Alvin Lucier: Music on a Long Thin Wire. Get it at Contemporary Music.
Archive for January, 2009
View from afar
I’m a little surprised at how much blog and press coverage there has been of that little John Williams piece played at Obama’s inauguration. This was the first inauguration ceremony I watched in any length on TV and, as a Brit, I’d just assumed that something like this happened every time, just part of the general pomp. But, as I sift through the various responses this morning, Anthony Tommasini’s strikes me as capturing a general mood:
Classical singers have performed for inaugurations in recent decades. But to have a new instrumental piece played was most unusual, something that should gratify classical music lovers.
Why, exactly? We have ears, and we’re supposed to be a discerning bunch. Are we so easily fobbed off by some star names (hey – wasn’t that guy in The West Wing?) and a little bit of public recognition that the quality of the music doesn’t matter?
Who knows what Perlman, Yo Yo et al were doing up there, but the most likely explanation is prestige. Obama (or more likely his handlers) wanted a bit of high arts sheen to the proceedings. What’s a little bit surprising to me is how many commentators seem to have bought this so easily. Let’s look past the ‘whoo! classical music at the inauguration!’ bit: this was a new piece commissioned from John Williams, a composer who has become hugely wealthy and very well known by writing conventional scores (with a team of helpers) for big budget films that don’t rock the boat. This was not a new administration of aesthetes stamping its colourful mark on the next four years. This was a lacklustre choice drafted by a mid-level staffer, and Mark Swed is absolutely right to call Obama on this (although I don’t see how his list of alternatives moves us much further on, to be honest). If people are serious about improving the status of classical and contemporary music in America, they need to be a bit less willing to settle for such crumbs.
Some are happy with the nod to Copland in Williams’s piece. It might have looked like harking back to a bygone age (but, sadly, the same has to be said of a fading Aretha Franklin) but wouldn’t we all have preferred been some actual Copland?
Total Immersion: Stockhausen, Barbican, 17 January 2009
Also posted to Musical Pointers, alongside two other reviews from the day. Also recommended: Ben.H’s review.
Adieu; Klavierstücke I–IV, V, VII; Kontra-Punkte; Choral; Chöre für Doris; Klavierstück IX; Litanei 97
Guildhall New Music Ensemble
Richard Baker (conductor)
BBC Singers David Hill (conductor)
Nicolas Hodges (piano)
Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke’s
Inori
BBC SO
David Robertson (conductor)
Kathinka Pasveer (dancer/mime)
Alain Louafi (dancer/mime)
Barbican Hall
Hymnen
Barbican Hall
The Barbican’s day of ‘Total Immersion’ in Stockhausen invited a reconciliation between his early, acclaimed works and his mystifying later career. This was the tone of the first concert, at least, a peculiar mix of gilt successes (Kontra-Punkte and the Klavierstücke), oddities (Adieu, Choral and Chöre für Doris) and one late baffler (Litanei 97).
Adieu set the lopsided ball rolling. Wind quintet is an odd medium: it’s vibrantly coloured but struggles with profundity. Its best repertoire (Stockhausen’s own Zeitmasze notwithstanding) is lighthearted and ironic. It is, therefore, a strange ensemble to set a memorial for but, as often with Stockhausen (the piece was written in memory of the son of Wilhelm Meyer, an oboist who had championed Zeitmasze), the pragmatic inspiration came first and the notes would have to follow as best they could.
This pragmatic approach is one of the most distinctive qualities of Stockhausen’s overall output. Adieu is an uncharacteristic cut-up of Mozartian cadences and microtonal fogs, but it somehow works. Stockhausen’s ear preferred the obdurate, and crude, but this gives his music a unique immediacy. It sounds at first so wrong and so unreflective, but it is presented so vividly that you can’t help accepting that the ‘wrongness’ must be in one’s own preconceptions and not in the music. The two short early works, Choral and Chöre für Doris, date from a time before Stockhausen had found a way to project that confidence but their naivety hints at the unwavering forcefulness that would soon come: Choral is an early attempt at serialism, and its simple repeating statements of a melodic row over a homorhythmic harmony is brazenly elementary.
