Category: Columns

Heil Byron Au Yong! Down with the piano-elite! There’s a crowd down in the square burning piano music as we speak. Run quickly to show your support for the Manifesto! Pull all those racist, capitalist books all off your shelf! Schubert! Beethoven! The piano-vocal score of Cats! Our Committee for the Promotion of Drums and Vocals will send an Axe Artist to come to your middle-class household and chop up your piano for free. Join the revolution! Pianists who don’t co-operate will be forcibly sent to the countryside to Drum and Vocal Re-education Facilities.

Seriously, folks, don’t you think art-music is marginalized enough in this society, without a righteous diatribe from the inside against the whole family of keyboard instruments? If Byron Au Yong is concerned with racism and class injustice, you’d think he might at least temporarily overlook the limitations of the piano (a 19th-century instrument) and show his support for music education, nationalized health insurance, proper financing of public schools, gay marriage, the defeat of the WTO, and the unionization of Wal-Mart. Or, perhaps he could invent a utopian instrument that could represent these things, with the help of a few far-reaching metaphors. But for goodness sakes, stop picking on us poor pianists and slay a Goliath instead! The piano is already being banished from the fringes of the new music scene here in New York as it is. At best, all many of our experimental venues have is a crappy upright that really should be used as firewood. If we pianists don’t watch out, we’ll be reduced to playing “air piano” in the subway with a tip glass at our feet.

We love them, we hate them, we love to hate them. But we read them all the same.

• Chris Dahlen has sharpened his pencil but stops to put it all in perspective before we start dropping names.
• Can’t remember what you heard this year? You might browse here, here, here, or most humbly, here.
• Na, na, nya, nya, nyaaa. Alex Ross finished his list, and it’s wrapped and under the tree.
• Not to be outdone, Steve Smith has already drunk his champagne and moved on to what just might be “the contemporary-classical-smart-pop breakthrough hit of 2006, mark my words…”

When used open-mindedly and in the spirit which they were intended—namely as fuel for Internet forum arguments and gift suggestions for people you don’t actually know well enough to buy gifts for—”best of” lists are useful up to a point. But please remember, especially during the holiday season, always list responsibly.

Does it seem a little odd that our concert-going experiences involve so much reading? Granted, program notes are great when bored stiff only 5 minutes into a piece, especially prose written by the composers themselves. Whether pontificating about some anecdotal detail or obsessing on certain musical elements, these mini-manifestoes always provide insight, though not so much in the way we hear the music unfolding. I mean, we all understand the inner workings of music in our own special ways and that’s how it ought to be, so I don’t go looking for any musical epiphanies or great wisdoms of logic to be imparted by these texts. Program notes, more often than not, are simply windows into the personality of their creators, rather than the reliable listening roadmaps they claim to be. To be honest, I wish more composers would riff about what happened, say, last Tuesday rather than explain musically how this follows this, and this comes in, which relates to that… snore. And what’s so important about all that stuff anyway? Give me an ad hoc context instead, even if it’s cryptic.

Personally, I like to treat my own program notes like an extension of a work’s title, something enigmatically interesting, yet somehow related to the music. Of course presenters are often frustrated when my efforts don’t exactly fit their mold. For last year’s Global Ear Festival, my program note simply read: I want to live in Paris. Six words, that’s it. When I composed This May Not Be Music, those six words precisely captured what the piece was all about. Of course when the program book arrived from Dresden with a few extra paragraphs tacked on, I refused to get upset about whatever was written, and luckily I don’t read German. Regardless of what was printed, I can assure you it wasn’t necessary or even relevant to the music’s performance.

At the London premiere of This May Not Be Music in December 2001, a time when weasel-hating Americans were enjoying “freedom fries,” my references—musical, political, program note and title-wise—were obvious. Now a few years down the road, the whole package has grown oblique, but so what? Shouldn’t the music be hermetically complete in and of itself? The fact that I’m a Francophile and won’t allow the piece to be performed on American soil should never trump the music itself. Any piece of music that relies on a lengthy explanation as the key to its enjoyment, to me, hints that something is out of whack. I’m not suggesting an end to program notes, maybe just a tweak in focus. Besides, who wants to be stuck in a crowded concert hall without anything to fan themselves when things get a little stuffy.

At the beginning of the Thanksgiving weekend, I found myself outside an antique shop at the edge of SoHo where I saw a pile of classical music CDs going for $3 a piece. Never one to pass up an opportunity to increase the size of my record collection, I rifled through them and wound up with a stack of mostly Baroque music plus a lone CD featuring a mass by Frank Martin and a requiem by a composer I’d never heard (all the more exciting) named Ildebrando Pizzetti. The man I bought them from was extremely pleasant but assuming that I had picked up the Martin and Pizzetti disc by mistake felt obliged to warn me, “That one’s contemporary you know.” Normally such a comment would provoke a 20-minute sermon from me about the virtues of new music. But unfortunately, I was already running late, so I simply said “Yes, I know” with a big smile, waited for my change, and left.

