There’s going to be an album release party tonight at Le Poisson Rouge. Two groups on the New Amsterdam Records roster, NOW Ensemble and the Chiara String Quartet, are celebrating their respective releases.
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Chiara are presenting string quartets by Jefferson Friedman, along with remixes thereof by special guest electronica artists Matmos. Meanwhile, NOW Ensemble presents a mixed program of new synthetists pieces by the likes of Judd Greenstein, Sean Friar, and Missy Mazzoli.
Check out Joshua Frankel’s new video Plan of the City below; it will accompany the performance of Greenstein’s Change at the gig.
Composer Paul MoravecNo doubt if you have participated or read any of the chats below for Spring For Music concerts, you are pretty excited. If you haven’t heard about Spring for Music, it starts tomorrow night with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall!
Orpheus has a wonderful resource about their New Brandenburgs project, but I was curious to talk with Paul Moravec about the idea of hearing his Brandenburg Gate with the other commissions. Here is our chat from Sunday night at his apartment: mp3 file
Concerts continue through May 14th at Carnegie including the Dallas Symphony in Steven Stucky’s August 4th, 1964; the Albany Symphony in a Spirituals Re-Imagined project; and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in Maria Schneider’s Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories with Dawn Upshaw. Ticket prices are reduced, and I love the idea there will be hometown sections for the visiting orchestra fans!
Published in 2007, The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross’ first book, was an engrossing and thoughtful survey of Twentieth Century music, equally useful as an introduction to neophytes and a refresher to specialists (he’s since tweaked the paperback edition to be even more comprehensive, including updated info and a “go-to” listening list). By “classical music” standards, the book was wildly successful, and Ross subsequently garnered a number of honors, including a 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award and a 2008 MacArthur Fellowship. Its follow-up, Listen to This, doesn’t limit itself to contemporary concert music. Instead, it’s a wide-ranging survey of musical topics, including portrait essays of musicians as diverse as Radiohead, Marian Anderson, Sonic Youth, and Cecil Taylor, discussions of specific musical genres, and thought pieces on the state of music education, the record industry, and cultural consumption at home and abroad.
Ross has been a music critic on the staff at the New Yorker since 1996. While most of these essays are culled from his writings there, Listen to This never strikes one merely as a “greatest hits” compilation. Rather, the volume is structured to tease out several overarching concerns. One of them is the working musician. In one chapter, he demystifies the grueling touring schedule of chamber musicians, pointing out that even acclaimed groups such as the St. Lawrence String Quartet have to hustle to make a living in today’s economic climate. Far from being another “death of classical music story,” Ross argues for the relevancy of these touring ensembles that, despite these challenges, bring music of a very high level of artistry to locations far and wide, many of them off of the beaten path. Another topic is globalization’s affect on postmillennial music, which is explored in a particularly fascinating travel essay detailing a concert-filled trip to China and in a jaunt to Carnival in Brazil with Björk.
While there’s no mistaking Ross’ erudition, a trait that allows specialists to prefer his writings to those of some of his journalist colleagues with less musical knowledge, Listen to This is an approachable collection. One of the ways in which it speaks to a wide audience is with an eagerness to share in what Leonard Bernstein called “The Joy of Music.” Indeed, Ross is that rare writer on music who can share his enthusiasms for an artist’s work with unabashed honesty. But even when backstage with Radiohead or following Björk through the streets of Salvador, he defuses any notions of fanboy journalism – a trend that, alarmingly, has infiltrated all too many publications of late. Instead, Ross seeks to put a human face on artistic process, detailing the origins of Björk’s eclectic musical tastes and providing a foil for the singer’s exotic costumes and playful demeanor by detailing a studio session in which, while humane, she is exacting in eliciting musical details from collaborators. There’s an emotional openness, even vulnerability, which runs through a number of these essays. His eulogy of the exquisitely talented mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is one of the most affecting yet observant tributes to this recently departed artist (rereading it was made all the more poignant by the passing in April of her husband, the composer Peter Lieberson).
