“Music of the Future” Whose Time Has Passed

This morning I found myself reflecting on the final program for this year’s San Francisco Tape Music Festival, which will take place this coming Sunday evening. That program will begin with works by two particularly inventive (and controversial) composers from the last century, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. I first became acquainted with Cage when I went on mushroom hunts with him in Boulder, Colorado. (My thesis advisor at the time was teaching a summer course at the University there and had invited me to join him as teaching assistant.) My encounter with Cage led to a spurt in both my writing, particularly about the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and experiments with tape music. My encounters with Stockhausen’s music, on the other hand, were few and far between; and, to the best of my knowledge, we were never in the same place at the same time.

I think it would be fair to say that both of these composers believed strongly that the immediacy of performance should always take precedence over any attempts at “capture” through recording technology (video, as well as audio). Nevertheless, when I learned, back in the Nineties, that there would be a “complete edition” of Stockhausen’s works on compact disc, I tried to keep up with individual albums as they were released. To be fair, however, I never saw this project through to its completion, which resulted in 106 albums.

Cover design of the HYMNEN album (Stockhausen Edition no. 10, from the COMPLETE EDITION CD CATALOG)

One of the albums I did collect was the two-CD account of HYMNEN: Elektronische und Konkrete Music. This was a two-hour reflection on national anthems from around the world, which combined instrumental performance with a diversity of electronic equipment for both synthesis and transformations. For those that do not already know, “concrete music” was a genre of tape music based on recordings of natural (concrete) sounds, which may or may not also involve instrumental sounds. In HYMNEN the techniques of synthesis and transformations pretty much obliterated any brief moments when a phrase of one of those national anthems might be recognized. Nevertheless, the score was definitely intended for performance, but in a setting in which both sound and lighting could be projected in ways that would surround the audience. Furthermore, there were three different versions of performance; and the album of four CDs that I had acquired accounted for only the first two of them.

Over the course of the decades that followed my purchase of HYMNEN, my interest in its performance has come and gone. These days I would say that the interest is wistful but not particularly proactive. For the most part, I tend to be reluctant to take a “deep dive” into anything of epic proportions (and Stockhausen was never shy when it came to creating on an epic scale). For that matter any interest in the “complete edition” has pretty much faded, simply because there are too many other things clamoring for my attention!

Indeed, listening to the HYMNEN CDs reminded me of an experience with Earplay that dates back to the spring of 2019. That occasion was an all-premiere program entitled Sound and Shadow. One of the works on the program, “Feel” by Australian composer Claire Jordan triggered (for me at least) memories of Third Stream Jazz. This involved encouraging jazz combos to jam with serial techniques. Things did not turn out very well; and, at that time, I compared it with the promise of transportation by monorail, which I (and many others) described as “an idea of the future whose time quickly passed.”

I suppose one could say that Third Stream was an attempt to move into the future while informed with techniques of the past. Obviously, everything we do (including the way in which I am writing this) is informed by the past. What matters is not whether or not we are cognizant of the past but how we assess our knowledge for application into the future. My guess is that, for better or worse, we can only muddle our way into the future. The good news is that at least a few are better at muddling than others!

Islandia Music Records to Launch Schick Series

Composer John Cage (photograph by Rob C. Croes for the Dutch National Archives, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

This Friday Islandia Music Records (the label managed by cellist Maya Beiser) will launch a multi-album series of recordings of performances by percussionist Steven Schick, collectively entitled Weather Systems. The title of the first album is A Hard Rain. Most of the release is devoted to innovative approaches to percussion that were explored during the Fifties and Sixties. The contributing composers from that period are (in order of appearance) John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Charles Wuorinen, Helmut Lachenmann, and William Hibbard. The album then concludes with an “electronic augmentation” of Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate.” Amazon.com has created a Web page for this new album, which is processing pre-orders. Unfortunately, it is only being distributed for digital release; but, fortunately, the download includes the accompanying booklet.

Where the content of this recording is concerned, anyone of my generation will probably see the elephant in the room. That elephant is the album Electronics & Percussion - Five Realizations By Max Neuhaus, a vinyl album released by Columbia Masterworks in 1968. That album is still available through an Amazon.com Web page at what may described politely as “collectors’ prices.” To the best of my knowledge, the CD version has only been produced by Sony Music Japan International, meaning that the price on the Amazon.com Web page will probably also only appeal to serious collectors. Two of the selections on A Hard Rain also appear on Electronics & Percussion: Feldman’s “The King of Denmark” and Stockhausen’s “Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger” (cycle for a percussionist), given the number 9 in the composer’s catalog.

Now, to be fair, I enjoy the fact that anyone interested in either of these compositions has an opportunity to choose between performances or even listen to both of them. Nevertheless, I have to say that David Behrman tended to make better programming decisions than those made jointly by Schick and his recording engineer Andrew Munsey. As a case in point, consider the opening tracks on A Hard Rain.

The first of these is Cage’s “27 minutes 10.554 seconds” (I have chosen the headline used on the Wikipedia page for this composition to clarify the meaning of the title) scored for a solo percussionist. That meticulous approach to duration suggests that for this piece (and others titled only by the span of the duration), Cage was particularly interested in the interplay of sounds and silence. As a result, there are extended periods of silence in the performance, one of which occurs very early in Schick’s performance (so early that even I wondered whether there might have been a defect in the recording medium). The good news is that Cage was more interested in the general qualities of the passing of time than he was in how time is shared through the alternation of sounds and silence.

However, this becomes problematic on Schick’s new recording when the Cage selection is followed by “Zyklus.” The latter also involves the alternation of sound and silence, since the percussionist has to rotate himself in a circle, surrounded by the instruments he is playing. Stockhausen’s silences tend not to endure as long as Cage’s, but they are just as much a part of the music-making process. The problem, however, is that any listener that is not watching the clock while listening to Cage’s composition will probably have a hard time recognizing when the Cage piece ends and the Stockhausen piece begins! Behrman, on the other hand, ordered the selections on his album in such a way that one could detect significant qualitative changes in progressing from one piece to another.

Is this a matter of picking insignificant nits? Personally, I do not think so. I believe that every composer has a right to have his music recognized as such, even if the indeterminacy of that music is a significant element in the behavior of listening. Thus, while the performer may have to contend with watching both clock and notation at the same time, the listener should only have to focus on listening. In other words, while I can appreciate A Hard Rain as a valuable catalogue of compositions from the middle of the last century, I feel that the production has overlooked the fact that the listener also has a “point of view,” which tends to be even more important when indeterminacy is involved.

The good news for Schick is that the prevailing “digital mindset” is no longer constrained to honor the “program” defined by a recording. One can listen to any track in isolation as easily as one can shuffle the ordering of all of the tracks. (When the tracks are digital, one no longer has to worry about whether or not they are on the same CD!) Were Cage still alive, I suspect that he would relish the ways in which one may take a more creative approach to the act of listening. (On the other hand, I am not sure that either Stockhausen or Feldman would agree with him on this matter!)

Nevertheless, perhaps because my values seem to become more old-fashioned as I get older, the Neuhaus album still appeals to me more than the Schick album does. However, that is just my state of mind in the immediate present. If I spend more time listening to A Hard Rain, who knows where or how my tastes will shift!

