Archives for May 2009

…is my middle name. Lucky I have a glacial attention span. After 15 years of working intermittently with the Relache ensemble, I finally got to hear the rest of my Planets last night, and I’m so happy with them. I’m posting mp3s for all the movements, at least until the recording comes out in the fall. There are a few patches from rehearsal takes due to note flubs and one violent stream of audience coughing:

Sun
Moon
Venus
Mars
Jupiter
Mercury
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto

It’s official: my next book will be on the life and works of Robert Ashley, one of my favorite composers, and one of my favorite people on the planet. It’s for the University of Illinois Press’s series on American composers, the first two of which are excellent books on John Cage (by David Nicholls) and Lou Harrison (by Leta Miller). I’ve gotten sucked into the short-book industry. I’m still grinding away on that Music After Minimalism book, which is a huge project and keeps changing shape, but it has seemed professionally expedient for me to get a few books out quickly, so I’m reluctantly letting myself get sidetracked. But what an inviting sidetrack: every time I hang out with Bob Ashley (which I’ve been doing since 1979) I get a buzz off of his laidback enthusiasm. Great man, great composer, vastly misunderstood, so I’ll get to add a lot more new information to the world than I did in John Cage’s 4’33” (coming out in the fall).

Chicago critic Marc Geelhoed nicely noted my upcoming return to Chicago, and in so doing, noted that some eleven of my articles for the Chicago Reader, starting from 1987, are available online. I had no idea. In fact, I’d forgotten that I continued writing for the Reader so long after I joined the Village Voice, up through spring 1989 – just three months before I left Chicago for good. I’ve linked the available articles from my web site (scroll down a little, the titles are in green) – interviews with Harold Budd, Peter Gena, Elodie Lauten, Nicolas Collins, Henry Gwiazda, Neil Rolnick, and others. Not of much interest to others after 20-odd years, but the Reader always makes me sentimental. In some ways I always thought it was the best organization I ever worked for, and my editor there, Pat Clinton, was a saint. 

A student, preparing for her senior recital, asked me how to write program notes, and I knew just what to tell her. I’ll pass on my recipe. You need three kinds of sources. First, copy (assuming you can computer-access it) the entire article on the composer from Grove Online, just so you have the accepted skeletal facts in front of you and won’t go astray. Next, assuming the composer is moldy enough, check out books of two kinds: an old-fashioned biography, pre-WWII if possible, of the conventional myth-making variety, and then a more recent revisionist book of articles by musicologists, such as the Cambridge guides, or Bard’s “So-and-so and His World” series. Then you find the date of composition of the work in question, and look through the old-fashioned biography for some colorful event in the composer’s life immediately preceding, if possible, or at least proximate to the piece’s creation – say, Saint-Saens’s baby falling out of a window, or Brahms jilting that woman he was supposed to marry. Naturally, you lead with that event, not, “Cherubini lived from 1760 to 1842,” or “Giuseppi Verdi was the towering figure of 19th-century Italian opera” – both deadly. If the biographical event has some actual connection to the work, all the better, but if not, proximity will do. You then play up the contemporaneous events found in the myth-making biography, but contrast them with some point of revisionism from the recent musicology book, so that you can get credit both for indulging the reader’s need for heroism and romantic detail, and also for showing that you’re not taken in by the démodé illusions of conventional hagiography. For instance, you mention the famous story of Alkan’s being crushed by a bookshelf, before letting the reader know it never happened. 

There’s a story from Tchaikovsky’s last years so good that you’d think it’s apocryphal, but it appeared in a 1912 Moscow newspaper, and none of the principals involved ever contradicted it. In December of 1890, Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades was premiered. He felt it was his greatest work, but he interpreted the audience reaction as cold, and, after the performance, wandered the streets of Petersburg despondently. Suddenly he heard music from his opera in the street, the first-act duet between Liza and Polina. He investigated, and found three students, who indeed had acquired a piano score before the performance and attended it, and were now enthusiastically singing through their favorite parts. Their names were Sergei Diaghilev, Alexandre Benois, and Dimitrii Filosofev, and they would become friends of Tchaikovsky for the brief remainder of his life.

Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), of course, was to become a great choreographer and impresario, a supreme figure in the world of ballet. Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) became a painter, graphic designer, and theater designer. All three men were associated with a movement to become known as Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), which would start its own magazine in 1899 and usher in a new, 20th-century sensibility in Russian art.

