidd (who came up with the dust jacket of every single book you've ever bought just because of the dust jacket). Managed to restrain myself from running up and saying HEY J.D. MCCLATCHY WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THAT at the intermission, but I am dying to know what he was thinking.
Also! Let me point out that you can download the whole libretto here, from the Met website, for study or meditation.
Okay to bed.
(See our last episode of Libretto Problems, here.)
Hooray, so I spent the night in the city after the excellent NOW/Dargel show at Le Poisson Rouge (more on this soon), and in a few hours I'm going to see the new production of Doctor Atomic at the Met—to my many fans in attendance I'll be the guy wearing a brown cap with no friends, who vaguely resembles the picture to the right only in need of a shave.
Okay where were we? Right right right! Mark Adamo.
We might have guessed that Adamo knew an awful lot about libretti when we read this insightful interview from NewMusicBox, regarding his Lysistrata. For instance, Adamo talks about how in prewriting his operas, he draws up (1) a synopsis of nothing but sounds, just a description of what you'd hear if you were listening to the opera being broadcast on the radio, in Hungarian or something. Then he draws up (2) a synopsis of nothing but physical action and stage business—the opera as silent movie, nothing but dumbshow.
Brilliant! He goes straight to the things that make opera unique. As opposed to Tommasini's eunuch-in-a-whorehouse type advice, this is the sort of trick an opera librettist or composer could actually learn something from. Opera is about the sounds of women's voices mingling offstage, and wordless cries from anguished baritones, but also about people clutching letters to their breasts and hesitating on staircases. On the one hand, music can be exploited as a tool for storytelling—but on the other hand, the music also abstracts the drama to the point where one cannot ask the dialogue to do as much work as it might in a piece of spoken theatre. A certain amount of physical melodrama, a few bold dramatic gestures, are key to the success of a big chunk of the operatic rep.
This strategy is a bit old-school, however. What works within a Verdian aesthetic might not work for John Adams. True, if we were to imagine a silent movie production of Doctor Atomic, we would probably imagine a bunch of dudes in suits talking to each other for a couple hours. But I'm going to cut a few yards of slack for this piece, just because the conventional music-drama is so obviously not the model Sellars and Adams are after, or have ever been after. A third of Nixon in China is dudes in suits talking to each other; the libretto of The Death of Klinghoffer, about a hijacking and murder, is structured like an oratorio, not like a conventional opera—the actual death of Leon Klinghoffer takes place offstage, for instance, instead of being dramatized. What sort of opera composer would leave out the death scene by accident? Clearly something else is going on there.
Happily, Adamo's critical approach, unlike that of certain music writers I could name, while registering how the dramatic goals of the piece depart from his own tastes, is also capable of addressing the piece on its own terms. He identifies what is missing here that was present in Adams & Sellars' earlier history-operas: Alice Goodman, their visionary librettist.
Yes, this libretto is a collage, and draws on a certain poetic energy that only collage can provide. And so I think Adamo is wrong to single out Oppenheimer's John Donne aria for criticism—not only did the Trinity project borrow is title from the poem, but each line, in the context of the opera, takes on multiple meanings relevant to the situation. When Oppenheimer confesses that he is "betroth'd unto Your enemy," we wonder if he has, like the Doctor Faust alluded to in the title of of the opera, sold his soul for the enormous power he is about to wield; but when he sings, "ravish me," is he begging to be mastered instead by Good, or is he simply willing himself to surrender his own moral judgment to a higher political authority? Is he praying to God, or to the Bomb?
I'd go so far as to defend what somebody (who? remind me!) has called the "carbs aria" of General Groves, a musical recitation of his calorie intake. This is an opera about hubris, after all; Groves is trying to win the war in the Pacific, he's trying to split the atom, we even see him try to control the weather—but he can't even master his own body. It's a good and revealing joke.
(And while I'm being critical of Adamo's critique, I can't let him get away with this silliness: "Not since Szymanowski have we heard such opulent ninths and elevenths; not since Saarijaho, such shimmering harps and gongs." "Not since" Saariaho?? Saariaho is now. She is not dead yet. You cannot say "not since Saariaho," as that would mean, like, "not since last summer," which is to say, it would not mean anything. Nit picked, carry on.)
The shift between these two modes, between what is known about a given political situation (what was said in the presence of reporters, what happened in front of the TV cameras) and what will be forever unknowable (what they were thinking it happened) gets at the essence of the Sellars/Adams opera project in general. Nixon especially focused on the divide between public and private life, between the yin and yang of historical/heroic/male vs. personal/domestic/female. In Act One, we get to see Nixon shake hands with Chou En-Lai; we see him and Kissinger sit down with Chou and Mao, and the libretto sticks largely to realistic, political/philosophical dialogues. In Act Two, we meet the missus; Pat Nixon takes a tour of Beijing, Madame Mao puts on her terrifying ballet, The Detachment of Red Women, and the libretto veers off into fantasy. Act Three finds the whole gang in a liminal, half-dreamed space of strange rhapsodies.
And that's the thing—bringing a bona fide librettist on board allows you then to negotiate between those two spheres. Like, Pat Nixon did not really say, "Let Gypsy Rose kick off her high-heeled party shoes!" while taking her big stroll—that's a lyrical flight of Alice Goodman's fancy—but she actually did say, "That's prophetic!" to her Chinese handlers (and the assembled press corps), and Goodman then transmuted those two words into the aria, "This is prophetic." (See how a poet can massage a clunky turn of phrase into something musical—"that's" to "this is"?) In Klinghoffer too, actual quotations and historical facts are woven into arias of rhymed couplets; real and fictional characters share the stage.
But when Doctor Atomic shifts registers between documentary and lyrical, the thread is lost. We back off of the action just when we should be zooming in. Whole characters turn into a blur. Says Adamo:
Pasqualita’s rainsong is authentic Tewa lullaby, Rukeyser may have been acquainted with the Oppenheimers, and Groves’s diet worries are amply documented. But a libretto is not a program note. Pasqualita’s lullaby boasts impeccable historical pedigree. But what does it tell us dramatically? If this is characterization, what on earth is stereotype?
Bingo. I'll insist that there is nothing wrong with going all high-toned and dreamy once in a while, but the Native American characters never get a chance be human. They never get to count their calories. They just have to stand around and symbolize unspoiled Mother Nature or something. I mean c'mon, Pasqualita? More like Pasquahontas! LOL!
Hum. Some of Adamo's suggestions are not great. E.g., I shudder at the thought of a part for Harry Truman; one of the things that makes Dr Awork is its unity of place. And you know what? I love Doctor Atomic; I think it is a great piece, and I can't wait to see it again. While Adamo makes sure to distance himself from outright attacks on the opera, it's clear he doesn't enjoy it quite as much as I have. But this is twice now that I've read his comments on the art of libretto-writin' and immediately wanted to write somebody a big fat libretto (dude, composerfriends, call me). Who else is thinking this hard about dramatic problems in opera? We need more of this!
Ooh check it out, a comment from fearless soprano Melissa Fogarty, regarding her upcoming performance of David Del Tredici's My Favorite Penis Poems:
