The Original New Music Community
“A Harvard Business School study looked at job satisfaction. Orchestra players came just below prison guards. Chamber musicians came in at number 1. What’s the difference? The presence of a conductor.”
Boston Philharmonic Conductor Ben Zander, speaking at Leaders in London 2007
Gavin Borchert, composer and the Seattle Weekly‘s classical music critic, has an interesting take in this week’s rag, on current calls for jazzing-up or otherwise “slumming” the concert experience. A couple cogent paragraphs:
A couple of things puzzle me. First, the classical concert experience is, in all essentials, identical to that of dance, theater, literary events, or for that matter—barring the munching of popcorn and cheering the fireball deaths of villains—movies. Go to the performance space, buy a ticket, sit down in rows, watch and listen, try not to disturb your fellow audience members. Yet it’s only in conjunction with concerts that you hear complaints about what a crushing burden this all is. Second, why is sitting quietly considered such an unendurable ordeal? Millions of people do it every night in front of their televisions.
[….]
So what have we learned? Well, maybe people behave the way they do at concerts not because it’s an artificial standard imposed by ironclad tradition but because the music sounds better that way. Maybe listeners feel classical music most deeply when they pay quiet attention to it. Maybe sometimes not clapping is OK, and we don’t need to rush in and obliterate every silence. Maybe true innovations in concert presentation—new ways of getting music and music lovers together—will be concerned not with questions of formal vs. informal, loose vs. uptight, but with what setting best allows music to work its magic.
Don’t know what’s happening on PBS in your town tonight, but here in the center of the universe, Channel 13 is bringing us Kurt Weill’s brilliant (and somewhat depressing for the Christmas season) “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” Great cast includes Audra McDonald, Patti LuPone, John Doyle, and Anthony Dean Griffey. Check your local listings.
Paul Dirmeikis attended Stockhausen’s funeral on December 13, and has a report.
The family is already starting to slowly walk away. Some of us stay around the tomb, scattered between the neighbour tombs. Near the larger alley going down to the chapel, all members of Stockhausen’s family gathered together in a circle, holding their hands. Simon reads something. It’s around 4 pm. That’s it. One of the greatest composers of these last 50 years has just been buried. It’s a freezing afternoon in a distant German village. Fermata.
The New York Times leads off its Sunday Arts Section tomorrow with one of those double-bylined investigative reports that spell trouble for somebody. It appears that all is not well with the Seattle Symphony. The article is not up online yet but here’s the lede:
Any dictionary will tell you that a symphony orchestra trades in harmony. Anyone who has spent much time around orchestras will tell you that the harmony often stops at the music’s edge; that tensions abound in a body of 100 or so high-strung thoroughbreds as a music director seeks to impose a single vision.
And to judge from alarmist reports coming from here over a dozen years or so, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra has carried disharmony to new heights, lurching from crisis to crisis…
That’s the good part. I’ll put up a link as soon as I find it.
UPDATE: See comments for link.
Passed on by Carson Cooman:
The American composer Robert Moevs died Monday evening, December 10, 2007 at age 87. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin on December 2, 1920, Moevs studied at Harvard University (BA, 1942). He entered the US Air Force and served as a pilot. He resumed his musical studies at the Paris Conservatoire (1947–51) and then at Harvard (MA, 1952); his principal teachers were Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger.
For the next three years he was at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize Fellow. An inspiring teacher, Moevs served on the faculty at Harvard (1955–63) and at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (1964–91). He was composer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome (196061) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1963–4).
Awards made to him include one from the National Institute of Arts and Sciences (1956) and many from ASCAP; in 1978 he received the Stockhausen International Prize in Composition for his Concerto grosso for piano and orchestra, which was later recorded on the CRI label. Among the conductors who performed his works were Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Michael Gielen, Erich Leinsdorf, and Leon Botstein.
Our gaucho amigo Marvin Rosen is the most innovative and knowledgeable music programmer in the universe but who knew that he aspired to become the new music world’s Jerry Lewis?
Marvin is hosting a special 24-hour marathon edition of his terrific radio program Classical Discoveries titled “Viva 21st century,” which will air on WPRB out of Princeton, NJ beginning at 6:00 pm on Thursday, December 27 and will conclude at 6:00 pm on Friday, December 28.
Sympathizers and fellow travelers who don’t live in the Princeton area can listen to the show online at www.wprb.com The program includes works from only the 21st century from all over the world. (Got that, only works from the last seven years.)
If you’d like to submit selections for possible airplay on the show please email Marvin at marvinrosen@classicaldiscoveries.org
Here are the Marvin rules: The selections must be on a regular CD with all tracks and notes on the music in a traycard. Submitting a CD does not guarantee the music will be aired. In addition no CDs will be returned. All CDs for consideration for this program must be received by Saturday, December 22.
Can Marvin stay awake? Will he explain why he is doing such a silly thing? Will Frank and Jerry show up in a misguided display of solidarity? You’ll just have to tune in and find out.
I was late getting to the Times today and just noticed that Andrew Imbrie has died. Joshua Kosman’s obituary is here. Robert P. Commanday remembers him here.
Imbrie wasn’t nearly as spectacular or well-known a musical figure as Stockhausen but through his prolific and quietly impeccable body of work, his teaching, and his singular, unique voice, he may have been just as influential. You can listen to his magnificent Requiem, written in 1984 after the death of his son, free at Art of the States. I’m listening to it now.
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.
recieved at the Canadian Eletroacoustic mail-list:
PRESS RELEASE
The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away on December 5th 2007 at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg and will be buried in the Waldfriedhof (forest cemetery) in Kuerten.
He composed 362 individually performable works. The works which were composed until 1969 are published by Universal Edition in Vienna, and all works since then are published by the Stockhausen-Verlag. Numerous texts by Stockhausen and about his works have been published by the Stockhausen Foundation for Music.
Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer, who have performed many of his works and, together with him, have taken care of the scores, compact discs, books, films, flowers, shrubs, and trees will continue to disseminate his work throughout the world, as prescribed in the statutes of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, of which they are executive board members.
Stockhausen always said that GOD gave birth to him and calls him home.
****
for love is stronger than death.
IN FRIENDSHIP and gratitude for everything that he has given to us personally and to humanity through his love and his music, we bid FAREWELL to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lived to bring celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings, so that Man may listen to GOD and GOD may hear His children.
On December 5th he ascended with JOY through HEAVEN’S DOOR, in order to continue to compose in PARADISE with COSMIC PULSES in eternal HARMONY, as he had always hoped to do: You, who summon me to Heaven, Eva, Mikael and Maria, let me eternally compose music for Heaven’s Father-Mother, GOD creator of Cosmic Music.
May Saint Michael, together with Heaven’s musicians in ANGEL PROCESSIONS and INVISIBLE CHOIRS welcome him with a fitting musical GREETING.
On behalf of him and following his example, we will endeavor to continue to protect the music.
Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer
in the name of the world-wide family of musicians who love him, together with everyone who loves his music.
****
On Thursday, December 13th 2007, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. it will be possible to personally say farewell to Karlheinz Stockhausen in the chapel of the Waldfriedhof in Kuerten (Kastanienstrasse).
A commemorative concert will take place soon at the Sülztalhalle in Kuerten. Programme, time and date will be specially announced.
……………………..
The Stockhausen foundation has already published a PDF memorial booklet, which you can download and print for free. And, thirty-five years ago: