Sequenza21

Congratulations to our pal Alex Ross, one of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows. There were three other music-related “Genius Grants,” as they’re more commonly called, for 2008:
Violinist Leila Josefowicz, instrument maker and composer Walter Kitundu, and saxophonist Miguel Zenón.

According to the MacArthur Foundation website “There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.” Prospective fellows are nominated anonymously by a group of Nominators, and are selected by an anonymous Selection Committee.

It’s my pleasure to pass on a terrific piece, written for S21, by Daniel Levitin.  In addition to teaching at McGill University and being a real mensch, Levitin is the best-selling author of “This is Your Brain on Music,” which I personally recommend to all.  Below,  he gives us a look at his new book “The World in Six Songs:  How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.”   — David Salvage

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It is unlikely that either language or music were invented by a single innovator or at a single place and time; rather, they were shaped by a large number of refinements, contributed to by legions of developers over many millenia and throughout all parts of the world. And they were no doubt crafted upon structures and abilities that we already had, structures we inherited genetically from proto-humans and our non-human animal ancestors.  It’s true that human language is qualitatively different from any animal language, specifically in that it is generative (we can combine elements to create an unlimited number of utterances) and self-referential (we can use language to talk about language).  The evolution of a single brain mechanism – probably located in the pre-frontal cortex – created a common mode of thought that underlies both the development of language and of art. I describe this in my new book The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.

One of the things that humans are good at and animals are not is encoding relations.  We can easily learn the idea of something being bigger than another.  If I ask even a five-year old to select the larger of three blocks in front of her, she will do this effortlessly.  If I then bring in a new block that is twice the size of the one she just selected, she can shift her thinking, and choose that when I reask the question.  A five-year old understands this. No dog can do this, and only some primates.  This understanding of relations turns out to be fundamental for music appreciation; it is a cornerstone of all human musical systems.  It permits us to recognize Happy Birthday as the same song regardless of what key it is sung in.  It is also the basis of composition in nearly every musical style we know of.  Take the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth.  We hear three notes of the same pitch and duration, followed by a longer note at a lower pitch.  Beethoven takes this pattern and moves it lower in the scale, so that the next four notes follow the same contour and rhythm.  Our ability to recognize that this pattern is essentially the same, even though none of the notes are the same, is relational processing. 

These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, art and even science.  Music may have played an important role in allowing us to communicate before there was language, and in forming a mental exercise that was fundamental to being able to manipulate objects in the real world.  The available evidence is that music has been with our species from the very beginning, shaping social bonds, social systems, cooperative work projects, and the transmission of knowledge.  Our current love of music is deeply rooted in evolutionary biology – our brain responds favorably to music because those of our ancestors who had musical brains found themselves at a distinct survival advantage.

REDCAT, the CalArts outpost in Walt Disney Concert Hall, opened its fifth season last night with the first of two programs in a renewal of the Creative Music Festival. Wadada Leo Smith was curator of the festival once again; he chose and assembled creators for two programs: “Music and the Voice” (last night) and “Music and Video” (tonight, but we already had tickets for Howard Shore’s “The Fly”). Smith opened the festival conducting the premiere of a new Smith work, “Central Park”, written for scat-singing baritone, with piano, string quartet, trumpet, clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, and percussion. Thomas Buckner was just right for the baritone instrumentalist; the whole ensemble seemed as if they had been playing together, with Smith’s music, for months instead of being a festival assembly of CalArts mainstays and New York performers.

Wadada Leo Smith has a philosophy from which he composes. From our seats we could see both the piano score and the conducting score Smith used. This view made it clear how much improvisation went into the performance, and how much advance thought and consideration had preceded the improvising. A page of Smith’s conducting score, for example, had four rectangles and looked rather like a top-level conceptual diagram of a complex computer system. This page of the score covered three or four minutes of ensemble work and solos; during the period Smith might stop conducting and just listen before using his hands to regain the attention of the musicians before setting the beat and cuing the entrances for the next step in the evolution. Smith has developed a notation system called “Ankhrasmation”; he summarizes it here, but look at the symbolic example he provides on the page; the piano score had two or three pages with a symbol on the page.

I liked Smith’s “Central Park”. I think Charles Ives would have liked it as well. The works are very different, but both present a kaleidoscope of sound. The two would make an interesting match on a program.

