Randomly Placed Qualifiers (Monday Quickie)

Hyperbole is, I guess, to be expected. After all, it is a classical rhetorical device, and pretty easy to pull off without fucking anything up.

Qualifying hyperbole weakens the effect of exaggeration, which is pretty much all it has going for it anyway.

Doing so at random is just confusing.

(Susan Pena, Reading Eagle, Concert Review: Philip Glass &c)

Philip Glass, the world's best known...living composer of classical music...

Really? I mean: possibly, sure, I guess. Maybe. But, hey. Hyperbole, am I right, folks?

Philip Glass, the world's best known and possibly most prolific living composer of classical music...

"Possibly" the most prolific, but the unqualified best-known [sic, or anti-sic(?)] composer?

Sheesh.

Also, and not for nothing: it seems like "most prolific" is actually, you know, researchable and verifiable. Unlike "best known" [sic].

Doo dee doo dee do.

Figure 1: Philip Glass Cutty Sark advertisment, Newsweek, 1982

Inventions and Discoveries

There are several confusing bits in an otherwise New York Times-y New York Times review by Mr. Kozinn last weekend.

2 Pianists in Supple, Flowing Dialogue

I like the way that "two" (or "2") is reinforced by "dialogue." Clever, no?

Classical music has been treated as a poor relation at the Lincoln Center...

Since when?

Classical music has been treated as a poor relation at the Lincoln Center Festival in recent summers,

Oh. Wait, what?

but this year the tally was down to one:

The tally? Of what? Down to one what? What?

...a program of contemporary works for two pianos performed by Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, the next-to-last night of the festival.

The tally was down to one program?

That is one confusing run-on sentence. Let's see:

Classical music has been treated as a poor relation [of what?] recently (at the festival), but this year the tally [of classical music-s?] was down to one: a program of contemporary works etc., on the next-to-last night.

The tally of musics was down to one program? Okay.

Lincoln Center apparently considered even that much to be heavy lifting.

That one...tally...was...heavy? Much?

The concert was presented as a collaboration with the Ruhr Piano Festival in Germany, which commissioned the works by Chen Yi and Philip Glass that made up the second half of the program.

Is the fact that the Ruhr Festival commissioned the works why the Lincoln Center Festival is felt to not have done the "heavy lifting" for the concert? It seems to me that pens and checkbooks are not all that heavy compared to, say, composing new works or learning, memorizing, and performing them.

Mr. Davies, though best known as a conductor, is also a fine pianist, and he has been playing duo recitals with Ms. Namekawa since 2003. A memorable concert at the Miller Theater in 2005 was also devoted to modern music, but their repertory includes Zemlinsky’s four-hand arrangements of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” They have recorded both, and a contemporary American program, for the Ruhr festival’s label, Edition Klavier-Festival Ruhr.

They play contemporary music. But they also play Mozart arrangements, but they also play contemporary music. The Ruhr Piano Festival's label is called Edition Klavier-Festival Ruhr. Who knew?

Mr. Davies and Ms. Namekawa began with a lively account of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos (1935), a work Stravinsky composed for his own use in duo concerts with one of his sons, Soulima. He kept it eminently practical: by arguing that the orchestra parts that might normally be expected in a concerto were incorporated into the keyboard fabric, he guaranteed the work’s portability.

Okay, that's logical. Is there a reference to Stravinsky's "argument," or is it borne out by the fact that the piece, you know, exists?

And by couching it in Neo-Classical gestures and textures, he made it accessible and appealing, if not quite as sharp-edged as his most enduring work.

Ah, my. Sharp-edged is the opposite of accessible and, especially, appealing. We like our modernism drowned in a gigantic puddle of accessible pudding (e.g. Barber, Samuel).

Curiously, though, "appealing" does not necessarily equate to "enduring." Take that, anti-formalists!

The following is, inexplicably, the next paragraph in its entirety:

Its charms include a rhythmically vital opening movement and inventive variations, and Mr. Davies and Ms. Namekawa gave it a supple performance with a hint of modernist steeliness in its closing fugue. They ended the first half of their program with another, more recent oldie, Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” (1967), an early experiment in applying to instrumental music the phasing techniques that Mr. Reich discovered in his seminal tape pieces, “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain.”

