Archives for 2010

Today I’ll be a guest on Sound Check, WNYC’s daily talk show all about music. Sound Check is currently doing a series all about singing and today’s show is focusing on men who sing high, which is a lovely coincidence as I’m devoting tomorrow’s episode of VoiceBox to the very same topic! I’m excited to be on air with one of my favorite countertenors, Philippe Jaroussky. Listen in at 93.9 FM or via the live webstream on the WNYC website.

I’m probably going to make myself very unpopular with this blog post. For what kind of cold-hearted arts critic would say anything negative about Youth Speaks, one of the the leading (if not the leading) nonprofit presenter of teen-oriented spoken word performance, education, and youth development programs in the country?

Founded in the Bay Area in 1996, Youth Speaks has done an amazing job of reaching out to young people and helping them to channel their thoughts and beliefs into text, which the youngsters (mostly teens) can share aloud at various Youth Speaks events like poetry slams and youth poetry festivals. The organization has achieved considerable fame around the US. According to the Youth Speaks website, it works with 45,000 teens per year in the Bay Area alone, and has created partner programs in 36 cities across the country.

I’ve heard Youth Speaks poets on several occasions at various events around San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland. I’ve always been impressed by the poets’ level of commitment, passion and confidence. Every now and again, I even hear amazing poetry delivered so powerfully that the words cut right to the core.

But at the organization’s annual Martin Luther King celebration in San Francisco on Monday, where I was able to watch and listen to many Youth Speaks poets one after another, I found myself less caught up in the performers’ rabble rousing enthusiasm than I was by their lack of basic delivery skills.

An assortment of young poets, some of them with more highly developed artistic abilities than others, got up to share their work. What mostly got in the way of my engagement with the event was the fact that half of the time, I couldn’t make out what the speakers were saying. Some of them spoke too fast, while others managed to mumble, even though they were miked. Also, I’m fine with young poets using the stage as therapy if they feel the need — at least a few performers gave tortured diatribes on being abused by their parents as children.

But whatever kind of poem you put out there in the world, if you’re going to put it in front of people, it should be a real performance i.e. learn the poem from memory. Standing on stage staring at a sheet of paper and stumbling over words is not my idea of performance poetry. The Youth Speaks mentors and instructors should insist that the poets learn their work by heart and pay more attention to the performative aspects of live poetry. After all, even if some of the speakers consider what they’re doing to be therapy, the people out there in the audience are usually looking to be entertained.

For most people, the word “choir” evokes an image of a group of people standing together singing. Last weekend, I learned that the term can also apply do dance.

Of the many beautiful and innovative qualities of Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton’s rapturous dance piece, The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories, the most memorable is the “movement choir.” The choreographers assemble a group of 18 women who appear on stage at the start of the work standing in rows on risers. When the work begins, they all make beautiful patterns with their bodies to the sound of a live musical score played by eight musicians as six soloists dance before them.

The texture of the movement choir is indeed chorus like. The work in harmony with and at some times in counterpoint to the soloists. At one point, a soloist gets swept up by the movement choir, as if she’s being carried off the ground by some powerful elemental force. The group carefully and almost imperceptibly shunts her body sideways and upwards. At another point, the movement choir becomes a long serpent of bodies bent over one another and moving in perfect synch through space unstoppably. Anything that gets caught in between its ever-trundling legs gets shaken up and destroyed. The effect of the hapless soloists getting caught up in the monster’s belly is at once comic and sinister.

Garrett and Moulton haven’t created a narrative work with The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories. But I found myself thinking of the movement choir as a force of nature or an energy field that’s ever-present in our lives but completely unknowable. I guess the best singing chorales in the world convey the same feeling when they sing masterworks like Monteverdi’s Vespers, Tallis’ Spem in Allium or Mozart’s Requiem. Whether standing still and singing, or keeping their mouths shut and moving, choirs at their best can make us understand the word “harmony” in a profound way.

Just as it’s often the case that playwrights and screenwriters aren’t always the best people to direct their own plays and movies, so composers don’t necessarily do an optimal job leading performances of their works from the podium.

This hypothesis was borne out over the weekend when I saw the British composer George Benjamin conducting the San Francisco Symphony in two of his pieces — “Duet”, a work for piano and orchestra written in 2008, and “Ringed by the Flat Horizon”, which the composer wrote at the very start of his career in 1980.

Unlike the previous concert of Benjamin’s work which I saw last week under the baton of David Robertson, this composer-helmed concert lacked, for want of a better word, oomph. Benjamin conducted both of his pieces as if sewing a pair of delicate lace curtains. The soundscape shimmered and was extremely intricate. But it all sounded very much the same. Robertson, on the other hand, brought out the extreme contrasts in the composer’s works. We heard filigree and fire in Benjamin’s music as interpreted by Robertson. But the contrasts were subdued in the composer’s hands. Perhaps it’s a case of the creator “not being able to see the wood for the trees”?

