Facing Budget Cuts, New York Times Enacts Dire Cutbacks on Diacritical Marks

Anthony Tommasini has a piece in the Times about the American Composers Orchestra. Sadly, even the Arts page is suffering the effects of the economic downturn; as the dollar continues to slip against world currencies, the costly, exotic diacritical marks used in some foreign alphabets are the latest casualty.

And other issues. To wit:

The American Composers Orchestra practices truth in advertising.

I think you mean "truth in autonomenclature" (not the kind about handguns, though).

As its name implies, its mission is to perform new, recent and neglected works by American composers.

Its name also implies, importantly, that it's an orchestra.

On Friday night at Zankel Hall it offered a program of premieres by Lukas Ligeti and Derek Bermel and the New York premiere of the Guitar Concerto by Robert Beaser.

Makes sense, I guess.

Obviously "premiere" has long been Anglicized (or Anglicised, if you prefer); the term became so prevalent that we obliterated its erstwhile accent grave to demonstrate our linguistic superiority over the French.

See? American Composers Orchestra.

A piece from 2007 by the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher was slipped in, proving that this open-minded orchestra is willing to reach beyond America for a worthy piece now and then.

Ooh. Although we approve of this programming, it does in fact set this paragraph at odds with itself, as it were. Ah, well. We can't have all of the supporting sentences, uh...supporting the topic sentence, now can we? That could be construed as gauche.

But the other purpose of the evening was to honor artistic leaders who have been crucial to the orchestra’s success: Mr. Beaser, its artistic director; Mr. Bermel, just finishing his tenure as composer in residence; and Dennis Russell Davies, the conductor laureate, who founded the orchestra 32 years ago and looked elated to be back.

Perhaps they should have called it the "American Composers, Conductors, and Artistic Directors Orchestra," but that hardly rolls off the tongue, does it?

Mr. Bermel’s work, “A shout, a whisper, and a trace,” was particularly effective and often exhilarating.

I've always thought "effective" was an odd descriptor of concert music. Effective as...music? Diversion? Intellectual fodder? Thirst quencher? Floor cleaner? Dessert topping?

Mr. Bermel draws from myriad genres: jazz, rock, gospel, cerebral modernism, you name it.

You already named it, and its name is Inherent Bias.

Jazz: Not Cerebral. Rock: Not Cerebral. Modernism: Cerebral.

Argument: There are lots of kinds of modernism; the qualifier merely indicates the particular cerebral kind of modernism alluded to in the piece reviewed here. You're being hypersensitive (again). Give it up.

Rebuttal: There is cerebral rock, and also cerebral jazz, one could argue. (Cererbral gospel is not familiar to this author; however this could constitute a deficiency or ignorance on my own part. (I suspect not. But it could.)) Qualifying modernism, and only modernism, in this description sets the "thinky" music appart from the "feely" music (rock, jazz, gospel).

Moreover, the construction of the sentence amplifies this effect. It's not "rocky rock, swingy jazz, goddy gospel, and cerebral modernism;" and the inclusion of the modified "modernism" at the end of the list only further sets off the distinction.

"Cerebral" is code for "thinky." You'll recognize the other influences, sure, but be careful! there's also some of that awful modernism.

That his interests are so wide-ranging could prevent him from forging a distinctive voice were his ear not so keen and his technique so assured.

Translation: There's some thinky music, but you'll still like it. Becuase, you know, rock and jazz! It's like two great tastes that taste great together! It's thinky on the outside, with a creamy, accessable center.

Figure 1: An early, successful attempt at modernist collage techniques. If conisdered today somewhat simplistic and naïve in its dualism, this classic example of early modernism is echoed now in less strictly dialectical efforts such as Snickers' Ice Cream Bar with Almonds.

Mr. Bermel says that this 20-minute piece was inspired by his reflection on Bartok’s final five years, as a transplant to New York. Though relieved to have left Hungary, his homeland, under the Nazis, Bartok maintained a personal connection to his musical roots.

His name, however, and the alphabet of his youth were abandoned at Ellis Island, corrupted by the influence of the New World.

