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…)

Well, I’m back from Japan. It wasn’t a particularly explicitly musical visit, we only made it to one performance of anything and that was kabuki at the kabuki-za, which had some musical features (excellent use of the woodblock, for example) but the act that we saw was not predominantly musical. I also completely failed in my endeavor to hear some live gagaku (more…)

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.)

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.

—–

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.

Last Friday, La Villette showed The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at their no-longer-free outdoor film festival. There a lot of different ways I could go with this, but for the sake of concision, I’m going to zero in on Morricone. I was excited to see the movie because of its cinematic reputation, of course, but doubly so because of the score. I don’t think I’ve seen many Morricone-scored films - The Mission comes to mind, but that was back in middle school, on VHS - so I was curious to hear, as an adult and a relatively mature musician, how he approaches film scoring.

(I should mention that if you do not want to know what happens in the film, you shouldn’t follow after the break)

I have to say, I found the music altogether weird, which is to say, beyond the famous whistling motive, not altogether appropriate. (more…)

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…)