Category: Listen

Sounds Heard: Duo Scorpio—Scorpion Tales

Posted on October 16, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

With Scorpion Tales, Duo Scorpio doesn’t require you to set aside all of your wedding prelude and garden party images of the harp before you hit play, but they are going to stretch those sonic ideas out of whack once things get going. This may be the sum distillation of the work included on this album—it doesn’t build barriers out of repertoire, but it does open quite a few windows in the library.

And that suits the broader mission of the ensemble quite neatly. When harpists Kathryn Andrews and Kristi Shade founded Duo Scorpio (they were both born on November 5, 1982, hence the astrological nod), they noticed somewhat of a hole when it came to contemporary repertoire for this instrumentation and set about trying to correct that absence through commissioning and arranging existing compositions. A portion of that work resulted in a Kickstarter campaign to record some of these pieces and promote them more broadly—an album that would ultimately feature three premiere recordings (including one commission) plus three other pieces for harp duo by contemporary composers. They exceeded their $12,000 goal and produced an impressively packaged collection drenched in the ethereal photography of Frances J. Melhop.

The disc takes its name from the nearly 15-minute work contributed by Robert Paterson (a commission by Duo Scorpio and the American Harp Society), each of its three movements a play off of the scorpion—animal, vegetable (hot pepper), and Greek mythological legend. Plenty of those iconic cascading harp lines run through each of the movements, but they appear in the mix amid intricately orchestrated moments, two harps and four hands filling the sonic image from top to bottom to deliver a neatly locking quartet-worth of sonic information. The play of harmonics, the dark and loose vibration of low strings, and the tight unison playing elsewhere accent the balanced clockwork-like integration of these passages.

Premiere recordings of Sebastian Currier’s Crossfade and Stephen Taylor’s Unfurl both take the harp out a few paces further into the stereotype-challenge, playing more aggressively with technique, rhythmic material, and slightly altered tuning. In Crossfade, quickly strummed repeated notes and patterns build a bed of nervous energy atop which each instrument rises and recedes, riding her own wave and offering sharp statements as she passes by, one often interlocking with the other in interesting ways. Where Currier was rhythmically adventurous, Taylor creates a floating (or perhaps drowning) world of unconventional harmonies. The retuning of certain strings is something his program notes suggest is an optional way to present the piece, but I can’t imagine the work not having this amazing color. Despite the sharp staccato of much of the delivery, this gives the same material an intriguing watery-edged gloss. For Caroline Lizotte’s Raga, the duo grabs a few extra-curricular percussion instruments and mixes in some Hindustani-flavored extended techniques in the harp lines, conjuring Indian colors that float in and out of the frame, accenting more than stealing the focus of the work. Perhaps we might subtitle this one “two Western harpists dream of the Subcontinent.”

Works by Bernard Andrès bookend the disc: the shimmering Le Jardin des Paons and the exotic Parvis. Both works, in their way, showcase the diverse range of timbral color that the harp is capable of delivering. If there was actually any question at the outset that the harp was the instrument of angels, fairies, and cocktail receptions, Andrews and Shade will likely have erased that notion by the close of the album (if they hadn’t succeeded in doing so within the first five minutes). Scorpion Tales is a showcase of way contemporary composers are finding their music within its timbral compass, and it’s likely to leave music makers and fans inspired to seek out more. I suspect Duo Scorpio will consider that appraisal mission accomplished.

Sounds Heard: Annie Gosfield—Almost Truths and Open Deceptions

Posted on October 9, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

In the liner notes of her latest recording, Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, Annie Gosfield writes of her “parallel lives” performing music with her own band and writing fully notated compositions for other musicians and ensembles. With both of those worlds represented on this recording, it seems more that her two creative worlds are deeply interconnected, influencing one another and sharing common musical elements and sources of inspiration.

One of the striking things about Gosfield’s music is its unusual combination of visceral rawness and otherworldly distance. It often has a very direct sort of in-your-face quality while her obsession with broken machinery and obsolete technology crafts a somewhat ghostly scrim around the instrumental sounds. But because her connection to the technology is personal—much of it has been inspired by her family history—it is mysterious in the way that wandering around in a grandparent’s attic searching for old letters or hidden secrets can feel haunting and nostalgic at once.

The first track, Wild Pitch, was composed for the ensemble Real Quiet, featuring cellist Felix Fan (a major player, literally, throughout the CD), percussionist David Cossin, and pianist Andrew Russo. The piece travels through episodes of strong, lyrical cello lines that spill into frenetic ensemble interludes, which do indeed give the impression of a baseball game gone mad. The instruments flail away only to exhaust themselves into new contemplative states that give rise to more cycles of stillness and activity. An enticing assortment of small percussion instruments such as cymbals and small gongs mesh well with the sound world created by the piano and cello, and the score is thoughtfully arranged with all instruments nicely balanced in the mix.

Gosfield performs often on a sampling keyboard, mapped with a selection of sounds that seems to bear no relation to a piano keyboard. (I have often wondered how she keeps track of all the samples!) It is a nice surprise to hear her playing an actual piano on Phantom Shakedown, accompanied by an arsenal of electronic sounds created out of recordings made from failing technology, such as a broken radio. Her playing contains hints of numerous styles, from Romantic era to ragtime, and this combination of piano with electronics is quite beautiful and artfully coordinated, especially when the piano lets up after periods of intense activity, allowing the electronics to shine through to the foreground.