Yeah, what? The entire last paragraph was about the Stravinsky; the entire next paragraph is about the Reich. Methinks the copy editor had an Idealized Paragraph Paradigm that somehow failed to take into account the subject of the sentences in their grouping preferences.

Figure 1: Goddamn it do I hate grouping preferences.

But let's back up to what should be the first sentence of the next paragraph:

They ended the first half of their program with another, more recent oldie, Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” (1967), an early experiment in applying to instrumental music the phasing techniques that Mr. Reich discovered in his seminal tape pieces, “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain.”

I like "recent oldie;" it amuses me. However, did Reich "discover" the phasing techniques he used in those [excellent] tape pieces? I guess...sort of. I mean, it's basically a really really really tight canon; and I think he more "invented" than "discovered" the phasing idea. Does this matter?

Figure 2: Steve Reich (r) with David Wooderson (played by Matthew McConaughey) from Dazed and Confused

Figure 2 [supplement]: (File photo of Wooderson for reference)

Anyway. So, phasing, huh? Sounds interesting. What's the idea?

The idea is that two musicians playing brief, simple figures begin in unison and then move apart one beat at a time.

I see!

Eventually they return to the positions from which they began, but along the way the displaced beats create an increasingly dense web of sound from which phantom themes emerge and interact.

Sounds about right, even if the procedure in the aforementioned tape pieces is more complicated.

Or at least, they seem to: Mr. Reich’s real discovery here is the power of the overtone series and of psychoacoustic effects.

Again, did he "discover" the "power" of the overtone series? I don't know about Pythagoras, but Helmholtz might be pissed about that claim.

Figure 3: Was 1863 before 1963?

In his phase pieces we hear rhythms and counterpoint that no one is actually playing.

Well, sort of. Someone is playing them, but between the echo and the overtones, and our acoustic memory...but I guess that's the "power" that Reich "discovered." Invented? Experimented with? Employed? No...? Discovered?

I find this turn of phrase very, very odd. Did Albers discover colors? Or combinations of colors in squares? Wait--maybe it was Mondrian?

Figure 4: I've "discovered" the "power" of embedded images!

Well, that was my main concern, I guess. The rest of the article basically...well, here:

Mr. Glass employs an amusing trick in his Four Movements (2008)...

The "amusing trick" is that it doesn't sound like Glass!...but then, it does. Ha ha! He's a one-trick pony! Hilarious.

The rest of the article is available from the link at the top, or, if you're lazy, here.

Thoughts about discovery or discoveries about thought are welcome.

Title Fail

I’ve no problem with this review—Kyle MacMillan of the Denver Post is, as usual, on his game. But the editor, or whomever gave this piece a title was off in a seedy motel sucking down qualudes with vodka. To explicate, Kyle starts off thusly:

The Colorado Symphony and Friends of Chamber Music sometimes include unusual offerings on their lineups, but fans typically have to look to smaller niche organizations for large doses of such repertoire. [italics mine]

But the title giver gives us this gem:

An eclectic offering from chamber group

Did I miss the memo? Last I heard, “unusual” does not mean “eclectic.”

See, the performance included pieces such as Paul Hindemith's Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24a, for 12 Solo Instruments (1922), Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 (1940), and Philip Glass' String Quartet No. 2, "Company" (1984). Generally speaking, pieces written within 62 years of one another don’t necessarily make for an eclectic offering. That’s like saying, “The Philharmonic played an eclectic concert that included pieces by Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.”

Whatever, this is more of a public service announcement: You should not take qualudes, especially if you plan on drinking copious amounts of vodka—it makes you forget how to interpret chronological timelines and it makes you write inappropriate synonyms. There are other, less damaging side effects, too. There is nothing wrong with seedy motels, however.

