Month: July 2014

Contemporary Classical

A belated response to David Byrne

I’m happy to be returning to posting here at Sequenza21.  It has been a while.

Recently, a quote from David Byrne was brought to my attention by Joe Benzola in a Facebook post. (The original Byrne post may be found here.)  Although the quote is from 2008, it’s new to me; besides, Byrne was responding to “modern music” written in 1957 as if it was new, so I feel okay with my discussion here.

Essentially, Byrne’s comments amount to “why don’t these composers act normal?”  I’ve heard comments like this from my undergraduates, usually non-music majors in my electronic music class. When we get to Cage and Stockhausen, there’s always one kid who thinks he’s either being funny or brilliant by asking either of the following questions:  “Is he on drugs?” or “Did he make any money from this?”

Both my students and Byrne share a similar misconception about ‘classical’ music; really, about music genres outside the larger umbrella of mass-marketed pop music, according to blog posts on 토토사이트 순위.  That is, the very odd idea that one can create a piece of music, indeed a whole body of works, not for hopes of financial gain.  Sure, many of us receive commissions to compose works, but for the most part, the money generated is meager in comparison to even a modest success in the pop world.  One can also point to the few highly-paid artists like Glass or Adams, but they are a rarity.  Many of us are creating works out of our own artistic desires, whatever they may be.

This brings us to the next point – the often-repeated idea that contemporary composers deliberately try to alienate their audiences.  First of all, I’ve never heard any composer say that.  And I knew Cage, and Babbitt, neither of whom created ‘audience-friendly’ music.  More accurately, they knew that what they wrote would appeal to a limited audience, nothing compared to the vast crowds listening to pop genres.  You could say the same thing about, say, Thelonious Monk.  This is akin to ‘narrowcasting’: targeting a message to a specific audience, like when a college radio station has a hour-long show all in Italian.  In all cases, the messenger knows and indeed revels in the fact that he or she is not going to reach a huge percentage of the audience at large.

On a side note, I am reminded of a quote from Cecil Taylor, which I heard in Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary.  (Okay, I have a LOT of issues with the tone of the post-1945 portion of the documentary, but still…) When asked why his music was so difficult to follow, Taylor responded (I’m paraphrasing here) “I spend many hours practicing before a concert.  Why can’t the audience do the same?”  Okay, that’s harsh.  One can say that he’s not exactly accommodating.  Yet, he’s asking his audience to prepare for the experience.  How, I’m not sure.  Perhaps by learning how to be open-minded, allowing the music to flow rather than trying to control it or pigeon-hole it into a pre-conceived notion.  Don’t expect to hear tunes based on “What is this Thing Called Love?” or the blues (at least not past the mid-60s, from what I know).  That’s where audience members, including Mr. Byrne, get lost.   They’re expecting an experience similar to what they already know, and it is simply not there in this case.  I will agree, however, that some artists take this to an extreme, leaving the audience little to grasp on to.  I don’t find this with the composers mentioned in the Byrne article.  Schoenberg is quite traditional in many ways, especially when it comes to motive and structure.  In many ways, he is a Neo-Classical composer, with a twist!

One last point:  opera is about spectacle.  Whether you’re talking about bringing in half the zoo for a production of Aida, massive sets for Wagner, or the staging in the Zimmerman, it’s all about the wow factor.  It’s a huge multi-media event, so it’s no wonder that more recent operas have made use of technology.  And that operas continue to be written.  And, yes, Mr. Byrne, sometimes there is a long gap between the creation of a work and its first performance.  It takes a long time for a work to be produced in general; when larger forces are involved there is more preparation needed.  Sets have to be built, costumes designed, and musicians rehearsed; even for a commissioned work, it is not uncommon for a few years to elapse between the composer putting down the pen and the conductor holding up the baton.

