Friday Quickie: Suffering from an excess of good taste?

An interesting dichotomy is often created between the technical prowess of a performance and the depth of the emotional narrative. It is commonplace that some performances are maligned as being cold and technical, while less-than-perfect performances are excused and even lauded because of a sense of greater emotional involvement.

Richard Storm, reviewing the Sarasota Music Festival for the Herald-Tribune, has one such review.

REVIEW: Sarasota Music Festival faculty artists touch the heart

Every music student has been there: Listening while a beloved teacher illustrates the way a particular composition should go, exploring the heart and soul of the piece, possibly slighting some of its technical requirements.

Hehe. Yep, those who can't -- teach. Right?

Which is more important: note-perfect execution or an exploration of the composer’s intentions?

That's a tough one. It really seems to allude a deeper philosophical question: what makes a piece of music what it is...the information in the score or the manner in which player performs it?

It's a complicated question, to be sure, which requires quite a bit of nuance in answering. However, before answering we should ask, more fundamentally, why should these two be diametrically opposed? It seems that a piece could be performed note-perfect and to the composer's intention. If not, then there would seem to a fundamental flaw, a Catch-22 of sorts, in the composition to begin with. Right?

But it's your rhetorical question, so...

No-brainer: The soul wins every time.

I'm guessing the "soul" is the composer's "intention", not the actual notes he wrote. From the point of view of the listener I can understand this feeling.

So, having attended the concert, enlighten us to the "soulful" rendering of the evening's performances.

So, while the faculty artists who performed at the Sarasota Music Festival Artist Showcase Thursday afternoon did not always achieve technical perfection, they fulfilled their roles as mentors and teachers of the fine young musicians who are training with them at the festival.

Huh? Because the faculty performed, and didn't achieve technical perfection, they were mentors and teachers?

The best example of this important distinction...

That performing all the right notes isn't important?

...was found in John Perry’s intensely engaging rendition of Robert Schumann’s moving and challenging Fantasy in C Major, an extended reaction to forced separation from his beloved Clara.

Which is why he dedicated the work to Franz Liszt? (note: link is to a pdf of the score)

And which (the infallible) wikipedia claims was composed in part as a monument to Beethoven, even quoting Beethoven in the work?

But whatever, I get it...all great composers get boiled down to one or two simple storylines: Mozart's all-consuming genius, Beethoven's deafness/savior of concerts with new music, Schumann's love of Clara/going crazy, and Brahms' love of the corn dog pizza.

figure corn dog pizza: And people say America doesn't invent anything anymore.

But we were talking about how great the interpretation of the piece was...

Perry’s performance was by no means technically perfect...

Yeah, I think you've mentioned that. If there's one thing performers love, it's having wrong notes pointed out to them.

...but it was touching in its intensity, powerful in its commitment to communication.

And this intensity and commitment to communication was enhanced by the lack of concern for right notes and technical perfection?

It's an interesting theory, but I'm going to need some convincing as to how the "heart and soul" of the piece was enhanced at the expense of the technical aspects of the piece.

Tell us more about how the performer plumbed the emotional depths of Schumann's desperation over his separation from his beloved Clara?

Yes, notes were missed,...

No, no, we get it. Ix-nay on the ong-wray otes-nay.

...there were messy and muddy moments,...

(This sure is a funny looking positive review.)

...but the final result was an appreciation of both the genius of Schumann and the influence of Perry on his students.

Please pardon me if I'm asking an obvious question, but how was this muddy, messy, technically imperfect performance an appreciation of the influence of Perry on his students?

I'm not sure we're getting anywhere, how about we check in on some of the other faculty performances.

The same evaluations...

Again, the technical and emotional battle for supremacy.

...applied to an over-cautious performance of Gioachino Rossini’s youthful “indiscretion” — his String Quartet No. 1, in an arrangement for winds, performed with great skill but very little witty spirit by Leone Buyse, flute; Franklin Cohen, clarinet; Frank Morelli, bassoon; and William Purvis, horn.

Okay, let's summarize...the Schumann had wrong notes, but was ultimately a good performance. And by contrast, the Rossini was played with "great skill" (which I can only assume means all the right notes), but wasn't spirited, and therefore not as satisfying a performance.

Hmmm...I'm beginning to see your point. This is indeed a conundrum.

Where was the mischievous wit for which Rossini was famous,...

It was probably lost in all the right notes being played...

...even at the age of 12,...

Wait, pardon the interruption -- Rossini was famous for his mischievous wit when he was 12? Famous with who -- his mom?

figure Rossini: Getting a lecture from his parents after his famous mischievousness caused him to trample Mr. Wilson's newly planted begonias.

...when he is alleged to have written this charming piece? Perhaps the performance suffered from an excess of good taste.

Just like the corn dog pizza.

That caution may also have affected the first piece on the program;...

The way they performed the Rossini may have affected the first piece? I'm assuming the "first piece on the program" was performed before the Rossini...right?

...Erno Dohnanyi’s “Aria,” performed by Buyse and Jonathan Spivey, piano, in which cautious good taste may have resulted in flute tone slightly under pitch.

Sounds like another excellent teaching moment for the kiddies. Intonation, just like accurate notes, aren't as important as the soul. Right?

Also, I have no idea what "cautious good taste" means. But it obviously is something to avoid. ...or not?

But back to our exploration of technical versus emotional. It seems what we have here, with the Dohnanyi, is a less than technically perfect performance, that was at the same time also suffering from "good taste" (e.g. not a satisfying emotional performance).

Does this suggest a flaw in our basic premise?

Hmmm...one more example maybe?

Yasha Heifetz’s clever arrangements of arias from George Gershwin’s glorious folk opera, “Porgy and Bess,” performed by Alexander Kerr, violin, and Jean Schneider, piano, was much more like the expectations of the students in the audience in its energy and swing.

Wait, I thought all these wrong notes, lack of wit, and bad intonations were what we expect when our beloved teachers perform for us? But I guess I should have assumed that when you said it had "energy and swing", that meant it was "exploring the heart and soul of the piece, possibly slighting some of its technical requirements." However, I'm not quite sure how the example of this dichotomy was a positive learning experience for the kiddies -- I guess we're teaching them priorities?

But, perhaps your larger point stands, that technical blemishes aren't as detrimental to the success of a performance as are cautious, unspirited performances. I suppose that there is some truth to this notion when it comes to live performances. How these two facets of musical performance became inversely intertwined remains a mystery to me. But I suppose there's a logic to it, that people wished to be moved by music, not impressed by it.

And while I'm certain that the case has yet to be proven, I think there is sufficient evidence that emotional performances are the greater performances. And for that reason, I am ordering that technical perfection keep at least 500 yards from the "heart and soul" of a piece at all times.

A Challenge to the Challenging, or: Just enough thinking for me to confirm what I already think

I’ll begin today with the ending.

