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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Saturday afternoon, already. We’re half-way through this year’s Ojai Music Festival, and I need some time-shifter to slow things down. Today’s mid-day concert was superb. Dawn Upshaw, but that’s redundant. It was a lovely program. Each song, seemingly, gave her a different opportunity to tell a story. Anyone there could pick a different set of highlights. My own included a simple, beautiful song by Ruth Crawford Seeger of a lyric by Carl Sandburg, “White Moon”. But then an absolute highlight came with the last set: a French song by Kurt Weill and three cabaret songs by William Bolcom. For each of her two breaks, giving her friend and accompanist Gilbert Kalish a solo, Upshaw sat in a chair by the piano. Just watching her gave a lesson in performance secrets as she sat there, focused on the music, changing expression with the shadings of the music on the piano. Being in Ojai, hearing Dawn Upshaw. We have a lot to be thankful for.
The Festival began Thursday night with a Steve Reich retrospective: Eight Lines (1983), Nagoya Marimbas (1994), Four Organs (1970), and Daniel Variations (2006). Signal and So Percussion gave lovely performances, conducted by Brad Lubman. The audience enjoyed the treat. For Four Organs, this was the 35th anniversary of its first performance at Ojai. Having heard Daniel Variations performed by the Master Chorale in the Disney, it was a less powerful version outdoors at Ojai, with four singers instead of a chorus. There were slight gains in clarity of the words, but that probably depended on location of your seat. Still, I’ll keep my recording of the Master Chorale’s performance.
In the Friday night concert David Robertson gave us music for the theatre, music of humor and fun. The focus of the night was performance of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), complete with a live performance of Chaplin’s music for the film, as reconstructed. Great music? No, but it was fun to hear and see how his musical ideas could be used to support his film. And it was interesting to see how difficult it was to see his film transition between silent movies and the talkies, so that other than its background music, the film used recorded sound only in those instances when the sound was central to Chaplin’s idea. To me it was a long stretch, however.
The music was much more interesting in the first half which opened with George Antheil‘s A Jazz Symphony (1925, revised in 1955). This music was a surprise to me; it had wit, and charm, and sparkle; its musical ideas were interesting. (It helped that there was a good performance by a conductor and darn good orchestra that followed all of the jagged rhythms and changing meters, and that Gloria Cheng was here at Ojai for the crucial piano role.) I guess I’ll have to make a point of listening to some other music by Antheil; his music seems to deserve more than a footnote to the musical history of the 20s or of the Hollywood film.
The first half ended with another first for me, the performance of Francois Narboni’s El Gran Maturbador (2000) for orchestra and electronics. This is a complex set of elaborate interactions between sampled sound and acoustic instruments. I looked for a recording of this after the concert, to hear it again.
Friday’s seminar sessions gave us a triple treat. The morning was spent with The Master discussing the West Coast trends in music, from Charles Seeger to John Luther Adams. Then David Robertson discussed his three programs and Steve Reich closed the afternoon. Ara Guzelimian, as usual, was a skilled and sensitive moderator.
Thursday night was a reception honoring the newest classical music blogger in the West, Alan Rich. You’ll want to put this site in your bookmarks.
I move that the role of Al Gore be essayed by the entire La Scala Opera Chorus! Wait . . . no: Anna Netrebko–who wouldn’t drive a Prius for her? . . . No–I got it now: a dancer on stage who doesn’t sing! (ala Death in Venice) . . . hmm, but maybe that’s how “Global Warming” should be portrayed. Heck, I don’t know. But there better be a horse in this damn thing, ‘else I’m not going!
I always walk around with a guilty conscience. My inbox gets loaded all the time with press releases and so forth, and I’m a bit stingy about passing on the goods. Let’s give this another try by way of redemption.
SoCal’s S21 readers might want to check out RedBox, an experimental music series held the third Thursday of every month at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood. A bunch of groups with achingly hip names are performing this summer. Tickets are only $10.
Here’s a composition competition in Finland. Dust off your small orchestra piece and see if you can impress Magnus Lindberg (he’s on the jury). Deadline December 1st, so, as they do in Finland, you can chill for now. Rim shot.
