Hamelin Returns to SFP for “Anniversary” Recital

Marc-André Hamelin (photograph by Sim Connety-Clarke, courtesy of SFP)

Last night pianist Marc-André Hamelin returned to Herbst Theatre to contribute to the 45th Season Favorites series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). This was his fifteenth visit to SFP. Hamelin has a prodigious command of just about every keyboard style at the piano, and the diversity of those styles was both evident and engaging in the program he prepared. The first half juxtaposed Joseph Haydn with three twentieth-century composers (one of whom is still alive). The second half was also twentieth-century, this time featuring two Russian composers whose births were separated by less than a decade. The earlier of these was Sergei Rachmaninoff, born in 1873; and he was preceded in the program by Nikolai Medtner, who was born in 1880.

Hamelin consistently takes the stage with an engaging personality. However, when he sits down at the keyboard, he is intensely focused on his work. Nevertheless, he opened his program with two composers with reputations for their prankish personalities. He began with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XVI/37 sonata in D major, the third of the five Opus 30 compositions. Haydn was known for his engaging approach to expressiveness, and it would be fair to say that Hamelin’s account caught that expressive spirit. However, he also adapted it to his instrument, taking the liberty of a wider dynamic range than any of Haydn’s keyboards could have afforded.

Most importantly, however, Hamelin was not shy in expressing Haydn’s prankishness, making his interpretation a perfect complement to the following offering, Frank Zappa’s “Ruth is Sleeping.” The title referred to Ruth Underwood, the percussionist for The Mothers of Invention from 1968 until 1977. However, that title was even more specific than naming one of Zappa’s “partners in crime.” Apparently, during a long rehearsal that would involve other members of Zappa’s band, she would “curl up underneath the marimba and go to sleep” (in Zappa’s words). My guess is that, if there is a Heaven, Zappa is up there having a good time sharing stories like these with Haydn!

Zappa was followed by the far more serious composer Stefan Wolpe with a performance of the “Passacaglia” movement from his Opus 23, Four Studies on Basic Rows. This music was inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s approach to treating all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale as equals, exploring different ways in which “rows” of all twelve of the tones could be permuted. I must confess that I could not, for the life of me, suss out what made this composition a passacaglia; and the performance, as a whole, reminded me more of Amadeus than of Schoenberg, with that “too many notes” phrase in the script! The first half of the program then concluded with John Oswald’s “Tip,” which amounted to a plethora of thematic quotations, which were presumably meant to be funny but, due to excessive length, came across as only tedious.

I welcomed the second half of the program because I have had little exposure to Medtner’s music. Hamelin selected two relatively short pieces played without interruption: a set of variations given the title “Improvisation” (Opus 31, Number 1 in B-flat minor) and “Danza festiva” (Opus 38, Number 3). However, Medtner had to give way to Rachmaninoff, represented primarily by his Opus 36 piano sonata in B-flat minor. Sadly, too much of this felt like Hamelin was just banging away at the notes, which had also been his approach to the “warm-up” for the sonata, the E-flat minor “Étude-tableau,” the fifth piece in the Opus 39 collection. Taken has a whole, his performance of Rachmaninoff’s music came off more like an Olympic event than a piano recital.

That disposition continued in Hamelin’s second encore with a particularly aggressive (but unidentified) selection by Sergei Prokofiev. The first encore, on the other hand, was more engaging. “Music Box” was a short piece that Hamelin had composed during his school days. As far as I am concerned, it definitely benefited from an opportunity to see the light again!

Hamelin will be Next SFP “Anniversary” Artist

Marc-André Hamelin at the keyboard (photograph by Sim Connety-Clarke, courtesy of SFP)

The 45th Season Favorites subscription series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) will continue at the beginning of next month. Readers may recall that there are four programs in this series, two of which will be solo recitals. Next month will see the first of those recitals, performed by pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who made his SFP debut in December of 2003. This will be his fifteenth appearance, the last having been in July of 2021, which was structured around very early and very late compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven.

There will be no Beethoven in next month’s program. However, Hamelin will begin with music by Beethoven’s teacher, Joseph Haydn. He will play the Hoboken XVI/37 sonata in D major, the third of the five Opus 30 compositions. Haydn will then get to rub shoulders with three far more recent composers, each with his own unique approach to making music: Frank Zappa, Stefan Wolpe, and John Oswald.

The second half will be shared by two major Russian composers of the twentieth century. The first of these will be Nikolai Medtner, represented by the first of his Opus 31 compositions, an improvisation in B-flat minor, followed by the third of the Opus 38 pieces, given the title “Danza festiva.” The program will then conclude with two works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, the fifth of the nine Opus 39 études, given the collective title Études-Tableaux. This one is in E-flat minor with the tempo “Appassionato.” Hamelin will then conclude the program with a complete account of Rachmaninoff’s second piano sonata, his Opus 36 in the 1931 version.

This performance will begin on Saturday, February 8, at 7:30 p.m. in Herbst Theatre, located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices are $85 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $75 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $65 (remaining Dress Circle and Balcony); and they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. Single tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545.

SFCMP: Progressive Rock Meets High Modernism

Following up in RE:voicing, the first program in the 53rd concert season of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) in Grace Cathedral last month, the ensemble will present its second program, RE:visitations at the more conventional venue of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). The “visitations” involve an encounter between the worlds of Progressive Rock and High Modernism. Each of those worlds is oriented by a “distinguished representative.”

Where rock is involved, that representative is Frank Zappa, while advanced modernism is represented by Pierre Boulez. Many might view the two as an “odd couple;” but, back when I was a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, I was fortunate enough to attend a dialog between the two of them, which took place at the University of California at Los Angeles. This was probably the most agreeable encounter of “opposites” that I ever had an opportunity to witness.

In that context I can appreciate that the final two works on the RE:visitations program will be compositions by Boulez and Zappa, both of which were completed in 1984. Boulez’ “Dérive 1” was scored for the five instruments selected by Arnold Schoenberg for his Pierrot Lunaire with a vibraphone added for good measure. The duration of most performances runs between seven and eight minutes. (For those curious about the Boulez catalog, there is a “Dérive 2,” whose history is more elaborate. It was scored for eleven instruments, and it was originally completed in 1988. Boulez then revised it in 2002, followed by an expanded and final version, completed in 2006.)

Cover of The Perfect Stranger album (fair use to illustrate the audio recording in question)

“Dérive 1” will be followed by Zappa’s “The Perfect Stranger,” the opening track on his album of the same title. It was scored for 28 musicians; and Zappa described the content as “post-Varese with frequent gestures of acknowledge towards Messiaen.” These two pieces will be preceded by a work from the following decade, Steve Mackey’s 1997 “San Francisco,” which finds a “middle ground” between Boulez and Zappa with instrumentation for electric guitar and cello.

