Tag: Los Angeles

Music for Angelenos, by Angelenos

Posted on December 5, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

An overview of Los Angeles (composers!) at Walt Disney Concert Hall

An overview of Los Angeles (composers!) at Walt Disney Concert Hall
Photo by Federico Zignani

This Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic finally took the leap and programmed a concert of works all by Los Angeles composers—Sean Friar, Julia Holter, Andrew McIntosh, and Andrew Norman. Composer John Adams, who conducted most of the concert, had a hand in selecting these pieces, and to his credit, it was an extremely eclectic program that showcased the range and depth of talent here.

Sean Friar’s Little Green Pop, originally written for Ensemble Klang, began with a series of poignant, resonant chords before breaking them apart, rendering them into more capricious, pointillistic textures meant to invoke the popular music of imaginary aliens. Inexplicably, at this concert the piece was drenched in artificial reverb, which turned some of the piece’s extremely compelling, dense rhythmic interaction into a wash. But fortunately, this didn’t manage to bury the music’s obvious charm and wit.

The reverb continued throughout Julia Holter’s haunting Memory Drew Her Portrait, though here it was justified, even necessary. This piece was more concerned with setting a mood than creating a trajectory, with long, enigmatic pauses between phrases. Holter set and sang her own text, an evocative poem about separated lovers, inspired by the letters of medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut. The influence of early music was also readily apparent in the restrained harmonic language of the ensemble, making the barest hints of chromaticism feel extremely powerful. Modernity creeped into Holter’s vocal style too, which was somewhere between the pure tone of early opera and the more colloquial, speech-like character of a pop singer.

LA composers

(l to r) Composers Andrew McIntosh, Julia Holter, Sean Friar, and Andrew Norman.

After intermission, Andrew McIntosh’s Etude IV seemed to strip music down even further to its barest components. Arranged for two clarinets (James Sullivan and Brian Walsh) and violin (Mark Menzies), the piece consisted of slowly shifting patterns of just intonation intervals. The unadorned austerity of this piece made it challenging for some concertgoers, but I found it riveting after losing myself in the pattern of subtle harmonic changes.

The finale, Andrew Norman’s Try, proved to be bracing and invigorating after the relative tranquility of the rest of the concert. The piece begins with what almost sounds like a mistake, a fragment of a piano arpeggio, before exploding into a relentless flurry of ideas from the rest of the ensemble. The orchestration is dazzling, with each gesture so distinct that even brief moments are instantly recognizable when they recur. Adams seemed most in his element here as a conductor, and for the first time on the program I could see a direct connection to his music. The bouncy rhythmic interplay and flashes of orchestrational color reminded me a bit of Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony, though Norman’s harmonies and timbres are a lot pricklier.
Norman has a few more radical ideas, too. After a furious climactic moment where you’d expect a John Adams piece to end, the piece returns to the initial piano arpeggio, which becomes a descending broken chord that is reiterated over and over, with slight variations. This revealed what the piece was about—having the courage to be wrong while having the patience to get it right.
I’m trying to decide if this program makes a statement about LA composers as a whole, or if there’s any particular aesthetic bent that can be detected. I don’t quite think so, though the progression suggested a narrative of sorts, a metacomposition that tried on a few different versions of minimalism, briefly erupted in a maximalist outburst, then returned to introspection and calm. There was also a kind of shared indifference to formal convention. All the pieces had at least moments of deliberate meandering, taking their time, refusing to be hurried. Only Andrew Norman’s work seemed tightly structured at first, before thumbing its nose at structure at the very end.

Maybe this expansiveness is Californian after all. The vast imagination on display, if nothing else, was certainly a testament to this.

Invisible Cities: Choose Your Own Opera

Posted on November 27, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Christopher Cerrone’s Invisible Cities
There’s something about Italo Calvino’s novels that makes them seem inherently musical. Maybe it’s the omnipresent interaction between precise mathematical structure and human intuition that recurs again and again in his writing. Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which finds Marco Polo narrating his travels to Kublai Khan, has a prescribed combinatorial chapter structure that dictates what kind of cities Polo describes and when, but the content of those chapters is so imaginative, so free. The structure becomes a kind of window frame that both enables and restricts what we see.

At LA’s Union Station last Sunday, November 17, I saw composer Christopher Cerrone’s opera based on Calvino’s novel, also called Invisible Cities. Wisely, Cerrone doesn’t copy the book’s structure, instead focusing on five particular cities. But as produced by the opera company The Industry and directed by Yuval Sharon, the event brilliantly captured both the ephemerality and rigor of Calvino’s writing. The Industry first grabbed people’s attention last year with a production of Anne LeBaron’s Crescent City, which featured a sprawling set composed of individual parts designed by different artists. Invisible Cities managed to be at once more extravagant and subtle, with the audience listening to the live performance on wireless headphones while wandering freely through an actual, historically scenic train station. The singers and dancers moved through the station too, with varying degrees of conspicuousness.