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By the way, if you’re thinking that the title reflects the eclectic styles of the pieces, save your commentary, because I disagree. Beethoven to Schubert to Brahms would be very eclectic, too, then. I’d argue that their styles are just as normative as Hindemith, Shostakovich and Glass’ styles given a 62-year long, evolving Zeitgeist. Also, I take it back. Don’t go to seedy motels for any reason—most no longer honor frequent flyer miles, which could lead to qualudes and vodka. I speak from experience.
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Subtlety and Mr. New Age: John Cage

I’m not entirely positive that this is a slap in the face, but it sure seems like it.

[Pianist X] opened the concert on his own with an early Cage work, “In a Landscape” (1948).

You know who wasn’t born yet, in 1948? New Age pianist George Winston.

This is a side of Cage you don’t hear often, and you would be hard pressed to identify it as his work.

Possibly. Could you?

Its textures are gentle, rippling, vaguely Debussian, with simple melodies weaving through a tissue of arpeggiated, diatonic noodling.

“Noodling” is one of my top four favorite descriptors. Ever.

How odd to think that as a young composer, Cage wrote music that could today be mistaken as...

...as the back of Philip Glass’s (Glasses?) right eyeball? No? What, then?

...as the New Age meandering of George Winston.

Ugh. See? It just feels like a jab in the gut. Could Allan Kozinn be calling In a Landscape “New Age?” “Meandering?” Or how about “like George Winston?” Ever hear George Winston play?

Either way, I don’t like the implication; all three are pretty bad. It’s like, “How odd to think that as a young critic, Bernard Holland wrote reviews that could today be mistaken as the postmodern meandering of Allan Kozinn.” It just doesn’t feel right, for some reason. Subtle, indeed.
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My Breadcrumb Trail Has Been Eaten!

The Cliffs Notes to this column will be offered for only $4.95 at any of our participating cheesesteak stands and only $1.95 with the purchase of a side of Cheese Whiz.

Contradictory as it sounds, minimalist music is arriving in an avalanche this fall.

That’s gotta be one big avalanche, a big, contradictory avalanche; Philadelphia’s nowhere near the mountains.

But since minimalism is, by definition, minimal, one envisions...

a) a Buckminster Fuller building.
b) a Samuel Beckett play.
c) a Franz Kline painting.
d) a “less is more” attitude.
e) creatures from some musical Lilliput engulfing Beethoven and Brahms.

If you guessed a-d, you’re getting warmer. However, if you guessed the Jonathan Swift reference...

Yet minimalism has evolved to a point where John Adams' newest opera, The Flowering Tree, commands attention musically and dramatically as handily as Verdi.

Um. From its sheer numbers, minimalism is overshadowing (?) Beethoven and Brahms, yet (?) it commands attention, like Verdi? Okay. And all of this despite the fact that John Adams doesn’t consider himself a minimalist. (Sorry folks. This is for my sake. I just want to leave myself a trail of breadcrumbs, if you know what I mean.)

A musical language based on the idea of small cells of sound repeated to hypnotic lengths has found a range of expression undreamed-of 30 years ago, when some of this music sounded like an LP record stuck in a groove.

Thirty years ago, in 1978, which would make musical minimalism roughly twenty years old, John Adams was beginning to move away from eight-tracks to cassettes and from minimalism to this neo-romantic-minimalist hybrid of which you speak. So, John Adams, at least, was dreaming, way back then.

Is this the culmination of a long-germinating movement?

Cassettes? Probably not. Minimalism? Is fifty years long enough? A hybridized form of minimalism with expressive flexibility? As sure as the seasons change, which is, by the way, what will happen to this “movement,” too.

Certainly, there's a critical mass.

(brain twitches) Critical mass is the SMALLEST amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. In the vernacular, it’s the same, except it refers to people, ideas, or fads. So...

Tons of expressively flexible minimalism, an avalanche if you will, is ready to explode? Or has it already exploded? I’m confused. Very confused.

Either way, a bevy of CDs, DVDs and performances will be rolling down the hill this fall. This includes some John Adams (not a self-described minimalist) and Philip Glass.

Only Steve Reich, minimalism's J.S. Bach, is missing.

This avalanche of minimalism, as one might want to color it, consists of two, count them, two composers—a whole two composers (2). Too.