The first half of the program will feature world premiere performances of works by two of the SFCM students in the Technology and Applied Composition Program. Specifics have not yet been finalized. These new pieces will be preceded by Missy Mazzoli’s “Tooth and Nail,” scored for solo viola and electronics. The first half will then conclude with Louis Andriessen’s “Life,” which he composed for the soundtrack of a film by Marijke van Warmerdam. That film will be screened as part of the performance.

This program will take place on Saturday, January 27, at 8 p.m. in the SFCM Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, which is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. As usual, the program will be preceded at 7 p.m. by a How Music is Made discussion with Artistic Director Eric Dudley in conversation with participating SFCMP musicians. General admission will be $35 with a $40 VIP rate, and $15 for students. Tickets may be purchased online through a City Box Office event page.

Alex Winter’s Zappa Documentary

courtesy of Larsen Associates

This coming Friday will see the opening of Zappa. Directed by Alex Winter, the film is being described as the “first all-access documentary about the life and times of Frank Zappa.” Presumably, “all-access” refers to the prodigious breadth of footage of not only Zappa himself but also a wide diversity of those who worked with him and several of those that interviewed him. Running 126 minutes in duration, Winter’s film is definitely more comprehensive than Thorsten Schütte’s Eat That Question—Frank Zappa in His Own Words, which I discussed in July of 2016, back during my Examiner.com tenure. 93 minutes in duration, Schütte’s film is about half an hour shorter than Winter’s; but, writing as one that is primarily concerned with listening experiences, I do not feel that Winter had much to add to the profile of Zappa that Schütte had developed.

To be fair there are far more contributors to Zappa than had been interviewed for Eat That Question. However, my own perspective is that of one that takes listening to Zappa’s music on recordings very seriously (as well as having visually experienced his 200 Motels film). In that context I feel that Winter’s exhaustive account ends up distracting from much (but definitely not all) of the experience of listening to the music. Most important is that both directors acknowledge the significant role of the music of Edgard Varèse in Zappa’s development. Winter is more specific about the record album that seized Zappa’s attention, but one of the most significant episodes that Schütte captured involved Zappa conducting a performance of Varèse’s “Ionization” not too long prior to his death. On the other hand, very early in Zappa Winter captured footage of Zappa leading the original Mothers of Invention group in an “encore” performance of Varèse’s “Octandre.” The instrumentation was not quite right, but the brash delivery made it perfectly clear how the composer’s style had appealed to Zappa. Sadly, the film accounts for only the opening phrase; and I would be very disappointed if that was all the Mothers played!

I was pleased that Winter accounted for the only time I actually saw Zappa up on a stage. This did not involve the performance of music. Rather, David Raksin served as moderator for a discussion that brought Zappa together with Pierre Boulez. The latter had conducted performances of Zappa’s music with his Ensemble InterContemporain. This connection may have been elided because Zappa himself was not satisfied with the performances, and Winter does provide footage of Kent Nagano rehearsing the London Symphony Orchestra in a series of Zappa compositions that were released on a series of two albums. It may well be that Boulez was as unhappy about Zappa as Zappa had been about Boulez; and I found it interesting that, not only is Zappa never mentioned in the lectures collected in Boulez’ Music Lessons book but also the EnsembleInterContemporain and its base of operations, IRCAM (the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, “Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music” in English) only appear in Jonathan Goldman’s Preface to the English translation of Boulez’ lectures.

The good news is that Winter provided much more footage of Zappa’s music being performed. I also felt it was valuable to listen to what many of the performers had to say about the effort that went into negotiating the many complexities in his scores. However, the listening is what matters most; and, for my money at least, I would have preferred much less talk replaced by much more music.

Zappa in Glorious Excess from Zappa Records

from Amazon.com

Those who have been following me for some time may recall that, when I was trying to take stock for my “Memorable Recordings in 2016,” any candidates in the audio category were solidly trumped by the release of Thorsten Schütte’s documentary film, Eat That Question—Frank Zappa in His Own Words (which, I am happy to say, is still being screened regularly on cable channels managed by STARZ). In his time Zappa was a cutting-edge iconoclast in the domain of rock concerts whose impact can probably be compared only to that of Lenny Bruce in the genre of standup comedy. However, Schütte’s footage made it clear that Zappa was far more cerebral than his popular image of a mad dog gone wild. All it took was a commitment to serious listening to appreciate the substance of what he had to offer. Fortunately, during the second half of the twentieth century, two major conductors, Kent Nagano and Pierre Boulez, made that commitment, with the result that Zappa’s impact extended far beyond the offerings of his own groups.

Zappa began his relationship with the recording industry when the Mothers (later to be called the Mothers of Invention) signed with the Verve division of MGM, leading to the release of the group’s first album, Freak Out! in 1966. As might be expected, it did not take long for Zappa to chafe from the sorts of commercial constraints that MGM imposed on its properties; and in 1977 he created his own label, Zappa Records. While the label was dormant for the last quarter of the twentieth century, it was revived in 2006 by the Zappa Family Trust , whose executor is Zappa’s son Ahmet. This has become the definitive source for Zappa recordings, and since 2012 Universal Music Enterprises has been responsible for distributing the label.

The most recent such distribution took place this past Friday with the release of a seven-CD box set entitled The Roxy Performances. This amounts to about as comprehensive an account of a single concert series as one could hope to obtain. The series consisted of four public shows taking place on December 9 and 10 of 1973. However, the collection also includes material from an invitation-only sound check and film shoot session held on December 8 and post-performance recordings made at Bolic Studios on December 12.

It is worth considering the historical context of these dates. I had begun an Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania in September of 1973 and had shortly thereafter taken on my first doctoral candidate writing a thesis on technology for computer music. Through him I had learned of Phil Lesh’s ventures into working with digital equipment for Grateful Dead performances and had gotten a chance to hear some of the results when a Dead tour came to Philadelphia. However, where the “legitimacy” of such work was concerned, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (institute for research of coordination in acoustics/music), best known by the IRCAM acronym, would not open until 1977. Zappa would visit IRCAM when his travels took him to Europe; and his music would find its way to performances by the resident performance group, Ensemble InterContemporain (conducted by Pierre Boulez), as well as the London Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Kent Nagano). This was also the time frame in which Zappa would begin working with a Synclavier.

However, Zappa’s appreciation of the avant-garde began in his teens with his first encounter with the EMS Recordings album of four compositions by Edgard Varèse. By the time the Mothers gave their first performance in 1965, Zappa had become well aware of the adventurous complexities coming from European composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. While most of those Europeans turned to those complexities as part of their efforts to do away with any need for a tonal center, Zappa began to experiment with complex polyrhythms distributed across a complex of rock riffs. (Perhaps he had decided to thumb his nose at Chuck Berry by overtly refusing to use a back beat.)