Life's too short.

Ah, yes. Gather ye rosebuds, carpe diem, just do it. Or, for our purposes, don’t waste your fucking time on modernism!

"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short.

Besides the distinct possibility that Joyce was yanking Wells’ chain—Joyce’s quote was actually taken from an interview with Max Eastman in Harper’s Magazine by Richard Ellmann (1959), Wells’ (d.1946) from a personal letter to Joyce—besides that, there’s several interesting points of note, before we get going.

The first is the contrasting points of view, illustrating continuing dichotomies between high and low art, commercial and non-commercial, accessible and inaccessible, etc., etc. (Surely, this is simplified, but something I think the author of today’s article intends)

The second is our author’s obvious retort. He questions the worth of investing time in a complicated aesthetic (to be contrasted with complex, below).

-

Okay. Now, let’s poop on modernism from the beginning.

Too Complicated for Words: Are our brains big enough to untangle modern art?
Terry Teachout
Wall Street Journal

Literary types recently celebrated Bloomsday, a "holiday" not generally recognized by those who haven't read James Joyce's "Ulysses," a novel whose principal character is named Leopold Bloom and that takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

How could I have forgotten, dear Detritusites?

Happy Bloomsday!

As always, the celebrations included a marathon bash at New York's Symphony Space during which excerpts from "Ulysses" were read. One participant was Stephen Colbert, who admitted to a reporter: "Performing 'Ulysses' on Bloomsday at Symphony Space is the only way I'll ever finish the damn book."

Very funny—but also very much to the point.

Is the point that one TV pundit-parodist can’t finish reading Joyce? That’s not a very good point.

The novels of Joyce and Gertrude Stein, the poetry of Ezra Pound and John Ashbery, the music of Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter, the paintings of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock: All have at one time or another been dismissed as complicated to the point of unintelligibility.

Uh oh. Now no one can figure out when to be happy or sad.

Modern art comes in many varieties, and countless works once thought to be unintelligible now strike most of us as clear.

Excellent point. End of article, right? I mean, time put it into perspective and, lo, it made sense. Enough said. Happens all the time.

End of article. Right?

I wish it were so.

But I have yet to notice a collective change of heart when it comes to such exercises in hermetic modernism as Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," which contains thousands of sentences like this: "It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?"

I have to be honest, Microsoft Word didn’t like that sentence very much, either. So what’s the deal?

Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand?

Ah!

Ah.

Oh.

Uh…

But wait…

The authors of the Wikipedia article, faulty though they may be, seem to understand Finnegans Wake pretty well. They even seem to embrace Joyce’s difficulties.

Fred Lerdahl [This year’s Pulitzer runner-up] thinks so, at least as far as his chosen art form is concerned.

Hmm. I like music.

Let’s give it a go. What does Fred say?

In 1988…

Twenty-two years ago. Or the difference in age between Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky. Or the difference in age between me and someone born in 2000.

In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University…

Ivy League? I thought we were going to be arguing against having to think too hard. Was I wrong?

In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, published a paper called "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in which he argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers like Messrs. Boulez and Carter betrays "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result."

A very good argument, too—one worth thinking hard about!

And Mr. Teachout is also kind enough to give us a link to the online article. I recommend it; it’s a good read.

"Much contemporary music," [Lerdahl] says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity."

Okay. Let’s take a step back and clarify what Mr. Lerdahl meant, because cherry-picking quotes that fit your thesis is usually considered a bad practice.

Throughout the cited article, Lerdahl builds upon his 1983 book, A generative theory of tonal music, co-authored with R. Jackendoff, in which they outline, à la Chomsky, a grammar of listening, which is broken down into rules, preferences, and constraints that must be present for musical structures to be intelligible (cognizable). Complexity and complicatedness are, thus, semantically differentiated for reasons we will see below.

An important thing to note is that, “[Lerdahl is] not interested in passing judgement on the composers and compositions that are mentioned, particularly not on the remarkable work by Boulez that [he uses] as a representative example. The thrust of [his] argument is psychological rather than aesthetic.”

So, to get back to Mr. Teachout’s point: there is no guarantee that a compositional system will be intelligible. Fair enough.

What else?

Mr. Lerdahl's paper isn't widely known outside the field of music theory.

You don’t say.

But it stirred up a huge stink when it was published, and it continues to make certain of his colleagues understandably angry. For if he's right, then a fair amount of classical music written in the past century is too complicated for ordinary listeners to grasp—meaning…

Ordinary listeners can't grasp the notion of a sound cloud?

…meaning it is never going to find an audience.

Yikes. "Never" is a little harsh, don't you think? Didn't you just say:

Modern art comes in many varieties, and countless works once thought to be unintelligible now strike most of us as clear.

You did just say that. What gives?

Can there be any doubt that "Finnegans Wake" is "complicated" in precisely the same way that Mr. Lerdahl has in mind when he says that a piece of hypercomplex music like Mr. Boulez's "Le marteau sans maître" suffers from a "lack of redundancy" that "overwhelms the listener's processing capacities"?

"Precisely"? Uh, highly doubtful. I mean, can’t you reread a sentence?

The word "time" is central to Mr. Lerdahl's argument…

Right! You can’t just ask the orchestra to replay that complicated bit of Atmospheres before moving on; but you can reread a sentence whenever you wish.

…for it explains why an equally complicated painting like Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" appeals to viewers who find the music of Mr. Boulez or the prose of Joyce hopelessly offputting.

No. You’re doing it wrong.

While a book may be laid out linearly, you can reread it at will—it’s not time dependent. With Pollack, or painting in general, you are afforded the luxury of focusing your attention on whatever you wish, at any time, whether one strain of dripped paint or the total cacophony. But Boulez? Not so much.

If time is the question, then the pairing of Pollack and Joyce has more in common than Boulez and Joyce.

Unlike "Finnegans Wake," which consists of 628 closely packed pages that take weeks to read, the splattery tangles and swirls of "Autumn Rhythm" […] can be experienced in a single glance.

You’re still doing it wrong.

Is that enough time to see everything Pollock put into "Autumn Rhythm"? No, but it's long enough for the painting to make a strong and meaningful impression on the viewer.

Wait. How is that analogous to a piece of music? It isn’t.

Does our author wish it to be analogous? Is this the call to arms for an aesthetic reappraisal?

Should all music strive to be a sound bite, ready for mass consumption? Is this a Wall Street Journal thing? Should I blame capitalism?

That is why hypercomplex modern visual art is accessible in a way that hypercomplex literature and music are not.

See, you’re still doing it wrong.

You can't get through a complicated novel faster by turning the pages more quickly.

You’re. Still. Doing. It. Wrong.

Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting…

You just said it’s not! Remember?!

Is that enough time to see everything Pollock put into "Autumn Rhythm"? No [..].

