Natural Harmonics

Live Music: Menlo Park, Bede's Church, January 27 of 2007

2007-01-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine and I turned up at a Master Sinfonia concert this Saturday. Like most local classical groups, they remain well below the radar of any sort of publicity or media attention unless you happen to listen to the excruciating KDFC ("Your place on the FM dial for oboe concerto after fucking oboe concerto!") or read the bizarrely joyless San Francisco Classical Voice. I happen to know one of the Master Sinfonia trombonists and -- my interest whetted by a promise of the Stravinsky Danses Concertantes -- I graciously deigned to accept a comp ticket from him.

The show was at St. Bede's in Menlo Park, which is an institution of the Episcopal persuasion and seemed very charming and innocuous. There were posters for the midly blasphemous weekly movie night by the church door (Life of Brian, Dogma, etc.) as well as a promise of a coming anniversary celebration for the church which will feature, essentially, a church renaissance faire. "Aim for the period of Chaucer" was the advice at the bottom, regarding appropriate attire. Will do, Bede's.

The interior of the place is generally %95 wooden, with big solid rafters and a general Anglo-Saxon weightiness that makes you think of Heorot in Beowulf. The orchestra was enclosed in a sort of sheep-pen on a dais in the center (the chapel is 'in the round') surrounded by stiff wooden pews well-freighted with old people and a modest smattering of people whose hair retained some color.

The Master Sinfonia itself seems to be a good little orchestra. It's quite small, as these things go, arguably a 'chamber orchestra' (just two basses, for example) but this seems to have allowed them a certain amount of selectivity in terms of players.

The conductor David Ramadanoff, unfortunately, came off as a terrible blowhard and couched the whole concert in terms of an old-fashioned music history lesson. Before every piece he delivered a potted history of the composer and his milieu, all of it very tame and firmly rooted in the 'great man' theory of music history, whereby certain composers are revered as gods and a few are fortunate enough to be given an occasioanl nod as demigods.

I am, needless to say, disgusted by this practice of prefacing music with lectures. The motive, it seems, is to explain to the audience why the piece they are about to hear is not actually boring or tame or badly-played but rather is important historically and therefore good for them, like dutifully-consumed medicine or flaxseed bread.

(As a side note, it is extremely irritating to the woodwind players, whose reeds are drying out and horns cooling while the guy on the podium outlines the major plot-points in the thrilling tale of Haydn in London.)

Saturday night had a good program, in theory: a J. C. Bach sinfonia, the aforementioned Stravinsky Danses Concertantes, and the extremely good Symphony No. 100 by Haydn. So, major points for program planning, which is usually incoherent even in professional orchestras.

Unfortunately, the J. C. Bach was a snore, played very straight and without spicy continuo or similar flourishes. Technically, everything was there for a good performace -- contrasting dynamics, a nice blended sonority, fine oboe playing, passable first violin athleticism -- but the whole affair was unexciting and riskless, with no effort made to pick out little details or otherwise breathe life into what can very easily be boring music.

The Stravinsky more than compensated, luckily. This was first-rate playing, with the added excitement of coming from a group just barely far enough to the 'amateur' end of the spectrum not to sound overly technical or bored. Ramadanoff's meticulous style -- which arguably made sitting through the Bach such a chore -- is perfectly suited to the rhythmic complexity and split-second texture changes of Stravinsky. In an ideal world, Master Sinfonia would dispense with old music and dedicate itself to the 20th century, where the fresher air and colder harmony is a source of invigoration. I'd be remiss not to mention the principal bass player, whose heroics counterbalanced the whole string section and almost single-handed kept the agular cardiovascular thump of the quick movements in motion.

And then... Haydn. It was an okay rendition of a great piece, tolerable but not good enough to prevent me from leaving during the intermission if I'd had a crystal ball. The percussion section did a nice job, particularly the aggressive timpani and a light touch with the cymbals, but they conspicuously lacked ruthe for the bass drum part. (If you're going to go for Turkish percussion effects, you may as well really dive in.) Also, the woodwinds -- so good in the Stravinsky -- didn't seem to have room to breathe or shimmer in the first movement, with the result that the chipper little fife tunes sounded muddy and uninspiring. Of course, no piece could live up to the pre-performance eulogy this one received.

Live Music: SF, The Fillmore, October 21 of 2006

2006-10-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

I am opposed to paying more than $20 to hear music involving electric guitars.

That, at least, is my general rule when seeing bands in The City. I much prefer putting my $7 in the musical slot machines of the Hemlock Tavern or the Bottom of the Hill, places where you are much more likely to be astonished or irritated or amused than the cavernous palaces of hip like the Fillmore.

So, now that I've taken pains to pose as someone eclectic and worldly-wise, I'll admit that I usually break my $20 rule at least two or three times a year to see music at the Greek Theater or Great American Music Hall or... that cavernous palace of hip called the Fillmore.

Objectively, I should like that club more. It occasionally gives out nice posters, there is a 'greeter' who (once you get past the door goons) provides a nice Wal*Mart touch of civility, the upstairs lounge gives a chance to young DJs, and, hey, it's on a convenient bus line. Unfortunately, the show on Saturday night -- and the whole Fillmore experience in general -- was pretty terrible.

A few weeks earlier my friend Alison had emailed me: did I want to see Yo La Tengo with her? Why, sure. Yo La Tengo is one of those bands that succeeds largely by seeming just a little bit half-assed. They aren't especially good-looking people, they're not master technicians on their instruments, and in many ways they do better when covering other people's songs. As such, there's a scruffy normal-people appeal about them, like they're the band you can imagine your older sister being in. Even when they turn on the echo effects and churn out some head-bobbing rockabilly, there's a hum of failure underneath, a complete absence of the the showmanship and glamor normally associated with selling an audience on rock music. As such, their aesthetic is an interesting photonegative of cool, you might say.

This was not a great night, though.

Things got off to a bad start- two Fillmore door goons threatened to bar me from entering because my bag had 'too many Sharpie pens' (the bag has about ten slots for pens, in which I carry, among other writing implements, a few laundry pens for writing on CDs). I'm not sure where they get these people- one was a ravaged former punk in leather and tattoos (the drugs had turned him into what Stan Lee might have been if he'd done a lot of heroin):

The first guy just asked "What's with all the Sharpies, man?" after rifilng through my bag, but Stan Lee announced: "This guy's not comin' in!" I explained that I could check my bag if it was an issue, and the upshot was that I had to be taken aside for a little talk with the main door goon about whether I was planning on vandalizing their club. I got the impression that this might be a regular good cop/bad cop routine that they've worked up, but the whole experience was very sour and irritating after already shelling out for the privilege of entering their hallowed temple.

Ahem. Let me set aside my Fillmore irritation to describe the opening band:

"Why?" is a San Francisco-based band assembled by Yoni Wolf. The music is a tissue of influences, from They Might Be Giants (very apparent in the -- forced, unfortunately -- wordplay of their lyrics), to early '80s British piano-based thumpy music hall rock (er...Boomtown Rats? Dexy's Midnight Runners?), abundant mallets in the modern style (cf. Sufjan Stevens, Stereolab), and about a dozen other very discernible musico-genetic vectors. All of this, however, is tastefully integrated, and it is impressive to hear so many ideas melded together without collapsing in a kitchen-sink implosion.

The lyrics, unfortunately, contain an undue number of bloating corpses, funerals, apostrophized 'you's, and eye-rolling fun-with-language. ("Cheery-A Cheery-E Cheery-I Cheery-O, Cheery-U" -this repeated several times, no less.) Worse, the singer has a nasal, swooping voice that is very much at odds with the glockenspiels, electric pianos and dreamy guitar. The effect is like seeing a stick figure drawn in grease-pencil over a watercolor.

They were pretty good though. The best thing about 'Why?', in my opinion, was how satisfying it was to see people who were adept with their instruments approaching songs in a way that was compositionally clever. These songs were arranged with nice attention to detail. Instrument distribution was more interesting than the music itself, and the bearded drummer's alternation of drum kit with glockenspiel (using the same mallets for both somehow!) provided better entertainment than the latest graveyard in the lyrics. So, hats off to 'Why?' for being good at their instruments.

As a side note: this is possibly the darkest era in human history for stupid band names. I don't know if 'Why?' think they're sticking it to the man by picking such a stupid, general name designed to elicit confusion in conversation and writing.

And then, the main event: Yo La Tengo.

I didn't really know what to expect from a Yo La Tengo audience, and, in a way, I still don't. I don't know if the audience on Saturday night were fans of the band or, like me, somewhat lukewarm but vaguely affectionate- they certainly didn't seem particularly interested. As soon as the three bandmembers strolled onstage, there was a unanimous sparking up of terrible weed and the bad concert lurched into motion.

High, Scandinavian-looking people flailed their arms and danced for every song, dozens of pairs of skinny-glasses nodded imperceptibly on the bridges of noses, but -- mostly -- people talked. And talked. Through every song.

"WHAT? Your brother said what?"
"...so I don't know if you know a lot about screenplays..."
"...oh yeah, he's in the Mission now. The rent is..."

This drove home for me that I don't understand concerts. Or, rather, I don't understand why most people go to concerts. The 'classical' concert ritual has evolved in such a way that, implicitly, hearing the music is supposedly why you paid your money and presumably you'd want to listen to it without making a big distraction. I'm not some jerk who gets sniffy when people clap between movements, but this Yo La Tengo show floored me. Who would pay $35 to stand around at the edge of a club shouting over the music to be heard by their friend?

The band, I hate to say it, was bad, too. After two decent songs at the start of the set, they offered up a 13 minute wailing guitar solo over a literally one-measure repeating bass and drum groove. I don't understand how that could constitute entertainment for anyone. The idea struck me- is everyone at this show only pretending to enjoy this? Or is it a gigantic hive-mind effort, having paid their money, to make the best of things? Or is the idea to bask in the aura of something culturally accepted as impeccably cool and credible? Or do you use it as wallpaper for a conversation while you play the rôle of a hip young San Franciscan who gotes to Yo La Tengo shows?