“Kurzwellen” for a New Age from mode records

courtesy of Naxos of America

Two weeks ago mode records released a new recording of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Kurzwellen” (short waves). This piece was created in 1968, scored for six players with shortwave radios and live electronics; and it is Number 25 in the catalog that Stockhausen compiled of his own compositions. When the work was first performed, the players were Aloys Kontarsky (piano), Harald Bojé (Electronium, an early model synthesizer also equipped for algorithmic composition), Alfred Alings and Rolf Gehlhaar (both on a single tam-tam with microphone), Johannes Fritsch (viola), and Stockhausen himself managing the live electronics and sound projection. Deutsche Grammophon recorded two performances they gave on May 4, 1968 and April 9, 1969, respectively, releasing both on a two-LP album. These were subsequently reissued on CD by Stockhausen-Verlag, each on a separate disc in the Stockhausen Complete Edition series.

These days I suspect that most readers will have to resort to Wikipedia to find out just what a shortwave radio is. Before the Internet simplified the process of distributing content on a global basis, the shortwave radio was one of the cheapest and simplest ways to listen to content that originated from a great distance. If you were lucky and skillful enough, you could receive signals from around the world; and shortwave radio operators took pride in maintaining logs of the sorts of content they received, its source, and the time of its reception. Incorporating this technology in a performance was one of the ways in which Stockhausen responded in his own way to John Cage’s pioneering efforts to use chance techniques in the creation of his compositions, There was no way in which he could exercise control over the sounds that the shortwave radios would contribute to a performance of “Kurzwellen.”

Nevertheless, on one occasion Stockhausen did try to exercise some control. In 1970, the year of the bicentennial of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, he created a special version in which all the radio sources would be broadcasting Beethoven. Since there was no way that he could realize this with shortwave technology, he replaced the radios with four tape collages based on both Beethoven’s music and his own reading of the “Heiligenstadt Testament.” However, except for this bit of tinkering with the nature of the sound sources, the rest of the performance instructions were left intact.

This variation on the original concept allows us to appreciate just what Stockhausen was trying to do. He referred to “Kurzwellen” as a “process” composition, meaning that, as a composer, he was specifying the activities of the performers, rather than the product that would result from those activities. This was an approach that he had clearly encountered when he was getting to know the nature of many of Cage’s compositions, but it is clear that he wanted to take some of Cage’s ideas that appealed to him and steer them off in another direction.

Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007; but, to the best of my knowledge, the curriculum of summer courses that he organized in Kürten is still active. It was certainly active in 2011, because that is when the performance of “Kurzwellen” on this new mode release was recorded. That performance was given by the C.L.S.I. Ensemble, whose initials stand for “Circle for the Liberation of Sound and Image.” As had been the case with that Beethoven version, the group strove to maintain the process while altering the materials to suit the ways in which technology had advanced since 1968.

That goal was achieved through a new performing version requiring four instruments, four shortwave radios, six computers, and a conductor. More specifically, each instrumentalist was coupled with a “personal radio operator.” The resulting recording is only two seconds longer than 48 minutes. The CD itself is divided into 31 tracks, which are grouped into four “Systems.” This reflects Stockhausen’s plan to divide the performance into four large sections with increasing numbers of events following a predetermined sequence of proportions, with a similar (but different) series of proportions specifying the events themselves within each large section. The track listing for the album suggests that C.L.S.I. did not choose to honor either of Stockhausen’s structural series of proportions.

Writing as one who has experienced a fair number of such “process” pieces, more inspired by Cage than by Stockhausen, I have to confess that, with so much activity going into making the performance, being a passive listener is not very rewarding. When one attends such a performance, one can at least enjoy the “choreography” behind the (wo)men-at-work execution of the “score.” However, even when the recording is an audio document of a performance for an audience, the experience of listening to the recording is impoverished when compared with that of actually being there.

Furthermore, because the process is almost never realized the same way twice (or even in a similar way), a recording does little to prepare one planning to attend a performance of the piece. At best this new recording may trigger some appealing memories among those present when C.L.S.I. gave their performance in Kürten on August 10, 2011. Those who have experienced other realizations of the “process directions” may also enjoy certain “rings of familiarity;” but my guess is that such pleasures may be beyond to reach of most listeners’ capacities for memory. As a result, this new mode release may turn out to be primarily of academic interest, rather than appealing to a broader base of listeners eager to learn more about Stockhausen’s work.

Dates Announced for San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2018

Once again the new year will be celebrated by the annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival. This remains one of the best opportunities in the United States to enjoy the performance of synthesized audio compositions projected into a three-dimensional space. That space is configured with 24 high-end loudspeakers; and, for many of the performances, the projection of the audio sources onto those speakers is controlled in real-time. The results are experienced by the audience sitting in total darkness.

As in the past, the festival schedule will consist of four concerts over the course of a single weekend. Specific dates and times will be as follows:

• Friday, January 5, 9 p.m.
• Saturday, January 6, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, January 6, 11 p.m.
• Sunday, January 7, 8 p.m.

Details about the specific compositions to be performed at each of these concerts have not yet been released. (Those details were added to last year’s version of this article when they became available.)

The schedule will include three pioneering works in the medium. The earliest of these will be Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge,” created in 1956 and one of the earliest pieces to have a significant spatial dimension. There will also be a projection of James Tenney’s “Blue Suede,” his first collage created in 1961. This was one of the instances of what would later be called plunderphonics, since the collage was based on samples taken from an Elvis Presley recording. Finally, there will be a projection of Pierre Henry’s 1963 “Variations pour une porte et un soupir” (variations for a door and a sigh), considered as one of the pioneering works in the musique concrète genre.

[added 12/26, 3:40 p.m.: Program details have now been announces as follows:

Friday January 5, 2018 (9pm)
PIERRE HENRY Variations for a Door and a Sigh (excerpt) (1963)
FRANCIS DHOMONT Phœnix XXI (2016)
MAGGI PAYNE Coronal Rain (2017)
FERNANDO LOPEZ-LEZCANO Y Sonó como Arpa Vieja (2017)
NATHAN CORDER clima, slice, clima (2017)
ELSA JUSTEL Cercles et Surfaces (2013)
PANAYIOTIS KOKORAS Qualia (2017)
JAMES O'CALLAGHAN Xenoia (2017)

Saturday January 6, 2018 (8pm)
JAMES TENNEY Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) (1962)
THOM BLUM Tabula Rasa (2017)
MATT INGALLS Collage 3.1 (2017)
SOPHIA SHEN / GABBY WEN Cloudburst Dreamscape (excerpt) (2017)
ADAM SOHN Cricket Rhythms (excerpt) (2017)
ROCÍO CANO VALIÑO Tâches (2016)
NIKOS STAVROPOULOS Karst Grotto (2017)
DEMIAN RUDEL REY Che-toi (2016)
BERNADETTE JOHNSON Summer (2009)
FRANCESCO GIOMI Scabro (2011)