The showcase work of this disc, Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, is a hefty chamber concerto for cello with 2 violins, viola, contrabass, piano, and percussion featuring cellist Felix Fan again in the spotlight along with the other 3/4ths of the Flux Quartet. Gosfield pulls a nice big sound out of the ensemble during several raucous tutti sections; about 11 minutes into the work, the group flits briefly into a nightclub-ish sound, evoking a more intimate, smaller space. The music again builds, up to a different shift in texture to pizzicato strings and a pounding bass drum. After another boisterous period, the cello calms everything down to a wavering drone on D that gradually fades into silence.

The following track, Daughters of the Industrial Revolution, is a big change in instrumental scope and sonic palette. Written for Gosfield’s mixed quartet, it features rock guitar and drums with sampled machine and factory sounds set to a pulsing 4/4 groove. In Cranks and Cactus Needles Gosfield brings her passion for the sounds of broken and obsolete technology directly to her instrumental writing, as the Stockholm-based ensemble The Pearls Before Swine Experience recreates the warping, uneven sounds associated with old 78rpm records through their instrumentation of violin, flute, cello, and piano. This piece is structured differently than the others on this disc (to my ear), with a smoother through-line and more subtle gradations between the contrasting spare and busy textures that characterize much of Gosfield’s work.

Almost Truths and Open Deceptions is a selection of well-constructed, carefully recorded works that show how the parallel pathways of a band member and concert music composer can gel into a singular artistic vision.

Sounds Heard: Boiling Point—Music of Kenji Bunch

Posted on October 2, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Nashville’s all-volunteer Alias Chamber Ensemble received a Grammy nomination last year for their Naxos recording of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Hilos, and this season the ensemble—which donates 100% of its proceeds to other community-based nonprofits—has already been hard at work on a new collaboration with Nashville Opera as well as promoting their new CD for the Delos label. The plucky and progressive ensemble reflects a certain homegrown, do-it-yourself spirit, and the decision to follow the Frank release with the equally earthy and folk-inspired music of Kenji Bunch makes for an inspired follow-up.

Bunch is a violist and former member of the Flux Quartet, and his performing and composing often inform each other; Bunch’s recent viola showpiece The Devil’s Box was premiered at last year’s SONiC Festival at Zankel Hall with the composer as soloist, weaving folk sources into notated music of exceptional energy, expression, and charm.

“Boiling Point represents some of my favorite and most personal chamber music of the last decade,” Bunch explains. “These are the works that have led me to define my approach as a composer of what I like to call New American music. Just as we see a culinary movement that incorporates locally sourced ingredients and unexpected creative flourishes into traditional forms to re-imagine classic American dishes, I draw from regional vernacular musical elements, infuse them with avant-garde improvisation, Romantic lyricism, and classical forms, and humbly offer my idea of chamber music for the 21st century.”

The disc features nine tracks, although listeners are strongly encouraged to purchase the album’s digital edition which features a final duet between Kenji Bunch and ensemble cellist Matt Walker. The first work, String Circle, is a string quintet featuring Bunch on the extra viola. The work’s first movement, “Lowdown,” moves through several moods in less than five minutes, seamlessly transforming the simplest open string sounds into laid-back grooves. Folk-derived string techniques like slides, bends, and percussive “chops” lend the music a primal character. Bunch uses drones in more than one movement of the piece, and his music always has a strong tonal center. That’s perhaps because Bunch stays very close to his materials, exploring all kinds of possibilities within vernacular idioms, rarely blending them to noticeable effect and never holding them at a distance. String Circle is closer to Appalachian Waltz than to Bartók; it is folk music for classical players more so than a contemporary composition tinged with folk influences. It is music with an immediacy and authenticity that is clearly audible from the first measures.

Alias negotiates material both rough-edged and refined in this composition, capturing moments like the rickety, old-timey pizzicato fourth movement, titled “Porch Picking.” Surprisingly, for music with such a folk basis there isn’t as much outright soloing as one might expect, and the majority of the movements groove well below peak intensity. The final movement, “Overdrive,” is wilder and also draws from a crunchier harmonic palette than the other movements; it’s a great ending to a piece that serves as effective a calling card as any to introduce listeners to the range of styles Bunch has absorbed.

The next works on the disc, Drift and 26.2, find Bunch working in a less Americana-styled idiom; it’s refreshing to hear examples that blend influences more completely with his own compositional voice, yet at the same time I find myself more excited by the works that give themselves wholly and unabashedly to the particulars of folk techniques that Bunch utilizes so persuasively. Luminaria for violin and harp stands out among these less overtly vernacular works, with lots of fine dialogue and some exquisitely ornate violin playing over the work’s many trill figures.

Boiling Point for amplified string quartet, bass, and drums takes the album in a new direction, with more improvisatory playing from the ensemble and a more contemporary hard-rock feel. The work accompanies a teakettle, which is set to begin heating during the course of the piece, the whistle coinciding with the piece’s climax. It’s a clever idea that works well even without the visual cue, hinting at a path unexplored on the rest of the album.

For those who purchase the album’s digital edition, Double Down is likely the best performance of the disc, with playfulness, drama, and elan, kind of a distillation of all that String Circle has to offer. Bunch and cellist Walker engage in some friendly competition and some of the only real dirty playing on the album—it’s an electrifying mix of deft compositional choices and wonderfully intuitive soloing that also suggests the kind of skilled improviser/performer by whom Bunch’s music is best represented.

