aworks :: "new" american classical music

From the Steeples and the Mountains (1901). Charles Ives

In a used CD bin, I found "A Portrait of Charles Ives," a 1992 recording by Ensemble Modern and Ingo Metzmacher. It's a compendium of Ives' program music.

From Metzmacher's bio: Ingo Metzmacher has recorded extensively for EMI Classics since 1992 when his first CD, “A Portrait of Charles Ives” with the Ensemble Modern, was nominated a Grammy Award and earned the Grand Prix from the Académie Charles Cros.

Metzmacher went on to record an orchestral arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano. Compared to the original player piano recording, Ensemble Modern is colorful, riveting, illuminating and an excellent introduction to that work.

From the Steeples and the Mountains is a programmatic work based on his mother's recollection of church bells warning of a fire started by lightning:

"Pretty soon the air was alive with the sound of ringing bells--but my husband stood outside on the back porch like a man entranced, till the bells finally died down and the fire was stopped."

Other more contemplative works on the CD include Adagio Sostenuto (At Sea) and Mists. His A Set of Pieces for Theater or Chamber Orchestra is also promising.

So, I had high hopes for the Ives CD. It is not the eye opener that Ensemble Modern's Studies for Player Piano was. This may be due to the somewhat incoherent music bundled on one CD. Unlike say the Philip Glass Etudes for Piano Vol. 1 CD (also in that used bin), this selection of music is unpredictable and chaotic. "Unpredictable and chaotic" probably being a fair characterization of Ives' music in general.

Amazon samples the Tilson Thomas recording of From the Steeples.

Three Places in New England for Orchestra (1903-14). Charles Ives

Matthew Guilford, blogging bass trombonist for the National Symphony Orchestra (and currently on tour), writes about Charles Ives and his Three Places in New England:

The finale movement of Three Places in New England, The Housatonic at Stockbridge, is a poignant music picture of this river. The strings provide the constancy of flowing water motion, with a rich C# major chorale from the winds and brass murmuring in and out of the texture, suggesting bends and dips in the river’s course. It sounds eerie, dark and beautiful to me. I can actually see the color of the water from listening to the music-it is a blue/gray shade so dark that it is almost opaque. The water is cold as well, the kind that would numb your ankles if you waded in longer than a few minutes. Only great music can paint these pictures for you.

Ives deserves better PR.

It's Gonna Rain, for tape (1965). Steve Reich

Alex Ross has an offline (now) online essay in the latest New Yorker about classical music versus popular music. He starts by mentioning the music terminology problem--is "classical" better than "art"/"serious"/"great"/"good"/"dead"/"unpopular"? I hedged this one in the aworks weblog title you see at the top, after trying several alternatives, although I also like Robert Christgau's "semipopular music" for describing his coverage in the Village Voice of recorded commerical music.

Ross then describes his journey from classical isolate to temporary Northern California punk and back to "the classical ghetto". This influenced him:

I have always wanted to talk about classical music as if it were popular music and popular music as if it were classical.

His 2001 essay on the rock band Radiohead demonstrates this.

I really perked up when he points out Missy Elliott's hip-hop "Wake Up" (sample here) reminds him of Reich's It's Gonna Rain and Come Out (sample here):

[They all] use tapes of impassioned black voices to create seething electronic soundscapes. Whether Elliott and her producer, Timbaland, have listened to Reich is beside the point. (If you say, "Of course they haven't," ask yourself what makes you so certain.) The song works much like Reich's compositions, building a world from a sliver of sound. It's almost manic and obsessive enough to be classical music.

He goes on to describe the history of European and American classical music culture and also asserts that other genres like jazz and rock are going more quickly through the same five stages of history:

1. youth rebellion e.g. Louis Armstrong, Beatles
2. bourgeois grandeur e.g. Glenn Miller, stadium rock (think Journey)
3. artists rebelling against the bourgeois e.g. Charlie Parker, punk rock
4. avant-garde breaking free from the masses e.g. Cecil Taylor, Sonic Youth?
5. retrenchment e.g. Wynton Marsalis, The Strokes

He also talks about the future and thinks the iPod shuffle feature will be a good thing for classical music in that it breaks down the barriers between genres. I am ambivalent about this. I look at my current "Most Played Tracks" in iTunes, and see John Adams, Henry Cowell, and Philip Glass competing for my attention with Boards of Canada, Howie B, some music from Mali, (and in increasing order of embarrassment) Beck, Black Sabbath, Coldplay, and Blink 182(!). If I sit down and really listen to full CDs, I am much more likely to carefully pick and focus on music with more depth, which usually means "classical." But choosing on a one-track-at-a-time basis...