Saturday January 6, 2018 (10:40pm)
[program runs one hour and fifteen minutes with no intermission]
MONIQUE JEAN T.A.G. (2013)
JOSEPH ANDERSON Pacific Slope (2002)
TIM WALTERS The Answer in the Flame (2017)
CHAMBERLAIN ZHANG Spiralism (2016)

Sunday January 7, 2017 (8pm)
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN Gesang der Jünglinge (1956)
HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP Kit's Beach Soundwalk (1989)
JONTY HARRISON Espaces cachés (2014)
NATASHA BARRETT A Soundwalk through Shanghai (2014)
HANS TUTSCHKU Remembering Japan (part 1) (2016)
CLIFF CARUTHERS Short Walk to Killaloe Moon (2001)
ORESTIS KARAMANLIS Sterfos (2009)]

All performances will take place in the Victoria Theatre, located in the Mission at 2961 16th Street, one block east of the 16th Street BART Station and the Muni bus stops on the corner of Mission Street. General admission will be $20 for each concert with a special $10 rate for balcony seating for the underemployed. As in the past, there will be a festival pass sold for all four concerts for $60. Tickets will be available at the door after 7 p.m. on each of the three days of the festival, and only cash will be accepted. The Web page for the Festival announcement has a hyperlink for advance ticket purchase; but, as of this writing, the Web page accessed by that link is not currently processing ticket orders.

The Knights’ Second Warner Classics Album Features Yo-Yo Ma

Towards the end of 2014, the Brooklyn-based orchestral collective known as The Knights announced their debut as exclusive Warner Classics artists; and their debut album, entitled the ground beneath our feet was released in January of 2015. This coming Friday Warner will release their second album, Azul; and, as usual, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for the album from which pre-orders may be placed. The title of the album is also the title of the longest composition to be included, a work by Osvaldo Golijov that had been commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and written for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who gave the premiere performance. Ma is also soloist in this performance; and, along with his performance in two shorter selections, his contribution amounts to more than half of the entire album.

Ma seems to be building up a reputation as the Yehudi Menuhin of this new century. This has less to do with his music-making than the way in which he has established himself as a “citizen of the world,” not only through his global presence as a performer but also by seeking out a broad scope of “intercultural” performance opportunities, rather than confining himself to “standard repertoire.” In Menuhin’s case, however, the downside was that he did not always “get into” the spirit of many of his cross-cultural collaborations, while, at the same time, his “standard repertoire” performances tended to settle into the comfortable category of being merely capable. Ma’s departures from “standard repertoire” are almost always adventurous; but their rewards, at least for serious listeners, tend to be variable.

To a great extent, then, “Azul” can be taken as an opportunity for Ma to come back to the “concert zone,” but with a composition that is very much situated in our immediate present. The title is the Spanish word for “blue;” and its relevance is established in the accompanying booklet by the words of astronaut Charles Walker documenting his first impression of seeing our planet from his viewpoint in outer space. However, the music was inspired by verses from a book-length poem in twelve parts completed by Pablo Neruda in 1945 and entitled Alturas de Macchu Picchu (the heights of Macchu Picchu), the Inca citadel that Neruda had visited in 1943.

The verses that Golijov selected dwell on one of his own favorite themes, the loneliness of an individual in the vastness of the cosmos. This is also the underlying theme of “Tenebrae,” a Golijov composition that has enjoyed several different performances by different chamber groups in my home town of San Francisco. Indeed, the spirit of “Tenebrae” returns in the final movement of “Azul,” while each of the preceding movements explores specific phrases from Neruda and, in the case of the first movement, specific text.

The result is surprisingly effective; and it is definitely to the advantage of all those who take listening seriously that there is now such a fine document of this music in performance. However, since such listeners tend to be interested in acquiring and maintaining a broad repertoire, many will be struck by the motif that pervades this composition from the very first statement by the solo cello. It is also the opening motif in Leoš Janáček’s first string quartet, based on Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. Presumably, Ma has played the cello part in at least one quartet performance of this piece; but (fortunately) he does not seem to have tried to establish a connection between Janáček and Golijov!

However, if “Azul” elevates the listener to other-worldly heights, the rest of the album brings him/her back to earth with a dull thud. The opening selection is a followup to the concerto for santur (Persian dulcimer) and violin composed jointly by Siamak Aghaei and Colin Jacobsen (one of the two Artistic Directors of The Knights) featured on the ground beneath our feet. Entitled “Ascending Bird,” the piece allows Ma to cut loose with some non-standard cadenza work; and there is no questioning the richness of the work’s overall instrumentation. However, I found it difficult to resist recalling the sex therapist’s response to the exchanges between Frank Drebin and Jane Spencer at the beginning of Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, “Please, I’m a diabetic.” The sugar-coating on this music has been laid on far thicker than my personal tastes prefer! The same can be said of Jesse Diener-Bennett’s arrangement of the “Song to the Moon” from Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka, in which Ma’s cello work never really rises to the expressiveness that a skilled soprano can bring to this music.

The remainder of the album consists of The Knights playing two decidedly non-standard arrangements. The first of these is Caroline Shaw’s “Leo” movement from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s zodiac-inspired Tierkreis, originally composed for music boxes. This music is often held up as the prime example of a Stockhausen composition that does not sound like Stockhausen, and it is unclear that Shaw has done anything to establish either an alternative or an enlightening point of view.

The album then concludes with a suite of movements from Run Rabbit Run, an album that took the tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ Enjoy Your Rabbit and rearranged them for string ensemble. Five of those arrangements were created by Michael Atkinson, who plays horn for The Knights; and four of them are included in this suite. This is definitely “fun music;” but, with due respect to John Updike, who wrote Rabbit, Run and its four sequels, the whole thing sounds a bit too much like “Kronos Redux” for a larger ensemble.

Center for New Music: November 2016

It is not too early to start thinking about the concerts that will be presented at the Center for New Music (C4NM) next month. However, it is first necessary to report that yesterday C4NM announced the Ensemble-in-Residence for the 2016–17 season. That Ensemble will be The Living Earth Show (TLES), the adventurous duo of guitarist (primarily on electric) Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. As of this writing, TLES is preparing for its debut concert a National Sawdust in Brooklyn, which will double as a release party for their new album Dance Music, which will become available on November 18. As is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders. The album will present compositions commissioned for TLES’ joint project with Robert Dekkers’ Post:Ballet for the full-evening production Do Be.