Yes, composers are not always the most practical in a business (or pop-music) sense.  We create music that makes our performers work a little (some more than others), and we expect our smallish audience to engage in active listening.  Is that truly a horrible thing?

by Anthony Cornicello
Contemporary Classical

Vijay Iyer–The Most Happy Fellow

Vijay Iyer and the Brentano Quartet in a live performance of sections from Mutations at Greene Space

Over the past two decades, Vijay Iyer has recorded some 18 albums of bold, genre-defying, and original music that navigates the fine line between composition and improvisation, between jazz and New Music. Although his restless musical imagination roams easily through both Carter and Monk territory, unearthing insights that evolve and morph over time, the gestures have largely been identifiable as jazz. His new and first ECM recording—Mutations—unveils more of the composer side of the 42-year-old New Yorker’s prolific bag. Meanwhile, as players explore diverse musical landscapes, the demand for convenience in other areas grows, exemplified by the rise of platforms offering casino retrait instantané, providing users with quick access to their winnings. The title composition—for string quartet, piano, and electronics—was written nearly 10 years ago but is recorded here for the first time, with considerable care, by Iyer and top chamber players Miranda Cuckson, Michi Wiancko, Kyle Armbrust, and Kivie Cahn-Lipman, under the magic ear of Manford Eicher.

Is Mutations jazz or is it contemporary classical or some sort of Third Stream, as envisioned by Gunther Schuller?  Does it matter?

“I find myself at the intersection of several music communities where people have different understandings and assumptions about what music is,” he says.  “When you talk about genres you’re really talking about different communities of people each of which has people who have a shared understanding of music.  But, those assumptions shift as we are exposed to different approaches and sounds so we are constantly redefining what music is. ”

In other words, he isn’t much interested in labels or categories.

“As you can imagine, from the perspective of an artist who makes music and has lived pretty intimately in both the jazz and classical worlds it is not useful think about labels or categories.  It’s more useful to think about what can I do with these particular people.  Because when you talk about genres you’re really talking about communities and people who have a shared understanding about what is music.  When you’re exposed to something new, that can expand or alter your perceptions.”

Lately, Iyer has become the Pharrell Williams of the New Music community—a musician who has worked over 20 years to become an overnight success.   Although Iyer’s music is unlikely to dominate the planet in the same resistance-is-futile way that Williams has, he has plenty to be “happy” about, too.  In the last two years, he’s won a MacArthur Genius Award, gotten a tenured teaching position at Harvard, landed a big commission and retrospective at BAM this coming December and released an extraordinary new album on ECM.

(more…)

by Jerry Bowles
Boston, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, Orchestras

FCM on Monday

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On Monday, July 21st at 8 PM, the last concert of Tanglewood’s 2014 Festival of Contemporary Music is a well-stocked program of orchestral works. The centerpiece is Roger Sessions’s Concerto for Orchestra, a work commissioned by the BSO thirty years ago. Steven Mackey’s violin concerto Beautiful Passing will feature as soloist Sarah Silver, one of Tanglewood’s New Fromm Players. Music by John Adams has not in recent memory frequently been featured on FCM programs, but this year his Slonimsky’s Earbox makes an appearance. The sole work by a younger composer, The Sound of Stillness by Charlotte Bray, piqued my interest – it is an impressive piece. (Check out a video about it here.) Thus, this year’s FCM ends the way that many of its seasons are curated: with nods to tradition as well as explorations of new, unfamiliar, and underrepresented corners of contemporary repertoire.

by Christian Carey
Opera

The Importance of the New

Marc Day and Patrick Fennig in
Marc Day and Patrick Fennig in “Brother Brother”

In June I sat on a panel organized by Opera Cabal, in their visit to the Kitchen to produce Georg Haas’ Atthis, with two other critics, John Rockwell and Zachary Woolfe. While the audience was sparse, they were generally attentive and the talk, which began with the question of whether or not we missed City Opera, was varied and interesting.