There’s a tension between the different approaches to integrating classical and vernacular traditions on this disc, and that’s why it’s so fascinating to hear Kenji Bunch at work with an ensemble as talented and dedicated as Alias. I’m curious to see whether he will likewise “double down” on any one style or notational approach or continue to explore a wide breadth of genres and approaches. The works recorded on this disc give a lot of insight into Bunch’s musical journey and the kinds of close collaborations that fuel his creative efforts.

Sounds Heard: Gene Pritsker—William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience

Posted on September 25, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Arnold Schoenberg usually gets credited for the emancipation of the dissonance that defined much of the music of the 20th century. But if there’s anything that can be claimed to categorize the music of the 21st century a mere 12 years into it, I’d argue that it’s the emancipation of cognitive dissonance. In much of today’s music, elements that seem like they don’t belong together co-exist and, in so doing, frequently yield sonic experiences that can be initially jarring and which sometimes never intellectually resolve. As recently as the 1980s such contextual ambiguities would have been considered an irreconcilable aesthetic assault, much like those emancipated dissonances were to folks in fin de siècle Vienna even though to our 2012 ears they sound somewhat quaint. But like the expressionistic plunge into atonality and beyond mirrored the zeitgeist of a century ago, today’s ambiguous-seeming free-for-all recontextualization of any and all stylistic vocabulary is an accurate reflection of our current uncertain, contradictory times.

One might even posit that the reluctance toward having one’s creative expressions confined exclusively to a single musical style is a clear manifestation of this phenomenon. Today’s almost de rigueur amalgamations of contemporary classical chamber music, jazz, and rock (genres which now sometimes don’t even really sound all that different from one another) might actually belie a response to the world in which we live that goes far beyond any attempt at crossover. It’s not so much that the composers of today are embracing every sound by which they are surrounded in an effort to attain some kind of meta-style; such an effort would be indicative of the aesthetic positions of a previous era. Rather, this blurring of boundaries is the only possible reaction to being surrounded by all of these sounds and the musical styles from which they originate. We’re no longer attempting to make them all get along with each other so much as we’re resigned to the fact that it is impossible to separate them from one another anymore; perhaps those rare moments where stylistic disparities still result in clashes are the only remaining breakthrough moments we can have.

The creative output of a musician like Gene Pritsker, who self-identifies as a composer, guitarist, rapper, and D.J., seems emblematic of such a world view. Over the years I’ve heard his music both in symphony orchestra halls and clubs. In another era, it would not have fit comfortably in either setting but now it’s at home in both. And yet Pritsker’s chamber opera, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, recently released on Composers Concordance Recordings, still manages to sound unsettling to me. It still somehow defies any paradigm I try to create for it as I listen to it. Perhaps I still listen with 20th century ears.

Or perhaps it’s because of how I first came to hear the music Pritsker composed for this opera. A few years back, Innova released a recording of Pritsker’s Varieties of Religious Experience Suite performed by his group Sound Liberation in which he plays electric guitar and is joined by another electric guitarist, electric bass, drums, and cello. The music is a visceral jazz/rock/contemporary classical hybrid that comes across as something by a latter-day Frank Zappa, though probably more Jazz from Hell era than Mothers of Invention era. Zappa indeed would seem like a perfect role model for Pritsker, since in addition to being one of the first American composers to ignore the firewalls between commercially driven stylistic categorizations, Zappa also relished the role of provocateur. In our own time when these firewalls have long been eroded, and therefore there’s little provocation in continuing to mine their erosion, Pritsker’s attempts at doing so herein still manage to sound raw.

In the notes for that Innova release, the music was described as originally being the score for an opera derived from a somewhat unlikely source—a lecture by the 19th-century American philosopher William James. But since the music on that release was all instrumental, I didn’t think much about its operatic origins. However, now that I’m finally hearing Pritsker’s Varieties of Religious Experience in its original operatic context, my impressions of it have completely transformed. I originally thought of this music as an extremely effective genre-blurring romp whose effectiveness is in part attributable to its roughly hewn edges. But now what is center stage is the barrage of cognitive dissonances—narrative drama vs. non-linear narrative, sacred vs. profane, contemporaneity vs. historicism. These go far beyond the music’s combination of idioms (think Zappa’s jazz/rock/postclassical stew mixed with contemporary opera and musical theatre as well as hybrids like Adams’s Ceiling/Sky). And that barrage now completely defines my listening experience.

So much so, that rather than attempt to describe the opera play-by-play (which I think could run the risk of giving away the goods for anyone who hasn’t yet heard it and which would somehow diminish its impact), I will impart here a couple of the responses Gene Pritsker offered me after I sent him an email asking him to describe exactly what he is aiming to do in this opera.

Since my starting point for this music was the earlier recording of the instrumental suite, I was curious, now that the original opera was available on a recording as well, what Pritsker’s thoughts were about the relationship between these two recordings and if he considers the suite and the opera to be separate works. His rejoinder was as follows:

The two works treat the same material in a very different manner. The opera is focused on the narrative of the William James lecture and on supporting the vocal expression, while the suite takes more of a chamber jazz approach where the music is in a constant transition between the written material and improvisation, and the musicians play off each other. Since the opera was written first and the main musical ideas were composed while creating this opera I feel that it is the definitive composition for this material. But I think the suite takes this music to such a different place that it stands alone as a brand new piece of music, almost a variation on the opera. I have done this in the past with other music. A good example is a solo drum set piece which I turned into a solo violin piece.