By the time he came to the Roxy, he had assembled a band of musicians as skilled as he was in negotiating the thickest of polyrhythmic textures. This involved working with multiple percussionists (Ruth Underwood, Ralph Humphrey, and Chester Thompson) and George Duke playing a variety of keyboards and synthesizers. The rest of the group included Napoleon Murphy Brock on tenor saxophone, Bruce Fowler on trombone, and Tom Fowler on bass. Then, of course, there was all of Zappa’s narration, much of which seems to waver between homage and parody directed at the sorts of lectures being given by Stockhausen and his colleagues at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.

Boulez deserves credit as the one member of the “Darmstadt set” to realize that Zappa did not need to compete with anyone in that crowd. Zappa had defined his own path, and he was both fearless and enthusiastic in following it. Boulez clearly approved; and, as I have previously observed, Zappa was responsible for the only occasion when, at a public event, I saw Boulez crack a smile.

This brings us to the virtues of this new Roxy release. While there may be an element of mockery in Zappa’s tone of voice, it definitely pays to listen when he is describing some of the complexities in what the band is playing. Furthermore, it is advantageous to have several different public takes of the same piece. Through repeated performances, the attentive ear begins to suss out relationships between foreground themes and background textures. One might almost say that this box set offers an advantage that one cannot find in even the best albums of music by Stockhausen or Varèse.

My guess is that there will be any number of potential listeners out there likely to resist on the grounds that seven CDs is too much, but this is one of those cases in which awareness of quality will only begin to emerge through exposure to quantity!

Memorable Recordings in 2016

Those who saw my report at the beginning of this month already know that the universe in which I live is almost entirely disjoint from that of the judges who determine the winners of the annual GRAMMY awards. When I looked back on the memorable recordings of 2015 on my Examiner.com site, I observed that my selections marked the largest departure from GRAMMY nominees since I began writing those retrospective articles. This year I seem to have gone the extra mile: None of my selections came even close to what the GRAMMY “experts” deemed to be prize-worthy. Furthermore, that observation gives me a comforting sense of satisfaction, perhaps the closest a writer about the performing arts can get to Mr. Dooley’s declaration that the newspaper “comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable.”

However, when it comes to afflicting the comfortable, I have to preface any remarks about recordings by recognizing a documentary film about a man whose approach to the recording industry could not have been more revolutionary, at least in his own time. The man was Frank Zappa; and the documentary was Eat That Question—Frank Zappa in His Own Words, made by Thorsten Schütte. (Those with cable service who have not yet had the opportunity to see this film should be made aware that STARZ will start broadcasting it early next month.)

Zappa may not have been the most outrageous musician of his time (the latter half of the twentieth century); but he may well have been the most unabashed about being outrageous. The title of the film comes from one of the tracks on his album The Grand Wazoo, which is probably as good a way to establish expectations for listening to Zappa’s music as one is likely to find. However, while just about any Zappa track gives the listener a good feel for how he could afflict the comfortable, Schütte’s film is based on footage of interviews he gave, most of which were on television, in which his manners are always impeccable and his delivery always soft-spoken. Furthermore, because the film is, for the most part, organized chronologically, there is something almost heartbreaking about the conclusion, in which Zappa, only months before his death by cancer in 1993, assembled an ensemble of percussionists that he conducted in a performance of Edgard Varèse’s “Ionisation.” Taken as a whole, the film is a valuable lens through which we may all view what is now passing for modernism in our “new century.”

The impact of that film on my own thinking may explain why none of the recordings that I listened to over this past year involved instances of that modernism. On the other hand they all involved decidedly fresh approaches to performance, suggesting that modernism is more important in the immediacy of acts of making music with instruments than in any acts of putting marks on paper or, for that matter, laying down tracks. The best example of the significance of that distinction can be found in the recording by Graindelavoix of the Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut, released on the Spanish Glossa label this past April. This music dates from the fourteenth century, a time when music notation was just beginning to admit of systematic interpretation, rather than serving merely as a memory aid. Nevertheless, there is an immediacy to the performance of that notation by the male voices of Graindelavoix led by Björn Schmelzer that suggests that spontaneous improvisation was part of the “package.” This is a performance of Machaut without the accumulated dust of six or seven centuries; and it is likely to have a significant (not to mention healthy) impact on how any of us think about the performance of “early music.”

A similar kind of spontaneity can be found in the recorded performances of the concertos of Antonio Vivaldi released by Brilliant Classics. These involve a string ensemble called L’Arte dell’Arco led by its concertmaster Federico Guglielmo, who is soloist in all concertos for violin. Brilliant has been releasing albums that have probably been extracted from the 66-CD “new, extended, improved and upgraded” box set called Vivaldi Edition. This year saw the release of three of those “piecemeal” albums, each taken from one of the twelve collections that Vivaldi published. Opus 8, given the title Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (the contest between harmony and invention), was released in February. This is likely to be the most popular of the releases, since the first four concertos are known as a group as The Four Seasons. This was followed by the release in July of the twelve concertos in Opus 9, given the title La Cetra (the lyre). This collection may be less familiar but is particularly engaging for the ways in which the performances honor the plucked-string connotations of the title. Finally, this month began with the release of Opera 11 and 12 in a single album. (Opus 10 is a collection of six flute concertos.) No matter how much you think that there is something “routine” across the many concertos that Vivaldi composed, there is a freshness to each of these albums that will quickly seduce you into appreciating how every concerto that Vivaldi wrote has its own unique qualities.

Freshness is also the order of the day in at least two of the releases that celebrate the centennial of the birth of Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter in March of 1915 (better late than never). Having just discussed how that freshness can still be found in Vivaldi, it is appropriate to begin with release of a major Bach album by Richter. This is what seems to be the only recording of Richter playing all 48 preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s two Books of The Well-Tempered Clavier. As is the case with many of the available Richter recordings, the performances were taken from a series of four recitals (twelve preludes and fugues at each) that Richter gave in Innsbruck in July and August of 1973. Parnassus Records released the entire collection this past May and took the relatively imaginative packaging strategy of issuing everything on a single Audio DVD. Purists may grouse about the fact that these preludes and fugues are not being played on a “period” instrument. However, whether one is learning to play these pieces or learning to listen to them, what matters most is the clarity of the individual voices that contribute to Bach’s counterpoint (this is as true of the preludes as it is of the fugues); and it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to find a performance in which Richter neglects that need for clarity. This album simply cannot be ignored by anyone who takes listening to Bach seriously.