Remember that? I did.

So, are you insinuating that maybe we don’t (shouldn’t?) want (need?) to see everything that Pollack put into it?

…and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it.

…because critics often have it dead wrong.

I feel the same way.

Good.

Oh. You didn’t mean what I meant. Sorry.

I suppose I could get to the bottom of "Finnegans Wake" if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble?

The scholars [sic] of the Wikipedia entry think it's totally worth the troub…

Wait a goddamned minute! You haven’t read Finnegans Wake but are perfectly happy to criticize it?!

Or would I be better served by spending the same amount of time rereading the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," a modern masterpiece that is not gratuitiously complicated but rewardingly complex?

First, is more better? I mean, I could read the entire Twilight Saga in the same amount of time it takes to read the first volume of Proust. And I hate vampires.

Second, my argument, by contrast, is this: that the complicatedness of artworks serves other exigencies, not just unintelligibility. Or, put another way, intelligibility is another criteria with which a composer may play.

And it’s here, too, where I somewhat disagree with Lerdahl. At the end of his article, he contemplates aesthetic value. He first claims that, “The best music utilizes the full potential of our cognitive resources,” which he is careful to qualify. It leads him to make the distinction between “complexity” and “complicatedness” we saw above.

Complexity refers not to musical surfaces but to the richness of the structures inferred from surfaces and to the richness of their (unconscious) derivation by the listener.

And…

A musical surface is complicated if it has numerous non-redundant events per unit time.

However, as I proposed above, I think that complicatedness can be just as valuable to an aesthetic position as intelligibility. In this sense, the artist may choose to play with or against intelligibility as a means of expression, rather than following a cognitively-prescribed formula. If we obey the later, we cease to seek anything beyond our baser intuitions. That is, if what is desirable is immediacy, then thinking becomes unnecessary, superfluous, and merely an afterthought.

And, because this is coming from the Wall Street Journal, I have to think: if music is indeed a commodity, then you don't want the consumer to think too hard about it--just get 'em to pay the entry fee and move 'em along. That is not a reason for aesthetic realignment.

Anyway, Lerdahl goes on to make his second aesthetic claim:

The best music arises from an alliance of a compositional grammar with the listening grammar.

Again, quite elegant. And given his definition of “complex,” this makes a lot of sense—it strikes an efficient balance between compositional grammar and listening grammar.

Still, is he asserting that he knows what the “best music” looks like? That would be arrogant, for sure.

Instead, what if what he meant by “best” is as I suggested above, efficient, then to whom is it efficient and complicatedness not worth the time? As we’ve seen earlier, Mr. Teachout doesn’t have the time; he finds immediacy valuable.

More importantly, if “efficient” is indeed what Lerdahl intends, he’s still fastidiously avoiding polemics, which is commendable. (Though I have my doubts to whether or not this is the case.) However, this is not Mr. Teachout's goal. He's not exploring cognitive and aesthetic issues; he's using a cherry-picked article to justify the disparaging of complicatedness simply because it’s difficult and time consuming. It's just another attack on thinking, which attempts to value art on its cognitive (market?) efficiency—a lazy reason to like what one already likes, and an excuse to be intellectually insufficient.

-

Mr. Teachout’s aesthetic prescription is then fervently echoed by a commenter who, to my delight, recalled some of his previous thoughts on the matter.

I can't quite work up sufficient enthusiasm (or courage) to read in full or closely the hugely detailed and technical 25-page PDF file of Fred Lerdahl's treatise cited and linked by Mr. Teachout…

Awesome.

[Seriously, dear Detritusites, if you read the article, you would have noticed that the “treatise” is not very detailed nor is it technical. In fact, six of the nine figures are simple flow charts. (And for the record, I love flow charts, because, if done right, they increase intelligibility and dispense with unnecessary complicatedness!)]

Figure 1. A simple flow chart

…but I did skim through enough of it to get the impression that Dr. Lerdahl is saying essentially what I said…

How sure are you about that?

…Dr. Lerdahl is saying essentially what I said in a 2008 post on my blog…

Except he said what you think he said twenty years earlier...or the difference in age between Antonio Salieri and Anton Reicha.

…on my blog, Sounds & Fury…

Mmmm.

…titled, "On Music And Gibberish". Herewith, an excerpt.

I actually remember this one very well. I wanted to comment but couldn’t.

"In the wake of yet another wave of outraged attacks by New Music's defenders, supporters, and champions against The New York Times's [sic] longtime classical music critic, Bernard Holland, one of this crowd's favorite MSM whipping boys, for his latest critique of atonal music, we started to think afresh concerning what it is about much of the atonal music of our experience that we found so, well, unmusical — worse, found to be non-music.

“We” is only one person, in case you were confused; it sounds less authoritarian that way.

That reminds me of…

What was that thing that Obi-Wan said to Anakin?

It's not atonality per se — i.e., the music's lack of a triadic tonal center(s); a 'home base,' so to speak — nor is it the almost unrelenting, unresolved harmonic dissonance that's the hallmark of the atonal.

I’m sure it’ll come to me. You know what he said, right?

It's something much more fundamental: the lack of a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end, which is to say the lack of the work's saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods which are — or ought to have been and be — but mere tools used in its making.

It’s at the tip of my tongue. It was in the third one, toward the end, I think. Uh…

"To put the matter ... bluntly ... a composition absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end is gibberish and not music."

Oh, right! “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Get it?! Because life’s too short for anything but simple, cozy stories.
-

Friday Quickie: Stravinsky best used to remove lingering flavors, avoid heartburn and promote good digestion

Opinions are important. They make a critic, or a critique, what they are -- an educated, reflective review and discerning examination of the relative value of a given piece of music or concert. They can also be fun, primarily in challenging standard orthodoxies and bringing new perspectives to common pieces and experiences.

Then again, some opinions are just...inexplicable.

Review | Chamber orchestra season has powerful conclusion

John Heuertz, Kansas City Star, June 13, 2010

The Kansas City Chamber Orchestra’s last concert of the season featured Mozart’s last work. The Mozart piece, his 1791 Requiem Mass, was preceded by Igor Stravinsky’s 1938 “Dumbarton Oaks” chamber concerto.

An interesting combination of pieces. While certainly accessible for a chamber ensemble, the Mozart Requiem (with a very sizable choral component) seems a very large scale work by comparison to the Stravinsky. But, whatever...I'm game.

Conductor Bruce Sorrell kept the 15 or 16 instrumental voices in the score in good balance.

That's good. Plus specifics are overrated.

He conducted with precision and gave the music an appropriately playful feel.

Appropriate is nice.

This cheery little item...

the Stravinsky?

...is often compared to Bach’s Brandenburg concerti.

Yes, I've heard that. In fact, I think Stravinsky even mentioned this himself:

“I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto,and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do."