I also wonder who is minimalism’s Baldassare Galupi.

If there's a consolation, it's a strange but imposing one: British composer Michael Nyman, who coined the term "minimalism" and enjoyed overnight popularity with his distinctive score for the 1993 Jane Campion film The Piano, is getting a burst of U.S. visibility.

“Hear me my diminutive dominions. Instead of Steve Reich, let them eat Nyman.” Yeah (whimper).

Stand back from it all, and conclusions are unexpected.

Conclusions about what? Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the conclusions about this being the culmination of a long-germinating movement.

Why are conclusions unexpected, Dave?

Compare Adams' The Flowering Tree, about a woman who can transform herself into a tree, and Richard Strauss' Daphne, whose title character has similar talents.

Since comparisons are not conclusions (sigh), I’ll play along. What, then, separates the two? Though, I’m not sure where this could be going. Can a comparison of two similar stories utilizing different aesthetics inherently reveal whether or not this avalanche is, indeed a long-germinating movement? Paint me skeptical.

Adams defines the unimaginable, using hypnotic minimalist arpeggios in ways that convey the rhythm of the Earth while melodies wander into unknown regions, governed only by the winds of fate.

Sorry, I need to stand back from it all for a second, too, because it’s breadcrumb time (my head hurts)!

To recap: From its sheer numbers (three), minimalism is overshadowing (?) Beethoven and Brahms, yet (?) it commands attention, like Verdi. It has grown into something more expressive. Both of these facts leads to the question whether or not this is the culmination of a long-germinating movement. To investigate this further, we need to stand back, look at the bigger picture by closely examining two similar, yes dissimilar, works up close. (Am I being fair up to this point?) And conclusions are unexpected. But we're going through the motions anyway.

Where’d I leave off? Ah!

Adams defines the unimaginable, using hypnotic minimalist arpeggios in ways that convey the rhythm of the Earth while melodies wander into unknown regions, governed only by the winds of fate.

First, “hypnotic minimalist arpeggios” is, well, quirky. Unless “hypnotic” is modifying “minimalist,” which is okay, then...no. I take that back. It’s just wrong. Minimalism is, by and large, hypnotic. So, “hypnotic minimalism” is redundant. On the other hand, if “hypnotic” is modifying “arpeggios,” fine. But, then, in this case, the “minimalist” is redundant. You see? Both “hypnotic arpeggios” and “minimalist arpeggios” are the same thing. If you want to contend that they are not the same thing, then whoops, too! You need a comma separating “hypnotic” and “minimalist.”

Despite that nitpicky mess, the contention is that “Adams defines the unimaginable,” which, by its implicit impossibility, is impossible, given that he can’t imagine the unimaginable. Right? Moving on.

The woman-to-tree transformation arises from a bedrock of radiant string tremolos; celebratory percussion sounds like pealing bells in a meadow of glistening string harmonics and soft percussion.

I just threw up in my mouth.

The assemblage of sounds is one thing, but could traditional composers create such trancelike stasis?

Excellent. We’re back on track, sort of. We’re back on track to compare apples and oranges. But we’re still nowhere close to finding out why conclusions pertaining to whether or not today’s minimalism is the culmination of a long-germinating movement are, in fact, unexpected.

And to answer the question about traditional composers, yes.

In contrast, Strauss is about the emotional impact the characters experience at the hands of magic, so the transformation musically is such an afterthought - expressed with Daphne's wispy, wordless vocalization - that you could almost miss it. In effect, Strauss ducks the dramatic problem.

I’ll give Dave one thing: the conclusions, if you can call them that--and are apparently back on the table--are, indeed, unexpected. By comparing Adams to Strauss, we found that they composed with different means and intents. Adams defines the unimaginable; Strauss ducks the dramatic problem. In “conclusion,” romanticism is not minimalism. And to think, I’m up to my ears in student loans, when I could have just waited a few years in order to read this.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Like Renaissance vocal polyphony, which gives a spiritual radiance to anything composed with its precepts, minimalism seems to be the language of the heavens.