Those who prefer breadth to depth will probably be more interested in the 24-CD box set Sviatoslav Richter: The Complete Warner Recordings. Because of its size, this site devoted three articles to this collection, one for solo piano music, one for concertos, and one for chamber music (including a single CD of art song). Here again, the factor that matters most across all three of these categories in the clarity that Richter brings to what he is playing, whether the music comes from the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century. Indeed, his skill at bringing clarity to his Bach performances serves him just as well with modernists at a considerable distance from Bach. Perhaps the best example in this collection is that of Alban Berg’s 1925 Kammerkonzert (chamber concerto) recorded at a concert performed at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris in December of 1977. Richter shared solo duties with violinist Oleg Kagan, and they were accompanied by an ensemble of thirteen wind instrumentalists from the Moscow Conservatory conducted by Yuri Nikolayevsky. Having had to sit through at least one rather opaque performance of this work in concert (with an excellent set of performers whose names are best left not mentioned), I could not help but drop my jaw at just how self-evident this recording made the music seem.

The other major collection that occupied my time this year actually crossed the boundary between 2015 and 2016. This was A Tribute to Rudolf Barshai, a twenty-CD box set released by ICA Classics in November of 2015. My guess is that most readers will appreciate that I was not ready to write about everything in this collection until the first quarter of this year, which means that, for all intents and purposes, it is part of my memory of the current year! Over the course of this entire collection, one is exposed to recorded documents of Barshai as a solo violist, as the founding member of the Borodin Quartet and an distinctive performer of chamber music with other partners, as a conductor of orchestras (both full ensembles and chamber orchestras), as an arranger, and as the author of a performing version of all five movements of Gustav Mahler’s tenth symphony. In other words there is as much breadth here as in the Richter box set, and it would be safe to say that there is not a dull moment across the entire repertoire covered by this collection.

The other memorable collection of this year is the seven-CD box set released by Loft Records of Colin Andrews performing the complete works of Olivier Messiaen. This is definitely an appropriate time to consider this collection, since the very first disc is devoted almost entirely to the cycle La Nativité du Seigneur (the Lord’s Nativity). Almost all of the works in this collection are sacred in one way or another and probably grew out of Messiaen’s duties as organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité (church of the Holy Trinity), a post he held for over 60 years. Messiaen’s own approach to faith involved a balance of the liturgical and the mystical, and both elements can be found in his organ music. In addition many of the pieces are given to extended duration, so the curious listener may wish to begin by taking small samples. However, as one begins to get used to Messiaen’s sonorities and his approaches to phrase structure, one will eventually ease into his extended durations as well.

Finally, there is one “historical” recording that definitely made its mark this year. This is the two-CD album released by harmonia mundi of the two piano trios by Franz Schubert, D. 898 in B-flat major and D. 929 in E-flat major, along with an additional track for the D. 897 nocturne in E-flat major. The pianist is Andreas Staier, playing a “fortepiano after Conrad Graf” (as it says in the booklet notes). The sonorities of this instrument definitely throw lights on Schubert’s music that one may find unfamiliar but (hopefully) not alien. Staier is joined by violinist Daniel Sepec and cellist Roel Dieltiens, and those unfamiliar with period instruments may be struck by the narrowness of the dynamic range. However, on this recording that quality lends a sense of intimacy that might otherwise be spoiled by louder dynamics. Thus, things only really get loud when Staier engages the “special percussion effects” of his instrument for the trio section of the third movement of D. 929, suggesting that Schubert wanted this section to have a really rustic sound. Eyebrows may be raised, but it is easy to appreciate that Staier’s approach makes perfect sense.

On the whole, then, this was a very good year for recordings; and, if the GRAMMY judges did not “get it,” then that is exclusively their problem!

Remembering More Than John Henken

Thanks to a post by Alex Ross to his The Rest is Noise blog, I found a link to the review John Henken wrote for the Los Angeles Times about an event at UCLA called An Evening With Pierre Boulez and Frank Zappa. Henken's opening words, deliberately cribbing from Abraham Lincoln, were, "The world will little note nor long remember what was said." For those who had not attended the event, it took a while to figure out why this was the case. It had nothing to do with either Boulez or Zappa or, for that matter, the relationship between them. (Zappa had been a guest at IRCAM; and the Boulez Conducts Zappa CD is still available from Amazon.com.)

Rather, the key factor in the evening being as unproductive as it was can be attributed entirely to the moderator for the event, David Raksin. For the benefit of those who do not recognize this name, Raksin composed the theme song for the movie Laura, a tune of awesome sophistication that has yet to be surpassed on any film soundtrack. He was also a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, who supposedly once said to him something like, "Your music for Laura was excellent. Why do you want to compose twelve-tone music?"

Sadly, Raksin always seemed to feel that he needed more "reputable" credentials; and that conviction probably haunted him throughout his life. Thus, he tried to approach Boulez as an equal and Zappa as some insignificant upstart. He also annoyed the audience by dismissing questions submitted for both Boulez and Zappa as not worth asking, thus provoking annoyed catcalls from said audience. To some extent Henken was right: What was said was not particularly memorable, because Raksin all but prevented anything of significance from being said.

On the other hand, in the spirit of one of Alan Kaprow's happenings, the evening was unforgettable. Fortunately, it was memorable for at least one reason other than Raksin's reprehensible behavior. That was the only occasion on which I ever saw Boulez smile; and, as might be guessed, the smile was in response to one of Zappa's off-the-wall comments.

Leonard Bernstein: Champion of the Middle-brow?

I have no desire to read all 606 pages of The Leonard Bernstein Letters, no matter how good a job Nigel Simeone did as editor. I figure that reading Robert Gottlieb's account of the book for The New York Review has informed me to a level of satisfaction that does not need to be further advanced. I rather like Gottlieb's dispassionate approach, providing background material when it was necessary and being "frank and open" about many of the warts without getting overly judgmental about any of them.

For better or worse, however, I realize that my own opinions of Bernstein have been shaped, at least in part, by the time I have put into reading Amiria Baraka (writing as LeRoi Jones) writing about jazz. If was from reading Baraka that I confronted that hard truth that not everyone who pays to attend a performance of music is necessarily committed to actually listening (in Igor Stravinsky's sense of that word) to that performance. For Baraka such lackadaisical audiences were simply symptoms of a "culture of middle-brow thinking." Among the middle-brow, Bernstein was the ultimate source of knowledge of the concert repertoire. I have even known music critics capable of writing accounts of concerts that I have felt were worth reading who still, perhaps out of reflex, regard Bernstein as the ultimate authority when it comes to bringing a better understanding of music to the general public.

From my point of view, I recognize that he could labor long and hard to simplify the complex. Unfortunately, there are too many situations when he achieved that goal through distortions that run the gamut from simply confusing to creating dangerously false impressions. The good news is that he tended to focus on topics that he figured would "sell" to the general public. One positive result is thus than Arnold Schoenberg was spared his distortions (as, for that matter, was Thelonious Monk). On the other hand I shall always remember when he decided it was time to explain what was happening to popular music in the wake of The Beatles and eventually came to the conclusion that the epitome of how things had changed could be found in the music of Janis Ian!