I was, in a word, disenchanted.

The rest of the night is a little bit of a blur. There were a few good songs -- covers, mostly -- and some pretty, soft songs ruined by the chattering crowd. Mostly, though, I remember yawning during interminable, vaguely improvisatory guitar solos. Colored lights flashed, I lost my friend in the crowd, some girl was using her cellphone as a flashlight to look for her keys on the floor- all of these minor incidents are more interesting and memorable than the music.

Unfortunately, since I'd lost my friend, I had to stay through the first set of encores, culminating in a fucking Bob Dylan song, which, to my mind, placed a big cherry on the sundae of inexplicably bad music. Alison and I luckily bumped into each other again and fled before the second set of encores, taking our complimentary (and pretty) Yo La Tengo posters at the door with decidedly mixed feelings.

The Flying Dutchman (a. k. a. Der Fliegende Hollander): first impressions

2006-10-06T00:20:00.000-07:00

Over at Tears of a Clownsilly, Patrick is doing a series of essays about what he thinks of Wagner's operas. The best thing about blogs, I think, is that they serve as an excellent catalyst for projects like this that might not get carried out without some form of fake public accountability. With that in mind, I'm totally stealing his idea and doing the same thing.

I've actually seen quite a few of Wagner's operas- the whole Ring at the Royal Opera (under Haitink) and a well-regarded Parsifal at the ENO (though sung in English, natch). I'm still not sure if I liked them.

Wagner is, almost more than any other composer, a creature of the 19th century, with all the potential badness that can imply. Art in that century was mostly sprawl and churn: literature -- Gibbons, Trollope -- had gigantic words and spun on for hundreds of pages, David's painting attained an astonishing sheer yardage, Keats thought people would want to read tedious hundred-page epics idealizing faux-Grecian pastoral antics, and, of course, Wagner asked people to sit through Parsifal.

As I slowly get older and wiser, I discover that the art of this era is increasingly hard to take. To tolerate the libretto of a Wagner opera takes a superhuman effort to:

(a) not be bored

(b) not be a little contemptuous

(c) pretend to care about crowds of wholly unsympathetic, vaguely Germanic characters

This is hard. Now, granted, few opera librettos of any era have been especially good or vivid as literature, but most are a few notches above Wagner's on the tolerability scale.

This brings me to the first opera: The Flying Dutchman. In theory, this is a crackerjack idea for an opera, since German romanticism and ghost stories go together like märzen and schnitzel. It's hard to think of a more likeable opera, for instance, than Die Freischutz, whose Wolf's Glen scene is so good and exciting and grin-inducing that it completely excuses Weber for writing his irritating pyrotechnic clarinet concertos.

Unfortunately, Wagner's libretto is structured in such a way that we don't really get anything especially spooky or ghostly. A summary:

--

(Implied backstory, common knowledge in the 19th century, included in the program notes today: The Flying Dutchman swore to 'round Cape Horn in a howling tempest, and was... cursed for some reason to continue sailing until he'd found a faithful woman? He gets a chance to do this every seven years. Presumably, he's been at this a while, but this has not improved his dating skills. In other words, Wagner takes a spooky sailor's story and tries to shoehorn in a romantic angle.)

Through complicated maritime maneuvers, a wealthy Norwegian (?) merchant's ship is joined with the famous Flying Dutchman (in this case meaning the ship rather than the captain) after a storm. The DUTCHMAN assists the MERCHANT and shows off some treasure, resulting in the fastest offer a daughter's hand in marriage in opera history. The wind blows up and they head for home, where the previously mentioned daughter is to be examined.

Meanwhile, back at the anchorage, a bunch of maidens are spinning and singing. SENTA, the daughter, is spinning and staring longingly at a portrait of - the Flying Dutchman (in this case meaning the guy rather than the ship). This is a good example of the ghost-story motif so prevalent in most Norwegian interior decorating. Senta is really, really, into the painting, in a way that everyone admits is creepy. This is because, yes, that's really creepy, to stare with longing at a painting of a ghostly captain of maritime legend all the time. Eventually, the Merchant and Dutchman arrive, and Senta and the Dutchman fall in love instantaneously. So far, so good.

Back at the docked ships, the sailors are having a big party, to which they have invited Mädel (which is Wagnerese for 'girls'). Now, you'd think they'd want to leave the ship and hang out in a nice warm house on the shore, but presumably there are regulations. As a bunch of zombie kill-joys, the crew of the Flying Dutchman (meaning in this case the ship) aren't joining in the fun, prompting a fierce and one-sided song contest as the crew try to spur them into some merry-making. So, a big storm blows up as the irritated crew of the Flying Dutchman sing a really chilling song about being the crew of the Flying Dutchman (sort of the reverse of the opening number of 'H. M. S. Pinafore') and the whole affair gets awkward and the sailors leave, understandably.

Then, finally, there's a quick scene where SENTA's earlier betrothed, ERIK, gets all huffy about her engagement and asks whether she remembers promising to be true to him. (ERIK was in the wool-spinning scene, but just a tiny bit, so that his arrival at the end wouldn't be a total surprise.) Anyway, the Dutchman overhears this (ghosts eavesdrop) and immediately goes into a histrionic fit about how he's doomed and sprints for the quayside to go off and be damned upon the waves some more. Senta runs after him and jumps off a cliff, proving her love for ghostly sea captains and breaking his curse. The libretto says they ascend to heaven.

--

Yeah, so, clearly, there aren't very many good ghost story moments here, mainly because everything takes place in relatively cheery surroundings (stormy weather aside). "A Merchant's House" isn't nearly as scary a setting as "A Wolf's Glen".

It's therefore a miracle that, for all its problems, Wagner really does make the libretto work pretty well. It furnishes him with numerous opportunities for storms, and few would deny him the status of one of the great composers of storm-music. It is, moreover, stormy ocean music, a la Scheherezade, which means fast chromatic scales in the lower strings to indicate precipitous waves. Okay, I happen to like that sort of thing. I am easily sold on cheap program music gimmicks. A lot of the scenes work surprisingly spookily, such as Senta staring at the painting, or the thrilling storm during the song-contest (a certain held piccolo note is a fine example of the sort of orchestration that frustrates aspiring composers because it doesn't look even slightly special on paper but gives you a chill to hear it). Wagner's skill with more conventional opera moods makes even the abrupt marriage proposal and mutual love-at-first-sight feel almost plausible.

This, of course, is the magic of opera, and already in The Flying Dutchman Wagner is pretty comfortable with writing music in which the singers aren't really carrying a tune. They sort of declaim tuneful lines around the tune (which is in the orchestra) in a sort of combination of recitative and melody. In this opera, it works very well, since he can insert a lot of expository dialogue into active, bustling scenes rather than roll it out as proper recitative. (Yes, there's 'real' recitative in the opera too, and it's particularly tedious.) Moreover, by not always giving the characters proper arias and set-pieces, Wagner does create the illusion of The Flying Dutchman as a solid musicalization of a single story, a big slab of mood and noise that (mostly) flows together seamlessly. That's my theory, anyway.

So, do I like it? Well, a bit. As the old saw goes, there are some beautiful moments and dreadful quarters-of-an-hour. It's hard to form a strong opinion when listening to a recording -- I went with Solti and the Chicago Symphony, with Jones, Martin, and Talvela and my score of choice was a nice hardcover Broude -- because the magic is necessarily broken into pieces. I have never thought that Wagner comes off well outside the opera house, or even in the semi-staged opera house.

One thing I did find amusing, though, was that I kept thinking of the music of Arthur Sullivan. Wagner must have been a powerful influence on Sullivan, and the two share a surprisingly similar vocabulary (at least at this early stage in Wagner's career).

So, these constitute my first impressions of The Flying Dutchman. Like all serious music critics, I shall assign a final score using strict aesthetic critera.

(on a scale of 1-10)

Libretto -- 6. (Ridiculous, but so much so that it almost becomes endearing.)
Leitmotifs -- 10. (The ship's main theme would make a great snobby novelty horn for a Wagner-themed lowrider.)
Music -- 6/10. (Highly competent 'regular' music, superb storms.)
Anti-Semitism -- 0. (Unless you're counting strained 'wandering jew' analogies, in which case it might be a 1.)

Finale score: 22. Or 26. Or 27.

Coon songs available.

2006-10-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

I have always been interested in the minstrel show. It is, arguably, the first uniquely American art, but in the last forty years it has been almost completely purged from our culture. All that's left is an easy punchline for people trying to sound non-racist. We're proud, by contrast, to point at jazz and keep it dusted and shiny on the national mantelpiece- the minstrel show, meanwhile, sits in the attic, wrapped in newspapers behind a box of anti-Kaiser WWI songs.

This is wrong, this selective memory of what is allowed to constitute America's musical past, and the result of our well-meaning cultural purges is a mythologized past that is curiously misaligned with our present reality. When you do see a genuine piece of Old America -- a southern restaurant shaped like a mammy, an old IWW banner, a tobacco shop indian -- it gives you a tingle, a sudden realization of what the past was really like, all slaughterhouses and barbed wire and gunpowder and mud and buffalo carcasses and sheet music with titles like "Little Coon Lullaby."

The truth is that America (and the world) loved the minstrel show, and coon songs were popular tunes that sold millions of copies. Moreover, the issue is more complicated than stating simply that 'people used to be racist', because, while they were indeed racist, it wasn't necessarily a vigorous, angry racism like the kind that motivates hate metal bands and certain Virginia would-be senators today. Racism against blacks in 1900 was a little like the treatment of indians in cowboy movies from the '50s- increasingly distasteful, by modern standards, but almost admiring by the standards of the time.

Moreover, coon songs were often -- and this is the part that is unfortunate -- musically good. Songs like "If The Man In the Moon Was A Coon" and "Coon, Coon, Coon" are gems of the tin pan alley music factories. Tuneful, memorable, possessed of admirably economy of harmony and charming gimmicks, these songs are fine pieces of American popular music, as good or better than many, say, Stephen Foster songs that are still polished up and presented to company.

