I come to praise Michael Nyman.  No, really.  Since the nice people at Naxos began distributing Nyman’s MN Records a couple of months ago, several of his musical adventures have come into my possession and I have to admit that I find them as light as the floating feather in Forrest Gump and as addictive as an open box of Entemann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts.  I play them again and again, knowing I should move on to something meatier–like, say, the amazing new Da Capo recording of Per Norgard chamber works or Lee Hyla’s extraordinary Lives of the Saints.  

But it couldn’t hurt to put on Nyman’s Mozart 252 while I’m deciding.  Mozart 252 (Nyman was a couple of years late in finishing his tribute to Wolfgang’s 250th birthday) brings together two main bodies of Nyman work inspired by Mozart (whose music, by the way, I loathe).  The first is the soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers, and the second draws from Nyman’s score for Letters, Riddles and Writs (1991), a BBC2 homage to Mozart. Like my favorite doughnuts, there’s lots of empty calories but it tastes so sweet going down.

Or maybe, I’ll go with Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit, a couple of extended vocal works that show Nyman’s approach to word-setting, song structure, and choice of subject matter.  Oooo..this is interesting.  Says here that Acts of Beauty is a song cycle based on miscellaneous texts on beauty from a 1556 text of Vincenzo Cartari, which “looks at the measurements of beauty by comparing buttocks to beauty in the urban environment as viewed by Kurt Scwitters and Dzuga Vertov to Martial’s Epigrams on the weighing of a penis.”   Kind of gives a new definition to the word “heavy.”

Exit no Exit began life as Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores, a ‘homage’ to the England football team as part of a documentary on BBC Radio 3 to celebrate the end of the World Cup finals in Japan/Korea in 2002. Nyman took extracts from announcer John Motson’s commentary to the England v Argentina match and sampled, looped and ‘instrumentalized’ them…in the manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains: translating the loops repeating rhythmic and melodic patterns played without variation.”  Good cover copy that:   “In the Manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains…”  Nice.  In this version,   Motson’s voice has been replaced with a bass clarinet.

There’s nobody here right now except me and the cat so maybe I could even go with the “Composers Cut” version of the score from Nyman’s most famous piece, The Piano.  Poor Holly Hunter losing her pinky like that.  That’s exactly why I prefer cats to children.  Let’s see…Nyman says:  “The purpose of the Composer’s Cut series is to present music from my soundtracks in a state of continuous evolution. As I transferred particular cues from film to concert hall both musical structures changed and performance styles developed, enabling the music, perhaps, to realise its true potential. So these recordings represent the Michael Nyman Band’s state-of-performance as of spring 2005.”  State-of-Performance…In the Manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains.  Now, we’re getting somewhere.

Nyman’s score for Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano is one of the most successful film soundtracks of all time, won lots of movie music awards, and made Nyman one of the few composers who can afford to own their record labels and hire any musicians they want to play their music.  The concert suite for The Piano as performed by The Michael Nyman Band is a staple of the band’s concert repertoire and has been performed all over the world with the composer acting as pianist and conductor. According to the notes:  “It is this expanded form of the soundtrack that Nyman chose to record as his own definitive edition in Abbey Road studios in April 2005.”

So, let’s see what we have when we put it together:  “Live from Abbey Road…a State-of-Performance performance..In the Manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains…the definitive edition of the Composer’s Cut of…”

And, by the way, did I mention that he’s the man who gave “minimalism” its name?

So the guy’s a pompous asshole.  I dare you to buy a copy of one of his CDs and not play it at least 10 times.

Click to Play

For the past couple of years the Kepler Quartet has been on a mission from God to record all ten of Ben Johnston’s string quartets with their intended tunings. The first recording in this series–String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 & 9–was our (or, at least, my) favorite album of the year. Eric Kepler remembered and offered us (with Ben’s blessing) a Fourth of July treat we couldn’t refuse.

Enjoy Ben Johnston’s microtonal version of the National Anthem. It was written for the N.Y. Miniaturist Ensemble a couple of years ago, and Eric made this studio quality recording with Ben as a demo for them. Ben himself is singing. It’s a very short piece, 100 notes, scored for two voices, male and female, violin, clarinet and snare drum

Performers are from Present Music in Milwaukee. Voices Ben Johnston, Laura Monagle, snare Terry Smirl, bass clarinet Bill Helmers, violin Eric Segnitz, engineer, John Tanner copyist, David Bohn

PDF of Score

Steve Smith, writing this morning in the Center of the Universe Times:

During a panel presented recently at the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, the American Music Center and the American Composers Forum reported preliminary findings from “Taking Note,” a survey of American composers. The study was undertaken to help those organizations better serve their constituencies. According to its findings, the average American composer is a highly educated 45-year-old white male.

Update: Judith Zaimont has more from the study on her MusicMaker blog.

Benjaim Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, has become a hot ticket on the corporate leadership circuit. Here’s why:

David V. Foster, whose management firm Opus 3 Artists represents many top performers, conductors and Osvaldo Golijov, has come up with an idea for an annual festival at Carnegie Hall that will recognize leading orchestras for the the “creativity and distinctiveness” of the programs they propose to perform.   Called Spring for Music, the festival is scheduled to begin in May 2011, at Carnegie Hall.   According to the Center of the Universe Times:

The Festival of North American Orchestras, as the organizing entity is called, will rent the hall and handle production and marketing, and the orchestras will bear their own costs for travel and soloists but share the proceeds, with a guarantee of at least $50,000 per appearance. Tickets — $25 each except for 100 or so seats in the top balcony at $15 — will be sold on a first-come-first-served basis two months before the event.

The principals– Foster, Thomas W. Morris, a former executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra and the artistic director of the Ojai Festival; and Mary Lou Falcone, a public-relations consultant describe the festival as an “idealized musical laboratory designed to see what kind of programming an orchestra can concoct when mundane considerations like marketing are taken out of the equation.”