Ronen Givony’s unstoppable Wordless Music series is all over the Whitney this month. Ingram Marshall, Chen-Yi, and Jefferson Friedman are all represented. How about you represent now, huh? Shout out to the tenacious Amanda Ameer…
Speaking of Friedman (who I pretend is much older than I am so it’s okay he’s so successful): the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is giving the Chicago premiere of his Sacred Heart: Explosion The piece is based on the outsider art of Henry Darger.
Question: whom do you have to know to become an “outsider” artist? Rim shot.
New ensemble alert: It’s called the MZJ Ensemble, presumably after this guy who founded it. He writes: “The medium-sized group (between a chamber ensemble and a full symphonic group) consists mostly of winds and brass, with some strings, and will perform my compositions as well as some arrangements of existing repertoire.”
And there’s fresh dirt at the CD Reviews and Composers Forum.
And Good Heavens!! C4 is performing Saturday night. Give it up, yo.
The Paul Bailey Ensemble is a self-described “alternative / classical garage band” busy these last few years in and around Los Angeles. Though Bailey (The bulky but sharp-looking fella in the center of the photo, surrounded by some of the PBE posse) gets naming rights and creates a large amount of the featured music, the ensemble performs works by a number of other like-minded composers, too — most living, a few dead guys as well. That “like-mind” is post-minimal, with equal parts 1980s minimalism, 1680s Purcell, and heavy doses of the rock-band riff factor (though there’s usually no drumkit in the ensemble, there’s almost always electric bass and guitar).
The way Bailey tells it, he’s …had an eclectic musical career since moving to Los Angeles from Wichita, Kansas in 1989. A trained classical and jazz trombonist, he started his career as a staff musician at Disneyland. In 1995, he resurrected the music program at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. During his tenure, the band won numerous awards and was recognized as one of the most outstanding music programs in the city of Los Angeles. He is now adjunct Professor of Music Education and Music Theory at California State University, Fullerton.
In 2005 Rex Reason interviewed Paul for the OC Weekly, and I can’t think of a better way to explain Bailey and his ensemble, than in few more of his own words:
OC Weekly : So you left Kansas to become a professional musician in California, and you ended up . . . at Disney. How was that?
Paul Bailey: It’s Disney. Anything anyone else has said? It’s true. I was trained to be a musician, I practiced very hard, and I got there, and I basically had to make farting noises on my trombone and play show tunes. At Disney, you don’t have a choice. We played the same 12 songs for four years.
OCW: Is that what drove you to become a teacher?
PB: Being a teacher is the only way I can be a composer and a musician and not have my soul taken out of me. Being paid to play trombone or being paid to write music, I have to worry about who’s going to pay me next. Now, in a sense, I have no filter. I can write whatever I want. It can be shitty, but at least it’s what I want.
OCW: So explain why you want to do what you do.
PB: I’m 36. Are people my age supposed to listen to pop music their whole lives? The whole music industry is set up to please a 17-year-old kid. I don’t mind listening to that stuff, but am I supposed to live my life through the eyes of a 17-year-old child?
OCW: But you told me earlier how much you like Weezer.
PB: I love Weezer. They’re one of my favorite bands, but it would be false of me to write pop songs or rock songs. Is rock and pop music the only way you can express yourself in today’s culture? If I had drums, we’d be a rock band. Right now, it’s very deliberate—I’m not a rock band, although I use rock instruments
OCW: So is this something closer to an orchestra?
PB: Fuck the orchestra. Let’s burn that puppy down and start over. The orchestra’s proper place is the museum. The idea you’re getting some cultural experience that’s going to make your life better and it’s going to expand your mind is total bullshit.
OCW: Then how do you reconcile the two forms?
PB: There’s the technical aspect where I can say, academically, we’re not modernist music. We believe in stuff that has the same chords as Weezer, the Beatles or Radiohead. I’m choosing to deal with music I grew up with and that interests me. But I don’t want to make people go through all these things to decide whether they like it or not. In this big piece I wrote, there might be a message, but the actual music takes very little to understand. You don’t need to listen to Michael Nyman or Steve Reich or Phillip Glass to listen to my music—although it’s based on them. You don’t need to have 20 years of musical history in your mind to listen to stuff I write.
