Today’s Washington Post has picked up on the story linked to below – seemingly the first Big Media outlet to do so. Again, I would urge all my readers to go here, read the post, and consider linking to it yourself and, if you are in a position to, writing to your US representative. This is important, attention needs to be drawn to it, and something has to be done to stop it.
Enough said.
listen is a new blog by Steve Hicken, sometime contributor to Symphony X, exploring Steve’s own list of 101 essential pieces of 20th-century music. In making a connection between this and my own Music Since 1960 series, Scott Spiegelberg inadvertently reminds me that I ought to add a few more entries to that. Well, I do have a half-written post on Lutoslawski’s Livre pour orchestre knocking around for 1968, so that will see the light of day before too long. And I have a few more slabs of Warsaw to get out too: but for now I’m a bit too busy, so it may all have to wait until the weekend.
This is not, and never intends to be a political blog: I know about music, I like talking about music, and political blogging without fail always turns ugly and I have no time for the inevitable mudslinging. However linking to this post is clearly a special case, and I do so in order to raise awareness. In summary:
The Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition. “Extraordinary rendition” is the euphemism we use for sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation. As one intelligence official described it in the Washington Post, “We don’t kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them.” …
As it stands now, “extraordinary rendition” is a clear violation of international law–specifically, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Degrading and Inhuman Treatment. U.S. law is less clear. We signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture, but we ratified it with some reservations. They might create a loophole that allows us to send a prisoner to Egypt or Syria or Jordan if we get “assurances” that they will not torture a prisoner–even if these assurances are false and we know they are false.
Last month Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Congressman, introduced a bill that would clearly outlaw extraordinary rendition. But Markey only has 22 cosponsors, and now the House leadership is trying to legalize torture outsourcing–and hide it in the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission Report. …
To other bloggers: Please consider linking to this post. This bill will pass unless people know about it, and no newspaper has reported on it. The press coverage of the CBS memos showed that blogs can break a story and have an effect–and this story is about 100 times more important than Bill Burkett’s shenanigans and CBS news’ negligence.
I’m talking to Republicans, conservatives and libertarians as well as to Democrats and liberals. I know that you are more decent than this, and that you do not approve of torture. Please prove me right, and do something about it. Republicans are the majority in Congress, and they are much more likely to listen to you than to any Democrat. The press is much more likely to report on the story if liberal and conservative blogs both cover it.
Thank you.
c7.30-9.30 pm
Filharmonia Narodowa
5 Jasna
Rafal Augustyn: Symphony of Hymns
The afternoon concert ran on much longer than anticipated – I only had half an hour before the next one began, and allowing ten minutes to overshoot the Filharmonia and get lost, I barely made it. At the door I was asked to leave my coat and bag in the cloakroom and in the rush forgot to extract my programme book. So not only am I writing review notes for the most substantial première of my time here sans food and drink, I am also without any of the information painstakingly transcribed by the Festival organisers for people like me. Damn.
It turns out this is a big piece, by any any measure. It clocks in at 100 minutes; requires forces of more than 170, including two solo singers, electronics and solo flugelhorn; sets texts from 20 sources by 17 authors in five languages; and took its composer two decades to write. For all its scale, what is perhaps most impressive about the work however is that across these dimensions Augustyn has written a score that is contiually inventive and enjoyable. Nevertheless, it is an exhausting listen, and several members of the audience ran out of stamina before the end, by which time almost the full gamut of orchestral technique – bar outright sonorism, ironically – had been run.
The first of the three movements is the most monumental, a continuous flow and sway of colours. It ends with a simple hocketing line between the two soprano soloists, that begins out of phase and moves into unison, setting words from Thomas T. Andrews’ A Greenwich Palimpsest:
Over the water the echoes glide
light on light, flashing before and behind
like ripples, time on time, in a moment
and all is gone
to the far edge of primordial time.
‘Light’ is the symphony’s main theme, but Augustyn does not restrict the imagery or symbolism attached to this one word. In the first movement, light is life-giving, the light of nature; in the second it is firelight – amorous, apocalyptic, cleansing and destructive; in the final movement the light is “the dawn of a new day and the inner, mystical life”. With such a plethora of themes it is no wonder that Augustyn’s piece swelled from the work planned to take “a year or two to complete” to one that occupied him for 20. It is also little wonder that such various musical ground is covered: the Reichian phasing hockets described above were for local detail only, and hardly seemed typical. As a whole, the work has that broad sweeping feel of neo-Romanticism that one might expect from a contemporary Polish symphonist, although it features none of Górecki’s direct simplicity, or Penderecki’s gloomy ponderousness. It does however, as both these composers’ works do themselves, continually blur the line between orchestration and form. The clearest example of this is in the very opening of the work, in which single notes are passed around the percussion in a stark Klangfärbenmelodie; here the sole interest is timbral, but the momentum that is born gradually spreads across the orchestra, until it grows into a full extended introduction into the choir’s first entry. Melody and harmony are present, but not discernible as such; more important is a lilting shifting of colours that tumbles the music forward.