I was particularly eager to learn more about Pritsker’s decision to convey the words and ideas of someone from the historical past with music that could not be construed as anything but 21st century, so I asked him about that as well, to which he responded:

The instrumentation of the chamber opera being scored for 2 electric guitars, cello and contra bass was intentional, since I knew I can perform it with my band Sound Liberation, so the adaptation of this music to a suite was pre-planned as I was writing the opera. I was not trying to create a period piece in any way. The most fascinating thing for me was the question: “How can I turn a dry (yet brilliantly written) lecture in to an operatic narrative?” As soon as William James enters the hall in my mind he steps into a no time place. It is not any century or any country or any period. It is a man with ideas trying to express his thoughts to the world and my job is to heighten and further enlighten these ideas and thoughts through music while creating a narrative (even a loose operatic one) in a lecture that never intended to have a narrative.

Beyond that, I think it’s best for everyone listening to do so without any additional baggage. We’ve certainly had enough of that in the 20th century despite all the attempts at emancipation.

Talk About Sound: Austin’s Mother Falcon

Posted on September 18, 2012 by - Listen

Mother Falcon

Mother Falcon – Photo by by Brian Rindfuss

Austin’s Mother Falcon is comprised of an ever-changing group of performers, mostly string players, who’ve taken their classical training and background and applied it to their own music. Their sound is born of instrumentation largely rooted in the world of classical music mixed with a healthy dose of an indie rock aesthetic. After recording an EP and a full-length album, as well as garnering a number of accolades in Austin, Mother Falcon has begun to branch out into new ventures, including projects involving education and film. I sat down with Nick Gregg and Matt Puckett to talk about the past, present, and future of the group.

Tracks excerpted in this podcast (in the order in which they appear):

“Kathryn”
“Fireflies”
“Alligator Teeth”

All titles from the album Alhamabra

Sounds Heard: Ion Sound Project and the Music of Jeremy Beck

Posted on September 11, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Ion Sound Project, the fourth Innova recording dedicated to the music of composer Jeremy Beck, takes its title from the Pittsburgh-based chamber group of the same name. Stemming from a friendship with pianist Robert Frankenberry, Beck’s collaboration with Ion Sound Project began in 2007 at the University of Pittsburgh with a performance of his September Music, the piece which also closes this album. Beck’s music is unabashedly tonal, rhythmically intricate, and makes nods to the past while sitting squarely in the present. He is a prizewinner in the 2010 National Opera Association’s New Chamber Opera Competition, Boston Chamber Orchestra’s 2011-2012 Commission Competition, and the 2012 Aliénor International Harpsichord Composition Competition. When he’s not releasing new recordings of his work or receiving accolades from national and international competitions, he practices intellectual property (copyright and trademark) law, entertainment law, and general business law in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ion Sound Project opens with its strongest piece, In Flight Until Mysterious Night. Pulsing, jazz-inflected rhythms propel the work forward, recalling Copland’s Three Latin American Sketches in spots. Bright shifting harmonies in tandem with those syncopated rhythms pull the music this way and that, occasionally giving the listener the feeling you get when you are walking up (or down) a flight of stairs in the dark and you think there is one more stair, but there isn’t. Held together by the fluid playing of Frankenberry, this juxtaposition of largely accessible and recognizable pitch and rhythmic material with the occasional sharp left makes for compelling and interesting listening. Up next is by Beck’s Cello Sonata No. 2. , performed by Elisa Kohanski. The delicate and understated first movement starts quietly and builds to its animato namesake before returning to its hushed beginnings. The second movement features long melancholic melodies with sparse accompaniment in the piano before perking up with rhythms and harmonic language akin to In Flight Until Mysterious Night.

Soprano Margaret Baube Andraso joins ISP for In February, a work written in 2002 with text by the composer. For soprano, clarinet, violin, and piano, this one-movement song of love lost opens with a slow ostinato in the piano into which the other instruments weave. The simple melodies, accompaniment, and pacing make this a piece that could be at home in theater or film as easily as on the concert stage. Gemini for flute, cello, and piano features independent lines leading to tutti accents on upbeats that could be (at least rhythmically) straight out of any number of rock tunes from the ‘80s and that betray a contemporary classical style that formed in that period without sounding dated or borrowed. The ironically titled Slow Motion for piano and vibraphone takes cues from the collaborative work of Chick Corea and Gary Burton. Percussionist Eliseo Rael deftly trades polyphonic strains with Frankenberry, parts winding around one another before briefly coalescing in chords and accents that stutter step around, dressed in colorful harmonies. A less active choral section provides a respite from this activity before returning to the manic, quasi-improvisatory material from the top.

Third Delphic Hymn is a showcase for the evocative playing of violinist Laura Motchalov. Her ability to cleanly perform multiple lines at once sounds at times like two distinct players and is quite effective. This brief work is the oldest on the album (the original version for viola was written in 1980), but it is nonetheless a highlight both in terms of performance and composition, and I’ll admit to being disappointed that it ended so soon. This is not to say it was an inappropriate length, but that I was left wanting more. The final work on the album, September Music, initially picks up on the melancholy of Third Delphic Hymn in its modest tempo and longing harmonic language, and these characteristics continue for the most part in the second movement. The insistent third movement eventually displays many of the characteristics of the other works on the recording. Tutti climaxes rebounded from duo and trio excursions. Colorful clashes in the clarinet and flute, performed by Kathleen Costello and Peggy Yoo respectively, are answered by dramatic responses in the strings.

