Not only is it hard to describe Benedict Mason’s Meld, which was given it’s first performance on the late night Prom given by the Aurora Orchestra and the choral group Chantage, conducted by Nicholas Collon, on August 16, it’s hard even beginning to think about how to describe it. All of the advance notices of the concert were particularly, and unusually, vague about the details of the work, and even the program claimed to be not at liberty to divulge much information about it. In the concert itself, which began with the Mozart 40th Symphony (played from memory) and also included Dobrinka Tabakova’s Spinning a Yarn, a short and very attractive piece for violin and hurdy-gurdy, played (also from memory) from the organ loft by Alexandra Wood and Stevie Wishart, the fact that something was up was indicated by the emptiness of the arena and gallery of the Albert Hall, the domain of the promenaders. One noticed a number of people who are continually there as promenaders in very good seats in the stalls.

Once it was underway it was clear that Meld was going to use all of the Albert Hall, up, down, inside, and out. It began with a mysterious and halting throbbing music coming from some place outside of the hall which turned into a march for a parade of players across the gallery at the top of the hall. Suddenly there were four bass players in the lower tier of boxes, echoing a group of ‘cellos and basses in the gallery, and then, suddenly without one having noticed their getting there at all, the entire upper tier of boxes was filled with pairs of players and singers, who sent volleys of pizzicato notes ricocheting around the hall, succeeded by skittering and scurrying flurries of notes. After a period of time when different kinds of groups with different instrumentation would seem to simply appear in lots of different places, a bevy of horns started moving over the arena area and the stage, and eventually through the audience, followed by other people, playing various percussion instruments, sometimes moving very fast, pursuing, as the poet says, urgent voluntary errands. Then there were some small groups of players in the arena, seemingly menaced (I’m not sure if there’s another word for it) by one or two people wearing some kind of stoles of clacking blocks. The sequence of events is somewhat hazy in the memory, although the events themselves were striking and memorable. During all of this, the music–the actual notes being played–which had a fairly high level of complexity, was always full of detail and held one’s interest.

After a while the delight and excitement about what would happen next began to ebb somewhat, but not so much that anything ever got, for lack of a better word, boring. I found myself, though, wondering about what the shape of the piece being presented in this all enveloping environment and its structural argument might be. I was reminded of a place in the final scene of The Years by Virginia Woolf where one of the characters asks herself whether, if one could get far enough above life, one might be able to see a pattern in it. After a while longer I found myself thinking of another Woolf and wondering if Meld wasn’t a pageant, in some ways like the pageant in Between the Acts, including in its outlining some kind of (unspecified–in the case of the Mason) loosely historical progression. Pageants are a series of more or less static and not necessarily closely connected tableaux whose larger scale succession, thematic in some way, but not plot based, rather than the immediate flow of the individual moments give the work’s structure and continuity. At some points in Meld we seemed to be in fact offered some kind of excerpts of a pageant, in the bit with the clacking stoles, and also in a segment where most of the chorus and some players coalesced in the arena, first rolling balls of some kind and appearing to play some kind of game (cricket?), then formed several small groups doing what appeared to be some kind of folk dancing, and then made one big ring around the perimeter, before forming two groups that then sat for a few moments in seats in opposite sides of the stalls, muttering. At a certain point one began to wonder when and how it was all going to end, and eventually it did, but I can’t remember how, although I think it was more with a whimper than a bang.

There was never any point in this almost hour long work which was not engaging or at which the material, musical or otherwise, seemed anything less than first class. The performance, by 93 players and 49 singers, was astounding–completely committed and assured. They were playing without music, although everybody seemed to have receivers and earphones, and some of them seemed to be wearing cameras, so its hard to know exactly what information they were getting from that. The program listed a person responsible for staging and choreography (Mason), a movement director (Chris Tutor), and two people who did a click-track (Felix Bastian Dreher and Griff Hewis). The work involved in planning and executing the whole effort must have been mammoth, and it was brilliantly accomplished.

The recording of this Prom is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dqbhv.

For sixteen years now the BBC, as one of its many activities connected with the Proms, has run a program which it calls Inspire, comprising of a competition and several workshops for composers between the ages of 12 and 18. On this last Sunday, composer Fraser Trainer, who chaired the committee of judges for the competition, led a workshop for about two dozen young composers whose activities were related to the works on that night’s Prom, which was presented by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Trainer was joined by six artist instrumentalists, violinist Anna Smith, saxophone player Simon Haram, double bass player Ben Markland, trumpeter Bruce Nockles, percussionist Hugh Wilkinson, and flutist Rosanna Ter-Berg, who began the day as colleagues of the participants and by the end of the day were performers of works that had been written for them in the afternoon. The day began with the whole group, extemporaneously working out elements of a short piece which they performed with clapping, stomping, and finger snapping, followed by smaller groups, this time using instruments, devising works more specifically focused. In the afternoon each of the composer wrote a short duo for some combination of the artists performers which were read at the end of the day. The level of musical sophistication of the participants was impressive, as was the quality of music played at the end of the day, which they had produced in very little time. There are two other workshops to follow focused on electo-acoustic music and popular music arranging, each also connected to a Proms concert. There is also a concert of the competition winners on the August 20.

In the time between the two sessions of the Inspire day, at King’s Place, at another end of central London, Jane Manning was conducting another kind of workshop, billed as Jane’s Contemporary Clinic, as part of the annual festival of Tete a Tete Opera Festival, during the course of which she sight read excerpts of operatic and vocal works which had been submitted that morning. She was assisted by the composer and pianist James Young. Manning read music of fearsome complexity both of pitch and of rhythm with the unflappable ease and performance-ready accuracy of someone who regularly does six impossible things before breakfast, offering comments of great intelligence, insight, and common sense with down-to-earth simplicity, and displaying a simply astounding technical command and beauty of sound.