Hmmm. Either something is terribly wrong with this or I’m beginning to nod off. I know! I need some coffee. Just continue reading; I’ll be back in a moment.

Revisiting Glass' Mohandas K. Gandhi meditation, Satyagraha, one noticed anew how the piece elegantly bypassed the mundane particulars of a linear plot - the sort that took Tan Dun down hackneyed blind alleys in The First Emperor - and went straight to more important matters of the soul.

It's not the most dramatic way to go - you'd never want a sequel to Tosca done in this way. And yet Adams' Doctor Atomic gets dramatically muddy without leaving its lofty perch. Its landscape - Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945 - is built from peripheral details. A hard-bitten military officer goes on at length about counting calories. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer closes Act I by singing the John Donne sonnet "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God."

Soon, you realize the opera is directing its energies toward the moral dilemma of those who made the bomb: Civilization was in the hands not of gods but of real, calorie-counting individuals. The minimalist element - with high-stakes drama juxtaposed with almost passive washes of sound and repetition - gives space to the moral problems at hand, not just for the characters, but for the audience.

Okay, I’m back and caffeinated.

What would you have done?

What?! Who, me? Shit! What did I miss? A lot, apparently.

Into this comes Nyman - with all the grace of an atheist at a Christmas pageant.

I’m no stranger to insults, but man, this is like shooting an Indian for trying to dress all civilized and such but failing to cinch the bolo tie tighter.

What the hell did I miss!?

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(reads previous thread)

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Oh. Weird.

His new, determinedly secular pieces prove that minimalism can be earthy, jazzy and sexy, which would be admirable if the music weren't so suffocating in its inflexible, intractable manner.

So, is it fair to say that his pieces are characterized by suffocating earthiness, suffocating jazziness, and suffocating sexiness? Is it also fair to say that those things don’t mean anything?

Jesus. “An atheist at a Christmas pageant.” Jesus. What's with this "sacred vs. secular" thing, anyway?

Among American minimalists, repeated ostinatos are like the broken white stripe down the middle of the highway, each one taking you farther along the piece's musical path.

By most accounts (Well, one really. I did some research a while back, which was funded by the Michael Nyman Institute of Stupid Things People Say About Him)—by most accounts those white dashes in the middle of a road or highway are there solely to inform a motorist which side of the road he/she may occupy, while, circumstances allowing, indicating a safe place to pass a slower vehicle. They are not, repeat not, there to take you anywhere. You may pass by them, but never will they take you anywhere. In fact, they are not living creatures. Some living creatures can, indeed, take you places, like horses, elephants, seeing-eye dogs, and most importantly, asses.

Similarly, ostinati are simply there. You, you, pass by them.

Nyman's repetition is more like a rock-and-roll riff with abrasively robust sonorities and little contour, and with the composer's considerable sense of invention relentlessly tethered to the central idea. Never does his music kick into that minimalist overdrive when the music mushrooms into something greater than its parts. Nyman takes a straight, unveering, almost robotic route to its conclusion.

Really. When did this become a Michael Nyman bashing party? I thought we were here to find out whether or not this “expressive” (subjective opinion) minimalism (misnomer) is the culmination of a long-germinating movement. Or at least why conclusions are unexpected.

While I don’t particularly like Nyman’s music, does he deserve this? Maybe. But, still...

All the plasticity cultivated by American minimalists of late - which we may have taken too much for granted - is rejected by Nyman.

That is, if you can call what they’re doing “minimalist.”

In its place is novelty: His suite, Mozart 252, sets to music letters from the composer's father, poems by the composer, plus his list of debits and credits, all with clinical detachment and vocal lines behaving like just another instrumental voice within the larger musical machinery. Same thing, oddly enough, with settings of sexually graphic Italian poetry titled Lust Songs.

Setting odd texts to music is not novel.

Put to the service of a strictly secular cause, minimalism hardly seems like music.

Where did this come from? Where the fuck are we? I’m caffeinated and alert. Would someone like to fill me in?

However, that theory is shot down by, of all people, the devoutly Buddhist Glass.