I was surprised, though, by how much we ended up talking about the Metropolitan Opera, and how Rockwell and Woolfe’s critical thinking is so involved in the context of not only what the Met produces, but the general standpoint that the long-standing repertoire is the thing that matters. The Met demands that much attention in terms of both time and money, and the professional critics (I’m making a value-free distinction between those who are paid for every review they write and those who are paid for some of the reviews we write) pay that much more attention to the Met and that house’s peers: it’s their job.

This is certainly no criticism of Rockwell and Woolfe, especially the former, who has done so much to advocate for contemporary opera. It actually made my contributions more valuable, because while I certainly see plenty of things at the Met (almost a dozen performances this past season), what happens outside that house matters to me more. Nothing against good productions of operas of lasting value (though the grand opera tradition, as seen on stage, includes too many mediocre works), but as a composer I’m most concerned with the state of the form now, what other composers and companies are doing with it.

When I answered the opening question, I was even more surprised to realize that I didn’t miss City Opera. The loss of the company is still painful, but what involved me the most with them was what George Steel was doing to produce modern and contemporary work, and this past season, starting with City Opera’s swan song of Anna Nicole, I saw enough new work (on a necessarily smaller scale), and missed so much more new work, that it was clear to me in retrospect that contemporary opera is in decent enough shape. Smaller companies like Gotham Chamber Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, HERE Arts Center and Experiments in Opera are making new work, and they are free of the burden of having to maintain a redundant version of the repertoire that the Met has a lock on.

What does it take to produce an opera? Experiments in Opera has an infinitesimal fraction of the Met’s budget, easily less than 1,000,000th, so the composers who formed the organization—Aaron Siegel, Jason Cady and Matthew Welch—work together to produce each other’s pieces. I saw their season finale, Siegel’s Brother Brother, in the beginning of May at the Abrons Arts Center, and while the opera didn’t come off as a successful music drama, it has two important things going for it: it tries to expand the repertory and it made it to the stage—that itself is a success.

Siegel is trying to move narrative structure beyond linear story telling, something the world of contemporary opera desperately needs (as I said at the panel, I’m amazed that in a world with comic books, Pulp Fiction and long form dramatic TV, there is almost never any variation to the Verdian model). He is trying to convey a drama about the Wright brothers by telling the story of an additional pair of brothers, abstracted as Red and Blue. An interesting idea, but unsuccessfully executed.

Siegel wrote the libretto, and could probably have used some critical distance: the words don’t amount to much meaning. They don’t do much to provide human flesh to the Wright brothers (sung by countertenor Patrick Fennig and tenor Marc Day), and the fragmented, abstract dialogue for Red (Julian A. Rozell, Jr.), and Blue (Danyon Davis) make them poetic figures and put them out of the context of the drama. Red and Blue are also speaking parts, and although they are accompanied by music, they seem to belong to an entirely different piece.

Siegel fills in a lot of the narrative with a chorus, but this also works against his drama, because this is music the Wright brothers could sing, and by singing bring us closer to their experience and dramatic realization. They pop up, Day sings heroically at one point, everything goes up in flames. It doesn’t work. Siegel also doesn’t completely get beyond the challenge of his own minimalist idiom—the repetitive music relies predominantly on vibraphone (the accompanying ensembles were Mantra Percussion and the Cadillac Moon Ensemble, conducted by David Bloom), and as lovely as it often is, there is too little changes in quality and harmony to indicate that some kind of narrative transformation has occurred: the music doesn’t convey the dramatic idea.

Production- and performance-wise, the event proved that there is no lack of capable singers, musicians and directors (Mallory Catlett). The actors were miked, probably because the instruments were miked, but in the tidy acoustic of Abrons this should never have happened, and the vibes overpowered the actors and the singers too many times. Perhaps tight budgets mean insufficient tech rehearsals.

But the problems with Brother Brother are those of commission, people trying to do something new. No money means nothing much to lose, and an unsatisfying but honest attempt at something different is more welcome than another acceptable and predictable production of Strauss.

by George Grella