PS: Read Stephen Smoliar’s response to my blog post here.

The media landscape is in such a mess at the moment that media organizations should be shoring up their energies, focusing on turning out high quality product and finding ways to make sure that that product reaches an audience. There’s strength in numbers, so it makes sense for media organizations of a similar kind to look for ways to partner with each other and help each other out.

The reality, however, is very different. I’m seeing nothing but bitterness and resentment across the board. Local media outlets here in the Bay Area are harboring pointless and petty rivalries for one another, rivalries which they can ill-afford at a time when resources are at a premium and time, money and energy ought to be funneled in more productive ways.

Interestingly, the main source of disgruntlement seems to be happening not at the level of the big players in town (who are all suffering just as much as the small fish), but rather in the terrain of alternative weeklies, blogs and public radio stations. This seems ridiculous to me. You’d think these Bay Area-based liberal-leaning organizations would have more of an open mind and want to help each other out. But a spirit of mean-spiritidness is rife.

If any of these organizations hopes to get through the next couple of difficult years in tact, they need to start being less insular and lose the misplaced camp mentality, which can only lead to their mutual destruction.

One art form which is en vogue at the moment in the Bay Area and elsewhere is the practice of composing and performing new musical scores to accompany silent films.

One of the highlights of the annual SF International Film Festival is its combination of live rock music and silent film at the Castro Theatre. Recent years have witnessed pairings between Deerhoof and Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, Lambchop and Murnau’s Sunrise, Yo La Tengo and Jean Painlevé’s wildlife films, and, last year, Dengue Fever performing the world premiere of their newly composed score for Harry Hoyt’s 1925 dinosaur epic The Lost World. Meanwhile, local composers like Jill Tracy write and perform luxuriant noirish scores at cinemas all over the Bay Area.

Because silent film has no dialogue or other sound, the musical score has the potential to stand out much more clearly than in a talkie, which gives composers much more creative leeway in some ways. Yet writing music for this medium has its challenges. The composer must take care not to usurp the pictures with his or her soundscape. He or she can underscore the mood of a scene or perhaps even undercut it if going for a special effect. But the music should always be in service of the images and shouldn’t guide audience members emotions in ways that don’t fit with the film. Because the filmmakers of these early films are mostly long dead by now, keeping all these elements in check is difficult — the creator of the movie isn’t around to consult with about mood, intention, and other qualities visible on screen.

Last night’s San Francisco Film Festival event, Music for Silents, showed how composing for early film can be done well. Musician Steven Severin, co-founder of the 70s British punk band Siouxie and the Banshees and, more recently, a film composer, presented his original score for The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), a French Surrealist fantasy directed by Germaine Dulac and written by Antonin Artaud.

The film’s plot, if it can be said to have one at all, is obscure. The story seems to revolve around a randy Catholic priest whose obsession with women leads him to behave erratically. He rips off a female character’s bustier and strangles a fellow priest, among other things. It’s no wonder that the British Board of Film Censors called the film blasphemous and banned it.

Severin’s electronic score thrums with life throughout the 35-minute film. The pulsations draw us into ourselves. Our breathing slows and before long we find ourselves occupying the same psychological space as the characters. The low church organ-like rumbles suggest the religious landscape of the story. Meanwhile, some fast, scattered phrases create a flighty, bird-like energy. It’s as if the music is mimicking the rapid heartbeat of the priest.

The combination of music and visuals reminded me strongly of the Cremaster films of Matthew Barney, owing to the mixture of cold, sepulchral stasis in the composition of some of the images and throbbing score and larger-than-life emotions.

I’m constantly struck by the ways in which music, more than any other artform, is capable of stirring up deep personal memories. It’s also interesting to see how those memories mutate over time.

I as reminded of this once again over the weekend at a San Francisco Symphony concert featuring two works by the British composer George Benjamin who is currently in residency at the Symphony. The conductor was David Robertson.

One of my most powerful memories as a youngster was singing in Jubilation, a piece written by the Benjamin in 1985 for orchestra and children’s choir. My school choir joined forces with ensembles from other local schools to sing in the piece. We performed the work in Canterbury Cathedral with the composer conducting. I was about 11 at the time and have vivid recollections of standing amid what seemed like a vast army of children belting out Benjamin’s sustained notes to syllables from the solfege system — “mi, re, so fah, doh!” I was terrified of missing the high C at the climax of the piece. Our teacher worked with us for weeks on trying to hit that note in tune. When we performed the piece, the sound, at least as it has reverberated in my mind across the intervening decades, was nothing short of cataclysmic.