Ion Sound Project is a thoroughly engaging CD from top to bottom. Ion Sound Project (the group!) does a great job of presenting Beck’s work here, whether in solo or ensemble settings. Though architecturally rigorous, Beck writes clearly and without pretense, and while one might listen for the technical elements of his work, I think that would be missing the point. Well-wrought music should be architecturally sound as a matter of course, but checking that compositional tick-box alone does not necessarily a great piece of music make. If you’re interested in music that is for the most part harmonically tonal and rhythmically diverse, you’re sure to find a great deal of satisfaction in the world of Jeremy Beck.

Cage = 100: Walking Along Paths the Outcome of Which I Didn’t Know…

Posted on September 6, 2012 by - Commentary, Listen

John Cage

John Cage in August 1992, the last month of his life. Photo by John Maggiotto, courtesy S.E.M. Ensemble.

Five days after the death of colleague and friend John Cage, I produced and hosted a two-hour tribute broadcast on the New York City radio station WBAI-FM. Only a few of the many, many friends who were also close to him could be invited. As you’ll hear, the emotions of the moment are still raw. Everyone is working to come to terms with this sudden absence at the center of our community. Cage was such a friendly, welcoming, and challenging presence in our lives and in the music scene—for everyone—that even now, all this time later, it’s hard to believe he’s no longer with us.

In the WBAI studio with me were artist William Anastasi (at the time co-artistic advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company), composer Earle Brown, Don Gillespie (who worked with Cage for decades at C.F. Peters, Cage’s publisher), R.I.P. Hayman (composer and a founder of EAR Magazine), Mark Swed (a music critic who is probably more knowledgeable about Cage than almost anyone else alive), and Margaret Leng Tan (a pianist who worked with Cage intensively, especially on annotating his works for prepared piano). Speaking by telephone sequentially (WBAI only had a single line) were: Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and David Tudor. The engineer and in-line producer for WBAI was Peter Schmideg, who was the regular host of the station’s weekly program “Soundscapes: Explorations in Radio Sound & Music.” He graciously offered his timeslot for this special tribute broadcast which can be heard in the following audio file.

This program was the initial broadcast of a year-long radio series I produced for Source Music, Inc., called 0’00” – after the piece Cage described as his 4’33” No. 2: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action, with any interruptions, fulfilling in whole, or in part, an obligation to others…” The series went on to include, with permission, the first complete rebroadcast of Cage’s complete Harvard Norton Lectures and Seminars of 1988-1989, plus all of Morton Feldman’s WBAI “Radio Happenings” with John Cage, not heard since the 1960s. Each program of the series also had an interview with a different Cage-related guest. Half of the programs in my 0’00” series were broadcast on WBAI, and the other half on WKCR.

With this 0’00” series, I was working to fulfill not only the obligation we all felt to Cage himself, for having been the center of the entire music community for musicians of all stripes—and doing so with inspiration and an infectious joie de vivre—but also for the extremely thoughtful professional encouragement of having written me an encomium about my own music. In addition, it was one small way to show my appreciation for having been awarded two grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts—a philanthropic organization Jasper Johns co-founded with Cage and others which helped support so much new and creative work in our community. (To the surprise and delight of all grantees, the awards arrived in the mail in the form of Foundation checks personally co-signed by Cage and Johns.)

Adding an element of chance to the proceedings, as this broadcast took place, that year’s Republican Convention was just getting underway, and we were supposed to be prepared to cut away at a moment’s notice to former President Ronald Reagan, who was scheduled to speak after the keynote speaker. Fortunately the speech went on so long that Reagan came on late, and our tribute wound up lasting only slightly less than the intended full two hours. Towards the end of the recording, you’ll hear increasingly frequent references to the convention going on as we are speaking, and there are a couple of fake-out cut-aways to the convention feed before we finally go out, allowing the last words of this historic recording to be spoken by Reagan. Odd as this juxtaposition is, the contrast between the visions represented by this politician and by this composer makes perfect poetic (and Cageian) sense.

Near the end of the program, in my protest against the formulaic last sentence of The New York Times’ obituary, “There are no immediate survivors,” we seconded John Schaefer’s heartfelt exclamation on his radio program that, on the contrary, all of the thousands in our new music community are Cage’s children. I meant no slight to Allan Kozinn’s excellent writing of the obit. He wrote it under extremely difficult circumstances, which I am happy to take this opportunity to underline and especially to note the grievous mistake inserted into it by his editors without Kozinn’s knowledge or consent: that the headline and its lead incorrectly labeled Cage a “minimalist.” The newspaper got it right though, in putting the obit on its front page. (Kozinn told me Cage benefited from the outrage that had erupted when the horse Secretariat died on the same day that Virgil Thomson had—and the editors had chosen Secretariat’s obit for the front page, rather than Thomson’s!) While he was alive, John Cage often had to deal with much disrespect and consternation. When I wrote for The New York Times myself, the editors would not allow me to describe him as one of the most influential composers of our time, suggesting I substitute “musical philosopher.” With much difficulty, I held my ground, but had to compromise with an added equivocation, referring to him as “this most influential and elusive composer.” Since his death, however, the proper estimation of his work has now grown apparent even to the most hidebound naysayers. The range, reach, and depth of his work is enormous.