NY Times: I'm sorry, Mr Bartók, we're going to have to go with an unadorned "o". Going to have to be "Bartok" for now. Frightfully sorry old chap. [adjusts monocle; money flies everywhere]

BB: But, sirs, please, it's my name...it's a different alphabet...

NY Times: Sorry, sir. Diacritical marks are just too expensive. Economy and all that.

BB: I see...

NY Times: Well, off with you, then.

BB: But I read the Sports section today! I saw...

NY Times: Well, yes. But you know, the arts and all, we can't afford to give them the same consideration as South American cities. Or baseball players. The Latin American market is very important.

BB: That sucks.

Anti-Anti-Modernism

Ah, New York City, where you can go to contemporary music concerts on…barges?

Floating, Personalizing, and Performing

Everyone knows about the three B’s of classical music: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Here is a list of classical composers whose last names start with “B”. But that’s not the point. Chiding a well-known pithy truism is the point, Well, actually, that’s not the point either.

The pianist David Holzman, speaking from the Bargemusic stage before his recital on Friday night, introduced a new wrinkle with three A’s: austere, abstract and academic.

Oh, here we go again with the modernist-hating again. Wait, I thought Mr. Holzman was a specialist in the contemporary piano repertory?

Mr. Holzman, a specialist in the contemporary piano repertory and a congenial commentator, brought up those qualities to debunk them.

Ah, pity poor Sator Arepo; his straw man has been set up and knocked down before he could even get there. Well played, Steve Smith of the New York Times.

True, his program was chock full of challenging works by some of the 20th century’s more formidable musical thinkers, including Roger Sessions, Ralph Shapey, Stefan Wolpe and the now ubiquitous Elliott Carter. But Mr. Holzman’s intent was to humanize these figures and to provide an entry point for comprehending their music.

Awesome. Slightly subjective, perhaps, but awesome.

The first half of the program was largely devoted to works by Sessions and Shapey, whose music is also paired on the Holzman CD issued in December by Bridge. He spoke of Sessions’s patrician upbringing and personal melancholy and of Shapey’s rebellious contempt for polite society.

Ah, Shapey, the consummate curmudgeon. And..?

The music supported his comments. Sessions’s lean, muscular Piano Sonata No. 1, a Neo-Classical work from 1930, was tonal and even jazzy at times. But its melodies were usually limited to solitary lines with little counterpoint: a sign of isolation, Mr. Holzman said. In Shapey’s “Mutations” (1956) and “Mutations II” (1966), flinty, atonal kernels were objects of cool, obsessive scrutiny from varying angles.

First: “flinty”?

Second: This is a great way to (at least) give listeners who are perhaps [read: probably] unfamiliar with the rep to get some leg up on a way to try to understand the music.

In his comments Mr. Holzman also made a connection between Sessions’s piece and Mr. Carter’s Piano Sonata (1946), which opened the second half of the program. Mr. Carter considers Sessions to have been a major influence. But in place of his mentor’s melancholy, Mr. Carter offers an exuberant optimism, maybe even a cocky flexing of newly honed muscles. Mr. Holzman’s account was not spotless. But a few missed notes during the work’s most agitated passages were a small price to pay for playing so full of blood, steel and unshakable conviction.

Again, a noble pursuit. Sorry so little snark. I really liked the article and the concept. Last but not least:

In Pozzi Escot’s Sonatina No. 5 (“For Hobie,” 2006), serene bell tones alternated with manic outbursts of Ivesian cacophony.

Yay! Pozzi Escot!

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[Edit] This post, in fact, was composed by Sator Arepo (if you couldn't tell already), which may account for the unfamiliarity with barge music. See: Alvin Curran.]
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Serialism Is Over! Someone Call Milton Babbitt!

Daniel J. Wakin of the New York Times recently wrote about B. A. (that’s Bernd Alois) Zimmerman’s epic, impossible-to-stage anti-war opera “Die Soldaten”. I have no issues with Mr. Wakin’s writing. My issue is with the stage director, who…well, let’s see.

First, though, the production sounds awesome. The audience is moved around an empty armory on bleachers on rails! So freaking cool. And, well…let’s just read on.