Yes..."borrow".

Anywho, so one would do well to compare to this piece to the Bach Brandenburg concerti I would say. Go on...

A better comparison might be to music from the mid-18th century Mannheim school.

A better comparison, eh? Even better than the piece the composer even admitted he stole, er...borrowed themes from?

Explain.

Mannheim composers wrote the same kind of elegant, polished,...

Elegant, polished...yes yes. These were indeed traits of the neo-classical style, which was the style at the time, that Stravinsky embraced while composing this piece. What else...?

...the same kind of elegant, polished, commercially successful music that Stravinsky did.

Yes, commercially succ...wait...what?

Stravinsky wrote commercially successful music? "Dumbarton Oaks" is a commercially successful piece?

I have no idea what this means. I guess compared to Henri Pousseur Stravinsky wrote commercial music...

figure pousseur: Was always secretly disappointed that his Dichterliebesreigentraum (1992-3) didn't even crack the Billboard Hot 100, but UB40's crappy remake of "Can't Help Falling in Love" was #1 for 7 weeks.

And, like Stravinsky’s music, Mannheim music is easy to forget before intermission.

Forgettable?! Stravinsky's music is forgettable? I apparently don't know what the word 'forgettable' means.

Are we talking about the same Stravinsky?

But that matrix of forgettable music has to be there for unforgettable music to be written — and Mozart’s Requiem is unforgettable.

Whew. I thought you were being a tad dismissive at first, but I think I get it now. We need Stravinsky's forgettable music so we can fully appreciate good music from a composer who never wrote forgettable music.

Good call. Really, we should have a term for music like this. Any thoughts?

Thus Sorrell aptly described the Stravinsky as a “palate cleanser” for the Mozart.

Perfect. Stravinsky's music is like an unsalted cracker, or even better, a fruit sorbet.

figure palate cleanser: Bottled Stravinsky. Available in 6, 12 and 24 packs.

Classical Musicians Are Boring

Classical music, as we all know, is boring. Really fucking boring.

It is distinguished from all of the other lively (or “fine”) arts; poets, painters, and even sculptors are generally animated folk who enjoy emotions, colors, and being alive. Musicians—classical musicians, that is—are, on the other hand, tepid and stiff, and would just as soon count beans or sit still as eat, drink or enjoy any sort of pleasure.

The general malaise of scholarship and intellectualism has infested this arm of the arts. Those suited to musical study are cheerlessly devoted to it; the joy of sounds and the interplay thereof give them no delight. It is, rather, a matter of pressing buttons or touching strings in the proper sequence without smiling.

The classical music world, then, is full of grey, dull sorts who’d raher do long division than hum a tune, and find laughter a useless diversion that only serves to steal precious time from their busy schedule of not caring what you think.

What a delight, a surprise, an anomaly, when we find that most exotic of birds: a joyous musician!

Pianist with global reach comes home for good cause
Tom Murray, Edmonton Journal, 6/17/2010

For Maria Thompson Corley, music is more than just an intellectual exercise.

For the vast majority of people who have given up the pursuit of other careers, paths in life which at some point have a beggar’s chance of providing a decent living, so that they may instead pursue their passion for classical music, music is just an intellectual exercise.

Figure 1: George Gershwin, unsmiling and not smoking a pipe, engages in an intellectual exercise (ca 1936)

The Juilliard-trained pianist, who studied under the legendary Gyorgy Sandor, has been immersed in classical music since she was a young girl, but she doesn't look to it as the only soundtrack for her life.

Again, this is implicitly contrasted to most classically-trained musicians, who have no idea about this "Elvis" person they keep hearing so much about.

Figure 2: The soundtrack to unsmiling Charles Ives's life was nothing but stodgy old classical music.

"Oh, no," she says over the phone from her mother's home in Leduc. "It's all about what you feel like at the moment.

Oh, no! No no no! Music is an accoutrement. Like earrings, or underwear. To help you express your mood, absent the proper function of facial muscles.

Figure 3: Young composers Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky only ever had one feeling at any given moment, which is why they composed classical music.

"Sometimes you want to dance," she laughs.

Never, ever in the history of Western culture has anyone actually danced to classical music. Ever.

Figure 4: George Balanchine loved classical music, so he never felt like dancing.

"A while back I wrote an article about Michael Jackson and the editor asked why I would want to do this. Michael Jackson was a big deal to me and my friends growing up. We would try and learn the dance moves to his songs.

Who ever heard of a classical musician that likes pop music? Outrageous!

Figure 5: Erik Satie never smiled, nor did he have any truck with popular music; he certainly didn't earn his living playing cabaret songs in a seedy bar.

"I once spoke with urban kids about classical music, and since there was no piano I just talked about how different kinds of music moved me. The kids would come up and ask me if I knew about Fur Elise or Moonlight Sonata.

I don’t understand this anecdote. Michael Jackson…urban kids…no piano…Moonlight Sonata.

"People do have open minds about these things."

I read this as having a British-style emphatic do.

You could certainly say the same of Corley, who met the exacting standards of Sandor while still maintaining a sense of fun often absent in the rigid world of classical music.

My goodness, that awful, rigid world of classical music devoid of fun.

Figure 6: Known far and wide as a joyless soul, John Cage certainly typifies the lack of fun in the classical music world.

It is of course generally understood that music students, when not practicing or learning the dull, stifling art of music and its history, are forced to sit, chained to a dank grey wall in a dungeon and read Spinoza aloud to one another ad nauseum.

I mean: let’s be honest here. Do you think music schools, especailly Very Serious ones (like Julliard), are full of young, artistically-minded, creative, intellectually curious types who spend their spare time going to lots of concerts with their friends, drinking, and fucking?

Don’t be silly.

Figure 7: Unlike most college students, 18-21 year old conservatory academics and musicians are interested in neither sex, nor drugs, nor rock 'n' roll.

Extreme Merdle and Haggard

Merdle: You know, it’s been a long time since we’ve been to a new music concert. I’m feeling a little guilty for not supporting the arts. Plus, I have a hankering for something not associated with Toy Story 3.

Haggard: Me too. I could go for something that doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator.

Want some coffee?

M: Sure. Thanks.

H: [pours coffee] We should check the listings—see if we can find something worthwhile.

M: Mmm. Did you grab the paper?

H: Yeah. It’s on the counter, behind you.

M: Oh. I didn't see it there. It’s early--not quite awake yet.

H: That’s what coffee is for.

M: You said it. [sips] Hmm. [fumbles through paper] Arts section...NY/ Region…Ah! Here’s something. Ooh! It’s about the Caramoor Music Festival.

H: We haven’t been to Caramoor in years. What are they up to?

M: Well… “CHAMBER music has been a key part of the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah for most of its 64 years. But rarely has the festival presented as wide a spectrum of chamber offerings as it will in its 65th season, which opens this month.”

