aworks :: "new" american classical music

North Star (1977). Philip Glass

The University of Michigan Digital Music Ensemble is playing North Star, Philip Glass' first film score.

...penned in 1977 as an aural compliment to a film of kinetic sculptures by Mark DiSuevero. Program also includes a pre-recorded interview and rarely heard works by minimalist composer Lamonte Young.

Robert Christgau, Village Voice pop critic, gave the album an A-: Rock ears take to this avant-garde composer because he understands electronic sound in a melodic context and loves rhythm, a rhythm achieved--like the hypnotic/mystical mood of the music as a whole--not through percussion but through mechanical repetitions cunningly modified.

Written a year after the opera, Einstein on the Beach, North Star is much less "severe" although still minimal. If you found the opera tedious, North Star will be as well, despite its bite-size scope. Still, the track "Ange Des Orages" (Angels of the Storms) in particular never fails to delight, with its swirling keyboard lines on top of a repeated Hammond organ figure and other driven accompaniement.

Some images from the film here.

String Quartet No. 5 (1995). Elliott Carter

The Chamber Music Society of Detroit recently cancelled the performance of Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 5.

Mark Stryker: But society president Lois Beznos asked the Pacifica to drop the Carter quartet for fear of alienating those subscribers who complained after a November concert by the Juilliard String Quartet that included 20th-century atonal works by Viennese modernist Anton Webern. This is lunacy.

I have not heard this quartet although I did attend a San Francisco Conservatory of Music lecture/performance series of the first four quartets (with the charming Carter in attendance). Independent of what was best for the Detroit audience, I find these works difficult but worthy of the intellectual effort. And that familiarity helps me place them in the context of the overall string quartet literature. Having said that, I much prefer a Carter piano piece, Night Fantasies, which despite also being unconventional, did not require rigorous study to enjoy (although I did later buy the score).

Aaron Copland gets the last word on Carter:

A Reader: One might point also to the example of Elliott Carter, who has shaped a music of his own out of a wide knowledge of the music of our time.

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Update: San Francisco Performances, an arts series, has scheduled the Pacifica Quartet for February 2005.

Sharing a dedication to the best in contemporary and modern works, the Pacifica present American composer Elliott Carter's five string quartets.

Interestingly, it is not part of any of their subscription series e.g. their chamber music series including the Guarnieri, Tokyo, etc. Gotta keep that modern music segregated...

Music for 18 Musicians (1978). Steve Reich

Rob, a Brit in Sweden writing About Pip, blogs his Top Five desert island discs a la Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.  Good choices like Springsteen's The Wild, The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle, Philip Glass'  Powaqqatsi, Glenn Gould's Bach, and the Smiths' The Queen Is Dead.  Interestingly, he has to choose between Steve Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments, Voice, and Organ and Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and goes for the latter:

Nevertheless, it has to be one of the pieces of music that gets close to describing how I experience the world. It's like I've always heard it Pretentious, s'pose so. Buy it, listen to it.

He also relays his High Fidelity/Jack Black-like encounter in a music store when he first hears this music. 

Despite the superior form and impact of this minimalist breakthrough, I have a slight personal preference for Music for Mallet Instruments, Voice, and Organ.

The Mojo Collection, a list of the greatest popular music albums, has this to say about Music for 18 Musicians:

...sublime, with moments of stunning beauty - particularly in the multiple piano sections, and the huge arcs of bass clarinets and voices that crop up as a recurring motif.

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Update:

Kyle Gann: Natures mortes by Georg Friedrich Haas (what an 18th-century-sounding name!) was, if not entirely compelling, at least the first German orchestra work I’ve heard to acknowledge the seductive influence of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians...It does seem to me that Europe, as in America, much of the best new music gets buried by the establishment - perhaps even a little more than here. 

The Unanswered Question (1908). Charles Ives

I have been thinking about my response to the music of Charles Ives over the last week or so.  Then, Lynn at Reflections in d minor commented on Samuel Barber: 

Beyond his famous Adagio for Strings and the wonderful String Quartet in B minor from which it was taken, I haven't found much by Barber that appeals to me a great deal.

I entered the worlds of both Ives and Barber by first hearing a really compelling work (The Unanswered Question, Adagio for Strings).  With Barber, I went on to find other music of his I like, in a low-key kind of way.  But with Ives, after hearing his eye-opening work, I went on to give him the benefit of the doubt on anything else he has done.  I may ultimately disdain what I hear but something clicked initially so much that I am compelled to try to repeat the experience.  John Adams' Shaker Loops provoked the same response in me.  How one piece can shape my experience with the rest of a composer's work amazes me, especially since Barber's Adagio did not give me that same sense of momentum.

So, the intersection of my Ives and Adams enthusiasm (and maybe my American music enthusiasm in general) is the CD where John Adams conducts American elegies,  including The Unanswered Question as well as excellent music by David Diamond and Ingram Marshall.  Ironically, Adams' own Eros Piano is the weakest piece on the CD.  Amazon samples much of the album.

By the way, I've also learned to not recommend The Unanswered Question to the unitiated; it's just too jarring, although I find it stimulating.  My current guidance would be to start with Ives' more conventional first three symphonies (and skip the 4th which is "out there").

The Consul (1949). Gian-Carlo Menotti

Aaron Copland, via the book Aaron Copland: A Reader, wrote a lucid essay in 1939 on the history of opera and musical drama. Here's my 2004 "no time to really think about it" condensed version:

• Monteverdi - high-quality recitative text
• Scarlatti - musically appealing vocals at the expense of story and drama
• Gluck - drama via music serving the text
• Mozart - perfect opera
• Wagner - opera as the union of all arts, with an emphasis on the orchestral
• Verdi - virtuoso theatrical gifts
• Moussorgsky - nationalist opera (Russian)
• Debussy - "Monteverdian poetic drama"
• Berg - expressionistic, dramatic realism
• Weill - popularizing (Three Penny Opera)
• Menotti - "opera as comment on the social scene" (The Consul)
• Milhaud - grandiose spectacle (Christopher Columbus)
• Thomson & Blitzstein - Americans whose operas were created outside the opera establishment

Harriet March Page on The Consul: Little did we know when we programmed The Consul that this powerful story of doomed individuals would speak so strongly in this new world we have just been born into. I worried at first that the opera was too dark. But Menotti's passionate text and magnificent music have touched our hearts and souls in ways we couldn't have imagined before September 11.

Copland ends his opera article: But in any event, I feel sure we have not heard the last of the form, either here or abroad.

Sixty years later, we might say John Adams has tried to tap into social realism and Philip Glass, in Einstein on the Beach anyway, has written a highly dramatic opera with little or no text...