aworks :: "new" american classical music

******** (1958-60). ****** *****

Via Fred, M., and Lynn. Ok, classical music memes complete with simple html markup don't happen very often so I better jump on this one while I have the chance. Of course, this being aworks, the composer list is skewed -- after all, I don't even care what I think about Havergal Brian...

Stravinsky	yawn
Schoenberg	infuriating yawn
Tallis	cool
Glass	overly prolific but cool
Adams	great and/or yawn; love the orchestration
Reich	percussion great; vocals mostly annoying (apologies to TSR's cool Tehillim friend)
Copland	cliched but great
Roy Harris	one great, rest yawn
Bernstein	tuneful and unfocused [yawn on that assessment -editor]
Nancarrow	better performed by humans (apologies to that noted net music person who emailed me and who probably wouldn't think much of this meme)
Corey Dargel	not prolific enough (give this man a recording contract, please)
Ives	indescribably awesomely authentically complicated
Carter	complex but yawn (again, apologies)
Carl Stone	electronically cool
Virgil Thomson	writerly cool
Riley	unironically cool
Cage	zenfully cool
OSU composers	huh?
U of M composers	aiee! (apologies to my fellow native Michiganders; since I previously made an obscure slight of the composer I am thinking of, I've cloaked the name of this post)

Rumble (1958). Link Wray

Link Wray (1929-2005).

From today's obituary:

The power chord — a thundering sound created by playing fifths (two notes five notes apart, often with the lower note doubled an octave above) — became a favorite among rock players. Wray claimed because he was too slow to be a whiz on the guitar, he had to invent sounds.

Rumble is both simple and powerful.  cultura.fr wma clip. threadless.com mp3.

Symphony No. 7 (1952-55). Roy Harris

Tonight on aworks Evening Concert, as the clouds clear after a California autumn rain, we'll start with Stephen Yi on Roy Harris:

I had never really given Roy Harris’s music much attention, no particular reason I guess, but today on Rhapsody I put on Roy Harris: Symphonies Nos. 7 & 9, currently listening to Symphony no.7 and am enjoying very much the colors.

We also don't give Harris' music much attention on this show but his Third Symphony deserves all its acclaim.

Via iTunes, we'll now play tracks not heard on the program since March of last year. First up is Ives' Symphony No. 1 played by the Detroit Symphony. Delightful and always surprisingly conventional.

Then, as a treat, we have the pianist Ursula Oppens playing Carter's Night Fantasies...

No, nothing wrong with the audio. I just couldn't resist playing the last minute of the work three times in a row -- those strong chords and then it trails off into oblivion.

We'll break the mood (and scare off most of our audience) with Autechre's Drone...

There, that wasn't as bad as you thought it would be, was it? For more, Disquiet recommends the Autechre/Hafler Trio double CD:

Disc one moves from what could be a distant volcano rumbling, to rabid fissures and sparks, to more earthen tumult. Disc two is more sedate, the sort of noise that never seems to get louder, no matter how much one turns up the volume knob.

And for those who came here because of the Autechre, we'll prove orchestral music doesn't have to be legacy music. Stick around when Benny blogs about some David Bowie-inspired symphonies by Philip Glass amid mentions of Hawkwind, Guided by Voices, Taj Mahal and other eclectica:

The 'Heroes Symphony' came four years later and was the New York composer's third release in 1997. 'Heroes' has shorter, swifter pieces than on the more grandiose 'Low' ('Heroes' doubles as a ballet score) and a more tenuous connection to the original songs.

  Coming up, by Samuel Barber of Platoon soundtrack fame, the swirling First Essay, also conducted by Neeme Jarvi and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra whom we encountered earlier. Speaking of Detroit, we heard the mayor was re-elected last night but some are hoping he improves his performance. Do we miss Coleman Young? By the way, here's a Cincinnati-based blog about Neeme's conductor son Paavo Jarvi I've been reading.

And we'll end tonight's aworks Evening Concert with Miles Davis giving us In a Silent Way/It's About That Time. Thanks for listening.

