I have an opinion: John Cage’s Roaratorio should be performed outside.

Well, perform is maybe not quite right for a tape piece, but still, it should be outdoors and amongst the people. Really, what other avant-garde “classical” work is so ideally suited to being public art? It will get the attention of unsuspecting passersby and, as it were, bring them in from the cold. (It will make them pause for a minute, thinking, “what is this I hear?”) For the “sophisticated” crowd it has all kinds of cool weird noises. For the conservatives in the audience, there’s Irish music. It isn’t narrative, so no harm done if you wander in and wander out again.

So, IRCAM, for next year’s Agora, I want to hear Roaratorio piped out onto the place Stravinsky for the people to hear, instead of hidden down and away in your Espace de projection.

And while you’re at it, could you maybe please put Cage’s voice back into the mix! It’s really a travesty that this fellow Sarkis has seen to remove him from the piece, I think. Sure, it’s a work of sound art, but it’s also explicitly a response to a piece of literature, and removing the words robs the work of a lot of its continuity and its humanity. The stream of words in a single voice connects what otherwise becomes a random mix-up of noises.

So put Roaratorio outdoors and bring back the Cage vocals! Please! Good sirs, I beg you.

“Now that — uncertain ends, confident means — is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know.”

-Peter Schjeldahl in the October 12, 2009 New Yorker

(It’s a reminder not to try to control a work’s outcome)
(which turns out to dovetail nicely with some comments on a post from last year)

I just got back from a percussion concert put on by le cabaret contemporain, which is one of the few groups in France that seems interested in taking new music to the people. I support them whole-heartedly. This show was at the Studio de l’ermitage, where I saw tango last night and where next week there’s a chanson française party. Excellent! It was a good show - the percussionist, Laurent Mariusse played energetically, musically, subtly, emotionally, everything you want from a concert. His improvisations with Mr. Buddy-on-laptop (that would appear to be Gérard Assayag - there was no program and I missed his name) were inspired. But he did something that percussionists seem to like to do, which is not stop between pieces. The kids at Stony Brook did this all the time - they’d put on these crazy marathon concerts where all the percussion set-ups, sometimes involving living trees, surrounded the audience and we were supposed to get up and follow them, and stuff like that - and most percussion recitals I’ve been to since have also displayed some variation on this theme. It must be a response to the amount of time it takes to set up each piece, which is admittedly a pain in the ass to sit through. Since it can take much longer to set a piece up than to play the piece, having everything put together ahead of time is a good move.

That is different, however, from not stopping to acknowledge applause/tell us what the next piece will be/generally stop the flow of music for a few moments. I don’t entirely understand this, since the difference between an marimba and a bunch of tom-toms is so huge, and so much bigger that, say, the difference between and string quartet and piano quintet, but it seems to me that percussion is particularly poorly suited to not taking breaks between pieces. For some reason, percussion pieces tend to bleed into each other, even if their instrumentation is radically different. The best I can guess, it may have something to do with the way we perceive struck instruments with sharp attacks and fast decays - or maybe it’s the high volume - but whatever the reason, in order to really articulate the difference between one piece and the next in a percussion recital, you really have to stop for a while and let the previous one sink in. Denying that results in a fluidity that makes a perfectly normal hour-and-a-half long recital feel like a completely crazy mad two-and-a-half-hour feat of endurance. That Mariusse filled in the spaces between works with improvisation made it even more difficult to tell what was going on. Again, the improv was exceptional - I want more - but I would have preferred to have had the concert split into discreet parts, including a few discreet improv sessions please!, instead of everything coming at me all the time.

So percussionists, I beseech you! Please take a few seconds between each piece. Let the audience clap for you. It’ll clear their ears for the next piece, it’ll allow you a moment of rest and meditation, and it’ll also let you revel in all the more adoration. It’ll be good for everyone!

I haven’t written anything of substance here in a while, but today I read an article in the Times today and it fired me up. The article is by Michael Kimmelman, who recently also wrote about, among other things, how people walk absently through art museums instead of looking at the art. This museum article actually gives a pretty good context to the impression I get of Kimmeleman’s point-of-view: he’s trying to get at the purpose that art serves in these crazy modern times we live in. In the Louvre article, he posits that art’s role has degraded with the advent of technology - hardly a unique argument but framed nicely in the Louvre’s non-Western art room. In the Dresden article, he’s coming up with, well…

To summarize what you’ll read when you read the article, a pregnant Egyptian woman was murdered in a courthouse in Dresden by a Russian man who apparently is a racist psychopath. They were in a room together awaiting his trial for insulting her because she wore a veil. Kimmelman goes on to note that East Germany, and especially Saxony (Dresden is the capital of Saxony), has more problems with racially-motivated crime and especially racially-motivated violent crime than the rest of Germany. He then observes that Dresden is a marvelously beautiful city, now fully restored from the firebombing at the end of World War II.