Perhaps the historical placement of Stockhausen’s early works at the forefront of a musical revolution – wherein they can be regarded as masterpieces or travesties without the bother of having to listen to them – has softened their edge and brought them closer to us, an advantage not given to the later works, which remain to be heard. But now that it is possible to hear past their reputations let’s not forget how peculiar those earlier pieces are. These supposedly formalistic works continually undermine themselves with surprise twists and unexpected moments of drama. They pose some of the most awkward challenges to any norm of musical listening, and in this way open up imaginative worlds far greater than their immediate surfaces.
Litanei 97 was the most recent and strangest offering of the day. Highly ritualised, its score dictates every detail down to choreography and costumes. The aural aspects were quite simple, in fact: a long text by Stockhausen was recited by the choir, whose rhythms, registers and glissandos (but not pitches) were notated. Each verse began with a sung introit and the striking of Japanese temple gongs. The theatrical side might have been better done – the BBC Singers moved as surely as a teenager at his first school disco – but the music was surprisingly effective. I don’t know if I liked it, but for all its simplicity it filled and shaped its 25 minutes very successfully.
The complexion of the day was now changed and moved from this extremity, through the magnificent Inori to, several hours later, the sound of the composer’s breath at the end of Hymnen. When it was last performed at the Barbican, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, I found Hymnen’s egotism quite nauseating. Three days before the end of the Bush era, I expected to hear it quite differently. This time the composer’s many interventions (his voice, his breath and his unravelling of the world’s national anthems) sounded like insecurity rather than dominance. There is no sense of polyphony in Hymnen: events happen one after another, somehow finding enough energy to push through to the next minute. This again is a naïve, unreflective way to compose, and requires a leap of faith from the listener. Yet I knew that it worked when, during the final minutes, as a drastically slowed-down Swiss anthem transposes into the composer’s breathing, I found my own breath had become just as slow and deliberate and that the piece had not stamped me into submission but it and I had become one with each other.
Stockhausen had a gift for the large-scale, single-minded form, which I think may be the strongest feature of his later music. Inori – 75 minutes long, with the orchestra divided into high and low instruments either side of an elevated platform, on which stand two mime-dancers – is a classic introduction to the type. Its plan is of a slow movement from rhythmicised single pitches to complex polyphony, through which it hopes to convey a vague, new agey, global spirituality: the title means prayer, invocation or adoration, and the two mimes perform an endless sequence of prayer gestures from around the world. Any cynicism was again blown away, however, by the absolute assurance of the music (and an exemplary performance). I don’t know anyone else who could have written music like this, whose plan is so banal, whose aspirations are so twee, that yet speaks so powerfully in an unmistakable voice.
Conservative modernism
Very nice article by Chris Fox in the Guardian this weekend – thanks Colin H for the pointer. Ostensibly it’s about Schoenberg, but the real value is in Fox’s cautionary remarks on the sort of mainstream modernism marketed around the globe as ‘cutting edge’, in place of the real thing:
In retrospect, the most striking feature of the postwar period was the way in which Schoenbergian modernism hardened into the dominant orthodoxy of new music. Adorno had argued that Schoenberg was the true musical heir of Beethoven and Brahms, and Adorno’s arguments persuaded generations of composers to adopt the techniques pioneered by Schoenberg. Not to do so was to risk being thought old-fashioned or worse: in The Philosophy of Modern Music, Adorno dismissed Britten and Shostakovich as “feeble” and “impotent”. From Tel Aviv to Toronto, Cambridge to Cape Town, post-Schoenbergian composition became the lingua franca of new music, studied in the academies, commissioned for concert halls and opera houses. Even those composers who chose not to adopt this way of musical speaking could turn its ubiquity to their advantage: composers of bad tonal music explained their lack of success as evidence of institutional prejudice; composers of interesting tonal music (mostly minimalists) could celebrate success achieved in the face of the same prejudice.
The result has been a peculiar form of quasi-modern music that still survives today. It has the superficial characteristics of Schoenberg’s version of modernism – angular melodies, uneasy harmonies, abrupt shifts of tone – but, lacking the expressive necessity that propelled Schoenberg towards his new musical language, it has none of the fervent urgency of the second string quartet. This paradoxical music, conservative modernism or modernist conservatism, has its merits. It is often very skilfully made and, for those who acquire the taste, it can seem very tasteful. It sounds like modern music and is assiduously promoted as modern music by much of the classical music industry. Its disadvantage is that, when heard alongside the modernist masterpieces of the first decades of the 20th century, it just sounds vapid and dull.