Then, this morning, as I was rushing to catch the dress rehearsal of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera House, a solitary youngish man who was more than likely high or in some other way mentally unstable was pontificating to the rest of the world in a high-baritone relatively-pitched monotone. All I heard was: “…related to the best composer ever.”

Was he claiming to be the son or grandson of someone we all admire? Who, in his opinion, was “the best composer ever” anyway? Normally this sort of talk stops me dead in my tracks no matter the outcome. But since, once again, I didn’t want to be late (I wasn’t) plus he was probably crazy, I ran quickly on without being able to catch any more of his rant. But all through the subway ride up I kept wondering what he was talking about. It is all too rare to have a random quotidian encounter with words like “composer.”

Whereas during intermission at the Met today I saw at least ten prominent composers… It was a strange and awkward moment as these high profile unveilings often are. Everyone wanted to hear it but nobody wanted to be the first to say anything about it. Some literally stopped talking about it when they saw me approach perhaps afraid I’d write up their reactions or that theirs would differ from the ones I would later write. Odd, given how often I advocate for a non-“critical” stance. There’d be no chance of my writing a “review” of this performance even though for the record, against my better judgment, I will write here that I was very impressed with the opera.

I don’t plan to expose anyone here a la Page Six or even to go further in my description of An American Tragedy since journalistic codes of ethics, for what their worth, have traditionally treated dress rehearsals as strictly off limits to critical commentary. Yes, I know, all is fair in the blogosphere, therefore I will paraphrase one comment that I think bears some reflection here. One of the people I spoke to confessed that it was difficult to formulate an objective opinion about the work because he wished that it was his own work being done there instead, perhaps adding further fuel to Joshua Kosman’s argument that composers ought not be critics, but perhaps not.

Hey, I wished it was my work being done up there, too! But that’s beside the point. If I had written An American Tragedy, I would have let the long trombone sustain at the end of Act Two end the opera rather than follow it with a quick declamatory tonic chord. But, you know what, I didn’t write An American Tragedy; Tobias Picker did. One of the important things that is gained from abandoning a critical stance, whether you’re a composer or not, is to allow yourself to appreciate things you would not want to do yourself. Allow yourself to let in a work of contemporary choral music even if what you really like is Baroque music. Allow yourself to appreciate the infinite variety of art that is the product of being a human being rather than madly and incapably trying to focus only on what you assume or what you are told is “the best.”

O.K., that’s the rant I never unleashed on the guy in the antique shop which might have made him think of me what I thought of the man ranting about “the best composer ever” this morning. But it still leaves room for a few more questions… When you really don’t like a piece of music you hear, what precisely is it that you don’t like and why? Do you listen to music with a built in set of expectations or do you come to it new every time? (Be honest.) How often do you hear someone randomly mention new music? Do you think most people don’t talk about new music because they might be afraid to proclaim a “wrong opinion” about it?

What ushers hand everyone after an hourlong Family Concert by the NSO

Last weekend, I went down to Washington, D.C. to chat with Leonard Slatkin for NewMusicBox (stay tuned for “Cover” in January). In the process, I managed to attend two orchestral concerts at the Kennedy Center. Both were billed as concerts for young people. The first, called Youth Orchestra Day, placed members from six youth orchestras from around the region alongside members of the National Symphony for performances of a contemporary orchestration of a Bach fugue, Sibelius’s Finlandia and two movements of the Shostakovich Fifth. The second, an NSO Family Concert featuring the world premiere of David Del Tredici’s 30-minute Rip Van Winkle for narrator and orchestra, was an all-American potpourri also featuring music by Copland, Grofé, and Morton Gould, among others.

What ushers hand everyone after an hourlong Family Concert by the NSO

What these two concerts had in common, aside from both having repertoire exclusively from within the past century, was that both lasted around an hour and neither had an intermission. They were all the better because of it and it started to make me think that perhaps the intermission is an unnecessary anachronism. Once you’re being transported by a sequence of pieces of music, the last thing you want to do is to break the music’s spell, fight your way through the crowds for some air or small talk only to find your way back minutes later attempting to recapture the concentration necessary to listen which is now completely gone.

Of course, you’re thinking, it would be difficult to keep a very large group in its place for a much longer time. But that’s what movies do all the time. And maybe having shorter concerts is not such a bad idea anyway except for those special occasions where the compositions themselves call for a longer playing time: Mahler and his ilk, good ol’ Morty or La Monte, etc.