It was with the intention of dredging up some of this real, hidden American music that I embarked on what I called (to myself) The Coon Song Project.

I selected a program of ten out-of-style tunes from the invaluable University of Colorado at Boulder sheet music archives and then set about arranging them for string quartet. I did this for a number of reasons:

(1) It is easier to confront the musical value of a coon song if you're not being distracted by the (invariably shame-inducing) lyrics.

(2) To toughen up my string-quartet-writing chops.

(3) I felt a certain amount of liberty inserting 'improved' harmonies, counter-melodies, dynamic surprises, and other interpretive changes into coon songs since, for all practical purposes, they've been thrown away by society.

At any rate, I'm done now with 'phase one', which would be arranging the songs. They are:

(1) "Abyssinian Patrol"
(2) "The African Glide"
(3) "If the Man in the Moon Were A Coon"
(4) "A Coon Band Contest"
(5) "The African Hunter"
(6) "Darkie's Dream"
(7) "Darktown Barbecue"
(8) "Ebony Funeral"
(9) "Little Coon Lullaby"
(10) "Hear the Pickaninny Band"

As you might have noticed, not all of these are strictly coon songs- some are rags or marches in an 'African' mood. Some, like "Ebony Funeral", are actually quite musically sophisticated in their borrowings, and I felt they justified considerable alteration to emphasize their inclusion of 'real' spirituals and folk tunes.

So, here's my offer:

I would like for these pieces to be played, ideally in a small public concert, but am too busy to arrange anything with a local string quartet at the moment. So: if anyone reading this has a string quartet, I'd be happy to send you parts as .pdfs for you to play through them, perhaps noting any rough patches in the arrangement that could use a polish. If you do decide to include any on a program, I'd be happy to write notes.

To contact me, just make a note in the 'comments' section and give me an email address or AIM account or something.

I must take pains to say that I didn't arrange these songs in order to present them as "An Evening of Old-Timey Racism!", although I suppose I did intend it as an act of provocation. I arranged them, as I said, in order to shed some light on a patch of American musical history that's been so strenuously buried that most people don't even know it exists.

---

As a side note, I know that some people may take exception to my alterations of the songs, since according to some people a arranger is supposed to be the equivalent of the guy who translates the Bible from American English into Papua New Guinean. I wanted (although I know this has a little implicit hubris) to put these songs in their best possible light, and that meant introducing elements of 'classy' string quartet textures that are admittedly at odds with the music's origin as dime-store piano pieces.

Elvis Costello's 'Il Sogno', redux

2006-09-28T00:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, full disclosure:

My last post was an extended commentary on the percussion parts in Elvis Costello's 'Il Sogno', much of which was pretty unflattering. I wrote it after a long, hot, bad rehearsal, and I was feeling angry at the piece- the parts have some technical problems that made the first read-through very difficult.

So, what did I do?

Why, the cleverest thing possible! I wrote a long, incoherent assemblage of nasty comments about the layout of the parts, and the bile seeped through into other considerations as well, such as:

(a) whether I'd like the piece if I weren't counting measures and worrying about putting down the tambourine without making a lot of noise and

(b) whether Elvis Costello ought to ask fo an alto bass drum.

In other words, in the course of venting my frustration over a bad rehearsal I managed to badmouth the composition based purely on my personal inconvenience. Classy!

Anyway, tonight a guy at orchestra mentioned that he'd read it, and immediately I had that unhappy flash of realization that, gosh, that essay was undoubtedly a lot nastier than it had any right to be...

And then things got worse: he said Elvis Costello's manager had read it. And mentioned it. And commented that maybe Mr. Costello wouldn't be terribly interested in attending the performance if he saw it.

This, of course, made me feel like a thousand kinds of bastard, so the least I can do -- if I could, I'd take a time machine and tell my past self to wait a couple days before sitting down to the keyboard -- is offer a more considered appraisal of the piece, having had several more rehearsals to get used to EC's notation style. At the end of the last post I said "Still, I resolve to give it more chances." So, here it is, after a few more chances.

In my last post I mentioned (coming to my senses for a moment): "I am very sympathetic to Elvis Costello's ambitions in the ballet because he does make an effort to incorporate popular music material in a way that treats the conventions in that music seriously." Over the last few rehearsals, that opinion has solidified. EC's approach to 'popular music', I think, is the thing the thing I like best about the ballet. The intrusions of slinky vibraphone-and-sizzle-cymbal jazz and Nino Rota-style marches are something almost unknown in 'serious' concert music today, but (I think) extremely important if 'classical' music has any hope of extricating itself from its current snob ghetto. What's good is that the jazz and bouncy marches aren't presented in quotation marks- the music is allowed its full status as something just as viable as the more traditional Prokofiev-esque passages it abuts.

I do, however, still think that it's got all the earmarks of an early piece. It's like a puppy- the paws are a little too big, the ears aren't standing up yet, but, hey, its got charm. It's not Prokofiev's 'Cinderella', but Mr. Prokofiev wrote seven ballets before he got around to that one.

The parts... are still a pain. Most of the sheet music we play from in orchestras has been revised for a hundred years or so by publishing houses with professional engraving staffs- someone's usually taken the time to work out an efficient distribution of material. Il Sogno is, by comparison, what- a year old? Like I said, these are still basically draft copies, so I was undoubtedly kind of a dick in my assessment.

So, that's that, for what it's worth. I'll post something about how the piece goes in concert.

***

Addendum: there was also some irritation that I'd referred to an ensemble as a 'dorkestra' but, c'mon- we're all people who were inside worrying about F-sharp major while the other kids were out learning to French kiss.

Elvis Costello's 'Il Sogno', from the inside.

2006-09-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

NOTE: As I mention in a subsequent post, all this is ranting and based on a single rehearsal, so keep a grain of salt handy. Thanks.

The dorkestra in which I play is doing a suite from Elvis Costello's ballet 'Il Sogno' for this season's first concert. The original plan was to do the Prestigious West Coast Premier of the full ballet, but apparently American Music Publishers or DG or some other copyright holder doesn't want smaller (i.e. unfamous) orchestras doing the full piece yet and wouldn't rent out the full score for another year...or something. Management only gave us a hazy, slightly shamefaced version of the details.

As it turns out, being forced to content outselves with the suite is no great loss, as the overriding feeling in rehearsal has been 'If these are the highlights, what did they leave out?'

'Il Sogno' got a 10 out of 10 at Classics Today, a review site I usually find to be pretty good. You can see David Hurwitz's review right here.

I can't help but think that Mr. Hurwitz would have a lower opinion of the music if he were forced to rehearse it.

You see, the parts are a nightmare. I can only imagine that they were intended as draft/working copies for the first production and then never corrected.

They are, one might say, conceptually flawed. Costello, for reasons known only to himself, insists on nonsense like repeating a passage five times, adding various melodies and sections with each repetition- the sort of thing you might do in a jazz chart. Nobody can tell why he notates like this with a full orchestra. Saving paper maybe? A bar rest with a '16' above it is easier for an orchestra to digest than four bars with a repeat sign and PLAY X5 above it- the idea being that you let these bars go by four times and then you get to play your bit. Needless to say, this often causes confusion since a notation like that can just as easily be interpreted as: 'I play this five times?' On top of this are the little typographical problems: repeats have opening brackets but no closing brackets, there are no cues whatsoever except for a single ambigious violin line in the set drum part, dynamics are nonexistent (or pop up at random), the piece begins with percussion notation that doesn't bother to indicate which instrument is intended and -- and this is the most frustrating for the percussion section -- the percussion parts appear to have been laid out by idiots.

There's no rhyme or reason to the percussion flow- it calls for four players, and then randomly assigns instruments among them. This means I have to keep two or three parts open on my stand but, stupidly, it's hardly even an issue since most movements are tacet (although fully notated with bars of rests, bizarrely). So, I play snare drum for a Movement A in Perc Part 1 during which Perc Part 2 is tacet, and then play the snare in Movement B in Perc Part 2 during which Perc Part 1 is tacet. And during both movements, of course, the set drum player is sitting there in front of his own snare drum doing nothing. It's a big waste of resources, and I can't imagine that most arrangers would be caught dead trying to pull something like it. Another great detail is that Elvis Costello, or his stenographer, is apparently a little hazy on percussion instruments, so you get, over the course of the piece, alternating requests for 'Crash Cym. (clashed)' 'Crash Cym.' 'Piatti', often with requests for, say, rolls on crash cymbals. Also, amusingly, Mr. Costello wants us to bring a 'Piccolo Snare Drum' to be used for about 30 seconds, and an Alto Bass Drum (my personal favorite) to be struck three or four times. In my own music, I find the Alto Tenor Bass drum to be a more appropriate choice.*

In a way, the notation ambiguities and hilarious use of repeats (trust me, when it happens five times per movement, it becomes hilarious) make the piece more interesting for us to play. The music just isn't that good, and at least counting repetitions and shuffling parts around on the stand gives us something to do.

What drives me nuts about it all, though, is that I think Elvis Costello is a fantastic songwriter. His first five or six albums are extremely good and exciting- he's more than demonstrated a knack for writing great ear-worm melodies. So, why, in a 45 minute suite, do we get nothing that even approaches the rollicking rhythms and good humor of, say, 'Oliver's Army'? Instead he alternates between bland faux-Prokofiev and the sort of artificial big band music that you might find in an episode of 'Matlock' in which a big band conductor is found murdered. Also, as a side note, this piece contains the most egregious cembalom usage I've ever heard. It's bit like if someone started playing a Chinese jinghu in the middle of a Chopin piano concerto.

So, the question for me is- why did this piece get such good reviews? In some ways, I am very sympathetic to Elvis Costello's ambitions in the ballet because he does make an effort to incorporate popular music material in a way that treats the conventions in that music seriously. Still, this piece is a badly orchestrated one in an era which, whatever its defects, has raised orchestration to an unequalled, gorgeous height of cultivation. There are lots of composers writing better music that is equally accessible. Also, I must confess, I feel the natural green-googly-eyed irritation of an aspiring composer watching a famous pop singer's student works being recorded by the LSO.