The Brutality of War, on a Big Stage

A FOREST of aluminum greets a visitor to the normally cavernous drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory. The thicket of metal forms the backside of what is essentially a giant, horseshoe-shaped set of bleachers filling much of the space.

The structure looks as fixed as a rock. It is not. Underneath are 12 railroad tracks, on which the structure and its nearly 1,000 seats glide back and forth, straddling a ribbon of stage running the length of the hall.

That is awesome.

It is on this stage that a 40-member cast of singers, dancers and actors will play out “Die Soldaten,” Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s dark and brutal opera steeped in post-World War II despair, starting on Saturday as part of the Lincoln Center Festival’s opening weekend. The audience periodically travels back and forth, at a top speed of seven and a half inches a second — the rate of a slow creep — as the scenes evolve onstage.

For a month now, technicians have been loading and building the set at the drill hall in one of New York’s most logistically complex opera productions this year. It will also represent a milestone in the armory’s recent transformation into a performance and visual arts space.

How cool is that? Answer: deeply cool.

“Die Soldaten” is considered one of the 20th century’s most difficult operas, both logistically and, for the audience, emotionally, because of its difficult subject matter. The orchestra numbers 110; it also has a separate percussion ensemble, a jazz combo and recorded sounds. The film of war scenes that the score calls for has been discarded as outdated.

I think that the war scenes films being discarded is too bad, since it was the composer’s intent to include them, but the rest of that is all kinds of super-modern/postmodern kinds of fun.

Based on a 1775 play by Jakob Lenz, the opera chronicles the fall of Marie, the daughter of a French merchant, at the hands of soldiers. She is raped and turns to prostitution. For the audience it is a work of total theatrical immersion, in which Zimmermann sought to portray past, present and future action simultaneously.

Sounds like more modern/postmodern kinds of fun. What else?

Zimmermann composed a thoroughly thorny 12-tone score.

Uh-oh. Sounds fascinating to me, but is potentially critical dynamite…

There are overwhelmingly loud passages, but also delicate moments of chamber music, jazzy rhythms and Bach-inflected passages.

Passages passages passages. But still, sounds interesting…

Sometimes three sections of the orchestra play completely different rhythms. In one passage percussionists embedded in the chorus tap out rhythms with spoons on bottles, as jazz dancers sound out a cross-rhythm. The demands on the singers are formidable. One particularly devilish vocal passage will be recorded and played back during the performance, a compromise sanctioned by Zimmermann himself.

Wow. I bet that’s a spectacle to behold, I wish I could see it.

“It’s incredibly challenging from the technical point of view,” said the conductor, Steven Sloane, who will lead the Bochum Symphony Orchestra, of which he is music director. “It’s been billed as unplayable all these years.” Yet each scene is constructed according to traditional musical forms, like rondino and nocturne. There are flashes of Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier” and Berg’s “Wozzeck” and “Lulu.”

Modernist techniques are combined with older forms and influenced by other works, creating an intertextual opera with multiple influences, and, potentially, interpretations. Awesome! Sounds like a graduate student’s Instant Dissertation Topic (TM).

“It is one of the monuments of 20th-century music,” said David Pountney, the stage director. “You can say, ‘I don’t like it,’ but you can’t ignore it.

I have no desire to ignore it! I am jealous of people going to see it! But wait…

It’s the end point of 12-tone music, really.”

Really? “Really”? Because, no.

This opera was written in 1957.

Nineteen Fifty-Seven.

Here, with a really minimal modicum of research, is a list of composers who wrote 12-tone music after 1957.

Wait. First, I will now go compose a 12-tone piece…

…okay, back. It’s short, but I did it. Now for my list:

Louis Andriessen
Hans Erich Apostel
Milton Babbitt
Arthur Berger
Pierre Boulez
Robert Ceely
Luigi Dallapiccola
Ernst Krenek
Joseph Johnson
Bruno Maderna
Donald Martino
Luigi Nono
George Rochberg
Roger Sessions
Nikos Skalkottas
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Stefan Wolpe

So, yeah. Not the end of 12-tone music. You can keep wishing it’s still 1842, but (news flash) it’s not.