That night the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Edward Gardner, presented a concert including Petrushka by Stravinsky (in the original version) and the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra, which along with Sonance Severance 2000 by Harrision Birtwistle, some of whose compositional issues had provided the focus for the earlier Inspire workshop. The orchestra, as many youth orchestras tend to be, was enormous, and seemed to have twice as many of everything as scores called for. The sound they made was large and rich and beautiful and in the final tableau of the Stravinsky was enough to bring tears of joy (which the music does anyway). The number of players, though, was no impediment to realizing either the accuracy of the playing or the intricacy or clarity of ensemble work.

There must have been a good reason for putting the Birtwistle piece at the beginning of the second half of the concert, rather than at the very beginning where it belonged, but it’s not clear what it might be. Commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for the reopening of their home, Severance Hall in January of 2000, it is a three minute elaborate flourish, conceived of by Birtwistle as a sort of call to arms, or sonance, for consisting of a series of waves of sound welling up through the orchestra, with abrupt halts (or severance) of the sound, most especially at the very end, where after a big crash, prolonged by a tam-tam, is followed by a four note trumpet call.

The Lutoslawski, written in the earlier years Poland’s post war communist government and in the wake of the banning of his First Symphony on the grounds of its ‘formalism,’ is an imposing bravura display piece, both for the orchestra and the composer, steeped in Polish folk music and clearly modeled after the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. It has a structure of considerable intricacy, so one wonders if it was merely the folky melodic qualities that kept it from being declared formalistic. Earlier in the concert the orchestra was joined with Louis Schwizgebel in a performance of the Prokfiev First Piano Concerto.

Earlier in the week another Youth Orchestra, the European Union Youth Orchestra, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, persented a concert consisting of the Berio Sinfonia and the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony. This orchestra is a very fine group and has a very high technical level. One couldn’t fault their playing at all. However the performance of the Berio was a great disappointment. The Berio is undoubtedly the archetypal 60s piece and is a sort of rock star among pieces, and, for me, at least, its quality and glamor and importance and breath-taking beauty are undiminished. This performance has several aspects which mitigated its full effect, though. First of all the amplification of the voices was too high. The idea seemed to be to try to make all the words audible all of the time, as opposed to the voices being a part of the general texture with occasional words and phrases coming through to the surface. In the second movement, the jabbed notes were not sufficiently loud enough and different enough from the rest of the music to make the texture clear, so its effect was of a certain aimlessness. The performance of the third movement, on its immediate surface didn’t have the swing and liveliness that one would hope for in a performance of the Mahler which is its shell. On top of the there was the balance problem with the voices, and there seemed to be no recognition of, and certainly no attempt to bring out, the various quotations that flow through it. So basically what one got was a sort of not terribly energetic, not terrible well differentiated mush. The Shostakovich, which is a much more traditional piece, got a more satisfactory performance, but still lacked the clarity of texture and desperate life and death intensity of dynamics and general affect to make it really memorable. In all of this the level of playing was never anything other than first rate. I think the fault was in our Petrenko.

The Proms concerts are available for listening at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b043b491/clips

A reminder of the muscular, haunting style of Peter Schulthorpe, who passed away a couple of days ago.

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?

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…)

Like everybody else, I was stunned to hear that Lee Hyla had died. I first met Lee in the spring of 1973; I was a senior at New England Conservatory and he was a freshman, I think. That year he was studying with my teacher, Malcolm Peyton, but the previous year he had been a special student and studied with John Heiss. During that earlier year he was taking piano lessons with Irma Wolpe, who I also studied with. My recollections of her are that she was the second most unpleasant person I ever met in my life, but Lee got along well with her. She had a way of stopping you just as soon as you touched the piano and telling you what you’d done wrong, which I found completely maddening and disabling–the one thing I learned from her–through negative example–was to let people play through things before starting to talk to them about what they did. Lee didn’t have that problem with her. He said that the first piece he played in his first lesson was the Webern Variations. He had play the first dyad when she stopped him, but he just turned around to her and said “Wait. There’s More.” She let him play through the whole piece then and never stopped him before he’d finished playing through a piece after that. Mike (aka Conrad) Pope and I ran a concert series of new music at the Museum of Fine Arts, and we included a piece of Lee’s, White Man on Snow Shoes, on one of our concerts. Over that year I got to know Lee, and he introduced me to Monty Python (via their first record, Another Monty Python Record–which was responsible for making a connection in my mind between “Mary, Queen of Scots” and the first movement break in the Carter first quartet), Cecil Taylor, Duke Ellington, and Captain Beefheart, so he was a major contributor to my education. I saw Lee all the time before he moved to New York, but after that saw less of him. When he moved back to Boston, to teach at NEC, he was on a higher level than me, and the relationship became more complicated.

In Virgil Thomson’s autobiography, he wrote about his encounter with the Copland Organ Symphony: “Nadia Boulanger came to American that year for giving organ recitals and some lectures. In New York and in Boston she played the solo organ part in Aaron Copland’s First Symphony, a work composed especially for her. When she asked me how I liked it, I replied that I had wept. ‘But the important thing,’ she said, ‘is why you wept.’ ‘Because I had not written it myself,’ I answered.

I have only felt that way when first hearing a piece by somebody who was more or less my age twice. One of those times was when I first heard Lee’s Third Quartet.