C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. Tickets for all events are now available for advance purchase online. Specifics for C4NM performances in November are as follows:

Tuesday, November 1, 8 p.m.: Adam Marks will curate a visit from Boston by the patchtax duo of Mary Joy Patchett on saxophone and Eve Boltax on viola. They will present a multimedia program in which their own self-directed video will be interwoven with compositions by Georges Aperghis, Lei Liang, Rosalie Burrell, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Johann Sebastian Bach. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Wednesday, November 2, 7:30 p.m.: Matthew Creer will present a program of his multimedia works for solo computer, percussion duo, and outdated electronics. He will give the premiere performance of “Eagle Masters,” which combines noise music with videos of eagles. Performers will include percussionist Nava Dunkelman and the Ctrl – Z electronic trio of Ryan Page, Daniel Steffey, and Nick Wang. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Thursday, November 3, 7:30 p.m.: Pianist Marks will curate a second program featuring Albatross, his duo with mezzo Jennifer Beattie. They have prepared a program of art songs by women composers from North and South America in a variety of styles from jazz standards to the avant-garde. Composers represented in the program include Rachel Peters, Alicia Terzian, Alice Ho, and Jocy de Oliveira. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Saturday, November 5, 8 p.m.: Los Angeles-based percussionist Justin DeHart will give the premiere performance of the suite Percussion for Apartments by Aaron Gervais. This is a collection of pieces for solo percussion and electronics, each of which requires playing a single percussion instrument at volumes appropriate for apartment-dwellers. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Wednesday, November 9, 8 p.m.: Kyle Bruckmann will curate the next sfSoundSalonSeries concert. This will be a solo recital by pianist Fausto Bongelli made possible with support from the Italian Cultural Institute. The program will include works by Giacinto Scelsi, Tonino Tesei, Fabrizio De Rossi Re, Ada Gentile, Paolo Ugoletti, Stefano Scodanibbio, and Alberto Savinio. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Sunday, November 13, 3 p.m.: Danny Clay will curate a performance of “Sinbabbit,” a three-hour composition for electric guitars composed jointly by Brent Miller and Matt Vandegriff. This will be the second installment of Clay’s Quiet Time concert series. Clay will be one of the guitarists, along with Travis Andrews, Matt Linder, Robert Nance, and Joseph Colombo. General admission will be $10 with an $8 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Tuesday, November 15, 8 p.m.: This will be another sfSoundSalonSeries concert curated by Bruckmann. It will be in two parts. In the first part the martha & monica duo of pianist Hadley McCarroll and cellist Monica Scott will perform compositions by Scott and Matt Ingalls. The second part will have members of the sfSoundGroup welcome violist Julie Michael as a new member with the performance of several small ensemble works. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Wednesday, November 16, 7:30 p.m.: The next concert that Marks will curate will feature Chicago-based clarinetist Jennifer Woodrum. Woodrum will honor the 80th birthday of Steve Reich with a performance of his “New York Counterpoint,” scored for solo clarinet playing with eleven pre-recorded clarinets. She will also play Anna Clyne’s “Rapture” for distorted clarinet sounds accompanied by an industrial and raucous pre-recorded tape. Woodrum will also perform her own transcription of “So Low” by Jimmy Giuffre and a set of solos by Evan Ziporyn. Woodrum will then be joined by Marks on piano for duos by Roshanne Etezady and Marc Mellits. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Friday, November 18, 7:30 p.m.: C4NM will host the next concert in the 2016–17 season of the Fête Concert Series. This concert has been organized around the music of Joaquin Rodrigo, whose 115th birthday will take place on November 22. The program will include the Canciones de dos épocas for voice and piano and the Tres Canciones Espanolas for voice and guitar, as well as solo pieces for both piano and guitar. In addition, in keeping with the Fête Concert tradition, composer Emma Logan has prepared an arrangement of “Happy Birthday” in Rodrigo’s style. The performers will be pianist Paul Dab, guitarist Patrick Smith, and sopranos Chelsea Hollow and Anne Hepburn Smith. In birthday party tradition, the ticket will include wine, snacks, and desserts, as well as party hats for all. General admission will be $15, and the $10 rate will apply to seniors and students, as well as C4NM members. Fête Concert Series tickets may be purchased in advance through a Brown Paper Tickets event page.

Saturday, November 19, 8 p.m.: This will be the next Rova “Plus One” concert, a two-set evening with one performer joining the Rova Saxophone Quartet in each set. In the first set they will be joined by percussionist and vocalist Dohee Lee for an improvisation on a structure by Larry Ochs. In the second set they will be joined by Jon Leidecker performing under the name Wobbly to improvise on structures arranged by Steve Adams. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Tuesday, November 29, 8 p.m.: This will be a duo improvisation based on the amalgamation of Futurist and Techno aesthetics. The former will be embodied in Luciano Chessa performing on saw. The latter will be taken by Tyrel Williams on turntables. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Wednesday, November 30, 8 p.m.: Portland-based composer and pianist Karl Schultz, a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, will return to San Francisco to make his debut as a new music pianist. He will premiere selections from his set of twelve ricercari for solo piano based on his own system of polytonal counterpoint. In addition to playing some of his other compositions, he will also perform the works of Colombo, David Conte, and Nicolas Lell Benavides. He has prepared a one-hour concert with 50 minutes of music and a ten-minute intermission. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Stockhausen Challenged by Description

I have been reading the University of California Press anthology of articles from Source, which I plan to review on my Examiner.com national site.  In the first issue I found a transcription of a conversation in which one of the participants was Karlheinz Stockhausen.  I was particularly struck by one of his observations:

Every day, working in the electronic studio, the worst problem I have is to describe what I have done.  All you can use are words and numbers.  Incidentally, a studio in Stockholm is almost ready where every action is automatically recorded.  You just fool around, and at the end you get a so-called reportage.  Recently I worked four days in our studio.  At the end, I had to spend another four or five days analyzing what I had done in order to write it down.  It is an awful thing for me.  But without what I describe there will be no culture whatsoever in the new dimension.  If I make a thing, I’m not only interested in the result;  I’m interested in the initial culture.  Let’s say we have no score, but we do have a tape.  The tape alone doesn’t help enough for study.  We can listen, yes;  we can get a kind of idea;  it may stimulate other things one can do.  But one is really not able to go further in that direction.  There wouldn’t be any scientific or philosophical or musical progress in our culture if one couldn’t learn from one’s forefathers.

I suppose there is no reason to assume that Stockhausen would have been aware of what was happening in literary theory at the time he made this remark.  I wonder if he would have been comforted or disturbed by the proposition that description was the most difficult of the major text types, to a point where an entire monograph was eventually written to explain why it was so difficult.

More important, however, is why Stockhausen was obsessing over the difficulty of description.  It concerned what he later called the “medium of transport,” which entailed the principle that one could not “learn from one’s forefathers” without some kind of physical medium.  This strikes me as yet another example of artifact-centered noun-based thinking, overlooking the fact that making music is a verb-based practice.  Thus, while Stockhausen may have had the “secret stash” of jazz records that may have inspired him, he may not have had much of a clue as to how the practice of jazz is passed from musician to musician through verb-based practice, rather than through noun-based artifacts.  This makes for an excellent example of how all of us, no matter what we do or how well we do it, have particular blinders that limit our worldview;  and those blinders are so effective that we do not even know they exist!

Trivializing Wagner?

Since I often make a point of writing about jazz as “chamber music by other means,” I should be pleased when others who focus on the classical side make the move into jazz.  However, when Ivan Hewitt decided to write about the Wayne Shorter Quartet’s performance at the Barbican for the London Telegraph, his account seemed more directed at the classical set than the jazz aficionados.  Declaring Shorter to be “the Wagner of jazz” on the basis of an 80-minute set beginning with a 40-minute composition comes across like a distortion of both Richard Wagner and Shorter in equal measure.  Hewitt seemed to rest his case on extended duration and Shorter’s use of “pithy motifs,” which seems to indicate that his understanding of both Wagner and jazz practices is seriously limited.