So it was a real treat, and a slight disappointment, to hear the piece performed again on Friday. The choir was from one of the local music-oriented schools, The Crowden School. But it was much smaller in size than the ensemble I had sung with in the 80s. As a result, even though the singing was lovely — and the instrumental and harmonic nuances of Benjamin’s intricate score rang clearly — the piece came across without as much force as it should have. Jubilation sounded more apologetic than jubilant. I don’t know whether my memory had inflated the piece of music to a more imposing size than it really was, or whether it genuinely lacked the power I recalled.   

Backstage after the concert, I went to say hello to the composer. Looking dapper but casual in beige slacks, a pale blue shirt, a light brown jacket, brown shoes and a lemon yellow tie with his close-cropped white hair sweeping back from his round, boyish face, Benjamin looked more like a self-effacing community college professor than a widely respected composer being celebrated by a major symphony orchestra. Benjamin seemed happy to hear about my experience of singing his piece way back when. I was surprised to hear that Jubilation has only received a couple of other performances since it was written. The composer didn’t seem to mind the smaller choir in SF Symphony’s performance — “they did a good job,” he generously said (his voice is soft, high-pitched and sing-songy). I got the impression that he thought the piece worked just as fine with a small choir as a big one. But perhaps he was just being kind.

Then we shook hands and he went off down the hall to meet composer John Adams, who was waiting for him with his coat over his arm and a bright red scarf around his neck.

I’ve always wondered about the futuristic-looking convex panels in Davies Symphony Hall that glide up and down during performances to hone the acoustics of the auditorium.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman answered most of my questions in his short yet eloquent piece about the panels in yesterday’s paper.

San Francisco’s nooks and crannies are full of unusual and often beautifully-rendered bits of street art. The trouble is, even the loveliest bits don’t seem to have a long shelf life.

Around Thanksgiving last year, a makeshift ply-board wall around a building site on Market Street near Octavia Boulevard caught my eye with its detailed and colorful rendering of six drag queens. I took a picture of it with my iPhone. (See image on the left). The New York Times published the picture on its Bay Area blog page and readers were asked to identify the drag queens depicted by the mystery artist’s hand.

Less than a couple of months have passed since I took the picture and the drag queens have disappeared from view. (See image on right, which I took this morning.) You can just about make out a bit of Dame Edna’s pink coiff in the top left hand corner of the second image, but otherwise it’s as if the drag queens had never existed on that wall. I don’t know whether someone scratched them out on purpose or whether they just weathered away. I’m guessing the former because it would probably take more than a few weeks for the graffiti to disappear.

I’m sad about it. Those drag queens brightened up an otherwise ugly building site. They made me smile when I passed them, which I did nearly every day. That’s the nature of street art though: here today, gone tomorrow. That’s one thing that makes street art like theatre.

At least San Francisco artists are constantly creating new, eye-catching works on our local walls. Here’s a beautiful rendering by a mystery painter who initials his or her work “TS”. The word painted on the bottom in blue type (illegible in this photograph) is “clairvoyance.” I wonder what the artist is trying to say here? Maybe he or she knows that it won’t be long before this bespectacled, bearded gent, like the drag queens, will disappear.

Should the rules that apply to one genre of music apply to another?

This question popped into my mind last night in the wake of two very contrasting vocal music experiences

I spent the first part of the evening at the KALW radio studios in San Francisco recording a VoiceBox show with jazz and blues singer and jazz historian Kim Nalley about Ella Fitzgerald’s voice. Critics are pretty much unanimous in praising Ella for her crystal clear diction, spot-on intonation and careening range. Every song we played during the hour-long recording session for the show substantiated these aspects of the singer’s voice.

Later on that evening, I went to The Bottom of the Hill, a music club in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco to hear a couple of new bands — Hey Young Believer and Blood and Sunshine. The members of these electronic indie rock groups, are — at a guess — all in their early to mid-20s — in other words, a bit older than Ella was when she started out.

The musicianship, as far as instrumental beats and riffs go, was lively. Both groups created thick, woven textures with their synthesizers, drums and guitars. But the vocal lines were just about the weakest aspect of the music I heard. I could barely make out a single word the singers were uttering and the voices were raspy, limited in range and flexibility, often out of tune and lacking in support. I wasn’t super impressed with either group.

Of course, the singers in some of my favorite bands right now, such as Florence and the Machine and Radiohead, make a habit of poor diction. Somehow this shortcoming matters less, though — perhaps because the voices have such an extraordinary or unusual timbre, superlative range and are always in tune.

I’m not saying every singer should aim to sound like Ella Fitzgerald. But paying attention to the basics, such as diaphragmatic support and tuning, should probably be a foundation for all singers across all genres.