Thursday night, our friend brought out a whole big box of pâte de fruit (think: fruit roll-ups, but sweeter and gooier and better), thereby setting in motion a weird bender of sugar and music. The next morning I had my last Friday analysis class of the school year, devoted this week to the 50-minute sixth scene of Messiaen’s opera, Saint-François d’Assise. The only comment I could muster, especially in the desperate thralls of a massive post-sugar downer, was “c’est fatiguant.” The “bird symphonies” are cool but almost entirely undifferentiated, and the score as a whole shows the classic post-War French inability to continue a thought past the point that it becomes recognizable. At least Messiaen repeats the barely-thoughts many times, but maybe too many times. I’m all into repetitive music, as they like to call it here (more on this coming in a few days, I hope), which is to say, music based on repetition, but this scene has the disadvantage of, instead of being based on repetition, not being built around repetition, which makes the repetition irritating repetition. Let me try that again; it’s a linear scene, but stuff keeps coming back without any clear reason to. I feel like this has something to do with Messiaen’s religiosity. In my limited exposure to his work, he seems to get so caught up in expressing the divine that he forgets to worry about scale, so he repeats passages endlessly to no effect. Or maybe, because he’s expressing the divine, he has no use for human scale. Either way, with humans listening, there’s a problem. I’d love to see the scene staged though - I suspect that the simplicity of the surroundings would add a great deal of depth to the scenario.

It also came up that the first use of electroacoustic music with an orchestra, and also the first use of recorded bird-song in a piece, was probably The Pines of Rome by Respighi.

That night I went to see John Zorn at the Cité de la Musique - though I didn’t realize until I got there that Zorn himself wasn’t going to be playing. When I arrived, scalpers were all over the place. I know Zorn is hot shit and everything, but I was taken aback - how cool is it that there are scalpers at a new music event?! But then I got to thinking, I bought my ticket on Wednesday. Can there be scalpers for a show that hadn’t sold out two days before? Something must be on at the Zenith. Indeed. Damn! Concert hall was about 3/4 full.

I have stuff to say about Zorn, but it won’t fit in this post. Soon…

Yesterday, we discovered obliquely that our friend Ben was playing trombone with The National that day at the Furia Sound Festival way outside of Paris. So we hopped on the train and went out there.

It was good show. But the thing that got me was something that had been in mind since the Zorn show and the one-man claque* who was sitting behind me. What do you do about applauding songs and pieces that end quietly and/or introspectively? (more…)

I’m glad that other bloggers have also been a bit uninspired recently. Myself, I’ve been to plenty of things that should have stimulated me to write something - Rossini (go Mr. Continuo Player for the inspired Pink Panther Theme when Basilio enters), student concerts, mostly excellent piano music at the Bouffes du Nord, Pascal Dusapin’s attractive new opera (though it was more of a staged monologue), Medea, Pascal Dusapin’s not-quite-right sound installation with Richard Serra’s sort of overwhelming sculpture at the Grand Palais (why do neither Serra nor Dusapin have websites???), but nothing was quite worth writing about. I even went to see J Mascis playing drums for some band called Witch, but, well, they were terrible. You get what you pay for at the Fleche d’or, which is to say, nothing, right?* (more…)

The tea shop outside our building hosts a band each Sunday morning. It’s a big shopping time in our neighborhood, since most stores close at around 1pm, and everything is closed on Mondays. Normally, when I walk out the door on the way to the green market, I’m serenaded by chanson française, or something a little like Mahler’s second exploit, or maybe if the band is being really edgy, they might be playing something like Puff the Magic Dragon. All family-friendly stuff designed to get the kids to stop and listen and dance and cry a little bit, thereby sucking mom and dad into the cute tea shop.

This morning, I left the house and immediately burst out laughing because the band was playing Sweet Child O’ Mine. It was embarrassing, especially since I was still laughing when I crossed in front of the band. I wasn’t laughing because I don’t like the song (as I confided to Sarah a few days ago, though I probably shouldn’t admit to it here, Sweet Child o’ Mine is probably a candidate for my five favorite pop songs ever - but in my defense there are probably one or two hundred contenders for the list and I don’t know how I’d possibly narrow it down). It wasn’t even because it was incredibly bad - they weren’t exactly a great band (and the drummer was playing some sort of African-looking lap-drum, which didn’t help), but they played passably - but because of how unexpected it was. Last week was Klezmer, so for some reason I was really expecting the same thing again, and when it turned out to be cheesy but excellent 80s hard rock, it made me laugh.

More fallout from my lecture at Stony Brook.

One of the students responded to the music I played them - 2 of the Preludes for Harpsichord, for Baroque Trio by comparing the sound of the harpsichord to horror movie music, or even better, to the music in the haunted houses or the especially the castle worlds in Super Mario Bros. This took me totally off-guard, but as soon as I heard it, it was pretty obvious. The harpsichord at the beginning of the first movement - high dissonant chords in funny rhythms kind of like screaming - does everything it should to fit the part.

The fact that I didn’t think of the harpsichord’s connotation in the popular imagination as a spooky instrument beforehand makes me nervous. I thought about The Doors, even though I sort of hate them, and of course I know the classical literature from the Baroque to Ligeti etc. But how did I miss the most basic contemporary cultural allusion that the instrument implies? (more…)