Still, I resolve to give it more chances. It's only been a few rehearsals, so the piece still has time to grow on me. At least we're not doing anything by Paul McCartney.

--

*I know I sound like a jerk pointing this part out, but it only seems funny because the percussion instruments he calls for are so banal for the whole piece and then -- BAM! -- piccolo snare drum, and then alto bass drum.

In which I ruin my knuckles.

2006-08-09T22:26:00.000-07:00

Well, my knuckles are almost completely healed now, actually, but it's certainly taken a while.

As I might have mentioned before, I am a charlatan percussionist in a moderately highly-regarded local orchestra (the kind where nobody gets paid). For my first year or so, this imposture wasn't terribly difficult because I restrained myself to instruments like bass drum, cymbals, and triangle. (This is not to denigrate the instrument, but a trained musician can play most bass drum parts at a convincing C+ level after about 45 minutes' aquaintance with the instrument.)

This safe approach got extremely boring. So, to keep myself entertained, I've grown bolder in my percussion fakery- I now ask for the hardest percussion part in a piece, the theory being that anxiety trumps ennui.

So far, this has had pretty good results. I played the gong and (tricky) bass drum part for Rite of Spring, bells for the R. V.-W. Dona Nobis Pacem, tambourine for The Red Poppy, claves, bongos, and starter pistol for a big modern clarinet concerto, and -- most recently -- cymbals for the last movement of Tchaikovsky's 4th.

Now, I had some inkling that the last movement of Tchai 4 was famous for being a hard cymbal part, an 'audition piece', but deep down I figured that, hey, it's cymbals in a 19th century symphony. This was a summer concert, meaning that we got two rehearsals and then a dress, which seemed like ample time for me to get a feel for it. Thus began the cymbal nightmare.

In the first rehearsal -- held in a hot little borrowed high school band room -- we got to play through that last movement exactly once. I had reacquainted myself with the piece in the car on the drive over, and had been feeling capable. Needless to say, it was a total disaster.

The cymbal part in movement IV of Tchai 4 is, for the great majority of the piece, wholly reasonable. I mean, there are a lot of crashes that punctuate the usual dramatics (my college conductor D. Kern Holoman memorably described Tchaikovksy as 'one fucking aneurysm after another') but it's nothing outside the scope of standard 19th century cymbal pyrotechnics.* Then, just when you're feeling secure, it turns into the most cacophonous godawful crashing imaginable. The last three minutes of the piece looks like it was written for a ride cymbal for a set drummer or something- fortissimo crashes on every quarter note, then riding on offbeats, and then every eighth note, all driving on to the conclusion while the brass blare at full volume.

This leads to certain problems, the foremost being that if you're banging cymbals together very loudly, well, after about ten seconds of this kind of concentrated crashing you can't hear anything, just a sort of general noise cloud that envelopes you. It's not really your fault, even, with an instrument like the cymbals- the piece is moving extremely quickly and you can get caught up in your own sense of pulse very easily. So, when Tchaikovsky asks for you to play on the beat in opposition to extended brass off-beats, the whole idea of who's on which part of the beat gets very nebulous, particularly if the conductor is doing tick-tock baton business that actually obscures the beat.

Compounding this difficulty was my friend's brand new pair of beautiful Zildjian cymbals that, I soon discovered, had an approximately 5% chance of inverting on any given crash. In a piece with as many crashes as the Tchaikovksy, they were more or less fated to pop. And indeed, at every one of the rehearsals I'd get about a minute into the big crashy part at the end of the piece only to find -- GOD DAMN IT -- that they'd inverted, yet again. The procedure for unpopping cymbals is laborious and delicate- you put a tennis ball or bass drum beater on the floor, place the disc on top of it, and then, with the help of a friend, attempt to place an even, strong pressure around the rim of the disc to pop it back in the other direction. This takes about half a minute, which is quite a long time when Tchaikovsky is rattling by vivace in the background.

So, at the dress rehearsal things were looking grim. The cymbals had popped again. I had a spare set of crappy high school cymbals handy as the emergency set, but there were all sorts of nasty murmurs in the string section about the problem. This is a sort of ingrained prejudice that amateur musicians seem to have regarding percussion, since it seems like it ought to be very easy to whack two pieces of brass together once or twice in the course of a piece. I'd played through the piece only three times now -- once per rehearsal -- because the other movements and other pieces on the program were swallowing all the rehearsal time. I was starting to feel pretty guilty about how badly my part was sounding.

And so, here's the "Rocky"-esque portion. I decided, first, to just ditch my friends beautiful-sounding but unreliable cymbals in favor of the trash-can lid high school cymbals. Thus equipped, I started on a morning-of-the-concert crash course in Not Sucking At Tchaikovsky. I put in some earplugs (I didn't like the idea of sustaining permanent hearing damage for the sake of one concert) and banged cymbals together for five hours. I worked a long while with just a metronome, memorizing the part, then played along with the recording (via an iPod and big ear-shielding headphones), ticking off every successful play-through on a pad of paper, working toward my goal of three sets of thirteen.

This, it turns out, is really, really miserable for your hands. The way orchestral cymbals are held, you grasp a leather thong in a closed fist, the thumb and first big knuckle of the index finger holding tight at the point where the strap disappears through the disc. The left hand is held underneath, at an angle, the whole weight of the rough brass plate on approximately the middle knuckle, and the right cymbal held above. Now, there are prettier, more dramatic postures, but at the velocity of the Tchaikovksy this was the only option. After the first few hours, I'd worn through the skin on both hands, a nasty process by which the accumulated grime on the brass was rubbed into the wound.

The next step was heading to a friend's house to practice performing in front of someone. I usually try to perform in uncomfortable settings with strangers before a concert, to put things in perspective and calm my nerves. We both put in our rock-club ear plugs and cranked up the Tchai on his computer's loudest setting, undoubtedly delighting the neighbors. This was a few weeks ago, in the midst of northern California's memorable heat wave. I don't know if I can convey the sensation of banging cymbals together over and over, in a demanding, tricky pattern, in a house without air conditioning. It was easily 110°, and the sweat was rolling down my back. The leather thongs in my hands were getting that weird roughness that's unique to wet rawhide (copious palm sweat). My friend conducted as best he could (he didn't have a score, and kept getting tripped up by the brass off-beats, just as I had in rehearsal), but it was a good hour or so of practice under difficult circumstances. My hands hurt so badly that I wrapped them in paper towels, which turned out to be a good solution. I assume the neighbors really enjoyed it, so I had the 'strangers' angle covered. I then went home and put in another hour or so with the iPod.

So, that was where things stood when I headed out for the concert. I hadn't played the piece correctly in rehearsal yet, my hands were throbbing, and I didn't know whether to wear the earplugs for the show. All of my rehearsing, after all, had been with the plugs in, but I didn't know if onstage I should risk them- what if I couldn't hear the orchestra and ended up way off the beat?

The first two thirds of the concert were unremarkable. I played some bells and chimes stuff in Morton Gould's warhorse 'American Salute', and then a comparatively easy cymbal part in Liszt's first piano concerto. All this was stressless and successful, prelude to the main event. For the first two movements of the Tchai we (the triangle, bass drum, and cymbals) sat offstage, nearly a half hour in which to get nervous or sleepy. Then, during the plunky pizzicato stuff in the third movement, we snuck on.

I had decided to wear the earplugs. I'd worn a single one during the Liszt, just to try to get a sense of what it would feel like, and decided it was worth the risk. It was an interesting sensation- you feel a degree of removal from the situation, like seeing a landscape through tinted glasses. I'd left the knotted paper towels on top of the bells set, very picturesque, and carefully wrapped them around my hands as the pizzicatos began to wind down.

And then it went fine.

Unfortunately, there's no way to finish this little story without this anticlimax- it went very well. I didn't fuck up even a little, which can be a rare and delightful sensation in live music. Honestly, in all my years playing clarinet, which is arguably much more work and infinitely more expressive and demanding, I never felt such elation as I did successfully playing cymbals in the Tchai after one day of earnest, knuckle-ruining woodshedding. And that's How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

---

*I should add that cymbals aren't exactly easy- they demand a great deal of good taste from the performer. Most composers are very inexact with their notations for percussion, and a certain amount of creativity is required with regard to how long the cymbals will ring, how they will be damped... well, I guess that's it, really. But those issues are more complicated than they might seem on first consideration. Nothing drives me crazier than some hack crashing the cymbals and then damping them inappropriately quickly at a dramatic moment.

Live Music: SF, Davies Hall, May 10 of 2006

2006-05-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

I spent my junior year of college living in London by way of a year-abroad program. London is arguably the most expensive city in the world, charging you exorbitant prices for simple things like public transport or tiny amounts of food. It's therefore kind of a paradox that I saw more live music in that year than in the rest of my life combined. Music's cheap in London! You can get stand-in-the-back-with-the-rest-of-the-scum tickets to the ENO for about $6 if you show up at the right time, and regular concerts will seldom set you back more than $20 if you're content with mediocre seats.

In the Bay Area, by contrast, you can get a 6 lb. burrito for $5 but, on the downside, it kinda sucks for music. I hate driving up 101 during the nastiest commute hours to see a concert that starts at 8, paying a remote booking fee for tickets, $11 parking, and so forth. If I lived in town I might consider subscribing to the symphony, but right now I have to pick and choose- I'm certainly not going to buy a quarter tank of gas at today's prices to see Beethoven.

Last night was a concert that made the hassle worthwhile though. The San Francisco Symphony actually put together a program that made me excited enough to drag along two non-classical-music friends, Spencer and Dan, to see- Debussy: 'Sacred and Profane Dances', Ades: 'Living Toys', Bizet (who cares?), and ... drum roll ... HK 'Nali' Gruber's 'Frankenstein!!'