More production videos available here.

This means that anyone who saw the opera had a unique, unrepeatable experience—or, in Sharon’s words, everyone had a “front row seat.” But the fragmentary nature of this experience that makes it so compelling also makes it difficult to review. I can’t really evaluate the whole opera; I can only evaluate my experience of it.

Thankfully Cerrone’s music provides a powerful throughline for the entire duration. Less overtly dramatic than a typical opera score, there is an undercurrent of placidity to his music even at its most frantic and furious. It mirrors the benignly distant character of Calvino’s writing, unmoved by or removed from the cities’ inhabitants in a way, a kind of storm’s eye, an observer in a world of actors.

As the opera progressed, I felt unsure if I was an observer or an actor myself. After a brief instrumental overture, we wandered into a courtyard where a woman in white holding a large, shallow bowl sang long, lyrical lines. Crossing through the station into another courtyard, we came upon a stoic man in a wheelchair. While he wasn’t singing at the time, he was clearly part of the production. But this line was not always clear. When we re-entered the station, there were several audience members clustered around some chairs where two men were sitting. One looked bewildered, while one was sleeping or pretending to sleep. We had clearly just missed something, but what?

After that we found the bar, which became our stationary vantage point for much of the opera. We saw businessmen on smartphones moving in lockstep, dancers in military uniforms, and some kind of confrontation between the man in the wheelchair and a man in Italian Renaissance garb. As we watched, the man in the wheelchair stood, unsteadily, leaning on a cane.
Finally we returned to the ticket booth area where we began. Most of the audience seemed to be clustered here now, mesmerized by a line of dancers on the counter. A man emerged from the crowd that I recognized as the man in the wheelchair, but he was walking now, and dressed in resplendent robes. It was Kublai Khan. I prepared to follow him to his next destination but the music ended, and the opera was over.

I was left with an immediate desire to see the opera again, but unfortunately, appropriately, this was the final performance in a two-month run.

I should mention that on Sunday, the opera was preceded by a special performance of Cerrone’s Memory Palace, a work for percussion and electronics performed by Ian David Rosenbaum. Based on sounds from Cerrone’s childhood, the piece has a remarkable economy of materials, with subtle variations of a haunting motive threaded through five movements lasting 25 minutes. Rosenbaum’s performance was exceedingly sensitive to these subtleties. The piece was performed in commemoration of translator William Weaver, who brought most of Calvino’s novels to the English-speaking world.

Gloriously Messy Lodging: Zappa’s 200 Motels

Posted on October 28, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels in LA

Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels is a glorious mess. In some ways this makes it the perfect thing to put on to celebrate the 10th anniversary of LA’s Walt Disney Hall and its already turbulent history. While there’s a 1971 film version of Zappa’s magnum opus, and excerpts have been performed live plenty of times before, last Wednesday’s performance boasted the world premiere of Zappa’s orchestral version in its entirety. Before the show, the mood in the sold-out hall was practically jubilant, and some pre-concert shenanigans did a great job of setting the tone. Chorus members waved and blew kisses to the audience. The orchestra did a very uncoordinated version of “the wave” and made a deliberate mockery of tuning up. The audience collectively booed the “no photography” announcement. A Zappa impersonator presided over all of this from a neon throne. Finally, conductor laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen came on stage to a rousing cheer. (Four years after the start of Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as music director, it still feels like Salonen’s orchestra when he shows up.)

Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels in LA

Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

As for the score itself, it is—how should I put this?—spectacularly over-orchestrated, bordering on near-cacophony with unsettling frequency. I mean this as a good thing. It’s a bit like the climax of an Ives symphony, except it goes on for two hours, more or less. The ensemble includes a full orchestra, a rock band, a substantial chorus, a bevy of acoustic guitars, an accordion, and a few other things I couldn’t quite identify. The story is also all over the place, more like a series of loosely connected vignettes than a complete narrative arc. The notion linking (most of) these scenes is a trio of touring musicians trying to get back to LA, played with irresistible manic energy by Jeff Taylor, Matt Marks, and Zach Villa. It’s a very broad satire of small-town life in America that still feels relevant, for the most part. When the trio sings that the town they’re in is like a “sealed tuna sandwich,” we know what they mean without having to have it explicated for us. Some bits were also apparently updated or embellished, though it’s hard to say exactly where, except at those points when the characters veer into vaguely topical humor. (It’s kind of a cheap joke, but I enjoyed Rich Fulcher as Cowboy Burt quipping, “French horns? Why don’t you call them freedom horns?”)

Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels in LA

Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

This all culminates with a couple of even more over-the-top scenes. First there’s “Penis Dimension,” which features Marks bloviating about male anatomy in the manner of an evangelical preacher while the chorus languidly waves around glowing dildos and two women (Diva Zappa and Sheila Vand) loudly express their disgust. Finally there’s “Strictly Genteel,” one of those gorgeous, endless rock ballads that sweep you up in spite of yourself. Zappa’s lyrics here vacillate wonderfully between the platitudinous (“God bless the mind of the man in the street”) and the nonsensical (“a Swedish apparatus with a hood and a bludgeon”). It’s the perfect ending—the only possible ending, really.

Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels in LA

Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

Some of the most interesting stuff, though, happens in the meandering middle. There are long orchestral interludes that are musically fascinating but dramatically inert. It’s a common complaint that 200 Motels is in need of editing, but I have no idea what you’d cut from it, since most of it seems equally essential or non-essential. The narrative is so spotty that I’m not sure that cuts would make the dramatic arc any more effective. And besides, some of the best stuff has little overt connection to the main narrative, like when “Frank” (another Zappa doppelganger, played by Joel David Moore) describes composing another piece called “The Pleated Gazelle.” In this meta-operatic diversion, Zappa drops the bombast and explores a variety of chamber music textures: shuddering strings, skittering acoustic guitar counterpoint, ominous accordion drones. This is seemingly what Zappa does best, presenting an abundance of fantastic ideas without any sort of pretense of development. In a moment that could be read as a manifesto, Frank admits, “It’s not very pretty and doesn’t make any sense.” So to make it more palatable, over the orchestral accompaniment Frank tells the story of a girl who falls in love with a knute farmer. In between Frank’s monologues, soprano Hila Plitmann expresses the girl’s emotions through wordless vocalise as the orchestra swells. (Piltmann, who also played the role of an obnoxious journalist, was a standout soloist in general, hitting elaborate coloratura lines with laser precision while still being engrossingly expressive.) But as it turns out, the tale is just as rambling and capricious as the music, and the love story was merely a pretense to get us to listen to a bunch of nonsense.
But what nonsense!

Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels in LA

Photo by Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

The Tom Johnson Paradox

Posted on February 20, 2013 by - Columns

Last Friday, composer Tom Johnson kicked off a week-long Los Angeles residency with a concert and exhibition opening at Art Share in collaboration with the wulf. Johnson is generally known for his contributions to minimalist music and mathematics, but this event placed his work in a refreshingly different context, presenting his sketches and drawings as visual art. Some of these were taken from his scores, but many were not. A mural of the composer’s Falling Thirds with Drum, drafted by Aspacia Kusulas, greeted visitors at the entrance, and served as an excellent introduction and visual motto for the exhibition as a whole.

The atmosphere in the gallery was informal, with the composer himself wandering through the space and happy to chat about his work with the attendees, pointing out mathematical relationships between seemingly heterogenous pieces. The starkness of the presentation, with letter-sized sheets of paper evenly spaced along blank white walls, served to highlight the variations between the various pieces. Some had an immediately beautiful symmetry, while others looked more like tangled circuit diagrams.
The concert was similarly relaxed, with Johnson first presenting selections from his Counting Series, which, he was quick to stress, is a “work in progress.” In these purely verbal pieces, the performers count in various languages and dialects, beginning with simple patterns that soon spiral into dizzying complexity. Johnson performed the first excerpt as a solo before being joined by Michael Winter, Eric KM Clark, Aiden Reynolds, Juli Emmel, and Aspacia Kusalas in various combinations. The third excerpt, based on a Yorkshire dialect, was a particular highlight. Johnson indulged himself in a little vocal “orchestration” here, setting the male and female voices off one another in engaging and clever ways.

Simplicity, complexity, and humor were recurring themes for the evening. When listening to one of Johnson’s pieces, it may initially seem almost bewilderingly simple. Sometimes, gradually, a deeper structure becomes clear, and a slow-motion moment can feel like a revelation. At other times, the pattern remains tantalizingly, maddeningly just out of reach. The curious thing about this scenario is that while the pattern is still perceptible, it is “felt” rather than understood. This was certainly the case for me when hearing the the sparse, disjunct falling gestures of Tilework for Viola, performed with precision and subtlety by Andrew McIntosh.

Of course, Johnson is cannily aware of how his pieces are perceived, and often exploits this awareness for comic effect, as in the last piece on the program, Squares. In this performance, McIntosh’s viola phrases were interspersed with Johnson’s narration, which describes how the piece was constructed. Far from your typical treatise, the dryly witty narration includes asides directly addressing the audience, pointing out intentional “mistakes” and often anticipating the listener’s reaction. “Of course, I don’t expect you to understand all of this,” he says at one point.

This is perhaps the most curious and intriguing paradox of Johnson’s music. While he doesn’t necessarily expect to be understood, he hopes that people will put forth the effort to at least grasp a fragment of it. It is essentially a gesture of trust: here is an offering, and you can take it or leave it. For those who return that trust, Johnson’s music can be addictively compelling.