Feeling Prankish on a National Holiday

from the Bandcamp Web page for the recording being discussed

Having just “run the marathon” of accounting for those performing artists that will be visiting Davies Symphony Hall as recitalists (rather than concerto soloists) during the 2021–22 season, I feel a need to celebrate the day with a somewhat prankish reflection on our country. It involves the music that Aaron Copland composed for Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo” ballet, which the San Francisco Symphony played in Davies on Friday evening and will play again today at the Stern Grove Festival. In her first memoir, Dance to the Piper, de Mille recalled her first meeting with Copland before he began work on the score.

She told him that she wanted to make a ballet about “the real America." Copland replied that, if she wanted a ballet about “the real America,” she should set it on Ellis Island. De Mille responded by telling Copland to go to Hell. From that first encounter, some of Copland’s most recognizable music was born!

Taking Copland’s stance, I decided that I would seek out my own take on “the real America” today. So it was that I decided that this would be the day when I would set aside time to listen of a recent album of clarinetist Ben Goldberg that I had added to my collection. The album consists of 21 short duets performed with Kenny Wollesen under the title Music for an Avant-Garde Massage Parlour, currently available only for digital download from a Bandcamp Web page.

One of the things I like about Bandcamp is that its Web pages tend to provide the content usually found in accompanying booklets, thus avoiding the need to create a PDF file to add to the download. The “program note” for this album reflects the dry wit with which Gertrude Stein concluded The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

Kenny said "someone needs to make a record called Music for an Avant-Garde Massage Parlour." So we did.

Four of the tracks have “massage” in the title, preceded by a number; but the numbers are first, second, third, and fifth. Furthermore, they are not in ascending order. On the other hand the final track, “Final Cloud,” has two predecessors, “Bell Cloud” and “Cloud Nine,” suggesting that there is more logic “in the cloud” than there is in massage parlors.

Since Wollesen’s name was unfamiliar, I was also struck by how he accompanied Goldberg playing different sized clarinets with, as the Bandcamp page enumerated, “Vibraphone, Slide Vibe, Diddley Bow, Bells, Drum Machines, Animal Gadgetry, Sleepgrinder, etc.” with “etc.” apparently accounting for any electronic effects beyond those of the drum machines. That instrumental diversity tends to induce a rhetorical diversity as the selections advance almost seamlessly from one track to the next. Given that it has been almost a century since Ellis Island ceased to be a major immigration center, it is about time that we find “the real America” somewhere else; and, if an avant-garde massage parlour is not a viable alternative, I do not know what is!