Finally, Kimmelman accuses art of having not sufficiently altered the character of Dresdeners. If the city’s trove of architectural and artistic treasures had done its job, he implies, this terrible murder would not have occurred, and indeed all Dresdeners would live together in blissful multicultural harmony. (more…)

I should have put this up earlier: my friend Marc (violinist, Brahms, that’s him in the red sweater) is a finalist for the YouTube Symphony, so go vote for him. Today, because today is the last day. (Watch out for the incredibly cheesy video that starts up, and go straight to the Vote button, and search for his instrument, name, and/or composer, and hit the green thumbs-up button)

Beyond just looking out for my friends, I do think he’s the best performer amongst the Brahms choices. He has the clearest, most consistent interpretation, the cleanest sound, and the most rhythmic precision (and for what it’s worth, the best reverb, which sort of points out the problem of this whole thing: it’s pretty hard to compare the dude playing in the hall of his conservatory with the cello section playing scales behind him with the girl in her dorm room…)

But we have what we have. I was checking out the violas, and was really astonished that they all sounded horrible. But it’s the repertoire that was picked for them. The orchestral excerpts, like the development from the finale of Mozart’s 40th Symphony (starting on page 41), are all representative. But because of that, they’re not particularly showcases for the instrument. The viola’s problem, always, has been one of size: it’s too small to make the notes it’s tuned for, and as a result, it not only has a nasal sound, but it’s also very quiet (only the double bass has a worse problem in the string section).

The Mozart and Brahms excerpts, and even more the Rossini, and also the Beethoven’s Fifth to a lesser extent, show how composers have dealt with the problem when they need the viola to sound out. (more…)

Yesterday, my English student asked me a question. I’m very excited when he asks questions, because it’s not quite his strong suit… But he pulled out a doozy. I quote:

“Do you prefer music or petting a cat?”*

Well, first, I’m proud of how impeccable this question is grammatically.

But, what to say?! I said I prefer petting the cat. Because music is hard, and petting the cat is easy - and soft.

OK fellow composers and artists of all stripes: am I a terrible person for preferring the cat to my art?

To add a complication, I answered as though I were being given a momentary choice; do this or do that right now. What if my student meant to ask, permanently, would you always prefer music or petting a cat? Or: you will lose one of these things, music or the cat. Which could you not live without? Probably I’d chose music over the cat if we’re talking forever. (Pet owners! Does this make me a terrible person?!) Or: was he talking about composing music or listening? Listening to music isn’t as hard as composing it, and can be just as pleasurable as petting a cat. Does that change my answer?

Oi!

——
*Get your mind out of the gutter - that’s not what he meant!

“Imperfection is the mother of style.”

From My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

See also last month’s post and this one, too, for context.

I brought the tentative instrumental opening of the saxophone quartet + electronics that I’m writing to my computer music class on Wednesday. My teacher and my classmate each had a look and both said, this looks a lot like that recorder quartet.

I guess I’m to take this as evidence of a personal style forming? That’s good on its face, as an individual voice is supposedly what we’re all looking for out here in composition land. I hadn’t meant to write another wedge, but as soon as they said it, I realized I had, though this time it moves by skips instead of chromatic steps, and it covers an octave-and-a-half instead of only a perfect fifth, and it’s shorter.

But then I look at that and think, well, I should do something different. At least formally - I’m sick of starting each piece with a bare-bones statement of a small geometrical fragment that “is the root material for the whole work.” No way to get around the first bars being the root material, but in the piece after Omie (that’s what the sax quartet’s called), I’m planning to kind of start with a bang, throw it all out at once and break it down as the piece continues instead of building up.

I guess that’s called “growing,” but as I’m about to post in another ramble, it’s weird to feel the need to rebuild from scratch each time. But I also don’t want to get predictable, I mean, I’m only 30, there’s no reason to start repeating myself yet, and I’ve already written two long pieces based on a wedge shape…

well, for whatever reason, it’s a reasonable excuse to advertise that I will be in Japan for the next few weeks.

In the mean time, does anyone else feel like there’s something creepy about the following quotation, like that it’s trying to tell us to forget about the past, and for that matter, anything ugly about the present, too?

“There is still only a short list of “safe choice” composers, most of whom grew up in the shadow of WWII, which has left a dark spot in music for the last 50 years. No question a lot of this music will never speak to audiences of any kind. I basically started Magnum Opus to find out why, and if there was anything to be done about it! And what I have found out is that there is something to be done, but it takes money and effort and the ability to introduce new ideas into the system. My positive revelation from the last few years is that there is actually a little bit of great new music being written. Most of that music is being written outside the academic circles, it seems, and much of it by younger composers—not because they are young, but because they did not grow up with teachers who grew up in the dark musical shadow of the World Wars. For a lot of reasons the spiritual and physical dislocations of those wars destroyed art music for a long time. I think we’re over it—that’s the good news for me!—but we need to rebuild our ability to discover and perform new music of merit. I’m optimistic, but we have a lot of recent history to overcome.”

(That’s Kathryn Gould in an interview with Molly Sheridan at newmusicbox.)

“Emotional reach exceeds formal grasp throughout the show… But the futility of artistic technique in the face of world conditions may constitute a subject for art as substantial as any other”

Peter Schjeldahl on “After Nature” at the New Museum. A while ago in the New Yorker.