H: I didn’t know they’ve been around that long! Good for them.

Would you like your eggs scrambled or sunny-side up?

M: Sunny-side up, please.

H: So, a rare, wide spectrum of chamber music? [goes to refrigerator, grabs butter, eggs, bacon, and jelly] Sounds good. What else does it say?

M: “Along with established and emerging artists serving up standard chamber fare, an audacious group of new-music exponents will be on hand — bending the chamber format and…”

H: How does one bend the chamber format?

M: Maybe it’ll be played in a large arena.

H: Or maybe there’ll be just enough players so that you can’t quite call it chamber, but few enough that you can’t quite call it an orchestra.

M: Meh. “’We’re still pushing the envelope, for Caramoor, and trying to reach a broader part of the community,’ said Michael Barrett, the chief executive and general director of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts.”

H: The qualification of “pushing the envelope” doesn’t instill much chamber-format-bending confidence.

M: That and "trying to reach a broader community" kinda smells funny, don't you think? I mean, it sounds like a good thing, but for whom?

H: Not gonna tell you. It's just so good.

M: Mmm-hmm. “The new-music aesthetic being presented this year departs somewhat from that of academically oriented composers like Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter.”

H: Again with the qualifiers! I’m not sure what to make of these messages: first there was "wide spectrum"; then "format bending"; followed by pushing the envelope “for Caramoor”…

M: Don't forget departing “somewhat.” Yeah. They’re toeing a line, for sure. But the bigger issue is the seeming way almost all new music is being marketed.

H: Do you mean how they want to distance themselves from thinking and academia?

M: Totally. What’s wrong with thinking?

H: You got me. Not for nothing, I seem to think we've been through this whole "we want an art that appeals more to the senses than to reason" thing before.

Anyway, want to think about how you want your bacon to appeal to you?

M: Charred, baby.

H: That’s why I love you.

M: “While Caramoor’s performers maintain a uniformly high level of musicianship, they embrace elements of popular culture…”

H: Doesn't "while," as a conjunction here, connote a contrast? What's that supposed to mean?!

M: Hold on. “…producing what the festival’s marketers call extreme chamber music.”

I guess it means that nobody knows how to market that which is unmarketable.

H: But they know how to market popular culture! It’s like calling a sports drink extreme, because it actually contains water, instead of processed, liquid-like crap.

M: Do you ever get the feeling that arts advertising is, like, ten years behind current doublespeak practice?

H: Ha! You said sunny-side up, right?

M: Yep. “Reflecting their training at Oberlin and Juilliard, the members of 2 Foot Yard, a violin-cello-guitar trio that will appear on July 2, bring a certain phrasing and detail of tone to their interpretations, said Carla Kihlstedt, the group’s violinist.”

H: [cracks an egg]

M: “Yet, she said, the group works in forms that have more in common with folk or pop music than with traditional classical composition.”

H: …Because phrasing and details can't exist in folk and pop forms, don't you know? What?!

M: Maybe there’s something to this whole anti-academic distancing. Schools are obviously not doing their jobs well.

H: You’re just saying that to get under my skin, aren’t you? Besides, you mean conservatories; they're hardly schools.

M: But you’re cute, when you’re mad. [sips coffee]

H: Seriously, just read. Meanwhile I’ll cook your breakfast, without help…all by myself.

M: “None of its tunes run more than six minutes.”

H: Selling point for short attention spans, no doubt.

M: No doubt. Or broader audiences. Heh. “In pieces like ‘On Waking,’ which it may play at Caramoor, the band employs extensive harmonics and extended improvisations punctuated only by a recurring four-note vocal line — Ms. Kihlstedt and the cellist double on vocals.”

H: I’m glad they may decide to use more than just sine tones. Grisey would be happy. [removes several strips of bacon from the skillet] Also, don't you think it's kinda a stretch to call a six-minute improvisation "extended"? A happening might be extended, but not a six-minute improv.

M: Or, it's like...

H: I know. Sex joke.

M: Mmm. “This, she said…”

H: What does “this” refer to?

M: Dunno. The "four-note vocal line"?

H: Dah-dah-dah dum!

M: “This, she said, results in a kind of abstraction that owes as much to the ethos of alternative rock as to the culture of the academy.

‘I find that audiences are getting much better at connecting the dots between different kinds of music,’ she said.”

H: Wait. Are we or aren’t we going to this festival?

M: Connect the dots.

H: Would you like toast, my abstract cryptographer?

M: Two pieces, please.

I dunno. I've liked Caramoor events in the past. Maybe the wonky description is coloring my preferences; but I think I'd still like to go.

H: We have nothing better to do, I suppose.

M: Either way, let’s find out what else is said about the state of arts advertising.

H: Good call.

M: “Connecting with audiences is a primary goal of Ethel, a quartet with two violins, a viola and a cello…”

H: Wait. Who wrote this, again?

M: Phillip Lutz, with two Ps, two Is, three Ls, an H, a U, a T, and a Z.

H: I suppose he has two eyes, four limbs, a torso, and a head, too.

M: You're funny. Not!

H: Nice. Nobody's used that reference since 1990!

M: Actually, 1992, chef-slave. Or 1993, if you want to count the sequel; but I don't know anyone who thinks that should count. [sips coffee]

“…the group adopts a ‘pedal to the metal’ attitude that plays down ‘the pursuit of perfection in classical performance,’ said Mary Rowell, one of the group’s violinists and a Juilliard graduate.”

H: That’s an odd thing to say.

M: You mean invoking a “pedal to the metal” attitude in order to downplay something?

H: Yeah, that. The idea is provocative, though.

M: ...if not logically problematic. “While the group’s playing hardly lacks precision […] the precision is never achieved at the expense of passion, Ms. Rowell said.

‘If we’re going to alienate audiences, it’s just not going to work,’ she said.”

H: More coffee?

M: Please. [ponders, sips] Do you think she’s implying that pursuing perfection alienates audiences? Or pursuing an antiquated ideal alienates them? Or is perfection unattainable? Or...

H: I think you’d be better off by asking what she means by “work.”

M: True. Or maybe I'll just send a letter of complaint to Julliard's office of academic standards.

H: Ha! [plates the last of the food, carries it over to table]

Alright, hun. Time to cry uncle. Breakfast is ready. Plus, this ham-fisted puffery is ruining my morning.

M: But you’ll miss my favorite part.

H: Yeah? What’s that? [sits at table beside Merdle]

M: Get this: “And the clarinetist Anthony McGill, who said that the pivotal works of his Caramoor debut would be by Debussy and Stravinsky…”

...

...

Wait for it.

...

H: Come on. My eggs are getting cold.

M: “...Debussy and Stravinsky — arguably new-music practitioners of their day…”

H: Did I read somewhere that Heidegger once argued this proposition and lost?

