Emerging from Elliott Carter’s “What Next?” for me paralleled uncannily the experience of the characters onstage, all of whom have just endured “some kind of accident” whose significance and impact, however powerful, remain baffling. Details from the libretto and the set design suggest a multi-car collision has occured, and, amid the wreckage, the victims intermittently soliloquize about their plight and attempt to comfort each other, though all — physically, at least — are unhurt. But an absurd, profound interpersonal disconnect ultimately predominates, and the opera ends with a pair of oddly fastidious road workers who, after they clear the debris, lead the accident victims to safety.

A post 9/11 work written a few years before the event itself, “What Next?” externalizes the “musical deeds” in Carter’s later music and reveals his emotional landscape to be one founded on catastrophe and alienation. The opera is a comedy, but not the sort that makes you laugh. And nor is the piece something to awaken audiences’ sympathies for the characters: “What Next?” throws all such reactions back onto listeners like light hitting a mirror. My pulse only quickened in the opera’s final measures, when the clamorous opening percussion sounds return (the “accident” sending us off) and a soprano’s lonely high note rises to the rafters. In these moments, the opera at last irretrievably sheds its pretentiousness, and it becomes clear that, while not a cuddly work, “What Next?” is art at its truest and deserves the long life its creator has enjoyed.

“What Next?” has two more performances at the Miller Theater. The libretto is by Paul Griffiths, and the performance and production are first rate.

The great American Musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock died early on Wednesday morning (December 5, 2007) after a long illness.  Hitchcock started his career in musicology studying French and Italian Baroque music, and then transitioned into American music, editing the New Grove Dictionary of American Music and a series of 11 textbooks (writing the volume on American music himself), and publishing extensively on Charles Ives.  He served as director of the American Musicological Society from 1990 to 1992, and spent most of his career teaching at Brooklyn College.

Frank Oteri interviewed him for NewMusicBox in 2002, and at the end of the interview he said:

Any music, if one gets interested in it, is worth taking very seriously, not only emotionally but intellectually and significantly as a part of life. It’s a matter of being interested in sound and music, and in the experiencing of sound as something other than a signal for action (like a siren, for instance). For me, no music that I can imagine is unworthy of attention. Whether it mandates attention by everyone is another matter.

I lovely sentiment.

Update: Kyle Gann eulogizes his friend Wiley here.

Don’t miss this piece in last Sunday’s LA Times about recording engineers for classical music.  As the author, Constance Meyer, says, popular music engineers and producers are often famous in their own right, but most people can’t name a single classical music engineer or producer.   “Yet just as in rock ‘n’ roll or hip-hop, the engineer for such music — who is often, though not always, the producer as well — is the person who makes or breaks an audio performance.”  Meyer goes on to profile Max Wilcox, Da-Hong Seetoo, Fred Vogler, and Armin Steiner, and to describe a bit of how the recording process works.

There’s even a modicum of disagreement.  Steiner talks about recording the Bach violin sonatas and partitas in 1956, and recals that Szigeti would record a small section “10 or 15 times or more. So they had all these bits and pieces. There were at least 100 reels of 1/4 -inch tape. I spent three or four months editing those for him.”

Wilcox, on the other hand, says “While you can eliminate mechanical imperfections, you can’t make someone an artist by making 400 splices. . . You can’t give a violinist a more beautiful tone or a better conception of the music or a better idea of the tempo. You can make it sound mechanically and technically solid, but all the things that make ‘music’ can’t be fabricated.”

These statments aren’t necessarily at odds, but do seem to indicate two different approaches to the process.  In fact, the cut and splice method requires a great deal of consistency, especially of tempo, in the source recordings.  Providing modular pieces that fit together into a coherent whole is its own kind of artistry, as is making those pieces fit in the studio.  Personally, I lean toward that strategy, but aiming for the consistency of long, uninterrupted takes has value too.

Our revivified Monday Evening Concerts opened its second season of its new life last night.  This was an evening of MEC as we had been hoping for.  The program gave us music we wanted:  stimulating and sometimes challenging music; some new composers and new music, along with some to link to earlier times; music performed by very talented musicians; music in a hall with good sound; music to make us feel glad we had come.  And almost 300 of us came out Zipper Hall at Colburn School to hear and enjoy.

The new and most challenging music was in the first half of the concert, with the first performances in Los Angeles of music by Horatio Radulescu with two works, one of which was a U.S. premiere and one a West Coast premiere.  His music seems to attract some of the least comprehensible writing I’ve tried to read in quite a while; his compositions seem to attract doctoral students writing to show off to other doctoral students, as demonstrated by the fifth paragraph in the site giving his bio.  Even an expert communicator like Paul Griffiths had his program notes get a little gnarly about Radulescu.  I thought I understood what Griffiths wrote, but I didn’t hear what he described about “Agnus Dei” (1991) for two violas, so I decided to just relax and drift with the music.  That was probably a good decision, for the second Radulescu work, “Das Andere” (1984), was enormously difficult to understand and probably even more difficult for the solo violist to play.  I didn’t understand the work at all, but I was dazzled by the sheer technique required, a non-stop combination of harmonics on the top two strings and low arpeggios on the low strings, interchanging and then mixing.  Weird and wonderful.  “Primitive Force”, indeed.  Vincent Royer was the outstanding performer.

Separating the two Radulescu works, and giving Royer a bit of a break, was Stravinsky’s “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas” which had its 1954 premiere in a Monday Evening Concert.  William Kraft led Jonathan Mack, the Calder Quartet and four trombones (two from the Phil) in a lovely performance.  In the context of last night’s program, Stravinsky’s first fully serial work sounded like an established, safe, unthreatening classic.

And then, Zenakis.  The second half was two works by Iannis Xenakis.  First, Steven Schick came up from San Diego to perform “Rebonds” (1989), and Schick made work for drums and woodblock a work of great musicality.  This music wasn’t “primitive” at all.  Then the program actually topped that performance, with a breath-taking performance of “Eonta” (1963-1964) for piano, two trumpets and three trombones.  Eric Huebner returned to L.A. for the knuckle-busting piano part, so brilliant that you almost (not quite) shut out the sound from the five brass players to listen to that astounding piano.  It was good to have Rand Steiger with us again to conduct and keep the pieces together.

Justin Urcis as managing director of the new Monday Evening Concerts should feel awfully good today.  As Mark Swed wrote last year, Justin has made this a rousing success, which is not to denigrate the contributions of many others.

It’s that time of year again when critics make lists.  The New York Times musical luminaries have made their choices which include, by the way, a couple of items on my list which I’ll be revealing in these very digital environs in due course.  First, however, I thought we should do a community list.  What were your favorite new music releases in 2007?  Oh, hell, let’s make it favorite live performances too.