What does this have to do with The Nutcracker, that simple staple of Christmas celebrations? According to Russian cultural historian Arkadii Klimovitsky, The Nutcracker (which Tchaikovsky wrote a year later in 1891/92), was the first “opera of miniatures,” and its evocation of puppetry, its underlying dark symbolism, its mixture of humans and toys, and even its imitations of 18th-century music were all inspirations behind the aesthetic of Mir Iskusstva. Without The Nutcracker, it is unlikely that Diaghilev, Benois, the dancer Nijinsky, and the composer Igor Stravinsky would have gone on to create the puppet-show ballet Petrushka, one of the seminal ballets of the modern world. Now that we in the West have more open access to Russian scholarship, Tchaikovsky appears to have more direct ties to the formation of 20th-century aesthetics than his reputation as one of the 19th century’s great sentimentalists would have suggested.

Tchaikovsky’s reputation has changed in other ways, too. In 1891, the same year Tchaikovsky made a tour of America, a Carnegie Hall program presented Brahms, Saint-Saens, and Tchaikovsky as the three greatest living composers. By the end of the century, rumors of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality began to circulate outside Russia, and he came to be thought of in the English-speaking world as a dark, tortured individual, one who may possibly have even committed suicide to avoid scandal and exposure. Recent attention to Tchaikovsky’s letters and diaries, however, shows that while he was certainly a deeply sensitive individual, uncomfortable in all but fairly intimate social situations, his sexual orientation was not nearly the burden on him that inheritance of a Victorian moral outlook would lead one to assume.

While homosexual acts were officially illegal in 19th-century Russia, the laws were virtually never enforced, and potential scandals even among the highest nobility were simply overlooked. In 1876, however, at the age of 36, Tchaikovsky decided that his sexual decadence was a bad influence on his likewise homosexual brother Modest, and he decided to marry. Conveniently, he started receiving love letters for a former student, Antonina Miliukova, and after some courtship, they were married on July 6, 1877. The composer quickly realized that he had made a terrible mistake, and that his sexual preference was not something he could change at will. After 21 days, the marriage still unconsummated, he traveled to see his sister, and when he came home in September, he stayed only 12 more days before leaving Antonina forever. (It might correctly be inferred that Antonina had a couple of screws loose, and she indeed ended her life in a mental institution.)….

The life of Camille Saint-Saëns spans ancient and modern France. [Disappointingly conventional start, but it’s a setup.] At the age of 12 he played for the “Citizen King” Louis Philippe, yet he lived to write a cantata about electricity, the first film music by an established composer, and music in praise of the aviators of World War I. Liszt pronounced him the world’s greatest organist, and he astonished Wagner and Hans von Bulow by his ability to sight-read the orchestral scores of Tannhauser and Lohengrin at the piano. Thanks in part to their influence, in youth he was more famous in Germany than in France – his opera Samson et Dalila, widely considered his greatest work, was produced in 1877 in Weimar, and not performed in France until 13 years later. In old age, England and America considered him France’s greatest composer long after his reputation had begun to fade in his own country. 

In short, Saint-Saëns stands astride French music like a colossus, but a frail one, and everyone seems to find fault with him. He was a child prodigy who composed at six and played Mozart and Beethoven with an orchestra at ten, leading the older French musical giant Hector Berlioz to remark, “He knows everything but lacks inexperience.” Unlike most Romantics – Schumann, Chopin, Wagner, Liszt – Saint-Saëns wrote best in the sturdy classical forms of sonata, symphony, and concerto, yet George Bernard Shaw dismissed his music as “graceful knick-knacks and barcarolles” (the barcarolle being a piece that imitates the songs of gondola drivers). The advent of the Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel made Saint-Saëns seem like a dinosaur at the end of his life, and he railed against Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune: “I’d soon lose my voice, if I went round witlessly bawling like a faun celebrating his afternoon.” Ravel returned the compliment: “If [Saint-Saëns] had been making shell-cases during the war, it might have been better for music.”

Perhaps Saint-Saëns’ difficulty in playing nice with others is responsible for the steep decline in his posthumous reputation. It’s difficult to decide even how French he seems: extremely so in languorous melodies like “The Swan” and his fairy-like schrezo textures, the least so in his devotion to sonata form and full-bodied contrapuntal textures. (Gounod dubbed him “the French Beethoven.”) He did fit, however, into a long and illustrious tradition of French organist-composers, most recently embodied in the late Olivier Messiaen…. 

