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!

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…)