Shorter is hardly the first to work on an extended scale of duration.  My guess is that he, himself, would acknowledge a debt to John Coltrane, who always seemed to move his improvisations into yet another take on whatever tune he happened to be playing, just because he felt he had more to say about it.  On the less tune-based side we have some of the more extended abstract efforts from Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman.  The bottom line is that none of this is about duration;  it is about, as Karlheinz Stockhausen put it, “how time passes” over the course of that duration.  Hewitt never seems be able to account for how Shorter’s Barbican gig came off as a listening experience, possibly because Hewitt just did not have that experience.

Piece or Stück?

As I have previously written, I organize my recordings according to an old Schwann catalog (“Schwann’s Way”).  Today, however, I discovered an interesting classification discrepancy.  For most composers works that are called simply “pieces” are listed under “P” in the alphabetical ordering of title.  However, the solo piano compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen are listed as “Klavierstücke.”  Was this an effort on the part of the Schwann editors to emphasize that Stockhausen’s works were, in some inherent way, “different?”

The Legacy of Honoring "The Sound Itself"

The proposition that, as serious listeners, we should think more in terms of our experiences of "the sound itself," rather than in terms of any abstraction of those sounds through notation, has been an ongoing theme of interest, not only on this platform but also in my writing for Examiner.com. Indeed, last month in that latter forum, I invoked this concept with respect to two composers whose work would be featured this month: George Benjamin, who will be hosted by the San Francisco Symphony as part of their Project San Francisco Series, and Michael Jarrell, who will be featured as a composer at the next concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and as an orchestrator of Claude Debussy's piano etudes by the San Francisco Symphony. Thus, I was not surprised (and rather pleased) to discover in my reading of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley, that Monk was another composer whose work was intimately wrapped up in this nature of "the sound itself."

The source of my discovery was a profile of Monk by Herbie Nichols, demonstrating that some of the most astute writing about making music comes from an author familiar with making music on equally intimate terms. Here is a passage of Nichols' text that Kelley quotes:

His eyes light up when he speaks of instrumentalists getting the right ‘sounds’ out of their instruments. He is forever searching for better ‘sounds,’ as he loves to say. He doesn’t seek these effects elsewhere. He creates them at his Klein piano. This way of thinking throughout the years has resulted in the creation of a system of playing which is the strangest I have heard and may someday revolutionize the art of swing piano playing.

Kelley's interest in this passage is clearly grounded in his own experience, since he invokes this idea of "the sound itself" in the "Prelude" to his book to explain how his interest in Monk was first sparked:

I became completely obsessed with Monk’s sound, his clang-clang sound of surprise, rich with deafening silences, dissonances, and harmonic ambiguities.

In Kelley's case that sound came from a recording of "Evidence," released on Riverside and taken from a performance at The Five Spot in New York City on August 7, 1958, with Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Roy Haynes on drums, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, about a dozen years after Nichols' profile had appeared in print.

My own first encounter with Monk recordings probably took place either during or just before my freshman year. That was a time when I was more obsessed with "the emancipation of the dissonance" than I was with the possibility that a search for better sounds might have been the motivation for that emancipation. Thus, I was more interested in the theoretical insights of Arnold Schoenberg and those who followed his path than I was in putting the scores off to the side and just concentrating on the listening experience. Put another way, I was spending so much time on the logic behind Monk's own approach to dissonance to appreciate that its fundamental impact was rhetorical.

These days the question is not whether or not dissonance has been emancipated but whether we, as listeners, have been emancipated from the theoretical thinking of the last century that subordinated the rhetorical to the logical. Thus emancipated, we can listen to Schoenberg and Monk as situated on the same "terrain" of musical discourse, just as (to draw upon another one of my examples) we can listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Ahmad Jamal. This reflects one of the lessons that Randy Weston took away from the experience of being Monk's student, which is, as Kelley put it, the need "to be wary of false distinctions between 'modern' and 'traditional.'" It's all music; and the experience always comes down to that same capacity for listening that, hopefully, we have built up since our first encounters with music.

Yasmina Reza's Guilty Pleasure?

Whenever it feels as if everyone is telling me that I have to see a show, I tend to start looking for reasons to run the other way. Several years ago, while on a business trip to the East Coast, I found myself with an evening to myself in Manhattan; and, forgetting my rule of thumb, I decided to plunk down my American Express card for a ticket to see Art. I was not as annoyed as I have been on other such follow-the-crowd occasions; but just about everything I witnessed fell flat on me. Leaving the theater, I took a look at my watch and realized that I had just sat through the duration of three Seinfeld episodes; and that seemed to capture the experience in a nutshell: a lot of rapid (but not necessarily quick-witted) banter around a situation that had gotten a bit too long in the tooth to count for an authentic situation any more.

Now I do not know very much about Yasmina Reza beyond what I have read on her Wikipedia page. I know she is French, the child of an Iranian father and a Hungarian mother, both Jewish. I have no idea whether or not she watches television and, if she does, what she enjoys watching. I also have no idea if her parents left her with that Jewish sense of humor that has enjoyed so much popularity in the United States. However, I suspect that the hypothesis that one instance of that Jewish sense of humor, Seinfeld, was popular enough that it got distribution on French television is a viable one; so there is some possibility that the program had at least a subconscious influence on Reza's writing. Whether or not Christopher Hampton was similarly influenced when he translated her text into English is more problematic. Hampton has always struck me as being too damned productive to spend much time in front of a television; but, at the very least, he may be like many of us who fall back on it in a hotel room when we are too tired to do anything else. So there is some chance that the "Seinfeld voice" in the English version of Art could have come more from his exposure to that voice through his own television viewing than from Reza's source text.

Still, the question of where Reza gets her ideas remains; and the crowd is now "Oscar Mike" to sold-out performances of God of Carnage on Broadway, which has now moved on to its second cast. Like many, I was curious about the original cast (James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, and Hope Davis), all of whom had impressed me with their work in a variety of settings. (I even remember seeing Daniels in off-Broadway theater around the time that Hollywood was discovering him.) However, when The New York Times gives the second cast as much attention as it gave the first, I have to start wondering whether the fuss about God of Carnage is as much a superficial fad as the fuss had been over Art.

This time around the banter seems to have been replaced with verbal pugilism (reinforced by the headline for the second cast review); and the situation has a bit more substance. Nevertheless, it is still a premise that is showing its age and may once again have been inspired by American television. The kicker is that, this time around, the source seems to be Curb Your Enthusiasm, which Larry David cooked up after having so much success in working with Jerry Seinfeld on the Seinfeld series. Since Curb Your Enthusiasm is an HBO production and HBO now gets international distribution, I am even more confident that one can see it in Paris than I was about Seinfeld. Furthermore, if Hampton has already mastered that "Seinfeld voice," then translation of a "next generation Seinfeld" script (which, by the way, again has the duration of three episodes) was probably a walk in the park (or at least a stroll to Zabar's).