We had the cheap-as-possible circle terrace seats, which, for those of you not familiar with Davies, are a semicircle of soft benches fanned out behind the orchestra. These are my favorite seats in the house because, generally, the people sitting in them are 'serious' enough about music that they don't cough and fidget. Moreover, having the whole hall staring at a person makes them less likely to whisper irritatingly to their neighbor during the performance.

This program was the sort of thing that, in my dreams, could revitalize 'classical' music: it wasn't built around some fancy itinerant virtuoso-of-the-minute offering his interpretation of the Beethoven piano concerto that everybody's heard 5,000 times and, most astonishingly, fully %50 of the composers on the program are still alive. That being said, I had no idea what Dan and Spencer's reactions would be.

The show started exactly at the stroke of 8:00 (I have to admit that punctuality feels weirdly luxurious compared to all the dead time at a place like Bottom of the Hill)- out of the wings strolled conductor-for-the-night Edwin Outwater and the symphony's own harpist, Douglas Rioth. I am always pleased to see orchestras using their own musicians in pieces like this instead of getting 'soloists' off the touring circuit. The 'Sacred and Profane Dances' were... well, here my powers of description fall apart. It's very hard for me to give any sort of impression of the pleasure and excitement that live music holds for me: after a steady diet of recordings, to hear the real thing is like stepping out of a cramped, smelly tour-bus with its dirty windows to walk out into hot, dry air and see a landscape shimmering in all its color and warmth. So, the Debussy was as charming and serene as a person could hope, all bass pizzicatos and harp bisbigliandos and those languid arch-like phrases at which the symphony's strings excel. Spencer seemed especially appreciative afterward, slapping his massive hands together and making the low hooting noise by which he exhibits pleasure.

Then Outwater had to go and be a twit for several minutes, interrupting what had so far been a very fine concert with -- sigh -- a batch of Conductor Condescends To His Audience bullshit. I understand that the idea behind a conductor addressing the audience and trying to give some hint about the 'difficult' piece ahead is meant to make the proceedings easier to handle, but, with every little joke and simplification, Outwater was undermining 'Living Toys'. Moreover, please note that the program notes just had to go out of their way to mention: the Ecstasio movement of Asyla! Why, apparently it:

includes a frenetic movement evoking a night of London club raving and excess.

How fun! Perhaps my great-grandson would enjoy that!

That being said, 'Living Toys' was fantastic. I often dislike Ades' music, but 'Living Toys' has always fascinated me and hearing it live pushed me over the edge from appreciation to enthusiasm. It's really amazing to see living humans doing this piece, especially the two percussionists that use what appears to be around 300 different instruments within that quarter hour. I can't really tell if Dan and Spencer liked it- Dan said that he found some of it a little hard to take. Spencer was chewing on his fingers and rocking back and forth. This generally means he's deep in concentration, so presumably he liked the piece. I've heard the piece so many times on the recording that I'm sure my experience and expectations were very different. Incidentally, I overheard at least three nasty comments about it.

GRAY-HAIRED MAN IN SUIT: "I thought the tuning-up was more tuneful than that Ades piece."

Oh, snap! Good one, sir! Nobody's ever used that bit of invective about contemporary music! I only saw a few people leave during the performance itself- I assume they suddenly realized that Lost was on in twenty minutes and, goddamnit, they can hear 'Living Toys' any day.

The Bizet on the program was 'Jeux d'enfants' and I can't really think of anything much to say about it. It was tasteful, prettily arranged, tuneful 19th century music- on a program of 20th century pieces that made it sound bland and hackneyed. I assume it was there so the Haters (as Dan appropriately called them) would have a reason to stay past 'Living Toys' and get trapped by 'Frankenstein!!'

At intermission, we had the amusing experience of a Davies door guardsman in a bad tuxedo asking Spencer for his ticket before letting him come in - this after ten older people before us had walked in off the balcony without a murmur. Now, granted, Spencer hadn't exactly dressed for the occasion, but the doorman was pretty unpolite about it. There seems, to me, that there's a vein of snobbery at Davies that I don't remember at the halls in London.

Anyway, after intermission came the Gruber. 'Frankenstein!!' is one of my favorite pieces, and the man himself - 'Nali' to his pals, apparently - was there in the flesh to act as chansonnier. 'Frankenstein!!' is a set of German children's poems comprising lines from traditional German nursery rhymes that have been repurposed to tell creepy little surreal stories about monsters and superheroes, all rasped and trilled by Gruber in a comic German accent -- think Dr. Strangelove on amphetamines -- with an elaborate orchestral accompaniment that mixes the sound of toy instruments with the regular orchestra sonority. Slide whistles, melodeons, ghostly melodic hosepipes that are whirled over the head, popped paper bags, toy pianos, penny whistles - all of these infuse the orchestra with a dreamy, satiric nastiness.

One thing I found interesting was that the audience's primary reaction to 'Frankenstein!!' was laughter- and, indeed, it's all very fun and interesting to see these toy instruments deployed and the finest trombonists in San Francisco frowning over their slide whistles. On the recording, however, Gruber's hyperventilating and death-rattle wheezes are terrifying- you don't get many laughs when you listen on headphones, and the effect of the toy instruments is more ghostly when you can't see their cheerful, brightly-colored plastic.

Dan and Spencer clearly enjoyed it, though, and the audience brought Gruber back for three curtain calls, richly deserved. Spencer took off his shirt and swung it around his head - he calls this his 'hooray flag' -- which is his way of indicating that he thinks a piece is a great success.

La galerie des compositeurs charmants

2006-05-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

In the Wax Museum of Important 20th Century Composers, we always see the same serious figures: in this corner we find scowling Ives with his scraggly diabetic's beard ... in this niche is fishlike, hunched Stravinsky, trapped in a massive wool suit ... here is Schoenberg with his shining pate and sleepy eyes ... aha!- young Boulez molded in the act of spitting on the score of Das Lied von der Erde...

No complaints from me!- all these composers deserve to be here in the Central Gallery. They wrote music that made permanent changes to the musical landscape, flannel-shirted Paul Bunyan figures who connected rivers, gouged out canyons, installed new constellations.

However, if we turn this corner at the end of the Central Gallery, we find- the Gallery of Charming Composers! What a difference!- many of them are sculpted with smiles on their faces, glasses of red wine in their hands.

Here are three composers from that Gallery who, I think, would put a brighter face on 'classical' music if anybody would bother to program or record their works. I'm not saying that this is great, important music. Instead, I'm pointing out that 20th century music, as currently represented, is alarmingly short of good froth. Mozart and Haydn excelled at froth, Strauss made his entire career out of it, Mahler symphonies are usually %20 excellent froth- but, Schoenberg? Copland? Stravinsky? Even when they were having a good time, these composers usually had to have some artistic agenda to justify it. For instance, Pulcinella isn't just fun, it's also safe for academics who can pretend they enjoy it because of the way it explores the concept of "pastiche" within the context of an era that treats ... blah, blah, blah inevitable mention of Adorno.

But, on to the Gallery....

Wax Figure 1: Francaix

Jean Francaix was a child prodigy, wowing Nadia Boulanger with his counterpoint acumen at a tender age. His music is, I think, perfect. Whereas a Bruckner symphony is an enormous, lumpy, mountainous heap of wonders -- glorious and sprawling, but much too big to be seen from a single vantage point -- Francaix's compositions are on a human scale. His pieces are perfectly built and counterbalanced little elegances, ticking away like those pretty 18th century clockwork representations of the solar system. Every piece displays a sort of casual mastery, every detail mapped out- dynamics, for instance, are obsessively notated, every bar punctuated with sfz and fp and three different species of staccato. But what does it sound like? In terms of mood, you might say he's the P. G. Wodehouse of 20th century music. Most people wouldn't want to live on a steady diet of Wodehouse, it is true, but well-rounded person can afford to take their nose out of The Anatomy of Melancholy and not feel frivolous.

Wax Figure 2: Dondeyne

Desire Dondyne was described to me as certain type of Frenchman who is 'big and beefy and drinks a lot of red wine.' His music is, sadly, pretty much impossible to find in the US, having mainly appeard on LPs that never made the transfer to CD. This is unfortunate, because, while principally famous as a symphony conductor and writer of military marches, he composed a great deal of sweet, fun chamber music and four intriguing symphonies. Someone once characterized his typical mode as 'French travelogue music- imagine the soundtrack for a car bouncing along a country road in Provence', which seems pretty fair.

Wax Figure 3: Wüsthoff

Klaus Wüsthoff was a German composer who wrote a lot of 'light' orchestral music for German radio after WWII. I've only found one disc of it, released briefly on Koch when some accountant had his back turned. The pieces, though, are great. For instance, there's a little 'Russian' piano concerto that has so many little giddy, infectious moments that you don't care about whether he's advancing the state of modern music. The harp serenade is gorgeous, serene fluff, the sort of thing the Boston Pops might play if their audience were pleasantly stoned instead of full of hotdogs and waving miniature American flags. Wüsthoff be great fare for community orchestra 'pops' programs- it's tuneful, fun music that would appeal to an audience without resorting to humiliating stunts like quoting the 'The Irish Washer-Woman'.

Matt Groening (hearts) Messiaen

2006-04-27T11:13:00.001-07:00

In an interview this week at the Onion AV Club (click here for it), Matt Groening casually induces a dopamine rush for hundreds of music geeks: "I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day."

Somehow, this is the exact opposite of that time Condi Rice professed to love Brahms.

Groening's comment brings up an interesting question, though. I imagine that he's quite a busy guy -- "Life in Hell" / "The Simpsons" / "Futurama" revival -- but somehow he apparently finds time for... Messiaen?

'People are busier than ever!' is one of the modern era's more popular bromides. We all sigh and wish we had the leisure time of, say, Charlemagne. Irregardless of Holy Roman scheduling issues, though, people spit out that little sentence over and over because it very much feels true- and nothing makes its point more clearly than the music of Olivier Messiaen.

He wrote fairly long pieces. "Turangalîla" clocks in at around an hour-and-a-half, the "Catalogue des Oiseaux" takes three CDs (I've never gotten through it all), "Quaotour pour fin du Temps" is at least an hour, and there are lots and lots of pieces with names like "The Ascended Blood of the Lord" (in French) that usually go on for about a half-hour. These pieces don't get performed in public very often, so presumably Matt Groening listens to them -- as I do -- on a stereo or computer or iPod.