? “Of all people?” ? ?????????? ??? ??? Glass shot down theories? Really? Your theory, maybe. Or maybe, you just didn't think your theory through before writing it down for all of Philadelphia and beyond (I'm in San Francisco) to read?

He achieves Nyman's in-your-face aggressiveness without the rigidity in Waiting for the Barbarians, a 2005 operatic adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's novel about military-dominated regimes and merciless torture.

Torture? What does this “story” have anything to do with Nyman’s music not really sounding like music?

Here, Glass exercises every compositional muscle he's ever had: In place of his usual musical expanse, he constructs scenes from penetrating modules that lack the pin-point specificity of nonminimalist composition but are dramatically masterful.

Oh yes. The “penetrating modules that lack the pin-point specificity of nonminimalist composition but are dramatically masterful” scene-construction muscles. I just worked those out the other day. Boy do they hurt.

In one, the humanitarian hero confronts a dictatorial colonel, who is heard against a choral backdrop telegraphing how much he's in the majority.

The story...though secular...what? Seems like music? Despite your theory?

The key difference is that Glass' compositional ego is subordinated to telling the story, while Nyman subordinates his stories (whether abstract or literal) to his personality.

Help. Anyone?

For Glass, minimalism is the key to a world of poetic expression.

Did you ask him? Christ.

Just fucking shoot me already. Any semblance of coherence is gone. Every sentence, phrase and word is problematic. I’m plain lost. And I still have no idea whether or not minimalism is the culmination of a long-germinating movement, nor are we even trying to conclude anything--that's why conclusions are unexpected--not to mention we still only have three composers that constitute an avalanche. And what's with this whole "sacred vs. secular" bullshit?

Nyman's key is just that,

What?! A world of poetic expression? I. Don’t. Know. What. Is. Going. On. Anymore.

...which means that no matter how technically impressive he is, the music remains cold and strangely irrelevant.

A note to everybody ever: Please stop talking about “stories” in music as if they were concrete, irrevocable determinants of a piece’s worth and importance. Thanks. It helps no one.

Usually, compositional methods are only as good as those using them. But minimalism is one that penalizes practitioners who use it perversely.

Those sentences say exactly the same thing!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !! !!!!!!!!(?)

Except now you’re calling Nyman perverse. For what? What's perverse? And where’s my goddamned long-germinating movement? (insert poop joke here about how we've been reading it, all along)
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The Ned Flanders of Music Criticism

Otherwise known as Scott Cantrell, former president of MCANA, the Music Critics’ Association of North America. About Philip Glass, he says:

For four decades, his diddle-diddles and doodley-doodlies have transported some and maddened others.

That’s just F-ing fiddley-diddly dumb.

But here’s the kicker—one I didn’t expect. The article is not about a concert or a recording; it’s about a lecture where Glass was heard saying this:

"My musical mother was Nadia Boulanger, my musical father was Ravi Shankar. I was their child, by immaculate conception."

Jesus Christ!

By the late 1960s, the musical scene was ready for something radically different from abstract atonality. Composing a score for a Samuel Beckett play opened Mr. Glass' ears to the possibility of music based on hypnotic repetitions. "It was," [Glass] said, "the shell of the egg cracking."

Weird, I thought his first statement was hyperbole. But...

no. It wasn’t.

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This Sucks Dick

I'm not sure what to make of this. Philip Glass, scheduled to perform some of his piano music for the University of Miami, received an injury causing him to cancel the performance (Miami Herald).

“One of my kids jumped into my arms... and he bent my finger back.”

He actually told this to a reporter.


But this is also very disturbing.

You most certainly have entertained my dislike of interchangeable/vague-and-meaningless adjectives. And, to a degree, I acknowledge that it may be overly nitpicky. But why waste words, when it can be said in a clear coherent manner? So far, the only answer I have goes something like this:

(speaking as a critic)

The writer of classical music reviews has an obligation to compete, along with the other writers of other subjects and advertisements, for column space and, thus, readership. And the only way to do so is to mimic those “extreme” cultural norms, i.e., over-inflate the language, to give it some Gestalt, to make it sound bigger, to sound more important, than it really is.