Now to be fair, I have nothing against either Reza or Hampton getting a kick out of Larry David. I personally do not share that pleasure, but that is just a matter of personal taste. This kind of influence is probably not that different from Karlheinz Stockhausen's experiences with jazz. However, just as the influence of jazz on Stockhausen may have provoked his own anxiety, leading him to try to bury it in his hyper-theoretical essays about composition, both Reza and Hampton may labor under a Euro-centric aesthetic that would not tolerate influences from American television. On the other hand the success of both Art and God of Carnage on Broadway may be attributed to the desire of today's audiences to have a "television experience" in a somewhat more elite setting. If I personally find that a rather inadequate excuse for entertainment, that is, as I said above, a matter of personal taste. However, if Larry David comes up with a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode about his material being appropriated in a Broadway stage play, I would probably take the time to watch that episode!

A Reflective Practitioner of Jazz

Most of what I have written about the reflective practice of making or listening to music has drawn upon the classical repertoire, primarily because this repertoire was the source of the data in Donald Schön's field work in this domain. Last night, however, I had the pleasure of listening to a true Jazz Master (authenticated by the NEA), who provided excellent (and stimulating) examples of reflection-in-action with regard to both performance and listening. The Master is Ahmad Jamal; and, as I wrote in my Examiner.com review, he is a composer who, like Ornette Coleman, seems to have latched on to Karlheinz Stockhausen's "moment" style of composition and made it his own. Using this review to think through this hypothesis was great fun, but I still have to be honest about the fact that it was little more than hypothesis.

However, I happened to share this hypothesis with the guys sitting with my in my box in Herbst Theatre. One of them went backstage after the show, asked Jamal if he had been listening to Stockhausen, and reported back to me through electronic mail. His quote of Jamal's reply was:

Yeah, and I been listening to everybody

Jamal then added:

Lately, I've been mostly listening to myself.

I took this as an affirmation of Jamal's fundamentally reflective approach to his practices of both making and listening to music (including his own).

This adds further fuel to my fire that any "theory of listening to music" must be grounded in Schön's principle of reflection-in-action. We can only "elevate ourselves from the sensory experience of hearing to the more cognitive nature of listening," as I wrote on Friday, if we can tap into the reflective nature of what we hear. This is why I often try to identify autobiographical elements in compositions, even those works as abstract as the preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich. Jamal, too, was autobiographical in his decision to perform the fifty-year-old "Poinciana," the work that is probably still most closely associated with his name. However, as I wrote in my review, rather than reviving memories of his fifty-year-old recording, he approached the tune "in a far more deconstructed way." Here is how I explained that point while, at the same time, establishing his connection to Stockhausen's "moment" style:

By assuming that we all remember "how it used to go," he can now extract individual "moments" from the tune, putting each one under a microscope, so to speak, and examining it from a variety of different angles before moving on to another "moment."

Thus, last night's performance was a synthesis of reflective listening and reflective performance. Listening to himself was an important element, but just as important was that he had a good strategy for selecting his listening matter! Perhaps this new insight into Jamal's reflection-in-action will reflect back on my ongoing effort to listen to Coleman's Free Jazz session!

Honoring Andrew Imbrie

Cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau's Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was dedicated to the memory of Andrew Imbrie. The composer and Berkeley faculty member died at the beginning of last December, roughly around the same time as the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen. While Stockhausen's music received considerable "memorial attention" during 2008, particularly in Europe, last night was my first opportunity to hear any of Imbrie's music. He was represented on Fonteneau's program by two short pieces: the 2002 "Duet for Two Friends" and the 2006 "Melody for Gayageum."

It is unclear whether the "friends" of the 2002 composition were Fonteneau and clarinetist John Sackett, who gave the work its first performance, or whether the friendship referred to the scoring for cello and bass clarinet. There is certainly an affinity between these two instruments, so the work provided an opportunity to explore the subtleties induced by their different sonorities. Thus, the work could be approached more as an intimate conversation than as a conventional duet. For jazz listeners such a conversation is not particularly new. Charles Mingus may have played bass, rather than cello. However, he often approached his instrument more as a cello than as a jazz bass; and this was certainly the case in his improvisations with Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet. These two could go on at great length covering extensive ground that was as technical as it was emotional. Imbrie's work was far more modest, although just as technically demanding. Indeed, the intimacy of the engagement seemed to have progressed to a point where these "friends" had little to actually say beyond just enjoying their mutual presence.

The gayageum is basically a twelve string Korean zither. Thus, as was the case with Stewart Wallace's score for The Bonesetter's Daughter, Imbrie's 2006 composition seems to ask to be approached in terms of Asian music heard through Western ears. My own problem was that, while I was familiar with the music that inspired Wallace, I knew absolutely nothing about the gayageum. I was thus confronted with a lack of contextual knowledge that would elevate this work beyond just another introspective cello solo. Fonteneau certainly helped by offering some introductory remarks about the general thematic structure, but the question of how a traditional Korean instrument figured in the conception of the work remained unanswered.

The "bookends" for these rather modest works were more "monumental" in nature: Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 102, Number 2 sonata in D major and Johannes Brahms' Opus 38 sonata in E minor. Brahms was working on this sonata during the same time when he composed his Opus 34 F minor piano quintet, and both works display similar levels of emotional energy and intensity. While the resources of the sonata are not as extensive as those of the quintet, Fonteneau invested the performance with all the emotion it demands and was more than ably supported by pianist Jeffrey Sykes. Similar qualities emerged from their performance of Beethoven, although this was a work from his final years. Listening to these works in succession, I realized that Brahms' sonata was definitely not "haunted by Beethoven's shadow." There may have been a sense of a torch being passed, but it is through the passing of that torch that a work like the Opus 38 can be heard as both retrospective and prospective. If there was a problem with shadows, it was that these two works ultimately made it difficult for very much light to shine on the more recent compositions by Imbrie.

Rarely-Heard Twentieth Century Music

The composer George Rochberg was in the Music Department of the University of Pennsylvania back when I was teaching Computer Science there. To call him reclusive would be a polite understatement. I taught there for five years and never saw him once (and my building was across a parking lot from his). On the rare occasions when his name came up, even in the Music Building, there was often the connotation that he lurked in his office a bit like Fafner in his cave (at least in Siegfried), not to be roused by the faint of heart (even those with tenure). From this it also follows as a corollary that, over those five years, I never heard any of his music performed. Indeed, my first taste of his music only came last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Master Class conducted by violist Kim Kashkashian, where the first students to present offered the first movement of his viola sonata. Given Kashkashian's background, I was not surprised that she was familiar with the work; so this was an excellent opportunity for my personal listening experiences to break new ground. Ironically, this sonata was completed in 1979, which means that he may have been working on it while I was at Penn.

Had I known that Rochberg would be opening the program, I would have done well to approach the evening with a bit of background, such as this summary of his compositional approaches from Wikipedia:

After a period of experimentation with serialism, Rochberg abandoned it after 1963 when his son died, saying that serialism was empty of expressive emotion and was inadequate to express his grief and rage.[1] By the seventies he had become controversial for the use of tonal passages in his music. His use of tonality first became widely known through the String Quartet No. 3 (1972), which includes an entire set of variations that are in the style of late Beethoven. Another movement of the quartet contains passages reminiscent of the music of Gustav Mahler. This use of tonality caused critics to classify him as a neoromantic composer. He compared atonality to abstract art and tonality to concrete art and compared his artistic evolution with Philip Guston's, saying "the tension between concreteness and abstraction" is a fundamental issue for both of them (Rochberg, 1992).