Finally, Ross hopefully imagines how a pop fan progressively moves closer to classical music, reaching a watershed moment attending a live performance of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. What is missing in his scenario is the social and networked component. I am fascinated by this music being referenced in online "hubs" . On musicmobs, an iTunes community, paramus has listened to the Philip Glass track "Religion" from Naqoyqatsi 94 times in the midst of Erasure, Blondie, something called "Utah Saints" (and to a much lesser degree John Adams). When Stephe mentions John Adams's Nixon in China in the context of LiveJournal, I find that interesting as a potential bridge for the music to travel to others. Maybe adjacency to other musc is a good thing after all.

Here are the closing thoughts from Alex Ross' superb article:

...The symphony became a fragmentary, unfinished thing, and unfinished it remains. It becomes whole again only in the mind and soul of someone listening for the first time, and listening again. The hero is you.

Arcana (1927). Edgard Varèse

I'm listening to Arcana by Edgard Varèse.  I like noise, er, organized sound as much as the next person but as orchestral music, this is not it.  Is there some mystical or organic meaning I am missing?  Anyway, here are some other points of view...

Terry Barfoot in a review of the Naxos recording comments on the performance "...the final climax erupts volcanically before subsiding."

Peter Grahame Woolf suggests on Classical Music Web:

Arcana (1927) is a music of sound, which determines structure through repetition and contrasts of rhythm and timbre, developing without any pre-imposed plan... But give your ears a break and don't play the CD straight through.

Frederick L. Kirshnit in a ConcertoNet review says:

A good performance of Arcana is truly an experience of primeval power, stirring racial memories of life in the ancient wilderness.

Elisabetta Brusa notes that Arcana was written only a year before Puccini's Turandot. 

Amazon samples here, but for me, on to more approachable Varèse...

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 38 (1962). Samuel Barber

In honor of the hundredth anniversary of the music publishing company G. Schirmer, Inc. and written for John Browning, neo-romantic Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963.

In her book on Samuel Barber, Barbara Heyman suggests the work "marks the high point in Barber's career." In a review of the Naxos recording, Robert Cummings says it is "masterful" but suffers from too much thematic repetition. Paul Cook writes that:

It's no cakewalk and should have more currency than it does.

Pianist Tedd Joselson said:

...it's really a throwback to a Romantic style, and in many ways it's Barber's answer to the Bartok 2nd. But it's also really Barber the man.

Mark Kanny reports the slow movement has been transcribed for flute and was recently performed by Timothy Hutchins and the Pittsburgh Symphony, and was reminiscent of Maurice Ravel.

And Walter Simmons asserts that while Barber's individual works get recognition, overall, he is not well understood as an American composer due to the (misguided) focus on Charles Ives and John Cage.

Shri Camel (1978). Terry Riley

In January, I ended up listening most to three albums: Philip Glass: Early Keyboard Music (new recordings of 60s compositions), Terry Riley's Shri Camel from the 70s, and Return to Forever(featuring Chick Corea)'s Where Have I Known You Before from the 70s.

The Philip Glass pieces are generally hard-core minimalism played on organ, the Riley is "loopy" minimalism played on altered organ, and Return to Forever plays jazz-rock fusion on electric keyboards (with guitar, bass and drums). To cope with the different but similar music, I placed them on a continuum from rigorous/hard/composed/serious to casual/light/improvised/fun. And Shri Camel falls exactly in the middle of that spectrum, neither too heavy nor frivolous.

The CD notes that Shri Camel is "composed and performed live-improvised" on an electronic organ tuned in just intonation with digital delay. That timbre plus the improvisational feel clicked for me.

For what it is worth, Keith Potter, in the book Four Musical Minimalists, points out that "shri" is an Indian term of respect, so in effect the title is "Mr. Camel." He also says this piece "represents the culmination" of Riley's works for electronics begun in the 1960s and marks the end of Riley's interest in pure minimalism. Reportedly, the group Piano Circus is recording the piece based on a notated version.

Samples on Amazon (click on the CD covers).