I would now like to skate out on some thin ice and suggest that Bernstein could thrive in New York because so many New Yorkers were eager to gobble up the stuff he was dishing out. Baraka was obviously not one of them. Indeed, among those who took teaching very seriously, I get the impression from available biographical material that Lennie Tristano knew the limitations of Bernstein' superficial capacity for perception. One consequence is that, for some time, if you wanted to go to Lincoln Center to inform yourself on how a piece of music ticked, you would learn more from watching the choreography of George Balanchine at the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater) than you would from buying a ticket to get into Avery Fisher Hall. Those were days when it seemed as if Chicago had better taste in conductors.

Fortunately, the New York Philharmonic now has Alan Gilbert, and life seems to have become more interesting. I am left wondering, however, if Bernstein would ever have figured out what to make of a composer like Magnus Lindberg. My guess is that Lindberg would have been too far from Bernstein's comfort zone; but in that distance Lindberg would have enjoyed the company of Frank Zappa, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage!

Plastic People of the Solar System?

Given the grief we are getting from just about every region on planet Earth, "getting away from it all" might entail traveling a significantly great distance. One would have thought that Titan, a moon of Saturn currently be scanned by the Cassini probe. However, according to a story on BBC News, Cassini has detected what appears to be naturally-occurring propylene. This is, by no means, a rare item on earth. It is strung into long chains (polypropylene) for many of the familiar products of the plastics industry. In other words, until Cassini stuck its nose into Titan, so to speak, we though of it as a synthetic compound. Since Cassini is rich in hydrocarbons, it is not beyond the imagination that propylene would form naturally there. On the other hand, it may turn out that Titan is the home of Franz Zappa's Plastic People and that The Plastic People of the Universe may have set their sights further than necessary.

Work: Dodging the Existential Bullet

It appears that BBC News thinks that “Technology of Business” is a big thing.  When I first encountered an article by Sharif Sakr that listed him as “Technology of Business reporter,” I was not quite sure what to make of the title;  but I found that he had at least one or two interesting observations to make.  Now I see that Fiona Graham is writing under the same title;  and I am beginning to worry that this “department” may have an unhealthy signal-to-noise ratio.

Graham’s piece, submitted yesterday, has the title “The virtual business: Doing deals in your pyjamas;”  and my concern is that it does more to encourage misconceptions than to enlighten.  Start with the caption to the photograph at the top of the article:

Blue sky thinking: Running a virtual business could mean that when you have an internet connection, you're at work

The photograph itself shows a young man who has converted two park chairs into a recliner, his back leaning on one and his feet propped up on the other.  He has neither shirt nor shoes;  but he does have a netbook propped up on his rolled-up jeans.  The implication is that this is the new face of the “man at work.”

My immediate reaction was that this reclining state sort of pulls back the camera view of those insidious billboards advertising the iPad.  The implication seems to be that, whether we are talking about reading or working (the two of which may, of course, be combined), the highest priority is that of creature comforts.  For those of us who remember Fellini Satyricon, life has become all about being a guest at one of Trimalcione’s excessive parties;  and all else is incidental.  (By the way, Fellini was far from the first to pick up on this imagery;  those parties apparently inspired Scott Fitzgerald to write The Great Gatsby.)

What does this have to do with work?  Does it have anything to do with work?  These questions are the tip of an iceberg that involves far deeper inquiry into the nature of work in the world the Internet has made.  The problem is that neither Graham nor any of the people she interviewed for this particular article care a fig about that iceberg.  The bottom line is that the motto behind this article can be attributed to Frank Zappa:  We’re Only in It for the Money.  Unfortunately, no one involved with this article realized that Zappa was being satirical!

Getting One's Perceptual Categories in Order

My recent attempt to do justice to this week’s performance of Edgard Varèse’s “Amériques” by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas reminded me of my current round of struggles with reading Jacques Derrida.  Specifically, I have been wrestling with Dissemination, Barbara Johnson’s translation of La Dissémination, and the mind-bending games Derrida plays with the concept of “preface,” trying to make the case that the text that appears where one would expect a preface is not really a preface (nor could it ever be).

For those unfamiliar with this work, the first sentence is:

This (therefore) will not have been a book.

Think of that as the ascent to the top of the roller coaster ride before the free fall begins.  The basic game that Derrida plays is to ask what it means for a writer to write something that tells the reader what (s)he will be reading in the future.  In far blunter language than Derrida would ever use, it comes down to asking:  Why would you say what you are going to say when you have already said it?  (This presumes that the preface is written after the “work” has been completed, which is usually the case.)

If all Derrida wanted to do was get me lost in a labyrinth, I could appreciate his intention with some amusement;  but I still wanted to get a bird’s eye view of the labyrinth he had designed.  After a bit of groping around with his convoluted sentences, I found myself falling back on Friedrich Hayek’s speculations about sensory order and Gerald Edelman’s efforts to pursue those speculations through the investigation of brain behavior.  Edelman’s work revolves around the capability of the brain to perform perceptual categorization;  and, as I wandered through Derrida’s labyrinth, I realized that there are actually two aspects of perceptual categorization.  The better understood aspect is the one motivated by Hayek;  and it involves “ordering sensations” according to “known categories.”  The more challenging aspect, however, involves how mind maintains a repertoire of the categories it “knows.”  From this point of view, writing a preface is a strategy for making sure that the reader has those categories that are prerequisite for making sense of the text to follow.  Thus, it is less a matter of saying what you are going to say and more one and more one of inducing a set of perceptual categories in the reader such that, when you get around to “saying it,” the reader can then figure out what you “mean.”

This brings me to the challenge of listening to Varèse.  For his time Varèse basically laid siege to those perceptual categories that we all assumed would serve us when listening to music.  What he wrote just did not “fit” into those categories;  but, what is worse, he never bothered to provide us with the benefit of any sort of preface.  Thus, there is little a listener can do other than roll his/her own categories as the music unfolds.  The good news is that there is now music that goes beyond the Varèse canon;  and much of that music can help us establish new perceptual categories as much as “total immersion” in Varèse’s own works can.  This would explain why I found myself thinking a lot about the music of Frank Zappa while I was listening to “Amériques” on Thursday night.  I might even suggest that, if one wanted to prepare a “preface” for this particular composition, a good start might be a screening of 200 Motels!