The rest of the article is available via the link at the beginning of the post.
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Why?

Last week, Steve Smith of the NY Times wrote a nice article about a Boston new music ensemble called Xanthos. It’s called:

Modernism, Rapid-Fire or Dreamy

But don’t go and read it yet. Hold on a sec.

…Xanthos Ensemble of Boston, which came to Roulette in SoHo on Saturday night with a program featuring works by three uncompromising modernists: Pierre Boulez, Mario Davidovsky and Charles Wuorinen. And in the hands of musicians so copiously skilled and confident, this undeniably challenging music had genuine appeal.

Yes! Challenging, appealing music! Hooray!

That Mr. Boulez is modern music’s foremost voluptuary is no secret. Much of his ensemble music seems as much descended from the gauzy Impressionism of Debussy and the instrumental brilliance of Ravel as from any modernist vein. “Dérive I,” a brief work scored for the now-standard “Pierrot”-plus configuration — flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion — was a brief, intoxicating cloud of trills and flutters.

I’m not entirely sure what “modern music’s foremost volupturary” means (and my Google search for that phrase returned zero results), so I’m not sure that it’s no secret. The sentiment, though, is welcome, and tracing Boulez to Debussy is something all-too-infrequently done.

I also like the image of a “brief, intoxicating cloud”. Sounds like we’re smokin’!

Equally mysterious if less outright sensual was Mr. Davidovsky’s “Flashbacks,” in which sharp eruptions and skittering figures repeatedly rupture a placid rumination. The percussion part makes daunting demands of its player with its rapid-fire alternations of timbre and technique. George Nickson handled the role with ease and flair.

I am a sucker for alliteration.

Most appealing of all was Mr. Wuorinen’s “New York Notes,” in which six players mix and match in a cheerfully choreographed bustle. The opening movement is filled with jazzy rhythms and snatches of nostalgic melody. A throaty cello monologue in the second movement is followed by a passage in which flute and violin curl seductively around a lonely clarinet. In the final movement, a wild barrage of impressions, you can’t help but be swept away by Mr. Wuorinen’s giddy thrill in writing for virtuoso players.

Wuorinen: serialist holdout. You know, for those people who claim that “nobody writes 12-tone music” at all ever anymore, and why would they, blah blah blah.

Among four newer pieces, only Derek Charke’s “What Do the Birds Think?” could be said to extend the modernist tradition. The work’s animated outer movements call for a catalog of unorthodox expressive techniques. In between, an onstage trio (alto flute with muted violin and cello) is juxtaposed with an offstage duo (bass clarinet and percussion). While physical separation was impossible here, the layered sounds still proved fascinating.

Sounds great! What else?

In Daniel Knaggs's "Three Nature Songs," a premiere, the soprano Jennifer Ashe sang sweet, airy melodies accompanied by instrumental impressions of chirping birds and croaking frogs. "Aria IV," bu Pozzi Escot, had Ms. Ashe ritualistically intoning vowels over a droning flute and tinkle of finger cymbals. Donald Hagar's playful "I Am Not a Clock" alternated between bustling, mechanical rhythms and slow, dreamy interludes.

Actually, Escot’s piece sounds like it “extend[s] the modernist tradition”, too. But, whatever.

Why am I writing about this? It was a great review. It treated the pieces fairly, and on their own merits. It was well-written with lots of style.

Why?

Because I omitted the beginning of the first paragraph, reproduced below:

The word has been out for decades now: The bug-eyed monster of musical modernism is vanquished. Try telling that to the young, accomplished members of the Xanthos Ensemble…

Why? Why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why why?

Why begin a wonderful review of young, scrappy, new music-advocating players playing new music you liked and reviewed well by reiterating old-hack adages about the death of dumb old “bug-eyed monster” modernism?

Why?

Aargh! “Everyone knows modernism sucks/sucked, but here’s my review of some modern music that was actually good!”?

Besides reinforcing damnable and clichéd stereotypes, it undermines the article before it even begins.

Why?