Sequenza21

Sequenza21 is pleased to scoop the rest of the world wide web and announce the most exciting news of the day in the world of new music.

On December 4 and 5, the Lost Dog Ensemble, in residence with the Astoria Music Society, will be playing a concert of . . . works by Sequenza21 composers!! The December 4 concert will be in Astoria at the very hip Waltz-Astoria Café, and the following night we’ll be at the Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (right by Lincoln Center –– an institution that will certainly be feeling a little bashful that night).

Okay. Now here’s the good part.

THIS IS A CALL FOR SCORES!!!

The regulations are a bit tighter this time, so read closely, y’all:

• Submissions are limited to the following instruments: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.
• Pieces using subsets of this ensemble are especially encouraged, though don’t be afraid to send us your Pierrot piece if you think it’s your best.
• Solo pieces are also acceptable.
• Pieces should be a maximum of 12 minutes long, One submission per composer.
• As for electronics, talk to us about the requirements, and we’ll let you know if they’re feasible.

Next, let’s be clear about something: we’re mostly interested in composers who actually blog here or who actually take part in the threads. Now, if you’ve never made your voice heard on S21 and you really want to send a piece, that’s fine. But others who have posted will be ahead of you in line.

Postmark deadline: July 16^th. So time’s a little tighter this time, too. But we have our reasons, friends.

To submit: send me an email (my address is down in the credits bar to the left), and I’ll send you the address.

Anthony Braxton has released a nine-CD anthology of his piano music on Leo Records. Performed by Geneviève Foccroulle, the boxed set includes all of the prolific composer’s piano music written from 1968-2000. The set includes detailed liner notes by Stuart Broomer, featuring an interview with Braxton, and a separate booklet with the libretto and performing directions for his Composition 171, a lengthy work for pianist, actors, prompters, and “constructed environment.”

Ranging from Braxton’s Composition 1, a modernist offering in the post-Webernian vein, to Composition171’s complex narrative and theatricality, this is an excellent overview of Braxton’s evolving aesthetic and questing character, presented with sincerity and impressive facility by Foccroulle. In an era in which record companies are, by and large, shying away from such projects, kudos to Leo Feigin for supporting this ambitious endeavor.

http://www.leorecords.com/?m=select&id=CD_LR_901/909

Eliot was wrong; May is the cruelest month, at least here in the Center of Universe this particular year.  Lingering winter infirmities, a miserable San Francisco spring and, of course, the mixed blessing of having passed that peculiar threshold where one becomes officially old.  I am now a card carrying member of the Medicare set; I am invisible to young women; the next fishing license I buy will not expire until I do.  When I was younger–which seems about 20 minutes ago–I subscribed to that great philosopher Neil Young’s credo:  “It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.”  Now, I’m thinking rusting has a certain appeal; it works for Richard Serra.  Fair warning to all; I plan to be a rage, don’t whine kind of old person.

You know who I think is underrated?  Terry Riley.  A lot of people think of him as a one-hit wonder but I’ve been listening to a lot of his stuff lately and it brings me great pleasure.

 I was at the Matrix Music Collaborators’ season finale concert on May 5^th, and while the whole concert was good the highlight was the last piece on the program: “Girltalk” by young South African composer Braam du Toit. It’s a lush, gorgeous, and sometimes surprising postminimalist meditation/groove which manages to be still and restrained while simultaneously pregnant with occasionally relieved dramatic tension. It was one of the best new pieces I’ve heard in months.

The piece was composed for two pianos, two string quartets, and bass—the pianists were South African duo pianists Cara Hesse and Laura Pauna (friends of du Toit’s from music school), and the string section was headed up by Matrix violinist Yuri Namkung and consisted of other South African players and local friends of Matrix. Musically, it’s constructed out of a series of five movements related through similar motifs and harmonic moves, with much of the harmony coming out of pop progressions. And then, in the very last moments of the piece, it gives away the game and briefly quotes Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” I asked Braam (via e-mail, as unfortunately he was unable to be at the concert) how that quote related to the rest of the piece, and he explained that the earlier material is designed to be similar to the Lauper tune without ever being a direct quote. He describes the whole piece as theatrical and filmic, and says that it’s also a character study of pianists Laura and Cara. He talks about how when they were in school together he used to stand outside the door of their practice room and listening to both their verbal and musical communication, and that he used that as an inspiration for the structure of this piece, with its motif trading and sense of play.