Of the works composed early in his career, the Symphony No. 2 (1955-56) stands out as an accomplished serial composition by an American composer. Rochberg is perhaps best known for his String Quartets Nos. 3-6 (1972-78). Rochberg conceived Nos. 4-6 as a set and named them the "Concord Quartets" after the Concord String Quartet, which premiered and recorded the works. The String Quartet No. 6 includes a set of variations on the Pachelbel Canon in D.

A few of his works were musical collages of quotations from other composers. "Contra Mortem et Tempus", for example, contains passages from Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Edgard Varèse and Charles Ives.

Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, and 5, and the Violin Concerto were recorded in 2001–2002 by Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee and released on the Naxos label.

I am not sure I am comfortable attaching that adjective "neoromantic" to the viola sonata, even if the timing is right for it. I am also not sure that I would listen to the sonata in terms of a "tension between concreteness and abstraction." On the other hand the concept of tension itself was extremely important to Kashkashian, who spent much of her time on this piece dealing with how to create and manage a sense of physical tension that controls how the bow is drawn across the strings. Nevertheless, the Guston reference is probably appropriate, since familiar concrete objects first began to appear on Guston's canvases in the mid-Sixties; so the Guston of the late Seventies may very well have been on Rochberg's mind. For those with a sense of irony, Guston's portrait of Morton Feldman, "Friend – to M.F.," which appears on the cover of the collection of Feldman-related essays published by Beginner Press, was painted in 1978, a time when Feldman was practically black-listed by most of the established academic music departments (including the one at Penn). I suppose that Rochberg could have been a "closet admirer" of Feldman, just as I have suggested that Karlheinz Stockhausen was a "closet admirer" of Eric Dolphy (among others); but, on the basis of what I heard in this viola sonata, I doubt that Rochberg ever gave much (if any) thought to Feldman.

Indeed, I have to wonder to what extent Rochberg gave much thought to listening itself. There is clearly much to occupy the mind of the performers; this was evident even before Kashkashian started offering her own observations. However, I was left with the nagging suspicion that Rochberg may have cared about little more than the relationship between the violist and pianist and the notation staring at them from their parts. The very presence of listeners seemed supererogatory, if not irrelevant. This may, of course, all be a product of an imagination colored by past encounters with a cloud of mystery that was always surrounding the man; and, on the basis of what I heard last night, I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to hear this sonata performed in its entirety, even if the composer would have regarded me as an unwelcome intruder.

By way of comparison, Paul Hindemith's name is much more familiar, at least to those familiar with twentieth-century music. While he may not receive very much attention in the concert audience, many ballet audiences are likely to know at least one of his compositions, since it was set by George Balanchine for his ballet "The Four Temperaments." Hindemith had a particular interest in Gebrauchsmusik, which his Wikipedia entry translates as "Utility Music." This was music for all sorts of different collections of instruments, often written at a level suitable for amateurs. The second work prepared for Kashkashian was an excellent case in point, three movements from Hindemith's Opus 35, "Die Serenaden," which he called a "little cantata for voice, oboe, viola, and cello." I have to wonder whether or not Hindemith may have had at least a few thoughts for Johann Sebastian Bach in this piece, since Bach's cantatas could be seen as the "primal spirit" of Gebrauchsmusik, with solo parts that tended to be written for the instrumentalists who happened to be available for a given Sunday service. The full plan for this cantata, taken from the Schott Music Web site, is as follows:

1. Barcarole (Adolf Licht)
An Phyllis (Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Gleim)
Toccata für Violoncello
Corrente für Sopran und Violoncello
Nur Mut (Ludwig Tieck)
2. Duett
Der Abend (Joseph von Eichendorff)
Der Wurm am Meer (Johann Wilhelm Meinhold)
3. Trio
Gute Nacht (Siegfried August Mahlmann)

The three songs performed for Kashkashian were "Nur Mut," "Der Wurm am Meer," and "Gute Nacht." Since the audience was not provided with the texts and I was unfamiliar with all of them, I am not sure what to make of the listening experience. I know that the viola and cello provided an interesting bit of tone painting of a sea serpent ("Wurm am Meer") slithering just below the surface of the water and occasionally (and always briefly) rearing its head; but, beyond that rather obvious depiction, I drew blanks. This is a piece that probably requires more homework than the Rochberg sonata, particularly since I think Hindemith had a bit more consideration for listeners, at least to the extent that he composed music through which performers could form a relationship with their listeners. At the very least this composition offered an interesting latter-day take on the nature of the cantata itself, which, in my book, is reason enough to learn more about it.

An Unexpected Ligeti Fix

I really do not like to miss an opportunity to hear a performance of the music of György Ligeti; so, while I was not particularly tempted by tonight's program by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, I was delighted that they arranged one of their Contemporary Insights events devoted entirely to the first work on the program, Ligeti's "Sippal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel," sung by mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger accompanied by four percussionists, none of whom were identified (but I recognized William Winant among them). For those for whom Hungarian is as tongue-twisting as it is for me, all those syllables translate to "With Pipes, Drums, Fiddles."

I have always felt that Ligeti was one of the more accessible of the composers who pursued all manner of experimental approaches to their work in the wake of the Second World War. As I have previously observed, the only time I ever saw Pierre Boulez with a smile on his face was in the presence of Frank Zappa; and, even when his music could be construed as at least slightly playful, Karlheinz Stockhausen always looked deadly serious. The most notable exception to this prevalence of the dour was John Cage, who was never ashamed to write about his "sunny disposition." Fortunately, the trend changed once we got out from under the "tyranny of algorithms" that was occupying many of these experimenters; so there were a lot more sunny dispositions in the final quarter of the twentieth century. In many ways, however, Ligeti led the way in this attitude change, because he always managed to find wit in what he did.

"Sippal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel" (thank God for copy-and-paste) is one of his later works (composed in 2000); and the wit begins in the title. As I mentioned, the work is for mezzo and four percussionists; and, while all four of them have to blow into one kind of pipe or another in the course of this fifteen-minute setting of seven Hungarian poems by Sándor Weöres, the closest any of them get to a fiddle comes when one of them strokes a cymbal with a bow! Ligeti is playing with our expectations before we even start to form them; but then Weöres is doing the same with our expectations of poetry, two of which are in nonsense syllables, at least one of which has a folk quality, and most of which boil down to rather simple syllables (which is probably advantageous for any singer unfamiliar with Hungarian). The result is a healthy supply of good-natured fun, whose music tweaks all sorts of conventions, from folk music collected in the field, through composition based more on sonorities than on the usual conventions of counterpoint and harmony, all the way to the Eurovision Song Contest (getting its best ribbing since the days of Monty Python). Yet, as is again almost always the case in Ligeti, there are sublime moments that lie down with the ridiculous as securely as Isaiah's lamb keeps company with the wolf.