The state of music education is a frequent topic of discussion of late. Ross’ essay “The Crisis of Music Education” should be required reading for policy-makers, educators, and the parents of artistically motivated children alike. As one can tell by the title, it acknowledges the beleaguered state of arts and education funding; but Ross still provides several glimmers of hope for the future. He describes the unlikely and extraordinary flowering of a music program in the inner city at Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark, New Jersey. Another urban success story is detailed in Providence, Rhode Island’s Community MusicWorks, a program run by the Providence String Quartet, a group of graduates from major conservatories who prefer giving back to staking a claim for fame and fortune. Ross even gets in on the education act himself: part of his book tour for Listen to This has featured a performance/discussion of bass lines throughout music history ranging from Purcellian grounds to Delta Blues walking lines: it’s also made for a cult YouTube hit, in which Ross is joined by the Bad Plus’ Ethan Iverson and ex-Battles composer Tyondai Braxton.
A staff position at the New Yorker provides a platform from which can wield considerable influence. Some of the essays collected here have already had undeniable impact. Ross has done a considerable amount to raise the stock of Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, and his fascinating chapter on the composer’s works and working environments is another “must-read” excerpt. One wonders whether it’s mere coincidence that Providence String Quartet founder Sebastian Ruth received a 2010 MacArthur Fellowship. If Ross had a hand in this, more power to him: it’s nice to see a music critic on the side of the good guys!
There is another fantastic all-day new music marathon happening and tomorrow it’s Seattle’s turn for the good-times. Sunday, May 1st, from noon-10pm is the Second AnnualMay Day! May Day! marathon at Town Hall in Seattle.
This 10-hour performer- and composer-driven celebration of contemporary music is produced by artistic director Paul Taub (of Seattle Chamber Players fame) and is curated by eclectic composer and pianist Wayne Horvitz, pianist Cristina Valdes, and Jarrad Powell (composer and artistic director of Gamelan Pacifica).
This years marathon features 25 sets by local ensembles and soloists, including:
Spring for Music, an annual festival of concerts by North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, was created in part to start a conversation about repertoire, about audience expectations, and about orchestral programming in general. To help continue this conversation, the festival is hosting a series of online events allowing participants to interact with members of the team in an open dialogue.
The second of these chats is today (Thursday) at noon with composer Steven Stucky, whose evening-long concert drama August 4, 1964 will be performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on May 11 as part of the Spring for Music festival. This is Steven’s conversation starter:
“How does a composer write a work about a failed President (Johnson) and a probable war criminal (McNamarra) without lapsing into propaganda? Does he have to check his personal opinions at the door? If a middle-class white composer writes music about the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, does he risk being patronizing? In writing a historical symphony does he steal the voices of those who actually went through the struggles of the movement, fought and died in Vietnam?”
I am currently visiting my brother who teaches English at a University in Fes, Morocco. One of his roommates is Chris Witulski, a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology from the University of Florida currently researching indigenous Moroccan music. A big part of Chris’ work is devoted to transcribing performances of certain types of Moroccan folk music, and Monday he hosted a group of Gnawa musicians at the house to perform a series of songs.
As Chris and a few Moroccans told me, Gnawa is rooted in West African music and primarily uses pentatonic scales, although more Arabic-sounding melodies with half-steps and microtonal vocal intonations evolved once the tradition reached Morocco. Monday’s performance featured three musicians, two who played iron castanet-like instruments called krakebs and one who played a three-stringed bass-like instrument called the hajhuj. The hajhuj player led the group through the songs, which often featured call-and-response passages.
Although the raw materials of the Gnawa music I heard were very straightforward – repetitive rhythmic grooves supporting tunes rooted in a simple melodic language – I was struck by the unpredictable phrasing. Rarely were lines repeated in a cookie-cutter manner, and most of the time there was little sense of antecedent-consequent relationships in the songs’ melodic framework. The music simply moved along from one piece of text to another, stabilized by the rhythmic drone of the krakebs.