But it remains a monster of a work: I left feeling that for all its invention and bravery, it would have benefitted from some judicious editing, from concept to execution. It was greeted with warm applause and roars of approval – but almost all of these that I could make out came from the stage, not the stalls. Many of us, having been going non-stop for almost 5 hours by this point, were simply relieved to be out in the cold air.
After taking a breather yourself, please continue with Part IV here.
Part I here
c11.30 am
23 Sept 04
Krasinski Gardens
The park is heavily wooded. Warsaw is heavily wooded: as those citizens surviving at the end of the war cleared the rubble and stored their dead – in preparation for proper burial at a later, more propitious date – they also planted hundreds of thousands of trees to help accelarate their city’s renewal. None of the guidebooks tell you about the trees. So many of the wide avenues have large trees down both sides. As the leaves turn to their autumn colours, the effect is magical – everywhere is beautiful.
I’ve sorted out my tickets and programme book for the festival. Apparently there was some misunderstanding and my hotel reservation was not made, but that is sorted now. They’d also run out of press passes, so I had to buy my tickets in the end, but for the princely sum of £28 (155 zl) I have entry to 7 concerts and an opera, so I’m not complaining. I also have a fat, 400-page concert book for just £3.50 (20 zl).
–
Ah, that programme book. When I started reading it, I immediately imagined Kyle Gann’s reaction (see here and later posts; in related news, see also these others), and it wasn’t favourable – neither was mine. Warsaw Autumn, you see, has been a tremendously successful exercise in promotion. It is also a proud and valuable part of the new music calendar, and has given a huge boost to the careers of many now-prominent composers. But there are all sorts of reasons why it looms larger in the consciousness than many other new music festivals. These have to do with Cold War politics, Western European feelings about the East, Polish national sensibilities, a sudden explosion of creativity at the end of the 1950s, etc etc etc. But it has to be admitted that the Festival is also run by an extremely efficient publicity machine. As I’ve said before, the international press were covering the event from the very start – and not the music-specialist press. The New York Times had a piece on the preparations for the event before the first one had even begun, and the London Times reviewer sent in several reports from the early years of the festival. By it’s nature it was (is less so now) an event that attracted huge international interest, and it’s organisers were quick to work with this. Warsaw Autumn reviews are now a more-or-less annual fixture somewhere within the journal literature these days.
Such a wealth of commentary, as well as the music itself, makes the festival an attractive subject for academic work, and at least one Ph.D. that I know of has focused entirely on the aims of the early festival years; it also looms large in my own thesis, although I’m not yet sure how large. Reviewers and academics. Professional listeners, if you will. If nothing else, the Warsaw Autumn programme book is a Godsend to them (I’ll be mining the complete 47-year index of composers and works performed for some time to come). For every work, the composer is given a biography, and the work has a short programme note – usually supplied by the composer themselves, although in the unusual, more interesting cases it is by a third party writer. The biography consists, in practically every case, of exactly the sort of thing Gann despairs of: a roll call of institutions and awards received, then a selected works-list with no indication as to how that list was chosen (are these recommended further listening? The composer’s favourite works? Or just an even, chronological spread?). After the first, I skipped every one. Even more sadly, the notes on the work itself were often even more bare. Here, in full, is what was supplied for Pawel Szymanski’s work Compartment 2, Car 7:
Compartment 2, Car 7 was written as a commission of the Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet in San Francisco. Tonight’s performance is the work’s Polish premiere.