A word for those who did not have the good fortune or opportunity to interact one-on-one with Cage as a person: he gave generously of himself to everyone, always with diligence and patience. In New York City, one could often run into him, whether shopping at the Union Square Farmers’ Market or attending concerts at Phill Niblock’s loft. Despite his unbelievably busy schedule, he always had time for everyone. And it was rare for anyone to speak with him and not come away enriched. His famous “Eleventh Commandment” was “Thou shalt not have an answering machine”—which meant, if anyone called him (his number was listed in the phone book), they would likely find him at the other end of the line. (Even John Ashbery once told me Cage had transformed his life by advising him, rather than getting upset, to include the telephone interruptions in his poetry.)

Cage was protean, and without question the most influential composer since Wagner—and for entirely opposite reasons. No one since has come anywhere near to taking his place.

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Thanks are especially due to Peter Schmideg; to WBAI/Radio Pacifica; and to Laurie Spiegel for archiving and transferring the broadcast to digital form.

Radio image via Bigstock

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Raphael Mostel 1985 Photo

Composer Raphael Mostel with Tibetan singing bowls, 1985. Photo by Michael Sullivan.

Raphael Mostel is a composer, writer and lecturer based in New York City. His work has been performed by musicians of the Royal Concertgebouw and Chicago Symphony orchestras and New York City Opera. To realize his very different compositions revivifying ancient ideas of sound, Mostel created the Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble: New Music for Old Instruments℠.

Sounds Heard: Ernst Krenek—Complete Symphonies

Posted on September 4, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

Mere months after fleeing Europe for the United States, the composer Ernst Krenek visited the home of George Washington in Mount Vernon. “I was moved to tears hearing the tolling of the bell on a gunboat that passed by way down on the Potomac,” he wrote. “What a world of strength and beauty was irrevocably lost to us who are walking around among its august remains.”

That Washington moment might seem strange for an Austrian-born composer of Czech descent, but Krenek felt the gap between past and present as acutely in Mount Vernon as he did in Vienna. His hometown, and the locus of the culture he had held most dear, had succumbed to the Nazis and was no place for a composer of jazzy operas and atonal music. “I had become a preferred target of the rapidly increasing barbarian tribe of German supermen,” Krenek wrote in his memoirs.

Today, those memoirs languish practically unread at the Library of Congress. Though penned in English, they have only been published in an out-of-print German translation. The memoirs aren’t even listed in the library’s catalogue. (An intrepid librarian discovered them for me in the stacks.) Call up ML95.K83, and you will come face-to-face with a large box containing over a thousand typed pages, divided into six tattered envelopes. Each envelope bears the label: “This must not be opened before fifteen years after my death.”

Krenek was a man of many contradictions in a century full of them. He hoped to succeed Mahler as a great symphonist, but became best known for an opera about jazz (the 1927 Jonny spielt auf). He was rejected by the Nazis for being a radical and by the postwar avant-garde for being a conservative. Constantly adapting to new circumstances, learning new musical languages to fit the times while pushing to new creative heights, Krenek seemed one step behind the curve, unable to catch up with the speed of the 20th century.
Reading the memoirs while listening to a new boxed set of the composer’s five symphonies—recorded over the past two decades by the North German Radio Philharmonic Hanover and released in May by CPO—helps rekindle Krenek’s world of strength and beauty, revealing the tumultuous life and searing music of an unjustly overlooked composer.

Krenek’s life and music inform us about the cultural heritage of Vienna, but perhaps more importantly about what happened to that legacy when Hitler forced a generation of artists and intellectuals into exile. Two of Krenek’s five symphonies were composed after he arrived in the United States, and they reflect his turbulent years as a émigré. Though some exiles felt, as Arnold Schoenberg famously put it, “driven into paradise,” in the case of Krenek it was a paradise in which his name, once heralded in the 1920s, was largely and unfairly neglected.

Krenek began writing his memoirs in 1942 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He thought himself near death, and fervently documented in English his childhood in Vienna, his twenties in Berlin, his return to his home city, and its downfall in the 1930s (born in 1900, Krenek died in 1991, making him an almost exact contemporary to Aaron Copland).

The memoirs move at a luxuriously slow pace, but are rife with insights into the cultural life of 20th-century Europe. In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg was seen as a “local lunatic, a pure crank of no significance”; in Germany, Paul Hindemith obsessed over miniature trains; and in France, Igor Stravinsky insisted that Krenek eat salad with olive oil to gain the affections of women. Unfortunately, the memoirs conclude in 1937, leaving scant details about his American life.*

The memoirs also provide a gaze into Krenek’s own multifaceted identity, one that would acquire even more intricacy when the composer went into exile. “I am neither Czech nor German, and being Austrian appears to practically every living person as an artificial abstraction,” he wrote.

Krenek’s five symphonies mirror the complexities of his persona and the upheavals of his life. His First Symphony premiered in Berlin in 1921, heard by Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Gropius; his Fifth was premiered in 1950 by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony, and heard by, well, the residents of New Mexico.

In his early twenties, having relocated from Vienna to Berlin to follow his teacher Franz Schreker, Krenek composed his first three symphonies. They are a remarkable feat: over two hours of seething, post-Mahlerian grandeur, written in under two years. The First Symphony, a single movement broken into eclectic sections, is murkily atonal, with sudden fugal outbursts—a young man demonstrating his command of traditional counterpoint. The Third is a lighter work, though it still packs a punch.