So, my big question is: where does classical music fit into people's schedules today?

I like a lot of pieces by Messiaen, but I can't imagine sitting down in the evening with a pair of headphones and listening to "Turangalîla" in one block. Even if I were following a score, I'd probably start to get sleepy or antsy- this is a long symphony, and even with the aura of immediacy and excitement that hangs in the air at a live concert it can start to weary the listener. As a result, %90 of the Messiaen that has entered my ears as been, in some sense, 'background music.'

This is a dirty, despicable thing for a classical music person to admit. Composers like Hindemith were always at pains to point out that the existence of background music cheapens the very nature of music, the idea being that true music -- concert music -- must be enjoyed with full concentration and no distractions. How many people have the luxury of approaching music like this today, though? Who, upon arriving home with their new album, reverently sets it up on their stereo/computer, takes the phone off the hook, sedates the dog, closes their eyes, and earnestly savors the music for an hour?

Well, not me. I would earnestly like to be that person, so serious and focused on music that whole evenings drift past as I lay on my back with my MDR-7506s caressing my ears, never growing bored or antsy. That never happens though. More likely I hear a fifteen minute tract of "Turangalîla" while running errands, the whole symphony divvied up over multiple days and multiple little occasions- tinkling piano and ondes martenot occupying the part of my attention that is not engaged in, say, checking email, then thunderous alien brass egging me on as I put away the groceries. This is a bit like if you could hang a Picasso in your hallway instead of traipsing down to the museum to stare at it earnestly- you gain a deep, pleasant famliarity with the painting by passing it constantly, but you unavoidably become a little numb to its initially striking features.*

Still, classical music as a culture -- and I do realize more and more that classical music is just a 'scene' with especially rich donors -- persists in pretending that people listen to its pieces in big blocks without interruption, that the vast majority of its listeners sit down with Beethoven 8 and listen to it as though they were reading a novel. Moreover, composers are still writing very long pieces (I am too, I realize). Honestly, there are probably only a few hundred people on the planet (and I think I'm being generous) that have made it through that six hour Feldman string quartet. This has the unusual effect, I think, of scaring off newcomers to classical music and making its existing fans feel guilty inside: on some level, you think that a good classical music fan, a serious one who really gets it, would be looking into SACD technology and sitting down in front of the stereo to smile dreamily for an hour of Schubert piano sonatas.

When I do sit down like this and listen to a piece 'properly' in a non-concert setting, it's almost always when I'm reading along in a score. Even this, it seems to me, is a little impure, like taking your Arden Shakespeare with you to the theater. It's music as study, not a pure aesthetic experience. Still, it's probably my favorite way of listening- I'm working through the complete Haydn symphonies right now, and without the scores I'd probably have been a little bored somewhere around the third CD.

So- am I alone? How do people listen to classical music today? Am I the only one who feels a trace of guilt that he's never heard Boulez' "Sur Incises" without groceries being involved?

--

*Still, in a sense I think know "Turangalîla" better because of this constant, casual acquaintence. I guess that's why people buy lots of recordings of the same Beethoven symphonies- an attempt to recapture some of the novelty.

Berio's Rendering- the light eye and the dark

2006-04-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school I took some private lessons from real symphony musicians, i.e. people who played in the (old) San Jose Symphony and present SF Symphony. (In retrospect, I should have been troubled by the fact that these musicians who had 'made it' were still spending their Sunday mornings trying to coax gangly high schoolers through the trickier parts of Don Quixote. The present status of orchestral musicians is kinda like that of doctors in the beginning of the last century: highly respected, lowly paid, and often forced to make housecalls). One of the tips imparted by these musicians was extremely practical: whatever you're going to be playing, your first task is to get a recording and (ideally) a score. It seems pure and virtuous to nurture ideals about arriving at a fresh interpretation by starting from scratch, but it's more important not to embarrass yourself in rehearsal.

And so, this weekend, I downloaded a recording of Berio's Rendering from iTunes for a whopping $5. The orchestra in which I percuss has announced Rendering as a program item for next year, and I figure that any composer who gets billed alongside Boulez on CDs probably deserves my early attention.

I had heard the idea for Rendering before I heard the piece: it's yet another piece where a composer 'finishes' someone's incomplete sketches, like all those Mahler 10ths or Schubert 9ths or last acts of Turandot or Lulu. For some reason, composers love finishing other people's pieces, but authors seem to steer clear of tacking happy endings onto, say, Kafka's Amerika.

Berio takes as his material some sketches for Schubert's '10th'. (These were sketched as though for piano apparently- I can't determine just how many fragments there are and whether it's certain that they were intended to be part of a symphony.) His idea goes something like this: rather than simply stitching these swatches of music into a symphony that would approximate something by Schubert, he instead creates an 'idea piece' in which the orchestrated fragments are left detached- the gaps between them are filled with nebulous, tonally ambiguous passages in which Schubert's themes are pulverized into atomized fragments (they sound a little like a cross between Stravinsky's Firebird and Ligeti's Clocks and Clouds, and apparently quote Turnadot- ho ho!). Moreover, Berio doesn't restrict himself to Schubert's orchestra- there is a full complement of trombones, a celesta, unusual string effects, and all the trappings of a fine orchestra c. 1918.

This work has been very successful. There are already four or so recordings of it in circulation, and a casual Google check reveals that it's popular with the more high-falutin' community orchestras. This is, presumably, because it isn't extremely difficult (I don't see these groups taking on Berio's Sinfonia) and consists of %95 classical tonal music that makes use of a full, modern orchestra. This last is a practical consideration- if you're working out the schedule for people to participate in a local group, you either restrict yourself to the 18th century or you find something for your trombones and clarinets to do.

So, by contemporary classical music standards, the piece is a success, no getting around that. So why do I find that it makes me so uncomfortable?

The first time I heard it, I was disappointed by how conservative it was. I'm not usually a huge fan of the more extreme IRCAM-style European plink-squawk virtuosity, but this piece was so restrained that I found myself eager for a little frenetic marimba and bass clarinet (those favorite agents of late 20th century plink-squawkery). Rendering sounds like Schubert orchestrated by Berlioz, with some dreamy intervals of 'modern' ambiguous music that wouldn't raise an eyebrow as background music in a 'classy' film score from the '80s.

Later, after I'd listened to it a few times, I grudgingly admitted that there are some fine, big Berlioz moments when the trombones blare and the strings saw violently. Still, though, the piece didn't convince me at all. I didn't get the feeling of there being a grand ligne in the traditional sense- and isn't that what tonal music like Schubert is built for? Eventually, I realized what was making me itch about this piece.

Consider this fragment from a conversation with Lutoslawski about programming modern music:

'No good comes from mixing two kinds of music, especially nineteenth-century and modern music. That results in what we might call the "cancellling-out" of two aesthetics. Perhaps this sounds rather extreme; but all the same it expresses the reality we have to come to terms with. [...] From my own experience I can give you two instances of modern music being performed along with other works. One occasion was successful, the other not. Both took place in America. The first was a subscription concert given in a large town with its own symphony orchestra and a typical subscription audience. They performed my Trois poèmes d'Henri Michaux, preceded by a Beethoven overture and followed by Tchaikovsky's Piano concerto in B flat minor with Rubinstein. This arrangement of the program resulted in some people cancelling their subscriptions and donations, while others wrote letters to the organizers expressing gratitude for the performance of my work. On the other occasion two works by Gabrieli were played first, then my String Quartet; after the interval there were Debussy's two dances for harp and string quartet and a Bach cantata, but I was very pleased to have my work in such company. / This is precisely the context in which modern music functions best. We should not combine modern music and nineteenth-century music, but there are great possibilities in performing it alongside music of other periods: Baroque, late Renaissance or early twentieth century.'

This seems, to me, to slice clean to the bone of what makes Rendering such an awkward, frown-inducing piece. There are fine tromboney passages of Berliozian Schubert and passably good passages of cloudy Schubert-deconstruction - all silvery with celesta and high strings - but, unfortunately, the two cancel each other out. If the 'idea' of the piece is to investigate the self-destructive juxtaposition then: fine, gold star for Berio, but he could have written an essay. I can't help but think that he could have made two fine pieces out of these fragments: an unusually-orchestrated, cohesive symphony and a great, weird boiling cloud of fragmented phrases and harmony.

The worst thing is how unhappy my vague dislike for these piece makes me. Rendering gets a thumbs-up from every critique I've read. In this sense, it's a piece like Ades' Asyla: fun to describe. It's the musical version of those book reviews in the New Yorker that excuse you from actually reading the books: you get the gist, like drinking a smoothie instead of peeling and chewing your way through a basket of fruit.

Spry (mentioned in my last post) concludes the first half of Life on the Bosphorus with a parable about a Sheik who, upon hearing that a certain town has fallen into sinful ways, sends two different dervishes to see the place and bring back news to him about whether it is still righteous. The first dervish returns and says:

"O, Sheik! it is high time that stringent correction should visit these people lest the hand of Divine wrath overtake them ... They are worse than their bad reputation; faith and truth to them are as treasures hidden in the sea. They neglect prayer-time, turn away their cheeks from ablution, and snap the finger of derision at Divine precepts. By my head and yours ! they are cheats, liars, false swearers, and there is no goodness in them. They deserve the fate of the children of Lot. I have spoken!"

The Sheik tells the first dervish that he has done very well and sends him off to get some rest. Then, the second dervish arrives to give his report:

"O, Sheik! God is great and infinite, and has made man both good and vicious. In His immeasurable bounty He has favoured these people and so balanced accounts that the majority are not of those who go astray. It is true there are some grievous offenders, but these are as black spots on the white lamb's fleece. I have eyes, and opened them to witness their ablutions; I have ears, and did not close them to the music of their five daily prayers ... These people could be much better; but many of higher repute are less deserving. Such they did appear to me; I have nothing to add!"