Miles Davis and Gregor Piatigorsky

Perhaps the only thing more awesome than the thoroughness with which Robin Kelley has accounted for the life of Thelonious Monk is the scope of his bibliography. As I read the book, I would occasionally tick off an item in one of the footnotes when it struck me as a source for further examination. Given the length of Kelley's book, I knew I should do this sparingly. Yesterday I took stock of all the ticks and started checking off which ones I could find in the San Francisco Public Library. I quickly realized that I would have to come up with a list short enough for a pile of books I could manage to carry home! I spent yesterday afternoon at the Library examining all of the candidates, homing in on six and rejecting five. I am not going to enumerate those five, because I suspect that there is still value in them. I had to make a pragmatic decision on what I could manage, and I am sure that I shall be reminded of all five of these books as my research proceeds.

Of the books that I did select, the most fascinating was probably Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews by Arthur Taylor. I realized that, in my own quest to tease out how and why it is that the nature of music has more to do with how that music is performed, rather than how it is documented in artifacts of notation, I often forget that the study of performance has more to do with anthropology (such as is practiced by someone like Pierre Bourdieu) than with music theory or music history. Anthropology, in turn, tends to be a product of methods of observation and interviewing. The problem in both of these settings, however, is that the anthropologist is almost always an outsider; and there any number of jokes about what happens when that outsider status goes awry.

Taylor, on the other hand, was very much an insider. His experiences as a drummer brought him in contact with so many of the leading figures of jazz history that, had he directed his efforts otherwise, he could have been as significant a chronicler of jazz as Jean Froissart had been for the first half of the Hundred Years' War. Instead, he chose a much more modest path. Beginning in 1966 he began to interview musicians whom he had worked with or known to document their perspectives on what "making jazz" meant to them. Notes and Tones is the result of that interviewing process, and it was one of those books that I could not wait to begin.

When the book first appeared, the first interview was with Miles Davis. In a subsequent edition published by Da Capo Press, Miles is preceded by Dexter Gordon; but my Library copy was the original Perigee edition. As could have been anticipated, Miles was not the most cooperative interview subject; but he also made it clear that he felt more comfortable talking with Taylor than with an outsider.

The passage from the interview that interested me the most was the following response to a question about how much things had changed since Miles was first starting to play jazz:

They don’t have anyplace to experiment for young guys who start playing and who play their own stuff. It’s because of all those records they make nowadays … you know, the guys copy off the records, so they don’t have anything original. You can’t find a musician who plays anything different. They all copy off each other. If I were starting out again, I wouldn’t listen to records. I very seldom listen to jazz records, because they all do the same thing. I only listen to guys that are original, like Ahmad Jamal and Duke Ellington, guys like Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Coltrane.

This interview was conducted on January 28, 1968. About a decade later I was working in Santa Barbara; and one of my colleagues had previously been in the Music Department at the University of Southern California, where he has served as a pianist for some of the classes taught by Gregor Piatigorsky. He told me that, when Piatigorsky got really mad at a student, the worst thing he could say was, "You sound just like a Rostropovich recording!" In retrospect I realize that he was saying exactly the same thing that Miles was saying to Taylor: The student was so obsessed with copying what (s)he heard on a recording that (s)he did not "have anything original" to say in his/her performance.

Any thought of performance as a "realization" of a notation document is a dangerous misconstruction. Performance is about "having something to say," which is worth saying only if it adds to an ongoing conversation, rather than just repeating what has already been said. The notation may provide the framework for structuring what one says; but the content of what one says resides in the approach one takes to performing, rather than in the notation being performed. This may be more evident when we consider the practices of jazz performers who relied almost entirely on working by ear (such as Art Tatum and Monk); but it is just as applicable in the classical domain, no matter how detailed the notated specifications may be. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it was not hard for Pierre Boulez to find common ground with Frank Zappa. Both saw notation as a path to push the envelope of what one could do in performance; but both knew that the music was in the performance, rather than the notation. My only regret is that, of the two of them, Boulez is now the only one left to keep reminding us of the significance of this precept.

Ultimately, Miles' complaint to Taylor had to do with "young guys" trying to perform without adequate education. Piatigorsky was up against the same problem. Has this situation improved? As usual, it depends which end of the telescope you use to examine the situation. When I hang out at master classes taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I encounter all sorts of imaginative strategies that direct students away from the details in the notation and towards the more subtle details concerned with performance. This reinforces me when I then confront so much of the junk that is now out there on the Internet by those who are better at self-promotion than they are in cultivating a "self" worth promoting! Unfortunately, quality is not its own reward. (Has it ever been?) Even Conservatory students with the richest of experiences will have to encounter the necessity of self-promotion in the world the Internet has made; but at least they will be going into that world with something that adds to, rather than repeats, the conversation!

Professors and Politicians in Vilnius

Apparently, it is one thing for a Yale University Professor of History to explore parallels between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and quite another for politicians to acknowledge that professor's work. The professor in question is Timothy Snyder. The work is the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which is not scheduled for publication until October 2010. However, this past May 9 Snyder delivered a lecture in Vilnius on material that will be included in the book; and a text based on that lecture has appeared in the latest issue of The New York Review. I found that lecture sufficiently fascinating that it inspired a post I wrote this morning.

That post concerned using Snyder's material as a new lens for critiquing the evangelism of globalization and economic growth, particularly from evangelists such as Tom Friedman. However, according to a BBC NEWS report, there are Russian diplomats not interested in reflecting on Snyder's position:

Russian delegates have walked out of an OSCE [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe] session in Vilnius after it voted for a remembrance day for the victims of both Nazism and Stalinism.

The pan-European security and democracy body passed a resolution equating the roles of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in starting World War II.

Moscow's delegation boycotted the vote after failing to have it withdrawn.

I suppose it is possible that neither Snyder's lecture nor the OSCE meeting would have taken place had Vilnius not been named European Capital of Culture of 2009; but it is a prime example of the sort of "bloodland" that Snyder is examining in his book. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Vilnius was seized by the Soviet Union on September 19, 1939, two days after it had invaded Poland from the east. When Hitler abrogated this Pact in June of 1941 and launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Vilnius quickly fell to the Nazis. After the Second World War Lithuania became a Soviet Socialist Republic, with Vilnius remaining as its capital. The city thus had the experience of "both German and Soviet armies passing through … twice, in attack and retreat" (as Snyder put it in describing Belarus and Ukraine). As its Wikipedia entry cites, Vilnius also played a major role in the history of Judaism:

A major scholar of Judaism and Kabbalah centered in Vilnius was the famous Rabbi Eliyahu Kremer, also known as the Vilna Gaon. His students have significant influence among Orthodox Jews in Israel and around the globe.

One of Snyder's points, however, is that there were both Christians and Jews in Vilnius who managed to survive the horrors of both Hitler and Stalin; and, perhaps in recognition of its "Capital of Culture" status, the OSCE saw fit to memorialize those who did not survive. Unfortunately, this did not play well with the representatives of a country that has been experiencing recent revivals of Stalin nostalgia as he becomes a more and more distant historical figure. I suspect that the irony of this situation will please the ghost of another controversial historical figure (this one from music history), who (again according to the Wikipedia entry) was honored by Vilnius back in 1995:

In 1995, the world's first bronze cast of Frank Zappa was installed in the Užupis district with the permission of the government.

