I got to write a really overly-technical post over at the Music 10 blog recapping the presentation I made there about the vielle a roue. I feel like such a rock star getting asked to write on someone else’s blog. So go have a look. (Music 10 being the festival/composition workshop I’m presently attending)

An addendum to that post - last night I played in Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union free-for-all. It was way harder than the Philip Glass.

On that note, my trio for violin, cello, and piano is getting its premiere tonight here in Blonay. Exciting!

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…)

Warning: this post is going to be a bit Inside Baseball.

Just before I began vacuuming this morning, I turned on the last.fm channel for Steve Reich. I like last.fm, but it does have its eccentricities, like a few days ago when within an hour of starting the Monteverdi channel, I had already heard Berlioz and Verdi. So this morning, within three songs, it had, of course migrated to Xenakis, but by that time, I was making a ruckus with the vacuum cleaner.

I believe that, given the situation, David Byrne would lambaste my vacuuming, as well as all modern appliances because they are alienating. New father and Ph.D (late congratulations!) The Rambler would boldly defend my right to make noise with the vacuum and also to listen to Xenakis. Kyle Gann would first bemoan David Byrne for ignoring all of the good that electrical appliances have done for us, but also tell me that I’m making an error by trying to make music with my vacuum that is as complex as Xenakis’s. Daniel Stephen Johnson would accuse Kyle Gann of not understanding the difference between “modern” appliances and “electrical” appliances while declaring that his favorite music is when the vacuum gets attached to him and gives him a giant welt on the tummy. Darcy James Argue would try desperately to get everyone to calm down, but take a kick at the obscurist vacuum, anyway. Kyle Gann would post a photo of himself enjoying a modern and electrical appliance in order to establish that he was into modern electrical appliances long before Daniel Stephen Johnson was born. Daniel Stephen Johnson would write an update and go on vacation. The Rambler would offer us all food.

In the mean time, The Universe would make its own decision by pulling the plug on the electricity for just long enough that my computer would turn off, rendering gnarly Xenakis silent. Apparently The Universe prefers the gnarly sounds of the vacuum, which stopped for a brief moment and started right up again.

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If that didn’t make sense, if it’s full of false analogies and poor logic and confusing conclusions, good, because none of this stuff - trying to tell young composers what style of music they ought to write - ever made sense.

My next project is an odd one for me. I’m taking a course in Gregorian chant, and each time we sing a sanctus (holy, holy, holy…), I just get the feeling I should be singing in Hebrew instead of Latin. So I thought, maybe I’ll set the Kedusha in a Gregorian chant style one day. I shared the idea with a friend in February, and she said, ooh ooh, my old voice teacher would love that! So she put us in touch.

A brainstorming session later, and now I’m working on a piece to be premiered at Jane’s vocal workshop in Croatia, in late June. And because of the Balkan setting, I find myself now not only setting the kedusha as Gregorian chant, but also adding the Old Church, or just plain Church Slavonic version of the sanctus, and also whatever version of the prayer I can find in Arabic. The idea is basically to “surprise” the largely-Catholic audience with Catholic-sounding music in the sacred languages of the two other large religions in the region, plus my own tradition, which also has deep roots in the Balkans. This is the sort of thing that I think I’d normally find silly, but for whatever reason, I’m getting more and more into it.

I’m still looking for the right Slavonic and Arabic texts. I’ve established that the Orthodox church uses the holy, holy, holy bit, but I haven’t found it in side-by-side translation with the Cyrillic (which thanks to my trip though the Balkans last year, I can sort of decipher, slowly). And the Arabic is proving to be a mess. Not only does holy, holy, holy not seem appear in the Quran, but, it would apparently be worse if it did.

I’ve been communicating with an Iranian friend who has lived in the US for the past dozen years trying to figure out what sort of text to use for the piece. The first thing he told me was that he didn’t think he’d ever seen holy, holy, holy in the Quran. But he continued, introducing me to the idea of “Ghena.” The definition of Ghena (at least in the Shia world) is subjective and open to interpretation by individual members of the Muslim clergy, but the main idea is that the Quran shouldn’t be set to music in certain ways. (more…)