Of this early trio, it is the Second Symphony that most intrigues. In 1922, Krenek fell in love with the youngest daughter of Gustav Mahler, Anna, whom he married and divorced in less than a year. Krenek dedicated his Second to Anna. He writes in his memoirs of his skepticism towards the idea that personal matters could inspire great music, but this symphony is one of his most towering works.

Hovering between Romanticism and modernism, it is a weird piece from its very opening, an ethereal duet of violins and plinking celeste. The music rises to massive climaxes that suddenly dissolve into mist before chaotically rushing forward to the next explosion. There is a sardonic streak throughout, channeling the other great post-Mahler symphonist of the day, Dmitri Shostakovich (who himself may have been inspired by Krenek’s music). One hears a fully formed musical personality—Krenek’s lifelong balancing act between reverence and cynicism.

The 25-year break between the third and fourth symphonies did not bode well for a composer hoping to succeed Mahler, as both symphonist and family member. But Krenek abandoned the genre when his opera career took off with the success of Jonny spielt auf, which briefly made him one of the most famous composers in Europe. Combining elements of jazz and late romanticism, Jonny was a surprise hit at its Leipzig premiere in 1927, and went on to tour Europe. A tale of a black jazz violinist who helps liberate a composer from esotericism, it became a kind of fable for the wild culture and loose morals of Weimar-era Europe, and a pioneering work in the cutting-edge genre of Zeitoper.

In the wake of sudden fame, Krenek found himself at what he called an impasse, unwilling to continue down the path of populist opera. He turned towards Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, ideas of which he gleaned from the composer’s disciples, since he was not allowed into the Schoenberg’s inner circle after a nasty battle earlier in their careers.

Neither the jazz-celebrating Jonny nor his subsequent twelve-tone turn ingratiated Krenek with the Nazis. Thugs disrupted performances of his music in Vienna and Munich, and rumors that he was Jewish (he wasn’t) led to cancelled concerts. Krenek had the unique position of being a composer who could be indicted as both an American-pandering populist and a mathematical formalist: the very ideal of the Nazi conception of degenerate art.

When Hitler annexed Austria in 1937, Krenek was in Brussels. He frantically applied for a visa and sailed to the United States. Over the next decade, he moved from university to university, started cranking out his memoirs, and composed a startling amount of music.

The final two symphonies, written in Albuquerque and Los Angeles in the late 1940s, harken back to his youth in Berlin. Despite Krenek’s engagement with twelve-tone techniques throughout his American career, both works are freely atonal, and less forbidding than much of his later output.

The Fourth is elegiac, even Copland-esque in its opening woodwind lament, though it still retains Krenek’s quintessential acerbity. As in the earlier symphonies, moments of utter weirdness puncture the music, like a lurching crunch of brass in the finale, a bleak revision of the Fanfare for the Common Man.

If the Fourth represented Krenek’s attempt to make his style more accessible, he didn’t tweak it enough. It premiered at Carnegie Hall, but the present recording is the first performance of the work in nearly sixty years. The Fifth, Krenek’s briefest symphony, reclaims some of the classicism of his earliest works, ending with a mordant fugue that recalls his first attempt in the genre.

Another fifty years passed, and Krenek wrote much music—electronic pieces, operas for stage and television, choral masterpieces like the Lamentio Jerememiae Prophetae—but not another numbered symphony. He dabbled in American themes: Santa Fe Timetable, a choral work setting the names of various train stops between Albuquerque and Los Angeles; a ballad of the railroads; a set of George Washington piano variations.

Despite his love for American culture, Krenek continued to feel like an outsider. The kind of writing which might have gained him an audience in the United States—the blend of lush early modernism and jazz found in Jonny—remained behind, part of the lost world of late imperial Vienna.

Living in its august remains, he pressed onward and adapted to his new home, even if it was less welcoming than the old. His music went unheard; it is worth resurrecting.

*Those interested can consult John L. Stewart’s 1991 biography of the composer; Claudia Maurer Zenck’s German-language study Ernst Krenek, ein Komposer im Exil; Krenek’s own 1974 Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music; and two generalized studies, Driven into Paradise and A Windfall of Musicians.

Games Played: Dyad

Posted on August 28, 2012 by - Listen

Released July 17, 2012 on the PlayStation Network
Developer: Right Square Bracket Left Square Bracket Inc.
Game Designer: Shawn McGrath
Music Composer: David Kanaga

Today, Dyad was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to administer heroic doses of ultimate sensory overload. It is absorbed directly into gamers’ cerebral cortex via their eyes, ears and thumbs… Research on Dyad began in 2008 at CERN by Shawn McGrath. After CERN officials observed test subjects wholly absorbed in euphoric trances and reviewed testimonies of transcendental interactive experiences, CERN halted development of Dyad and expelled Shawn. Determined to finish his research and enlighten gamers worldwide, Shawn partnered with composer David Kanaga and continued developing Dyad in secret. The misnomer “the god particle” has been the headline of choice for journalists since CERN’s recent discovery of the Higgs Boson. This dialectic dereliction prompted Dyad’s immediate release to stimulate gamers’ sense of discovery and aid in the search for their own “god particle.”