Since the work was only fifteen minutes long, the Contemporary Insights audience got to hear it twice, along with a fair amount of explanation, much of which was helpful. Unfortunately, none of that explanation touched on Ligeti's wittier side, which I found quite unfortunate. Music is often most poorly served by those who take it too seriously!

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?

Oscar Peterson in Jazz History

After all that writing about Bach, I settled down to watch the 3 PM telecast of the BBC News and learned that Oscar Peterson had died. I was glad to see that the BBC chose this as a "front page" story, even if their coverage left more than a little to be desired. Anyone who has any question as to the importance of reporting the death of such an important jazz pianist would to better to consult Wikipedia over the BBC, since this entry is less concerned with the personality of the man and more with his position in the grand scheme of jazz history.

The difference between the two accounts is most evident in the dog that failed to bark in the BBC account. That dog, of course, was Art Tatum, regarded by many as the strongest influence on Peterson. At the risk of making it all sound too reductive, just about any form of Western music comes down to the art of embellishment, how and where it is applied, how extensive it is, and, as the forms became more developed, how embellishments themselves could be embellished. In the history of classical music, Franz Liszt pushed embellishment to extremes that could be exasperating, if not offensive to some of more disciplined natures. To call Tatum the Liszt of jazz would not constitute offense to either pianist. Indeed, one of the frequent comments made about the vast catalog of Tatum recordings is that a little bit can go a long way.

However, in the spirit of that analogy, if Tatum was the Liszt of jazz, then Peterson was its Busoni, highly virtuosic in his understanding of both how to apply embellishment to the underlying "text" (i.e. song) and how to execute the embellishing without the embellished getting lost in the blur. When the CD was finally released of a session organized by Norman Granz that brought Peterson together with Count Basie, this was the first sentence on the back of the jewel case:

It could be argued that no two pianists could be more unalike than Count Basie, the master of understatement, and Oscar Peterson, the avatar of speed, power, and embellishment.

My own pet name for this CD is "The Minimalist Meets the Maximalist." The "official" name, however, is The Timekeepers, wherein all proper respect resides. Time was of the essence for both of these men, who knew full well that, without an "art of time," there is no "art of music." Thus, time was also the one element that could unite two such disparate performers, each of which understood the other in terms of strategies for how time passes (that last phrase having emerged in the title of an essay by Karlheinz Stockhausen, who may not have been a slouch where jazz was concerned).

Basie died back in 1984. Indeed, too many of the greatest who had performed so well with Peterson are gone as well. Atheist that I am, I still cannot resist the fantasy that they are all up there in heaven waiting for Oscar to join the jam. Meanwhile, there is so much of Oscar in every recording he made that the rest of us can keep learning to be better listeners from those recordings for some time to come.

Igor Stravinsky and the Cardinal Sin of Envy

In my reflection on the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen last week, I accused Igor Stravinsky of being envious of the jazz that was being played when he was living in Paris, because, in spite of his many efforts to do so, he just could never compose music like that. Watching the final performance of The Rake's Progress by the San Francisco Opera yesterday, I realized that there was probably another target of Stravinsky's envy, which was probably just as strong, if not more so. That target was Benjamin Britten, and I believe that this hypothesis cannot be ignored in addressing Stravinsky's only attempt at a "grand" opera.

This is not to say that I dislike Stravinsky. What he composed in his attempts to reproduce rags and tangos has a unique enough sound that the works are interesting through their very infidelity to their sources of inspiration. The same can be said of the rather convoluted ways in which Stravinsky set English text, not just in the Rake but in many shorter efforts. The counterintuitive phrasings must be enough to drive any singer crazy, and they ultimately highlight the extent to which English texts would fit within Britten's music like a hand in a glove. The comparison is most explicit in "The Flood," that "musical play" commissioned by CBS Television in 1960, which I find more worthy of Ivan Hewett's "cringe-making" epithet than just about anything Stockhausen ever produced. While it is possible to imagine that Stravinsky was unaware that Britten had composed a similar work, "Noye's Fludde," in 1957, the fact that Stravinsky drew upon exactly the same Chester Miracle Play texts makes that possibility highly unlikely. Nevertheless, I have seen many performances of the Rake that I have had no trouble enjoying for what they were and I treasure my CDs of the recording that Stravinsky made in London in 1964.

Perhaps some of that joy comes from this being the end of the second major "road" that Stravinsky followed in his musical career: the path of neoclassicism that stands between his more Russian period and his explorations of serialism at the end of this life. The Rake's Progress is classical in just about every way you can imagine, from the harpsichord-accompanied recitativo secco to the wisps of Handel and Mozart that are never quite tangible in the score but always seem to be suggested. If W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman were not able to produce a more salutary text for Stravinsky's musical language, then, as is the case with his experiments in jazz, one can still enjoy the results. Trouble only ensues in a production that does not let Stravinsky be Stravinsky.

Unfortunately, Robert Lepage provided the San Francisco Opera with such a production, reminding me of my having invoked the verb "undermining" when I wrote about Robert Carsen's setting of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride last June. Much of my discontent probably resides in the fact that Stravinsky was very good at falling back on structure when intuition was not serving him as well as he wished. The Rake's Progress is impeccably structured, so I was immediately on my guard when I picked up my Opera program and saw that Lepage had smashed Stravinsky's structure to bits. To be more specific, Stravinsky composed this opera in three acts, each consisting of three scenes; and this was the perfect complement to the Auden-Kallman libretto, which structures the narrative of Tom Rakewell around three wishes he makes and how they are implemented by Nick Shadow. Thus, when my wife complained that she felt the final scene of the opera went on far too long, my reaction was that it felt long because she had been deprived the benefit of an intermission before the "unit" of the third act got under way. With all of his experience in ballet, Stravinsky knew all about audience fatigue; and Lepage's attempt to restructure the opera in two acts was a serious "sin" against Stravinsky. When we then recognize that this revised structure also distracts from the narrative role of the three wishes, we must further conclude that he has "sinned" against Auden and Kallman. Finally, to honor a tripartite structure that may be the best part of the opera, I would suggest that Lepage also "sinned" against Hogarth by rejecting everything about his original conception of how the narrative should be set and conjuring up an image that sings of London but exhibits Hollywood. To be fair Hogarth is honored by both the music and the libretto only in spirit, but Lepage decided to have none of that spirit. Also to be fair most of Lepage's images were pretty impressive, fascinating enough to be a viable audience magnet. The problem was that they were an "alternative universe" to the one that Stravinsky, Auden, and Kallman had conceived. Those two universes were almost violently incompatible, which is why I can argue that the former undermined the latter.

The good news was that the music was still pure Stravinsky at his best. All of the primary voices, William Burden (Tom), Laura Aikin (Anne Truelove), Kevin Langan (Anne's father), James Morris (Shadow), Catherine Cook (Mother Goose), Denyce Graves (Baba the Turk), and Steven Cole (Sellem), had their parts solidly nailed and knew how to work with Donald Runnicles, the orchestra, and the chorus to make this production "work" as well as it could. Graves was particularly effective in her full-out-no-shame conception of Baba; and I suspect it would have been even more fun to see what she would have done with a staging that had been more true to the libretto!