For the most part, despite some folks claims that live concerts are the real music and that recordings are not, the majority of most people’s listening experiences are on recordings and those experiences are what shape the way people listen. This is obviously the reason most of the people asked didn’t seem to mind if music for the Radio City Holiday Extravaganza was pre-recorded rather than live despite the cries of Local 802. One of the things that recordings have taught us, for better or worse, is that musical experiences tend to last about an hour and, with the decline of having to flip LPs over, have no intermission.

Yes, I know, the next generation will be experiencing music mostly through random shuffle and downloads of individual tracks. Perhaps this will usher in an even more depressing day for folks who are saddened by the sight of people squirming in their seats at concerts. But while we can still get people’s attention for about an hour, let’s maximize it and get rid of the intermissions.

I’ll admit it. I’m jaded. I hear tons of music but like very little of it, yet my cavalier attitude doesn’t impede or handicap—I remain wide open to new ideas, still eager to listen to music of every persuasion.

As I type, I can’t help overhearing Frank on the phone talking about 36-tone equal temperament… something about four symmetrical subsets of nine seems particularly exciting to him. I confess that some of those classes on Schenkerian analysis and set theory were pretty cool, but most of the music we dissected wasn’t ever conceived formulaically. And in the end, after all the hidden relationships are revealed, the music doesn’t actually sound any different.

To all the composers out there with number fetishes, it’s time to ditch your precious crutch. Yeah, there was a time—over 30 years ago—when math surfaced in the visual arts, and it was short lived. Mel Bochner, Barry LeVa, Sol LeWitt, et al. eventually moved on to explore other issues. Yet music composition’s century-long math fixation still continues today. Okay, minimalism eradicated serialism, sort of, but so what? Minimalist music literally sounded like arithmetic. In the composer’s quest for formal unity, or whatever reason that calculator is turned on, absolutely nothing profound is instilled in the music. If anything, all those silly formulas are probably making music bland to the ears. Thankfully, there are signs that music, sans mathématiques, is thriving deep inside the trenches of contemporary music.

Look no further than the newly released recording of Alvin Curran’s Inner Cities piano cycle. This is music that was created with a blatant disregard for math, balance, and symmetry, but everything sounds utterly right. Notes and chords follow one another without any obligation to an underlying grand scheme—it’s music in a constant state of pure self-realization. And shouldn’t music reflect this sort of personal reality, rather than a set of numbers and calculations? Hmm, maybe I’m just jaded…

Molly: A funny thing happened on my way to make a record purchase this morning. Over my 8 a.m. coffee, I had read that an artist I’m particularly interested in had a new album out. Clicking over to iTunes, I entered it into the little search box, fully expecting to have the thing downloaded and ready to soundtrack my commute in just a few minutes. My excitement hit an immediate wall—iTunes did not offer this album. Ack! What to do? I could order it, but that would mean finding my credit card, filling in all those little shipping info lines, and waiting—waiting maybe two whole days!—before it arrived. I could go to an actual store, but probably wouldn’t have the chance until next week. I’m no technologically inclined early adopter, but I realized with a start that I haven’t even set foot in a real record store in over a year. I’ve completely adopted the whole online system and didn’t even realize it. It was just that easy, and that’s why it works.

Do I miss having an ever-expanding shiny wall of CDs? Not for a minute. My iPod and PowerBook together weigh in at about six pounds and travel too often to ever need dusting.

*

Frank: There was a really great piece of music I heard via a legally-downable MP3 on a web site a few weeks ago, but already it’s fallen out of my memory. I could try to retrace all my steps web-surfing to try to find it again but it could take hours, hours that would be much better spent listening to records.

Nowadays I frequently encounter composers saying, oh you can hear my music on my website. But rarely do I find myself listening to entire pieces. (A good deal of the time the measly amount of a composition featured on a site curtails the listening experience for me.) It does seem that MP3s have spawned a listening culture that has less respect for listening to a composition from start to finish. Of course, this already started with the fast forward button on CD players, which is probably still why I’m so attracted to LPs since lifting and dropping needles is harder to do than just letting the music play out. Nowadays, unless something is 100% compelling—and ultimately what is?—it’s just too easy to tune it out and move onto the next thing, ultimately never truly listening to anything.

For what it’s worth, I haven’t been in a real record store (one that sells LPs) in… 2 days, and already I’m feeling a bit shaky from the withdrawal.

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Molly: Two quick points…

A satisfying online music life requires investing in equipment and a delivery system that works seamlessly for you. My father has never used an ATM card—still visits a teller and writes checks to pay his bills. For him, the convenience of never having to keep track of due dates or scramble for stamps has not yet outpaced his discomfort with the machinery involved in online bill-pay.