My problem is that this kind of writing further confuses the music critic’s readership, alienating them from the possibility of understanding something about unfamiliar music. I do understand that music is ephemeral—it is an art, if you will, of memory—and that adjectives are often necessary to best describe, in word form, what happened. I also accept minor ambiguities, like:

...relentless momentum...

But even there, I find a problem. Does the author intend to suggest that there is a kind of “driving towards a goal,” or “snowballing growth,” momentum? Or does the author mean, instead of momentum, motion? Granted, either interpretation may be relevant to a particular work. However, we’re talking about Philip Glass, whose musical ideas (motifs, phrases, etc.) often meander (minimalism), but the motion is continuous (e.g., fast and continuous eighth-notes).

It is difficult to screw up an interview, or at least in the transcribing of one. And in many respects, this is a very insightful interview. The only problem I have is when Lawrence A. Johnson, the interviewer, interjects, adding his own “insightful” quips. Often, they are fine, or neutral. But this particular segue way, about Glass’s Violin Concerto, just sucks dick.

But first, I’ll give it to you in Mad Lib form.

In many ways the concerto seems to represent Glass at his most approachable and characteristic, imbuing a traditional form with his brand of (adj.) energy, (adj.) riffs and a (adj.), (adj.) lyricism that is distinctive in its (adj.), (adj.) sensibility.

Just remove the adjectives and this sounds pretty good. I get it. But I can still reword it so it’s even more clear:

“The Violin Concerto represents the quintessential Glass: a traditional form infused with his own distinctive brand of energy, riffs and lyricism.”

Personally, I think that sounds very good. But, obviously, this is not what was written. So we continue.

Now, just for fun, try to match the following adjectives with their appropriate placement within the actual sentence.

Sad
Urgent
Rock-like
Urban
Modern
Wistful

In many ways the concerto seems to represent Glass at his most approachable and characteristic, imbuing a traditional form with his brand of (adj.) energy, (adj.) riffs and a (adj.), (adj.) lyricism that is distinctive in its (adj.), (adj.) sensibility.

If you’re like me, the only one that really seems obvious is “rock-like.” Rock-like riffs. Correct! Even if all that comes to mind is “Iron Man,” which is probably not particularly an indicative Glass-ism. That leaves us with these:

Sad
Urgent
Urban
Modern
Wistful

And this:

In many ways the concerto seems to represent Glass at his most approachable and characteristic, imbuing a traditional form with his brand of (adj.) energy, rock-like riffs and a (adj.), (adj.) lyricism that is distinctive in its (adj.), (adj.) sensibility.

Aside from “rock-like,” I don’t feel confident assigning an adjective to the other blanks. I could make a case for and against every adjective in every space.

This is my problem with over-abundant adjectives. If you merely gloss over the sentence (in it’s original form) I can kind of get a sense of what Glass is about (or what Larry Johnson thinks about Glass), in which case the adjectives did their jobs. However, if I really think about the appropriateness of each one, I get confused. Very confused. Is it really “modern energy?” Or “urban energy?” Or “urgent energy?” I don’t know. Each one sort of makes sense. But, because “urgent energy” is not a thing, nor is it sufficiently differentiated from “traditional form,” I would have guessed that the correct pairing is “urban energy.”

Here’s the actual sentence:

In many ways the concerto seems to represent Glass at his most approachable and characteristic, imbuing a traditional form with his brand of urgent energy, rock-like riffs and a sad, wistful lyricism that is distinctive in its modern, urban sensibility.

Just sad.

That said, and to hedge a little, this was a very interesting interview. It was mostly, well-written. But, this one sentence, this one confusing, misleading, over-inflated excuse of a sentence, chaps my hide. There were so few opportunities to really F this up.

Like I’ve said before, this is not an isolated case of Color Me Badd journalism, it’s rampant, almost to a point where it’s the standard. This is one of the reasons why The Detritus exists. I just happened to catch Lawrence Johnson on a bad day. One on which Glass outs his son for sabotaging a concert.