If your concert promoters are prepared to print a 400-page book, space isn’t at a premium, so why were so many notes like this? I don’t mean to single out Szymanski for particular accusation in this respect – and I did enjoy his piece – but I’ve picked on him here for reasons that become clear in a few moments. In the end, two things were made abundantly clear. Firstly, that it is not just New York Uptown composers who present this sort of useless information to their audiences; and secondly that it is not useless at all. In fact, it is very useful indeed to those professional listeners I mentioned before, whom one is supposed to assume can pick up every salient detail of a piece on a first listen (rarely true – and anyway, who’d ever refuse the help?). In reviewing and academic work I’ll be referring to this thing many many times over I’m sure; but in the concert hall itself, it was all too often completely useless. The temptation, then, is to imagine this – an avowed item of promotional material after all – as written for that professional audience. Even, that the profile and commentary that their subsequent writings on the festival would generate are of more value than the ears and eyes in the concert hall at that moment. I obviously can’t really back up such a thesis with more than a hunch, but even if I could, Warsaw Autumn would hardly be alone in this respect. So, back to the story …
–
While looking for the monument to the Warsaw Uprising, I happened onto the Rynek Nowego Miasto (New Town Market Square): completely deserted, and, with churches on two corners very beautiful. Warsaw is often a private, hushed city (less so on Saturday, as I discovered). It seems as though people have learnt to speak in whispers, and they haven’t lost the habit. Last night all the restaurants had only one or two tables in use, and all were near-silent. I had to double check with one waitress that I had actually found the restaurant after all. The women in the Warsaw Autumn box office were a little more lively, and I charmed all three with my maly Polski.
When you find the monument itself, you wonder how you missed it. It creeps up on you around a corner on Ulica Dluga, but then appears to dominate the side of two whole blocks, in a zig-zag. 
The two bronze sculptures are surrounded on two sides by turquoise pillars, each with mottos in Latin and Polish on them, and each topped with the PW anchor. On three of the sides of the zig-zag the pillars enclose the modern buildings of the high court: the pillars on these three sides are the same, but are topped with stylized scales of justice that echo the lines of the PW symbol. Thus, the monument itself may only occupy one small square, but it is made very clear that the law court building is its continuation. In Warsaw past oppression and heroism and present justice are one.
–
c 2pm
Hotel room
I came back via the gorgeous baroque Saxon Gardens (Ogród Saski) I returned to the record shop opposite the grand theatre on Ulica Moliera (I’d tried dropping in earlier in the day, but they didn’t open until 11. This is a very commendable attitude to business, which I applaud!). For classical CDs and scores, this is the place. I couldn’t find any scores I desperately wanted, although they did have a fine, cheap selection of PWM. I didn’t leave without any CDs though, and for about £30 I got a couple of Penderecki disks (original recordings of St Luke and Utrenja, plus some odds and sods), and three assorted collections of modern Polish. Lutoslawski is very prominent on the racks here – a composer of similar international stature and musical complexity to Birtwistle, yet can you imagine any but the most specialised shop in the UK stocking a dozen different Birtwistle CDs? Yet that was the minimum standard for Lutoslawski in every record shop I visited here; even the Borders-style megastores had racks for contemporary Polish composers.
I had lunch in a cheap caff on Krakowskie Przedmiescie. The first concert of my festival starts in a couple of hours. From the ever-helpful Book (in practical terms, at least), I’ve worked out where PWM’s offices are, and I’m going to pay them a visit to see if I can pick up any scores that I do actually want.
–
PWM was shut. I gathered from the security guard (they share a building with a bank) that they stop working at 3pm. Again, I take my hat off to Poland’s new-found idle work ethic. Any chance you could use some of your new-found EU influence to spread the word this far West? Cheers.
–
4.30pm
Mazovian Centre of Culture and Art
12 Ulica Elektoralna
Five pieces here, all by Polish composers. The oldest dates from 2000; three are world premières. There is something of a scrum for seats, 15 minutes before the scheduled start. I must remember to get to concerts like this earlier – it’s already packed. This is a small hall, but they’ve had to put out another 40-50 seats, and still it’s not enough: people are standing and sitting in the aisles, behind pillars even. The audience is evenly split, and includes all ages, from early teens up. I’ve only heard Polish voices so far, and I don’t recognise anyone, except for one gentleman who I regularly see on the London concert circuit and who I’ve always assumed must be press.
The concert begins with a première – Magdalena Dlugosz’s Zakopane Liryki, which is not a new work at all, but this is a new version of it for sax, rather than clarinet, and electronics.
My first impression is that this is a little like Stockhausen’s Spiral if it had been commissioned by ECM. Not in itself a bad thing necessarily, but here it doesn’t quite come off I feel. In her programme notes (some of the more effective ones) Dlugosz talks of unifying the two layers of music – the live instrument and the computer sound layers. However, the soundtrack is composed from clarinet sound sources, with the piece’s original incarnation in mind, and here the aural discrepancy between saxophone and clarinet meant that more often than not the sax was isolated. The most effective part for me was at the very end when the saxophonist simply vocalised, and then whispered – here the source sounds matched those on the soundtrack more closely, but otherwise it seemed pretty shapeless, and I was puzzled as to why the new version had been written in the first place.