And it’s funny that Frank mentions music on composer websites—I love it when someone directs me to tracks on their site. If I hear a composer’s name that’s unfamiliar, it’s usually in reference to something else I’m reading or listening to at that very moment. Again, I want to be able to go directly to a site and listen to a piece by this new composer yet to be tested by my ears. Hopefully, the composer will have picked a work from his or her catalogue to share with the world as a calling card and just put the whole thing online so I’m getting a complete picture. Even one track is worth so much more that a simile-filled description. I’ll listen, and if I like, I’ll probably be passing the link around to friends and fellow bloggers. And I’ll probably be looking to give up another $9.99 to download an album. This means I can go from unfamiliar to potential fan in under five minutes.

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Frank: As an advocate for the new, far be it from me to get in the way of progress, but sometimes progress can feel like walking off a cliff. I happily check out music people point me to online all the time, but I draw a distinction between that casual encounter and a real listening experience, which is something I believe a listener can have as much from a recording as a live concert experience. And, I too plunk down money for things I discover online, I’m just patient enough for Amazon or whomever else to deliver them to me in a physical form.

I am a tad bit worried that in our desire for instant gratification, nothing has lasting significance. Part of the joy of having amassed a record collection for over 25 years is being able to constantly refer back to things, something much easier to do when you live amongst the records and see them all the time at home. Something about safely hiding the music away in a hard-drive feels like putting dirty laundry in a drawer and forgetting ever to wash it again. For the record, I refuse to keep my CDs in drawers or binders for the same reason.

Also, in the true confessions department, I don’t pay my bills online although I’ve started phoning them in from time to time since the rest of New York City always seems to be waiting online every day I need stamps at the post office.

• The Vienna Phil finally lets a girl get up on the podium and hold the big stick. Congrats to Simone Young. The Sydney-born conductor, currently music director of the Hamburg State Philharmonic, will conduct a program that includes Bernstein’s Overture to Candide and Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra. [Sydney Morning Herald via ArtsJournal]
• On a similar note, it’s not really Paul Horsley’s fault he must point out that Joan Tower “has shown audiences that a woman can write great music.” But still, it’s irritating.
• Mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore? So are they. [via The Rest Is Noise]
• The intellectual property debate has me so, so, so, so, so dizzy.
• No drooling on the equipment, now (wouldn’t want to electrocute yourself), but Brian Eno is having an online garage sale of sorts.
• Of course, if you’ve got an extra $8K lying around, you might want to go straight here. If not, there’s still time to add it to your holiday wish list.

Is it me, or does anyone else sense a slight undercurrent of masochism in new music? Think about it. Surely you’ve found yourself trapped during a performance, glued to your chair by feelings of obligation even though the music was worse than Chinese water torture. Just last week I found myself suffering through a horrible vocal piece. The audience’s collective frustration could be cut with a knife—thankfully there were no sharp objects in the room. My suspicions of communal dissatisfaction were confirmed during some after concert banter. A non-musician friend admitted he had a hard time refraining from laughter during that particular performance.

As audience members, we’re bound by concert hall etiquette to just sit still and be quiet, minus the occasional passive-aggressive unwrapping of cough drops. But how does a composer or performer know when an audience feels dissatisfied if we’re not allowed to say anything? Regardless of merit, a round of boisterous applause for at least the amount of time it takes for the performers to exit the stage is de rigueur. Yet we keep coming back for more—sit in silent pain, applaud, repeat.

Granted, not everybody feels this way. Those enlightened audience members who can enjoy, from start to finish, a piece like Non Stop Flight, a 4 hour and 33 minute spectacle by Pauline Oliveros, have my utmost respect. This isn’t a dig toward Pauline, I actually enjoyed the dancing clown and the throngs of people wandering around conducting impromptu performances of 4′ 33″. I remember someone conducting a very large tree outside the concert hall as I came in—beautifully strange, if not downright weird. However, I find my fatigue level hits a wall at around two hours, no matter what I’m listening to. So rather than sit and suffer, I leave, but not without a pang of guilt stirred by my presumed duty as a card-carrying new music devotee.

Still, ever notice how a lot of new music types avoid standard rep concerts? Maybe we share some strange aversion to standard notions of beauty. I mean, my old roommate used to refer to some of the stuff that I would listen to as “haunted house music.” I understand where she’s coming from. Scary thing is, I consistently choose to go to concerts featuring predominately thorny, dissonant music because I actually enjoy myself, I think. Even if I loathe what I’m hearing, ugly music is easier to endure, whereas the great warhorses tap into the respect-your-elders reserve tank. I’m more than willing to sit through an excruciating hour of amplified paper hole punchers wielded by the S&M-clad group The Haters, and yet cringe at the thought of going to hear anything by Bruckner. I’ve been trapped in both realms of hell. Strangely, the Bruckner, while more beautiful to my ears, was more infuriating. I was caged by concert protocol and a pressure to respect the music. At least if something is ugly, we don’t feel any obligation to perform a gentle breakup.