Sounds a little Jerry Jeff to me, but we can hope for the best.

You know how you like to put on an Erroll Garner CD sometimes and lie back on the sofa and imagine you’re somewhere–I know–that cool little bar with the piano downstairs at Blake’s in London–and you sit down and launch into “I Got the World on a String” and when you’re finished the killer Sloane Ranger at the far table walks over and asks you to play “Misty” for her? Or, maybe you’re at a Norwegian Christmas party and you’ve had a few Linjes and Elephant chasers and the band is really great except for the guitar player and you walk over and ask if you can play one and you launch into “Oh, they’re floodin’ down in Texas…’ and everybody goes holy shit, what happened here?

Do musicians have musical fantasies like us civilians? Does Eric ever put on Stevie Ray and pretend that he really does understand the blues experience?   Nobody fantasizes about being a great accountant.  What is there about making music that makes everybody want to do it, or pretend they’re doing it?

I’ll go first.

Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, Sandstone (W.Va.) High School Gymnasium. 1959. Bill was pissed because the total gate was less than $200 but he was there with musicians and once he started to play the money thing disappeared. All the great ones: “Uncle Pen,” “Footprints in the Snow,” “Little Maggie,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Molly and Tenbrooks,” “In the Pines.”

Update 1: Stop me if you’ve heard this one. I saw Charlie Mingus play one night at the Five Spot Cafe in 1963. First day of the first time I was ever in New York. Ron Carter and some of the Miles Davis crowd were on first but I couldn’t take my eyes off Mingus as he sat alone eating during the set. Elegant man in a sharp grey suit but something coiled and dark–like a loaded pistol sitting on a chair. You know it’s deadly just because it’s there.

Then he took the stage. One, two, three…Toshiko Akiyoshi starts “A Foggy Day” on piano. A few bars and Mingus stopped playing. 30 second pause. One, two, three, a few bars, same thing. Mingus put his bass down and disappeared into the kitchen, emerging a minute or two later carrying a large, butcher knife. He made a show of doing something with a string and laid the knife down on a table in front of him.

One, two, three…stop. Mingus picked up the knife and walked to a table where a guy was so busy talking to his girlfriend that he didn’t see him coming. Suddenly, he realizes there is a 10-inch knife stuck in the middle of the wooden table in front of him. Mingus glared as the couple grabbed their coats and ran for their lives. The concert continued as if nothing had happened.

So, this is the big city, I thought. Cool.

Update 2: Circa 1973. An outdoor park near Wilmington, Delaware. The last days of Porter and Dolly although Porter and the several hundred of us misplaced Appalachians gathered around the bandstand didn’t know it yet. It wouldn’t be the first, or last, time that the pretty young protege dumped an older mentor and lover to become a much bigger star. Toward the end, Dolly came out with a guitar and sang a “new” song called “I Will Always Love You.” The hair was fake, even then, but the tears were very real.

(More to come)

Among the cats who know great charts, the names Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan are magic.  Eddie exited a long time ago; Bill, just last week. 

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Bang on a Can NYC Marathon
May 31 – June 1, 2008 6:00pm

World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York, NY

This year’s Marathon will take place at the World Financial Center Winter Garden from 6pm on Saturday May 31st through 6am on Sunday June 1st. Here is a schedule of composers and performers:

6:00pm

Alarm Will Sound performing Son of Chamber Symphony (3rd Movement) by John Adams

Pamela Z performing Chalky Crystal Liquid Cave by Pamela Z

Alarm Will Sound performing Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Petpetuum by Harrison Birtwistle

Lisa Moore performing Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers^^ by Annie Gosfield

Crash Ensemble performing Gra agus Bas by Donnacha Dennehy

8:00pm

Crash Ensemble performing Loops for Ancient Giant Nude Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle (3rd Movement)^^ by Terry Riley

Karsh Kale and Raj Maddela performing Timeline by Karsh Kale

Ensemble Nikel peforming Sahaf^^ by Chaya Czernowin

Caleb Burhans performing _no_ by Caleb Burhans

Hartt Bass Band performing Strong Hold^ by Julia Wolfe

Young People’s Chorus of New York performing Every Stop on the F Train by Michael Gordon (with film by Bill Morrison)

10:00pm

Bang on a Can All-Stars performing music from Shadowbang by Evan Ziporyn

Bang on a Can All-Stars performing Convex-Concave-Concord^ by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen

Owen Pallett performing works by Owen Pallett

Bang on a Can All-Stars and Owen Pallett performing Twelve Polearms^ by Owen Pallett

Bang on a Can All Stars performing Glamour Girl by Lukas Ligeti

Bora Yoon performing ( ((PHONATION)) ) by Bora Yoon (with live visuals by R. Luke DuBois)

MIDNIGHT

SIGNAL performing Daniel Variations by Steve Reich

Crash Ensemble performing Resonant Relations by Arnold Dreyblatt

Alarm Will Sound performing Revolution #9 (arr. Matt Marks) by The Beatles

2:00am

So Percussion performing the so called laws of nature by David Lang

Marnie Stern performing works by Marnie Stern

Ensemble Nikel performing Riba^^ by Sivan Cohen Elias

Ensemble Nikel performing Nikel^^ by Ruben Seroussi

4:00am

Dan Deacon, Kevin Omeara and Jeremy Hyman performing Ultimate Reality Part 3 by Dan Deacon (with visuals by Jimmy Joe Roche)

Contact performing Discreet Music (arr. Jenny Pergolesi) by Brian Eno (with film by Suzanne Bocanegra)

Toby Twining Music performing Stimmung by Karlheinz Stockhausen

^ = World Premieres ^^ = US Premieres