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 got back from my sojourn in Grožnjan, Croatia on Wednesday, and I don’t know where to start my post about the place. I guess the logical place to start would be with my experiences with the piece that I wrote for the International Vocal Arts Workshop, since that’s what brought me there in the first place – but maybe I’ll try to talk about the setting a little bit first. Grožnjan is a hill town in Istria that seems to have been walled by the 12^th century, and which was part of the Venetian empire from the 1400s until the Napoleonic Wars, when it passed into Austrian hands. It’s full of mostly unpainted stone buildings and dark wooden doors and tiled roofs separated by narrow cobbled streets and small piazzas with flowers and vines bursting from the surrounding windows, balconies, and roofs. It interests me that the church and old municipal buildings are at the top of the village and not in the middle. The village commands an incredible view of the verdant (I don’t like that word, but I can’t think of a better description) valley beneath, and in the not-so-distance, the Adriatic Sea. The area is abundant with olive trees and grapes vines, and most other types of tasty vegetation. And truffles, they say, though I only saw them as part of dinner. (Sometimes it pays to be vegetarian: the meat eaters got polenta with a meaty stew, we got a truffle-cream sauce on our cornmeal.) They have managed to keep almost all signs of modernity, besides electric lines and a public phone, out of sight, so once you leave the parking lot on the outskirts, you can try to forget when you live. Surveying the view outside the dorm window, I got to thinking pretty quickly about how muchlittle the scene has changed in the past 800 years.

This was the backdrop for the street theater performance that I wrote Rising for. To recap, Rising is in a quasi-Gregorian chant style but using texts related to the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic. The piece was written as an experiment, both in notation and in sound. The idea of the piece was to have three completely independent vocal lines singing in separate modes, each with a different final,* all surrounding a D-natural drone. But instead of creating total chaos, I wanted to have a few points where the lines sort of lined up – not in pitch, but in character. I composed each part separately, but planned the piece out by dividing it into larger “melismatic” sections and shorter “recitative” sections.** That way, there would be breaks in the texture when the recits connected. The tension of the interlocking lines would give way to brief moments of repose when not quite so much would happen. (more…)

Isn’t that cool? I get to go to beautiful Croatian Istria, and it’s a business trip. I’d say that of the places I’ve gotten to travel as a composer, it’s the top so far - Berlin and NYC aren’t bad, but Berlin’s a little cold in winter, and New York is familiar; it doesn’t so much feel like a vacation. Croatia’s sure way better than the Hague.

Anyway, the point of all this is to announce the impending premiere (and seconde) of Rising, the tentative title for the piece I referred to back here and here. The piece is a gloss on the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic, sung in a quasi-Gregorian chant style, accompanied by an active drone, just about any instrument will do. The premiere is planned for June 20, as part of a street performance festival in Groznjan, and it we’re also planning to perform it on June 23 in Izola - still Istria, but across the border in Slovenia. The project was commissioned and abetted by Jane McMahan, who runs her International Vocal Arts Workshop in Groznjan. I’m particularly excited that this piece is being presented outside of the confines of the concert hall, and will reach an audience of locals and random, unsuspecting vacationers.

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…)