Pawel Lukaszewski’s String Quartet no.2 of 2000 was the earliest work on the programme, and the most recognisable slice of Polakiana. Like Górecki’s Harpsichord concerto, it is written in a homophonic, not-against-note style. Of the three short movements, the outer two were rhythmical, folk-ish, melodies, the middle a string of rotating chords that brought to mind Messiaen in the way tight dissonance would open out into bright neo-tonality. The whole was written with consciously limited means, and it had the immediacy and solidity one associates with recent Polish music.
Pawel Mykietyn’s Ladnienie (Becoming Fine) was another new work – brand new this time – written for baritone, microtonally tuned harpsichord, and string quartet, and setting a poem by Marcin Swietlicki. The baritone, Jerzy Artysz, who was in the mind of the composer when writing the piece, performed superbly well. The part was extremely isolated – often completely solo – and featured a lot of slow-motion articulation of the poem’s Polish text. This brought out, and played upon the sibilant sonorities and harmonic nasality of the language, but also inspired sniggers in many of the student audience around me. In fact, most of the audience was pretty uncomfortable with this piece. Many of the instrumental sections were in a pointillist style, and the musicians weren’t completely confident with their music, so these weren’t entirely successful. The more sustained passages, particularly making use of the microtonal harpsichord, were more effective, and the bitter irony of the poem (“A fine place. / The sun is smitten. / Glistening ashes / fall onto the earth. / The night is glistening. / Yours is a fine place . / Beasts rule here. / Beasts rule here.”) was brought out. However, despite Artysz’s best efforts, for the most part the piece sounded bare, rather than desolate.
First up after the interval was Szymanski’s aforementioned Compartment 2, Car 7, which was the first piece so far to really give the players license to play to their fullest – until now, they’d all looked a little uncertain and withdrawn. The piece began with strident hurdy-gurdy-like drones and shifting harmonies; these were interspersed with angular flourishes, and a descending arpeggio on bowed vibraphone. About a third of the way into the piece the mood abruptly shifted to a kind of subdued minimalism, the interlocking strings and vibraphone forming the accompaniment to an imaginary Baroque aria. With such an open-ended and episodic structure – and with a title that called to mind all the trains of Agatha Christie and Steve Reich – one felt urgently that there was a programme behind all this that we were not being let in on. So, point to point, the work was well written, attractive, interesting. However, it appeared to make little sense structurally – the sections were presumably interrelated, but the weight of the piece was all in the final minimalist arpeggiation that made up at least 2/3rds of its length, so by the end the opening drones and rhythmic vigour seemed ill-fitted. Without any assistance from the composer, this is all I can conclude from hearing it.
The final piece on the programme was by the youngest composer on the bill. Wojciech Ziemowit Zych is 27, and the same age as me, so I was already prepared to receive his new work, Kaspar Hauser’s Friends generously. Granted, it is a little rough around the edges, and will almost certainly never become a repertoire piece, but it was probably the most completely accomplished piece on the programme. In six short, aphoristic movements, each with a cryptic dedication to a different individual, it immediately recalled Kurtág. It occupied a tougher sound world than much Kurtág, but again like his music was never short on ideas or wit, including at one point a passage of distorted perfect cadences. Curiously, the shy, shaven-headed Zych even had a look of Kurtág about him. He has a teaching post in Kraków (at his age, bah!), and the piece was a commission from German radio; I expect to hear more of this chap in the future.
–
I think that’s about enough for the time being. For those that want, Part III is here.
If anyone’s forming a post-punk band and needs a name, that title’s a creative commons freebie if you want it 
So I was away for a few days, and everybody’s been talking about music and music writing. The fire seems mostly to have gone out of the debate now, so I won’t contribute much new here (although an upcoming Warsaw post will have some pertinent remarks – stay tuned), simply point interested readers to the various points: ionarts links to most of the relevant posts, and Jessica Duchen, Fredösphere, uTopianTurtleTop et al have more to add. For the record, my view on the matter is buried in the comments at Musical Perceptions, where Scott has been the most patient of all in keeping up with proceedings.
OK, I’ve found myself an internet cafe on Marszalkowska and since I’ve got a couple of hours before my flight and since this is the, er, 21st century baby, I’m blogging from Poland. Yeah.
I have a lot of notes here from Warsaw and the Festival, and I have every intention of writing them all up. If ever a city compels you to write, it’s this one, so what follows is a warts-and-all travel diary, in several parts. I make no apologies for self-indulgence – this is a blog after all! Just be thankful that thus far I’ve spared you pictures of my cat.
