aworks :: "new" american classical music

Big River (1958). Johnny Cash /you must hear this/

Musician and composer Mark O'Connor was on NPR's You Must Hear This yesterday. His pick: Big River by Johnny Cash:

The rhythmic phrasing and vocal performance by Cash in "Big River" is remarkable; its energy and drive replaces any need for drums or percussion. Cash's own guitar strumming riff was quite memorable as well. He strummed up the neck with a dynamic crescendo.

Johnny Cash's Big River on lala:

Big River - Johnny Cash

Now, won't you batter down by Baton Rouge, River Queen, roll it on.
Take that woman on down to New Orleans, New Orleans.
Go on, I've had enough; dump my blues down in the gulf.
She loves you, Big River, more than me.

Mark O'Connor's Americana Symphony conducted by Marin Alsop on lala:

Americana Symhony - Baltimore ...

Beat It (1982). Michael Jackson /non-traditional performance/

Now that it has really sunk in that my generation's Elvis Presley has died (and Gary, Indiana's for that matter), I'm sad...

Via David Itzkoff at the New York Times, organist Robert Rigdell plays the music of Michael Jackson at Trinity Wall Street church:

lala streams a more traditional rendition: BEAT IT - Michael Jackson

In C (1964). Terry Riley /founding or crowning?/

Terry Riley via last.fm

Kyle Gann points out that Robert Carl's book on In C is out.

From the first sentence in the Amazon description of the book:

Unquestionably the founding work of minimalism in musical composition...

I'm certainly no musicologist, even if Four Musical Minimalists is my favorite music book. Regardless, while In C is arguably the crowning achievement of minimalism, isn't La Monte Young's Trio for Strings, from 1958, the founding work?

For the record, Keith Potter's Four Musical Minimalists lists the following early influences on Terry Riley:

• Piano Concerto. Francis Poulenc
• Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11. Arnold Schoenberg
• Six Little Piano Pieces, Opus 19. Arnold Schoenberg
• Zietmasze. Karlheinz Stockhausen

Despite his relationship at the time with La Monte Young, Riley missed the student performance of Trio for Strings.

Potter also describes how Riley was interested in both non-Western music and the jazz of Miles Davis and John Coltrane:

One of the only two records he carried with him on his travels was a French BAM disc of Moroccan music. The other -- Cookin' With The Miles Davis Quartet (1961), with its explorations of the different ways in which repetition and modality could refocus the relationship between a melody and the rhythmic basis familiar from earlier jazz -- invited Riley to explore the links between Moroccan music and jazz, and to see more clearly the potential for his own work.

Tower of Power (1973). Beth Anderson

I found an interview of composer Beth Anderson, with a couple of interesting responses:

Did you ever feel discriminated against as a female composer?

Yes of course. When there are festivals of new music and 100 or 99 or 98 of the 100 composers are men and there are only 0 or 1 or 2 women, you know that's discrimination...

Who was your most influential teacher?

Terry Riley because even though he actually taught me the basic ideas of singing classical Indian music from India, he also reminded me how important melody is to music...

And yet, my favorite Anderson piece may be Tower of Power, a decidedly non-melodic, non-traditional organ piece:

"Hold as many keys and pedals down as possible, using only your body, at as loud an amplitude as possible, using both your ears and your equipment to decide, for a minimum of five minutes, using yourself and your audience to decide, changing timbres a minimum of five times, without letting any notes up, avoiding any sharp contrasts, allowing your organ to dictate the possibilities...Prepare your spirit, mind, ears, body, family, but avoid any discussion of the sound." (DRAM)

Tower of Power - Beth Anderson

Appalachian Spring (1944-45). Aaron Copland /full-contact americana/

Image via Wikipedia

Sam Whiting in the Chronicle:

After the third visit from the Atherton police, the Santa Clara Vanguard Drum & Bugle Corps decided it would have to split up its outdoor rehearsal at Menlo College...A neighbor might call in a tornado warning...It's blisteringly loud...For 28 consecutive days, the Vanguard has been moving around California, staying one step ahead of all the noise complaints while rehearsing "Appalachian Spring," the complex 11-minute Aaron Copland masterpiece, as their entry in the competition...A standard day of practice is three four-hour shifts, starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 10 p.m...The intensity is almost scary...and it's classy and professional....A lot of adrenaline junkies do drum corps...She's only had to be rushed to the emergency room once, when she took a saber tip to the skull...On this day she is wearing a boxer's welt over her right eye, having been hit by her own flag while learning the Martha Graham-inspired modern dance accompaniment to "Appalachian Spring"...Both will come in handy with the color guard, which she describes as "dance, with danger"...

Drum Corps International at Stanford this weekend, championship in Indianapolis August.

I saw Santa Clara Vanguard invade small-town Indiana in the seventies, playing Buddy Rich's Channel One Suite. Or was it Blue Devils who played such jazz and Vanguard who played classical? Last year's show was Adams/Glass/Talvin Singh/Whitacre, so perhaps my memory is wrong. Regardless, I also remember being super impressed with the people around that time who "graduated" from Madison Scouts  ("You'll never walk alone...").

And it's hard to believe it's been almost six years since I linked to Musings of a Music Major who suggested drum corps can be too avant-garde that drum corps sometimes tries to bill "a very nice show of chamber music as some kind of higher concept."

Channel One Suite - The Buddy ...