Big rehearsal for The Planets today. “Mercury”: lightning fast, ripping atonal scales, constant meter changes from 3/4 to 15/16 to 11/16, different tempos at the same time like 8-against-9 – went great, sounded perfectly secure. “Saturn”: slow, plodding pulse, rhythms in quarter- and 8th-notes – had a hell of a time pulling it together. I remember this from my early days as a competent pianist: difficult music is a lot easier to play than easy music. Scriabin’s fiery D#-minor Etude, with its relentless triplets and huge leaps, used to just fall under my fingers, while the Lento final movement of the Copland Sonata was a minefield of wrong notes. Why is that? Is it just because we practice hard music 20 times as much as easy music, or is it psychological, or what? Too much time to think in-between the notes?

Titled after an essay by the late philosopher and literary theoretician Jean-Francois Lyotard, Several Silences is a group exhibition exploring various kinds of silence. As a discourse, the aesthetic of silence has been thoroughly domesticated within the visual arts. Although silence as a discourse in art arose out of conditions calling for the negation of art, it has subsequently become familiar subject matter no longer operating as the avant-garde ideal it once was. This is not to say silence has lost significance. If anything, it has become a more potent antidote to a culture of distraction. Silence, however, is not the absence of communication. It is dialectically opposed to communication, so that one sustains and supports the other. Inextricably bound to communication, which it tacitly evokes, silence itself is a form of communication with many meanings. There are voluntary and involuntary silences–some comfortable, others not. There is Cage’s silence, which calls for the distinction between clinical and ambient silences. There is silence as conscious omission or redaction. And then there is memorial silence.

I’m not initiated into the MySpace phenomenon, and have no MySpace page nor any wish to have one. But it has finally dawned on me that my son’s “black metal” band Liturgy has one. They have a CD coming out this fall – with accompanying vinyl 12-inch – on the label 20 Buck Spin, which is apparently a big deal in black metal terms. (Larger or smaller than “new-music” terms? I wonder.) If you watch the video at the bottom of their page, Bernard is the guitarist in the white shirt. I think maybe I shouldn’t have played those Borbetomagus records for him when he was 3.

“When I hear gentlemen say that politics ought to let business alone, I feel like inviting them to first consider whether business is letting politics alone.”

– Woodrow Wilson

A composition student of mine, mature and centered beyond his years, wrote a song cycle this semester. He wrote all the voice lines first. When it came to write the accompaniments, we threw around a lot of ideas. His ultimate choices were the simplest ones possible: arpeggiated triads in one case, changing drones in another. I had two impulses. One was a sense of disappointment, that I hadn’t been able to get him to try something a little more complicated and “artistic.” The other was that his solution was effective, that it would be immediately grasped and allow the emotionality of the vocal line to come through. In performance, my second impulse proved right: the songs sucked the audience in with their nakedness and vulnerability, their reception exhibiting none of the distanced listening that other, more clever and complicated pieces elicited. I admired his courage for selecting ideas that would foreground the depth of the poems, not the impressiveness of his compositional bag of tricks. 

Two recording projects I was excited about got delayed for a year for economic reasons (and this was before the crash), but they’re now back on track. 

I taught Mahler today in my 19th-century harmony class. I never teach Mahler without teaching Hans Rott. Rott (1858-1884) was a fellow student of Mahler’s at Vienna Conservatory, and for a time Mahler’s roommate. Rott went mad and died at the age of 25, after completing a symphony that sounds remarkably like Mahler. Rott wrote his symphony in 1878-1880; Mahler’s First Symphony dates from 1884-1888. If you heard the scherzo of Rott’s symphony without identification, you would swear it was some unknown Mahler work: it is identical in style, orchestration, and melody to the scherzos of Mahler’s First and Third Symphonies. The long introduction to Rott’s final movement has much in common with the finale of Mahler’s Second. Mahler inherited the manuscript of Rott’s symphony after his friend died. Mahler later called Rott 

a musician of genius … who died unrecognized and in want on the very threshold of his career. … It is completely impossible to estimate what music has lost in him. His First Symphony soars to such heights of genius that it makes him – without exaggeration – the founder of the New Symphony as I understand it. To be sure, what he wanted is not quite what he achieved. … But I know where he aims. Indeed, he is so near to my inmost self that he and I seem to me like two fruits from the same tree which the same soil has produced and the same air nourished. He could have meant infinitely much to me and perhaps the two of us would have well-nigh exhausted the content of new time which was breaking out for music.