On the Dialectical Synthesis of Bach and Zappa

Regular readers know that SPIEGEL ONLINE is one of my favorite sources for news on a global scale, primarily where topics such as the economy, foreign affairs, and politics are concerned. However, when it comes to music, my major sources seems to be London (the Telegraph and the Financial Times) and New York (mostly Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times and Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review). Nevertheless, I had to turn to Sebastian Knauer for a thorough account of a legal battle between the Zappa Family Trust (run by Frank Zappa's widow Gail) and the Arf-Society, which organizes the Zappanale in the north-eastern German town of Bad Doberan. There is no reason to question the Zappanale's seriousness when it comes to maintaining performances of Zappa's music. As Knauer reported, "18 bands took to the stage in the 19th annual Zappanale last weekend."

However, I am less interested in how the legal dispute will ultimately be resolved and more interested in the innovative approaches that the Arf-Society is taking to musical performance. As Knauer reported, their activities are now extending beyond an annual gig in Bad Doberan:

Last week, Zappanale organizers put on a show at St. Katharinen church in Hamburg called "Zappa Plays for Bach." Some 600 guests showed up for a performance of variations on the famous Goldberg Variations. Indeed, improvisation is one quality Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) shares with his colleague Frank Zappa (1940-1993).

All proceeds from the concert went to the Hamburg foundation Stiftung Johann Sebastian, which is trying to raise money to recondition a Barock organ on which Bach played in 1720. And it was a fantastic show -- with nine musicians from the Florida group Bogus Pomp playing together with the former Zappa saxophone player Napoleon Murphy Brock putting on pieces ranging from "Absolutely Free Medley" to "Chunga's Revenge" to "Idiot Bastard Son."

Personally, I can think of few things more stimulating than an opportunity to listen to Bach in the context of Zappa and Zappa in the context of Bach, all in a single concert. When Zappa receives any attention in a concert setting, it always seems to be in conjunction with his work with the Ensemble InterContemporain with support from Pierre Boulez. Having seen these two men together on a stage at UCLA, I have to say that Zappa is the only person I have ever encountered who managed to get a smile out of Boulez; but, as far as the rest of the world has been concerned, there seemed to be a need to intellectualize Zappa's extremism as a prerequisite to enjoying it. Only Václav Havel seemed happy to enjoy Zappa's work for its own sake, although, as I wrote at the end of last season, there are some signs that the composer Magnus Lindberg is comfortable enough with Zappa's logic, grammar, and rhetoric to pick up where he left off and proceed beyond the "specialist confines" of the Ensemble InterContemporain to more conventional settings, such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.

Thus, I shall close with a question: If our listening of Lindberg is well informed by past experience of listening to Zappa, when will the San Francisco Symphony program one of Zappa's works on its subscription series?

New Sounds and Old

If there was a unifying theme to this week's San Francisco Symphony program at Davies Symphony Hall, it probably had less to do with any perceptual categories common to the offerings and more to do with the versatility of conductor Sakari Oramo, since he presented himself to us not only as a conductor but also as an orchestrator of Claude Debussy. When considered in the context of Debussy's consummate skill in writing for orchestra (and I happen to feel that Michael Tilson Thomas' interpretation of La Mer is one of his strong suits in the repertoire he has built up with the San Francisco Symphony), it is hard to view an orchestration of music by Debussy as anything other than an act of chutzpah. ("Dammit, if Debussy had wanted the voice to be accompanied by an orchestra, he would have written these songs that way!") Regular readers, of course, know that I have plumbed the depths of the semantics of chutzpah to the extent that I can admit positive, as well as negative, connotations; and I am willing to acknowledge that Oramo's intensions as an orchestrator involved the positive connotation. The performance, on the other hand, was another matter.

The problem is that, since these songs were performed by the conductor/orchestrator's wife, Anu Komsi, it is hard to escape the conjecture that this whole affair was a vanity project. Now vanity projects can turn out for the better as often as they turn out the other way. One of the most compelling performances of Arnold Schoenberg's "Erwartung" I ever heard took place at a Cleveland Symphony Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall when Christoph von Dohnányi was conducting his (then) wife, Anja Silja (whom I had recently seen singing Marie in the Metropolitan Opera production of Wozzeck). In this case, however, I am disappointed to report that Komsi is no Silja. The former may well be able to jump through more virtuosic hoops than the latter ever did, but she made it through those hoops with what must politely be called a neglect of the nuances of dynamic control. (Less politely, most of those jumps stood out like sore thumbs!)

If that were not enough, I could not help but feel that this particular Finnish diva was just not that all comfortable with the French language. This involved more than the usual trend of ignoring the consonants for the sake of getting the vowels right. It had more to do with the extent to which the poets being set by Debussy, such as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, took the very sound of the text as seriously as Debussy took the sound of the music setting the text. To put it in more extreme terms, a poem delivered without a gut-level sense of the sound is no longer that poem; it is little more than an abstract exercise in performance. Thus, the failure of Komsi to do as much justice to the poets Debussy had selected as to his settings of those poets rendered the question of the effectiveness of Oramo's orchestrations little more than moot.

Fortunately, this "vanity project" was a relatively minor part of the evening, sandwiched between one of the major monuments of the past and a truly awesome West Coast premiere. The latter was "Seht die Sonne" by Magnus Lindberg, jointly commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic (who first performed it under Simon Rattle) and the San Francisco Symphony, leading me to believe that Thomas and Rattle may be able to get along, regardless of whatever "Mahler rivalry" they may have. That Mahler reference is more than incidental, by the way. Rattle's premiere of "Seht die Sonne" was coupled with Gustav Mahler's ninth symphony; so I suspect that it is not coincidence that the very opening motif of "Seht die Sonne" is the same motif that begins the Mahler ninth, even if the title of Lindberg's work is taken from one of the poems by Jens Peter Jacobsen that Schoenberg set in his Gurrelieder. Nor is it a coincidence that the orchestral resources of "Seht die Sonne" bump those of the Gurrelieder up to the next level (without including either solo or choral voices, mind you). Indeed, it would probably not be unfair to say that, in "Seht die Sonne," Lindberg has taken the very palette of sonority, which may well be the greatest virtue of the Gurrelieder, and extrapolate it to even greater orchestral resources.