The PBE website has more info, and lots of music to hear, watch, and purchase, so go/do/hear/buy. Their next performance is as part of the line-up for RealMusic 2008, kicking off at 7pm June 21st at Whittier College (on the way from LA to the big OC, yo…). Also on the bill are plenty of other like- and unlike-minds, like Steve Moshier’s Liquid Skin Ensemble, John Marr/Brother Mallard, Susan Asbjornson, Brian Kehlenbach and Melody Versoza. All this for not more than a ten and a little gas money, what could be better?
The last concert of the season for the Phil closed with roars of applause and approval for Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s Piano Concerto, given its premiere last year by the New York Philharmonic. Listening to the broadcast of that performance was only a weak preparation for what we heard and felt yesterday. It seemed as if the whole audience was, like me, swept up and carried away by the music. And what a performance it was! The concert was recorded by DG, for which we are grateful, and I’ll download it on release. Yefim Bronfman was the soloist, as he has been in all prior performances. The orchestra was at their best.
In this work Salonen’s compositional styles seem to have taken a new step in evolution. Who would have imagined that this seemingly-cool, calm, analytical Finn would become such an emotional composer? The music is very busy, with many lines and rhythms, but it has an emotional sweep and surge that I haven’t heard in earlier music. “Wing on Wing” for instance doesn’t really make you feel you’re on the boat with its spinnaker and mainsail extended into the wind; it’s a nice picture, but you aren’t caught up by it. The music of the concerto catches you, gives you no time to think, and moves you into its world. I don’t know what to call the style. “Neo-romantic” isn’t quite right. “Neo-emotional” isn’t right. Maybe “contemporary” will just have to do for a while. The music seems right and very much for today. Salonen wrote some really excellent program notes.
The rest of the program ending with the concerto comprised to pieces of today looking back at yesterday. The concert began with the West Coast premiere of Colin Matthews‘ orchestration (and adaptation) of four Debussy preludes for piano; this was followed by a Matthews “Postlude” in which he tried to create a sound portrait of Debussy. This was a decent job of orchestration, except for the fact that his reinterpretation of “The Girl with Flaxen Hair” was too different from my memory, and I didn’t like that change.
Then the orchestra, the Master Chorale and four soloists gave the world premiere of Steven Stucky‘s orchestration of “Les noces”. I thought it was interesting, but not wholly successful in its result. Stucky’s program notes state that he was careful not to try to create a new sound as Stravinsky might have imagined. Perhaps he was too respectful to have the result more than “interesting”. The Stucky orchestration lets you hear the internals of the work more easily than is the case with the density of the four pianos in Stravinsky’s definitive fifth version of the work, but in performance I missed the verve and spark of that version. Perhaps I would have liked the result more if Stucky had gone back to an earlier Stravinsky idea of pitting two string quartets, one playing only pizzicato. Stucky’s notes say that the idea came from Salonen, looking for a work to share a program with “Rite of Spring”. That might have worked out differently for me.
Thursday is the start of the Ojai Music Festival. Prior to the concert there will be a special gathering of bloggers, sponsored by the Festival, and Alan Rich will be honored and welcomed into the blogging world. Now that my schedule is back to enabling me to write about my hobby, I’ll be there.
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
Think you’re too cool for Facebook?
Not any more you’re not.
S21 has put the freeze on the Internet’s leading social networking site. Get over there and join the Sequenza21 Facebook Group! Members will get a taste of the awesome powers at hand to those on the inside of S21. Oh yeah! AWEsome powers.
C’mon. You know you wanna.
(AWESOME!)
All right, back to interval cycles and Kurtag. Sigh.
For the past couple of hundred years, David Felder has been running June in Buffalo, the venerable annual music festival that traces its history back to Morton Feldman. Having recently suffered through ‘Savages,’ a small but brutally great film about old people with Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman set in Buffalo, I have to think that the festival is only justifiable reason to ever set foot there.
This year’s festival is set for June 2-7 and this is one of those year’s when the festival departs from its usual format and explores an overarching theme. This is “Music and Computers” year, drawing in some of the world’s most illustrious and innovative composers, researchers, and teachers of algorithmic, interactive, multimedia, acousmatic, and electroacoustic computer music. Headlining the conference are senior faculty Charles Dodge, Cort Lippe, Roberto Morales, Miller Puckette, Morton Subotnick, Ben Thigpen, and Hans Tutschku, a diverse and international group of composers and pedagogues.