Trio for Strings (1958). La Monte Young

Alex Ross has a brief review of the Eternal Music String Ensemble 70th birthday concert performance of Young's Trio for Strings ("an awesomely strange landscape of slowly shifting tone"). He also comments:

The experience wavered between the unbearable and the transcendent, coming to rest on the latter.

The same comment may also apply to the music of Philip Glass, although more often coming to rest on the former...

Young in a Music Mavericks interview:

It's interesting that even at the age of 2 or 3, I began to get an intuition about the way to create music. I didn't really start to do it until 1958, when I wrote the Trio for Strings, which is the first work in the history of music that is completely composed of long sustained tones and silences.

This reminds me of one of those Rob Kapilow lectures on why Mozart is so great:

Things are never as simple as they seem.... The next phrase of music continues elegantly...followed by an astonishing measure of complete silence.

Ok, I'll grant the music is graceful and elegant but after hearing the art of Cage, Young, and Johnson, sorry, "classical" silence like this no longer astonishes.

Although I don't want to cause Fred dismay, in order to re-calibrate my ears for "legacy" music, I'm taking Hucbald's suggestion to focus on Haydn rather than Mozart. And I have yet to decide if I'll  attend Kapilow's Stanford program on Copland's Appalachian Spring.

rgable: aworks american high era young: official del.icio.us wikipedia google news yahoo audio singingfish trio for strings: aworks octet version current track: and now, revelation!/rob kapilow/mozart

4' 33" (1952). John Cage /nothing/

Rajeev Nair, a journalist from the United Arab Emirates, reflects on John Cage's 4'33" and how nothing is something:

A realization that from your vantage position at “nature’s intimate theatre,” the Nothing around you is deceptively devoid of emptiness.

We Cannot Retrace Our Steps (1946-47). Virgil Thomson

Via tingilinde, Apple and Stanford University combine to present Stanford on iTunes. From the link, click on Open Stanford on iTunes, then from iTunes click on Music, click on the Concerts tab and finally, click on the Get Tracks button. Voila, thirty free downloads of concert music presented at Stanford for the Daniel Pearl concerts including tracks by Mark Applebaum, Virgil Thomson, Mozart et al:

Stanford on iTunes provides university-related audio content via the iTunes Music Store, Apple’s popular music jukebox and online music store.  Stanford on iTunes gives alumni and the general public free access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content.

Only one Stanford Marching Band track though (and it was sedate)...

North by Northwest (1959). Bernard Herrmann /top tracks/

Top tracks...

1. There Is an End. The Greenhornes featuring Holly Golightly. 60s feel via the Broken Flowers soundtrack. I have no idea who Holly Golightly is.
2. Frère Jacques. Matthew Shipp. Best jazz version of a children's song ever?
3. Sweet Home Alabama. Lynyrd Skynyrd. An I Love Music thread about whether or not Neil Young and LS really hated each other pointed out the drummer plays the ride cymbal only for  the guitar solo; I never noticed this in twenty-five years of hearing SHA.
4. Goin' Home. Albert Ayler. I very much prefer the full-bore tone of say, Dexter Gordon but this is a great track.
5. North by Northwest. Bernard Herrmann. Snatches of proto-minimalism?
6. Coulibaly. Amadou & Mariam. Vibrant. Not sure of the significance of this yet but I went to Tower Records the other day and made a beeline for the African section first.
7. Lufuala Ndonga. Konono Nº1. Congotronics. And this is what I bought. Five seconds into the track, it's obviously something special for us timbre fans.
8. Hyperprism. Edgard Varèse. Chailly. Exotic in its own way, not even considering the siren.
9. Funeral Song. Sleater-Kinney. My token indie-rock track of the week. Christhgau gave their new album an A and describes Corin Tucker's voice as an "abrasive warble."
10. Mice. Terry Riley. Via ubuweb.