The Sheik then praises the second dervish, and sends him off to be refreshed. A guest of the Sheik, puzzles, asks:

"With permission, how is this, Effendi? There are two sides to all things, and black side and a white side; shade and light cannot be on the same face; but, lo! one dervish enters and swears by his head that the people of a certain district are all heretics, unclean, and sons of the devil; thereat you exclaim: 'Thou has spoken well,' and bid him depart with blessings; presently a second dervish enters, and, behold, he declares these people to be good and pure, like unto angels; whereat you observe: 'Thou has spoken rightly,' and dismiss him likewise with benediction. Now this contradiction passeth my knowledge and understanding; I beseech you, therefore, to explain how it is that he that speaketh well and he that speaketh ill of the same thing can be worthy of commendation.'

The Sheik answers:

'O, Moossfeer (guest), the words I used to those worthy men were just. Knowest thou not that God hath not made all men's eyes to see alike? He has granted some a bright eye which softeneth errors; to others he has granted a dark eye which augmenteth defects; so it is with these two dervishes. Yet both are honest, conscientious men, and have doubtless narrated matters even as they appear reflected in their own eyes.'

So, when it comes to this piece by Berio, I clearly have been given a dark eye. Does the classical music press only employ people with light ones?

---

For reference, you might enjoy:

•Kaczynski, Tadeusz. 'Conversations with Witold Lutoslawski', Chester Music, London, 1972.

and

•Spry, William J. J. 'Life on the Bosphorus: Doings in the City of the Sultan; Turkey Past and Present; Including: Chronicles of the Caliphs from Mahomet to Abdul Hamid II', H. S. Nichols, London, 1895.

Cymbals, Triangle, Bass Drum... Ruthe

2006-04-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

(All of this will eventually be tied in to the Ottoman empire and contemporary American attitudes toward Islam.)

For the last couple years I've been assisting my friend Ryan in the percussion section of an amateurs-and-professionals orchestra based in San Mateo. Now, I'm a clarinetist by training (pretty good one, too) but this is the sort of orchestra where most of the winds double as treasurers and lawyers for the organization- in other words, the terms 'open clarinet spot' and 'obituary' are closely related. So, with this ensemble, it's the percussion life for me.

I've gotten okay at it, too. Sticking your neck out to play a clarinet solo in orchestra takes some nerve, and that mindset isn't so different from the spirit required to really commit to a big cymbal crash or ultra-precise little triangle tingggg. I mention this not to imply that I'm some kind of learning prodigy (%95 of what makes me a competent percussionist is years learning to count rests in youth orchestras), but because percussion's a weird field with lots of poseurs floating around. The size of a percussion section fluctuates widely, from the single timpanist required for early works to, say, ten people for especially clangorous contemporary pieces. As a result, you meet lots of itinerant subs and 'guest' percussionists of different backgrounds and skill levels.

There are: drummers who play well but can barely read sheet music, music theater pit-dwellers with van-loads of synthesizers and portable timpani, ultra-competent former youth symphony personnel with their old kit bags of pristine mallets, bearded (almost always bearded, for some reason) quasi-professionals who act pissy in order to advertise that they're a little too good for amateur orchestras...etc etc.

Anyway, last year we did Mahler 2, a piece that called for ruthe in the bass drum part. Nobody in our immediate section knew what this meant, and it wasn't mentioned in my orchestration books. Little things like this, I think, are what make someone into a seasoned musician- it's only by rattling around the concert demimonde for a while that you end up being asked to learn what a ruthe is.

The answer is suitably exotic and charming. In the Ottoman empire, the armies of the Sultan - white-turbaned Janissaries with sabers and picturesque moustaches - were accompanied on the march by military bands. These comprised crashing cymbals, big triangles (with rings on them to jingle), and a huge Turk whacking a bass drum- he'd have a conventional bass drum beater in one hand and a ruthe in the other. This traditional ruthe was a bundle of straight birch twigs, bound at one end like a sort of cross between a fasces and a little broom. The Turks would hit it against the head or rim of the drum to make a good loud rattly THWACK to contrast with the BOOM on alternating beats.

The Sultan marched his armies up the Balkan peninsula - crashing and jingling and thwacking - to treat the citizens of Vienna to authentic Turkish martial music for much of 1683. Now, you'd think that things that were Ottoman would be held in low esteem by the Austrians after this, but somehow the opposite happened: Turkish music got to be the fashion among the upper classes. An imperial aristocrat might, for instance, give the ultra-lavish gift of a full Turkish orchestra to another noble in order to cement an alliance, and it's a safe bet that Mozart and Haydn heard their share of weirdly-tuned Ottoman lutes and zithers. What really made an impression, though, were those cymbals and bass drums, and 18th century composers soon integrated these into theater orchestras.

I had never known this. There are lots of weird little details to performance practice that, for one reason or another, don't really get passed down. In traditional 18th century percussion notation, for instance, a downward stem in a bass drum part indicated a conventional beater but an upward stem is meant to be played with the ruthe hand. This sonority - much neutered today because of the smallness of contemporary ruthes - would presumably make the end of of Haydn's military symphony a good deal more exotic and clattery than what ends up on the recordings.

Anyway, Mahler apparently felt a good deal of ruthe nostalgia, for whatever reason. In the second symphony he asks for crescendoing ruthe rolls and mechanical ticka-ticka-ticka rhythms that sound like dry bones. The problem, as I said, is that contemporary ruthe are little things, about a foot long, intended to be used as clumsy brushes on snare drums. The Ottoman ruthe was a baseball bat by comparison.

Inspired, I set out to make my own, sneaking around suburban neighborhoods at night to steal twigs from likely birch trees. This was a bust, unfortunately, resulting in one massive (three foot long) ruthe and four fragile little ones of delicate, flexible twigs that would only produce a rustle rather than a good Ottoman thwack. The twigs in the big ruthe weren't straight enough to get an nice, even rattle, making me think that contemporary percussion technology has lost some vital lore necessary for ruthe creation.

It's interesting, though, that these percussion instruments aren't usually remembered as contribution to Western culture that came from the former imperial bastion of Islam. Long European centuries of fascination with the 'oriental' Turk and Arab have been replaced today with a vague anxiety best exemplified by the charming American expression: "Religion of peace, my ass!"

I've been reading an account of life in Constantinople by an English naval officer named Spry, written between 1895 and 1905 when English imperialism was at its zenith. It's a great book - Constantinople is presented through a series of vignettes and visits to historic sites, all lavishly illustrated on vellum plates overlaid with onionskin. Spry visits a religious service of dervishes, dons a fez to sneak through a holy cemetery, bargains for embroidery with Armenians in the bazaar, peruses the treasury of the old seraglio, and frequently takes detours to relate (with Edwardian aplomb) the Roman and Islamic history of the city.

Consider, though, this passage about a religious service during the 'holy month of Ramazan' in the Hagia Sophia:

'The only emblems of the conquerors displayed are six huge shields, bearing, in golden letters on a dark green ground, the names of God and His Prophet and of the first four Caliphs. / The real monument which they have raised to the Most High is the imperishable faith of a patient, long-suffering people who give to their God, not the child-like tender piety of the Christian devotee, but the fierce, passionate devotion of a clansman towards his chief. / When the last prayer is over and the Imaum has once more sent forth his shout - "Allah, Akbar!" - then the pent-up torrent of enthusiasm is let loose, and from some thousands of throats there peals forth a wild kind of shout, "Allah, Akbar! Allah, Allah!" the breath of their very souls.'

What strikes me most is Spry's sympathy. He doesn't condescend to Islam or accuse the worshippers of unhealthy fanaticism. Paradoxically, by finding the picture exotic he's approaching the culture on its own terms. Also, it's hard not to be amused by the 'child-like tender piety of the Christian devotee'- the Evangelical Christainty of today's America seems much, much closer to the 'fierce, passionate devotion of a clansman towards his chief.'

Good Slumming and Bad Slumming

2006-03-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

Alex Ross offered this review of Sofia Gubaidulina's new "Feast During a Plague" in the new New Yorker, containing this interesting teaser: "A mammoth landscape of orchestral desolation, mixing craggy fanfares and insectoid movement up and down the chromatic scale, is periodically disrupted by blasts of prerecorded techno music."

It's such a thrill to see a composer like Gubaidulina finally offering the public her "techno music." I've always thought that she seemed out of place on DG, and ought to take her place alongside Autechre and Squarepusher on Warp Records- I mean, her orchestra music is good, but her beats are amazing.

But, no, I doubt that's the case: more likely, Ms. Gubaidulina is taking a stroll through the pop music slums. In its natural habitat, techno of the sort that is 'blasted' is a hypnotic, ribcage-shaking music, designed for dark rooms and sweaty, bacchanal dance. I get the distinct impression that Sofia is using 'blasts' of it as a shorthand for a rotten society that grinds and twists in warehouses while the world goes to hell, the modern equivalent of the medieval gluttons who tucked into capons amid the rats and skeletons.

Does she like techno music, to use it so? Has she heard a lot of it, tried to meet it on its own terms? Is her apartment stacked with cardboard boxes full of white label EPs from Brixton basements and rare Aphex Twin CD-Rs? Probably not.

Rather, as I said, she's participating in the century-old tradition of musical slumming. Now, 'proper' composers have always written music that borrowed elements from popular music, and, indeed, for most of western history it's been tricky to distinguish between high art music and low. It's hard to put your finger on whether, say, John Downland was writing popular songs. Sure he was, compared to Palestrina in Rome, but they were singing something rougher than Dowland down at the tavern. This line was still blurry in the 19th century- it's hard to categorize a Strauss waltz or Souza march on the 'classy' scale.

Somewhere at the end of that century, though, as the middle class swelled and started sanctifying the 'fine arts', composers suddenly had the chance to deal with realism in a way that painters and novelists had since the middle of the century. Just as Degas could paint the greenish, weary prostitutes of the Parisian demimonde, Mahler could now wander past a schtetl klezmer band in his first symphony.