From that high point, the festival moved higher, with a set of works by Anthony Davis, currently one of the musical stars at UCSD. Davis had reassembled his group “Episteme”; the current version comprises J.D. Parran on clarinet and contr-alto clarinet, Earl Howard on alto sax and on synthesizer, his UCSD colleague Mark Dresser on bass, and Davis himself on piano. They opened with an emsemble work “Of Blues and Dreams”, which made me think of an evolution that Modern Jazz Quartet might have taken. For the theme of “Music and the Voice” they were joined by son Jonah Davis in “Malcolm Little’s Aria” from X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and by wife Cynthia Aaronson-Davis who sang the art song “Lost Moon Sisters” to the poem “Ave” by Diane Di Prima. A variation on the “Voice” theme was taken by two other works. “Goddess Variations” was a set of elaborations from a theme in his opera “Amistad”, a real showpiece for the Tatum-like fingers of Davis as pianist. The concluding work was a showpiece for Parran on clarinet, the second movement (“Loss”) from Davis’ clarinet concerto titled You Have the Right to Remain Silent. I want to hear the whole thing!

The second half of the program stepped back to the merely pleasant with Amina Claudine Myers and her trio, joined by a choir of 14 from CalArts. In “Manhattan” the trio provided solid framework as the members of the choir gave a series of scat singing solo riffs; some of the improvisations were really good. Two other works gave the choir the solo opportunities associated with African-American church enthusiasms. To me the really good solos didn’t compensate for the length and repitiveness in an evening that ran over three hours. But it couldn’t spoil the accomplishments of the evening.

I had been disappointed in what seemed to be the limited scope of last season’s music series at CalArts. But this season really looks great!

1931-2008. Ouch.

Here’s a nice appreciation from Gramophone.

This is the score for “Piece in the Shape of a Square” spread out across the stage at the Players Theatre. Tonight in Manhattan at 8:00 PM we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the birth of Minimalism with a concert of Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase,” two “Piano Pieces” by the obscure but great Terry Jennings, Terry Riley’s “In C,” and this piece by Philip Glass.

The Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal Street, Greenwich VIllage, Manhattan. Tickets are $20 ($15 with Student ID). Be there or be a person in the shape of a square.

1938 was the beginning of a very rough patch for Europe but–as it turns out–it was a great year for the future of American music. Several of America’s most influential living composers were born in the early dawn of World War II, including John Corigliano, Joan Tower, Frederic Rzewski, Charles Wuorinen, William Bolcom, and John Harbison. The serendipity of that bountiful year has not gone unnoticed as a couple of new recordings and numerous 70th birthday bashes will attest.

The most satisfying of these celebrations of the Class of ’38 to cross our path is pianist Blair McMillen’s revelatory Centaur release multiplicities: ’38: Music by Composers born in 1938. Multiplicities is exactly the right word in this case, because the composers represented here may have been born in the same year but, stylistically, they come from different planets. The cool and polite elegance of Corigliano and the cosmopolitan eclecticism of Bolson are as far removed from the populist Americana of Tower and Rzewski as they are from the gnarly serialism of Wuorinen.

And, of course, there is John Harbison, the pick of the 1938 litter IMHO (as the kids like to say), who has spectacularly succeeded at his own stated aesthetic intent: “…to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent tradition.”

Blair McMillen is one of three or four great young pianists who specialize in new music and if you throw in the caveat “has an uncanny feeling for the composer’s intent,” he may well stand alone. The quality of his playing on multiplicities: ’38 is consistently extraordinary but just as remarkable is the way he perfectly captures the individual “voice” of each of these highly diverse composers. We are accustomed to hearing most of them in larger settings but here, stripped down to a single piano (or in the case Corigliano’s Chiraoscuro two pianos tuned ¼ tone apart), the dazzling range of the Class of ‘38’s compositional talents becomes manifest. For his uncanny ability to contrast and compare music of enormous diversity, we owe McMillen a debt.

And don’t forget Monday night at Merkin Hall when the Da Capo Chamber Players, for whom McMillen is pianist, presents a 70^th birthday portrait of Joan Tower. Tower was an original founder of Da Capo and its pianist for 15 years.