M: Shut up, chef-slave, and pass the Tabasco.
-

And where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?

Since the widespread electronic proliferation of journalism and information, opinions about music are abundant, free, and easy to find. Reviews of concerts abound, and insights and writings of The Public Writ Large are largely free for the reading. This has democratized things quite a bit, and is largely regarded as A Good Thing.

“So why have professional music critics at all?” one may well wonder. Why would any one pay to read someone’s review—or, indeed, pay someone to write one—when the same content is free and widely available?

The answer is simple, of course: it's not the same content. The keen insights and musical expertise of the savvy concertgoer, you see, do not always combine easily with a facility for (and love of) the bon mot. Even the best-intentioned casual amateur wordsmith and musical devotee cannot match the fragile excellence of the Professional Music Critic.

Witness with me now the peerless renderings of keen musical insight wrought in fine language by just such a professional.

Concert Review: Jethro Tull at Wolf Trap
Jacquie Kubin, The Washington Times

Ah, the Moonies. Surely their rigorous journalistic standards belie an old-fashioned devotion to the twin arts of writing and editing. Right?

Returning to the beautiful Filene Center stage at Wolf Trap Jethro Tull, 62 year old Ian Anderson fleet of foot and flute, recreated many of his greatest songs alongside his career long friend Martin Barre.

Already the lofty language does more than report, it communicates a sense of place and event. “Wolf Trap Jethro Tull’s” center stage must be fine indeed, as well as overjoyed to welcome the very band that contributed half its name!

The intricate prose then takes a rhapsodic twist when the fragment “long” (from the previously stated word “along”) makes an appearance, as an apparition, between “career” and “friend.” This asyntactic maneuver feints at the hyphenated compound-adjective construction “career-long friend” while simultaneously implying that Martin Barre is rather tall.

The evening was welcoming cool…

Ah, what a fanciful, evocative construction. Just when you think you know what the subject of a sentence is, you're wrong.

…after last week's heat wave and Wolf Trap was not only lush and lovely, but the people as nice as one expects from this heritage DC Metro Area venue.

Good weather for a show, and also the people were Nice! As one would expect; they are after all from the Nice Part of Town, I gather.

The evening begins with Gary Booker and Procol Harum (Geoff Whitehorn/lead guitar, Matt Pegg/bass guitar, Geoff Dunn/percussion and Josh Phillips/Hammond organ)…

The sudden change of tense transports the reader to the occasion and place of the concert, beyond the everyday boundaries of linear time. Furthermore, listing the band members in this casual, parenthetical, separated-by-slashes fashion gives the impression that one is typing reading from a press release concert program. It’s just like we were there alongside Jacquie!

…in their first stop on a 2010 fifteen venue tour.

Sorry, what? I think I lost my place.

The evening begins with Gary Booker and Procol Harum…in their first stop on a 2010 fifteen venue tour.

As the evening begins they...were…in their first stop? This bespeaks a clear vision wherein vowel choice in prepositions is largely a stylistic matter. And I’m not sure what a “venue tour” is, or why the band is on (in?) one from (apparently) 2010-15. I think?

…a 2010 fifteen venue tour

A philological fragment of carefully-constructed ambiguity, that. I mean, clearly. Right? Because, obviously, a professional writer with fifteen years of experience would only offer such an artistically-rendered sentence with both clear intent and the consent of one’s (presumably) eagle-eyed editor.

Silver haired booker sang ala Steve Winwood, with sheet music in place as the rest of the band provided a backbone that, with the overload of dueling keyboard and organ, might have been tough.

I’m having trouble with this sentence; my many years of reading and thinking about music have not prepared me for the deft mastery and complex wordplay at work here.

Silver haired booker sang ala…

Clearly the lead vocalist Gary Booker is not meant here, for “booker” is rendered in lower case. And “ala” must be some artfully infantilized onomatopoeia signifying nonsense musical syllables. Another feint at a compound adjective, but again sans hyphen. [Note to self: is this becoming a leitmotiv-like recurring fragment? Remember to investigate!]

Like poetry it reads.

Silver haired booker sang ala Steve Winwood,

with sheet music in place as the rest of the band provided a backbone that,

with the overload of dueling keyboard and organ,

might have been tough.

Weaving and bobbing impressionistically, implying without reporting. Such gorgeous prose, not afraid to take risks, boldly and openly flaunting not only bourgeois conventions of grammar and punctuation, but the very notion of linear narrative itself!

“Might have been tough.” Indeed.

I think it is safe to safe the guitarist Whitehorn was absolutely pleased to be on stage as he grimaced and grinned through his parts.

Is it ever really “safe to safe”? That’s the real question here; the existential skeleton of the hidden narrative of this avant-garde review is slowly revealing itself. "Review" hardly does justice; this work is more of an artistic gesture.

The group riffed through an approximate forty-five minute set…

We see, or rather are gently shown, how form and content act in concert. An approximate sentence reflects the approximate set. The organicism of the writing is stunning. Adverbs would have been the easy way out.

…that included "Once we had a Highway," "One eye on the Future, One Eye on the Past," "The Devil Came from Kansas," "Pandora's Box," "A Salty Dog," the audience favorite "Whiter Shade of Pale"…

We are made keenly aware of which words designate the names of songs; they are set off in quotation marks. Why, therefore, should one strictly stick to commonplace capitalization rules? With the burden of the naming-work clearly carried by punctuation, the choice of which words to capitalize (or not!) becomes merely another free play of style for the adept wordsmith. Witness:

"Once we had a Highway"

Verbs aren’t even nouns. Why should they be capitalized? The same goes for pronouns; who do they think they are, anyway?

"One eye on the Future, One Eye on the Past"

The “eye” on the future isn’t properly a being at all, and its lower-case status reflects its essence as becoming and not being (all Gang and no Satz, if you will), while the “Eye” on the past is fully articulated and present-determined, and therefore capitalized.

Thus is struck into stark relief the radical contingency and arbitrariness of our “real” rules and conventions for written communication. Real writers—artists, if you will—need no such strictures. Every withheld stroke of the shift key neuters the suffocating patriarchy of the cultural elite Rule Makers, who would even tell us which words are worthy of capitalization. Every gesture by the true, bold writer is the new tradition.

…and closing with the obscure "Kaleidoscope" from the band's first self-titled album (1967).

It should now be obvious that the author is also no novice to all things Prog Rock; not just everyone knows how many self-titled albums Procul Harum released. And while it would have been simple—perhaps trivial—enough to write “album of 1967,” the parenthetical citation “(1967)” invokes scholarly reference styles and admits that, yes, the academy is welcome here as well, further testifying to the broad scope whence flows this sagacity.

