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.

While watching the dance concert, I discovered a few things:

1) I need to be more patient. I tend to start judging a piece by its first note, and that really isn’t cool. I hope people give me more than one note to decide if the rest is worth listening to…

2) I also need to pay more attention to performances if I’m going to effectively critique concerts. My inclination is always to blame the composer if a piece doesn’t work to my ears - but sometimes it’s the performance.

3) During the curtain calls, you can tell the composer from the choreographer because the choreographer knows how to walk backwards, while the composer keeps tripping.

Also, I went to another concert, on Thursday the 14th. It was called Anima and featured Garth Knox on viola and the cellist Pierre Strauch, who is apparently also the cellist for the group we can’t pay for the June 29 concert. Looking back at number 2 on the list above, I have almost nothing to say about this concert precisely because I don’t have much to say about the guys playing (more…)

I got myself into a rhetorical trap yesterday, which was good for me. I was talking to a physical theatrist about the Ballet électronique concert at IRCAM last Tuesday (June 12), and made a comment – that I’d been planning to indelibly inscribe here on the web – about how I lack a vocabulary to discuss the technical aspects, and more importantly, the emotional impact of dance, and movement in general. But then I realized that one of my big pet peeves is the idea that somehow you have to be “trained” to understand music, be it Beethoven, Berio, or the Backstreet Boys. I’m one who firmly believes that a “novice” should be able to understand at least the emotional framework of a piece of music regardless of a lack of musical vocabulary or training. I don’t expect everyone to be able to figure out complex motivic transformations, or how the large-scale harmonic plan worked, or how the two interacted to create the work’s narrative (I typically don’t get those unless I have the score, and the last could take some serious analysis!) – or even know what those things mean. But I do hope that anyone listening to a piece of mine will understand that, because of the shape that I give it and the specific musical ideas that I use, it “means” something, that it isn’t just an abstract collection of pitches and sounds.

And then I went and said, well I don’t know how to understand movement so I can’t really say anything about it. Bullshit. (more…)