From this point of view we would do well to consider two additional "sources of inspiration," one acknowledged by Thomas May's program notes and a second, unacknowledged but a corollary to the first. The acknowledged source is Pierre Boulez, particularly in the context of what Boulez learned about sonority from Olivier Messiaen. However, one cannot listen to the closely-knit passages of a large number of distinct wind voices cavorting through eccentric rhythmic patterns without thinking of all that Boulez had done, particularly with his Ensemble InterContemporain, to champion the compositions of Frank Zappa. Lord knows, Zappa's own groups, even the one he assembled for 200 Motels, could not cope with that particular aspect of Zappa's writing as well as the "Boulez band" could! Thus, Lindberg's escalation of orchestral resources applies as much to the Ensemble InterContemporain (particularly in the context of the demands that Zappa placed on them) as it does to the orchestration of the Gurrelieder.

The result, as one might imagine, is a mighty noise, never shy about its dissonances but always exhilarating. This made for a sharp contrast with the recent performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage's recent Three Asteroids, which, from an arithmetical point of view, may have used greater resources than Lindberg did but ended up using them to lesser effect. If we were to seek out another composition for comparison, we would do better to look back to Olivier Messiaen's "L'Ascension," not just for the numbers of the resources but also for the ways those resources were put to textural (as well as melodic and harmonic) use. All this is basically to argue that there would be much to be gained from "Seht die Sonne" making a "return visit" in some season in the not-too-distant future. This work does not deserve to be put on the shelf after it has had its first innings. It may well shape how we hear music in this new century, and for that alone it needs to be heard more often.

Thus, to say that "Seht die Sonne" was capable of holding its own against its "complementary bookend," which was the seventh symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven, is to say quite a lot. Scores whose ink is barely dry rarely deserve to be compared to those of a man who, as I have previously observed, tends to be more monument than master. However, if we try to get "beyond the monument," as I have done by trying to view Beethoven as the "omen" of John Cage and Philip Glass, the pairing of these two compositions is less intimidating, particularly since, for all of his other influences, Lindberg does not appear to owe any debts to either Cage or Glass! Nevertheless, that seventh symphony (which, as I recall, was Beethoven's first composition after losing all of his hearing) shows that same attentiveness to the rhetorical significance of both silence and ostinato, which I have observed, respectively, in Cage and Glass and which I continue to hear in all periods of Beethoven's life as a composer.

It was also apparent that Oramo appreciated that attentiveness. Indeed, his use of attaca transitions between the first two and last two movements were a sign that, one the larger scale, he wanted us to hear this as a two-movement composition in which the silences in those two movements were as important as the sounds. From that point of view, the silences we encounter in the seventh symphony prepare us for the even greater profundity of the silences Beethoven summoned in his ninth symphony. Beethoven's use of ostinato in the seventh symphony, on the other hand, has more to do with the obsessive persistence of specific rhythmic patterns, rather than with either the melodies behind those patterns or how those melodies are orchestrated. To a great extent the fundamental idea of a rhythmic pulse is scaled up to the level of a motif and becomes the primary driving force of each of the four movements (meaning that, if there is a two-movement scheme, then that force goes through a transition in each of the movements). Thus, one of the things that made Oramo's performance so interesting was the extent to which he conducted by this pulse, rather than "by the beat." (There was one passage in the Allegretto where his baton was barely moving, if it was moving at all.)

The result was a performance of Beethoven in the spirit of Thomas Stearns Eliot's Beethoven-inspired poetry. Oramo brought us to where many of us "started," when we were first getting to know the experience of hearing a symphony orchestra. However, when he brought us there, we came to know that "place for the first time;" and any conductor who understands how to do that has an understanding of Beethoven that transcends the mere document of a musical score!

Collaborating Composers

Earlier this week I found myself reviewing the Gavin Bryars discs in my CD collection. I first became seriously aware of Bryars during my time at Schlumberger, when I used to listen regularly to John Schaefer's New Sounds program on WNYC. (I say "seriously" because my first actual contact with Bryars was in late 1971, since he was the only person who had written to me requesting a copy of my doctoral dissertation! At that time, however, I had absolutely no idea who he was, let alone what he was actually doing.) One of Schaefer's programs featured "Jesus' Blood never failed me yet" in its original recording, which filled one side of a vinyl LP issued as part of Brian Eno's Obscure series. The work absolutely fascinated both my wife-to-be and me. In a sort of parody of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero," the composition was based on a tape loop of a British tramp singing this hymn on the text that Bryars assumed as his title, accompanied by a "live" chamber ensemble playing providing the tramp with more elaborate background on each iteration. It took me forever to find a copy of the recording, which I finally got when a British friend sent me a package of several of the major Obscure releases. By then I had also been exposed to the other side of the vinyl, "The Sinking of the Titanic," which offered a different (but equally fascinating) take on variation-through-repetition.

With the advent of compact discs, it became easier to collect Bryars' music; and I started learning more about him. I learned, for example, that the overall architectures of both "Jesus' Blood" and "Titanic" had been determined by the duration of music that would fit on a single LP side. Thus, when they were released on CD, they were no longer coupled; each work now pretty much filled the capacity of a single CD. More interesting, however, was my discovery of how many of Bryars' compositions seemed to grow out of musicians with whom he came to work; and those musicians made for an interesting mix of the genres they usually performed. For example "After the Requiem," composed in 1990 added Bill Frisell's approach to jazz on an electric guitar to three of the members of the Balanescu Quartet with an alluringly moody result. Similarly, in 1987 Bryars, himself a double bass player, composed "By the Vaar" for Charlie Hayden, who has performed bass in some of the most experimental jazz groups.

There is, of course, nothing new about composers working directly with performers. It is a practice that can probably be found in every era of music history. What is more interesting is the emergence of genre-crossing in what we tend to call "serious music;" and Bryars is far from alone in this practice. Each of Steve Reich's "Counterpoint" works was composed with a specific soloist in mind; and in "Electric Counterpoint" the soloist was Pat Metheny (who has experimented with collaborations of his own involving composers as radically different from his own style as Ornette Coleman, who, just to illustrate the complexity of the social network, frequently performed with Charlie Hayden as his bass).

We may have the Sixties to thank for at least part of this kind of cross-fertilization. After all, Frank Zappa's early fascination with Edgard Varèse (because the guy behind the counter in a record shop could not imagine why anyone would want to listen to that kind of music) eventually led to his collaborative work with Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain; and we should probably take at face value claims from The Beatles about the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen (even if, as I have suggested, Stockhausen was more reticent about his own influences). More important, however, is the way in which this trend provides us with yet another reminder that the music is all about the performance, rather than about a composer wrestling with filling up the pages of blank sheets of manuscript paper. As a corollary we have come to recognize that each genre engenders a different approach to listening. So the crossing of genres is an opportunity for the synthesis of new listening strategies, which will then engender new approaches to composition and performance that will elicit their own new approaches to listening. Has music ever before be so alive with so many avenues for creativity?