The band raised a bit of the late 60's era consciousness with a new bit of song, "War is Not Healthy,"

The delicious repetition of the word “bit” within a ten-word span re-emphasizes the plosive phoneme “b.” Obviously, this rhymes with “p” which stands for “pool”, yes—but also for “prose style.” And “is” is such a small word; although technically a verb, it looks like it could possibly be a preposition, and therefore may safely (but, ironically, at the same time radically) in lower case. The social commentary implied is both profound and clearly communicated: We the socially undercapitalized must rail against our capitalized/capitalist masters, and rally as many as possible to join our cause. Death to the capitalization police and their fascist corporate masters!

…a song that stands out not only for it being something entirely different but also as it is not instantly recognizable as Procol Harum.

The song was not only entirely different but also not instantly recognizable. On the surface this may seem redundant, yes, but closer reading reveals a subtler distinction.

The sentiments of this 2003-hard driving ballad would be as appropriate in 1969 as in 2010.

This simple insight is breathtaking in its wisdom. War, it makes one think, really is not healthy, not one bit. I am transported through time, across oceans and over mountains to a higher plane—a plane where people realize war is bad.

The predominantly older audience, with a few kids sprinkled in here and there, most of the young ones out with "dad" for the night, politely received Procol Harum, but they were obviously there for Jethro Tull.

Here the instinctive discretion of the seasoned writer is obvious, but the principled journalist must at least nod to the darker truths. I am referring, of course, to the punctuationally-marked “dad” which indicates obliquely that most of the “kids sprinkled in” were underage sex workers. Tactful and beautifully rendered; delicate, yet necessary.

Mr. [Ian] Anderson bounded, danced, and pranced throughout the one hour twenty minute set.

Why tarnish a sweet string of temporal description with conventional, and, strictly speaking, unnecessary hyphenated baggage? Usage is as usage does.

His energy was exuberant for a man decades younger than his years.

And here we see, finally, the real impetus of this review/manifesto: classic rock nostalgia tours force us to confront the widening gap between reality and the Lacanian real. “Age is a state of mind” may seem a trite message, but only to the city fathers who wag their fingers and stroke their beards and cluck their tongues, muttering “What’s to be done about this rock and roll business?”

In trade mark style, he was warm and jovial with the audience, peppering the performance with anecdotes and stories about the songs and the band.

It would seem that this “mark” was traded for a guitarist to be named later, a move which both reflects and undermines the free-market capitalist underpinnings of the music industry. A deft analysis that cuts to the quick.

Band mate for the last forty-plus year,

This is clearly a veiled condemnation of our backwards-looking stance on same-sex unions, cleverly disguised as a compositional error: “banned mate” would be a little too on point, no? This repressive trauma, however, has taken its toll on the would-be plural “year.”

…Martin Barre easily commanded the stage and audience with chops that have not degraded with time.

It is only the keenest musical insight that recognizes when musicians improve with four decades’ practice.

Breaking into Aqualung, striking each powerful chord with perfection brought the audience to their feet with grand appreciation for this master of the six-string.

“Aqualung,” being Tull’s best-known song, requires no nominally-indicative quotation marks to flaunt its titular status. Only a pedantic and banal writer (such as your humble narrator) would stick to a clearly-established (if arbitrary) naming convention one had articulated earlier in the article.

Jethro Tull's music has long been an mélange of musical styles incorporating American blues, jazz, Celtic, and folk along with a bit of classical influence.

Ah, the coup de grace. No longer content to merely prevent unsightly vowel elision (a bourgeois concern if there ever was one), the consonant-laden article “an” has been elevated to an higher status, one wherein any foreign or fancy technical word may take the enhanced particle to signify class or importance.

What are words, anyway? Words have their own life. They don’t follow your rules.

Never knowing the direction any one song may take makes enjoying the body of work presented so much more fulfilling.

Furthermore, utterly misunderstanding and misrepresenting the genre-bending (if occasionally tedious) polystylistic meanderings of Jethro Tull is clearly a moral and artistic choice rather than a sign of willful ignorance and depraved indifference to any musical sense.

The set wound in and around their library including the powerfully bluesy New Day Yesterday,

Yes! Stand athwart your own naming conventions! Become the ruling body!

…with Anderson on harmonica and his sardonic style playing to the songs sultry style.

Prose style is about so much more than appropriate placement of (so-called) “words” and a basic understanding of the punctuation rules governing possessives, don’t you think? Speak it!

Closing with the encore Locomotive Breath enhanced by two of those large 70's arena style balloons left the very polite group quickly leaving the center happy to have had the chance, once again to spend an evening with the lads.

And, finally, the practice of omission or inclusion of commas to divide sentences into comprehensible phrases is, in the final analysis, stripped of its oppressive imperialist power and demoted to impotent, decorative status. Balloons full of nitrous oxide make for a mellow crowd indeed.

-----------------------------------------------------

Perhaps this close reading comes across as far-fetched, or even implausible. Given, though, that the only real alternative is to conclude that we must convene an international tribunal to address the worst crime ever perpetrated in the English language, allowances must be made.

Friday Quickie: Cop-out Edition

One thing that is certain in the world of print media criticism: space is limited, which makes the art of description difficult. However, in a nine-hundred-word review, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

It’s good to be back
Pablo Bardin
Buenos Aires Herald

It’s really a good and long review, except for one part.

[Composer Unsuk Chin] is a disciple of Ligeti and it shows;

I’ll bite. How does her music embody the distinctive qualities of the late master?

…her music is sensitive and transparent, and it was conducted with virtuoso ability by [Shi-Yeon Sung]. [it. mine]

You could never reduce anyone else’s music to such precision.

Figure Google Search. “Sensitive and transparent stereo expansion control”

You won second prize in a beauty contest--collect $10

Here’s some puffery from the Seattle Times:

Seattle Symphony takes on Mendelssohn’s ambitious 'Lobgesang'
Tom Keogh

However, there’s only so much you can say about the piece, because...

...sorry, Mendelssohn, you are not Beethoven.

"The 'Lobgesang' is a choral symphony," says [SSO music director Gerard] Schwarz. "Beethoven's Ninth [completed in 1824] was the first."

Eat Beethoven’s dust, bitch!

After Beethoven died, everyone was afraid of composing choral symphonies that would be compared to it. But Mendelssohn went ahead and did something unique.

Yeah? What was that?

The first three movements are purely instrumental.

...uh...

After that...

...

...

...

After that, profit!

Flow chart 1. The sales pitch

Hey, why not ask for more?

And so nine orchestras and festivals co-commissioned a new, post-Pulitzer work from Jennifer Higdon.

Jennifer Higdon premieres concerto “On a Wire”
Philadelphia Inquirer
David Patrick Stearns

Though her Pulitzer Prize-winning Violin Concerto limited the soloist role to a single instrument...

Hasn’t she heard that bigger is better? She must not love America very much.