Having heard “Girltalk,” I wanted to know more about the composer. Born in 1981, Braam grew up in Swellendam, near Cape Town, South Africa. He studied composition with Peter Klatzow at the University of Cape Town, and in 2001 he won the Priaulx Ranier Award for composition. He has worked extensively in theater, writing music for more than 20 theater, dance, and film projects. He cites John Tavener, Hildegard von Bingen, Michael Nyman, Meredith Monk, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, and Steve Martland among his main influences.

Braam doesn’t have a website, but he was kind enough to send me some MP3s of his other work. It’s all good, although “Girltalk” is the masterpiece among the pieces I’ve heard. All of the work he sent me was short—no movement longer than three and a half minues, and most pieces are slow, lush, and atmospheric. Their miniature-like nature put me in mind of William Duckworth’s “Time Curve Preludes.” His dramatic intensity tends to come not from fast and aggressive music but rather from changes in dynamics that bring out a dark edge from material that started out as merely melancholy and meditative. In the second movement of his piece “Tripsongs” (for string quartet, I believe), for example, a violin cycles through a simple fourteen note cell, and gradually the other instruments enter cycling through a swelling chord progression. About two thirds of the way through, the cello starts grinding out the bass line and the mood shifts, becoming almost menacing. But then almost as soon as it began, the intensity subsides and the piece is over. These same structural elements were apparent in “Girltalk” as well; most of the movements could have gone on longer, but Braam errs on the side of restraint. And with so many composers writing long, self-indulgent pieces that run good ideas into the ground, it’s refreshing to be left wanting more.

Speaking of wanting more, as I mentioned Braam has no website to which I can direct you. He will, however, be writing a new piece for next year’s Matrix Music Collaborators season. I’m looking forward to it.

Ralph van Raat’s wonderul Naxos recording of The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (Naxos 8559360) has been getting some great press lately but (you know how cranky you folks are) some people have complained that the CD didn’t contain the timings for the variations.   Take heart, gentle listener, all is revealed here.

My dear late best friend Danny Cariaga, classical music critic extraordinaire of the Los Angeles Times, once observed that people went to Wagner’s operas when they were new because they had more time. But now, with the onslaught of e-mails, IMs, cells with text messaging, to say nothing of headsets, call waiting, call forwarding, numeric pagers and the like, time seems fractured beyond repair. Are we really that far gone? And if so how can we get back to the unalterable truths of life, like love and death?

These questions came to mind when I caught The Met’s penultimate performance of Philip Glass’ 1979 opera Satyagraha on Monday 28th April. One of its subjects is time itself, and Glass’ mature music has always played with our perceptions of it. How long is short, and how short is long? Glass’ exquisite and utterly involving 3-act meditation on Gandhi – its subtitle is “M.K. Gandhi in South Africa (1893 – 1914)” – shows how he transformed himself from an ordinary barrister thrown off a train into one of the most seminal spiritual and political figures of the last century whose ideas continue to reverberate. A tall order, for sure, but one that co-director designers Phelim McDermott and Juilan Crouch’s Improbable Theatre made incredibly vivid and tremendously moving.