Now, in my opinion, this sort of musical slumming - I can't think of a better term for it, and please understand that I don't mean it perjoratively - varied a lot in its success. Some composers, like Ives and Mahler, seem respectful of the popular music they reference. When Ives includes a raucous march or maudlin parlor song, there's no mistaking his fierce love for the material.

The opposite approach is the one Stravinsky adopts in 'Ragtime for 11 Instruments' - a piece that does no favors for ragtime or for Stravinsky. Ragtime was a flourishing, elegant style bursting with rhythmic energy, but Stravinsky strips it down into a wheezy, ricky-tick joke- crass and dry, crudely syncopated, all elbows-and-knees. The overall effect is, frankly, embarrassing, like a bad parody that barely understands its target.

And this, unfortunately, is the way a lot of composers today are approaching popular music. I am especially thinking of Ades' "Asyla", whose "Ecstasio" movement (Hilarious, right?) uses a gigantic orchestra to approximate a ketamine-dream night at the sort of club that 'blasts' techno. This is, of course, slumming: Ades isn't approaching techno as a genre whose gestures and vocabulary can be absorbed into classical music (minimalism already does that, right?) but as material for program music gimmickry of the crassest kind. The overall effect doesn't sound like techno, but like a bad marching bad transcription of techno that's been made 'classy' with difficult time signatures.

Now, granted, the surrounding movements have beautiful, innovative orchestrations, but the critical success of "Asyla" is, I think, because the techno gimmick (easy to embellish with phrases like "a ketamine-dream night at the sort of club that 'blasts' techno") is fun to pitch to people. "How novel!" -- the thinking seems to go -- "Using only 150 conservatory-trained musicians, he manages to make something that sounds like a mediocre techno DJ's half-hour's work with a sequencer!"

Maybe I'm way off- the Gubaidulina piece might be great, the 'blasts of techno' utterly convincing. Does anybody else feel weird when they hear classical composers picking up techno or ragtime with a pair of tongs, though?

I'll talk about Golijov and Scott Johnson in a later post.

* "Techno" itself is a bad term that attempts to embrace a hundred genres with as much success as a diver trying to embrace an equal number of live squids.

"The Situation in Trinidad"

2006-03-08T11:00:00.000-08:00

Imagine going to the library and stumbling across a large, hardbound folio volume of extremely detailed, naturalistic color photos of, say, Abraham Lincoln going about his daily life. All the weird little moments: petting a dog, blowing on a cup of coffee, getting a haircut. I'm not talking about dreamy Matthew Brady tableaus, either, but vivid documentary snapshots, unposed and perhaps a little awkward. The feeling as you turned the pages, I think, would be one of astonishment and -- for some, at least -- a deep relief that these little things that you assumed were lost had been incomprehensibly, miraculously spared.

This is the feeling I have when I listen to Emory Cook's field recordings of Trinidad calypso from '50s. Cook was a person similar to Alan Lomax, but more catholic in his preservational instincts. Whereas Lomax dragged his equipment from porch to porch capturing field hollers and children's song-games, Cook turned his microphones on everything from thunderstorms and locomotives to... calypso.

Most people, I think, would hate it. This isn't studio-recorded Harry Belafonte calypso, smoothed-out by a trained chorus and reverb effects. It is, instead, a documentary of what it was like to be in a calypso tent at carnival-time in the mid-'50s. The effect is eerie: because of Cook's technical prowess and superb equipment (he was a revolutionary engineer of sound equipment) these recordings sound clearer and more detailed than comparable studio recordings of the era. In holographically crisp stereo you find yourself transported to a moment in real life: the audience around you clapping and laughing, the goofy sax solos, the scuff of feet dancing, the clanging approach and departure of a marching steel band, the distant booming of Mighty Sparrow crooning through an outdoor sound-system- you are, by proxy, in Trinidad.

This has the unusual effect of making you nostalgic for a time and place you never knew, particularly with regard to the social engagement of the music. These songs are like nothing today (certainly in America) in their appeal to the intelligence, humor, and political consciousness of the audience. In "The Situation in Trinidad" (also known as "No, Doctor, No") Mighty Sparrow does the unthinkable- he creates a highly melodic, charming criticism of- his government's approach to tax policy, milk shortage, and local industry. And this song was popular! The equally infectious "Jean and Dinah" (a. k. a. "Yankees Gone") talks about the explosion of cheap prostitution following the closing of the US naval base. These are songs that would actually make politicians nervous. Also interesting is Lord Melody's "Booboo Man", in which the ugly singer (and Lord Melody did, by all accounts, have 'a face like a crocodile') grows angry at the jokes of his children. This is unpatronizing music for adults with children, pop music that assumes you're out of high school.

It's galling to compare popular song in America today. Our art is completely disengaged from politics, instead aiming to create artificial atmosphere of 'cool' that is meant to appeal, presumably, to people under 25. The closest thing I can think to a successful socially relevant piece of pop music in the last few years is that techno track that took a snippet of Bush's 'weapons of mass destruction' speech and reassembled it to create bromides such as 'fear is a weapon of mass destruction.' Compared to "The Situation in Trinidad", the Bush song is just a sour little joke from people who are snickering at the train running off the rails. More importantly, it's a very generalized sentiment.

At the other end of American popular music, the opposite sentiment is given equally generic treatment: when the guy in sunglasses and cowboy hat solemnly croons that "freedom isn't free", it's just a bland exhortation to do- what? The crassest WWI propaganda song about kicking the Kaiser was at least clear in its goals. In today's shifting political climate, the songs are as vague as the policy of the government. "Freedom isn't free" is a blank check.

The closest thing we have to the political engagement of calypso is angry black music, which I guess I'll discuss again in a later post.

Anyway, don't let the naive political sentiment in the last few paragraphs put you off from sampling the Cook recordings.

You can click through to find some at:

http://www.folkways.si.edu/index.html

UNGH...awright...yeah....

2006-03-06T12:38:00.000-08:00

How should a white person listen to hip hop?

I saw the new Dave Chapelle "Block Party" movie the other night. It's a loose, good-natured documentary about Chappelle putting on a hip hop concert in Brooklyn for an audience that commingles native New Yorkers with people from his adopted hometown in Ohio. The performances are extremely exciting, full of a raw energy and gutsy showmanship that has to appeal, on some level, to anyone who likes live music.

I seem to give listening to hip hop another try every few years. Fresh from reading some critic's gasping, eye-watering approval of such-and-such's contribution to hip hop, I spring for a 'classic' album and pop it into the CD player with nervous anticipation- will this be the one where I'll 'get it'? Hip hop, after all, is clearly here for an extended stay -- its era has already outlasted the heydeys of ragtime and swing and bebop and ska and disco -- so I figure I ought to try to understand what's going on. Nobody wants to be the equivalent of the snob who turned up his nose at Jelly Roll Morton in 1920 and suggested it wasn't 'real' music. Also, it's not like I'm some kind of classical music or rock purist- I love calypso and gamelan and jazz and Serbian brass band and enough other stuff to think I'm open-minded and have enough musical horse sense to know what I like.

So far, though, my experiments with hip hop have never worked out. I can appreciate hip hop classics like the works of Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and Rakim, but it's always from a musicological distance and my heart isn't quite in it- it always felt like 'homework'.

This time, though, freshly enthused by "Block Party", I asked friends to file-transfer me some albums by the musicians in the movie and dropped $5 on a used Wyclef Jean record at Rasputin's. So, how is it working out?

Better, I guess. I find myself listening to the music fairly regularly, but it's still 'homework' in the sense that I'm consciously immersing myself in it, trying to figure out how it relates to me as a musician and listener. Also, I find that when I'm driving around listening to it I feel like I'm participating in a socially loaded activity. I'm very conscious that most white people seem to listen to hip hop as a piece of cultural ornamentation, and I honestly wonder how they can do it. So much of the music is implicity or explicitly about the 'black' experience. Dead Prez rail against the government - I can get behind that - but that anger is bound up in a general anger at 'crackers'- and that's me. I'm not a rich white man in a blue suit sitting behind a desk in Washington, but I'm a white guy - no getting around that - and excruciatingly aware that Dead Prez hate me.

With Wyclef Jean, there's a similar weird gray area. I love calypso and ska, and he draws heavily from Caribbean music, but the album I got - "The Carnival" - is incomprehensible to me. So much time is spent on introductions and weird little in-song skits and postludes that it sometimes feels like there hasn't really been a 'song'. It's like a weird large-scale collage built around the concept of Wyclef being on trial for something, a conceit that fades in and out and seems to have little bearing on the songs. Am I supposed to listen to it all at one sitting? Am I supposed to hit >> until I get to the songs I like, even though those are usually filled with pockets of dialogue also? What are most hip hop fans' expectations? Is this considered a necessary feature of the genre?

I ask because this approach to content seems extremely common in hip hop albums. Kanye West's 'Late Registration' is often interrupted by skits that, while kinda funny the first time, soon lose their novelty and grow increasingly annoying. Mos Def has a similar weakness for introductory speeches that start to feel stale. Are hip hop records meant to be disposable? Is this in the very nature of a music medium which relies %90 on words rather than melody? I mean, nobody expects a book to be infinitely rereadable.

Another thing is that rap has a density that I find exhausting over time. There's so, so much speech that the sheer volume of words becomes oppressive. Do rap fans listen to all the words for content? I figure they must since the musical content tends to be based on a looped bassline and snatches of sung chorus- listening to the 'flow' is interesting but is different from the arc and shape of a pitched melody.

Does anybody else have an opinion on this? Hip hop fans? People who hate hip hop?

Introduction.

2006-03-03T12:02:00.000-08:00

Hi, I'm setting this up as a corollary to my usual blog, Harmonic Analysis Diary, a. k. a. Artificial Harmonics. Harmonic Analysis Diary can be a little dry since it's just an analysis project- I often find that I'd like to talk about something without having to relate it back to a Haydn sonata. This new page, then, will be little essays and entries of the usual sort, i. e. talk about recordings, books, or movies. And pictures of dogs wearing funny hats.