...Higdon got out from under the long history of concertos by writing the new work for six soloists, specifically the contemporary- music [sic] group eighth blackbird.

I presume the question confronting her was “how do I outdo my last big hit?” Her answer, via Stearns: less history; more soloists; hot new music group.

Got it?

(An aside: is there a limit to the number of soloists one can have in order that they retain their status as soloist? Anyway.)

Members of that group think nothing of playing multiple instruments in a given piece, often switching between piccolo and flute or violin and viola.

That’s cool. However, it’s pretty standard fare for flute players to also play piccolo and violinists to play viola. That’s not the best way to support the point that they, and the piece, are out of the ordinary.

In addition, Higdon’s concerto asks its players to practice “extended techniques” - plucking and bowing the innards of the piano...

Not that I find this passage terribly worded—close, though—instead, I take issue with the interplay of description with the premise, that the piece is new and innovative.

You and I know that extended techniques have been practiced for some time (or depending on the argument, since the very beginnings of music). Yet, to place “extended techniques” in scare/air quotes, today, puts them in a position of being exoticisms (outside of a norm), which we know not to be the case. So, I can only assume that othering “extended techniques” is an intentionally misleading puffery strategy.

Please feel free to take issue with that; but I hope it will become somewhat evident, below.

In addition, Higdon’s concerto asks its players to practice “extended techniques” - plucking and bowing the innards of the piano, much like the techniques pioneered by...[?]

1. Erik Satie – Piège de Méduse (1913); inserted sheets of paper into the piano
2. Heitor Villa-Lobos – Chôros no.8 (1925); again, paper inserts
3. Maurice Delage – Ragamalika (1912-22); cardboard inserts
4. Henry Cowell – Aeolian Harp (1923); manipulation of piano strings directly
5. John Cage – Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48); nuts, bolts, doodads, etc.

...much like the techniques pioneered by one of Higdon’s teacher’s, George Crumb.

I also left out all the other, lesser-known experiments with prepared piano and/or playing inside the piano. (The above was mostly found via Wikipedia)

So, circa 1970 George Crumb, you say?

Call me paranoid, but scare quotes around “extended techniques” are patronizing, as well as ignorant, false, and archaic; plus, I sense a bloated case of name-dropping.

-

A few awkward, unrelated moments:

Always a seeker of extra-symphonic sounds, in the past she's trawled the aisles of Home Depot for trinkets that would give her orchestration an ethereal jingle.

Can I assume, then, that junk from True Value would have given her music a transcendental glow?

Higdon has perhaps never cast her net so wide.

[snip]

So many kinds of musical incidents are contained within the 25-minute concerto that you'd think Higdon was inspired by the far-flung literary imagery of the Leonard Cohen song "Bird on a Wire."

Were there program notes?

However, Higdon, 48, swears she has never heard (or heard of) of the song.

-

Back to the meat of the issue.

The Atlanta premiere with a longtime collaborator like Spano turned out to be exactly what she needed in the wake of winning the Pulitzer in April.

I wonder why.

“I think you explored a whole new room in your musical mansion," Atlanta music director Robert Spano told Higdon on Sunday after a post-concert toast.

“I'm hearing things that sound exactly like you, but I haven't heard them before."

So, it’s new, but not too new? Like you just know Toy Story 3 is going to be good, because the others were?

That's one reason he scheduled a recording session the day after Thursday's premiere.

The other reason?

His plan is to rush-release the concerto as a classical-music single.

...to capitalize on her success. I love the free market co-mingled with the arts!

...[it is] yet another triumph in a series of Higdon works that have made her one of the most immediately embraced living American composers.

Example 1. How another immediately embraced American composer followed up his success (Hammerman).

Example 2. God Bless America rendered by the stylings of Canadian Celine Dion.

Composer of the Day!

Today's Composer of the Day is Benjamin Lees (b. January 8, 1924; d. May 31, 2010).

Benjamin Lees was part of a generation of American composers (mostly born in the 1910s and 20s) who remained beholden to many European classical traditions, yet embraced a modern tonal language. Lees quite staunchly avoided modernism, serialism, and later minimalism, and yet differed from many of his contemporaries by avoiding programmatic music, or returning to the excesses of romanticism.

Lees, an American born to Russian parents in China, served prominently on the faculties of the Peabody, Julliard and Manhattan schools of music. He developed as a composer under the likes of Halsey Stevens and Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California, and later under "bad boy of music" George Antheil. For the most part, Lees always remained a bit of an outcast in American music, primarily due to his rejection of the prevailing isms of the day. His music is often compared to that of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Bartok, and of course, contemporaries like Walter Piston, who also shared his belief in absolute music, or music for music's sake. Lees music seems to have remained remarkably consistent throughout the bulk of his career. Although distinctly modern in style, Lees once said, "I consider form on a par with expression," a position not commonly expressed amongst American composers in the 1960s and 70s.

Nicolas Slonimsky described Benjamin Lees’ music as “…so personal, so distinct, so assertive are the stylistic and idiomatic usages in the works of Benjamin Lees that an immediately recognizable Gestalt is formed from an attentive perusal of his scores.”

Perhaps the best examples of his style are his most well-known works. Even by the composer's own admission, amongst his best works are his often performed symphonies -- the Symphony No.4 (“Memorial Candles”), written for the 40th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, and Symphony No.5 (“Kalmar Nyckel”), which received a Grammy nomination in 2003. [ When asked about having lost the award (to Dominick Argento), Lees responded, “I came back, I took out the garbage, and life goes on.”]

However, he has many other compositions of note, including his Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (1964) and Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1958). When asked about why he wrote the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, which has recently become his most performed work, given that the composer admitted that he anticipated very few performances, Lees responded, "I needed the money."

Embeddence Lees: Piano Concerto No. 2 (mvt. III) -- like many of his works, the Piano Concerto No. 2 is composed using a contemporary sense of extended tonality, and makes considerable use of constantly shifting meters, which was the style at the time.


Lees was never shy, nor apologetic about this stylistic choices, which certainly kept him from reaching greater notoriety.

Of serialism and the 12-tone technique Lees had this to say in an interview in 1992: “I tried the technique, but couldn’t do it. It was like making love to a corpse.”

Of his own compositional style he said, "There are two kinds of composers. One is the intellectual and the other is visceral. I fall into the latter category. If my stomach doesn't tighten at an idea, then it's not the right idea."

You can read an interview Lees gave in 1987 with Bruce Duffie here. It is an interesting discussion as they cover many themes in the composer's life and music, and touch upon topics such as the future of contemporary music and the symphony orchestra.

Lees, who died on May 31st, at the age of 86, has mostly been an unfortunately neglected composer. Although not much of his music was recorded, what is available (like with all Composers of the Day!) deserves a good listen. The New York Times has an excellent story on the life of the composer here.

figure composer of the day: Benjamin Lees