Variations on "America" (1891/1910-11). Charles Ives /ok, so obama is not a maverick, now what?/

Paul Rosenberg writes on OpenLeft about James Fallows' post regarding Barack Obama's rhetoric in his "big" speeches. This gets to the root of my concern about Obama and his character.

As an example of James David Barber's presidential character framework, Nixon would likely be classified as a worst-case active-negative type e.g. he does a lot of damage to the country as he grapples with his personal demons.

However, my take on Obama is that he may be a passive-positive president in the manner of the compliant, hands-off, drifting but ever optimistic Reagan. This is opposed to active-positivist Franklin Roosevelt who remained upbeat and accomplished substantive and enduring results. 

As Rosenberg asks whether Obama is just about a change in tone that taps into underlying existing sentiment or about something more fundamental, he has this interesting aworks-relevant paragraph about the scope of what Obama probably does not represent:

But it's not as Monty Python would have it, "something completely different."  It's not Frank Zappa changing key and time signature at the same time.  And it's certainly not Charles Ives, playing in two different keys at once, or Harry Partch, playing in just intonation, with 17 notes to the octave. So if Obama hasn't given a major speech on GLBT issues-as some of you are surely already protesting--it's precisely because there is no such latent change on GLBT issues overall, even though there certainly is such a change with regard to their service in the military.

Variations on "America" - Sain...

The Ornithological Combat of Kings, or, The Condor of the Andes and the Eagle of the Cordilleras (1837). Anthony Philip Heinrich

Cover of The Fourth Turning

Calimac blogs about works by two early American composers. About Anthony Philip Heinrich's piece:

First the strings twitter, then the winds twitter, then the timpani and percussion twitter, then the strings again. (Calimac)

I haven't cited The Fourth Turning lately but here's the description of the era in which this was written:

The Transcendental Awakening (Second Turning, 1822-1844) began with Charles Finney’s evangelicalism and Denmark Vesey’s slave revolt. Soon merging with Jacksonian populism, it peaked (in 1831) with Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the founding of shrill abolitionist societies, and the rise of splinter political parties. After spawning a floodtide of “romantic idealism”—including feminism, new prophetic religions, food fads, and utopian communes—the mood gentrified in the early 1840s into a credo of self-help, moral uplift, and manifest destiny. (The Fourth Turning)

The era corresponds to the recent "consciousness revolution" of 1964-1984. Think of Terry Riley's In C from the start of that period.

Time Curve Preludes (1979). William Duckworth /my comments on bruce brubaker's list/

Carnegie Hall via Wikipedia

In the previous episode, Bruce Brubaker reports he has a new recording of piano music by William Duckworth and Philip Glass. (PianoMorphosis aworks)

Brubaker also notes that listeners of his music download other particular artists. My comments on his list:

• Radiohead. I'm not yet to the point of needing medication but yes, I'm pretty much obsessed with Radiohead. I did give up on my project to rank Radiohead tracks from 1 to n.
• Death Cab for Cutie. Not so interested.
• Carl Craig. Vaguely know who this is. 
• Aphex Twin. Fifteen months after being rear-ended on 101 while listening to this music, I still have an aversion to it. Though, kudos to the California Highway Patrol, Allstate Insurance, and even the guy who hit me after he suggested I move away from traffic and get back into my car, given my stunned state.
• Mozart as played by Radu Lupu. My one and only visit to Carnegie Hall was to hear Lupu play Chopin. Peak experience.

Of William Duckworth's work:

On the minimalist side, the Preludes are spare and meditative, each pursuing a single rhythmic figure to the end. With the exception of moody Prelude No. 6, however, none are literally repetitive. Every one is grounded by drones, a device minimalism picked up from Indian music. Rather than hum consistently, though, the drones appear and disappear, shift delicately from pitch to pitch, and define each prelude’s rhythmic backbone. (DRAM)

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and if i were 30 years younger and/or didn't have a mortgage, i'd probably respond to brubaker's craigslist ad.

Time Curve Preludes (1979). William Duckworth /important news/

Blogger (and contemporary pianist extraordinaire) Bruce Brubaker reports of his soon-to-be-released recording of music by William Duckworth and Philip Glass.  This is of such interest that I'll make my normal comments in a subsequent post so as to not distract from that message. (PianoMorphosis)

Wall Drawing #146A (2000). Sol Lewitt /art as music/

Sol Lewitt via Wikipedia

Why music may be a better way to describe the art of Sol Lewitt:

It might be easier for a viewer of “Wall Drawing #146A” to think of its 20 different kinds of lines as so many different notes meant to be played serially, in closely related variations and sequences, much as Steve Reich and Philip Glass began doing as pioneering Minimalist composers in the 1960s. (LeWitt knew and supported their work from the beginning.) The directions LeWitt provided for his wall drawings are essentially “scores” that readily transmit his ideas to others, much as composers use notation to transmit their musical concepts to the performers and audience. (Jock Reynolds Wall Street Journal)

Details about the work:

All two-part combinations of arcs from corners and sides, and straight, not straight, and broken lines within a 36-inch (90 cm) grid.
June 2000
White crayon on blue wall
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut

First Installation Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

First Drawn By Mio St. Clair, Ginger Wolfe, James Kendrick

MASS MoCA Building 7 Ground Floor (MASS MoCA)

I particularly like the idea of the "performers" also getting credit...