David Felder, currently Birge-Cary Professor of Composition at University of Buffalo, and Director of the Center for 21st Century Music, as well as Founder and Artistic Director of the Slee Sinfonietta, has actually presided as artistic director of June in Buffalo since 1985 (you didn’t really think it was a couple of hundred years, did you), when he resurrected the festival after a five-year hiatus. He has since reshaped the festival, emphasizing the importance of meaningful interaction between the senior composers and students.
This summer’s resident ensembles and soloists include some of the world’s leading performers of contemporary and computer music: the Ensemble for Intuitive Music, a German ensemble founded in 1980 in what was then East Germany for the performance of music considered taboo by the Communist government; members of Germany’s acclaimed experimental chamber music group Ensemble SurPlus; members of the widely-renowned New York New Music Ensemble; and UB’s own professional chamber orchestra-in-residence, the Slee Sinfonietta. Other distinguished performers will include bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, the Paris-based early music and new music specialist, and the Swedish classical guitarist and new music pioneer Magnus Andersson.
Joining the faculty and performers will be composition students from around the world, who must first pass through JiB’s fiercely competitive application process (last year there were 100 applicants for 20 spots.) June in Buffalo offers these students the rare opportunity to work and mix with top musicians and world-class faculty in an intimate and casual environment. Under the direction of Felder, more emphasis is now placed on providing opportunities for these emerging composers. For example, each gets to rehearse one of his or her pieces with world-class musicians in a professional setting, resulting in a public performance.
The round-the-clock festival schedule consists of daily seminars, lectures, master classes, panel discussions, and open rehearsals-capped by first-rate afternoon and evening concerts that are open to the public. Every seminar and concert since the Feldman days of ’75 has been recorded, and remains in the UB library’s extensive archives.
If you’re in the neighborhood, pounce. Send me a postcard if you go.
We take so much for granted – the sun will go down , the sun will come up – that we never seem to realize that some day it won’t be there or we won’t be here to see it. Same thing is true of friends you could always count on. So when I got an e-mail from my composer-conductor friend Gerhard Samuel’s companion, Achim Nicklis, that Gerhard had passed away a few weeks ago, I was shocked. Sure, I sensed he wasn’t well – repeated e-mails saying he’d changed his address indicated as much. – but the sad fact remains. He’s not here anymore.
One comes to know a person through what they say, or don’t say, do, or don’t do, and if that person’s an artist one gets to know them through their work. I first encountered Gary’s music when I was driving my sister Kathi’s car in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, and was so moved when I heard the La Salle Quartet perform his String Quartet # 1 (1978) on the radio, that I stopped the car until it was over. But isn’t that what art’s supposed to do, and isn’t its awareness meant to make us more aware?
Other pieces had just as much impact. There was his original and very touching “gloss ” on Mondeverdi, Looking at Orpheus Looking (1971), which he wrote for the Oakland Symphony when he was its extra innovative music director, Requiem for Survivors and suddenly it’s evening (1974), which he composed as a memorial piece for his Oakland successor, Calvin Simmons, when he was Mehta’s assistant conductor at the LA Philharmonic; the chamber piece, Nocturne on an Impossible Dream (1980), which he wrote with his mother in mind; the 1998 chamber work with tenor and saxophone solo, Hyacinth From Apollo, to a poem by his frequent collaborator, Jack Larson, who was the original TV Jimmy Olsen; and the 1994 Transformations for chamber string orchestra and solo violin. And though these were all completely different in style and expressive intent, they couldn’t have been more of a piece with who Gerhard was – passionate, charming as all get out, refined, yet always full of surprises.
Like that September evening in 1998 – the 19th, to be precise – when Tony Gualtieri and I presented him on KUSF-FM’s 3-hour Classical Salon, and he, during the time his music was playing, seemed completely at sea, and I said “ Don’t worry, “ as Tony looked across the room at us from “ Studio A”, to our perch at the little table which was “Studio B”, and then when our mikes went on rose to the occasion like the pro he always was. Which reminds me of a story he told me of what happened when he was conducting one of the Stravinsky ballets. The composer was backstage, hand cupped to his ear, listening intently as his wife, Vera, said “Why’s he doing that? He’s heard it a million times!” And Gerhard said “ Because he wants to hear it again!” which was a lot like him too– completely in the present, where everything is.