Of course, I am no expert on this music and I dislike describing this music to you after so little contact with it. So, below is a link to a video of an earlier performance by this same Gnawa group. Note Abd ar-Rzaq, the ma’alem, or leader and the dual function of the hajhuj as a melodic and rhythmic part of the ensemble. The animal skin wrapped around the main body of the instrument not only helps it resonate, but also acts as a drumhead, which he taps from time to time.
Spring for Music, an annual festival of concerts by North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, was created in part to start a conversation about repertoire, about audience expectations, and about orchestral programming in general. To help continue this conversation, the festival is hosting a series of online events allowing participants to interact with members of the team in an open dialogue.
The first of these chats is today (Monday) at noon with composer Melinda Wagner. This is Melinda’s conversation starter:
“Composers do not work in a vacuum. Every kind of music we hear, old or new, ‘serious’, ‘popular’, colloquial or vernacular – every note is a part of our sound world, even those we don’t like very much. Embracing, even celebrating our influences while striving to create something personal- well, that is the challenge with every new piece. With something as incredible as Bach’s Brandenbergs, though, the challenges are much greater. I can we rid ourselves of any apprehension associated with ‘living up’ a composer of such great stature? How can we engage with the past without lapsing into parody and pastiche?”
Peter Lieberson’s record label, Bridge Records, has been kind enough to share some of his music with us: an excerpt from The Six Realms, for Cello and Orchestra (2000), one of his later and larger works and a piece that has an explicitly Buddhist programmatic element.
Here is movement 5, performed by cellist Michaela Fukacova, the Odense Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Justin Brown. The recording is from Bridge 9178, The Music of Peter Lieberson.
In addition to silk and other precious goods, the Silk Road helped disseminate Buddhism, one of its earliest, and most valuable, cultural exports. For almost thirty years, Peter Lieberson has been a devout Buddhist, having studied with the great Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master he met in 1974. Says Lieberson, “Buddhism’s appeal to me in the early 1970s was that it was not a religion in the conventional Western sense. Buddhism did not posit the existence of any external deity or savior or, for that matter, an individual personal ego…The basic message of the great Buddhist masters was: Be brave enough to experience existence without dogma or beliefs of any kind.” (more…)
We’re saddened to learn from David Starobinof the passing of composer Peter Liebersonin Israel, due to complications from Lymphoma. He had been battling the disease since 2006 and for a time it had been in remission. But in late 2010, Lieberson travelled to Israel to seek treatment for a recurrence of the cancer.
Lieberson’s music was an extraordinary mixture of disparate strands of influences. It encompassed an intuitive post-tonal vocabulary, rooted in dodecaphonic training but also capable of lush verticals and, particularly in his vocal music, supple lyricism and sweeping melodies. In later years, his interest in meditation and Zen Buddhism contributed another layer of resonances and an intriguingly metaphysical counterweight to some of the modernist tendencies of his oeuvre.
Among the many honors he attained was the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize, which he won in 2008 for Neruda Songs. Although he was a finalist for the award on multiple occasions, the Pulitzer Prize eluded him. Back in 2004, I suggested that this injustice made him the “Pulitzer’s Susan Lucci.”
Of course, during this sad time, one can’t help but think of the passing of Lieberson’s late wife, the extraordinary mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, also of cancer. Lieberson wrote a number of memorable pieces for her, including the aforementioned Neruda Songs. If there’s a signature example to use when we advocate for our government to continue to fund medical research, I’d offer this one up: two brilliant creators in the prime of life laid low so cruelly. Both had so much yet to offer. It’s a tragedy that we’re bereft of their artistry and humanity far too soon.
Yes, we’re still planning to have a Sequenza 21/MNMP concert in 2011 and it’s going to be excellent. We’re still finalizing the details, but should have an announcement soon.
Thanks for your continued patience (which is code for “entrants: stop calling and emailing us”).
Speaking of synthetists, how’s about Craig Wedren and ACME performing a song from On in Love (video below)?
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