Glass and his scenarist Constance De Jong, assembled their libretto from the Hindu holy book The Bhagavad-Gita (“Song of the Lord“), and the verses they culled from it pinpoint what Satyagraha is really about — self-mastery in the service of spiritual growth. Gandhi developed his non-violent passive resistance movement, satyagraha — it roughly translates as “truth force”, or even “the force of love” –during his work in South Africa, which Glass’ opera dramatizes in seven highly allusive and mysterious scenes. The composer cites his absorption in the Khatikali theatre of Kerala , South India, and the extended and abruptly short mosaic-like approaches in Brecht plays like Galileo, and ,of course, his with Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach (1975), as inspirations for Satyagraha though a “Western“ source, or point of reference, is Stravinsky’s from Sophocles via Danielou and Cocteau’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1926-27) though their aim, like the ancients, was to provoke pity through terror. Glass’ aim is entirely different. His music and its staging strive to educate the audience in the most non-didactic way to what Gandhi and his followers were all about. And he and his collaborators here do this through slowly evolving sonic and visual images which provoke, distance – the Brecht, Lehrstuck and Stravinsky neo-classic tactic – and enthrall.

Much has been made of Glass’ supposedly “simple “ music, as if his “poverty of means” translated into poverty of effect, and affect, but nothing could be further from the truth. Of course he fashions each scene as a series of ground basses or chaconnes, but his imagination is in full flower here, even through this is his first orchestral piece since his Juilliard days (1958-1962). And it really does show how he’s bent his pit band of 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, strings 1 and 2, violas, cellos, and double basses, and a Kurzweil synthesizer, to his own deeply expressive ends.. Act 1’s opening scene, The Kuru Field of Justice, unfolded from its 2+3, 2+3, 2+3, 2+2… rhythmic structure, like a steadily opening flower, with Gandhi (tenor Richard Croft), in barrister suit and briefcase at the lip of center stage, being set upon – his valise rifled by the supers – as his solo’s joined by that of mythological figures Prince Arjuna, in blue face ( tenor Bradley Garvin ), and in Indian cap and white tunic pants Lord Krishna (bass Richard Bernstein), while warring parties, representing the internecine conflict of the Kuru clan, in Victorian and Indian dress, face off, and larger than life papier mache puppets, do battle.

(Paragraph revised per Walter’s comment) The succeeding scene – Tolstoy Farm (1910) was just as imaginatively realized, as Gandhi, his wife Kasturbai (mezzo Maria Zicak), Gandhi’s German secretary Miss Schlesen (soprano Rachelle Durkin) , Mrs Naidoo (soprano Ellie Dehn); and Improbable’s co-workers built Gandhi’s ashram in miniature.A  nd nowhere could Gandhi’s and Glass’simplicity of means be shown to more effect than in the long – 60 plus minutes, though 31 minutes in Christopher Keene’s CBS LP set –  stretch of Act 3’s single scene,  Newcastle March (1913) where the composer’s “limited means “ – roughly three themes / harmonies — seemed to burrow into the listeners’ psyches/hearts, until all was “released” at the final but not so final cadence/chord.

Glass’ music has always trafficked in the down to earth and the mystical, and Satyagraha provides both as 2sides of the same coin. And it’s not for nothing that the third, and concluding scene of Act ii, Protesttextural, harmonic, and yes, melodic variety than all of Satyagraha combined The Met’s forces rose to its challenges as true “athletes of the spirit”, proving that it shares deep yet deeply contrasting familial resemblances to its other siblings in Glass’ portrait trilgy – Einstein, and Akhnaten (1983). And that his spectacularly moving 2005 opera of John Coetzee’s 1980 Waiting for the Barbarians – which Orange Mountain Music will release this June – continues even more difficult explorations of the human condition. ‘ A man lost in a cruel and stupid dream / But still I keep walking / Walking. “ Improbable’s production differed in many respects from the Bruce Ferden led – he’s sadly dead from AIDS in 1993 – version of the David Poutney/Robert Israel 1980 Netherlands Opera production which I caught twice – and once with Danny Cariaga – at the SF Opera in 1989. And its immersion in themes of social injustice – will they ever solved – continued in Glass’ SF Opera commission, Appomattox, which bowed here last November. What happened – and this went on in the mind, body, and dare we forget it – heart? – can only be sketched here.