[for the sake of an easy life, I'm leaving out Polish accents for the time being. I might go back and put them in at a later date]
——–
22 Sept 04
Room 262, Hotel Europejski
Krakowskie Przedmiescie
My first act in Poland is to find a way to break one of my 50 zloty notes so that I can buy a bus ticket from the airport into town. There’s a small bookshop at Okecie airport, and I figure that a Polish edition of the first Lemony Snicket novel is as good a way to get some change as any other. It should help with the Polish too.
As it turns out, I forget to buy my ticket in advance, and the bus driver seems set on ignoring me. In fact, he closes the doors and pulls away, so I decide to chance a freebie. I take the bus all the way to the end of Krakowskie Przedmiescie and head into the old town, hoping to find the Warsaw Autumn offices on Rynek Starego Miasto open. On Plac Zambowy, outside the Royal Palace, a fusion band is playing on a small stage; banners and chalk on the pavement indicate that this is in aid of European no-car day – a fact I was completely unaware of on leaving London.
The Warsaw Autumn offices are at no.27, but I can only find nos.26 and 28, and no helpful plaques. I was prewarned that I might have to make my way through a restaurant to find the offices: in any case, most of the square looks shut for the night. I decide to find my hotel, and sort out passes and tickets tomorrow morning.
The Europejski proves tricky to find, and I almost accidentally stumble across it, even though it takes up an entire block. After waiting an age in the black-and-white marbled reception area I am served, and it turns out my name is not in their books, but they find me a room anyway. The room is compact, the corridors vast. Although the hotel is mid-19th century, its layout eerily echoes the priorities of Warsaw’s Soviet town planners.
The David Crowley book I was reading on my way here highlighted the importance of building projects to Warsaw’s identity; 
the swarm of cranes around the Palace of Culture and Science reinforced this; and the construction trade magazine left in my hotel room further emphasised the point: “When will there be more cranes in Warsaw?” laments its editor, Magda Szczecinska-Konstantynowicz, “A city with cranes projecting onto the skyline seems to be a dynamic place that is prosperous, enjoying growth, and with the chance of a better future … a few more cranes would give us a visual confirmation that the real estate market has finally woken up, along with the economy.”
–
Yet for all the rebuilding, Warsaw remains attached to its ruins. Last month was the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, and I have seen three new memorials already. One is temporary, and is outside St John’s Cathedral in the old town. It was a pile of rubble with Polish flags, and rising above were banners with faces of those who had died in the fighting. On the Plac Powstancow Warszawy, next to the Warsaw Hotel building are two more permanent memorials. 
One is a wedge shape, with a huge iron PW anchor motif on the front (PW stands for ‘Warsaw Fighting’, and the anchor mongram is the symbol of the Polish Home Army). Behind is a sort of counterweight of bricks and rubble, marking the dates 1944-2004. On the adjacent side of the square is a large marble and stone memorial with two eternal flames, an altar to those who died. The largest of these flames comes from a bowl shaped to look like a circle of bricks, supported by rifles standing on their ends. On both monuments people have left candles and flowers. One rose had miniature homemade barbed wire wrapped around it.
I came across this square by accident, taking a random path from the Nowy Swiat restaurant where I had dinner. The restaurant had a Chopin soundtrack, and I was struck by how well I knew some of it – every now and then a prelude that my Dad used to practise would tear at me. I was surprised by this connection I suddenly had with the city, so to come upon these monuments almost immediately afterwards was heartbreaking.
–
[continue with Part II here]
It’s slightly old hat now, but it’s related to the below posts, and I just discovered it, so here is Windows Noise, a track (with accompanying Flash visuals) composed entirely using SNDREC32.EXE in Windows. It starts a bit slow (the opening chimes have me instinctively reaching for my e-mail expecting a slew of spam to be flooding in), but impressive nonetheless.
There are now more than 40 mini-tracks on the 3 Notes and Runnin site (the full set may be found here). Some are really good, some are less successful, but the sheer diversity gets across the point that Downhill Battle are trying to make. I listened to all of them this morning, and I’ll be keeping an eye on developments over there: there may well be a larger post on this next week when I get back from Poland and have a little more time, but for now favourites include ‘Majesty Roundoff Saga’ by scragz, ‘Get a Life’ by Dirk Jorji and the ‘Crimson and Clover’ cover version (double intertextual whammy!) by Jordan DeMaio.
Prediction from the past. Mind you, the way my Dell dicks me around these days, I’d be tempted to try one of these out. At least it’s got dials to tell you when it’s about to crash.