One hundred years after the premiere of the second string quartet, Schoenberg’s musical legacy is a somewhat mixed blessing. His own works, particularly those of the early atonal period, retain the disturbing, kaleidoscopic vision that so upset the Viennese public a century ago. But the subsequent institutionalisation of the techniques he developed in those decisive months has produced hour upon hour of greyness, convincing generations of listeners that new music is always dull and often difficult.
There are two ways of reading this passage: one, and probably the more common, is to see it as the latest in a line of manifestos for audience-friendly, non-difficult, non-dissonant music.
But, knowing what I know of Fox’s music and his writing, this doesn’t sit right with me. For a start, the equation of ‘non-dissonant’ with ‘non-difficult’/'audience-friendly’ simply isn’t tenable – as many examples of difficult consonant music and non-difficult dissonant music attest. A second reading sees this passage as a call for the promotion of music that is actually more challenging. Not necessarily atonal, but not necessarily tonal either – narrow technical definitions get us nowhere in matters of aesthetic appreciation and should not be used to divide good from bad in this way. What does divide the good from the bad, Fox argues in this alternative reading, is ‘expressive necessity’ over ’superficial’ ‘quasi-modern[ism]‘, ‘disturbing, kaleidoscopic vision’ over ‘hour upon hour of greyness’. Too much of the music that is put promoted by ensembles and institutions in order to fulfill a real or imagined obligation to present new music falls under the latter descriptions and it is, simply put, not good music. This is the stuff that orchestral subscribers and Proms goers and YouTube users and Sunday supplement readers think is contemporary music (because that’s what they’re told) and quite rightly decide that it is stuffy, uninspiring and not for them. The trick is to show them how wrong they are: the underpublicised new music ghetto is full of composers ten times more interesting than this. It won’t be for everyone – why should it be? – but it will mean a lot more to those who it does touch, and isn’t that worth more?
News from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious
A leading literary scholar, who has studied hundreds of “Peanuts” strips with words in them, tells us “If you don’t read text and can’t identify the rows of letters in the speech bubbles, then you lose out on some of the meaning.”
Scholars have analyzed the speech bubbles spoken by the various characters in “Peanuts” and have found real words, including the phrase “Good grief”.
More here.
German avant garde: Colloquium and recital
One for your diaries:
Colloquia: Stockhausen and Music in West-Germany
04 Feb 2009, 16:45-18:00, St Davids Room, King’s Building, Strand Campus
Event series: Institute for Advanced Musical Studies Colloquia
School / area: Humanities
Department: Music
Location: Strand Campus
Location map: Strand: detail
Speaker: Mr Ian Pace
Speaker institution: Dartington College of Arts
“Karlheinz Stockhausen and Music in West-Germany during the Period of Collective Amnesia: Paradigms for Understanding the 1950s German Avant-garde”
The colloquium will be followed by buffet dinner and at 19.30 a recital by Ian Pace with works by Zimmermann, Boulez, Henze, König, Otte and Stockhausen.
Admission and refreshments free. All welcome.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/events_details.php?event_id=1164&year=2009
Park Lane Group concerts reviewed
I covered Wednesday and Thursday’s concerts in last week’s Park Lane Group series: my reviews are up now on Musical Pointers.
My comment in the second review -
The PLG Young Artists series is a venerable institution and a crucial initiative in the development of young performing talent in this country. However, I’m beginning to wonder how much, musically, it has to offer to impartial observers without a connection to the Group itself or any of the performers.
- possibly needs a little clarification. PLG concerts don’t draw big crowds: the bulk of their audiences are made up of people directly associated with the event, or friends and families of the performers. Yet they get big press billing every year because everyone else in the audience is a critic and there’s not much else to write about at this time of year. It’s a curious and slightly hermetic phenomenon. Which is not to say I’d rather the series didn’t exist – far from it – but its oddity can’t pass unremarked.
The end of DRM on iTunes?
Apple Inc has agreed to start selling digital songs from its iTunes store without copy protection software.
At present, most music downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store can only be played through an iTunes interface or iPod.
The new agreement with Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner Music will end digital rights management (DRM)software currently attached to iTunes music.