Besides being one of the most entertaining press releases I’ve encountered, the above is a pretty good introduction to the strange and striking world of Dyad, which resembles nothing so much as a particle’s-eye-view from the Large Hadron Collider—that is, if the inside of the LHC resembled a non-stop techno/rave party with an all-night laser light show. Dyad uses the trappings of a tunnel racer along with a reactive musical score that sounds more mind-blowing the better—and faster—the player is able to sling and hook other passing particles, catapulting the whole experience into audio-visual overdrive that emphasizes the thrill of virtuosity.

If ever a game deserved its standard epilepsy disclaimer, Dyad is it; certain kinds of players will absolutely love immersing themselves in the harmonious synaesthesia of music, color, and touch, while others will likely find the game over-stimulating, even headache-inducing. When the speed is upped to warp drive, the scintillating, kaleidoscopic imagery becomes a visual expression of the music, as well as the source of musical change—almost as if we’re zooming along so quickly that it’s no longer clear whether the music is reacting to gameplay, or if the shifting game environment is influencing the music. This ability to blur the senses is one of Dyad’s most unique achievements.

Each of the game’s 27 levels introduces a completely fresh gameplay mechanic, which lends the relatively short game a plenty-challenging learning curve. Just when you’ve gotten the hang of things and are really sailing along, the game tosses in a new concept or means of locomotion that forces you to slow down and reevaluate. Dyad is not a dumb, accelerate-to-the-finish-line kind of game, but neither is it a ponderous puzzler, and this tension between the joy of speed and the need for on-the-spot decision making provides just enough resistance for mastery to provide a real sense of accomplishment.

Dyad is that rare musical game that owes nothing to the stagnant glut of Guitar Hero and Rock Band knock-offs—a new and decidedly high-octane way to interact with our senses, both high-tech and deeply expressive of the user experience.

Sounds Heard: Robert Carl—From Japan

Posted on August 21, 2012 by - Albums, Listen

I am already on record as an admirer of Hartford-based composer Robert Carl’s music. His compositional language, which to my ear mixes a nuanced experimentalism within organic phrasings, speaks to me on a deep and strangely (considering that all the pieces I’ve heard are wordless) philosophical level. It readily takes me to an existential thinking place. Given that, I admittedly approached his latest release on New World Records, From Japan, with high expectations.

The slow pacing of the opening composition, A Clean Sweep (2005), invites deep and careful listening to the tones of a single shakuhachi (played here with notable sensitivity by Elizabeth Brown), and it accomplishes this without ever inducing the feeling that the listener is trapped in an expensive hotel spa. This is attributable in part to the way the poetic breath of the instrument is held in sharp contrast against a metallic, whining drone of variable pitch, which keeps a steady twist of tension running through the work. The two elements tangle on equal sonic ground, the drone taking on the role of a dance partner rather than a chaperone. A second performance of the work closes the disc, for which the composer joins Brown in a shakuhachi duet of sorts, the two artists leaning into and away from each other over the drone, providing slight variations on a single melodic line. It makes for a naturally more complex and crowded reading, but also one filled with more warmth in the companionship of making it.

In between these neat bookends are three later works by Carl. In the course of its 16-minute run time, Bullet Cycle (2007) takes the listener on a journey that mixes recordings made inside Japan’s high-speed bullet trains with the sounds of acoustic musicians (two improvising soloists and a percussive time keeper, roles here performed by Katie Kennedy, cello; Bill Solomon, vibraphone; and Sayun Chang, percussion). The world Carl establishes drifts in more of a leisurely spiral than typical point-to-point travel, the music mimicking something more akin to a dozing passenger’s experience—uneasy sleep regularly interrupted by train announcements and noise, the passage of time and miles strangely difficult to quantify, personal thoughts mixed up with glimpses of passing scenery, yet always the rocking train encouraging the mind to drift until just before the destination is reached.

Carl incorporates recorded sounds from Japan even more concretely in his electronic installation Collapsible Mandala (2008-09), his sources ranging from chattering birds to aggressive explosions, from children at play to adults in prayer. Though designed to be expanded and collapsed to suit various programming situations, the piece is here presented in a 26-minute version. In addition to the various ambient sound sources—which are collaged into sections ranging from seconds to minutes in length—the work includes fast fades into significant periods of silence (sometimes more than a minute in duration) between scenes. My experience of this structure surprised me; rather than allowing me to sink deeply into the music, I felt it as an extreme surface tension, the image of the preceding section echoing in the suddenly enforced quiet while my ear strove to catch the beginning of the next; meanwhile, the noise of my own listening environment taunted me with distractions.

At the very heart of the disc is Brown Velvet (2009-10), a piece for bassoon and live electronics (performed for this recording by Ryan Hare with Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn on laptop). Echoing elements of A Clean Sweep, the piece sets the woodwind against a deep drone of fluctuating pitch, its timbre this time more muted yet more ominous. Once again a deliberately paced dance plays out between the players, the drone supporting the movements of the bassoon, the bassoon made all the stronger in its ability to envelope the listener in the seductive richness of its tone. I never thought much about the dark beauty of the bassoon before, but this work makes it an unforgettable star.

Taken as a whole, the work included on From Japan may stand as a document to Carl’s multifaceted exploration of the intersection between American and Japanese musical culture. In much broader and perhaps simpler terms, however, it is evidence of how careful a listener Robert Carl is, and how generously he invites us all to listen with him.