Holly Golightly
Mathew Shipp
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Bernard Herrmann (alternate recording)
Amadou & Mariam
Konono Nº1 (clip is not the intro, though)
Edgard Varèse (rass brass but no siren)
Sleater-Kinney

Desérts (1950-54). Edgard Varese

While listening to a Charles Ives track last month, I realized that this constant stream of disparate music via the iPod was beginning to overwhelm my comprehension. It was if it was an extended version of that Police MP3 where all those hits are multi-tracked on top of each other in a Cageian way. Interesting but cumulatively deadly.  To compensate, I juggled my iTunes smart playlists to inject all tracks by a selected composer (although not all at once of course). For a couple weeks, that meant the 96 Aaron Copland tracks I own -- melodies, brash brass, poignant woodwinds, poignant brass, etc. All in all, a more coherent and mostly pleasurable experience. (except maybe Symphonic Ode and a poor recording of Rodeo).

Ok, after the Adams channeling Varèse quote ("I would say that my guardian angel is composer Edgar Varèse because, for me, Varèse’s music was the original post-nuclear holocaust sound.”), next up as featured composer was Edgard Varèse. After a week or so of his works, I found I needed a break; not just from Varèse's music but from all music. Recovering two days later, I'm back listening to Déserts and liking it. Alex Ross calls his music "earsplitting" in the article on Doctor Atomic in the new New Yorker. We'll see what the long-term effects of intense exposure to such modernism turn out to be.

I'm also reading the composer's recent biography by pop music author Alan Clayson. The father/son relationship was dysfunctional, to say the least. Regarding his teacher Vincent d'Indy:

Any concordat once established with d'Indy had deteriorated to the level at which the teacher was deemed by the provocative Varèse as being of the same authoritarian kidney as his father, as well as with the same short-sightedness, mental sluggishness, and -- if Edgard was feeling especially uncharitable -- cloth-eared ignorance.

Maybe this partially explains why we don't hear Copland-esque life-affirming melodies from Edgard...

Two Amazon-related pieces of trivia: the one statistically improbable phrase in the Clayson book is "organised sound" and the sales rank for the Chailly complete works of the composer is a surprising #9,984. That's not very long in "long tail" terms.

Out There (1960). Eric Dolphy

I listened to a large amount of jazz and then in my mid-twenties, for no apparent reason, I just stopped. Two years ago, I heard some Dexter Gordon which reminded me of what I was missing and ever since, I've been trying to fill in the gaps of classic jazz I hadn't heard. One artist I listened to this weekend was Bill Evans, but maybe I'm still not ready for him. On the other hand, I just heard Eric Dolphy's Out There for the first time and it's a good song, has some great soloing (Ron Carter on cello!) and provides an overall sound and aesthetic that still sounds new 45 years after it was recorded.  This BBC review points out that unlike Ornette Coleman, Dolphy managed to push the "envelope" of bebop without overthrowing its basic conventions. It also describes Dolphy's solo as a series of variations as if Philip Glass arranged a Charlie Parker solo. Now that would be interesting.

In another interesting intersection with minimalism, La Monte Young beat out Eric Dolphy for the second-alto chair in a Los Angeles City College dance band. Young:

I had to compete for the second alto saxaphone chair with Eric Dolphy. I ended up getting the chair, although I thought Eric really sounded great and I was surprised that I beat him out. However, people who heard me play at the time said I just sounded like an explosion. In the orchestra Eric and I played together and he played first clarinet and I played second.

Trio for Strings (1958). La Monte Young

Via David Beardsley, the MELA Foundation announces, in honor of La Monte Young's 70th birthday, a performance of Trio for Strings at the Dream House in New York. Composed while Young was at UCLA, the trio is an early example of using long, sustained tones as the organizing principle and is a benchmark of the minimalism movement. It lasts about an hour.

  The composer quoted by Keith Potter in Four Musical Minimalists:

The Trio is, he avers, 'a rather tonal piece. It's in some sort of C ... probably  C-minor .... It doesn't start there, but it gets there...

Potter also suggests Milton Babbitt admired the music of Young at the time.

rgable: aworks american high era young: official del.icio.us wikipedia google news yahoo audio singingfish

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